Speaking as a pedestrian (I drive too, but formed this opinion long before I started) speed humps and other traffic "calming" measures make the roads more dangerous because the cars are constantly changing speed, from 30 between humps to 10 as they go over them. This makes it much harder to judge where the car is going to be at any given time, and hence makes crossing roads more dangerous.
This is, admittedly, due to speed humps regularly being far too harsh - if they were flatter, you would be able to cross them at the speed limit without damaging your car and all your passengers!
There's also the environmental side... Cars constantly accelerating and breaking for no good reason pushes up the fuel used, and so the damage to the environment.
The other thing that puzzles me is the broken speed humps; the ones with gaps which are conveniently about the right width for most cars (ranging from Corsa size to Zafira size at least) to straddle them, and so whip through at about 40 with no discomfort.
Heh, so to stretch this analogy a little further, if your car gets stolen and then used in crime, that's equivalent to malware downloading dodgy stuff.
Perhaps more so if it's then returned to outside your house, so you have no idea it was stolen, given that most users are completely unaware of what's going on in their computers.
It's not the copy pasting that I find useful (although sometimes it is, I agree!), but the fact that nobody's going to nick it, it's not going to get lost under a pile of paper and it's got a lot more figures of accuracy than a £2 calculator are what make it handy for me!
Although I tend to use win+R, calc to load it.
When I played Vice City on my PIII 800, if you drove fast enough down the main highway on the 'other island', the textures degraded as you went, and detail vanished from a lot of the scenery as the computer couldn't load the data for the new areas quite quickly enough. So, yeah, Vice City's another example of the content being loaded as needed, but sometimes not quite quickly enough!
I have to reply to this...
There was (an easily repeatable) experiment done recently where people held blocks of wood next to their ears as they would with a phone for half an hour or so. Strangely, their ears still got hot. The heat here comes from your head, not from the phone.
However, your point about phones transmitting virtually nothing whilst you're not talking on it is very true - I had a friend who refused to carry her phone around with her all the time and left it as far away from herself as possible in her bedroom because of fears of radiation, yet still spent half an hour to an hour on it every day. I estimated that a month of having a phone nearby would get you the same amount of radiation time as 2 hours of call time, and this isn't even taking inverse square (for distance) laws into consideration.
In fact, one of Asimov's stories (Robots and Empire, I think... Can't remember for sure, but it was the 4th book in the Caves of Steel series) there were robots that, although they had the 3 laws, were programmed with a different definition of "human" that included the distinctive accent of a certain planet. This meant that they felt free to kill other people, as they weren't humans.
Slashdot Mirror
kW/h could be a rate of change of power though... Although even with this level of nitpick, I'm not sure I can come up with a real use for it.
I'm strangely reminded of http://galactanet.com/comic/39.htm
Speaking as a pedestrian (I drive too, but formed this opinion long before I started) speed humps and other traffic "calming" measures make the roads more dangerous because the cars are constantly changing speed, from 30 between humps to 10 as they go over them. This makes it much harder to judge where the car is going to be at any given time, and hence makes crossing roads more dangerous. This is, admittedly, due to speed humps regularly being far too harsh - if they were flatter, you would be able to cross them at the speed limit without damaging your car and all your passengers! There's also the environmental side... Cars constantly accelerating and breaking for no good reason pushes up the fuel used, and so the damage to the environment. The other thing that puzzles me is the broken speed humps; the ones with gaps which are conveniently about the right width for most cars (ranging from Corsa size to Zafira size at least) to straddle them, and so whip through at about 40 with no discomfort.
Agreed, less chances of viruses that way...
Heh, so to stretch this analogy a little further, if your car gets stolen and then used in crime, that's equivalent to malware downloading dodgy stuff. Perhaps more so if it's then returned to outside your house, so you have no idea it was stolen, given that most users are completely unaware of what's going on in their computers.
I prefer land of the fee, home of the vague...
It's not the copy pasting that I find useful (although sometimes it is, I agree!), but the fact that nobody's going to nick it, it's not going to get lost under a pile of paper and it's got a lot more figures of accuracy than a £2 calculator are what make it handy for me! Although I tend to use win+R, calc to load it.
When I played Vice City on my PIII 800, if you drove fast enough down the main highway on the 'other island', the textures degraded as you went, and detail vanished from a lot of the scenery as the computer couldn't load the data for the new areas quite quickly enough. So, yeah, Vice City's another example of the content being loaded as needed, but sometimes not quite quickly enough!
More interestingly, the UK appears to be larger than Texas...
No, it's 300% /of/ its original size, so 200% /larger/ that its original size.
And you meant "its" not "it's". /me is clearly a Nazi Nazi...
I have to reply to this... There was (an easily repeatable) experiment done recently where people held blocks of wood next to their ears as they would with a phone for half an hour or so. Strangely, their ears still got hot. The heat here comes from your head, not from the phone. However, your point about phones transmitting virtually nothing whilst you're not talking on it is very true - I had a friend who refused to carry her phone around with her all the time and left it as far away from herself as possible in her bedroom because of fears of radiation, yet still spent half an hour to an hour on it every day. I estimated that a month of having a phone nearby would get you the same amount of radiation time as 2 hours of call time, and this isn't even taking inverse square (for distance) laws into consideration.
In fact, one of Asimov's stories (Robots and Empire, I think... Can't remember for sure, but it was the 4th book in the Caves of Steel series) there were robots that, although they had the 3 laws, were programmed with a different definition of "human" that included the distinctive accent of a certain planet. This meant that they felt free to kill other people, as they weren't humans.