I know there is the whole "I don't consider myself British, now I'm Welsh or whatever" that's gone on - but Britain and UK are synonymous at least as far as wikipedia goes. Britain can mean either the island or the UK. And either one includes both Scotland and Wales. Maybe you are confusing this with people confusing England and the UK, which are actually not the same.
Hello, astroturf. Who the hell knows the model numbers of their friend's laptops??? Is there some sort of organized place where slashdotters can identify astroturfers like this?
When you use real money, it feels different. At least that's how it is for me. A lot of trading has nothing to do with knowledge of how to price options or if there may be an arb between two contract's volatilities. A lot of it is just guts.
I say use at least 5k dollars, though. And read real money by Jim Cramer, because while he is a bit of a cheerleader, I think he also has a lot of experience that he puts into his book.
The problem with biodiesel is that it congeals at temperatures that are commonly found in the winter in the united states. Unless you don't mind walking everywhere, you need a different solution. You can, of course, use a little bit of biodiesel to help reduce the amount of fossil fuel burn.
I'm at my work right now, where I am employed as an energy analyst. It is the opinion of every single person in the industry that there is no real possibility of replacing gasoline with ethanol. It would take the entire corn harvest of the United States to make that much ethanol, not even counting how much ethanol you would have to burn to harvest the corn. We will continue to burn gasoline until it becomes so expensive that people use alternate transportation, or until we all die in some horrible war. The whole ethanol thing is just another wall street fad that's brought in a bunch of suckers.
reason -1: Idiotic, unrealistic depictions of women. I absolutely refuse to play any more final fantasy after that bullshit in 8 where you are planning an assassination and the women aren't in position to MURDER someone because they forgot to say thank you to someone else and had to go back and do that.
The buttefly effect is a problem for a forecast for a particular day or short period, but over a longer period of time it cannot defeat climatology. There are forces in the atmosphere that work to keep the weather in an equilibrium. These are not effected by the butterfly effect in a large way. This is why you can say that it will probably snow this winter, while you can't say if it will snow on Christmas. Since these forces themselves actually change, and it is often possible to estimate how they will change (or at least understand what range they might fall in) you can give seasonal estimations, and estimate what the worst weather you can expect is (given a degree of certainty, like 1 in 100). Typically engineers already do this from historical data when building things like levees. They look back and say, "well the only way that this system will fail is if we get a storm that usually only happens once in 200 years". However, since climate has been changing, historical data might not be the best way to evaluate this risk. Therefore you can use forecasts to provide a better estimate of what you have to prepare for.
Occasionally there will be a more stable weather pattern which increases the accuracy of the forecast window to make longer range forecasts useful, but typically that's true. However, there are some longer predictions that you can make easily - I can tell you that there will probably be much fewer hurricanes this year than last year, both because last year was extreme, and because the water in the gulf is cool. Things like that don't change rapidly.
If you are referring to forecasts in the United States, there are several different forecasts provided by the government which provide the baseline to basically everything you see on TV or hear on the radio or whatever. There is a short term forecast called the AVN/NAV which is intended to aircraft, so they will know how to schedule flights. This has a forecast which provides information on 3 hour intervals and is updated many times a day. Next there is the MRF, which goes out 12 days or so (it has been a few years since I looked at it directly) and is a daily forecast, updated several times a day. It is intended for general use and is basically what you see every day. There are some commercial vendors that put their own spin on things, and plenty of specialized forecasts for things like hurricanes, etc. However, these two are the most important forecasts for anyone in the United States, and have been around since the 90's at least. What you may be seeing is a "keeping up with the Joneses" approach to TV weather forecasting. If one station has 9 days, and the other has 8, which one are you going to watch? While that last day may have no accuracy whatsoever, people would still tend to watch one over the other I think.
Everyone is going to talk about how the buttefly effect makes this useless, and that is true for any sort of instantaneous weather. However, there are many things that affect weather cycles that are much more predictable. First is El Nino/La Nina which oscillates every few years. Then there are other oceanic oscillators that operate on a decade or longer cycle. Also there is solar output and human output. Add all of these up and you may be able to predict the frequency and severity of storms, the probablility of different weather patterns, etc. You will be able to plan for these events which will be 30 years down the road, and be able to do something about them - like build buildings capable of withstanding stronger typhoons, or rising sea levels, or what have you.
But never, in no way, will someone be able to tell you if it will rain in 3 weeks, let alone 30 years. I've studied the accuracy of forecasts quite a bit (as an energy analyst), and you can't get much better than climatology once you go 2 weeks out.
No this is not the same, because a doctor needs a license to practice medicine, just like a lawyer or an engineer needs to have a license for their professions. A license is an extra right granted by the government, which means it can be taken away for much less than your normal rights. You don't need a license to use a computer, so they are actually restricting what people in the US would consider an inalienable right. This would require a trial and conviction in our legal system.
It is impossible for an interpreted language written in C (or even a compiled one that is converted to C) to go faster than C.
This is untrue. Almost any vectorized operations can go faster with an interpreter than in C because a programmer in C can't tell C that an operation is vectorized easily, while the interpreter can. For example, if you just want to add all the elements of one vector to all of the elements of another vector, in C you would need a loop and the compiler might not recognize it as a vector operation. If you use an interpreter, it knows it is vectorized and it can optimize accordingly. In this case the language has made it much easier for a programmer to let the compiler (or interpreter) know what he or she wants done. I'm not saying it is impossible for a programmer to write some code in C which acts just as quickly on vectors, but it is much more difficult. The whole point of languages is to make the job of programming easier for a specific task. C is great for some things, but not everything.
Mod parent up. There are only 2 things that could possibly kill us in the next hundred years, and that's large scale nuclear war or a huge meteor impact. The first we seem to have under control, and the second is incredibly unlikely.
Not only that, but I now use google chat more than AIM, the previous de facto standard. Google isn't making a single big winner, but they're chipping away at every other company with a big online presense. Yahoo and Microsoft with search and mail. AOL with their chat program. Ebay yesterday with their checkout. Google is smart to diversify their products - you can beat one of them but not all of them. They're like a hydra.
Slashdot Mirror
Come over to the wii water. It is warm. mmmmm.
Hilarious, yes. Sophisticated... um... not always.
I know there is the whole "I don't consider myself British, now I'm Welsh or whatever" that's gone on - but Britain and UK are synonymous at least as far as wikipedia goes. Britain can mean either the island or the UK. And either one includes both Scotland and Wales. Maybe you are confusing this with people confusing England and the UK, which are actually not the same.
Hello, astroturf. Who the hell knows the model numbers of their friend's laptops??? Is there some sort of organized place where slashdotters can identify astroturfers like this?
Yeah I wondered about that as well. Where can I look to keep up to date with the possibility of an SG1 movie?
When you use real money, it feels different. At least that's how it is for me. A lot of trading has nothing to do with knowledge of how to price options or if there may be an arb between two contract's volatilities. A lot of it is just guts.
I say use at least 5k dollars, though. And read real money by Jim Cramer, because while he is a bit of a cheerleader, I think he also has a lot of experience that he puts into his book.
I do energy, not gasoline or ethanol - my focus is actually on natural gas and electricity.
The problem with biodiesel is that it congeals at temperatures that are commonly found in the winter in the united states. Unless you don't mind walking everywhere, you need a different solution. You can, of course, use a little bit of biodiesel to help reduce the amount of fossil fuel burn.
I'm at my work right now, where I am employed as an energy analyst. It is the opinion of every single person in the industry that there is no real possibility of replacing gasoline with ethanol. It would take the entire corn harvest of the United States to make that much ethanol, not even counting how much ethanol you would have to burn to harvest the corn. We will continue to burn gasoline until it becomes so expensive that people use alternate transportation, or until we all die in some horrible war. The whole ethanol thing is just another wall street fad that's brought in a bunch of suckers.
It is just like a sick or dying tree - they will start shooting off new branches in an attempt to survive.
You could also turn your hands upside down I suppose!
reason -1: Idiotic, unrealistic depictions of women. I absolutely refuse to play any more final fantasy after that bullshit in 8 where you are planning an assassination and the women aren't in position to MURDER someone because they forgot to say thank you to someone else and had to go back and do that.
On the moon, nerds are pants'ed, and spanked with moon rocks.
I think it is located here, but again, the site is crippled. That was found by searching google for "penny arcade world of warhammer"
What will he think of next
The buttefly effect is a problem for a forecast for a particular day or short period, but over a longer period of time it cannot defeat climatology. There are forces in the atmosphere that work to keep the weather in an equilibrium. These are not effected by the butterfly effect in a large way. This is why you can say that it will probably snow this winter, while you can't say if it will snow on Christmas. Since these forces themselves actually change, and it is often possible to estimate how they will change (or at least understand what range they might fall in) you can give seasonal estimations, and estimate what the worst weather you can expect is (given a degree of certainty, like 1 in 100). Typically engineers already do this from historical data when building things like levees. They look back and say, "well the only way that this system will fail is if we get a storm that usually only happens once in 200 years". However, since climate has been changing, historical data might not be the best way to evaluate this risk. Therefore you can use forecasts to provide a better estimate of what you have to prepare for.
Occasionally there will be a more stable weather pattern which increases the accuracy of the forecast window to make longer range forecasts useful, but typically that's true. However, there are some longer predictions that you can make easily - I can tell you that there will probably be much fewer hurricanes this year than last year, both because last year was extreme, and because the water in the gulf is cool. Things like that don't change rapidly.
If you are referring to forecasts in the United States, there are several different forecasts provided by the government which provide the baseline to basically everything you see on TV or hear on the radio or whatever. There is a short term forecast called the AVN/NAV which is intended to aircraft, so they will know how to schedule flights. This has a forecast which provides information on 3 hour intervals and is updated many times a day. Next there is the MRF, which goes out 12 days or so (it has been a few years since I looked at it directly) and is a daily forecast, updated several times a day. It is intended for general use and is basically what you see every day. There are some commercial vendors that put their own spin on things, and plenty of specialized forecasts for things like hurricanes, etc. However, these two are the most important forecasts for anyone in the United States, and have been around since the 90's at least. What you may be seeing is a "keeping up with the Joneses" approach to TV weather forecasting. If one station has 9 days, and the other has 8, which one are you going to watch? While that last day may have no accuracy whatsoever, people would still tend to watch one over the other I think.
Everyone is going to talk about how the buttefly effect makes this useless, and that is true for any sort of instantaneous weather. However, there are many things that affect weather cycles that are much more predictable. First is El Nino/La Nina which oscillates every few years. Then there are other oceanic oscillators that operate on a decade or longer cycle. Also there is solar output and human output. Add all of these up and you may be able to predict the frequency and severity of storms, the probablility of different weather patterns, etc. You will be able to plan for these events which will be 30 years down the road, and be able to do something about them - like build buildings capable of withstanding stronger typhoons, or rising sea levels, or what have you.
But never, in no way, will someone be able to tell you if it will rain in 3 weeks, let alone 30 years. I've studied the accuracy of forecasts quite a bit (as an energy analyst), and you can't get much better than climatology once you go 2 weeks out.
No this is not the same, because a doctor needs a license to practice medicine, just like a lawyer or an engineer needs to have a license for their professions. A license is an extra right granted by the government, which means it can be taken away for much less than your normal rights. You don't need a license to use a computer, so they are actually restricting what people in the US would consider an inalienable right. This would require a trial and conviction in our legal system.
It is impossible for an interpreted language written in C (or even a compiled one that is converted to C) to go faster than C.
This is untrue. Almost any vectorized operations can go faster with an interpreter than in C because a programmer in C can't tell C that an operation is vectorized easily, while the interpreter can. For example, if you just want to add all the elements of one vector to all of the elements of another vector, in C you would need a loop and the compiler might not recognize it as a vector operation. If you use an interpreter, it knows it is vectorized and it can optimize accordingly. In this case the language has made it much easier for a programmer to let the compiler (or interpreter) know what he or she wants done. I'm not saying it is impossible for a programmer to write some code in C which acts just as quickly on vectors, but it is much more difficult. The whole point of languages is to make the job of programming easier for a specific task. C is great for some things, but not everything.
That's just a down-right decent thing to do for those of us that enjoy some of the older games.
I'd say it was a down, down-forward, forward, quick punch sort of thing to do.
Thanks I'll be here all night!
Mod parent up. There are only 2 things that could possibly kill us in the next hundred years, and that's large scale nuclear war or a huge meteor impact. The first we seem to have under control, and the second is incredibly unlikely.
I'd much prefer a Tigon thanks.
Not only that, but I now use google chat more than AIM, the previous de facto standard. Google isn't making a single big winner, but they're chipping away at every other company with a big online presense. Yahoo and Microsoft with search and mail. AOL with their chat program. Ebay yesterday with their checkout. Google is smart to diversify their products - you can beat one of them but not all of them. They're like a hydra.