OK used ANFO. Even if human feces had a high enough ammonium nitrate content, they'd still have to smuggle in a rather significant quantity of rather aromatic liquids. Not to mention the detonator.
Actually.. good ideas all. Those things shouldn't be paid for out of the national till, they should be insured out of the local profits of living in those areas.
New Orleans should stand as a city because it is profitable for it to be there. Not because it is the whim of a few powerful people to spend others' money to establish it there. If that means building a smaller port-city to handle the mississippi traffic, then so be it. It was hubris to reach out beyond what the resources were capable of supporting. They tried to have a large, artistic city, protected from weather, with corrupt government, people on the public dole, and organized crime. Lofty goals all, but some would have to be sacrificed to operate within the available means.
Now I am going to retract a little, and say that for humanitarian reasons, it's perfectly reasonable for national support of a rescue operation. If we're to have a national governance at all, what is the purpose except to provide mutual support in time of disaster or invasion? Rebuilding however is another matter entirely.
At the same time, the government should not be involved in insuring or regulating the price of insurance* of anything. It should be more costly to live in those dangerous places *because of the danger.* People that cannot afford insurance or absorb the cost in the event of disaster should not have governmental support to move into those places.
*regulating insurance should be limited to assuring that contracts are not fraudulent and that legitimate claims are compensated. Insurance companies should be allowed to set prices based on risk. Regulating insurance rates at sub-unity return/risk ensures that insurance carriers must not carry that type of insurance or they will go out of business. Either way, it means no insurance will be available at any price.
Using Mass-Spec to screen for explosives is like examining md5 hashes to screen for profanity.
Oh no, it's far worse than that. It's more like examining word length to screen for profanity. Which is sort of possible if you use a variable-width font, but you are still going to get a lot of false positives. Emmission spectroscopy is more like the "hash" technique.
It is either murder, which should always be opposed, or it isn't. If the problem you have with it isn't that you think it's murder, what IS the problem you have with it?
Your position baffles as much as the people who are "opposed, except in case of rape and incest."
Even at 1500, it's still cheaper to fly. That 1500 is the ROUND TRIP price. which means it comes to about 750 each way. Which happens to be roughly the gasoline cost of making the trip. Add to that about a week's worth of staying in crappy hotels and eating crappy food, and overall not actually being where you're trying to go and you see that it's still quite a bit less expensive to travel by air.
Furthermore, would it really take a week to recover/replace diapers, wipes, and all the unnecessary accoutrements thereof?
In dozens of domestic flights, my luggage has only been lost once, and that due to my misunderstanding of instructions regarding a change of flights at a connection. It was delivered to my house four hours later. I don't know where people get this idea of "the airlines always lose your luggage" but I suspect it is due to frustration at the loss of control over your bags magnifying the effect when anyone does lose luggage.
In fact, on all of those flights, I have also never been disturbed by a single 2 yr. old. Plenty of babies crying though (possibly because they can't communicate the fact that their ears are blocked -- try flying with a headcold and not using a valsalva maneuver and see what I mean). Flying with an infant is not a decision that should be taken lightly.
and.. a crib?? Under what circumstances could you possibly be travelling under which, a) you need a crib, b) there's enough room at your destination to accomodate one and c) it makes more sense to bring one along than to arrange for one to be there when you arrive?
Perhaps, but on the other hand, it's not like the classic object lesson from everyone's childhood of touching the hot stove. You can only cut off all your fingers once. After which you can't operate the saw anymore anyway. So if the training is keeping from becoming careless now, it should be even better with the same training and safer tools.
Your bank does. Sure it's not important if the multiplication operation is two pennies over, in fact, it's guaranteed that you're going to have to round your taxes somewhere unless your income is an exact multiple of the tax rate (which you could probably arrange with the proper amount of charatable giving). But the calculation that matters is the transfer of funds from the bank to the government. (or your matress to the government I suppose...) That calculation has to be exact to the penny. (or at least, there can be gaps, but no overlaps.)
That said, this whole discussion is rather meaningless. For applications where floating point numbers are sufficient (i.e. low numbers of additive operations, which will be between like-sized numbers only) It doesn't matter whether you use binary or binary coded decimal. It simply doesn't matter that you cannot properly represent.1 in base 2 numbers of finite length because.09998 +/- (floating point precision) gets the point across. In fact, if you're dealing with real physical phenomena, all that matters is that you choose a representation under which the ambiguity of the storage format is smaller than the ambiguity of the measurement itself. It could be exactly the same if your measuring devices are base-2 to begin with, which realistically is pretty much all the time. (ok, I could give a whole speech about accuracy and precision here, but we're really only talking about precision, so that can be tabled for a later date.)
It makes sense to use binary coding for anything involving floating point numbers because of the bit efficiency alone. There is no collection of bits with which to represent a floating point number which couldn't be done with less ambiguity than simply using those same bits as a binary floating point number.
For all other applications, there're integers. Which also doesn't matter whether they're BCD or not (unless you're really really short on the processing power to display the nubmers, but if you're that short on processing power you should probably be asking whether you need to display the nubmers at all!
If we really want to be able to exactly specify the maximum number of fractional numbers, we should specify a base that has an extensive factorization. You can't properly represent one-third in decimal you know. Our ancestors used base-12 for instance.
Don't listen to the naysayers. People who've tried and failed and given up. Of course they're going to say it's impossible. It might be impossible, but they're not the people to ask. Especially in a business that has had some successes already.
Their failure wasn't that their chosen business was simply no good. It was that their business plan wasn't very good and they simply didn't have what it takes to run a successful business. The fact is that most small businesses fail within a couple of years. And most successful entrepreneurs have a few failures under their belts before finally "making it."
The slate guy learned a valuable lesson: He learned how not to run a coffee shop. He also learned how to almost ruin his marriage because of it. But he applied the lesson by giving up. I think he made the right decision. He clearly couldn't hack it by his own admission. But if he'd tried again a couple more times, I'd think that was the right decision. He'd clearly have the perserverance to eventually succeed.
If the naysayers convince you to evaluate your business plan more critically, or change it in some way, that's fine. There're always details that could escape you if you don't consult enough resources. If they convince you not to even bother then you're not an entrepreneur. Be content working for someone else.
No, I am suggesting that vehicles like the canadair regional will become more prevalent, with vehicles of the size of 737 becoming the larger elements of the commercial fleet. Perhaps even vehicles as small as the cessna 172. I really doubt the skycar will ever be built, especially if what they are really holding out for is a viable pilotless autopilot system. IMO, you should roll out as few new technologies in your revolutionary product as possible. So building a fully-automated lifting-body VTOL the size of a luxury sedan all at once is probably biting off a bit too much at a time.
It is the NASA study that holds the most weight though. They are progressing toward automated flight with much larger numerical capacity, and I think they are anticipating a more egalitarian and and convenient "hubless" system. Southwest has proved the business model by doing the one thing the "major" airlines (who use hub & spoke doctrine) have failed to do for a number of decades: showing a profit.
eh? that's pretty much the goal of the skycar people. As well as FAA/NASA studies into dramatically increasing the capacity of air-traffic control. Small planes WILL replace large commercial airliners eventually, if only for the convenience factor. It's just a matter of time, engineering, and money.
um.. you don't *need* to eat during a flight (even a cross country flight if you ate before boarding). And all the commercial flights I've been on the only drinks you have to pay for are alcoholic. Remember to ask for the can/bottle when the stewardess drops by with the drink cart so you won't have to keep paging them.
This is a response to a very specific threat: terrorists were planning on smuggling dangerous chemicals (or dangerous combinations) disguised as innocuous liquids. The solution to ban everything that cannot be positively identified is logical and reasonable. In fact, it's far more reasonable than banning nail clippers.
No, it doesn't. You can fly across the country, diagonally, for under $300 if you buy your tickets well enough in advance. There's no way you're driving three or four thousand miles in a 12 mpg minivan at $3/gal. Fortunately, minivans get more than 12 mpg (closer to 21-24 on the highwa), but the real cost is still quite a bit higher than $300.
Your manager was (partially) right to do this. unless you were willing to volunteer to monitor the temperature of the freezer 24/7. Probably, he should've just had you put the stickers on the food and left it there (depending on how dead your winters are), but without any way to be sure the temperature was at the regulation temperature, he really has no choice but to assume the worst case.
Bringing the food in assured that it would be maintained at a regulated (albeit higher) temperature by the store's climate control. It also assured that the freshness stickers would be accurate by bringing them into the known environment.
Assuring public health is the most important aspect of the foodservice manager's job. minimizing food waste comes in somewhere after that.
What surprises me is that you had outdoor freezers at all. It would be better to simply increase the frequency of deliveries to avoid them altogether.
Part of the design process is choosing parts. In fact, part of the design process is justifying budgets as well, so even if "money is no object," it is still a constraint. Why should software engineers get to have all the fun?
Just out of curiosity, when you protest the war in Lebanon, which side do you protest?
Regardless, your definition of pacifist is meaningless. Almost everyone falls under the category of pacifist by it, since refraining from war whenever possible by definition means going to war when necessary. Even politicians can meet this low bar.
In this matrix, a select few will invariably be able to manipulate the environment by realizing it's not really there. But instead of jumping off tall building and not dying, why won't they ever think of simply turning off clipping?
Oh yeah? You can just walk into pricewatch, buy the ram, have someone install it for you if you're feeling particularly lazy, go home and log into the Slashdot 3D RPG? (what, did you think subscribers were paying all that just for frist psots?)
I challenge anyone to define gouging in such a way that a) some companies in a free market are commiting it and b) other companies in a free market aren't.
how exactly are "technology devices" defined here anyway?
I mean, even the stick monkeys use to catch termites is an technology device isn't it? Seems a little narrow to define it in such a way that people could reasonably obtain an average of less than ten "devices"
Perhaps they mean electronic devices, but even there, it seems a pretty low number of items. How many digital watches, televisions with remote controls, dvd players, automatic appliances, computer controlled engine timings, cassette players, radios, clocks, calculators, smart-chip credit cards, and whatnot are simply ignored to produce a number of ~7 devices?
well if it's a state attorney general, you could call the US attorney general office. The governor would also be interested in what you know. If it's the US attorney general, I suppose you could contact the president directly, if you're inside enough to even know about the corruption, you might be inside enough to have that kind of access.
failing that, I suppose you could wait until a new president is elected and attempt contact again, but likely you wouldn't be stopping the corruption at that point, just helping in the corruption prosecution after the fact, since a new president would probably appoint a new attorney general.
I dunno, IANAL. those are just the first things that come to mind.
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OK used ANFO. Even if human feces had a high enough ammonium nitrate content, they'd still have to smuggle in a rather significant quantity of rather aromatic liquids. Not to mention the detonator.
Actually.. good ideas all. Those things shouldn't be paid for out of the national till, they should be insured out of the local profits of living in those areas.
New Orleans should stand as a city because it is profitable for it to be there. Not because it is the whim of a few powerful people to spend others' money to establish it there. If that means building a smaller port-city to handle the mississippi traffic, then so be it. It was hubris to reach out beyond what the resources were capable of supporting. They tried to have a large, artistic city, protected from weather, with corrupt government, people on the public dole, and organized crime. Lofty goals all, but some would have to be sacrificed to operate within the available means.
Now I am going to retract a little, and say that for humanitarian reasons, it's perfectly reasonable for national support of a rescue operation. If we're to have a national governance at all, what is the purpose except to provide mutual support in time of disaster or invasion? Rebuilding however is another matter entirely.
At the same time, the government should not be involved in insuring or regulating the price of insurance* of anything. It should be more costly to live in those dangerous places *because of the danger.* People that cannot afford insurance or absorb the cost in the event of disaster should not have governmental support to move into those places.
*regulating insurance should be limited to assuring that contracts are not fraudulent and that legitimate claims are compensated. Insurance companies should be allowed to set prices based on risk. Regulating insurance rates at sub-unity return/risk ensures that insurance carriers must not carry that type of insurance or they will go out of business. Either way, it means no insurance will be available at any price.
Oh no, it's far worse than that. It's more like examining word length to screen for profanity. Which is sort of possible if you use a variable-width font, but you are still going to get a lot of false positives. Emmission spectroscopy is more like the "hash" technique.
Oh, if you think mathworld is awesome, this is going to blow your mind.
It is either murder, which should always be opposed, or it isn't. If the problem you have with it isn't that you think it's murder, what IS the problem you have with it?
Your position baffles as much as the people who are "opposed, except in case of rape and incest."
Even at 1500, it's still cheaper to fly. That 1500 is the ROUND TRIP price. which means it comes to about 750 each way. Which happens to be roughly the gasoline cost of making the trip. Add to that about a week's worth of staying in crappy hotels and eating crappy food, and overall not actually being where you're trying to go and you see that it's still quite a bit less expensive to travel by air.
Furthermore, would it really take a week to recover/replace diapers, wipes, and all the unnecessary accoutrements thereof?
In dozens of domestic flights, my luggage has only been lost once, and that due to my misunderstanding of instructions regarding a change of flights at a connection. It was delivered to my house four hours later. I don't know where people get this idea of "the airlines always lose your luggage" but I suspect it is due to frustration at the loss of control over your bags magnifying the effect when anyone does lose luggage.
In fact, on all of those flights, I have also never been disturbed by a single 2 yr. old. Plenty of babies crying though (possibly because they can't communicate the fact that their ears are blocked -- try flying with a headcold and not using a valsalva maneuver and see what I mean). Flying with an infant is not a decision that should be taken lightly.
and.. a crib?? Under what circumstances could you possibly be travelling under which, a) you need a crib, b) there's enough room at your destination to accomodate one and c) it makes more sense to bring one along than to arrange for one to be there when you arrive?
Perhaps, but on the other hand, it's not like the classic object lesson from everyone's childhood of touching the hot stove. You can only cut off all your fingers once. After which you can't operate the saw anymore anyway. So if the training is keeping from becoming careless now, it should be even better with the same training and safer tools.
Your bank does. Sure it's not important if the multiplication operation is two pennies over, in fact, it's guaranteed that you're going to have to round your taxes somewhere unless your income is an exact multiple of the tax rate (which you could probably arrange with the proper amount of charatable giving). But the calculation that matters is the transfer of funds from the bank to the government. (or your matress to the government I suppose...) That calculation has to be exact to the penny. (or at least, there can be gaps, but no overlaps.)
.1 in base 2 numbers of finite length because .09998 +/- (floating point precision) gets the point across. In fact, if you're dealing with real physical phenomena, all that matters is that you choose a representation under which the ambiguity of the storage format is smaller than the ambiguity of the measurement itself. It could be exactly the same if your measuring devices are base-2 to begin with, which realistically is pretty much all the time. (ok, I could give a whole speech about accuracy and precision here, but we're really only talking about precision, so that can be tabled for a later date.)
That said, this whole discussion is rather meaningless. For applications where floating point numbers are sufficient (i.e. low numbers of additive operations, which will be between like-sized numbers only) It doesn't matter whether you use binary or binary coded decimal. It simply doesn't matter that you cannot properly represent
It makes sense to use binary coding for anything involving floating point numbers because of the bit efficiency alone. There is no collection of bits with which to represent a floating point number which couldn't be done with less ambiguity than simply using those same bits as a binary floating point number.
For all other applications, there're integers. Which also doesn't matter whether they're BCD or not (unless you're really really short on the processing power to display the nubmers, but if you're that short on processing power you should probably be asking whether you need to display the nubmers at all!
If we really want to be able to exactly specify the maximum number of fractional numbers, we should specify a base that has an extensive factorization. You can't properly represent one-third in decimal you know. Our ancestors used base-12 for instance.
Don't listen to the naysayers. People who've tried and failed and given up. Of course they're going to say it's impossible. It might be impossible, but they're not the people to ask. Especially in a business that has had some successes already.
Their failure wasn't that their chosen business was simply no good. It was that their business plan wasn't very good and they simply didn't have what it takes to run a successful business. The fact is that most small businesses fail within a couple of years. And most successful entrepreneurs have a few failures under their belts before finally "making it."
The slate guy learned a valuable lesson: He learned how not to run a coffee shop. He also learned how to almost ruin his marriage because of it. But he applied the lesson by giving up. I think he made the right decision. He clearly couldn't hack it by his own admission. But if he'd tried again a couple more times, I'd think that was the right decision. He'd clearly have the perserverance to eventually succeed.
If the naysayers convince you to evaluate your business plan more critically, or change it in some way, that's fine. There're always details that could escape you if you don't consult enough resources. If they convince you not to even bother then you're not an entrepreneur. Be content working for someone else.
No, I am suggesting that vehicles like the canadair regional will become more prevalent, with vehicles of the size of 737 becoming the larger elements of the commercial fleet. Perhaps even vehicles as small as the cessna 172. I really doubt the skycar will ever be built, especially if what they are really holding out for is a viable pilotless autopilot system. IMO, you should roll out as few new technologies in your revolutionary product as possible. So building a fully-automated lifting-body VTOL the size of a luxury sedan all at once is probably biting off a bit too much at a time.
It is the NASA study that holds the most weight though. They are progressing toward automated flight with much larger numerical capacity, and I think they are anticipating a more egalitarian and and convenient "hubless" system. Southwest has proved the business model by doing the one thing the "major" airlines (who use hub & spoke doctrine) have failed to do for a number of decades: showing a profit.
eh? that's pretty much the goal of the skycar people. As well as FAA/NASA studies into dramatically increasing the capacity of air-traffic control. Small planes WILL replace large commercial airliners eventually, if only for the convenience factor. It's just a matter of time, engineering, and money.
um.. you don't *need* to eat during a flight (even a cross country flight if you ate before boarding). And all the commercial flights I've been on the only drinks you have to pay for are alcoholic. Remember to ask for the can/bottle when the stewardess drops by with the drink cart so you won't have to keep paging them.
This is a response to a very specific threat: terrorists were planning on smuggling dangerous chemicals (or dangerous combinations) disguised as innocuous liquids. The solution to ban everything that cannot be positively identified is logical and reasonable. In fact, it's far more reasonable than banning nail clippers.
You can be a fan of it even if you're not a believer in it.
No, it doesn't. You can fly across the country, diagonally, for under $300 if you buy your tickets well enough in advance. There's no way you're driving three or four thousand miles in a 12 mpg minivan at $3/gal. Fortunately, minivans get more than 12 mpg (closer to 21-24 on the highwa), but the real cost is still quite a bit higher than $300.
Your manager was (partially) right to do this. unless you were willing to volunteer to monitor the temperature of the freezer 24/7. Probably, he should've just had you put the stickers on the food and left it there (depending on how dead your winters are), but without any way to be sure the temperature was at the regulation temperature, he really has no choice but to assume the worst case.
Bringing the food in assured that it would be maintained at a regulated (albeit higher) temperature by the store's climate control. It also assured that the freshness stickers would be accurate by bringing them into the known environment.
Assuring public health is the most important aspect of the foodservice manager's job. minimizing food waste comes in somewhere after that.
What surprises me is that you had outdoor freezers at all. It would be better to simply increase the frequency of deliveries to avoid them altogether.
Part of the design process is choosing parts. In fact, part of the design process is justifying budgets as well, so even if "money is no object," it is still a constraint. Why should software engineers get to have all the fun?
flash vs. the blink tag. c'mon, tell me you're not nostalgic for the days of the blink tag.
Just out of curiosity, when you protest the war in Lebanon, which side do you protest?
Regardless, your definition of pacifist is meaningless. Almost everyone falls under the category of pacifist by it, since refraining from war whenever possible by definition means going to war when necessary. Even politicians can meet this low bar.
they?
you're.. not.. human?
SETI would be interested to know!
In this matrix, a select few will invariably be able to manipulate the environment by realizing it's not really there. But instead of jumping off tall building and not dying, why won't they ever think of simply turning off clipping?
Oh yeah? You can just walk into pricewatch, buy the ram, have someone install it for you if you're feeling particularly lazy, go home and log into the Slashdot 3D RPG? (what, did you think subscribers were paying all that just for frist psots?)
I challenge anyone to define gouging in such a way that a) some companies in a free market are commiting it and b) other companies in a free market aren't.
how exactly are "technology devices" defined here anyway?
I mean, even the stick monkeys use to catch termites is an technology device isn't it? Seems a little narrow to define it in such a way that people could reasonably obtain an average of less than ten "devices"
Perhaps they mean electronic devices, but even there, it seems a pretty low number of items. How many digital watches, televisions with remote controls, dvd players, automatic appliances, computer controlled engine timings, cassette players, radios, clocks, calculators, smart-chip credit cards, and whatnot are simply ignored to produce a number of ~7 devices?
In fact, sales are the only metric that counts. all other measurements are proxies for sales.
well if it's a state attorney general, you could call the US attorney general office. The governor would also be interested in what you know. If it's the US attorney general, I suppose you could contact the president directly, if you're inside enough to even know about the corruption, you might be inside enough to have that kind of access.
failing that, I suppose you could wait until a new president is elected and attempt contact again, but likely you wouldn't be stopping the corruption at that point, just helping in the corruption prosecution after the fact, since a new president would probably appoint a new attorney general.
I dunno, IANAL. those are just the first things that come to mind.