Bluetooth headsets still make all the difference in preventing accidents, because using one is far safer to as compared to holding the phone up to your ear and driving with one hand.
I drive one-handed naturally anyway, unless something untoward happens. Which I assure you if it did, the phone would go flying and both hands would be on the wheel in the same amount of time as if the phone hadn't been in my hands. At least before. Now to comply with the law I do in fact have a bluetooth device.
You really are stupid, you know that? We're not proposing a ban on steel, we're proposing a ban on the ultimate object that makes pulling a trigger the difference between life and death. Just like castor beans aren't illegal to walk around with sacks of but it is illegal to walk around with sacks of ricin because it is the final product that allows that person to cause death quickly and without much effort.
Are you saying that ricin, a schedule 1 substance, should be sold to whoever wants it because the act of using it to kill people is already illegal?
The fact that I have to explain this to you really illustrates the frustration of this whole gun control debate. I bet the whole concept of "weaponized" is lost on you when we're talking about mustard and ricin, isn't it?
You're a condescending asshole you know that?
Ricin's sole purpose is killing people. And you have to take some fairly extraordinary steps to make sure that doesn't happen (safe handling and suchlike). Guns can be used for a wide range of purposes, one of which is killing people, but many of which have nothing to do with hurting people like hunting, sport shooting, target practice, or tree trimming (true story). To take your argument to the completely opposite (and equally invalid) extreme - we should obviously ban hammers since they are used to kill people sometimes.
The simple fact is that "assault weapons" are not the problem. Handguns, if anything, are the problem. But even so, suicides by gun outnumber homicides by a ratio of 2:1. And deaths by car accident outnumber both put together by almost 2:1 again. And death from complications from fatness are probably 10:1 over car accidents. It seems to me that the more it is the case that a person dies due to their own actions (all of fatness, and about half of car accidents) then we are more accepting of that because, well, they took that risk. But with guns, we get completely irrational about it because...they're scary? I guess?
Because I have 21 QuickLaunch buttons conveniently grouped in a 7x3 grid, whereas that many pinned apps would be unduly cluttering. Plus I've been using QuickLaunch since Win2000 and at this point it's just more efficient for me and requires no thought at all.
Sovereign debt is a strange bird. You ultimately, as a sovereign nation, have the option to tell everyone to piss off and unilaterally cancel all of your debts. Or print a bunch of money (or mint a couple of trillion dollar coins) and pay it all off that way. When a person borrows money it's taking actual money from other depositors and paying back interest on it so that the bank and the depositors each make their profits off of it. When a country "borrows" money it's more a matter of creating money out of thin air (in the case of the federal reserve) or else issuing bonds with a promise to pay them back.
But in either case if they get in over their heads, countries always have the option of just devaluing their currency, paying everything off at half or less of the real cost, and moving on after some restructuring. Eurozone entities are having the problems they are specifically because they gave up sovereign control of the currency they are using. They can't just devalue the euro without screwing over all member countries.
Your only surefire way for recouping on sovereign debt is to invade and conquer the country owing you money. This is generally politically unpopular though, and your ROI is likely to be crap.
Well, the sun does move about the galaxy and complete an orbit about every ~220-250 million years. Realistically if there's some section of the galaxy where you're more likely to run into planet bashing meteors then all of the planets in the galaxy will pass through it over geologic time scales. Heck, maybe there's two such bands, roughly half a galaxy apart, and after we pass through three of them the complexity of life roughly doubles to compensate for these wild changes. So every ~370 million years we end up doubling in complexity. Or something.
But in any case I'm not sure the Drake equation needs an extra field for "planets with occasional planetary meteor strikes" because one of two things: either it's a galactic phenomenon which means every planet out there (or at least in our spiral arm) is apt to run into it at least every 250 million years or so, or it's a local condition (like the Perseids or Leonids), but the factors for planetary system formation make it such that it happens to all planets anyway as a matter of course.
Dishes made from melamine look like plastic, but heat up in the microwave (astonishingly quickly actually). Layman's explanation here. I'd be willing to bet if they are melamine that they're tagged "not microwave safe" somewhere on the dish.
Well and that's the thing isn't it. If you're ensuring that no signal is leaking out of your building, then you're already passively blocking cell signals emanating from within your structure anyway so the jammer is superfluous. And if you're letting letting your jammer signals leak out and interfere with your neighbors, then you're an asshole and deserve all the FCC fines you get.
if you want quicklaunch, you still need to install an app for that...
Quicklaunch for Windows 8 is the same as for Windows 7. Right click on the taskbar --> Toolbars --> New Toolbar... Browse to "C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch" Uncheck Show Title, Uncheck Show Text. Boom, classic Quicklaunch from the same effective location that it used to be at in XP. For the lazy, there's a vbscript out there to automate all of that for you, but even lazy people don't usually run strange looking vbscripts that do arcane things to your Windows box (hopefully).
Also, you can do a gimp start menu in Win8 by do the same basic steps but for the folder "C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs", leave on "Show Title" and shrink it so that only the arrow and title shows. Then clicking the arrow is sort of like clicking on a start menu but with reduced functionality. But hey, it's not third party and it doesn't require admin permissions, so for higher security environments maybe it's the ideal work-around.
These two changes made it so that I could "live with" Win8, but I'm still annoyed that it required jumping through hoops just to get back to semi-functional. And the metro interface remains an abomination.
Just like any electrical (and often mechanical) device. It's called a bathtub curve and it applies to failure rates over time. High incidence of failure in the "burn-in" phase (1-3 months typically), steady state and very much lower failure rate during expected lifetime, and then increasingly higher failure rates (often jumping exponentially towards the end) at end of life phase. This is a well known phenomenon in fault tolerant applications. It's also why you don't want to put anything important on your shiny new SAN until it's been spinning for a month or so and you've swapped out all the failed drives.
He actually turned 30 this year, and by 25 your prefrontal cortex is matured anyway. I'm afraid we can't blame his irrationality on biology at this point. Well, other than that he's the biological son of his batshit loco father Kim Jong-Il.
However I am also a Libertarian, and I agree that the government should not be getting into these nitpicky arguments, and should be left to the people and free market to decide. I personally will never pay for the option of having an in dash navigation in a car. Nor will I purchase an external GPS. I pull off to the side of the road, and use my street atlas and figure how to get anywhere. Why is this the case? Simple, I don't want to be distracted from driving.
That's all well and good, but the law is rather less about stopping people from hurting themselves and substantially more about stopping them from hurting others. It's like how its a misdemeanor for getting popped for a DUI, but if anyone is hurt because you caused an accident while drunk it jumps to a felony. The decision was made that it is in the public interest to have fewer distracted drivers. Not to play nanny state and protect people from themselves, but so that Mr. "lol omw ttyl brah" doesn't wipe out a family of four trying to text his friends that he's on the way.
Shoot, $10 gets you a lot of residential water. Ag water it'll get you almost half of an acre-foot (around 160,000 gallons). Irrigation water, thanks to the bureau of reclamation, is astonishingly abundant and cheap. And thankfully so, that way we get to have a food supply that doesn't depend on other countries.
Let's just hope they don't use Windows 8 for the power management computers.
They use Windows NT. No, I'm serious. Many of our nuclear-power facilities on these ships are still running old versions of windows. However, with only one notable exception during a shakedown cruise, its use hasn't caused any operational difficulties.
I really wouldn't expect any issues at all as long as a). the applications were thoroughly tested (and preferably mathematically proved to be correct), b). it's never exposed to an external network (especially the internet) and c). you configure the OS in a hardened and tested fashion with multiple redundant hardware backup systems.
Vista was not bad compared to pretty much any OS. The only people who think it was are people who have never even used it and just swallowed the negative hype of the media and other people who had never used it.
I used it. I had it on an OEM machine and that wasn't bad. I tested it at my workplace on a few machines and it burned us. Drivers had issues, upgrades were spotty at best, the addition of IPv6 on by default was an unpleasant surprise that our network didn't much care for, user account control was a constant nuisance for admin machines (less so, but still a relevant problem for users)... Essentially Vista was a warning label for all the things you had to do in order to prep for Windows 7. We did our prep work and Windows 7 wasn't so bad. But the burn on Vista meant that we didn't start our Windows 7 migration until our backs were against the wall on XP end of life.
Windows 8 is the best version of Windows to come out. Aside from the start menu (which is debatable), it's much improved over Vista/7.
Windows 8 is the best under the hood. Unfortunately Microsoft shit all over the interface in an attempt to leverage their market dominance on PC's to take over the phone/tablet market with a "unified interface". So yeah, it's basically a Ferrari with a Pinto chassis. It looks like we'll be running Windows 7 until it goes end of life now, and hope that Windows 9 doesn't look like such an abomination. And if we have to retrain 1000+ users on how to get to their programs so they can do actual work then maybe it'll be time at that point to examine replatforming options.
Who the hell is "we"? Society? The productive people IN society who do the innovation and perform the real work of providing valuable goods and services? These people should sacrifice the fruits of their labor so that others can "study what they want", regardless of how useful/useless the results of their studies might be?
Don't worry, in a few years Ayn Rand's influence will wear off and you'll stop being such a heartless douche. Just be careful not to let it be replaced with some new-agey free love hippie crap, that makes you douchey for other reasons.
I really wanted to mod this up because it's a great resource.
But: it's actually off topic. The question here is about using psychoacoustic compression like MP3 and AAC, not about sample rate or bit depth.
The logic and impassioned response is similar for both. Honestly the deal with psychoacoustic compression is a matter of prioritization. It just reorganizes the data so that the most important bits for hearing and recognizing it as a faithful representation of the original are front loaded and saved first. Beyond a certain bitrate you have drastically diminishing returns. 128kbps gathers the most significant and important bits and is probably more than sufficient for your standard earbuds and regular consumer. 256kbit will make a noticeable difference to audiophiles on good equipment. Anything above that and you're getting very close to saving plain old noise.
Nah, zip+4 plus delivery point. That guarantees uniqueness. If you're curious what your actual delivery point is you can find a piece of barcoded mail (companies typically do this to save on postal rates) and run the Intelligent Mail Barcode through the RIBBS decoder. The last two digits of the 11 digit "Delivery Point Zipcode" are the delivery point value assigned to your unique address by the USPS. Every residence is supposed to be able to be found via zip+4+dp for a unique 11-digit code.
Actually 128 bits isn't even enough to address every atom in the earth (you'd need about 166-167 bits for that). 256 bits wouldn't be enough for every atom in the universe (it would take 265-266 bits for that), but if we can reasonably assume that anything worth addressing contains at least 1000 atoms then a 256 bit standard should be sufficient for any conceivable address space.
I feel like North Korea is a screaming infant that the mom and dad (China and the U.S.) are holding onto in spite of its thrashing about because they don't want it to hurt itself and they know the thrashing will never actually hurt them.
Following up: it's C8H18 for octane giving you a molecular weight of 114 for the molecule, with 96 of that contributed by carbon. Ergo: (((96/114)*6.3 lbs/gallon)/12)*44 = 19.45 lbs of C02 per gallon of pure octane burned (with 100% conversion). But then, you're never putting 100% octane in your car, and you'll never get 100% complete conversion either. So I would say 19.29 lbs C02 / gallon of gas is well within good experimental error.
Of mild interest: in a perfect yield you would also get (((18/114)*6.3 lbs/gallon)/2)*18 = 8.95 pounds of pure water out of the reaction as well, which is more than a gallon of water.
Well, they certainly suck at sustained flight. They rarely manage to get over even a 5ft. fence (and if you feed them a little more grain, they won't manage that either). I don't think I've seen them fly for more that may 5 seconds or so in a burst when they're about to be caught.
Slashdot Mirror
Bluetooth headsets still make all the difference in preventing accidents, because using one is far safer to as compared to holding the phone up to your ear and driving with one hand.
I drive one-handed naturally anyway, unless something untoward happens. Which I assure you if it did, the phone would go flying and both hands would be on the wheel in the same amount of time as if the phone hadn't been in my hands. At least before. Now to comply with the law I do in fact have a bluetooth device.
I suppose it's the slashdot equivalent of being Rick-Rolled.
Basically, they take over your router, put a sniffer on it and they can sniff all your internet traffic.
I'm sure all of the encrypted SSL traffic between me and 80% of my web browsing will be incredibly useful to these malicious attackers.
You really are stupid, you know that? We're not proposing a ban on steel, we're proposing a ban on the ultimate object that makes pulling a trigger the difference between life and death. Just like castor beans aren't illegal to walk around with sacks of but it is illegal to walk around with sacks of ricin because it is the final product that allows that person to cause death quickly and without much effort. Are you saying that ricin, a schedule 1 substance, should be sold to whoever wants it because the act of using it to kill people is already illegal? The fact that I have to explain this to you really illustrates the frustration of this whole gun control debate. I bet the whole concept of "weaponized" is lost on you when we're talking about mustard and ricin, isn't it?
You're a condescending asshole you know that?
Ricin's sole purpose is killing people. And you have to take some fairly extraordinary steps to make sure that doesn't happen (safe handling and suchlike). Guns can be used for a wide range of purposes, one of which is killing people, but many of which have nothing to do with hurting people like hunting, sport shooting, target practice, or tree trimming (true story). To take your argument to the completely opposite (and equally invalid) extreme - we should obviously ban hammers since they are used to kill people sometimes.
The simple fact is that "assault weapons" are not the problem. Handguns, if anything, are the problem. But even so, suicides by gun outnumber homicides by a ratio of 2:1. And deaths by car accident outnumber both put together by almost 2:1 again. And death from complications from fatness are probably 10:1 over car accidents. It seems to me that the more it is the case that a person dies due to their own actions (all of fatness, and about half of car accidents) then we are more accepting of that because, well, they took that risk. But with guns, we get completely irrational about it because...they're scary? I guess?
Because I have 21 QuickLaunch buttons conveniently grouped in a 7x3 grid, whereas that many pinned apps would be unduly cluttering. Plus I've been using QuickLaunch since Win2000 and at this point it's just more efficient for me and requires no thought at all.
Sovereign debt is a strange bird. You ultimately, as a sovereign nation, have the option to tell everyone to piss off and unilaterally cancel all of your debts. Or print a bunch of money (or mint a couple of trillion dollar coins) and pay it all off that way. When a person borrows money it's taking actual money from other depositors and paying back interest on it so that the bank and the depositors each make their profits off of it. When a country "borrows" money it's more a matter of creating money out of thin air (in the case of the federal reserve) or else issuing bonds with a promise to pay them back.
But in either case if they get in over their heads, countries always have the option of just devaluing their currency, paying everything off at half or less of the real cost, and moving on after some restructuring. Eurozone entities are having the problems they are specifically because they gave up sovereign control of the currency they are using. They can't just devalue the euro without screwing over all member countries.
Your only surefire way for recouping on sovereign debt is to invade and conquer the country owing you money. This is generally politically unpopular though, and your ROI is likely to be crap.
Well, the sun does move about the galaxy and complete an orbit about every ~220-250 million years. Realistically if there's some section of the galaxy where you're more likely to run into planet bashing meteors then all of the planets in the galaxy will pass through it over geologic time scales. Heck, maybe there's two such bands, roughly half a galaxy apart, and after we pass through three of them the complexity of life roughly doubles to compensate for these wild changes. So every ~370 million years we end up doubling in complexity. Or something.
But in any case I'm not sure the Drake equation needs an extra field for "planets with occasional planetary meteor strikes" because one of two things: either it's a galactic phenomenon which means every planet out there (or at least in our spiral arm) is apt to run into it at least every 250 million years or so, or it's a local condition (like the Perseids or Leonids), but the factors for planetary system formation make it such that it happens to all planets anyway as a matter of course.
Dishes made from melamine look like plastic, but heat up in the microwave (astonishingly quickly actually). Layman's explanation here. I'd be willing to bet if they are melamine that they're tagged "not microwave safe" somewhere on the dish.
Well and that's the thing isn't it. If you're ensuring that no signal is leaking out of your building, then you're already passively blocking cell signals emanating from within your structure anyway so the jammer is superfluous. And if you're letting letting your jammer signals leak out and interfere with your neighbors, then you're an asshole and deserve all the FCC fines you get.
if you want quicklaunch, you still need to install an app for that...
Quicklaunch for Windows 8 is the same as for Windows 7. Right click on the taskbar --> Toolbars --> New Toolbar... Browse to "C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch" Uncheck Show Title, Uncheck Show Text. Boom, classic Quicklaunch from the same effective location that it used to be at in XP. For the lazy, there's a vbscript out there to automate all of that for you, but even lazy people don't usually run strange looking vbscripts that do arcane things to your Windows box (hopefully).
Also, you can do a gimp start menu in Win8 by do the same basic steps but for the folder "C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs", leave on "Show Title" and shrink it so that only the arrow and title shows. Then clicking the arrow is sort of like clicking on a start menu but with reduced functionality. But hey, it's not third party and it doesn't require admin permissions, so for higher security environments maybe it's the ideal work-around.
These two changes made it so that I could "live with" Win8, but I'm still annoyed that it required jumping through hoops just to get back to semi-functional. And the metro interface remains an abomination.
Just like any electrical (and often mechanical) device. It's called a bathtub curve and it applies to failure rates over time. High incidence of failure in the "burn-in" phase (1-3 months typically), steady state and very much lower failure rate during expected lifetime, and then increasingly higher failure rates (often jumping exponentially towards the end) at end of life phase. This is a well known phenomenon in fault tolerant applications. It's also why you don't want to put anything important on your shiny new SAN until it's been spinning for a month or so and you've swapped out all the failed drives.
He actually turned 30 this year, and by 25 your prefrontal cortex is matured anyway. I'm afraid we can't blame his irrationality on biology at this point. Well, other than that he's the biological son of his batshit loco father Kim Jong-Il.
However I am also a Libertarian, and I agree that the government should not be getting into these nitpicky arguments, and should be left to the people and free market to decide. I personally will never pay for the option of having an in dash navigation in a car. Nor will I purchase an external GPS. I pull off to the side of the road, and use my street atlas and figure how to get anywhere. Why is this the case? Simple, I don't want to be distracted from driving.
That's all well and good, but the law is rather less about stopping people from hurting themselves and substantially more about stopping them from hurting others. It's like how its a misdemeanor for getting popped for a DUI, but if anyone is hurt because you caused an accident while drunk it jumps to a felony. The decision was made that it is in the public interest to have fewer distracted drivers. Not to play nanny state and protect people from themselves, but so that Mr. "lol omw ttyl brah" doesn't wipe out a family of four trying to text his friends that he's on the way.
Shoot, $10 gets you a lot of residential water. Ag water it'll get you almost half of an acre-foot (around 160,000 gallons). Irrigation water, thanks to the bureau of reclamation, is astonishingly abundant and cheap. And thankfully so, that way we get to have a food supply that doesn't depend on other countries.
Let's just hope they don't use Windows 8 for the power management computers.
They use Windows NT. No, I'm serious. Many of our nuclear-power facilities on these ships are still running old versions of windows. However, with only one notable exception during a shakedown cruise, its use hasn't caused any operational difficulties.
I really wouldn't expect any issues at all as long as a). the applications were thoroughly tested (and preferably mathematically proved to be correct), b). it's never exposed to an external network (especially the internet) and c). you configure the OS in a hardened and tested fashion with multiple redundant hardware backup systems.
Arrogance+Invulnerability=Disaster for somebody else .
FTFY
Vista was not bad compared to pretty much any OS. The only people who think it was are people who have never even used it and just swallowed the negative hype of the media and other people who had never used it.
I used it. I had it on an OEM machine and that wasn't bad. I tested it at my workplace on a few machines and it burned us. Drivers had issues, upgrades were spotty at best, the addition of IPv6 on by default was an unpleasant surprise that our network didn't much care for, user account control was a constant nuisance for admin machines (less so, but still a relevant problem for users)... Essentially Vista was a warning label for all the things you had to do in order to prep for Windows 7. We did our prep work and Windows 7 wasn't so bad. But the burn on Vista meant that we didn't start our Windows 7 migration until our backs were against the wall on XP end of life.
Windows 8 is the best version of Windows to come out. Aside from the start menu (which is debatable), it's much improved over Vista/7.
Windows 8 is the best under the hood. Unfortunately Microsoft shit all over the interface in an attempt to leverage their market dominance on PC's to take over the phone/tablet market with a "unified interface". So yeah, it's basically a Ferrari with a Pinto chassis. It looks like we'll be running Windows 7 until it goes end of life now, and hope that Windows 9 doesn't look like such an abomination. And if we have to retrain 1000+ users on how to get to their programs so they can do actual work then maybe it'll be time at that point to examine replatforming options.
Who the hell is "we"? Society? The productive people IN society who do the innovation and perform the real work of providing valuable goods and services? These people should sacrifice the fruits of their labor so that others can "study what they want", regardless of how useful/useless the results of their studies might be?
Don't worry, in a few years Ayn Rand's influence will wear off and you'll stop being such a heartless douche. Just be careful not to let it be replaced with some new-agey free love hippie crap, that makes you douchey for other reasons.
I really wanted to mod this up because it's a great resource.
But: it's actually off topic. The question here is about using psychoacoustic compression like MP3 and AAC, not about sample rate or bit depth.
The logic and impassioned response is similar for both. Honestly the deal with psychoacoustic compression is a matter of prioritization. It just reorganizes the data so that the most important bits for hearing and recognizing it as a faithful representation of the original are front loaded and saved first. Beyond a certain bitrate you have drastically diminishing returns. 128kbps gathers the most significant and important bits and is probably more than sufficient for your standard earbuds and regular consumer. 256kbit will make a noticeable difference to audiophiles on good equipment. Anything above that and you're getting very close to saving plain old noise.
44.1khz ought to be enough for anyone...
Body:
human hearing beats the linear response assumptions used in lossy codecs. So yes, their criticisms are scientifically founded.
These have nothing to do with each other.
Nah, zip+4 plus delivery point. That guarantees uniqueness. If you're curious what your actual delivery point is you can find a piece of barcoded mail (companies typically do this to save on postal rates) and run the Intelligent Mail Barcode through the RIBBS decoder. The last two digits of the 11 digit "Delivery Point Zipcode" are the delivery point value assigned to your unique address by the USPS. Every residence is supposed to be able to be found via zip+4+dp for a unique 11-digit code.
Actually 128 bits isn't even enough to address every atom in the earth (you'd need about 166-167 bits for that). 256 bits wouldn't be enough for every atom in the universe (it would take 265-266 bits for that), but if we can reasonably assume that anything worth addressing contains at least 1000 atoms then a 256 bit standard should be sufficient for any conceivable address space.
I feel like North Korea is a screaming infant that the mom and dad (China and the U.S.) are holding onto in spite of its thrashing about because they don't want it to hurt itself and they know the thrashing will never actually hurt them.
Following up: it's C8H18 for octane giving you a molecular weight of 114 for the molecule, with 96 of that contributed by carbon. Ergo: (((96/114)*6.3 lbs/gallon)/12)*44 = 19.45 lbs of C02 per gallon of pure octane burned (with 100% conversion). But then, you're never putting 100% octane in your car, and you'll never get 100% complete conversion either. So I would say 19.29 lbs C02 / gallon of gas is well within good experimental error.
Of mild interest: in a perfect yield you would also get (((18/114)*6.3 lbs/gallon)/2)*18 = 8.95 pounds of pure water out of the reaction as well, which is more than a gallon of water.
Well, they certainly suck at sustained flight. They rarely manage to get over even a 5ft. fence (and if you feed them a little more grain, they won't manage that either). I don't think I've seen them fly for more that may 5 seconds or so in a burst when they're about to be caught.