Check out some of the other comments. A fair number of people seem unable to distinguish between "break" and "brake".
Okay, fine. Spelling is a fairly minor skill in the grand scheme of things. But I have to wonder at how far the confusion extends, if we take as a premise that language is essentially built upon metaphor. Do they have a mental image of something breaking when the brakes are applied?
I agree with you that there has been some confusion or wordplay with break/brake, but I think you've missed the larger point: The iconic 1975 song "Convoy" by C.W. McCall. There's even a Wikipedia entry. Ahh, the memories of taking the 45 out of it's sleeve and playing it over and over again...
. . . From the title of the article, I was expecting 12 distinct and separate features, not 6 features and a treatise on how awesome Styles are in LibreOffice.
You're right, but I think it's an important point because Word and Powerpoint completely break styles using bullets or numbers. I first noticed this when I was moving a document back and forth between Word and OpenOffice, and I thought OO was to blame. However, years more experience with Word and Powerpoint have convinced me that some drunk programmer screwed up something basic back in 1998 and nobody can find the fault. I have documents where changing the style from Heading 2 to Heading 3 changes the indentation of all Heading 3 paragraphs. I have slides in Powerpoint where adding and deleting lines changes the colour of the number/bullet. I don't go around trying to break these things, they just get into documents and never let go. I've had it with documents using compatibility mode, saved in the latest file format and started from scratch in Office 2010. The one feature I really want to use is broken. Drives me batty.
I live at 6 degrees south, not many are closer to the equator. I've never had insulin (Humalog lispro and Humulin NPH, both 3ml penfills) lose effectiveness.
Now, if I could only get XBMC shoehorned stand alone into a high end "smart" HDTV with wifi to my LAN. It just might make for the ultimate home theatre pc experience I so crave.
Indeed, this is the exact reason I've signed up for two of the Raspberry Pi boards. One for fun, one for my TV.
On another note, one of the things I was hoping to do with my new computer (kubuntu/nVidia but I could change the OS) was connect HDMI to my TV and have that as a separate display device for movies only. I can make it an extended desktop, but that isn't what I want at all. I thought this would be a fairly common thing, but I haven't been able to find anything with Google. Sound over HDMI is still a problem for me also. Sigh
So not only does he deal in human sex slavery, he also is acting as a catalyst for the FBI to erode our right to privacy a little bit more.
And both are eroding a little more of my faith in humanity.
FBI, instead of trying to get a skeleton key to all our phones, including me who has never made a woman sell herself for money, how about you just pass a law that people convicted of pimping can't have phones? No objections from me on that one... anyone else?
Huh? I know you didn't RTFA, but I did (at least the Ars one) so I'll point out:
1. They are asking for access to one guy's gmail password.
2. Said guy was banned from owning a cell phone while on parole, but he had one.
3. Said guy was wearing a tracking device, so he was making money "phone pimping."
4. Said guy had already signed away his Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search.
But, thanks for posting that the FBI is eroding your faith in humanity. Mine is eroded every time post uninformed opinions as suggested policy. My faith suffers a lot more regularly...
I can understand the fascination with "covert" leaks - there might appear to be a certain emotionally sensational quality about it, to the uninvolved and/or uninformed observer. When someone takes the security of a country, a governmental branch, or even a private enterprise as if it was "fair game" to breach the security of which for their own personal political statement, then it becomes dangerous. Considering so far as such statements would ultimately backfire, can we not learn to be more responsible as citizens and as people?
While I generally agree with your sentiment above, I think there are situations where being able to anonymously blow the whistle on something is for the best. Where I work and live, tax authorities are corrupt. Mightn't it be nice to have a device like this streaming the demands for bribes over the 'net? If your manager is considering doing evil, might this be a way to stop it without losing your job? I agree with you that we all have to act responsibly, but when someone else isn't, sometimes action is required.
How could you coat the interior of a microSD card slot that's covered with a loose-fitting cover and make it waterproof? If the nano-coating doesn't conduct electricity then any card you insert won't make contact with the contacts. If it does conduct, then it's useless as a waterproofing seal over electronics. The same would seem to hold true for any earphone plug or charging port, right?
I don't know how it works for sure, but I imagine its just surface tension. The coating doesn't physically close the slot, it coats the outside of the slot with a film that repels water. Water doesn't go into very small places at routine pressure -- the raindrop-size drops you encounter all the time are its least-energy state, the "natural" curvature of water drops. The coating keeps water far enough away so this curvature radius doesn't contact the inside of the slot.
And how do you know they don't have a license to put that up???
To be honest I don't. I would be surprised, though, if the various news agencies they use all gave yahoo carte blanche to display their work in such an outlandish way. I also haven't seen yahoo claim anywhere that they already pay news agencies for their work. So, I can't prove that they do or don't, but it doesn't seem likely that yahoo are compensating sources.
I read the news. A lot. The current system is broken. Look at sites like my.yahoo.com, which used to aggregate credible sources and provide links. I could choose a Reuters group, a Sports Illustrated group, Asia News, whatever. Clicking on a link would take me to a Reuters, eg, page. Now all the news links go to news.yahoo.com and give shit like this: http://news.yahoo.com/single-tuna-fetches-record-736k-japan-auction-040041043.html That's a yahoo.com page, with Yahoo links and ads all over it, with a small logo suggesting that the article came from AFP. Yahoo is eating AFP's lunch (and all the other people who do the work getting the news and writing it up). Parasitic is the best way to describe this. If this new venture can get good sources of news rewarded by collecting from aggregators then how does it make things worse? I'm completely in agreement with fair use; this ain't it.
Customer/User satisfaction. If problems are solved in a reasonable way (in terms of time considering your workload, budget and expertise) then that's the only thing management should care about. You're not running a support call center where your job is to read solutions from pre-written scripts - you're solving real problems with real people. There is no script
That still doesn't necessarily work. My recent experience: I am a senior manager in a non-IT job. I needed access to our SAP system, so asked for an id/password combination, which got kicked to our regional support center in another country. I eventually received a ticket stating that it would be done within 5 business days. I got it, 4.9 business days later. When they asked me how satisfied I was, I said it seemed like a long time for a trivial task. They wrote back saying that the SLA for an id & password is 5 business days, so everything was fine.
End of year, I was asked for my overall satisfaction with the regional support centre -- could I please fill in an online questionnaire? I did so, except for a few fields asking for my satisfaction with a bunch of services I have never used. I couldn't submit the form because it refused to accept it with any fields left blank. I am bitterly dissatisfied with these guys, but I can't even use their tool to indicate my dissatisfaction anonymously. And given their professionalism, that's the only way I want to do it.
It will fail, but not even for the (valid) reasons you state. It is simply a publicity stunt, it's not an attempt to win a trial.
The complaint can be downloaded http://www.freedomwatchusa.org/pdf/110331-Fbook-Complaint.pdf [pdf] but it's really just a poorly written collection of innuendo and personal slurs. No judge would bother giving it a second glance, except the clown who allegedly wrote it. It is as much about the completely irrelevant case the same clown is pursuing against the Islamic center planned for ground zero as this issue.
My uncle has a country place
That no one knows about
He says it used to be a farm
Before the Motor Law
And on Sundays I elude the eyes
And hop the Turbine Freight
To far outside the Wire
Where my white-haired uncle waits...
I strip away the old debris
That hides a shining car
A brilliant red Barchetta
From a better vanished time
I fire up the willing engine
Responding with a roar
Tires spitting gravel
I commit my weekly crime
I love that song. Maybe now even more so. I love the Earth, buy green, etc. but I don't want a government requirement -- at least not yet.
I've been watching CNN International for the last few days, tracking the probably meltdowns. For several days, on the ticker at the bottom of the screen, they've been informing me that the earth's axis tilted by 10cm as a result of the quake. Every time I see it I want to slap someone and ask pointedly how big an angle 10cm is.
Now if you've got a molten pool of this stuff, the surface area vs the mass ratio is much lower. This means that heat removal (which is done with surface area) is degraded. As a consequence, the fuel heats up incredibly (until the decay heat falls off), but relatively little sensible heat is transferred to the steel reactor vessel- which can conduct heat away from the uranium pool at the bottom rapidly, especially if they flood the primary containment structure.
As I understand it, the core is inside 6 inches of stainless steel, so heat removal from the RV is so close to zero that it can be neglected. Am I missing something -- is there any significant heat removal mechanism aside from (heat) radiation from the containment vessel?
My dad sent me word of this story, as I'm a Canadian living in Indonesia. I think the guy's a bit of a joke. Entry-level attaches leaning on a host government to change policy? There are good reasons, I assume, for having low-level attaches but I can't imagine any of them changing the behaviour of a host government. Perhaps the author simply doesn't want to admit that his job only existed for him to collect data and gain experience. With Youtube, flikr and wikileaks he isn't needed to go to Dili to meet a schoolteacher. He also doesn't seem to get the way information is now getting into the public domain, of which wikileaks is an example at least as much as a driver.
It's worth noting that it says "three-hour exams," and nothing else. There are other courses that could have other kinds of finals -- for example, engineering courses with comprehensive final projects or liberal arts courses with final papers/presentations and the like. In some ways, it makes more sense for students to work on a final project that utilizes the skills they're supposed to have learned in real-world situations -- especially for engineers.
I graduated from a good Engineering program in 1986, and as I recall we had final exams in every subject -- six per semester for four years. The one exception was the senior project, or thesis, where we had to do the work, prepare a final report and defend it to a panel of professors. Class size was well over 30 in the first 1.5 years, dropping to 30 or less after that.
My eldest child is entering a political science program next week. I've been told all classes will be around 300, and everyone brings laptops to class to take notes. I can't even imagine it. In our classes a professor who didn't accept interruptions was a bad professor. The flip side was that a student who raised too many interruptions was made to feel the error of his* ways.
* The use of the masculine pronoun is all-too appropriate, sadly for both us and the profession. I hope that at least has changed.
It's a valid comparison because, when you're using pulsars to detect gravitational waves, the effective size of your detector is the distance from one pulsar to another, which is (some large fraction of) the size of the galaxy. Okay, pulsars aren't man-made - but if we deliberately set out to make the transmitter component of a galaxy-sized gravitational-wave detector, we wouldn't be able to produce anything nearly as suited for the task as they are. They keep time as well as our best clocks, and are trillions of times as powerful as any radio transmitter we could build (and they need to be, if we want to see them at these distances).
The snarkiness is entirely justified, I think, as a response to the Telegraph's claim that LISA is the largest gravitational wave detector, when it's not. This doesn't mean that it isn't useful, though. LISA and pulsar observations are sensitive to gravitational waves of different frequencies - about 10^-1 and 10^-9 Hz respectively - so they're complementary techniques in the same way that (say) optical and radio astronomy are.
Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_wave does a pretty good job of describing these things, with the bonus that it doesn't say anything about "proving" Einstein's theory of general relativity. The take-home point is how tiny these waves are. The predicted energy is enough to distort space by 10 ^-20. From the stupid wording in the Telegraph article, the satellites will be 5 million kilometres apart, and will be able to detect displacements of "40 millionths of a millionth of a metre." So, they can detect displacement of 40*10^-12 / 5*10^9 which I get as 8*10^-22, so good enough I guess. The scales are unimaginable to me, at both ends.
You're kidding right? If you're MS, you can choose to have a near-total monopoly on desktop operating systems, and all the attention that brings from regulators and customers concerned about lock-in, or you can choose the status quo. What's so good about the status quo? You have the world's best competitor: tiny market share but very visible, with sky-high prices. MS isn't worried about Apple, they love them to death. They support Apple with versions of MS Office, just to make sure Apple doesn't go out of business. They're probably scared of Linux, but I don't know that for sure -- I would be, as Ubuntu gets more publicity and both gnome and kde get better (debatable in the case of kde4, I know).
(Subject is tying in to the weekend's Leonard Nimoy theme.)
What a fantastic approach! I haven't thought it through, as I hadn't seen things this way before, but the approach of bringing artists back to the audience really is fascinating. Compare Bruce Springsteen's relationship with his audience in 1980 to Brittney Spears' 20 years later. I know which I want.
Slashdot Mirror
Check out some of the other comments. A fair number of people seem unable to distinguish between "break" and "brake". Okay, fine. Spelling is a fairly minor skill in the grand scheme of things. But I have to wonder at how far the confusion extends, if we take as a premise that language is essentially built upon metaphor. Do they have a mental image of something breaking when the brakes are applied?
I agree with you that there has been some confusion or wordplay with break/brake, but I think you've missed the larger point: The iconic 1975 song "Convoy" by C.W. McCall. There's even a Wikipedia entry. Ahh, the memories of taking the 45 out of it's sleeve and playing it over and over again...
. . . From the title of the article, I was expecting 12 distinct and separate features, not 6 features and a treatise on how awesome Styles are in LibreOffice.
You're right, but I think it's an important point because Word and Powerpoint completely break styles using bullets or numbers. I first noticed this when I was moving a document back and forth between Word and OpenOffice, and I thought OO was to blame. However, years more experience with Word and Powerpoint have convinced me that some drunk programmer screwed up something basic back in 1998 and nobody can find the fault. I have documents where changing the style from Heading 2 to Heading 3 changes the indentation of all Heading 3 paragraphs. I have slides in Powerpoint where adding and deleting lines changes the colour of the number/bullet. I don't go around trying to break these things, they just get into documents and never let go. I've had it with documents using compatibility mode, saved in the latest file format and started from scratch in Office 2010. The one feature I really want to use is broken. Drives me batty.
I live at 6 degrees south, not many are closer to the equator. I've never had insulin (Humalog lispro and Humulin NPH, both 3ml penfills) lose effectiveness.
Schadenfreudegasm.
Best Neologism I've come across. Thank you for that.
Now, if I could only get XBMC shoehorned stand alone into a high end "smart" HDTV with wifi to my LAN. It just might make for the ultimate home theatre pc experience I so crave.
Indeed, this is the exact reason I've signed up for two of the Raspberry Pi boards. One for fun, one for my TV.
On another note, one of the things I was hoping to do with my new computer (kubuntu/nVidia but I could change the OS) was connect HDMI to my TV and have that as a separate display device for movies only. I can make it an extended desktop, but that isn't what I want at all. I thought this would be a fairly common thing, but I haven't been able to find anything with Google. Sound over HDMI is still a problem for me also. Sigh
So not only does he deal in human sex slavery, he also is acting as a catalyst for the FBI to erode our right to privacy a little bit more.
And both are eroding a little more of my faith in humanity.
FBI, instead of trying to get a skeleton key to all our phones, including me who has never made a woman sell herself for money, how about you just pass a law that people convicted of pimping can't have phones? No objections from me on that one... anyone else?
Huh? I know you didn't RTFA, but I did (at least the Ars one) so I'll point out:
1. They are asking for access to one guy's gmail password.
2. Said guy was banned from owning a cell phone while on parole, but he had one.
3. Said guy was wearing a tracking device, so he was making money "phone pimping."
4. Said guy had already signed away his Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search.
But, thanks for posting that the FBI is eroding your faith in humanity. Mine is eroded every time post uninformed opinions as suggested policy. My faith suffers a lot more regularly...
Indonesia, currently on three time zones, has just announced they're looking at all going to one. It would be UTC+8, which would suit businesses and me very well personally, on permanent DST. http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/home/government-mulling-one-time-zone-for-all-of-indonesia/503952
I can understand the fascination with "covert" leaks - there might appear to be a certain emotionally sensational quality about it, to the uninvolved and/or uninformed observer. When someone takes the security of a country, a governmental branch, or even a private enterprise as if it was "fair game" to breach the security of which for their own personal political statement, then it becomes dangerous. Considering so far as such statements would ultimately backfire, can we not learn to be more responsible as citizens and as people?
While I generally agree with your sentiment above, I think there are situations where being able to anonymously blow the whistle on something is for the best. Where I work and live, tax authorities are corrupt. Mightn't it be nice to have a device like this streaming the demands for bribes over the 'net? If your manager is considering doing evil, might this be a way to stop it without losing your job? I agree with you that we all have to act responsibly, but when someone else isn't, sometimes action is required.
How could you coat the interior of a microSD card slot that's covered with a loose-fitting cover and make it waterproof? If the nano-coating doesn't conduct electricity then any card you insert won't make contact with the contacts. If it does conduct, then it's useless as a waterproofing seal over electronics. The same would seem to hold true for any earphone plug or charging port, right?
I don't know how it works for sure, but I imagine its just surface tension. The coating doesn't physically close the slot, it coats the outside of the slot with a film that repels water. Water doesn't go into very small places at routine pressure -- the raindrop-size drops you encounter all the time are its least-energy state, the "natural" curvature of water drops. The coating keeps water far enough away so this curvature radius doesn't contact the inside of the slot.
And how do you know they don't have a license to put that up???
To be honest I don't. I would be surprised, though, if the various news agencies they use all gave yahoo carte blanche to display their work in such an outlandish way. I also haven't seen yahoo claim anywhere that they already pay news agencies for their work. So, I can't prove that they do or don't, but it doesn't seem likely that yahoo are compensating sources.
I read the news. A lot. The current system is broken. Look at sites like my.yahoo.com, which used to aggregate credible sources and provide links. I could choose a Reuters group, a Sports Illustrated group, Asia News, whatever. Clicking on a link would take me to a Reuters, eg, page. Now all the news links go to news.yahoo.com and give shit like this: http://news.yahoo.com/single-tuna-fetches-record-736k-japan-auction-040041043.html That's a yahoo.com page, with Yahoo links and ads all over it, with a small logo suggesting that the article came from AFP. Yahoo is eating AFP's lunch (and all the other people who do the work getting the news and writing it up). Parasitic is the best way to describe this. If this new venture can get good sources of news rewarded by collecting from aggregators then how does it make things worse? I'm completely in agreement with fair use; this ain't it.
That still doesn't necessarily work. My recent experience: I am a senior manager in a non-IT job. I needed access to our SAP system, so asked for an id/password combination, which got kicked to our regional support center in another country. I eventually received a ticket stating that it would be done within 5 business days. I got it, 4.9 business days later. When they asked me how satisfied I was, I said it seemed like a long time for a trivial task. They wrote back saying that the SLA for an id & password is 5 business days, so everything was fine.
End of year, I was asked for my overall satisfaction with the regional support centre -- could I please fill in an online questionnaire? I did so, except for a few fields asking for my satisfaction with a bunch of services I have never used. I couldn't submit the form because it refused to accept it with any fields left blank. I am bitterly dissatisfied with these guys, but I can't even use their tool to indicate my dissatisfaction anonymously. And given their professionalism, that's the only way I want to do it.
It will fail, but not even for the (valid) reasons you state. It is simply a publicity stunt, it's not an attempt to win a trial.
The complaint can be downloaded http://www.freedomwatchusa.org/pdf/110331-Fbook-Complaint.pdf [pdf] but it's really just a poorly written collection of innuendo and personal slurs. No judge would bother giving it a second glance, except the clown who allegedly wrote it. It is as much about the completely irrelevant case the same clown is pursuing against the Islamic center planned for ground zero as this issue.
My uncle has a country place That no one knows about He says it used to be a farm Before the Motor Law And on Sundays I elude the eyes And hop the Turbine Freight To far outside the Wire Where my white-haired uncle waits ...
I strip away the old debris
That hides a shining car
A brilliant red Barchetta
From a better vanished time
I fire up the willing engine
Responding with a roar
Tires spitting gravel
I commit my weekly crime
I love that song. Maybe now even more so. I love the Earth, buy green, etc. but I don't want a government requirement -- at least not yet.
Thanks for letting me vent.
Now if you've got a molten pool of this stuff, the surface area vs the mass ratio is much lower. This means that heat removal (which is done with surface area) is degraded. As a consequence, the fuel heats up incredibly (until the decay heat falls off), but relatively little sensible heat is transferred to the steel reactor vessel- which can conduct heat away from the uranium pool at the bottom rapidly, especially if they flood the primary containment structure.
As I understand it, the core is inside 6 inches of stainless steel, so heat removal from the RV is so close to zero that it can be neglected. Am I missing something -- is there any significant heat removal mechanism aside from (heat) radiation from the containment vessel?
My dad sent me word of this story, as I'm a Canadian living in Indonesia. I think the guy's a bit of a joke. Entry-level attaches leaning on a host government to change policy? There are good reasons, I assume, for having low-level attaches but I can't imagine any of them changing the behaviour of a host government. Perhaps the author simply doesn't want to admit that his job only existed for him to collect data and gain experience. With Youtube, flikr and wikileaks he isn't needed to go to Dili to meet a schoolteacher. He also doesn't seem to get the way information is now getting into the public domain, of which wikileaks is an example at least as much as a driver.
I graduated from a good Engineering program in 1986, and as I recall we had final exams in every subject -- six per semester for four years. The one exception was the senior project, or thesis, where we had to do the work, prepare a final report and defend it to a panel of professors. Class size was well over 30 in the first 1.5 years, dropping to 30 or less after that.
My eldest child is entering a political science program next week. I've been told all classes will be around 300, and everyone brings laptops to class to take notes. I can't even imagine it. In our classes a professor who didn't accept interruptions was a bad professor. The flip side was that a student who raised too many interruptions was made to feel the error of his* ways.
* The use of the masculine pronoun is all-too appropriate, sadly for both us and the profession. I hope that at least has changed.
That's one of the funniest things I've read here. I'm getting image of 100 Peter Parker type guys working themselves up into a minor tizzy.
Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_wave does a pretty good job of describing these things, with the bonus that it doesn't say anything about "proving" Einstein's theory of general relativity. The take-home point is how tiny these waves are. The predicted energy is enough to distort space by 10 ^-20. From the stupid wording in the Telegraph article, the satellites will be 5 million kilometres apart, and will be able to detect displacements of "40 millionths of a millionth of a metre." So, they can detect displacement of 40*10^-12 / 5*10^9 which I get as 8*10^-22, so good enough I guess. The scales are unimaginable to me, at both ends.
I left my heart...
You're kidding right? If you're MS, you can choose to have a near-total monopoly on desktop operating systems, and all the attention that brings from regulators and customers concerned about lock-in, or you can choose the status quo. What's so good about the status quo? You have the world's best competitor: tiny market share but very visible, with sky-high prices. MS isn't worried about Apple, they love them to death. They support Apple with versions of MS Office, just to make sure Apple doesn't go out of business. They're probably scared of Linux, but I don't know that for sure -- I would be, as Ubuntu gets more publicity and both gnome and kde get better (debatable in the case of kde4, I know).
What a fantastic approach! I haven't thought it through, as I hadn't seen things this way before, but the approach of bringing artists back to the audience really is fascinating. Compare Bruce Springsteen's relationship with his audience in 1980 to Brittney Spears' 20 years later. I know which I want.
Record companies, are you listening?
Not to me.
Wait......
Tap tap tap...
Dean