What the heck? Prison murder rate is almost the same as general population? Despite their being in prison?? Who the hell is building these prisons that it's as easy to kill someone inside as out?
Hydrogen is difficult to store as methane, but if you add a few more carbon atoms, you get materials that are in liquid phase at practical storage temperatures.
Blockbuster would've had to buy the movies in order to have them sit unsold in a warehouse somewhere. Although I'm sure their back log contains numerous movies, I would find it hard to believe they had been in the habit of purchasing anything outside of their rather homogeneous standard selection until they were forced to compete with Netflix.
Netflix and Blockbuster, both, are in a fight for their lives, but it is Blockbuster that has arrived late to the game Netflix is playing. Their Plywood & Drywall stores are at the same time their greatest asset and their greatest liability.
Yeah, And we should keep it that way because 1,073,741,824 is a much easier number to remember than 1,000,000,000.
I wanna know how many of the "giga=gibi, damnit" people are out there that are also metric superiorists.
I understand that the ibi- prefixes are there to shoehorn a convenient convention. I also know that that convention was convenient when the error between binary k- and SI k- was only ~2%, but it was never as convenient a notation as people have creditied it.
It hasn't saved any actual space in describing drive size, the only benefit is that it may have made a human-readable-izing converter marginally simpler back when everything was at a premium.
It's just a little crazy to keep insisting on the 1000 ~ 1024 approximation anymore. It's a lot like using 20 as an e^pi - pi. It shouldn't have *ever* been used for anything more precise than comparing orders of magnitude.
It doesn't go into "college funds." It goes where all money collected by the state goes. The "General Fund." Which has some rather interesting properties:
If the expenses exceed the amount contained in the general fund, politicians are embarrassed by the shortfall and solve the problem in the following steps:
Borrow the shortfall against your credit.
Raise your taxes for the following year to what they assume will cover the shortfall and the interest on last year's shortfall. Note that they will try to raise taxes regardless of which side of the Laffer Curve they are on and will not even try to determine that information.
If the general fund exceeds the expenses, politicians are embarrassed by the implication of over-taxation and will solve the problem in the following steps:
Propose several sweeping new programs to eat up the difference.
Pass enough of these to consume no less than 1.7x the difference.
Raise taxes to cover the extra expenses anticipated* by the new programs. Note that the programs will be permanently enshrined in the bureaucracy, never to be repealed or examined again.
*actual expenses may be greater.
So, no, you don't win when you play the Lotto. In fact, everybody loses, including the people who didn't play.
Incorrect. The purpose of patents is to encourage inventors to publish their ideas. That can help spur additional development, but it also ensures that technology is not lost if the inventor goes out of business or buys a farm.
I think that charging more than that for, say, a Bose system is a bit overboard. The speakers are no better than what you get in the $60 system, the only difference I can discern is that Bose mangles audio in a way that "sounds bigger" by adding echoes and enhancing bass.
If the room you watch movies in is a fairly standard 12'x12'x10' box there's really no need for much more than a $60-$80 system. The components in such a system are superior in frequency response and isolation to expensive Hi Fi systems of a half century ago. AF electronics are cheap. High strength magnets are cheap. Precision machining is even cheap.
The law of diminishing returns kicks in quick for audio equipment, and the only reason you'll need to spend more is if you want to damage your ears by listening to an hour-long movie at jet-engine volume levels. In which case, you won't need high fidelity equipment for long.
Um.. America really has pretty much always been at war with terrorism. And not just any terrorism, but islamic terrorism.
Just because it's possible to use fear of terrorism for political gains doesn't mean that terrorism isn't a popular tool among our enemies, or that our enemies are all of our own creation.
Indeed. If they really want to prune the "not notable" stuff on the basis that it is noise in the search terms, just put a "not notable" tag, and exclude it from regular searching unless a "search obscure topics" box is checked Space just isn't an issue for the text (maybe images...), since the deleted articles are still in the database.
If they later accuse you of not actually doing anything about entropy, you can just quote the second law of thermodynamics, "Entropy increases for all real processes." Not doing anything is the only thing you can do about it.
There are national security reasons for prohibiting drug use, especially the highly addictive stuff. You don't want a nation of unproductive slobs concerned with little more than their next fix and damaged by repeated chemical abuse. It reduces the production capacity of the nation, which strategically is a pretty poor idea.
Of course, reducing the production capacity of the nation by outsourcing all the manufacturing to our most powerful potential enemy probably isn't the best of ideas, either...
Crichton's a hack who's never managed a satisfactory ending to anything he's ever written.
Which is especially interesting since he's only really got the one story:
A small group of people gets cut off from society in dangerous circumstances. They get picked off one by one until a very few remaining people prevent the big disaster. (...or so they thought, if a sequel is in the offing)
I've never understood why a two-hour Q&A session run by a (potentially partisan) "moderator" is called a debate. I dabbled in debate in HS, and it was nothing like the so-called "presidential" debates.
The moderator shouldn't have the power to direct the direction of the debates (by choosing questions to be answered with brief sound-clips). They should only have the ability to direct the mechanics of the debate, to ensure that everyone gets enough time to make statements and rebuttals, as exhaustive as the available time allows.
If you don't have the self control to use a credit card in a way that avoids those astronomical rates (i.e. paying it off at the end of the month) then you shouldn't have one. But if your method of keeping track of your purchases is: (wallet.money > toy.price)? toy.buy() :... then you're not going to accumulate a whole lot of wealth.
For responsible people who keep track of their purchases and set budgets and stick to those budgets, credit cards are just another tool that occasionally increases convenience.
Wrong guide. Their hardware section is as incomplete as anyones, not to mention not even on the main page. You have to drill down through howtos or search to even know it exists. It's great that they've collected all the howtos in one place (although my first distribution, Mandrake 7.2 conveniently included all of the howtos on the disk and had a menu item for them, even, so it's not that special)
My crappy wireless card, Linksys wmp54g, isn't even mentioned anywhere on the site.(based on site search) Not even out-of-date or inaccurate information. Very disappointing.
There are actually quite a few wikis, all are quite sparse and quite a few have simply incorrect information. I don't know if there is a fundamental reason why a community should not be able to maintain such a list, but so far it's been a failure.
I'm also not sure a wiki is the best way to organize the information. For a small number of peripherals and cards, certainly it is no more complicated than it needs to be, but for a huge number of similar cards, I think it probably needs to be a more traditional relational database. The cross-linking updates otherwise would be difficult to maintain:
queries people would like to be able to run on an eventual exhaustive database of hardware include
all hardware that works under Ubuntu. all network cards that work under slackware. {list of hardware} => {list of distributions known to be compatible with all elements} {list of hardware} => {list of distributions compatible with all but one element} {list of network cards} {wireless} {with 802.11 b or better} sorted by price, known to be compatible with {list of distributions}
etc.
But that's a far-future wish list. I'll take the mediawiki version if it can be made reasonably complete and accurate.
AMATEURTIP: good luck finding a list of "hardware that works with your operating system" that is accurate, up to date, and trustworthy. Or even one of those things for some classes of hardware. I'm talking to you, "wireless networking."
If someone would compile such a list, by actually testing the hardware in question instead of relying on forum posts of five-minute experts claiming, "It works for me, right out of the box," that in and of itself would be a huge service to the community. And maybe some revision information, so we know not to buy the exact model number that has an updated, incompatible firmware or worse, different actual specs.
If your camera shows your surroundings, they can calculate your speed from landmarks. I suppose you could mess with the timing of the tape, but there will be detectable clues that I suspect would be costly to eliminate.
Use a three minute continuous loop. Only pop the tape out if something happens. Like a motorcycle cop weaving through traffic at 150 mph and blowing through a red-light on a 10-lane highway.
There's no reason to carry more recording medium than can be useful to you, since the whole point of videotaping is for your own personal benefit.
Slashdot Mirror
What the heck? Prison murder rate is almost the same as general population? Despite their being in prison?? Who the hell is building these prisons that it's as easy to kill someone inside as out?
Hydrogen is difficult to store as methane, but if you add a few more carbon atoms, you get materials that are in liquid phase at practical storage temperatures.
Blockbuster would've had to buy the movies in order to have them sit unsold in a warehouse somewhere. Although I'm sure their back log contains numerous movies, I would find it hard to believe they had been in the habit of purchasing anything outside of their rather homogeneous standard selection until they were forced to compete with Netflix.
Netflix and Blockbuster, both, are in a fight for their lives, but it is Blockbuster that has arrived late to the game Netflix is playing. Their Plywood & Drywall stores are at the same time their greatest asset and their greatest liability.
Yeah, And we should keep it that way because 1,073,741,824 is a much easier number to remember than 1,000,000,000.
I wanna know how many of the "giga=gibi, damnit" people are out there that are also metric superiorists.
I understand that the ibi- prefixes are there to shoehorn a convenient convention. I also know that that convention was convenient when the error between binary k- and SI k- was only ~2%, but it was never as convenient a notation as people have creditied it.
It hasn't saved any actual space in describing drive size, the only benefit is that it may have made a human-readable-izing converter marginally simpler back when everything was at a premium.
It's just a little crazy to keep insisting on the 1000 ~ 1024 approximation anymore. It's a lot like using 20 as an e^pi - pi. It shouldn't have *ever* been used for anything more precise than comparing orders of magnitude.
- If the expenses exceed the amount contained in the general fund, politicians are embarrassed by the shortfall and solve the problem in the following steps:
- Borrow the shortfall against your credit.
- Raise your taxes for the following year to what they assume will cover the shortfall and the interest on last year's shortfall. Note that they will try to raise taxes regardless of which side of the Laffer Curve they are on and will not even try to determine that information.
- If the general fund exceeds the expenses, politicians are embarrassed by the implication of over-taxation and will solve the problem in the following steps:
So, no, you don't win when you play the Lotto. In fact, everybody loses, including the people who didn't play.- Propose several sweeping new programs to eat up the difference.
- Pass enough of these to consume no less than 1.7x the difference.
- Raise taxes to cover the extra expenses anticipated* by the new programs. Note that the programs will be permanently enshrined in the bureaucracy, never to be repealed or examined again.
*actual expenses may be greater.Perhaps he works for Verizon. $1000 dollars is like $10,000,000.00 cents, right?
"allow the technology to be developed."
Incorrect. The purpose of patents is to encourage inventors to publish their ideas. That can help spur additional development, but it also ensures that technology is not lost if the inventor goes out of business or buys a farm.
I think that charging more than that for, say, a Bose system is a bit overboard. The speakers are no better than what you get in the $60 system, the only difference I can discern is that Bose mangles audio in a way that "sounds bigger" by adding echoes and enhancing bass.
If the room you watch movies in is a fairly standard 12'x12'x10' box there's really no need for much more than a $60-$80 system. The components in such a system are superior in frequency response and isolation to expensive Hi Fi systems of a half century ago. AF electronics are cheap. High strength magnets are cheap. Precision machining is even cheap.
The law of diminishing returns kicks in quick for audio equipment, and the only reason you'll need to spend more is if you want to damage your ears by listening to an hour-long movie at jet-engine volume levels. In which case, you won't need high fidelity equipment for long.
I would advise you not to fill up in New Jersey.
Um.. America really has pretty much always been at war with terrorism. And not just any terrorism, but islamic terrorism.
Just because it's possible to use fear of terrorism for political gains doesn't mean that terrorism isn't a popular tool among our enemies, or that our enemies are all of our own creation.
Indeed. If they really want to prune the "not notable" stuff on the basis that it is noise in the search terms, just put a "not notable" tag, and exclude it from regular searching unless a "search obscure topics" box is checked Space just isn't an issue for the text (maybe images...), since the deleted articles are still in the database.
If they later accuse you of not actually doing anything about entropy, you can just quote the second law of thermodynamics, "Entropy increases for all real processes." Not doing anything is the only thing you can do about it.
If the new shows are technically movies, will they (or their counterparts) rip on the MST3K movie movies?
**shiver**
The three scariest words in IT. Actually... pretty much any business.
There are national security reasons for prohibiting drug use, especially the highly addictive stuff. You don't want a nation of unproductive slobs concerned with little more than their next fix and damaged by repeated chemical abuse. It reduces the production capacity of the nation, which strategically is a pretty poor idea.
Of course, reducing the production capacity of the nation by outsourcing all the manufacturing to our most powerful potential enemy probably isn't the best of ideas, either...
A small group of people gets cut off from society in dangerous circumstances. They get picked off one by one until a very few remaining people prevent the big disaster. (...or so they thought, if a sequel is in the offing)
I've never understood why a two-hour Q&A session run by a (potentially partisan) "moderator" is called a debate. I dabbled in debate in HS, and it was nothing like the so-called "presidential" debates.
The moderator shouldn't have the power to direct the direction of the debates (by choosing questions to be answered with brief sound-clips). They should only have the ability to direct the mechanics of the debate, to ensure that everyone gets enough time to make statements and rebuttals, as exhaustive as the available time allows.
Winamp as a free mp3 player for Windows has been around for ten years. Yeah, but for the past six, it's consistently failed to kick alpacan derrière.
If you don't have the self control to use a credit card in a way that avoids those astronomical rates (i.e. paying it off at the end of the month) then you shouldn't have one. But if your method of keeping track of your purchases is: (wallet.money > toy.price)? toy.buy() : ... then you're not going to accumulate a whole lot of wealth.
For responsible people who keep track of their purchases and set budgets and stick to those budgets, credit cards are just another tool that occasionally increases convenience.
Wrong guide. Their hardware section is as incomplete as anyones, not to mention not even on the main page. You have to drill down through howtos or search to even know it exists. It's great that they've collected all the howtos in one place (although my first distribution, Mandrake 7.2 conveniently included all of the howtos on the disk and had a menu item for them, even, so it's not that special)
My crappy wireless card, Linksys wmp54g, isn't even mentioned anywhere on the site.(based on site search) Not even out-of-date or inaccurate information. Very disappointing.
There are actually quite a few wikis, all are quite sparse and quite a few have simply incorrect information. I don't know if there is a fundamental reason why a community should not be able to maintain such a list, but so far it's been a failure.
I'm also not sure a wiki is the best way to organize the information. For a small number of peripherals and cards, certainly it is no more complicated than it needs to be, but for a huge number of similar cards, I think it probably needs to be a more traditional relational database. The cross-linking updates otherwise would be difficult to maintain:
queries people would like to be able to run on an eventual exhaustive database of hardware include
all hardware that works under Ubuntu.
all network cards that work under slackware.
{list of hardware} => {list of distributions known to be compatible with all elements}
{list of hardware} => {list of distributions compatible with all but one element}
{list of network cards} {wireless} {with 802.11 b or better} sorted by price, known to be compatible with {list of distributions}
etc.
But that's a far-future wish list. I'll take the mediawiki version if it can be made reasonably complete and accurate.
AMATEURTIP: good luck finding a list of "hardware that works with your operating system" that is accurate, up to date, and trustworthy. Or even one of those things for some classes of hardware. I'm talking to you, "wireless networking."
If someone would compile such a list, by actually testing the hardware in question instead of relying on forum posts of five-minute experts claiming, "It works for me, right out of the box," that in and of itself would be a huge service to the community. And maybe some revision information, so we know not to buy the exact model number that has an updated, incompatible firmware or worse, different actual specs.
Good idea. Now define "dangerous driving" in a way that is enforceable.
If your camera shows your surroundings, they can calculate your speed from landmarks. I suppose you could mess with the timing of the tape, but there will be detectable clues that I suspect would be costly to eliminate.
Use a three minute continuous loop. Only pop the tape out if something happens. Like a motorcycle cop weaving through traffic at 150 mph and blowing through a red-light on a 10-lane highway.
There's no reason to carry more recording medium than can be useful to you, since the whole point of videotaping is for your own personal benefit.