20 EURO??? as in 40 USD? for a freain' mouse? are you crazy?
$8-$9 for a standard three-button optical wheel mouse from logitech or microsoft is all you need. Unless you're shelling out big bucks for high-resolution or something. Those side-buttons you think you need don't provide any useful benefit beyond making the mouse more difficult to hold (gotta avoid the side buttons when you want to move it, y'know)
Of course, you could spend a little more and get a mouse with side-buttons that's also contoured so you can move it around again, but then the mouse has more surface area, and wouldn't you like just a few more side-buttons? If 2 is good, why not 4? or 8?
Heck, I'll even admit that apple might've been correct about having only one button on the mouse. If you're putting an entire keyboard on the mouse, you're tacitly admitting that the keyboard is actually a superior interface for the task you're trying to accomplish.
Frankly, I think if "principle designer of a critical tool used on high-profile space missions" is on their resume, it would more than offset the crappy jokes from the likes of you.
Someone should tell those guys who keep covering ships hulls with it then. They could save a fortune! Think about how impressive a fleet of gleaming, polished, bare metal ships would be!
It seems that they already had designed for several days of reserve power (a.k.a survival mode). The dust event threatens to exceed that amount, which could spell doom for the rovers. It is in no way forgone that it WILL exceed that amount, or even that the rovers will fail to restart after the event, however the latter is likely to follow if the former occurs.
If your plan makes the mission too expensive to fly for the sake of extending post EOL endurance, I'd say it's a bad plan. Consider the much ridiculed Ford Pinto. There were many improvements that could've been made to improve its safety, and by much better margins than moving the fuel tank around. But if each of the $5 here, $10 there improvements had been made, it would have ceased to be an affordable car.
You have to build the machine you can, with the budget you have. Not the budget you'd like to have. to paraphrase a famous statesman.
Yet, there are anti-virus programs for Linux. So, at least some are known to exist, however weak they may be. But without checking, you don't even know you don't have those.
Now, Granted, I'm typing this from my Ubuntu partition, which I do not virus check, and I also have faith that it has picked up as many viruses as my XP partition (which I do virus check) has over the time I've had each: 0. (XP: 4 years vs. Feisty: 3 months since complete install)
On the other hand, I do have multiverse in my repositories list, so I may not be as safe as I think...
20 Watts from personal vibration? It'd have to be placed all over your body and would make every movement sluggish, since you've only got a 100W power budget to begin with and most of that isn't used for locomotion. (2000 kcal/24 h)
Yes, but speed cameras ARE a perfectly reasonable alternative to traffic police. Unless, for some reason, you think you have a right to get away with -putting other drivers in danger- most of the time. It's not a privacy issue because you're already in public by virtue of being on the road, and if it were a privacy issue, then police would also infringe by enforcing traffic rules.
If you think the traffic laws themselves are unjust, you should strike those rather than their enforcement, as unequal or imperfect application of unjust laws leads to capricious or malicious enforcement of unjust laws.
Oh, jeez, are we going to start playing with SNR the way we've completely mixed up "learning curve?"
Blast man, there's no ambiguity in the concept. High S/N means low noise. It can only be interpreted as the ratio of the magnitude of the useful information compared to the magnitude of the useless chatter. Which places signal clearly in the numerator and noise clearly in the denominator. High signal to noise can only mean that there is a lot of useful information to be extracted, or just a little bit, but it's easy to find.
As opposed to this rant, which quite clearly has a rather low S/N, but lots of redundancy and repetition. Also a fair bit of "saying the same stuff but in a slightly different way."
Not only that, but she's also brave enough to dress up as a fat woman in a controlled, studio setting and pretend to be obese for an 2/3s of an entire 90-minute film!
Ironically, that project is exactly as appears as dangerous as it is, and from an engineering standpoint wouldn't be impossible, either. But a 1-atm submarine will not have any difficulty with decompression, nor would it be cheap, even considering the use of concrete.
The project that frightened me the most was a guy's idea for a swimming pool diving bell made out of transparent plastic. Not only is this possible from an engineering standpoint, it's almost trivially easy (cave divers use such bells, about the size and construction of a large tent, to decompress after long dives). But in an environment where untrained and potentially unsupervised (it's only a matter of time) kids (and other adults) would be using the thing, the potential for life threatening expansion injury is too great to ignore. All you need is for the bottom of the thing to be deeper than 2 ft and one kid take a deep breath and hold it all the way to the surface.
Who really cares if the clear channel station in atlanta and minneapolis have exactly the same play schedule? It's not like you can ever tune both stations. Now if every channel in atlanta plays exactly the same stuff, then you've got problems.
Of course, I've given up almost entirely on FM because it it is so homogeneous. In a medium sized market, you've got your 4 generic country stations, your 3 generic beat-box stations, and your generic pop station, which is a beat-box station weekends and evenings. If you're lucky, you've got an oldies station, but even the oldies get old if you can't listen to anything else.
Double warning: Some of the ideas are half-baked to the point of being quite dangerous.. YET STILL CHEAP TO ATTEMPT. Particularly anything involving submersibles tends to gloss over decompression problems.
The self-description of "right" or "left" or "Democrat" or "Republican" is a short, simple statement by which you describe the things you're willing to sacrifice in order to get the things you think are really important. Not everyone who votes republican has the same agenda, but on balance, the platform is an acceptable compromise to them to enact or prevent some or all of the goals of the Democrats, who organized on similar principles, but with different goals. At least on paper.
All of the labels are, really, a way to tell people your positions without having to actually list each and every one of 'em.
The second half of your post is trickier, but those of us "anti-GW" (not necessarily anti-George W...,) people agree with the argument for prudence, though we differ on what we believe prudence means in this case. For instance, the proposition that the earth has warmed over the last few decades is pretty well established. The liklihood that it will warm more is also pretty well established. Even the correlation between global temperature and carbon dioxide concentration is likely.
But there is a question of the effects, the time period over which those effects will occur, and the efficacy of any measures we can take to mitigate effects as necessary.
The thing we're not convinced of is whether reducing anthropogenic carbon sources to zero would have a useful effect, and we are definitely not convinced that, in an age where it takes over a decade to build a power plant, we can reduce emmissions dramatically without also reducing the world population dramatically as a consequence. We are also skeptical of many of the measures proposed to accomplish this goal.
1) Simple Conservation
This is important, but you can't conserve down to zero. All of the easy changes have already been made (barring new scientific/engineering discoveries), by definition, by companies looking to reduce costs. We can still go a little further, but we need energy to live. Reducing energy use means reducing quality of life. I would prefer to bring the third world up to our level than for us to descend to theres.
There are also a lot of snake oil vendors in this arena. Ideas like hybrid cars and fluorescent lights are dubious solutions due the problem, due to construction and disposal costs.
2) spend huge resources converting energy production
Plenty of snake-oil and public misunderstanding here as well. Power sources that are clean exist, but are politically unsavory. Transportation will for the forseeable future require liquid hydrocarbons, though their production need not necessarily involve sucking the stones dry. Ethanol and Hydrogen have been touted as potential successors to octane, though neither is actually sustainably produced.
3) Giant project to create a carbon sink
For instance seeding algal blooms in the pacific. I think it's fairly obvious there are some environmental issues to be worked out if we want to engage in planetary engineering, not the least of which is determining if it's actually effective.
4) Global communism
For some reason, most of the solutions proposed seem to come down to this, despite it being a completely orthogonal solution. The problems it solves, if any, have nothing to do with the environment. Historically, Communist regimes haven't been very good stewards of the environment, so it's somewhat of a mystery as to why environmentalists keep hitching their wagon to its gold star.
5) How much would it cost to simply relocate people affected as they become affected? In the case of a few feet sea-rise over the next century, It's pretty well unnoticeable. Most buildings don't last a century anyway, and buildings too close to the coast simply won't get replaced. Whole cities will simply migrate away from the coast, though in some cases this may mean some cities eventually simply disappear due to the utility of their location evaporating.
If that 5760 x 1440 dpi is the printer resolution, I can definitely see the dots, as I have seen the dots on higher-resolution printers than that, annoyingly.* You might need a magnifying glass to tell the difference, but that does not mean that your customers do, or that they're willing to view your work from a distance at which they can't see the dots. I will concede that if the numbers you've quoted are the effective resolution, and the actual printer resolution is much higher, then perhaps I would not be able to see it. The problem is a limitation of inkjet printers.
*There is a range of colors, at which I cannot see the dots, however it requires significant ink saturation to achieve. On normal paper it means a blotchy mess, but even on good paper, it means low-contrast and no highlights. Others' mileage may vary, however I don't think I'm atypical.
Just because the raw numbers suggest that your getting full use out of your 22 megapixel camera doesn't mean your printer is capable of taking full advantage of it.
Also, by "Photographic Process" I do not mean a film-based image. Merely that of projecting an image onto photo-paper, then developing it. The source can, of course, be digital. You could describe the paper as a kind of film, I suppose, if you were being obtuse. Personally, I prefer irregular, often diffuse film grain over pixelization as I find the former harder to notice.
People get caught up in the megapixel craze, and while more pixels, all other things being equal, does mean more detail, all other things are usually not equal. A 300 kilopixel image can look good if taken from a camera with low-noise and printed at an appropriate size, using a process that reproduces the full color depth per pixel.
Agent Smith has an extremely poor understanding of both Biology and Computer Science. Also dramatic irony, considering his condition in the final two "We wrote these while high, aren't they awesome" films...
Slashdot Mirror
20 EURO??? as in 40 USD? for a freain' mouse? are you crazy?
$8-$9 for a standard three-button optical wheel mouse from logitech or microsoft is all you need. Unless you're shelling out big bucks for high-resolution or something. Those side-buttons you think you need don't provide any useful benefit beyond making the mouse more difficult to hold (gotta avoid the side buttons when you want to move it, y'know)
Of course, you could spend a little more and get a mouse with side-buttons that's also contoured so you can move it around again, but then the mouse has more surface area, and wouldn't you like just a few more side-buttons? If 2 is good, why not 4? or 8?
Heck, I'll even admit that apple might've been correct about having only one button on the mouse. If you're putting an entire keyboard on the mouse, you're tacitly admitting that the keyboard is actually a superior interface for the task you're trying to accomplish.
Frankly, I think if "principle designer of a critical tool used on high-profile space missions" is on their resume, it would more than offset the crappy jokes from the likes of you.
No they didn't. They did it in special baggies, which they then had to seal and label with the relevant information for analysis back on earth.
Ships tend to congregate near ports, which are more often than not found fewer than 100 km from any land.
Someone should tell those guys who keep covering ships hulls with it then. They could save a fortune! Think about how impressive a fleet of gleaming, polished, bare metal ships would be!
Some reading material for you, then, by the guy who wrote the book on space mission design: Space Mission Analysis and Design
It seems that they already had designed for several days of reserve power (a.k.a survival mode). The dust event threatens to exceed that amount, which could spell doom for the rovers. It is in no way forgone that it WILL exceed that amount, or even that the rovers will fail to restart after the event, however the latter is likely to follow if the former occurs.
If your plan makes the mission too expensive to fly for the sake of extending post EOL endurance, I'd say it's a bad plan. Consider the much ridiculed Ford Pinto. There were many improvements that could've been made to improve its safety, and by much better margins than moving the fuel tank around. But if each of the $5 here, $10 there improvements had been made, it would have ceased to be an affordable car.
You have to build the machine you can, with the budget you have. Not the budget you'd like to have. to paraphrase a famous statesman.
DId you mean to say .002 or .2 for the font-size?
Candy stolen from.. babies perhaps?
Which brings to mind another completely off-topic question:
What the hell kind of incompetent parents are giving lollipops to infants, anyway?
Other than the obvious, AV vendors actually creating the beasties they protect against..
Has anyone calculated the odds that a virus could be created by transmission error (assuming negligence in checksumming)?
I'm sure it's very low, but are we talking, "Not before the Heat death of the universe" low or "struck by lightning while being mauled by a bear" low?
Yet, there are anti-virus programs for Linux. So, at least some are known to exist, however weak they may be. But without checking, you don't even know you don't have those.
Now, Granted, I'm typing this from my Ubuntu partition, which I do not virus check, and I also have faith that it has picked up as many viruses as my XP partition (which I do virus check) has over the time I've had each: 0. (XP: 4 years vs. Feisty: 3 months since complete install)
On the other hand, I do have multiverse in my repositories list, so I may not be as safe as I think...
20 Watts from personal vibration? It'd have to be placed all over your body and would make every movement sluggish, since you've only got a 100W power budget to begin with and most of that isn't used for locomotion. (2000 kcal/24 h)
how do you know?
Yes, but speed cameras ARE a perfectly reasonable alternative to traffic police. Unless, for some reason, you think you have a right to get away with -putting other drivers in danger- most of the time. It's not a privacy issue because you're already in public by virtue of being on the road, and if it were a privacy issue, then police would also infringe by enforcing traffic rules.
If you think the traffic laws themselves are unjust, you should strike those rather than their enforcement, as unequal or imperfect application of unjust laws leads to capricious or malicious enforcement of unjust laws.
Voting for a smallish statue in Brazil...
If you're a Frenchman, it's still an ego trip, FYI.
Oh, jeez, are we going to start playing with SNR the way we've completely mixed up "learning curve?"
Blast man, there's no ambiguity in the concept. High S/N means low noise. It can only be interpreted as the ratio of the magnitude of the useful information compared to the magnitude of the useless chatter. Which places signal clearly in the numerator and noise clearly in the denominator. High signal to noise can only mean that there is a lot of useful information to be extracted, or just a little bit, but it's easy to find.
As opposed to this rant, which quite clearly has a rather low S/N, but lots of redundancy and repetition. Also a fair bit of "saying the same stuff but in a slightly different way."
How does having a character called "hero protagonist" in any way constitute subtle parody?
Yeah but making snarky remarks and being a general asshole is unlikely to get you laid no matter how good you are at it.
Oh.. crap...
Not only that, but she's also brave enough to dress up as a fat woman in a controlled, studio setting and pretend to be obese for an 2/3s of an entire 90-minute film!
Ironically, that project is exactly as appears as dangerous as it is, and from an engineering standpoint wouldn't be impossible, either. But a 1-atm submarine will not have any difficulty with decompression, nor would it be cheap, even considering the use of concrete.
The project that frightened me the most was a guy's idea for a swimming pool diving bell made out of transparent plastic. Not only is this possible from an engineering standpoint, it's almost trivially easy (cave divers use such bells, about the size and construction of a large tent, to decompress after long dives). But in an environment where untrained and potentially unsupervised (it's only a matter of time) kids (and other adults) would be using the thing, the potential for life threatening expansion injury is too great to ignore. All you need is for the bottom of the thing to be deeper than 2 ft and one kid take a deep breath and hold it all the way to the surface.
Who really cares if the clear channel station in atlanta and minneapolis have exactly the same play schedule? It's not like you can ever tune both stations. Now if every channel in atlanta plays exactly the same stuff, then you've got problems.
Of course, I've given up almost entirely on FM because it it is so homogeneous. In a medium sized market, you've got your 4 generic country stations, your 3 generic beat-box stations, and your generic pop station, which is a beat-box station weekends and evenings. If you're lucky, you've got an oldies station, but even the oldies get old if you can't listen to anything else.
Double warning: Some of the ideas are half-baked to the point of being quite dangerous.. YET STILL CHEAP TO ATTEMPT. Particularly anything involving submersibles tends to gloss over decompression problems.
The self-description of "right" or "left" or "Democrat" or "Republican" is a short, simple statement by which you describe the things you're willing to sacrifice in order to get the things you think are really important. Not everyone who votes republican has the same agenda, but on balance, the platform is an acceptable compromise to them to enact or prevent some or all of the goals of the Democrats, who organized on similar principles, but with different goals. At least on paper.
All of the labels are, really, a way to tell people your positions without having to actually list each and every one of 'em.
The second half of your post is trickier, but those of us "anti-GW" (not necessarily anti-George W...,) people agree with the argument for prudence, though we differ on what we believe prudence means in this case. For instance, the proposition that the earth has warmed over the last few decades is pretty well established. The liklihood that it will warm more is also pretty well established. Even the correlation between global temperature and carbon dioxide concentration is likely.
But there is a question of the effects, the time period over which those effects will occur, and the efficacy of any measures we can take to mitigate effects as necessary.
The thing we're not convinced of is whether reducing anthropogenic carbon sources to zero would have a useful effect, and we are definitely not convinced that, in an age where it takes over a decade to build a power plant, we can reduce emmissions dramatically without also reducing the world population dramatically as a consequence. We are also skeptical of many of the measures proposed to accomplish this goal.
1) Simple Conservation
This is important, but you can't conserve down to zero. All of the easy changes have already been made (barring new scientific/engineering discoveries), by definition, by companies looking to reduce costs. We can still go a little further, but we need energy to live. Reducing energy use means reducing quality of life. I would prefer to bring the third world up to our level than for us to descend to theres.
There are also a lot of snake oil vendors in this arena. Ideas like hybrid cars and fluorescent lights are dubious solutions due the problem, due to construction and disposal costs.
2) spend huge resources converting energy production
Plenty of snake-oil and public misunderstanding here as well. Power sources that are clean exist, but are politically unsavory. Transportation will for the forseeable future require liquid hydrocarbons, though their production need not necessarily involve sucking the stones dry. Ethanol and Hydrogen have been touted as potential successors to octane, though neither is actually sustainably produced.
3) Giant project to create a carbon sink
For instance seeding algal blooms in the pacific. I think it's fairly obvious there are some environmental issues to be worked out if we want to engage in planetary engineering, not the least of which is determining if it's actually effective.
4) Global communism
For some reason, most of the solutions proposed seem to come down to this, despite it being a completely orthogonal solution. The problems it solves, if any, have nothing to do with the environment. Historically, Communist regimes haven't been very good stewards of the environment, so it's somewhat of a mystery as to why environmentalists keep hitching their wagon to its gold star.
5) How much would it cost to simply relocate people affected as they become affected? In the case of a few feet sea-rise over the next century, It's pretty well unnoticeable. Most buildings don't last a century anyway, and buildings too close to the coast simply won't get replaced. Whole cities will simply migrate away from the coast, though in some cases this may mean some cities eventually simply disappear due to the utility of their location evaporating.
If that 5760 x 1440 dpi is the printer resolution, I can definitely see the dots, as I have seen the dots on higher-resolution printers than that, annoyingly.* You might need a magnifying glass to tell the difference, but that does not mean that your customers do, or that they're willing to view your work from a distance at which they can't see the dots. I will concede that if the numbers you've quoted are the effective resolution, and the actual printer resolution is much higher, then perhaps I would not be able to see it. The problem is a limitation of inkjet printers.
*There is a range of colors, at which I cannot see the dots, however it requires significant ink saturation to achieve. On normal paper it means a blotchy mess, but even on good paper, it means low-contrast and no highlights. Others' mileage may vary, however I don't think I'm atypical.
Just because the raw numbers suggest that your getting full use out of your 22 megapixel camera doesn't mean your printer is capable of taking full advantage of it.
Also, by "Photographic Process" I do not mean a film-based image. Merely that of projecting an image onto photo-paper, then developing it. The source can, of course, be digital. You could describe the paper as a kind of film, I suppose, if you were being obtuse. Personally, I prefer irregular, often diffuse film grain over pixelization as I find the former harder to notice.
People get caught up in the megapixel craze, and while more pixels, all other things being equal, does mean more detail, all other things are usually not equal. A 300 kilopixel image can look good if taken from a camera with low-noise and printed at an appropriate size, using a process that reproduces the full color depth per pixel.
Agent Smith has an extremely poor understanding of both Biology and Computer Science. Also dramatic irony, considering his condition in the final two "We wrote these while high, aren't they awesome" films...