"The question is, do the creators deliberately make them addictive? "
I doubt it. An addicted player who spends 40/week in WoW brings in no more money than a moderate player who spends 4/week in WoW, but the addict is using up ten times as much resources.
It's just like broadband service providers, netflix, a gym, or any other business that provides a service for a flat monthly fee - ideally you use it just enough to keep you from canceling it.
For a while now I've been getting spam for various products or services where the spammers purposely misspell words, spell words with a mix of letters and numbers "l33t" style, or spell words phonetically. I assume that this is to get past spam filters, and I imagine it works to some extent. The question is, do they honestly think anyone would ever buy something from a company that advertises "ch3@p nonperscrip70n med1ca7ion" or "lo morgage rates"? Who the hell would ever do business with a company that can't even seem to spell properly?
This is true, but not for quite the reason you cite. It's very easy to cut kevlar with something like a knife. It stops bullets because bullets try to bluntly tear through the fabric. It's like the difference between stabbing a knife into a piece of fabric and trying to punch through a piece of fabric.
How the hell did this get modded to +5? This deserves a "-1, poster probably failed Introduction to Physics" mod option.
It is always safer to be in a deforming vehicle during a crash, assuming the vehicle doesn't deform so much that it crushes you. It doesn't matter whether you're crashing into a tree, an SUV, a tank, or another deforming vehicle.
If you hit a crumpling vehicle with your truck, the crumpling will decrease the elasticity of the collision and reduce the acceleration experienced by both drivers by some amount - but if you had also been in a crumpling vehicle it would have increased the inelasticity of the collision even more and doubled the safety factor introduced by the crumple zones.
In your ridiculous example of a tank hitting a Toyota, the tank crew will be safe because the tank's much, much larger mass would result in much less acceleration on the part of the tank. The rigidity of the tank's frame wouldn't have anything to do with it. In fact, it the tank were to crumple during its impact with the Toyota then the tank crew would actually experience even less acceleration during the collision.
Instead of cars, think about it like this: You are about to crash into an object at a high speed. Would you rather have a rigid object between you and the impacting surface, or a soft object?
Hitting a crumpling vehicle with a rigid vehicle is better for you than hitting another rigid vehicle, but it would still be safer for you if you were both driving crumpling vehicles. When you hit a crumpling vehicle in your truck, the crumpling absorbs X amount of energy from the impact - you and the driver of the other car will experience whatever energy is left over. If you were both in crumpling vehicles, then 2X energy would be absorbed and you would experience even less shock from the impact.
Now, driving a more massive vehicle would actually make you safer, since your vehicle's higher mass would mean that you experience less acceleration during the crash - but rigidity in your vehicle isn't your friend. The ideal vehicle would be both very heavy and would crumple as much as possible.
Anyone who has ever actually been poor knows that fast food is expensive compared to buying your own food at the grocery store and preparing it yourself.
A pound of ground beef (that I'm pretty sure is far superior in quality to what fast food places typically serve) costs around $2, which is usually close to the price that a fast-food place charges for a burger that only contains a few oz of meat. The marginal cost of making a hamburger yourself is far lower than buying one.
Your claim that the bodies of everyone killed on the interstate system in the last 50 years could circle the earth twice is absurd on its face. The earth is about 40000 kilometers in circumference. If we assumed that each person killed on the interstate was two meters tall, it would require over 800000 interstate deaths per year to circle the earth twice over a 50 year period. There are only about 40000 total car crash deaths in the US each year.
At 40000 deaths/year and assuming each person killed is 2 meters tall, all the people killed in car crashes over the last 50 year (both interstate and non-interstate) would stretch perhaps 1/20 of the way around the earth.
Please, think about what you are saying for a moment before you spout off stupid "facts" like this.
While this is certainly true, I think I can guarantee you that only a trivially small percentage of ebay users are interested in trying to figure out the value of an item based on other people's bids. Most people just (stupidly) enter a price that's far lower than what they would actually be willing to pay, then get disappointed when someone comes along and "steals" it from them at the last second without giving them a chance to counter-bid.
Indeed. Almost any form of accidental death that you could think of (drowning, accident riding a bicycle, sports accident) is much more likely to kill you than lightening, yet for some reason people seem to go nuts teaching the dangers of lightening.
Lightening is one of those non-threats that people (especially the media) like to blow out of proportion.
There are an average of 73 people killed by lightening every year in the U.S. While each of those deaths is individually tragic, this is a trivial number of people compared to, say, forty thousand people killed in car crashes, thirty thousand killed by household accidents, six thousand people killed in workplace accidents, or even the average eight hundred people killed every year from non-lightening accidental electrocution.
"I want to cancel my account because I'm moving to Uganda."
"I'm canceling because my computer was destroyed in a fire and I'm not planning to get another one."
"My unit is deploying to Iraq for a year and I won't have internet access."
"I've been sentanced to several years in prison and have to start serving my sentence in a few days."
"My wife was the one who used the account. She died of cancer yesterday."
It immediately cuts through the bullshit of them trying to convince you to stay with them. Even if they suspect it's not true, there's really no way they can argue with you.
No, you actually posted figures that refute your own position.
China has a population of China is 1.3 billion. If 16% of the population get tertiary education, this means that there are over 200 million people with have tertiary education. The U.S. has a population of 300 million. If 83% of people in the US get tertialy education, it means that there are about 250 million people in the US with a tertiary education. So yes, there are about 25% more people with tertiary education in the US than in China.
But here's the thing: China has a GDP of 1.5 trillion, while the U.S. has a GDP of 11.7 trillion. You have roughly as many educated people in China as in the US, but in China they are competing for jobs in an economy that's only 13% the size of the US.
It is you who seem to be missing the point. There are only roughly about 1/5 as many "white collar" jobs in China as there are in the U.S. So, even though the percentage of Chinese workers with college degrees is much lower, once you take the massive differences in population into account there are far fewer white-collar jobs per degree-holding worker than in the U.S..
In U.S. universities there is basically zero effort put into preparing people to teach college classes. One day a new grad student shows up to start their graduate school career and a week later they're standing in front of 40 undergrads trying to explain the difference between a joule and a watt. It's about the same with the actual professors; they generally just look at what sorts of research you've done and what school you got your PhD from, and as long as you can speak reasonably fluent english they don't worry about your teaching ability. It's certainly not a perfect system, but it seems to work well enough. There's no obvious reason why China's current universities couldn't produce more than enough professors to double or tipple their number of universities in a few years.
If you actually look at the energy transfer rates that you would need for cars, it seems very unlikely that you could recharge quickly - even if your battery/capacitor/whatever could handle it. 100 horsepower is about 75 kilowatts. If you drove for half an hour on the highway that would mean that you expended about 135 megajoules. If you wanted to replace that power in one minute, you would be looking at around 2.25 megawatts of transferred power.
It's because most parents (probably correctly) don't think that there's any real chance of their kid going out and killing police, stealing cars, and shooting pedestrians, so they don't really worry about it. They do, however, worry about their kids having sex. It's not so much a question of which act they think is worse, but rather a question of which act their child is likely to actually do.
I'm not saying they're necessarily correct, but that's why most parents get more upset about sexual content than violent content.
My biggest question is, why are they charging $90 for it when it's nothing but a black, blank version of the Cherry G81-3000 Professional brand keyboard? Granted, the G81-3000 is a very nice keyboard, but it retails for around $60. Does it cost them $30 extra to not print the letters on the keys?
True enough...but then again, it would also be trivially easy to get someone at school in major trouble by simply planting drugs or weapons in their backpack/locker/desk/whatever and then telling a school official that you noticed it, or simply sending in an anonymous tip.
Or you could write up a long essay about how you were planning to go on a shooting spree, put the other student's name on it, and "accidentally" leave it where someone would find it.
Because of the very superficial way that schools investigate things it's always been easy to frame people for things. When there's no actual burden of proof (as is the case with school officials when they punish students) it's very easy to get people into trouble.
You're confused about how this works; it's not like an MRI or NMR where a magnetic field creates energy states for different orientations of the atom's magnetic fields. This just induces rotational transitions in the molecules.
No, cooling it shouldn't matter; it would probably actually get easier to take a spectra of a cool sample because there would be less "noise" from vibrations.
The passive sensing is also not new. You can find journal articles about it going back at least 3-4 years; I don't have any off hand, but if you have access to a scientific journal database you can probably find them pretty quickly.
I don't recall the sensitivity of the technique given in the other articles that are out there, but then there isn't any hard data on sensitivity in this "article" either; just a reference to getting within 10 ppm in one particular test. Since they don't give the concentration of what they were measuring, this is of little value. 10 ppm error in something with parts-per-thousand concentration is pretty good. In something with parts-per-billion concentration, it's pretty bad. The information that they give in meaningless without knowing the circumstances of the test.
This is an example of what economists refer to as the "broken window fallacy."
The fallacy goes something like this: "On the whole, it's a good thing for people to go around randomly breaking windows. It creates jobs for the window installers and people who work in glass factories, and even helps to create new markets for shatter-proof windows!"
Although at first glance this appears to help the economy, it's an illusion; all the money that goes toward replacing the broken window is wasted money that could have been spent on actually improving economic infrastructure, rather than simply maintaining it. Perhaps new and improved shatter-resistant windows will be developed, but if there was enough demand to justify their development then it would have happened anyway.
Similarly, every dollar that people have to spend on things like antivirus software is a dollar that they weren't able to spend on improving their products, or hiring more employees of their own, or offering people cheaper prices. All this only benefits you if you are carefully placed within the market to take advantage of it. So yes, computer crime is good for you if you happen to work for a security company, but on the whole it's bad for society and the economy.
Insightful? This should be moderated -1, Did not TRFA.
In order to convict you with this law the police would have to prove that you have the keys and are refusing to hand them over. Indeed, the article discusses at length a potential problem with the law; people could easily argue that they have simply lost/forgot the keys, and it would be very difficult for the police to prove otherwise. In the case of something like a cellphone or SSH key, the police would not be able to convict you because it would be easy to show that you never had access to the keys.
Slashdot Mirror
Heck, dolphins use tools.
6 07_050607_dolphin_tools.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/06/0
"The question is, do the creators deliberately make them addictive? "
I doubt it. An addicted player who spends 40/week in WoW brings in no more money than a moderate player who spends 4/week in WoW, but the addict is using up ten times as much resources.
It's just like broadband service providers, netflix, a gym, or any other business that provides a service for a flat monthly fee - ideally you use it just enough to keep you from canceling it.
For a while now I've been getting spam for various products or services where the spammers purposely misspell words, spell words with a mix of letters and numbers "l33t" style, or spell words phonetically. I assume that this is to get past spam filters, and I imagine it works to some extent. The question is, do they honestly think anyone would ever buy something from a company that advertises "ch3@p nonperscrip70n med1ca7ion" or "lo morgage rates"? Who the hell would ever do business with a company that can't even seem to spell properly?
This is true, but not for quite the reason you cite. It's very easy to cut kevlar with something like a knife. It stops bullets because bullets try to bluntly tear through the fabric. It's like the difference between stabbing a knife into a piece of fabric and trying to punch through a piece of fabric.
How the hell did this get modded to +5? This deserves a "-1, poster probably failed Introduction to Physics" mod option.
It is always safer to be in a deforming vehicle during a crash, assuming the vehicle doesn't deform so much that it crushes you. It doesn't matter whether you're crashing into a tree, an SUV, a tank, or another deforming vehicle.
If you hit a crumpling vehicle with your truck, the crumpling will decrease the elasticity of the collision and reduce the acceleration experienced by both drivers by some amount - but if you had also been in a crumpling vehicle it would have increased the inelasticity of the collision even more and doubled the safety factor introduced by the crumple zones.
In your ridiculous example of a tank hitting a Toyota, the tank crew will be safe because the tank's much, much larger mass would result in much less acceleration on the part of the tank. The rigidity of the tank's frame wouldn't have anything to do with it. In fact, it the tank were to crumple during its impact with the Toyota then the tank crew would actually experience even less acceleration during the collision.
Instead of cars, think about it like this: You are about to crash into an object at a high speed. Would you rather have a rigid object between you and the impacting surface, or a soft object?
Hitting a crumpling vehicle with a rigid vehicle is better for you than hitting another rigid vehicle, but it would still be safer for you if you were both driving crumpling vehicles. When you hit a crumpling vehicle in your truck, the crumpling absorbs X amount of energy from the impact - you and the driver of the other car will experience whatever energy is left over. If you were both in crumpling vehicles, then 2X energy would be absorbed and you would experience even less shock from the impact.
Now, driving a more massive vehicle would actually make you safer, since your vehicle's higher mass would mean that you experience less acceleration during the crash - but rigidity in your vehicle isn't your friend. The ideal vehicle would be both very heavy and would crumple as much as possible.
Anyone who has ever actually been poor knows that fast food is expensive compared to buying your own food at the grocery store and preparing it yourself.
A pound of ground beef (that I'm pretty sure is far superior in quality to what fast food places typically serve) costs around $2, which is usually close to the price that a fast-food place charges for a burger that only contains a few oz of meat. The marginal cost of making a hamburger yourself is far lower than buying one.
Your claim that the bodies of everyone killed on the interstate system in the last 50 years could circle the earth twice is absurd on its face. The earth is about 40000 kilometers in circumference. If we assumed that each person killed on the interstate was two meters tall, it would require over 800000 interstate deaths per year to circle the earth twice over a 50 year period. There are only about 40000 total car crash deaths in the US each year.
At 40000 deaths/year and assuming each person killed is 2 meters tall, all the people killed in car crashes over the last 50 year (both interstate and non-interstate) would stretch perhaps 1/20 of the way around the earth.
Please, think about what you are saying for a moment before you spout off stupid "facts" like this.
While this is certainly true, I think I can guarantee you that only a trivially small percentage of ebay users are interested in trying to figure out the value of an item based on other people's bids. Most people just (stupidly) enter a price that's far lower than what they would actually be willing to pay, then get disappointed when someone comes along and "steals" it from them at the last second without giving them a chance to counter-bid.
Indeed. Almost any form of accidental death that you could think of (drowning, accident riding a bicycle, sports accident) is much more likely to kill you than lightening, yet for some reason people seem to go nuts teaching the dangers of lightening.
Lightening is one of those non-threats that people (especially the media) like to blow out of proportion.
There are an average of 73 people killed by lightening every year in the U.S. While each of those deaths is individually tragic, this is a trivial number of people compared to, say, forty thousand people killed in car crashes, thirty thousand killed by household accidents, six thousand people killed in workplace accidents, or even the average eight hundred people killed every year from non-lightening accidental electrocution.
Just lie to them. It's both fun and effective.
"I want to cancel my account because I'm moving to Uganda."
"I'm canceling because my computer was destroyed in a fire and I'm not planning to get another one."
"My unit is deploying to Iraq for a year and I won't have internet access."
"I've been sentanced to several years in prison and have to start serving my sentence in a few days."
"My wife was the one who used the account. She died of cancer yesterday."
It immediately cuts through the bullshit of them trying to convince you to stay with them. Even if they suspect it's not true, there's really no way they can argue with you.
No, you actually posted figures that refute your own position.
China has a population of China is 1.3 billion. If 16% of the population get tertiary education, this means that there are over 200 million people with have tertiary education. The U.S. has a population of 300 million. If 83% of people in the US get tertialy education, it means that there are about 250 million people in the US with a tertiary education. So yes, there are about 25% more people with tertiary education in the US than in China.
But here's the thing: China has a GDP of 1.5 trillion, while the U.S. has a GDP of 11.7 trillion. You have roughly as many educated people in China as in the US, but in China they are competing for jobs in an economy that's only 13% the size of the US.
It is you who seem to be missing the point. There are only roughly about 1/5 as many "white collar" jobs in China as there are in the U.S. So, even though the percentage of Chinese workers with college degrees is much lower, once you take the massive differences in population into account there are far fewer white-collar jobs per degree-holding worker than in the U.S..
In U.S. universities there is basically zero effort put into preparing people to teach college classes. One day a new grad student shows up to start their graduate school career and a week later they're standing in front of 40 undergrads trying to explain the difference between a joule and a watt. It's about the same with the actual professors; they generally just look at what sorts of research you've done and what school you got your PhD from, and as long as you can speak reasonably fluent english they don't worry about your teaching ability. It's certainly not a perfect system, but it seems to work well enough. There's no obvious reason why China's current universities couldn't produce more than enough professors to double or tipple their number of universities in a few years.
If you actually look at the energy transfer rates that you would need for cars, it seems very unlikely that you could recharge quickly - even if your battery/capacitor/whatever could handle it. 100 horsepower is about 75 kilowatts. If you drove for half an hour on the highway that would mean that you expended about 135 megajoules. If you wanted to replace that power in one minute, you would be looking at around 2.25 megawatts of transferred power.
It's because most parents (probably correctly) don't think that there's any real chance of their kid going out and killing police, stealing cars, and shooting pedestrians, so they don't really worry about it. They do, however, worry about their kids having sex. It's not so much a question of which act they think is worse, but rather a question of which act their child is likely to actually do.
I'm not saying they're necessarily correct, but that's why most parents get more upset about sexual content than violent content.
My biggest question is, why are they charging $90 for it when it's nothing but a black, blank version of the Cherry G81-3000 Professional brand keyboard? Granted, the G81-3000 is a very nice keyboard, but it retails for around $60. Does it cost them $30 extra to not print the letters on the keys?
http://www.accesskeyboards.co.uk/cherry.htm
True enough...but then again, it would also be trivially easy to get someone at school in major trouble by simply planting drugs or weapons in their backpack/locker/desk/whatever and then telling a school official that you noticed it, or simply sending in an anonymous tip.
Or you could write up a long essay about how you were planning to go on a shooting spree, put the other student's name on it, and "accidentally" leave it where someone would find it.
Because of the very superficial way that schools investigate things it's always been easy to frame people for things. When there's no actual burden of proof (as is the case with school officials when they punish students) it's very easy to get people into trouble.
You're confused about how this works; it's not like an MRI or NMR where a magnetic field creates energy states for different orientations of the atom's magnetic fields. This just induces rotational transitions in the molecules.
No, cooling it shouldn't matter; it would probably actually get easier to take a spectra of a cool sample because there would be less "noise" from vibrations.
The passive sensing is also not new. You can find journal articles about it going back at least 3-4 years; I don't have any off hand, but if you have access to a scientific journal database you can probably find them pretty quickly.
I don't recall the sensitivity of the technique given in the other articles that are out there, but then there isn't any hard data on sensitivity in this "article" either; just a reference to getting within 10 ppm in one particular test. Since they don't give the concentration of what they were measuring, this is of little value. 10 ppm error in something with parts-per-thousand concentration is pretty good. In something with parts-per-billion concentration, it's pretty bad. The information that they give in meaningless without knowing the circumstances of the test.
Um...rotational spectroscopy is not new at all. It's been around for a very long time - at least 50 years, probably longer.
o py
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotational_spectrosc
This is an example of what economists refer to as the "broken window fallacy."
The fallacy goes something like this: "On the whole, it's a good thing for people to go around randomly breaking windows. It creates jobs for the window installers and people who work in glass factories, and even helps to create new markets for shatter-proof windows!"
Although at first glance this appears to help the economy, it's an illusion; all the money that goes toward replacing the broken window is wasted money that could have been spent on actually improving economic infrastructure, rather than simply maintaining it. Perhaps new and improved shatter-resistant windows will be developed, but if there was enough demand to justify their development then it would have happened anyway.
Similarly, every dollar that people have to spend on things like antivirus software is a dollar that they weren't able to spend on improving their products, or hiring more employees of their own, or offering people cheaper prices. All this only benefits you if you are carefully placed within the market to take advantage of it. So yes, computer crime is good for you if you happen to work for a security company, but on the whole it's bad for society and the economy.
Insightful? This should be moderated -1, Did not TRFA.
In order to convict you with this law the police would have to prove that you have the keys and are refusing to hand them over. Indeed, the article discusses at length a potential problem with the law; people could easily argue that they have simply lost/forgot the keys, and it would be very difficult for the police to prove otherwise. In the case of something like a cellphone or SSH key, the police would not be able to convict you because it would be easy to show that you never had access to the keys.