No, most designs specify a thin ribbon. So, no matter where it breaks, it won't impact the ground at more than terminal velocity for thin, burnt sheets.
The design that specified steel cable did so specifically to show how impractical it would be to attempt a cable using existing materials.
That depends an awful lot on what that debt is held in. In many cases, it's dollars which the US government can devalue arbitrarily to eliminate debt. Of course, that tactic would kill international trade, but it would also do something else: it effectively means that there is a limiting rate at which that debt can be collected, and if they try to go too fast, they'll get far less than they put in.
We're literally getting something for nothing here: we're getting their goods, in exchange for our worthless paper, and the more goods they send, the more worthless the paper becomes!
They're getting something very valuable out of the deal, though: atrophy of our own strategic manufacturing capability. It was that capability which won two world wars and in the process pounded Japan. (ironically, in defense of china, though)
And since they do plan on military action in the future that we might object to (but not a direct assault on ourselves) it's in their best interest to reduce our capability to do for Taiwan what we did for China in the 40s.
Fortunately, the last time I checked, international trade was down around 10% of the gross national product, so the economy would take a dramatic hit, but not necessarily an irrecoverable one. We'd have some issues while ramping up manufacturing and oil and coal production again, but after a decade or so, I think we'd be back on track. Unfortunately, a lot of that 90% GDP is services, so we'd be in for more than a mere 10% hit.
Actually, come to think of it, the easiest 'solution' to the deficit probably isn't protectionism, but deliberate devaluing of the dollar to make imports less competitive, and foreign investment less valuable, and bring back balance.
So.. The situation is grave, but there are a few points of light, here and there.
They had photography, and all that entails. I'm sure that he could've created a crude mask and acid-etched the image onto a sturdier material. But it's certainly more convoluted than simply recording grooves directly in the first place.
Just who, exactly, would be more hurt if "we" defaulted on that debt, though?
"If a man owes you a thousand dollars, you have power over him. If he owes you a million dollars, he has power over you." -I forget who said this, but it's very wise.
No, it's still boring. Or rather, It's full of interesting content and brilliant visuals, and quests from humorous to dramatic.
Only, to get to that interesting content, you have to wade through a lot of boring crap like, "collect 10 livers from undead dire boars" And when you get there, you discover that they drop livers 2.5% of the time (so you need to kill 400 boars), and at least one of the following is true:
1) the boars are too powerful for you to take on easily, so you have to wait between them while you restore health and mana and/or burn through potions at a rate that the quest reward + the loot will not support (and therefore necessitating further farming...)
2) The boars are powerful, but you find other player(s) to help you, but you have to split the loot up, so factoring in the extra boars you need to kill, it takes just as long as if you solo'd.
3) there aren't enough boars, so there are a dozen people just standing around waiting for one to spawn, hoping to get the first shot in to claim the loot.
And you need those livers to make the soup to give to the informant to get the trinket to give to the other informant to get the key to enter the dungeon where the monster lives that drops half of the amulet that you need to be holding when you kill the elementals that drop the ingredient that you need ten of to bribe the wizard to give you the cure for the children of the village's mysterious plague.
Taking the cube apart doesn't damage the adhesion. If you remove the stickers, the first time it might be ok, but you risk stickers not staying on, and tearing of stickers. And you're going to leave plenty of evidence you sticker switcher.
But if you take it apart carefully, the worst evidence you'll leave is a pair of scratches from the screwdriver you used to pry off the first piece.
I think the "pixel for pixel" requirement is a bit of a red herring, though. What I, as a user, want is a format that scales well. I should be able to have a 3750x3000 pixel display that looks just like a 800x600 display, except much, much sharper. Also, image scaling should be a tad higher order than "step function."
Yeah, but you shouldn't alienate your allies just to protect yourself from the threat of enemies who won't respect your allies' borders. I mean, if France had extended the Maginot line to cover its border with Belgium, the trade and political disaster would've been enormous and devastating.
No, you're an idiot because you can't see through the shallow racism inherent in voting for a black candidate for no better reason than that it'd be swell to have a black president.
Oh, boy, Obama's for change. Big freakin' hairy deal. What kind of change is he for? Positive change!
The reason he can't be "smeared" directly is that he hasn't actually proffered much other than vague platitudes (but at least he is doing better than Kerry's ~"I'd do pretty much what Bush is doing in Iraq, but..Better!"). He's running as the "generic democrat" polls loved so much a few years ago, where you get to impute on to him all the things you think your ideal democrat would be. And it helps that he delivers those platitudes very convincingly.
Now, the way I see it, if he takes office, one of two things could happen: 1) he'll be a bit like Clinton, whose highest goal was to reach the office, and he really doesn't have much of a clue as to what to do when he gets there. Which is not so bad if he has an opposite party congress. I love vetoes. 2) he has true colors, which he'll show when he reaches office. As to what those might be, there is only fringe evidence (was that speech by his pastor a one-time thing? If not, then why was the pastor his campaign's religious advisor?) Which is also not so bad, as it guarantees an opposite party congress in two years.
But don't you think it's kind of sad that, if Obama is the first black president, he'd also the first president elected out of a guilt trip rather than actual policy agreement?
Ironically, asbestos is quite safe, as long as you leave it in the wall where it belongs. About the worst thing you can do is remove it from an existing installation where the building is not scheduled to be demolished (since you spread its dust around by removing it).
Living and working in buildings with asbestos isn't a big deal. You don't really get any increase in lung cancer risk, but you get the benefit if a much lower death from fire risk. working with asbestos was always the problem. So the solution? Marathon of extra work with asbestos for all the people removing it in a panic. Brilliant.
AFAICT, Wii was never intended to be "next gen." It was intended to be the last of "this gen." Under the assumption that High Definition won't really be getting common until near the end of it's 5 year life cycle. At which point they'd be ramping up for the next gen console. I mean, when they were developing the Wii, the input connector for HD hadn't even been finalized yet, so they couldn't have planned for all contingencies (well there was enough info to plan for all contingencies, but it would've made the hardware a tad more expensive, and only to benefit a relatively small market--people with High Definition displays-- for at least half of it's life cycle.)
Repeat after me: You can't future-proof computer purchases of any kind, and a console is just a computer with some specific optimizations and consistent hardware.
And since Moore's law means that a $700 console loses $350 in value in less than two years, why price consoles into that range? Especially as Sony already had the "high end" console market pretty much sewn up? "Just an updated Game Cube" was just the right size for a console when the Wii came out, and Nintendo's quarterly statement will show the truth of that.
I'm sorry that you're not excited about the hardware (frankly, I've got mixed feelings about it, but I'm not really a console guy, anyway), but it's popularity shows that that's not the prevalent opinion about it. It's not just about having the best hardware money can buy. It's about having fun, affordable games, and Wii is way out ahead on affordability.
They are well positioned by virtue of not having huge sunk costs and subsidy losses. If they end the platform right now, they will still have made a profit. Other platforms can't make that claim. Although companies who didn't get into the market are just as well positioned, as you say.
But Nintendo has the advantage of having never sold the Wii at a loss. They could put out an upgraded machine right now without having real losses (pro-forma "losses" though)
In other words, they're well positioned to be the first ones out of the gate for the next generation of home theater / video game equipment, and they won't have to worry about figuring out which disk format to back.*
Now, whether they actually take advantage of that position remains to be seen. But they've by no means screwed themselves out of anything with their design decisions regarding the Wii.
* of course, if it takes Blu-Ray as long to overtake DVD as DVD took to overtake VHS, USB thumbdrive movies will be well within possibility. Remember, this jump was a big jump data-wise, but High definition is pretty well defined for the next decade or so: 50 gig is going to be plenty for any storage medium for some time, but it's also going to get much easier to achieve. In that sense, Blu-Ray is a disaster. We should've gone with HD-DVD as an interim format (well, it was supposed to be cheaper), knowing that it would be replaced fairly quickly by something much more durable, storable, reliable, and possibly even cheaper.
Um.. so? It's not like mice are expensive. Include one, and a mousing surface that straps to your leg in the box. Or come up with an equivalent control scheme, tilt sensors are getting better, right?
I don't know if it's the answer, but an answer is that it has something to do with control, specifically, willingness to allow things to be out of your direct control, if that means that a greater benefit is possible.
In the case of computers, it is obvious: A computer user, or programmer more directly, prefers to set a series of rules for automating tasks rather than completing repetitive tasks.. repeatedly. And the computer can do repetative things far more efficiently than the programmer could, so by surrendering control to the machine, greater "good" can be accomplished.
In the case of politics, libertarians (well, free-market libertarians, anyway) believe that the market tends to relax toward the optimum conditions for production of wealth and happiness if the individual actors are autonomous enough to make their own decisions and informed enough to make rational ones. Non-libertarians, I believe, fear that either that information is not available, or that people will tend to make irrational decisions that, in agregate, are also harmful.
Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that this fear, itself, is irrational, which brings up some interesting, recursive philosophical questions. Nevertheless, the pro-state-control group appears to fear the uncertainty of not being (or having someone) in charge of everything, while libertarians are fully comfortable with the idea that what appears to be chaos is really another kind of order.
(by now, you can probably see that I have a bit of bias, which I hope isn't coloring my thoughts on the matter too much.)
Perhaps, IT professionals' experience with speedy automatons prepares them for this thought, or perhaps the minds that are likely to choose IT as a career are already comfortable with it. Or I'm way off. I've no idea how to test it, and clearly my thoughts on the matter need some refinement, anyway.
Dude, you got ripped off on your graphics card. Big time. No graphics card in the past two years that cost that much should be struggling. A $100 (£50) card from two years ago shouldn't even be struggling (not able to run in highest settings is not the same as struggling, and only the most recent games should be unable to run at the highest settings graphics-wise)
In the world of PC games, it really makes sense not to try and future-proof your system, rather, it's more cost effective (as long as it's graphics-bound) to buy the cheapest hardware that runs the games you want adequately, which if you're willing to settle for scaled back graphics settings (you can scale them up when you upgrade in two years, and it's like getting a new game!) that means just about the second cheapest card in best buy.
I'm sorry that you bought an old PC, new, though. Two years ago, DX10 was on the radar. What you did by purchasing that expensive graphics card that apparently isn't supported for it was a lot like paying roll-out prices on ebay for a PS2 six months before the PS3 was set to be released.
There are legitimate areas where the consoles are superior to PCs and vice versa. Although it's a mystery to me why the consoles are *still* vastly inferior interface wise. How difficult would it be to use USB peripherals and have mouse-control (or trackball) as an option for FPSs, anyway?
Can you really call that *pressure* though? I mean, the concept of pressure works under the assumption of a continuous medium, or an aggregate of particles so large that it can be approximated as a continuous medium, which you definitely do not have if you're considering individual particles. You might as well calculate the "pressure" of an individual air molecule striking an individual molecule of a pressure vessel by computing it's impulse, and dividing by the cross sectional area of the smaller of the two atoms.
BTW, recreational scuba divers use materials whose bulk properties are two orders of magnitude from STP, and put their own personal materials under conditions of nearly one order of magnitude away, so that's not actually all that impressive.
We only need 50 GB, and in a form factor about a third of a deck of cards, and cheaper than a BRD. And it doesn't even have to be rewritable. Then, the tyranny of spinning disk media will finally be temporarily ameliorated, by USB high definition video players.
Imagine: not having to worry about your media obsoleting because the interface is so cheap and useful that it is guaranteed to be on every computing device long after it has been surpassed by superior buses.
Imagine a robust format that doesn't skip or scratch, even if you keep it in your pocket with your keys.
Imagine a built-in crypto chip ensuring strong DRM by essencially creating an encrypted ssh tunnel straight to your video display device, using a different key every time for the actual data.
(ok, the last one's maybe not so great, but there's no reason why anything with a usb connect can't have the crypto built in, so you'd still have your portability. If there's still a problem, then it's better to enforce the rules as perfectly as possible. People don't usually object to rules that don't affect them, witness the capricious speed laws for your example there)
It's way better to be good at math, though, if you have to pick one. Sure, computers are quite practical for solving difficult problems, but you don't get nearly as much insight from simulation as you do from deriving an analytical formula for something (assuming such a formula is possible).
And it can be a lot faster and more accurate to optimize with a pencil than with generic optimization algorithm.
I don't want adds calling out my name like in "Minority Report"
Well you're just going to have to level up, or quaff an invisibility potion, or keep your aggro down by using lower-level healing spells when you can get away with it.
Seriously though, why would you want to buy food on a two week schedule, limiting yourself to mostly frozen and prepared foods. Better to shop every or two-three days, and stagger the long-term stuff so you only have to pick up one per visit. That way you can have fresh food every day for dinner. Plus you can get all your groceries in in one trip if you use the basket instead of the cart.
Slashdot Mirror
No, most designs specify a thin ribbon. So, no matter where it breaks, it won't impact the ground at more than terminal velocity for thin, burnt sheets.
The design that specified steel cable did so specifically to show how impractical it would be to attempt a cable using existing materials.
That depends an awful lot on what that debt is held in. In many cases, it's dollars which the US government can devalue arbitrarily to eliminate debt. Of course, that tactic would kill international trade, but it would also do something else: it effectively means that there is a limiting rate at which that debt can be collected, and if they try to go too fast, they'll get far less than they put in.
We're literally getting something for nothing here: we're getting their goods, in exchange for our worthless paper, and the more goods they send, the more worthless the paper becomes!
They're getting something very valuable out of the deal, though: atrophy of our own strategic manufacturing capability. It was that capability which won two world wars and in the process pounded Japan. (ironically, in defense of china, though)
And since they do plan on military action in the future that we might object to (but not a direct assault on ourselves) it's in their best interest to reduce our capability to do for Taiwan what we did for China in the 40s.
Fortunately, the last time I checked, international trade was down around 10% of the gross national product, so the economy would take a dramatic hit, but not necessarily an irrecoverable one. We'd have some issues while ramping up manufacturing and oil and coal production again, but after a decade or so, I think we'd be back on track. Unfortunately, a lot of that 90% GDP is services, so we'd be in for more than a mere 10% hit.
Actually, come to think of it, the easiest 'solution' to the deficit probably isn't protectionism, but deliberate devaluing of the dollar to make imports less competitive, and foreign investment less valuable, and bring back balance.
So.. The situation is grave, but there are a few points of light, here and there.
They had photography, and all that entails. I'm sure that he could've created a crude mask and acid-etched the image onto a sturdier material. But it's certainly more convoluted than simply recording grooves directly in the first place.
Just who, exactly, would be more hurt if "we" defaulted on that debt, though?
"If a man owes you a thousand dollars, you have power over him. If he owes you a million dollars, he has power over you." -I forget who said this, but it's very wise.
Wouldn't roleplayers support a ban on nerfing guns?
There're too many double negatives in that headline.
No, it's still boring. Or rather, It's full of interesting content and brilliant visuals, and quests from humorous to dramatic.
Only, to get to that interesting content, you have to wade through a lot of boring crap like, "collect 10 livers from undead dire boars" And when you get there, you discover that they drop livers 2.5% of the time (so you need to kill 400 boars), and at least one of the following is true:
1) the boars are too powerful for you to take on easily, so you have to wait between them while you restore health and mana and/or burn through potions at a rate that the quest reward + the loot will not support (and therefore necessitating further farming...)
2) The boars are powerful, but you find other player(s) to help you, but you have to split the loot up, so factoring in the extra boars you need to kill, it takes just as long as if you solo'd.
3) there aren't enough boars, so there are a dozen people just standing around waiting for one to spawn, hoping to get the first shot in to claim the loot.
And you need those livers to make the soup to give to the informant to get the trinket to give to the other informant to get the key to enter the dungeon where the monster lives that drops half of the amulet that you need to be holding when you kill the elementals that drop the ingredient that you need ten of to bribe the wizard to give you the cure for the children of the village's mysterious plague.
Taking the cube apart doesn't damage the adhesion. If you remove the stickers, the first time it might be ok, but you risk stickers not staying on, and tearing of stickers. And you're going to leave plenty of evidence you sticker switcher.
But if you take it apart carefully, the worst evidence you'll leave is a pair of scratches from the screwdriver you used to pry off the first piece.
I think the "pixel for pixel" requirement is a bit of a red herring, though. What I, as a user, want is a format that scales well. I should be able to have a 3750x3000 pixel display that looks just like a 800x600 display, except much, much sharper. Also, image scaling should be a tad higher order than "step function."
Indeed. And then bill the horse owner the amount of one horse. Then tax him every year for the horse feed.
Yeah, but you shouldn't alienate your allies just to protect yourself from the threat of enemies who won't respect your allies' borders. I mean, if France had extended the Maginot line to cover its border with Belgium, the trade and political disaster would've been enormous and devastating.
No, you're an idiot because you can't see through the shallow racism inherent in voting for a black candidate for no better reason than that it'd be swell to have a black president.
Oh, boy, Obama's for change. Big freakin' hairy deal. What kind of change is he for? Positive change!
The reason he can't be "smeared" directly is that he hasn't actually proffered much other than vague platitudes (but at least he is doing better than Kerry's ~"I'd do pretty much what Bush is doing in Iraq, but..Better!"). He's running as the "generic democrat" polls loved so much a few years ago, where you get to impute on to him all the things you think your ideal democrat would be. And it helps that he delivers those platitudes very convincingly.
Now, the way I see it, if he takes office, one of two things could happen: 1) he'll be a bit like Clinton, whose highest goal was to reach the office, and he really doesn't have much of a clue as to what to do when he gets there. Which is not so bad if he has an opposite party congress. I love vetoes. 2) he has true colors, which he'll show when he reaches office. As to what those might be, there is only fringe evidence (was that speech by his pastor a one-time thing? If not, then why was the pastor his campaign's religious advisor?) Which is also not so bad, as it guarantees an opposite party congress in two years.
But don't you think it's kind of sad that, if Obama is the first black president, he'd also the first president elected out of a guilt trip rather than actual policy agreement?
Ironically, asbestos is quite safe, as long as you leave it in the wall where it belongs. About the worst thing you can do is remove it from an existing installation where the building is not scheduled to be demolished (since you spread its dust around by removing it).
Living and working in buildings with asbestos isn't a big deal. You don't really get any increase in lung cancer risk, but you get the benefit if a much lower death from fire risk. working with asbestos was always the problem. So the solution? Marathon of extra work with asbestos for all the people removing it in a panic. Brilliant.
AFAICT, Wii was never intended to be "next gen." It was intended to be the last of "this gen." Under the assumption that High Definition won't really be getting common until near the end of it's 5 year life cycle. At which point they'd be ramping up for the next gen console. I mean, when they were developing the Wii, the input connector for HD hadn't even been finalized yet, so they couldn't have planned for all contingencies (well there was enough info to plan for all contingencies, but it would've made the hardware a tad more expensive, and only to benefit a relatively small market--people with High Definition displays-- for at least half of it's life cycle.)
Repeat after me: You can't future-proof computer purchases of any kind, and a console is just a computer with some specific optimizations and consistent hardware.
And since Moore's law means that a $700 console loses $350 in value in less than two years, why price consoles into that range? Especially as Sony already had the "high end" console market pretty much sewn up? "Just an updated Game Cube" was just the right size for a console when the Wii came out, and Nintendo's quarterly statement will show the truth of that.
I'm sorry that you're not excited about the hardware (frankly, I've got mixed feelings about it, but I'm not really a console guy, anyway), but it's popularity shows that that's not the prevalent opinion about it. It's not just about having the best hardware money can buy. It's about having fun, affordable games, and Wii is way out ahead on affordability.
That's not a transformer. That's an electric motor coupled to a generator. Which for a long time was the most efficient way to convert DC voltages.
They are well positioned by virtue of not having huge sunk costs and subsidy losses. If they end the platform right now, they will still have made a profit. Other platforms can't make that claim. Although companies who didn't get into the market are just as well positioned, as you say.
But Nintendo has the advantage of having never sold the Wii at a loss. They could put out an upgraded machine right now without having real losses (pro-forma "losses" though)
In other words, they're well positioned to be the first ones out of the gate for the next generation of home theater / video game equipment, and they won't have to worry about figuring out which disk format to back.*
Now, whether they actually take advantage of that position remains to be seen. But they've by no means screwed themselves out of anything with their design decisions regarding the Wii.
* of course, if it takes Blu-Ray as long to overtake DVD as DVD took to overtake VHS, USB thumbdrive movies will be well within possibility. Remember, this jump was a big jump data-wise, but High definition is pretty well defined for the next decade or so: 50 gig is going to be plenty for any storage medium for some time, but it's also going to get much easier to achieve. In that sense, Blu-Ray is a disaster. We should've gone with HD-DVD as an interim format (well, it was supposed to be cheaper), knowing that it would be replaced fairly quickly by something much more durable, storable, reliable, and possibly even cheaper.
Um.. so? It's not like mice are expensive. Include one, and a mousing surface that straps to your leg in the box. Or come up with an equivalent control scheme, tilt sensors are getting better, right?
I don't know if it's the answer, but an answer is that it has something to do with control, specifically, willingness to allow things to be out of your direct control, if that means that a greater benefit is possible.
In the case of computers, it is obvious: A computer user, or programmer more directly, prefers to set a series of rules for automating tasks rather than completing repetitive tasks.. repeatedly. And the computer can do repetative things far more efficiently than the programmer could, so by surrendering control to the machine, greater "good" can be accomplished.
In the case of politics, libertarians (well, free-market libertarians, anyway) believe that the market tends to relax toward the optimum conditions for production of wealth and happiness if the individual actors are autonomous enough to make their own decisions and informed enough to make rational ones. Non-libertarians, I believe, fear that either that information is not available, or that people will tend to make irrational decisions that, in agregate, are also harmful.
Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that this fear, itself, is irrational, which brings up some interesting, recursive philosophical questions. Nevertheless, the pro-state-control group appears to fear the uncertainty of not being (or having someone) in charge of everything, while libertarians are fully comfortable with the idea that what appears to be chaos is really another kind of order.
(by now, you can probably see that I have a bit of bias, which I hope isn't coloring my thoughts on the matter too much.)
Perhaps, IT professionals' experience with speedy automatons prepares them for this thought, or perhaps the minds that are likely to choose IT as a career are already comfortable with it. Or I'm way off. I've no idea how to test it, and clearly my thoughts on the matter need some refinement, anyway.
In 31 years, $1M won't be worth much. Certainly not enough to retire on.
Dude, you got ripped off on your graphics card. Big time. No graphics card in the past two years that cost that much should be struggling. A $100 (£50) card from two years ago shouldn't even be struggling (not able to run in highest settings is not the same as struggling, and only the most recent games should be unable to run at the highest settings graphics-wise)
In the world of PC games, it really makes sense not to try and future-proof your system, rather, it's more cost effective (as long as it's graphics-bound) to buy the cheapest hardware that runs the games you want adequately, which if you're willing to settle for scaled back graphics settings (you can scale them up when you upgrade in two years, and it's like getting a new game!) that means just about the second cheapest card in best buy.
I'm sorry that you bought an old PC, new, though. Two years ago, DX10 was on the radar. What you did by purchasing that expensive graphics card that apparently isn't supported for it was a lot like paying roll-out prices on ebay for a PS2 six months before the PS3 was set to be released.
There are legitimate areas where the consoles are superior to PCs and vice versa. Although it's a mystery to me why the consoles are *still* vastly inferior interface wise. How difficult would it be to use USB peripherals and have mouse-control (or trackball) as an option for FPSs, anyway?
Can you really call that *pressure* though? I mean, the concept of pressure works under the assumption of a continuous medium, or an aggregate of particles so large that it can be approximated as a continuous medium, which you definitely do not have if you're considering individual particles. You might as well calculate the "pressure" of an individual air molecule striking an individual molecule of a pressure vessel by computing it's impulse, and dividing by the cross sectional area of the smaller of the two atoms.
BTW, recreational scuba divers use materials whose bulk properties are two orders of magnitude from STP, and put their own personal materials under conditions of nearly one order of magnitude away, so that's not actually all that impressive.
We only need 50 GB, and in a form factor about a third of a deck of cards, and cheaper than a BRD. And it doesn't even have to be rewritable. Then, the tyranny of spinning disk media will finally be temporarily ameliorated, by USB high definition video players.
Imagine: not having to worry about your media obsoleting because the interface is so cheap and useful that it is guaranteed to be on every computing device long after it has been surpassed by superior buses.
Imagine a robust format that doesn't skip or scratch, even if you keep it in your pocket with your keys.
Imagine a built-in crypto chip ensuring strong DRM by essencially creating an encrypted ssh tunnel straight to your video display device, using a different key every time for the actual data.
(ok, the last one's maybe not so great, but there's no reason why anything with a usb connect can't have the crypto built in, so you'd still have your portability. If there's still a problem, then it's better to enforce the rules as perfectly as possible. People don't usually object to rules that don't affect them, witness the capricious speed laws for your example there)
It's way better to be good at math, though, if you have to pick one. Sure, computers are quite practical for solving difficult problems, but you don't get nearly as much insight from simulation as you do from deriving an analytical formula for something (assuming such a formula is possible).
And it can be a lot faster and more accurate to optimize with a pencil than with generic optimization algorithm.
Magnanimous!
Seriously though, why would you want to buy food on a two week schedule, limiting yourself to mostly frozen and prepared foods. Better to shop every or two-three days, and stagger the long-term stuff so you only have to pick up one per visit. That way you can have fresh food every day for dinner. Plus you can get all your groceries in in one trip if you use the basket instead of the cart.