Where imperial is the UK grown system of feet, pounds and miles.
I know everyone says "Imperial" when they mean the system in common use in the US, but they're not the same thing. One gallon containers (as for gasoline) used to be marked in two sets of units, US and Imperial. The Imperial gallons (for Canada and the UK) were slightly larger, and were moreover the same whether measuring dry or liquid. US dry and liquid gallons are different.
They're also called English measurements. After all, they were in use long before there was a British Empire, or even a UK for that matter. Official, fixed standards happened after the English settlement of America, so we wound up with units that varied a bit from what became standard later on.
Re:humm, reminds me of an old Dr. Who ep
on
Water Computing
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· Score: 2
The original Rollerball had one too. Don't remember it's name, but there was a main user interface of some kind that looked like a garganguan bubbling aquarium. None too reliable either; it misplaces the 14th century. "Ah well, only Dante and a few corrupt popes," as Ralph Richardson said at the time.
So you don't have one person reviewing all patent applications. Even a non-specialist ought to be able to determine the discipline best suited; so this person directs the patent applications to the appropriate staff specialists who are qualified and able to make the determination. Yes, this is possible. Even if an idea is totally new, the theoretical underpinnings ought to be clear enough that a specialist in the field can understand and evaluate them. The patent that establishes an entirely new field of knowledge that no one other than the inventor has any expertise in has never been filed, and never will.
And yes, you can too legislate ethics. We do it all the time. That we have not yet done so in such a manner as to effectively prevent these frivolous lawsuits is a symptom of the broken US tort law.
Read the books. They're still better, and you can have a nerd's true pleasure at pointing up everything the movie did wrong. In a really whiny, irritating voice.
Um... This is AOL Time-Warner, remember? They probably own the rights to more songs than any other media conglomerate in the world. Which means they can do whatever the hell they want with them.
They're all smiling 'cause their #!@%ing XP printer driver finally installed. (sorry, couldn't find this in the stock photo archive. I'm sure it's there though)
Geez, it's a PIA to try to come up with working links on that Getty site! Here's this image though: go to the image search page and enter 168025a in the "Keyword(s) or image number(s)" field.
In your reply, you seemed to be speaking from a bad position, saying that life was nothing but strife and pain (IE: "it's not easy going" and such repeated a few times).
I have to wonder what it is you're looking for if that's what you insist on seeing, and if the interpretation you apply to it is "that life was nothing but strife and pain." That's weird. I said it exactly once. (And what could have possibly have qualified as "and such"?) Problems I might have, but they have nothing to do with money, and touch on subjects that are, as I have said, both OT and none of your business. It's remains presumptious to suppose that you can solve someone's life problems based on the information conveyed in a single badly misinterpreted sentence. Even someone like Dr. Laura isn't usually so presumptious, and she at least is in a position where people are actively soliciting her advice.
["]From my point of view, I think you had a few too many dependants.["] if you ignore the have/had problem (oops), seems straightforward to me.
This kind of statement is always deeply offensive no matter how it's qualified. I will not speculate on why it is that you do not, or will not, understand this. You're just going to have to accept it as a maxim: Never again say anything of this nature to someone with children whom they love.
You might be, but Inoshiro's not. At least not for such families in the US. He's Canadian, which is how this thread came about in the first place.
Would you go so far as to advocate mandatory sterilization? I'd make an invidious (although possibly accurate in this case) comparison, but I don't want to invoke Godwin's law. Or maybe I do, because I don't want to see you post again. You're irritating.
You don't get to complain about a "touchy-feely world" and use an emotionally loaded hyperbole in the same sentence unless you intend to be deeply hyopcritical. If you're not exaggerating, you should see a doctor. No matter how hard you're working, you should not be sweating blood.
In any event, you're not paying for my kids, so why don't you go someplace and post this where it's relevant?
What set me off was your presumption in telling me how to live my life. I wasn't complaining, I was answering your question about the cost of living in the US. If you were less presumptious but still wanted to engage in some discussion, you might have asked what I meant by "not easy" (which I freely admit I base on the local culture) rather than lecture me on how I've got too many kids.
As for a Hyundai being a hardship... where does that come from?
From sarcasm. You're the one who told me that if I lived someplace with a lower cost of living my children's "home life will stabilize" based on no other information than what I chose to give you. If you were reading with more care, you might have noticed I hinted strongly that there was much more to my particular story, all of which is highly OT for this discussion and none of your business anyway. You judge far too hastily.
No, I'm not a single parent. There are several reasons why my wife currently has no income. The only one of them that's any of your business is that it's far healthier for kids in general to have at least one parent home and there for them, and far more important to their well-being than material wealth. I know that's terribly politically incorrect. Many people prefer to believe nowadays that we can just warehouse our kids in some impersonal facility and expect them to be just as secure and as happy as if they were being raised by someone who loves them. That's nonsense, and I think the kind of insecure, materially oriented, overweight brats that are all too common these days are a direct consequence of that. It also goes a long way towards explaining your own equating of material abundance with stability. We're in no danger of losing the roof over our heads or of starving. I do drive a Hyundai rather than a BMW, but I don't consider that to be such a great hardship that I need to do whatever it takes to acquire one. And I don't see how it would benefit my kids.
I used "parent" rather than "mother" up there for a reason. Don't go trying to slam me for advocating the oppression of women, or whatever phrase for the sentiment happens to spring to your mind. I know several families where the father is the stay-at-home parent. It works just fine.
I don't know why you put "non-living wage" in quotes, because I didn't use those words. I said "poverty line", and I used the figure from the US government for the year 2000. It's applied nationwide, as little sense as that may make. So it doesn't matter if you're living in Los Altos Hills, California or Podunk, Iowa, the government considers you to be in poverty if your annual household income is less than $13,861.
Finally: You're an ass. Just who the hell are you to tell me how many kids I should be having? Or where I should be living? Or how I should direct my career? Or what should and should not be important to me? Grow up a little more, get some life experience, get your degree, take on some actual responsibility for one or two other human beings, and then, just maybe, you'll be qualified to tell someone else how they should be going about it. Even then it's damned rude.
Yes it is. I assume the $18,000 you mention is $18K CDN. This converts to about $11,300 US, which is $1.5k below the poverty line for a family of 3.
Possibly the most expensive US center to live in is the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. OK, technically I live outside the Bay Area, since I don't live in one of the counties that are generally recognized as comprising it, but I work in Silicon Valley. Even with the cheaper rent you get with a 1 hour commute, it's not easy going with a family of 4 and an income < $100k.
I was being silly. Of course I know which one the CDROM is; it's DKA600. (Now isn't that obvious?) Those logicals you have pointing to them ain't necessarily there though. I don't have them anyway, and there's nothing in the OS that makes you put them there. If your sysadmin expects the users to have more 1337 than average (as ours do, sometimes without justification) they won't bother.
Presumably the two missing letters here are for his floppy and CD-ROM. He should try it with some OS that doesn't insist on using single letters of the alphabet to designate partitions. Like VMS, better known as the Operating System of the Gods, where you can find such euphonious device names as DKA0: Real VMS gurus know without being told that any device so bold as to be called DVA0: had damned well better be a floppy drive!
He's far too young-looking. Even if he's only supposed to be in his 60s according to the chronology of the books, he was prematurely aged by the power of Saruman working through Wormtongue. The vigor he displays in leading his people after his healing by Gandalf ought to be contrasted to his appearance. Here he looks positively energetic in his first appearance compared to how he ought to be presented.
Scientists at rival laboratories, however, had difficulty reproducing the results of Schon's work, thwarting a checks-and-balances process integral to the scientific method.
Um, no. If the "checks-and-balances process" were being thwarted, then it would have been circumvented or avoided somehow. This is an example of the process working as it's supposed to. You don't need a checks-and-balances system if everyone in the field is always going to be a good boy at all times. What happened here is that someone wasn't, and the scientific process caught him at it.
I would love it if these wire services would assign beats to reporters by taking into consideration what subjects they actually understand. They should also be fluent in the language in which they are writing, and display some comprehension of the words they're using.
Because it qualifies him to take the tone he does. GMD has never mentioned his degree before that I've seen, but he mentions it here to make his point. His remark was not a troll, but a valid complaint from a "member of the club."
A Ph.D. is not something that is waved about publically in polite society, even in academia. I should say especially in academia. It's pretty much assumed that all faculty members have one, so the important title is the one that indicates their position. Consequently, "Dr." suggests that they have no other title worth mentioning, and the really high-strung academic types will regard it as a positive insult.
In normal society, only MDs and holders of similar degrees such as DDS or DO -- that is, those who actually treat ailing people -- are addressed socially as "Dr." Everyone else, including boastful Ph.D.s, are "Mr." or "Ms". Just ask Miss Manners. That Brin insists on trumpeting his degree does him no credit.
You're confusing your pseudoscientific theories. The erosion patterns aren't on the pyramids, which don't exhibit any to speak of that you wouldn't expect to find on a 5,000 year old monument in the desert that's been repeatedly vandalized over the millennia, but on the Sphinx. I'm not enough of a geologist to offer a genuine opinion either way, but it seems that most geologists don't agree the weathering on the Sphinx was caused by water. Of course, most of them haven't examined it firsthand either.
Which may be neither here nor there anyway; the Sphinx was carved out of, and in part built on top of, a natural rock outcropping which is itself certainly older than human civilization. We shouldn't be too surprised to see weathering on it inconsitent with the time when it became the Sphinx instead of "that rock over there."
You're right, but the Egyptians didn't need to build pyramids to express the symbolism of the primeval mound. They already had such a symbol: the mastaba, which was the burial monument of choice for those who could afford it prior to the 3rd Dynasty and which continued to be used afterwards by anyone wealthy enough who wasn't a king. The first pyramid, the Stepped Pyramid, is nothing more than the form of six mastabas one build atop another: a mastaba of monumental proportions.
The architectural history of this structure has been fairly well established. It was begun as a standard mastaba, which was extended in two or three stages. Then, having apparently reached the limit of how grandiose a mastaba could be, three more mastabas were stacked on top of it, forming a 4-stepped pyramid. As Djoser was not yet dead, it was then expanded once again into the six-stepped form it still retains. It seems to me that the original mastaba was expanded until it was as grandiose as that particular form could have achieved with the building materials available -- it's built from stone cut into small, brick-sized blocks -- and that the piling up of successive mastabas may have been the only form that occurred to the architect to make it even more grandiose.
Another reason to build a pyramid shape is that it is likely to last longer.
That doesn't mean that a pyramid will last a long time if it's not built out of the right materials. There are numerous pyramids between Giza and Saqqara, but not all of them are still pyramid shaped. Towards the end of the Old Kindom, pyramids became decidedly low-buget affairs, constructed out of unbaked mud brick with limestone casings. Once the casing stones were removed for building material by later generations, the things just started to erode away. The pyramids of Giza also had their casings removed -- only the Second Pyramid preserves a few courses near the top -- but since their cores are stone they endured anyway.
In any event, I doubt longevity was a consideration, at least as far as the shape was concerned. The oldest pyramid was just a century or so older than the Great Pyramid, so they really had no data to go on in that regard. There were plenty of other monuments in Egypt at least as old as the Stepped Pyramid at the time, many older, and probably in just as good a condition.
It's not just that there are no other buildings of the ancient world comparable in height to the Pyramids that have survived; it's that there are no buildings in the ancient world comparable in height at all, not even in ruined condition. Every monument of significant height in the ancient world is roughly pyramid shaped, even when they weren't "houses of eternity", like ziggurats or Mesoamerican pyramids. That strongly suggests they knew of no other way to build something that tall except by shaping it like a pile of rocks. (I said "size" in my earlier post when "height" would have been better. That's a hazard for me when posting to/. from work; I generally don't have the time to phrase it as clearly as possible. I'm a sloppy writer by habit, and I make lots of mistakes in first drafts.)
You're right: it's perfectly possible that there will be nothing behind this stone. But it's more fun to speculate about there being something rather than nothing. We'll know in a few days either way.
I agree. I only had in mind that the exact method is a matter of speculation to a certain degree; there are a number of equally plausible theories on the details of how the construction ramps might have been arranged, the blocks transported to the site, etc. I didn't mean to invoke the weirdo theories.
The best proof that the pyramids aren't the product of some strange advanced alien or Atlanean technology is that they are in fact pyramids. Genuinely advanced tech can construct buildings of that size using many other designs. The primitive tech of the ancient world limited them to the basic rockpile shape; they simply didn't have building materials that could support anything else. This is the real reason for the ubiquitousness of the pyramid, from the Maya back through the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, not that they were based on any mystical prototype.
Possibly Khufu's mummy. It's not in the sarcophagus in the King's Chamber and probably never was, but if the Great Pyramid was really built as his tomb it's got to have been there somewhere. It then becomes an engineering puzzle as to how they got the mummy in there. Maybe there's a larger hidden passage we haven't located yet, or maybe he died before the pyramid was completed and it was built around the burial chamber.
Or maybe it's the control room to the alien launch facility....
Slashdot Mirror
I know everyone says "Imperial" when they mean the system in common use in the US, but they're not the same thing. One gallon containers (as for gasoline) used to be marked in two sets of units, US and Imperial. The Imperial gallons (for Canada and the UK) were slightly larger, and were moreover the same whether measuring dry or liquid. US dry and liquid gallons are different.
They're also called English measurements. After all, they were in use long before there was a British Empire, or even a UK for that matter. Official, fixed standards happened after the English settlement of America, so we wound up with units that varied a bit from what became standard later on.
The original Rollerball had one too. Don't remember it's name, but there was a main user interface of some kind that looked like a garganguan bubbling aquarium. None too reliable either; it misplaces the 14th century. "Ah well, only Dante and a few corrupt popes," as Ralph Richardson said at the time.
And yes, you can too legislate ethics. We do it all the time. That we have not yet done so in such a manner as to effectively prevent these frivolous lawsuits is a symptom of the broken US tort law.
Read the books. They're still better, and you can have a nerd's true pleasure at pointing up everything the movie did wrong. In a really whiny, irritating voice.
Um... This is AOL Time-Warner, remember? They probably own the rights to more songs than any other media conglomerate in the world. Which means they can do whatever the hell they want with them.
Geez, it's a PIA to try to come up with working links on that Getty site! Here's this image though: go to the image search page and enter 168025a in the "Keyword(s) or image number(s)" field.
I have to wonder what it is you're looking for if that's what you insist on seeing, and if the interpretation you apply to it is "that life was nothing but strife and pain." That's weird. I said it exactly once. (And what could have possibly have qualified as "and such"?) Problems I might have, but they have nothing to do with money, and touch on subjects that are, as I have said, both OT and none of your business. It's remains presumptious to suppose that you can solve someone's life problems based on the information conveyed in a single badly misinterpreted sentence. Even someone like Dr. Laura isn't usually so presumptious, and she at least is in a position where people are actively soliciting her advice.
["]From my point of view, I think you had a few too many dependants.["] if you ignore the have/had problem (oops), seems straightforward to me.
This kind of statement is always deeply offensive no matter how it's qualified. I will not speculate on why it is that you do not, or will not, understand this. You're just going to have to accept it as a maxim: Never again say anything of this nature to someone with children whom they love.
As for a Hyundai being a hardship... where does that come from?
From sarcasm. You're the one who told me that if I lived someplace with a lower cost of living my children's "home life will stabilize" based on no other information than what I chose to give you. If you were reading with more care, you might have noticed I hinted strongly that there was much more to my particular story, all of which is highly OT for this discussion and none of your business anyway. You judge far too hastily.
I used "parent" rather than "mother" up there for a reason. Don't go trying to slam me for advocating the oppression of women, or whatever phrase for the sentiment happens to spring to your mind. I know several families where the father is the stay-at-home parent. It works just fine.
I don't know why you put "non-living wage" in quotes, because I didn't use those words. I said "poverty line", and I used the figure from the US government for the year 2000. It's applied nationwide, as little sense as that may make. So it doesn't matter if you're living in Los Altos Hills, California or Podunk, Iowa, the government considers you to be in poverty if your annual household income is less than $13,861.
Finally: You're an ass. Just who the hell are you to tell me how many kids I should be having? Or where I should be living? Or how I should direct my career? Or what should and should not be important to me? Grow up a little more, get some life experience, get your degree, take on some actual responsibility for one or two other human beings, and then, just maybe, you'll be qualified to tell someone else how they should be going about it. Even then it's damned rude.
Possibly the most expensive US center to live in is the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. OK, technically I live outside the Bay Area, since I don't live in one of the counties that are generally recognized as comprising it, but I work in Silicon Valley. Even with the cheaper rent you get with a 1 hour commute, it's not easy going with a family of 4 and an income < $100k.
Hey, suppose the RIAA winds up suing the MPAA over this movie? We can't lose!
No.
I use VMS every day. It's what I do all my real work on.
I was being silly. Of course I know which one the CDROM is; it's DKA600. (Now isn't that obvious?) Those logicals you have pointing to them ain't necessarily there though. I don't have them anyway, and there's nothing in the OS that makes you put them there. If your sysadmin expects the users to have more 1337 than average (as ours do, sometimes without justification) they won't bother.
Which one's my CD-ROM? Ummmm....
He's far too young-looking. Even if he's only supposed to be in his 60s according to the chronology of the books, he was prematurely aged by the power of Saruman working through Wormtongue. The vigor he displays in leading his people after his healing by Gandalf ought to be contrasted to his appearance. Here he looks positively energetic in his first appearance compared to how he ought to be presented.
Scientists at rival laboratories, however, had difficulty reproducing the results of Schon's work, thwarting a checks-and-balances process integral to the scientific method.
Um, no. If the "checks-and-balances process" were being thwarted, then it would have been circumvented or avoided somehow. This is an example of the process working as it's supposed to. You don't need a checks-and-balances system if everyone in the field is always going to be a good boy at all times. What happened here is that someone wasn't, and the scientific process caught him at it.
I would love it if these wire services would assign beats to reporters by taking into consideration what subjects they actually understand. They should also be fluent in the language in which they are writing, and display some comprehension of the words they're using.
A Ph.D. is not something that is waved about publically in polite society, even in academia. I should say especially in academia. It's pretty much assumed that all faculty members have one, so the important title is the one that indicates their position. Consequently, "Dr." suggests that they have no other title worth mentioning, and the really high-strung academic types will regard it as a positive insult.
In normal society, only MDs and holders of similar degrees such as DDS or DO -- that is, those who actually treat ailing people -- are addressed socially as "Dr." Everyone else, including boastful Ph.D.s, are "Mr." or "Ms". Just ask Miss Manners. That Brin insists on trumpeting his degree does him no credit.
Which may be neither here nor there anyway; the Sphinx was carved out of, and in part built on top of, a natural rock outcropping which is itself certainly older than human civilization. We shouldn't be too surprised to see weathering on it inconsitent with the time when it became the Sphinx instead of "that rock over there."
The architectural history of this structure has been fairly well established. It was begun as a standard mastaba, which was extended in two or three stages. Then, having apparently reached the limit of how grandiose a mastaba could be, three more mastabas were stacked on top of it, forming a 4-stepped pyramid. As Djoser was not yet dead, it was then expanded once again into the six-stepped form it still retains. It seems to me that the original mastaba was expanded until it was as grandiose as that particular form could have achieved with the building materials available -- it's built from stone cut into small, brick-sized blocks -- and that the piling up of successive mastabas may have been the only form that occurred to the architect to make it even more grandiose.
That doesn't mean that a pyramid will last a long time if it's not built out of the right materials. There are numerous pyramids between Giza and Saqqara, but not all of them are still pyramid shaped. Towards the end of the Old Kindom, pyramids became decidedly low-buget affairs, constructed out of unbaked mud brick with limestone casings. Once the casing stones were removed for building material by later generations, the things just started to erode away. The pyramids of Giza also had their casings removed -- only the Second Pyramid preserves a few courses near the top -- but since their cores are stone they endured anyway.
In any event, I doubt longevity was a consideration, at least as far as the shape was concerned. The oldest pyramid was just a century or so older than the Great Pyramid, so they really had no data to go on in that regard. There were plenty of other monuments in Egypt at least as old as the Stepped Pyramid at the time, many older, and probably in just as good a condition.
It's not just that there are no other buildings of the ancient world comparable in height to the Pyramids that have survived; it's that there are no buildings in the ancient world comparable in height at all, not even in ruined condition. Every monument of significant height in the ancient world is roughly pyramid shaped, even when they weren't "houses of eternity", like ziggurats or Mesoamerican pyramids. That strongly suggests they knew of no other way to build something that tall except by shaping it like a pile of rocks. (I said "size" in my earlier post when "height" would have been better. That's a hazard for me when posting to /. from work; I generally don't have the time to phrase it as clearly as possible. I'm a sloppy writer by habit, and I make lots of mistakes in first drafts.)
You're right: it's perfectly possible that there will be nothing behind this stone. But it's more fun to speculate about there being something rather than nothing. We'll know in a few days either way.
Hey that's right! Neither did my old TRS-80! We should all get back to BASICs, yeah!
The best proof that the pyramids aren't the product of some strange advanced alien or Atlanean technology is that they are in fact pyramids. Genuinely advanced tech can construct buildings of that size using many other designs. The primitive tech of the ancient world limited them to the basic rockpile shape; they simply didn't have building materials that could support anything else. This is the real reason for the ubiquitousness of the pyramid, from the Maya back through the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, not that they were based on any mystical prototype.
Or maybe it's the control room to the alien launch facility....