In addition to providing entertainment, wasn't the court jester supposed to keep the monarch humble by pointing out things that others would not dare? I'd say Jon Stewart makes an excellent jester in that regard, and all the more power to him for it.
That's true. In fact, it brings up a point where computers and cars are very similar. That is, paying more does not necessarily shield you from bullshit. My parents' friends own a Mercedes, and they hate it. While their car gets great performance, the benefits of that are outweighed by the relative lack of reliability and the high costs of repair. The same applies to "performance" computers sold by major manufacturers. You're paying for a lot of shiny plastic, and the costs of repair are going to be higher with the proprietary cases used.
I certainly don't think it costs anywhere near $299. The chips are all standard models that have entered mass production. The operating system license is being subsidized by Microsoft. The real cost is assembly. Do you really think it costs that much to assemble a netbook?
No, the reason that BestBuy is interested in this is that it can't add as much markup to a $299 netbook as a $599 laptop. Therefore, any source of additional margin is a godsend for them.
Ah, but what is the correct error handling strategy? Do you ignore the value and silently carry on? Do you return a "reasonable" value? Do you stop execution and wait for the user to re-enter data? Choose wrongly and you'll at best reduce the users' productivity, and at worst end up killing someone.
In fact, one of the reasons for the Three Mile Island disaster was a temperature sensor that would only report temperatures below the "rated maximum", since higher temperatures were "obviously erroneous". The operators then did not realize that the core temperature had risen beyond the rated maximum because the gauge was programmed to ignore readings that were higher than expected.
You speak in jest, but for a lot of programmers these days, its figuratively true. For example, my last company decided to outsource its QA department to India. Sure, it saved money on paper, but the productivity of programmers was drastically lowered because the turnaround time on responses to questions went from 30 minutes to twelve hours.
Yeah, except for the ones holding the blimp in position. You can potentially hide the wires by running them inside your sock (though that may introduce other problems), but you can't get rid of them.
Construction of the Burj Khalifa was challenging because the building was designed to hold people. Construction of a simple tube that tall should be considerably simpler.
The problem is that actuators and Windex add a fair amount of weight. Remember, the big design constraint here was the airbag landing system. In order for an airbag landing to work, the rovers had to be fairly light. There's also the fact that you need to keep the actuators clean as well - how are you going to do that? What happens when the actuators themselves get cold and jam up? Also, it might not be a wise idea to try to clean the solar panels on your own - what happens if you end up scratching the panels, because Martian dust is much more sharp-edged than Earth dust?
For all these reasons (plus probably a few more that I haven't thought of) NASA decided against having any sort of cleaning system on the rovers.
Well, in addition to square footage, you need a way to keep the panels clean. The reason Spirit and Opportunity weren't expected to survive the winter is because they didn't have a way to keep the solar panels clean over winter, and, therefore, were expected to run out of power and lose instruments. However, what happened was that the wind on Mars cleaned the solar panels naturally. This natural cleaning, combined with some smart positioning by NASA engineers allowed the rovers to gather enough sunlight during the Martian winter to keep the heaters running.
This year Spirit is mired in sand. This means that NASA no longer has the ability to position it in a way to keep capturing sunlight during the winter. Therefore, it is not at all clear whether it will have enough power to keep its heaters running.
Not necessarily. If you look at the quote, it states, "The NCB is the designated contact point for the General Secratariat, regional offices and other member countries..." There's nothing there that says that the officers at the NCB work for Interpol. In fact, most likely, they don't.
To analogize, Interpol does for warrants what a hub does for network packets. It handles the logistics of ensuring that all member nations of Interpol receive the warrant for an international fugitive. In this analogy, the NCB is like the host computer's network card. It takes the warrant from Interpol and ensures that the law enforcement agencies within the host nation know who to look for. Just as your network card is separate from the hub that sends the packet, the NCB isn't part of Interpol.
Yeah, and the US is going to go ahead and invade every country that doesn't follow UN treaties? What about Iraq's intransigence made it different from this perspective?
We had an army there, blood in our eyes, and the Taliban folded up like a cheep suit, and we just needed to kill some more people.
Erm, you do realize that Iraq and Afghanistan are about a thousand miles from each other, right? Its not like one can simply say, "Well, Afghanistan is done. Where next?" and go directly to Iraq.
To be fair, one of the things that helped Ukraine get rid of all its warheads was the nice subsidies we were willing to pay in order to prevent those warheads from falling into the hands of less savory nations. Not that I'm resentful of that, of course.
I'm not suggesting that nuclear ought to be off the table, but I do think that liquid metal reactors are not the best or safest design. I'd much rather live next to something like a Pebble Bed Reactor, or some other design that has passive safety, rather than relying on active cooling in order to prevent meltdown.
Using sodium in a reactor is also a bad idea, because its reactivity with water makes firefighting a much more hazardous activity.
Yeah, but given the geography of Iran, all you need to ensure the destruction of Iran is the destruction of the cities. Given how rugged the Iranian countryside is, most of the populace lives in the cities. The countryside is largely empty. Destroy the cities, and you've destroyed the nation.
But so what if they really nuked each other to bits?
If they did, they'd cause a nuclear winter. I don't know about Israel's nuclear capacity, but I saw a study that said that even a "small scale" nuclear exchange (on the Indian subcontinent, for example) would throw up enough dust to lower global temperatures by enough to threaten food production.
<sarcasm>On the other hand, that'd fix global warming, wouldn't it?</sarcasm>
How exactly did Israel suffer and how exactly are they accountable, any more than Iran?
The Israeli government is accountable to the Israeli people. I don't see how you can make the same argument about the Iranian government in light of the recent elections there.
War is not a game. You can't launch attacks from civilian buildings and then complain about "fairness" or "proportionality" when those buildings get bombed.
In my opinion, the methods the Palestinians are employing are all wrong. As long as they continue armed struggle, they cannot win against the overwhelming military advantage that Israel enjoys. However, if they leverage their advantage in birthrate, and simply stage lots of sit-ins, eventually they will break the Israeli civilian population's will. After all, no democracy has successfully crushed a non-violent protest movement. As long as there is even a token level of violence from the opposition, the leadership can use it as a fig leaf to justify a response (no matter how severe - look at Haditha). However, if the opposition is completely non-violent, there isn't anything that the leadership can use to hide the depravity of their actions.
Just as with the Indian independence struggle, the Palestinians will only succeed when they renounce violence.
If Israel has been "attacked over and over again", so have the Palestinians and many of the neighboring countries.
Really? Last I checked, it wasn't Israel that launched a surprise attack during a religious holiday. The problem with the Arab/Persian position is that their leaders can't get over the fact that Israel exists despite their best efforts. Rather than working honestly to make their peace with the new state in their midst, they use the Palestinians as bargaining chips to try to shame Israel into disbanding itself. Quite reasonably, Israel refuses to do so. Until Iranian and Arab leaders follow Egypt's lead and normalize relations with Israel, little progress can be made regarding the situation of the Palestinians.
Well, if we didn't invade Iraq for its oil, what, exactly, did we invade it for? I mean, if you scoff at the "war for oil", argument, surely you'll scoff at the "they had Weapons of Mass Destruction", argument, which is even more patently false than the first one.
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In addition to providing entertainment, wasn't the court jester supposed to keep the monarch humble by pointing out things that others would not dare? I'd say Jon Stewart makes an excellent jester in that regard, and all the more power to him for it.
That's true. In fact, it brings up a point where computers and cars are very similar. That is, paying more does not necessarily shield you from bullshit. My parents' friends own a Mercedes, and they hate it. While their car gets great performance, the benefits of that are outweighed by the relative lack of reliability and the high costs of repair. The same applies to "performance" computers sold by major manufacturers. You're paying for a lot of shiny plastic, and the costs of repair are going to be higher with the proprietary cases used.
Sorry, I think my sarcasm meter was broken earlier. :)
I certainly don't think it costs anywhere near $299. The chips are all standard models that have entered mass production. The operating system license is being subsidized by Microsoft. The real cost is assembly. Do you really think it costs that much to assemble a netbook?
No, the reason that BestBuy is interested in this is that it can't add as much markup to a $299 netbook as a $599 laptop. Therefore, any source of additional margin is a godsend for them.
That's like saying the only way to get a drivable car is to buy a Lexus.
Ah, but what is the correct error handling strategy? Do you ignore the value and silently carry on? Do you return a "reasonable" value? Do you stop execution and wait for the user to re-enter data? Choose wrongly and you'll at best reduce the users' productivity, and at worst end up killing someone.
In fact, one of the reasons for the Three Mile Island disaster was a temperature sensor that would only report temperatures below the "rated maximum", since higher temperatures were "obviously erroneous". The operators then did not realize that the core temperature had risen beyond the rated maximum because the gauge was programmed to ignore readings that were higher than expected.
You speak in jest, but for a lot of programmers these days, its figuratively true. For example, my last company decided to outsource its QA department to India. Sure, it saved money on paper, but the productivity of programmers was drastically lowered because the turnaround time on responses to questions went from 30 minutes to twelve hours.
Yeah, except for the ones holding the blimp in position. You can potentially hide the wires by running them inside your sock (though that may introduce other problems), but you can't get rid of them.
Argentina can supply the hookers. Governor Mark Sanford can attest to their quality. As for the blow, where else but Columbia?
Construction of the Burj Khalifa was challenging because the building was designed to hold people. Construction of a simple tube that tall should be considerably simpler.
As others have stated, 2400 feet isn't "upper atmosphere". Heck, there are places in Arizona that have a higher natural elevation than that.
The problem is that actuators and Windex add a fair amount of weight. Remember, the big design constraint here was the airbag landing system. In order for an airbag landing to work, the rovers had to be fairly light. There's also the fact that you need to keep the actuators clean as well - how are you going to do that? What happens when the actuators themselves get cold and jam up? Also, it might not be a wise idea to try to clean the solar panels on your own - what happens if you end up scratching the panels, because Martian dust is much more sharp-edged than Earth dust?
For all these reasons (plus probably a few more that I haven't thought of) NASA decided against having any sort of cleaning system on the rovers.
Well, in addition to square footage, you need a way to keep the panels clean. The reason Spirit and Opportunity weren't expected to survive the winter is because they didn't have a way to keep the solar panels clean over winter, and, therefore, were expected to run out of power and lose instruments. However, what happened was that the wind on Mars cleaned the solar panels naturally. This natural cleaning, combined with some smart positioning by NASA engineers allowed the rovers to gather enough sunlight during the Martian winter to keep the heaters running.
This year Spirit is mired in sand. This means that NASA no longer has the ability to position it in a way to keep capturing sunlight during the winter. Therefore, it is not at all clear whether it will have enough power to keep its heaters running.
Not necessarily. If you look at the quote, it states, "The NCB is the designated contact point for the General Secratariat, regional offices and other member countries..." There's nothing there that says that the officers at the NCB work for Interpol. In fact, most likely, they don't.
To analogize, Interpol does for warrants what a hub does for network packets. It handles the logistics of ensuring that all member nations of Interpol receive the warrant for an international fugitive. In this analogy, the NCB is like the host computer's network card. It takes the warrant from Interpol and ensures that the law enforcement agencies within the host nation know who to look for. Just as your network card is separate from the hub that sends the packet, the NCB isn't part of Interpol.
What's so bullshit about it? As even Forrest Gump knew, "Stupid is as stupid does."
Yeah, and the US is going to go ahead and invade every country that doesn't follow UN treaties? What about Iraq's intransigence made it different from this perspective?
We had an army there, blood in our eyes, and the Taliban folded up like a cheep suit, and we just needed to kill some more people.
Erm, you do realize that Iraq and Afghanistan are about a thousand miles from each other, right? Its not like one can simply say, "Well, Afghanistan is done. Where next?" and go directly to Iraq.
Got rid of all of them.
To be fair, one of the things that helped Ukraine get rid of all its warheads was the nice subsidies we were willing to pay in order to prevent those warheads from falling into the hands of less savory nations. Not that I'm resentful of that, of course.
I'm not suggesting that nuclear ought to be off the table, but I do think that liquid metal reactors are not the best or safest design. I'd much rather live next to something like a Pebble Bed Reactor, or some other design that has passive safety, rather than relying on active cooling in order to prevent meltdown.
Using sodium in a reactor is also a bad idea, because its reactivity with water makes firefighting a much more hazardous activity.
Yeah, but given the geography of Iran, all you need to ensure the destruction of Iran is the destruction of the cities. Given how rugged the Iranian countryside is, most of the populace lives in the cities. The countryside is largely empty. Destroy the cities, and you've destroyed the nation.
But so what if they really nuked each other to bits?
If they did, they'd cause a nuclear winter. I don't know about Israel's nuclear capacity, but I saw a study that said that even a "small scale" nuclear exchange (on the Indian subcontinent, for example) would throw up enough dust to lower global temperatures by enough to threaten food production.
<sarcasm>On the other hand, that'd fix global warming, wouldn't it?</sarcasm>
How exactly did Israel suffer and how exactly are they accountable, any more than Iran?
The Israeli government is accountable to the Israeli people. I don't see how you can make the same argument about the Iranian government in light of the recent elections there.
War is not a game. You can't launch attacks from civilian buildings and then complain about "fairness" or "proportionality" when those buildings get bombed.
In my opinion, the methods the Palestinians are employing are all wrong. As long as they continue armed struggle, they cannot win against the overwhelming military advantage that Israel enjoys. However, if they leverage their advantage in birthrate, and simply stage lots of sit-ins, eventually they will break the Israeli civilian population's will. After all, no democracy has successfully crushed a non-violent protest movement. As long as there is even a token level of violence from the opposition, the leadership can use it as a fig leaf to justify a response (no matter how severe - look at Haditha). However, if the opposition is completely non-violent, there isn't anything that the leadership can use to hide the depravity of their actions.
Just as with the Indian independence struggle, the Palestinians will only succeed when they renounce violence.
If Israel has been "attacked over and over again", so have the Palestinians and many of the neighboring countries.
Really? Last I checked, it wasn't Israel that launched a surprise attack during a religious holiday. The problem with the Arab/Persian position is that their leaders can't get over the fact that Israel exists despite their best efforts. Rather than working honestly to make their peace with the new state in their midst, they use the Palestinians as bargaining chips to try to shame Israel into disbanding itself. Quite reasonably, Israel refuses to do so. Until Iranian and Arab leaders follow Egypt's lead and normalize relations with Israel, little progress can be made regarding the situation of the Palestinians.
Well, if we didn't invade Iraq for its oil, what, exactly, did we invade it for? I mean, if you scoff at the "war for oil", argument, surely you'll scoff at the "they had Weapons of Mass Destruction", argument, which is even more patently false than the first one.