Suppose somebody built a nuclear power plant next door to you that had a 1 in 4000 chance of going critical on any one day. That's a median of 11 years, right?
Yeah, sure. But the thing here is that it's not a 1 in 4,000 chance of this asteroid hitting us every day; it's 1 in 4,000 that it'll hit us once. 800-odd years from now.
1 in 4,000 is a small enough chance to be a virtual certainty over a few hours for events happening once a second - does that mean anything at all to a 1 in 4,000 once-in-a-lifetime chance? No. And this event is not even a once-in-a-lifetime event; it's once-in-several-tens-of-lifetimes.
Or to put it another way: People suck at probability assessments.
1. "Taxpayers like me" include you, me, the other employees at said company, and everyone else that pays taxes - the company in question and all other companies as well. The money comes from taxes already paid. 2. The sums involved wouldn't make a noticeable difference to your taxes since it's split several million ways. 3. How is protecting the employees of a failing company "propping up" said company? Either it's bankrupt and is going down, or it can recover and then has to pay back the money the government spent on employee salaries.
On a side note, I find it quite amazing that the McCarthy-era "red scare" still lives and thrives in 21st century America...
Now where did I define "employee protection" as "employees working for free"?
Oh, that's right, I didn't. I even gave an example of how strong employee protection made sure I got paid even though my company couldn't pay me.
In the example I gave, the government paid our salaries while the company negotiated with its creditors; the company then had to pay that money back to the government. I never missed a paycheck; the employees were indeed protected.
Had the company failed in its negotiations with their creditors, it would have had to declare bankruptcy and the state would have covered our salaries during the bankruptcy proceedings. After that, we would be on our own.
Luckily for me, the company succeeded in reducing or cancelling their debts and made a full recovery (which was actually the whole point of the example, to answer the question "do companies recover from a situation where they're unable to pay salaries for a period of time" - yes they sometimes do).
Is it a common thing for employees to stick around when they're not getting paid?
In countries with stronger employee protection than the US, yes. The company failing to provide pay is not an implicit termination of the employment contract, leaving or not working is.
How often do companies recover from a situation where they're unable to pay salaries for a period of time?
Quite common where I'm from (EU). The company I'm currently working for had to go through reconstruction four years ago; for three months the government paid our salaries while the company negotiated with their debtors to cancel or reduce their debt. In the end we lost about 25% of our employees (some people left voluntarily, some were let go), but the company survived and have been in the black since. In fact, last year was a record year for us; best financial result in the company's history.
Communism is State Socialism. It should be wrong to say that it is the only socialism out there, but it is definitely socialism.
Soviet communism was (corrupted) state capitalism disguised as state socialism.
Russia was truly communist for a few years after the Russian revolution, until the Bolsheviks took over and turned everything on its head and forever corrupted the word "communism". Now, instead of thinking "oh, communal ownership of the means of production so all may be equal", most people think "oh, corrupted state owns everything and represses its people so that a select few can have it unimaginably better than others" - which is so far from (any of) the communistic ideals that it's almost impossible to go any further.
Aye. My Nexus 5 has a 1080x1920 445 PPI display. Although I didn't know that until just a minute ago when I looked it up, it's not something they make a big deal of in their marketing..
iPhone 5 only has 326 PPI you say? And they brag about the iPhone 6 getting a 416 PPI display?
(for the click-averse: It's a Leopard 2 tank from the Netherlands demonstrating its emergency brake system by going full tilt towards a line of people (allegedly the inventors of said emergency brake system) and then hitting the brakes).
@13:38 he explains that all the critical functions needed to operate the spacecraft are available as manual (physical) buttons in the middle of the (locking-into-place) instrument panel. That includes a joystick for maneuvering.
Ten years ago I taught my sysadmin students how to write kernel modules in Linux (on their LFS systems I had them build); these days I make a living coding in C#...
I drink tea *EVERY* single day of my life that is hotter than that coffee was served. If you gave me a cup of tea at the temperature the coffee was served I would return it as not hot enough. Clearly the coffee was not served at an insane temperature.
It was served at 88 degC (190 degF), I sincerely doubt that you drink tea that hot. Perhaps you want it served that way, but you do NOT pour 88 degC liquids down your throat.
Liebeck was taken to the hospital, where it was determined that she had suffered third-degree burns on six percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent.
Reading further, she originally sued for $20,000 (hospital costs + lost wages), to which McD offered her $800.
IAAC (I Am A Cyclist). However I think that people who treat riding a bike as if they own the road are asking for trouble.
It doesn't matter if you SHOULD have right of way. It matters if someone will see you and stop (and not run you over).
Yep, that's how I treat many of my country's traffic laws, e.g. yielding for pedestrians on crosswalks: Fat lot of god it'll do me knowing I had the right of way when I've just run over and killed or badly injured someone. Let them cross, yapping obliviously away on their cellphones.
Or, conversely, if I'm the pedestrian - fat lot of good it'll do me knowing I had the right of way when I'm in a hospital bed with two broken legs. Let them pass, yapping obliviously away on their cellphone.
Cellphones and traffic don't mix, whether you're in a vehicle or biking, walking, or running. 99% of the bad driving I see is someone holding his or her hand to their ear...
"A continuously variable transmission (CVT) is a transmission that can change seamlessly through an infinite number of effective gear ratios between maximum and minimum values. This contrasts with other mechanical transmissions that offer a fixed number of gear ratios. The flexibility of a CVT allows the input shaft to maintain a constant angular velocity."
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuously_variable_transmission
My 2012 Toyota iQ 1.33 has one, and it's the smoothest ride you could ask for. A passenger once commented "You never hear it changing gears", to which I answered "that's because it never does":)
I guess the answer really is twofold; for one, everything is moving apart from everything else, so two objects moving apart on directly opposed vectors could do so at very, very close to the speed of light and the combined speed of separation for an external observer would be almost twice the speed of light, and secondly that the speed of light "limit" is for things travelling through the universe, not the fabric of the universe itself.
inflation - a particular period of rapid expansion immediately after the big bang.
"Rapid" doesn't really do it justice; if I've understood the theories (or rather, the analogies of the theories) correctly the expansion was equivalent to an object the size of a proton swelling to 10^19 light years across, in just 10^-33 seconds.
Also, and yet again I may be misunderstanding the analogies of the theories (I'm very far from being a cosmologist), the size of the observable universe was roughly 3 metres at that point; the whole universe was about 10^23 metres across - so it grew a fair bit in the intervening 13.8 billion years as well, but not nearly as rapidly as during inflation.
Which leads me to a question that always nagged me; wasn't the speed of expansion during inflation faster than the speed of light? Any cosmologist or mathematicians out there want to offer some insight?
At the end of the Permian era, 250m years ago, the global temperature rose by six degrees. That wiped out 95% of all life on earth.
That's why people come to that conclusion; it has happened before.
That, and the fact that just a few degrees may well kill off just about all marine life, raise sea levels, create deserts where there's currently farmland, melt the permafrost (releasing massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere, further accelerating global warming), melt the polar ice caps and the glaciers, deforest the rain forests, and basically make the world a hell-hole.
Sure, humanity could possibly survive; but at what cost and what kind of life would it be? We can't build AC and heating for the whole ecosystem...
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose somebody built a nuclear power plant next door to you that had a 1 in 4000 chance of going critical on any one day. That's a median of 11 years, right?
Yeah, sure. But the thing here is that it's not a 1 in 4,000 chance of this asteroid hitting us every day; it's 1 in 4,000 that it'll hit us once. 800-odd years from now.
1 in 4,000 is a small enough chance to be a virtual certainty over a few hours for events happening once a second - does that mean anything at all to a 1 in 4,000 once-in-a-lifetime chance? No. And this event is not even a once-in-a-lifetime event; it's once-in-several-tens-of-lifetimes.
Or to put it another way: People suck at probability assessments.
1. "Taxpayers like me" include you, me, the other employees at said company, and everyone else that pays taxes - the company in question and all other companies as well. The money comes from taxes already paid.
2. The sums involved wouldn't make a noticeable difference to your taxes since it's split several million ways.
3. How is protecting the employees of a failing company "propping up" said company? Either it's bankrupt and is going down, or it can recover and then has to pay back the money the government spent on employee salaries.
On a side note, I find it quite amazing that the McCarthy-era "red scare" still lives and thrives in 21st century America...
Now where did I define "employee protection" as "employees working for free"?
Oh, that's right, I didn't. I even gave an example of how strong employee protection made sure I got paid even though my company couldn't pay me.
In the example I gave, the government paid our salaries while the company negotiated with its creditors; the company then had to pay that money back to the government. I never missed a paycheck; the employees were indeed protected.
Had the company failed in its negotiations with their creditors, it would have had to declare bankruptcy and the state would have covered our salaries during the bankruptcy proceedings. After that, we would be on our own.
Luckily for me, the company succeeded in reducing or cancelling their debts and made a full recovery (which was actually the whole point of the example, to answer the question "do companies recover from a situation where they're unable to pay salaries for a period of time" - yes they sometimes do).
by whom? the company or the employees?
The company of course.
Gah, that's what I get for not proof-reading. The company negotiated with their creditors, of course, to reduce or cancel the company's debts.
Also, I'd like to clarify that the money the government paid for our salaries wasn't a gift; it was a loan and had to be paid back (and has been).
Is it a common thing for employees to stick around when they're not getting paid?
In countries with stronger employee protection than the US, yes.
The company failing to provide pay is not an implicit termination of the employment contract, leaving or not working is.
How often do companies recover from a situation where they're unable to pay salaries for a period of time?
Quite common where I'm from (EU). The company I'm currently working for had to go through reconstruction four years ago; for three months the government paid our salaries while the company negotiated with their debtors to cancel or reduce their debt. In the end we lost about 25% of our employees (some people left voluntarily, some were let go), but the company survived and have been in the black since. In fact, last year was a record year for us; best financial result in the company's history.
Communism is State Socialism. It should be wrong to say that it is the only socialism out there, but it is definitely socialism.
Soviet communism was (corrupted) state capitalism disguised as state socialism.
Russia was truly communist for a few years after the Russian revolution, until the Bolsheviks took over and turned everything on its head and forever corrupted the word "communism". Now, instead of thinking "oh, communal ownership of the means of production so all may be equal", most people think "oh, corrupted state owns everything and represses its people so that a select few can have it unimaginably better than others" - which is so far from (any of) the communistic ideals that it's almost impossible to go any further.
Soviet communism was communistic in name only.
It's not actually that hard to pronounce, "ey-a fjell-a yo-cull" is close enough.
"Fu-dji" is probably still easier though ;)
Aye. My Nexus 5 has a 1080x1920 445 PPI display. Although I didn't know that until just a minute ago when I looked it up, it's not something they make a big deal of in their marketing..
iPhone 5 only has 326 PPI you say? And they brag about the iPhone 6 getting a 416 PPI display?
I'll never understand marketing...
Solution: use natural language to tell the computer what you want to do.
It's hard to wreck a nice beach.
"The Neanderthals or Neandertals [...] are an extinct species of human in the genus Homo, possibly a subspecies of Homo sapiens."
- Wikipedia
You don't want tires if you want to stop quickly.
You could have just linked to this video instead.
(for the click-averse: It's a Leopard 2 tank from the Netherlands demonstrating its emergency brake system by going full tilt towards a line of people (allegedly the inventors of said emergency brake system) and then hitting the brakes).
http://www.spacex.com/webcast/
@13:38 he explains that all the critical functions needed to operate the spacecraft are available as manual (physical) buttons in the middle of the (locking-into-place) instrument panel. That includes a joystick for maneuvering.
Are you me from 2004?
Ten years ago I taught my sysadmin students how to write kernel modules in Linux (on their LFS systems I had them build); these days I make a living coding in C#...
Also, in 2004 I was 35...
where does Major Pain fit into the picture?
He's in another chain of command, he reports to General Mayhem.
I drink tea *EVERY* single day of my life that is hotter than that coffee was served. If you gave me a cup of tea at the temperature the coffee was served I would return it as not hot enough. Clearly the coffee was not served at an insane temperature.
It was served at 88 degC (190 degF), I sincerely doubt that you drink tea that hot. Perhaps you want it served that way, but you do NOT pour 88 degC liquids down your throat.
From the wikipedia page about the case:
Reading further, she originally sued for $20,000 (hospital costs + lost wages), to which McD offered her $800.
IAAC (I Am A Cyclist). However I think that people who treat riding a bike as if they own the road are asking for trouble.
It doesn't matter if you SHOULD have right of way. It matters if someone will see you and stop (and not run you over).
Yep, that's how I treat many of my country's traffic laws, e.g. yielding for pedestrians on crosswalks: Fat lot of god it'll do me knowing I had the right of way when I've just run over and killed or badly injured someone. Let them cross, yapping obliviously away on their cellphones.
Or, conversely, if I'm the pedestrian - fat lot of good it'll do me knowing I had the right of way when I'm in a hospital bed with two broken legs. Let them pass, yapping obliviously away on their cellphone.
Cellphones and traffic don't mix, whether you're in a vehicle or biking, walking, or running. 99% of the bad driving I see is someone holding his or her hand to their ear...
Whoosh.
That was the sound of the Millenium Falcon - the only ship to ever do the Kessel Run in under 12 Parsecs - passing over your head.
You can start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield.
"A continuously variable transmission (CVT) is a transmission that can change seamlessly through an infinite number of effective gear ratios between maximum and minimum values. This contrasts with other mechanical transmissions that offer a fixed number of gear ratios. The flexibility of a CVT allows the input shaft to maintain a constant angular velocity."
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuously_variable_transmission
My 2012 Toyota iQ 1.33 has one, and it's the smoothest ride you could ask for. A passenger once commented "You never hear it changing gears", to which I answered "that's because it never does" :)
Thank you, that was a very informative link.
I guess the answer really is twofold; for one, everything is moving apart from everything else, so two objects moving apart on directly opposed vectors could do so at very, very close to the speed of light and the combined speed of separation for an external observer would be almost twice the speed of light, and secondly that the speed of light "limit" is for things travelling through the universe, not the fabric of the universe itself.
Thank you again :)
inflation - a particular period of rapid expansion immediately after the big bang.
"Rapid" doesn't really do it justice; if I've understood the theories (or rather, the analogies of the theories) correctly the expansion was equivalent to an object the size of a proton swelling to 10^19 light years across, in just 10^-33 seconds.
Also, and yet again I may be misunderstanding the analogies of the theories (I'm very far from being a cosmologist), the size of the observable universe was roughly 3 metres at that point; the whole universe was about 10^23 metres across - so it grew a fair bit in the intervening 13.8 billion years as well, but not nearly as rapidly as during inflation.
Which leads me to a question that always nagged me; wasn't the speed of expansion during inflation faster than the speed of light? Any cosmologist or mathematicians out there want to offer some insight?
Yep, just a plain old orange BIOHAZARD sticker works wonders.
At the end of the Permian era, 250m years ago, the global temperature rose by six degrees. That wiped out 95% of all life on earth.
That's why people come to that conclusion; it has happened before.
That, and the fact that just a few degrees may well kill off just about all marine life, raise sea levels, create deserts where there's currently farmland, melt the permafrost (releasing massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere, further accelerating global warming), melt the polar ice caps and the glaciers, deforest the rain forests, and basically make the world a hell-hole.
Sure, humanity could possibly survive; but at what cost and what kind of life would it be? We can't build AC and heating for the whole ecosystem...
Here's an interesting doomsday summary, degree by degree, from one to six degrees: http://globalwarming.berrens.nl/globalwarming.htm
very cold throughout europe
You don't live in Europe, do you?
In Northern Europe it has been one of the mildest winters in 50 years.