Sugar dust, wheat dust, flour, and sawdust have been known to cause explosions in very rare conditions.
And they're dangerous even outside those conditions. Yes, there are ranges etc. but essentially when you have a cloud of aerosol it's a very bad idea to get an open flame anywhere near it.
My father used to be the security manager of a local shipping/milling company. Apart from a huge book of materials and how and when they are dangerous when airborne he had his fair share of fun with workers who had bright ideas like entering the mill with burning cigarettes. If you manage to ignite the dust hanging in the air nobody cares if it's an explosion or "just" a fire; you will damage or destroy the mill and endanger the lives of the people inside.
It's pretty amazing how many things become really dangerous when mixed with air. Oxygen is pretty nasty stuff for the precise reason we breathe it. (And that's one reason why gaseous fuels require special care: Once the fuel can leave the tank all of it will form a fuel-air mixture while liquid fuels have to evaporate first.)
Not much but if the assignment was "Class, using your knowledge of how it went in the Thirties and the current political climate in Germany, how would you go about turning Germany into a dictatorship with you at the top?" the students could learn something about how our society works, why it works the way it does and which problems we need to be more aware of.
The sibling pointed out a very true phenomenon: Far-right ideologies are fairly common in former-GDR states. The very same states usually have a struggling economy and a hard time attracting investors. It's easy to see that this breeds dissatisfaction with the country and is a fertile ground for extreme ideologies.
German students are exposed to violence and social disorder. German history class is 50% "German history between 1928 and 1945", under the premise that teaching the students about the inhumane cruelty of the Nazi regime will keep them from repeating these mistakes. There's some really gruesome stuff in there, especially when you get to the concentration camps. Mind you, this is not the same as showing them gory depictions of artillery shell victims. It's perfectly possible to teach someone about gruesome matters in school without sinking to the level of a B-movie.
Having gone through that, I not only know how to effectively gas people but also the basics of how to take over a poverty-stricken country and about the logistics of efficient genocide. Those are the side effects of having learned about the rise and fall of the Nazis - and the "how to take over a poor country" thing is in there explicitly so we can identify and potentially do something about people using similar tactics (and to prevent these tactics from becoming applicable in the first place).
Now, if the school teaches you how to build a bomb you know how to tell that someone is building a bomb and you can tell that not everything with wiring and batteries is an explosive device. You don't become more dangerous, usually, because at least all male teenagers I knew back when I was one were perfectly aware of how to construct a pipe bomb and many also knew how to improvise a somewhat functional fuel-air explosive using flour. We knew that because things going "boom" are naturally interesting to teenaged males and because it was trivial to find out how they work even back then. (And no, none of this was covered in school.) Granted, most girls probably wouldn't look into explosives on their own but I'd expect the deranged ones to do so.
Nowadays I wouldn't expect anyone with a serious intent to do harm to pick up his knowledge in school. Wikipedia can already tell you a lot and a Wikipedia session followed by half an hour of googling will give you everything you need to build an effective bomb. The schools are not imparting any new knowledge to those who already wish to kill someone.
Likewise, it's fairly easy to learn about effective bomb placement by reading/watching reports about terrorist attacks. Comments like "the terrorists did X wrong, otherwise the explosion would have been much more severe" aren't exactly rare. And given how a lot of amok runners spend quite a bit of time preparing for their run and tend to have a fascination with thiese things it's prefectly reasonable to assume that they will inform themselves about how to go about their business.
Unless American minds are extremely fragile, I'd say that teaching them about how terrorism works is unlikely to scar them. And teaching them about the methods of terrorism is unlikely to make them much more dangerous than they already are.
That's exactly what the GP means: If you develop empathy for the people fighting against you you're no longer susceptible to the usual "they're evil and they only live to destroy us" rhethoric. Imagine what would happen if the government and media lost their ability to incite fear at will. The government would actually have to do what the people want instead of what gives it more power and the media would have to resort to journalism.
Thus, the government isn't interested in students being taught to think critically about the enemy du jour and neither are the media.
Well, it's a new computer part. It computes. The computer I already own computes perfectly well so I don't see how a new one is any different. You act as if computers were a field of interest or even an industry.
What's next? People getting excited about new cars?
Of course it's entirely possible that worker A needs those two hours of downtime in order to be more productive during the other six. Either way, I agree that the employer shouldn't worry about anything besides the amount and quality of work done.
I'd assume that depends on how much shoch you can tolerate. We have pillow-shaped speed bumps (about as long as a car but with enough space at the sides for motorcyclists to easily pass through). You can drive over them at 30 km/h with no problem unless your car has been lowered or you have a bad suspension. However, doing so does induce a noticeable jolt.
I could imagine that ambulance drivers would want to avoid anything that unneccessarily exerts force on the patient. Driving over a speed bump at regular cruising speed would apply. Therefore it seems more reasonable to either slow to a crawl when passing over speed bumps or choosing a route that avoids them altogether, at least as long as a patient is in the ambulance. Both of these approaches waste time.
American football players are brutes who inflict violence on each other. Football players are thespians who treat us to fine displays of acting each week. I'd say that I'll stick with the fine arts but I don't give a crap about football either.
The GP's point is that the concept of an MP3 player was not novel when Apple made the iPod; Creative did it before. My point is that the concept wasn't novel when Creative did it, either; Rio made the first widely known MP3 player.
The Nomad wasn't the great innovation, the Rio PMP300 was. Well, actually some obscure device form Korea was but the Rio 300 was the first MP3 player people actually heard about.
Apple is like 4chan: Neither innovates much on their own but both are where ideas go to become famous. 4chan does it through its massive userbase and Apple through polish and an excellent marketing department.
I'm from Germany; we had calculators in school. However, we only had them for the last few terms. Essentially, we were allowed to use calculators that could solve problems not in the current term's curriculum. Linear algebra is not about adding and dividing numbers or calculating random square roots in your head, thus we were allowed to use tools to do that for us so we could focus on the problem at hand.
Of course we could have stuck only to problems that break down into integers and simple fractions but the real world doesn't always work like that. It's much better to have a graphing calculator that enables you to tackle some more realistic problems. (And no, they weren't useful for cheating. We had to use school-supplied calculators for our tests.)
Well, while Slashdot is US-hosted, there are posters from all over the world. It wouldn't hurt to at least use proper names instead of abbreviations for state names. I have a rough idea where each US state is but I couldn't tell without looking up what "CT" is supposed to be and whether it's a state, a territory or some kind of designator for offshore troops. It's a bit as if we were talking about Germany and I mentioned I live in NS but attend university in HB instead of using the terms "Lower Saxony" and "Bremen", respectively.
It goes along the same lines as giving imperial-to-metric conversions. It reduces confusion and helps us focus on the discussion. Also, not thinking locally is a good habit. It keeps you from doing mistakes like the Firefox 3 launch debacle when Mozilla gave everyone an exact time for the launch and half the world was disappointed when one day later it turned out they meant some obscure American local time instad of UTC, which every sane person assumed.
I already acknowledged that, though it made no real impact on the war and the resources that went into it could have been better used elsewhere.
The V2 only didn't make an impact because the German spy network in England had been completely subverted and thus the V2s had faulty targeting information. With working spies Germany could've reduced London to rubble (well, at least the more interesting parts of it). Yes, there is fault to be found in the rockets' failure but it's not in the rockets themselves but rather the fact that the German intelligence network was useless.
Sure, the V2 came late but I do imagine that a decently-aimable weapon with that reach could've shook up the Allies' morale a bit and might have even pushed them back slightly. Of course this probably would've only lead to the Russians taking over all of Germany but hey, an impact's an impact.
Literally, the only reason the Germans did not take over the world is they over reached. And in doing so, opened a second front against the Russians. Again, complete Hitler incompetence.
Not really, actually. Stalin wanted his slice of Europe and Hitler knew that. Both of them knew that one would backstab the other when they signed their pact and when Germany attacked Russia was busy preparing for their own attack. It was really inevitable.
The stupidity started when the Nazis had bright ideas like "let's wage war on the Russians during winter".
That term, of course, can be confused with what's usually referred to as "agnostic" - someone who has come to the conclusion that the existence of (a) god or a higher power can neither be proven nor disproven.
How does webmail store mails on my local computer? The answer is: It doesn't. This is unfortunate if one is not always connected to the internet yet wants to retain their ability to open arbitrary mails for reference. Not all e-mails are exclusively online discussions and useless outside that context.
Plus, there are still people using ISP-supplied e-mail? Seriously? Also, webmail doesn't magically protect you from having to switch accounts under certain circumstances, such as changing the ISP (if you do use an ISP-provided account it most likely has an optional web interface) or an account that is completely overrun by spam.
I see a different but similar problem: Thunderbird will pretend it's performing some kind of action while actually doing absolutely nothing. Consequently I can't receive any mail until I restart it but there is no indicator (such as heavy load) to tell me when this happened.
However, it's still rare enough that the proper OS X scrolling support outweighs it.
Re:Failed because it was stupid
on
Why Wave Failed
·
· Score: 1
Wave was essentially a very flexible user interaction server. Google had no idea what to do with it so they opted for "everything at once".
They should've offered several distinct products (IM, collaborative editing, mail, forum, blog, whatever) that appear to be separate and in fact use the same Wave server. Then code them as HTML/JS-based widgets and allow a site owner to place an arbitrary number of such widgets in one page. The result is a very flexible toolkit that allows one to quickly create a community-based website in whichever manner one chooses. Essentially WordPress on steroids. Add to that an open-sourced server component and a few more business-oriented tools and you also get a corporate information exchange environment in a box.
Instead we got "Wave can do everything and trying to explain it would be useless because Wave is so revolutionary". Instead of showing how to use Wave to simplify existing problems they demonstrated that they have no idea what it's actually good for.
Re:imaged a waved Real Estate contract
on
Why Wave Failed
·
· Score: 1
AFAIK there were some specialized clients. It could've been possible to write one that sfocuses colely on the collaborative editing part.
Wave had potential. It could have replaced a host of other services - but not in the way Google presented it. Look at XMPP: Companies run their own Jabber servers for internal communication. The same companies would probably not use an external service.
Wave could have been similar. Roll your own Wave server, set up plugins to offer the services you want (let's say an IM and a collaborative editor) and instruct people on how to use them. With the right plugins, companies could have possible replaced other, more expensive software with their own Wave server or simply improved productivity. Some could have improved existing plugins/specialized clients and some could have contributed new ones.
But when Wave is only accessible as a Google-provided service these companies aren't going to use it, much less contribute back. They'd be insane to let potentially sensitive internal data go through a third party's servers for no reason. Thus, Wave was uninteresting to companies.
To individuals it wasn't much more interesting, either. Most of the individual-centric things Wave does are already done by other products better suited to their individual tasks. Thus, Wave was uninteresting to individuals.
Google managed to produce a framework that could've been interesting to everyone but marketed it in such a way that it wasn't interesting to anyone.
Unfortunately, Bespin will be devlivered at some unspecified point in the future, possibly. The developers don't give any clues as to when their new server will be available and whether people will actually have any supported means of rolling their own.
Slashdot Mirror
And they're dangerous even outside those conditions. Yes, there are ranges etc. but essentially when you have a cloud of aerosol it's a very bad idea to get an open flame anywhere near it.
My father used to be the security manager of a local shipping/milling company. Apart from a huge book of materials and how and when they are dangerous when airborne he had his fair share of fun with workers who had bright ideas like entering the mill with burning cigarettes. If you manage to ignite the dust hanging in the air nobody cares if it's an explosion or "just" a fire; you will damage or destroy the mill and endanger the lives of the people inside.
It's pretty amazing how many things become really dangerous when mixed with air. Oxygen is pretty nasty stuff for the precise reason we breathe it. (And that's one reason why gaseous fuels require special care: Once the fuel can leave the tank all of it will form a fuel-air mixture while liquid fuels have to evaporate first.)
Not much but if the assignment was "Class, using your knowledge of how it went in the Thirties and the current political climate in Germany, how would you go about turning Germany into a dictatorship with you at the top?" the students could learn something about how our society works, why it works the way it does and which problems we need to be more aware of.
The sibling pointed out a very true phenomenon: Far-right ideologies are fairly common in former-GDR states. The very same states usually have a struggling economy and a hard time attracting investors. It's easy to see that this breeds dissatisfaction with the country and is a fertile ground for extreme ideologies.
German students are exposed to violence and social disorder. German history class is 50% "German history between 1928 and 1945", under the premise that teaching the students about the inhumane cruelty of the Nazi regime will keep them from repeating these mistakes. There's some really gruesome stuff in there, especially when you get to the concentration camps. Mind you, this is not the same as showing them gory depictions of artillery shell victims. It's perfectly possible to teach someone about gruesome matters in school without sinking to the level of a B-movie.
Having gone through that, I not only know how to effectively gas people but also the basics of how to take over a poverty-stricken country and about the logistics of efficient genocide. Those are the side effects of having learned about the rise and fall of the Nazis - and the "how to take over a poor country" thing is in there explicitly so we can identify and potentially do something about people using similar tactics (and to prevent these tactics from becoming applicable in the first place).
Now, if the school teaches you how to build a bomb you know how to tell that someone is building a bomb and you can tell that not everything with wiring and batteries is an explosive device. You don't become more dangerous, usually, because at least all male teenagers I knew back when I was one were perfectly aware of how to construct a pipe bomb and many also knew how to improvise a somewhat functional fuel-air explosive using flour. We knew that because things going "boom" are naturally interesting to teenaged males and because it was trivial to find out how they work even back then. (And no, none of this was covered in school.) Granted, most girls probably wouldn't look into explosives on their own but I'd expect the deranged ones to do so.
Nowadays I wouldn't expect anyone with a serious intent to do harm to pick up his knowledge in school. Wikipedia can already tell you a lot and a Wikipedia session followed by half an hour of googling will give you everything you need to build an effective bomb. The schools are not imparting any new knowledge to those who already wish to kill someone.
Likewise, it's fairly easy to learn about effective bomb placement by reading/watching reports about terrorist attacks. Comments like "the terrorists did X wrong, otherwise the explosion would have been much more severe" aren't exactly rare. And given how a lot of amok runners spend quite a bit of time preparing for their run and tend to have a fascination with thiese things it's prefectly reasonable to assume that they will inform themselves about how to go about their business.
Unless American minds are extremely fragile, I'd say that teaching them about how terrorism works is unlikely to scar them. And teaching them about the methods of terrorism is unlikely to make them much more dangerous than they already are.
That's exactly what the GP means: If you develop empathy for the people fighting against you you're no longer susceptible to the usual "they're evil and they only live to destroy us" rhethoric. Imagine what would happen if the government and media lost their ability to incite fear at will. The government would actually have to do what the people want instead of what gives it more power and the media would have to resort to journalism.
Thus, the government isn't interested in students being taught to think critically about the enemy du jour and neither are the media.
Well, it's a new computer part. It computes. The computer I already own computes perfectly well so I don't see how a new one is any different. You act as if computers were a field of interest or even an industry.
What's next? People getting excited about new cars?
How scary, this is all true. Telcos have a duty to record and store all phone and internet traffic. Cameras are everywhere on the roads.
Your country is a profoundly scary place.
Of course it's entirely possible that worker A needs those two hours of downtime in order to be more productive during the other six. Either way, I agree that the employer shouldn't worry about anything besides the amount and quality of work done.
I'd assume that depends on how much shoch you can tolerate. We have pillow-shaped speed bumps (about as long as a car but with enough space at the sides for motorcyclists to easily pass through). You can drive over them at 30 km/h with no problem unless your car has been lowered or you have a bad suspension. However, doing so does induce a noticeable jolt.
I could imagine that ambulance drivers would want to avoid anything that unneccessarily exerts force on the patient. Driving over a speed bump at regular cruising speed would apply. Therefore it seems more reasonable to either slow to a crawl when passing over speed bumps or choosing a route that avoids them altogether, at least as long as a patient is in the ambulance. Both of these approaches waste time.
Then again, Flash doesn't improve with faster connections. At least not on non-Windows OSes.
I'm really hoping that at one point someone releases a runtime that a) can compete with Adobe's and b) has decent video performance on all OSes.
American football players are brutes who inflict violence on each other. Football players are thespians who treat us to fine displays of acting each week. I'd say that I'll stick with the fine arts but I don't give a crap about football either.
The GP's point is that the concept of an MP3 player was not novel when Apple made the iPod; Creative did it before. My point is that the concept wasn't novel when Creative did it, either; Rio made the first widely known MP3 player.
The Nomad wasn't the great innovation, the Rio PMP300 was. Well, actually some obscure device form Korea was but the Rio 300 was the first MP3 player people actually heard about.
Apple is like 4chan: Neither innovates much on their own but both are where ideas go to become famous. 4chan does it through its massive userbase and Apple through polish and an excellent marketing department.
I'm from Germany; we had calculators in school. However, we only had them for the last few terms. Essentially, we were allowed to use calculators that could solve problems not in the current term's curriculum. Linear algebra is not about adding and dividing numbers or calculating random square roots in your head, thus we were allowed to use tools to do that for us so we could focus on the problem at hand.
Of course we could have stuck only to problems that break down into integers and simple fractions but the real world doesn't always work like that. It's much better to have a graphing calculator that enables you to tackle some more realistic problems. (And no, they weren't useful for cheating. We had to use school-supplied calculators for our tests.)
Well, while Slashdot is US-hosted, there are posters from all over the world. It wouldn't hurt to at least use proper names instead of abbreviations for state names. I have a rough idea where each US state is but I couldn't tell without looking up what "CT" is supposed to be and whether it's a state, a territory or some kind of designator for offshore troops. It's a bit as if we were talking about Germany and I mentioned I live in NS but attend university in HB instead of using the terms "Lower Saxony" and "Bremen", respectively.
It goes along the same lines as giving imperial-to-metric conversions. It reduces confusion and helps us focus on the discussion. Also, not thinking locally is a good habit. It keeps you from doing mistakes like the Firefox 3 launch debacle when Mozilla gave everyone an exact time for the launch and half the world was disappointed when one day later it turned out they meant some obscure American local time instad of UTC, which every sane person assumed.
No, it implies that some thinking isn't. Which seems reasonable.
The V2 only didn't make an impact because the German spy network in England had been completely subverted and thus the V2s had faulty targeting information. With working spies Germany could've reduced London to rubble (well, at least the more interesting parts of it). Yes, there is fault to be found in the rockets' failure but it's not in the rockets themselves but rather the fact that the German intelligence network was useless.
Sure, the V2 came late but I do imagine that a decently-aimable weapon with that reach could've shook up the Allies' morale a bit and might have even pushed them back slightly. Of course this probably would've only lead to the Russians taking over all of Germany but hey, an impact's an impact.
Not really, actually. Stalin wanted his slice of Europe and Hitler knew that. Both of them knew that one would backstab the other when they signed their pact and when Germany attacked Russia was busy preparing for their own attack. It was really inevitable.
The stupidity started when the Nazis had bright ideas like "let's wage war on the Russians during winter".
That term, of course, can be confused with what's usually referred to as "agnostic" - someone who has come to the conclusion that the existence of (a) god or a higher power can neither be proven nor disproven.
How does webmail store mails on my local computer? The answer is: It doesn't. This is unfortunate if one is not always connected to the internet yet wants to retain their ability to open arbitrary mails for reference. Not all e-mails are exclusively online discussions and useless outside that context.
Plus, there are still people using ISP-supplied e-mail? Seriously? Also, webmail doesn't magically protect you from having to switch accounts under certain circumstances, such as changing the ISP (if you do use an ISP-provided account it most likely has an optional web interface) or an account that is completely overrun by spam.
I see a different but similar problem: Thunderbird will pretend it's performing some kind of action while actually doing absolutely nothing. Consequently I can't receive any mail until I restart it but there is no indicator (such as heavy load) to tell me when this happened.
However, it's still rare enough that the proper OS X scrolling support outweighs it.
Wave was essentially a very flexible user interaction server. Google had no idea what to do with it so they opted for "everything at once".
They should've offered several distinct products (IM, collaborative editing, mail, forum, blog, whatever) that appear to be separate and in fact use the same Wave server. Then code them as HTML/JS-based widgets and allow a site owner to place an arbitrary number of such widgets in one page. The result is a very flexible toolkit that allows one to quickly create a community-based website in whichever manner one chooses. Essentially WordPress on steroids. Add to that an open-sourced server component and a few more business-oriented tools and you also get a corporate information exchange environment in a box.
Instead we got "Wave can do everything and trying to explain it would be useless because Wave is so revolutionary". Instead of showing how to use Wave to simplify existing problems they demonstrated that they have no idea what it's actually good for.
AFAIK there were some specialized clients. It could've been possible to write one that sfocuses colely on the collaborative editing part.
Wave had potential. It could have replaced a host of other services - but not in the way Google presented it. Look at XMPP: Companies run their own Jabber servers for internal communication. The same companies would probably not use an external service.
Wave could have been similar. Roll your own Wave server, set up plugins to offer the services you want (let's say an IM and a collaborative editor) and instruct people on how to use them. With the right plugins, companies could have possible replaced other, more expensive software with their own Wave server or simply improved productivity. Some could have improved existing plugins/specialized clients and some could have contributed new ones.
But when Wave is only accessible as a Google-provided service these companies aren't going to use it, much less contribute back. They'd be insane to let potentially sensitive internal data go through a third party's servers for no reason. Thus, Wave was uninteresting to companies.
To individuals it wasn't much more interesting, either. Most of the individual-centric things Wave does are already done by other products better suited to their individual tasks. Thus, Wave was uninteresting to individuals.
Google managed to produce a framework that could've been interesting to everyone but marketed it in such a way that it wasn't interesting to anyone.
Unfortunately, Bespin will be devlivered at some unspecified point in the future, possibly. The developers don't give any clues as to when their new server will be available and whether people will actually have any supported means of rolling their own.