Look, I don't mind the occasional slashvertisement, but reading this one gives me ENTIRELY ZERO IDEA about what the product is or does.. It's got something to do with teaching and languages.
Human languages or computer languages?
Is it a computer program, an app for iphones, a set of flashcards, a teaching aid, a web server thing that students log in to?
Does it pronounce words or correct student pronunciation or drill grammar or vocabulary?
Is it something a teacher uses to run a classroom, or something an individual learner buys to learn a language on their own?
Talking about "simple rustic dishes" sounds tasty - is it a platform for robotic kitchen automation? Or is it a potentially nice metaphor that's lost on the audience because we don't have a bloody clue what subject you're talking about?
Journalism isn't the same as teaching, but both of them use models of what the listener knows, what the speaker wants to convey to them, and how to lay out the information in ways that the speaker can use to get the listener interested in listening, give them a framework to understand the new information or skills, and then give them the content. The usual badly written Slashvertisement says "Version 4.6.2 of Grobzinator is out!" and goes on to explain that it's three times faster because they fixed a display bug, plus they've added Graphical Skins so you can decorate it any way you want, without indicating whether it's a programming language, game software, or open-hardware cell phone. This doesn't even do that part well. If you're writing a review, you need to do some journalism. Maybe the original review was written for a readership other than Slashdot, some kind of academic Moodle users' website where it's trying to recommend a new book. In that context it might be fine, but simply reposting here, out of context, fails.
Whether that's relatively reasonable depends a lot on what you're trying to do. For a netbook, probably not realistic. For a specialized machine where the FPGA enables something hard to do in a vanilla CPU, maybe. Maybe you can use the FPGA to do graphics processing more cost-effectively than a separate nVidia chip, or do good enough graphics while keeping the power consumption down, or do fancy geometry crunching for a game machine. Who knows?
The Electric Automobile Association of Silicon Valley has electric car rallies every year, usually on a Saturday in September, with various hobbyist and commercial electric cars, bikes, motorcycles, scooters, Burning Man vehicles, and parts.
The electric RAV4 was ok to drive - I don't find regular RAV4 seating very comfortable, and since it was 90s battery technology the range was only something like 50-100 miles, but it handled well driving around the block in the suburbs. (They didn't let us take it out to the freeway:-) There was a Norwegian car I liked better, one of the Think! line before they sold out to some big American car maker who wasted them, and there have been a number of really cool concept cars. The Teslas have been there since they were first out in prototype, but there's usually too much of a crowd around them to get a test-drive.
My wife's comment about most of the cars was "I'm a consumer, not a hobbyist, and they're not ready yet." (The Tesla was an exception, but we're not in the $100000 sportscar market.) Some of the electric bikes really are ready, if that matches the kind of driving you need to do, but in my part of Silicon Valley there are only a couple of towns I can get to without needing to get on a 45mph road or a freeway, and I don't feel safe riding a bicycle that's got that much power strapped onto its frame.
A few years ago was the 50th anniversary of the symbol, and the guy who designed it was being interviewed on BBC radio. He said that the John Birch Society tried to portray it as an anti-Christian symbol, but that was nonsense.
South Park is created by a small group of people who create and distribute provocative material for entertainment and occasionally social commentary.
Facebook is a platform where millions of individuals can write anything they want to their friends, and the content isn't created by Facebook, it's created by the users. Sure, Facebook occasionally encourages people to publish information that isn't necessarily limited to the choices the conservatives approve of (Interested in: Women. Status: It's Complicated. Politics: Anarchist Religion: Rastafarian) etc. But it's not the kind of thing that's pointed at the owners individually.
Most of the Wifi systems are negotiating a random session key and using the password to authenticate it, so that's doing pretty much what you want.
However, they were mostly designed with the assumption that the objective is to prevent unauthorized access, not to protect the contents of the communications from eavesdropping, so the only way you can get encrypted sessions is to have password control, which is too bad.
If you put the password in the SSID so it's obvious, people won't have to guess if you're following that convention, or the convention that the password is "guest" or whatever.
If the Ex-Ambassador's suggestion, that it might be a demonstration for China related to Obama's tour, were anything other than random blathering, it's a bloody stupid demonstration if there isn't a big press announcement about it from the White House, unless it's various government agencies demonstrating that Obama's not The Decider just because he's Commander in Chief.
I had a friend whose father was in the, ummm, Foreign Service during the 1960s, and whose brothers flew airplanes for Air America. Her father requested to be posted to Indochina, and they did in fact post him to Indonesia by mistake. (To cut them a bit of slack, there was Anti-Communist paranoia about both places, but it was basically a screwup.) It wasn't all bad for her, since she did meet her future husband there.
Microsoft didn't launch Internet Explorer to take over the lucrative browser market - they gave it away free, competing with Netscape who gave it away free, and older browsers like Mosaic, some of which were also free, or even because it helped them take over the web page development tool market, which they could charge money for. They did it to save Windows, and to save their products which depend on Windows, like Office and Mail.
The threat to Microsoft was the combination of Netscape, Java, and AOL, which were enough of an application platform to make the underlying operating system irrelevant, plus a distribution system that had people willing to feed dubious coasters into their home computers and a popular enough email system to compete with MSMail/Outlook. If the market got committed to that platform, and to compatibility with those standards, then it wouldn't matter if the underlying OS got replaced by Linux or Solaris or whatever.
By giving the public IE, and making sure that it wasn't quite compatible with Netscape and taking advantage of its proprietary or non-standard features, Microsoft was able to take over enough of the browser market that Netscape/Java/AOL couldn't displace them.
If populations stay isolated long enough, they can diverge enough to no longer successfully interbreed, but populations don't always work that way, especially when there aren't major geographical forces separating them, and species boundaries aren't always that sharp. Maybe we were as separate as horses and donkeys, maybe we were only as separate as wolves and dogs, or even only as poodles and Labradors.
The studies showed that Europeans, whose ancestors lived alongside Neanderthals for tens of thousands of years, have a few percentage of Neanderthalish DNA that Africans don't have, and later some of them took off for Asia where they may have also mixed with other human species. Africans have the most genetic variation among Homo sapiens genes, because only some of them moved up to Europe, and only some of the people in Europe headed to Asia, but the people who stayed in Africa didn't get the Neanderthal bits.
The problem isn't new - snail mail interstate commerce has been around about as long as the Post Office, and companies like Sears, Montgomery Ward, and Wells Fargo's shipping service became major players in catalog-based interstate commerce. And Television let you buy Ginsu Knives and Chia Pets by mail without even needing a paper catalog.
States keep pretending it's a new threat to their revenue, but the main differences are that the web makes a much better catalog than paper, computer automation cuts the transaction expenses, and shipping's getting cheaper, so internet commerce is more practical, plus some goods are digital-only so there's no physical shipping required (e.g. music, movies), which makes it easier for a seller to not need physical presence in the buyer's state. On the other hand, state expenditures per capita and sales tax rates keep going up, and hardly ever go down, so states really really want this money.
Back in the 1980s, my wife was doing programming for a mail-order book store (which was like Internet commerce, only on paper:-) New York State wanted them to collect sales tax, and as you say, the taxes vary by county, town, township, etc., while the book store only knew customers' addresses and zip codes, and the tax rates weren't aligned by zip code. And different jurisdictions have different rules about what's taxable - for instance, in New Jersey, clothes aren't taxable, but in New York they are (so NJ people buying expensive clothes in Manhattan would often have them shipped home, because that was much cheaper than paying NYC sales tax.) And the number of cities thinking that it's a good idea to tax Evil Snack Foods but not tax Nutritious foods keeps going up, but definitions of which foods are Evil Snacks varies widely.
Today you can do better than that, because computers have lots more storate and CPU horsepower, and the Internet gives even small companies access to online services, so you could hypothetically look up your customer's address on Google Maps Tax Rate Tool to find out which rates apply to their geography, but the question of what's taxed and what's not is difficult.
Fortunately, the Constitution says that states aren't allowed to regulate Interstate Commerce, so even though New York and New Jersey had a mutual tax-sharing treaty, participation was voluntary, and since New York didn't make it easy to implement, her employer decided not to participate.
Here in the Bay Area we still have *actual* Socialists and Communists. You can even walk up and talk to them! Ask them if Obama's one of them (yeah, what bullshit.) And, ok, most of the ones who call themselves "Communists" will tell you to get off their lawn, but there are a lot of Socialists around, and I knew a number of them back in NYC as well.
You're probably too young to remember Andrei Amalrik's book, but the Soviets had severe internal conflicts and economic problems purely aside from the Cold War. Reagan's military escalation probably hastened their collapse a bit, but they had more problems with the Pope telling Eastern Europeans that they shouldn't be subject to the Soviet Empire. Amalrik was mainly focused on ethnic tensions, and even after the Soviet Union collapsed and divested itself of many of its ethnic groups, Russia still had their civil war against the Chechens and other Muslim minorities.
According to the article, it seems that one of the five redundant control computers started polling out of sequence, and the missiles didn't like it so they sent error codes, which the control computers didn't like, and lots of errors were happening in a hurry. So the operators [talked to the bombs about phenomenology] shut the control computers all down and restarted them one at a time, which let them find the bad one, and they haven't yet told the public if they've figured out what was wrong.
Diesel isn't significantly different from home heating oil - the price is much different because of highway-funding taxes, home heating oil has red dye so they can catch you if you use it in your truck to avoid taxes, and diesel has a few additives to make engines run a bit better, but otherwise they're basically the same. I doubt jet fuel is a significant fraction of the diesel market compared to trucks or home heating.
Because it's not available in the UK or Canada either, and everybody else has the sense to use liters? So you're clarifying that it's US mpg, not UK mpg, and it's obviously not km/l or whatever.
If you want to keep a diesel engine happy and efficient, you get it hot and never turn it off. A taxi in the city may be less efficient than driving on the freeway, but it's still spending 8-24 hours a day driving around, so the engine's always hot, as opposed to a regular person's car which most makes short trips and maybe two long commute trips a day but is usually doing cold starts.
If you're buying "petrol" instead of "gasoline", then you're in a market with much higher fuel taxes; here in the US, diesel prices have varied widely over the years but are seldom much more than 20% higher than regular gasoline, and some years have been lower. I've never owned a diesel car, but I used to have oil heat, and the differences between heating oil and diesel fuel are (1) lots of tax, (2) red dye in the heating oil so they can catch you if you put it in your truck to avoid taxes, (3) a bit of detergent and such in the diesel, and (4) if you run out of heating oil in the middle of the night, you can drive out to the gas station and buy 5 gallons of diesel, which will keep your house warm for a day or two until the heating oil truck comes by with a refill.
The pollution problems with diesel aren't so much the CO2, but the particulate carbon, sulphur, and maybe NOx. Most new diesel engines are cleaner than the old ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably somebody planned to BBQ them...
Look, I don't mind the occasional slashvertisement, but reading this one gives me ENTIRELY ZERO IDEA about what the product is or does.. It's got something to do with teaching and languages.
Journalism isn't the same as teaching, but both of them use models of what the listener knows, what the speaker wants to convey to them, and how to lay out the information in ways that the speaker can use to get the listener interested in listening, give them a framework to understand the new information or skills, and then give them the content. The usual badly written Slashvertisement says "Version 4.6.2 of Grobzinator is out!" and goes on to explain that it's three times faster because they fixed a display bug, plus they've added Graphical Skins so you can decorate it any way you want, without indicating whether it's a programming language, game software, or open-hardware cell phone. This doesn't even do that part well. If you're writing a review, you need to do some journalism. Maybe the original review was written for a readership other than Slashdot, some kind of academic Moodle users' website where it's trying to recommend a new book. In that context it might be fine, but simply reposting here, out of context, fails.
Whether that's relatively reasonable depends a lot on what you're trying to do. For a netbook, probably not realistic. For a specialized machine where the FPGA enables something hard to do in a vanilla CPU, maybe. Maybe you can use the FPGA to do graphics processing more cost-effectively than a separate nVidia chip, or do good enough graphics while keeping the power consumption down, or do fancy geometry crunching for a game machine. Who knows?
Ok, indiscreet isn't spelled exactly the opposite of discrete, but it's on the continuum.
He was a fun guy when he was a kid, but he's gotten to be really annoying as he's gotten older...
The Electric Automobile Association of Silicon Valley has electric car rallies every year, usually on a Saturday in September, with various hobbyist and commercial electric cars, bikes, motorcycles, scooters, Burning Man vehicles, and parts.
The electric RAV4 was ok to drive - I don't find regular RAV4 seating very comfortable, and since it was 90s battery technology the range was only something like 50-100 miles, but it handled well driving around the block in the suburbs. (They didn't let us take it out to the freeway :-) There was a Norwegian car I liked better, one of the Think! line before they sold out to some big American car maker who wasted them, and there have been a number of really cool concept cars. The Teslas have been there since they were first out in prototype, but there's usually too much of a crowd around them to get a test-drive.
My wife's comment about most of the cars was "I'm a consumer, not a hobbyist, and they're not ready yet." (The Tesla was an exception, but we're not in the $100000 sportscar market.) Some of the electric bikes really are ready, if that matches the kind of driving you need to do, but in my part of Silicon Valley there are only a couple of towns I can get to without needing to get on a 45mph road or a freeway, and I don't feel safe riding a bicycle that's got that much power strapped onto its frame.
A few years ago was the 50th anniversary of the symbol, and the guy who designed it was being interviewed on BBC radio. He said that the John Birch Society tried to portray it as an anti-Christian symbol, but that was nonsense.
The rest of us always called it "scuzzy", and thought Apple Marketing's attempt to rebrand it as "sexy" was just lame.
South Park is created by a small group of people who create and distribute provocative material for entertainment and occasionally social commentary.
Facebook is a platform where millions of individuals can write anything they want to their friends, and the content isn't created by Facebook, it's created by the users. Sure, Facebook occasionally encourages people to publish information that isn't necessarily limited to the choices the conservatives approve of (Interested in: Women. Status: It's Complicated. Politics: Anarchist Religion: Rastafarian) etc. But it's not the kind of thing that's pointed at the owners individually.
Most of the Wifi systems are negotiating a random session key and using the password to authenticate it, so that's doing pretty much what you want.
However, they were mostly designed with the assumption that the objective is to prevent unauthorized access, not to protect the contents of the communications from eavesdropping, so the only way you can get encrypted sessions is to have password control, which is too bad.
If you put the password in the SSID so it's obvious, people won't have to guess if you're following that convention, or the convention that the password is "guest" or whatever.
If it's off Catalina Island, then obviously it's The Company. On the other hand, it could just be the usual OGA, The Company.
If the Ex-Ambassador's suggestion, that it might be a demonstration for China related to Obama's tour, were anything other than random blathering, it's a bloody stupid demonstration if there isn't a big press announcement about it from the White House, unless it's various government agencies demonstrating that Obama's not The Decider just because he's Commander in Chief.
I had a friend whose father was in the, ummm, Foreign Service during the 1960s, and whose brothers flew airplanes for Air America. Her father requested to be posted to Indochina, and they did in fact post him to Indonesia by mistake. (To cut them a bit of slack, there was Anti-Communist paranoia about both places, but it was basically a screwup.) It wasn't all bad for her, since she did meet her future husband there.
Microsoft didn't launch Internet Explorer to take over the lucrative browser market - they gave it away free, competing with Netscape who gave it away free, and older browsers like Mosaic, some of which were also free, or even because it helped them take over the web page development tool market, which they could charge money for. They did it to save Windows, and to save their products which depend on Windows, like Office and Mail.
The threat to Microsoft was the combination of Netscape, Java, and AOL, which were enough of an application platform to make the underlying operating system irrelevant, plus a distribution system that had people willing to feed dubious coasters into their home computers and a popular enough email system to compete with MSMail/Outlook. If the market got committed to that platform, and to compatibility with those standards, then it wouldn't matter if the underlying OS got replaced by Linux or Solaris or whatever.
By giving the public IE, and making sure that it wasn't quite compatible with Netscape and taking advantage of its proprietary or non-standard features, Microsoft was able to take over enough of the browser market that Netscape/Java/AOL couldn't displace them.
If populations stay isolated long enough, they can diverge enough to no longer successfully interbreed, but populations don't always work that way, especially when there aren't major geographical forces separating them, and species boundaries aren't always that sharp. Maybe we were as separate as horses and donkeys, maybe we were only as separate as wolves and dogs, or even only as poodles and Labradors.
The studies showed that Europeans, whose ancestors lived alongside Neanderthals for tens of thousands of years, have a few percentage of Neanderthalish DNA that Africans don't have, and later some of them took off for Asia where they may have also mixed with other human species. Africans have the most genetic variation among Homo sapiens genes, because only some of them moved up to Europe, and only some of the people in Europe headed to Asia, but the people who stayed in Africa didn't get the Neanderthal bits.
The problem isn't new - snail mail interstate commerce has been around about as long as the Post Office, and companies like Sears, Montgomery Ward, and Wells Fargo's shipping service became major players in catalog-based interstate commerce. And Television let you buy Ginsu Knives and Chia Pets by mail without even needing a paper catalog.
States keep pretending it's a new threat to their revenue, but the main differences are that the web makes a much better catalog than paper, computer automation cuts the transaction expenses, and shipping's getting cheaper, so internet commerce is more practical, plus some goods are digital-only so there's no physical shipping required (e.g. music, movies), which makes it easier for a seller to not need physical presence in the buyer's state. On the other hand, state expenditures per capita and sales tax rates keep going up, and hardly ever go down, so states really really want this money.
Back in the 1980s, my wife was doing programming for a mail-order book store (which was like Internet commerce, only on paper :-) New York State wanted them to collect sales tax, and as you say, the taxes vary by county, town, township, etc., while the book store only knew customers' addresses and zip codes, and the tax rates weren't aligned by zip code. And different jurisdictions have different rules about what's taxable - for instance, in New Jersey, clothes aren't taxable, but in New York they are (so NJ people buying expensive clothes in Manhattan would often have them shipped home, because that was much cheaper than paying NYC sales tax.) And the number of cities thinking that it's a good idea to tax Evil Snack Foods but not tax Nutritious foods keeps going up, but definitions of which foods are Evil Snacks varies widely.
Today you can do better than that, because computers have lots more storate and CPU horsepower, and the Internet gives even small companies access to online services, so you could hypothetically look up your customer's address on Google Maps Tax Rate Tool to find out which rates apply to their geography, but the question of what's taxed and what's not is difficult.
Fortunately, the Constitution says that states aren't allowed to regulate Interstate Commerce, so even though New York and New Jersey had a mutual tax-sharing treaty, participation was voluntary, and since New York didn't make it easy to implement, her employer decided not to participate.
Here in the Bay Area we still have *actual* Socialists and Communists. You can even walk up and talk to them! Ask them if Obama's one of them (yeah, what bullshit.) And, ok, most of the ones who call themselves "Communists" will tell you to get off their lawn, but there are a lot of Socialists around, and I knew a number of them back in NYC as well.
You're probably too young to remember Andrei Amalrik's book, but the Soviets had severe internal conflicts and economic problems purely aside from the Cold War. Reagan's military escalation probably hastened their collapse a bit, but they had more problems with the Pope telling Eastern Europeans that they shouldn't be subject to the Soviet Empire. Amalrik was mainly focused on ethnic tensions, and even after the Soviet Union collapsed and divested itself of many of its ethnic groups, Russia still had their civil war against the Chechens and other Muslim minorities.
According to the article, it seems that one of the five redundant control computers started polling out of sequence, and the missiles didn't like it so they sent error codes, which the control computers didn't like, and lots of errors were happening in a hurry. So the operators [talked to the bombs about phenomenology] shut the control computers all down and restarted them one at a time, which let them find the bad one, and they haven't yet told the public if they've figured out what was wrong.
Diesel isn't significantly different from home heating oil - the price is much different because of highway-funding taxes, home heating oil has red dye so they can catch you if you use it in your truck to avoid taxes, and diesel has a few additives to make engines run a bit better, but otherwise they're basically the same. I doubt jet fuel is a significant fraction of the diesel market compared to trucks or home heating.
Because it's not available in the UK or Canada either, and everybody else has the sense to use liters? So you're clarifying that it's US mpg, not UK mpg, and it's obviously not km/l or whatever.
If you want to keep a diesel engine happy and efficient, you get it hot and never turn it off. A taxi in the city may be less efficient than driving on the freeway, but it's still spending 8-24 hours a day driving around, so the engine's always hot, as opposed to a regular person's car which most makes short trips and maybe two long commute trips a day but is usually doing cold starts.
If you're buying "petrol" instead of "gasoline", then you're in a market with much higher fuel taxes; here in the US, diesel prices have varied widely over the years but are seldom much more than 20% higher than regular gasoline, and some years have been lower. I've never owned a diesel car, but I used to have oil heat, and the differences between heating oil and diesel fuel are (1) lots of tax, (2) red dye in the heating oil so they can catch you if you put it in your truck to avoid taxes, (3) a bit of detergent and such in the diesel, and (4) if you run out of heating oil in the middle of the night, you can drive out to the gas station and buy 5 gallons of diesel, which will keep your house warm for a day or two until the heating oil truck comes by with a refill.
The pollution problems with diesel aren't so much the CO2, but the particulate carbon, sulphur, and maybe NOx. Most new diesel engines are cleaner than the old ones.