As an econ. major I am surprised no one has given any reference to cost and benefit analysis. From a pure minimize cost point of few, there is absolutely no reason NOT to enforce wearing helmets. Here is one of the studies that I analyzed in the past:
Legislation requiring bicyclists to wear helmets in Israel will, over a helmet's 5-year duration (assuming 85% compliancy, 83.2% helmet efficiency for morbidity, and 70% helmet efficiency for mortality), save approximately 57 lives and result in approximately 2544 fewer hospitalizations; 13,355 and 26,634 fewer emergency room and ambulatory visits, respectively; and 832 and 115 fewer short-term and long-term rehabilitation cases, respectively. Total benefits ($60.7 million) from reductions in health service use ($44.2 million), work absences ($7.5 million), and mortality ($8.9 million) would exceed program costs ($20.1 million), resulting in a benefit-cost ratio of 3.01:1.
Barring signicificant difference between Israel and US people (no, getting hit by RPGs don't count), the benefit grossly offset the cost.
So what we have here is Itanium- look good on paper but impossible to be fully utilized.
That constitutes a failure if you ask me.
Actually I hold the exact opposite view. The hardware isn't ready, and by not ready I mean the performance isn't as high as expected due to design issues. If I am correct Intel doesn't want a repeat of the 1st gen Itanium where on release the brand name is blemished by the less than expected performance. This perception that IA64 is slow continues to haunt Intel up to this day. So by delaying Larrabee, Intel will have time to improve the cpu to the point where on release it will be a killer product (ie. hyped).
It's not as if Intel needs Larrabee in the near future anyway- AMD doesn't have anything significant in the near future as well; even if they do, with Intel's brute engineering capability, they will just pull a Core2 again.
Another possibility is that no game company is able to support Larrabee's architecture. Rather than releasing a product that 1. nothing old can run efficiently on 2. nothing new is designed for, Intel is delaying the release until more developers hop on the gravy train. When that happen, Intel can release the chip and immediately, consumers will be awe by the chip's performance in the newest games.
I used to play MMO frequently. While I would not play 12 hours straight, I played way more than what a healthy human being should devote his time into.
One day, one of my friend got unlimited (legitimate) GM access to one of the most popular MMO game in the world at that time, and I started 'padding' my characters with all sorts of extreme enhancements (+99, set items etc.) It was very fun to begin with.
After 3 days, my addiction was gone- It's like an epiphany- I suddenly jock awake and realized that, all the efforts you threw into the game will only amounts to a few bits in the game bits database.
I never got addicted to another MMO after that.
PS. But then, of course, the same concept also applies to the number on my bank account...but that's another story
You haven't seen anything until you personally witness someone who try to jam a brand new SAS HD into a brand new FC HD shelf and broke the HD connector.
Biosphere 2 was an experiment to simulate earth's natural environment and be self-sustainable.
The colony on Mars, on the other hand, needs only to be self-sustainable. This means that they can skip all the "pollinate with bees" crap and concentrate on producing O2 and food via artificial means.
As for moon base, given the nature of the moon- ie radiation, micro meteor, lack of atmosphere, etc. I would say that while a moon base is easier to do in the short run, a Mars base has a much better chance of being sustainable.
As for contamination- don't be silly, of course we have contaminated Mars. The question is, in what ways?
(Yes, IAAIS (I am a Irrigation Specialist), among other things that I do)
I have literally installed and repaired hundreds of lawn sprinkler systems. If the damn thing burst its pipe, chances are either 1) Your lawn is flooded, or 2) Your basement is flooded.
To have a cave that is twice the size of your house due to $20000 worth of potable water (which, by the way, means that your friend needs to have his eyesight checked as well because no one can miss that much water coming out of the ground) implies that there is something wrong with his house' foundation in the first place.
When you build a house, you always try to manage where the waste water from the lawn goes. Either to the storm gutter, or to the street, or you lay a nice gravel/sand lawn bed, or whatever. To have a piece of land so unstable that 1) all the water drains away before anyone noticed 2) creating a basin underneath implies some serious flaws in the design/construction process.
Free Fall? No Problem!
on
Flying Humans
·
· Score: 1
Admit it: You want to be the sole survivor of an airline disaster. You aren't looking for a disaster to happen, but if it does, you see yourself coming through it. I'm here to tell you that you're not out of touch with reality--you can do it. Sure, you'll take a few hits, and I'm not saying there won't be some sweaty flashbacks later on, but you'll make it. You'll sit up in your hospital bed and meet the press. Refreshingly, you will keep God out of your public comments, knowing that it's unfair to sing His praises when all of your dead fellow-passengers have no platform from which to offer an alternative view.
Let's say your jet blows apart at 35,000 feet. You exit the aircraft, and you begin to descend independently. Now what?
First of all, you're starting off a full mile higher than Everest, so after a few gulps of disappointing air you're going to black out. This is not a bad thing. If you have ever tried to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you know what I mean. This brief respite from the ambient fear and chaos will come to an end when you wake up at about 15,000 feet. Here begins the final phase of your descent, which will last about a minute. It is a time of planning and preparation. Look around you. What equipment is available? None? Are you sure? Look carefully. Perhaps a shipment of folded parachutes was in the cargo hold, and the blast opened the box and scattered them. One of these just might be within reach. Grab it, put it on, and hit the silk. You're sitting pretty.
Other items can be helpful as well. Let nature be your guide. See how yon maple seed gently wafts to earth on gossamer wings. Look around for a proportionate personal vehicle--some large, flat, aerodynamically suitable piece of wreckage. Mount it and ride, cowboy! Remember: molecules are your friends. You want a bunch of surface-area molecules hitting a bunch of atmospheric molecules in order to reduce your rate of acceleration.
I have been an NTL customer since 9th July 2001, when I signed up for your 3-in-one deal for cable TV, cable modem, and telephone. During this three-month period I have encountered inadequacy of service which I had not previously considered possible, as well as ignorance and stupidity of monolithic proportions.
Please allow me to provide specific details, so that you can either pursue your professional prerogative, and seek to rectify these difficulties -- or more likely (I suspect) so that you can have some entertaining reading material as you while away the working day smoking B&H and drinking vendor-coffee on the bog in your office:
My initial installation was cancelled without warning, resulting in my spending an entire Saturday sitting on my fat arse waiting for your technician to arrive. When he did not arrive, I spent a further 57 minutes listening to your infuriating hold music, and the even more annoying Scottish robot woman telling me to look at your helpful website.... HOW? I alleviated the boredom by playing with my testicles for a few minutes - an activity at which you are no-doubt both familiar and highly adept.
The rescheduled installation then took place some two weeks later, although the technician did forget to bring a number of vital tools - such as a drill-bit, and his cerebrum. Two weeks later, my cable modem had still not arrived. After 15 telephone calls over 4 weeks my modem arrived... six weeks after I had requested it, and begun to pay for it. I estimate your internet servers downtime is roughly 35%... hours between about 6pm-midnight, Mon-Fri, and most of the weekend.
I am still waiting for my telephone connection. I have made 9 calls on my mobile to your no-help line, and have been unhelpfully transferred to a variety of disinterested individuals, who are it seems also highly skilled bollock jugglers. I have been informed that a telephone line is available (and someone will call me back); that I will be transferred to someone who knows whether or not a telephone line is available (and then been cut off); that I will be transferred to someone (and then been redirected to an answer machine informing me that your office is closed); that I will be transferred to someone and then been redirected to the irritating Scottish robot woman...and several other variations on this theme.
Doubtless you are no-longer reading this letter, as you have at least a thousand other dissatisfied customers to ignore, and also another one of those crucially important testicle-moments to attend to. Frankly I don't care, it's far more satisfying as a customer to voice my frustrations in print than to shout them at your unending hold music. Forgive me, therefore, if I continue.
I thought BT were shit, that they had attained the holy piss-pot of god-awful customer relations, that no one, anywhere, ever, could be more disinterested, less helpful or more obstructive to delivering service to their customers. That's why I chose NTL, and because, well, there isn't anyone else is there? How surprised I therefore was, when I discovered to my considerable dissatisfaction and disappointment what a useless shower of bastards you truly are. You are sputum-filled pieces of distended rectum -- incompetents of the highest order.
British Telecom -- wankers though they are -- shine like brilliant beacons of success, in the filthy puss-filled mire of your seemingly limitless inadequacy. Suffice to say that I have now given up on my futile and foolhardy quest to receive any kind of service from you. I suggest that you cease any potential future attempts to extort payment from me for the services which you have so pointedly and catastrophically failed to deliver -- any such activity will be greeted initially with hilarity and disbelief -- quickly be replaced by derision, and even perhaps bemused rage.
Forgot to login
You know, that would actually be a pretty cool idea.
Imagine that instead of using HTTP as the signaling protocol for BitTorrent, you can use those free >1G email accounts (hotmail, Gmail, etc.) as the communication protocol/storage. You just need to use a program to divide a file into pieces and upload these pieces to the account.
When other people want a certain piece, their p2p program will email your account with a request. Your p2p account will periodically scan the email account for new email; if it has one, it will parse that email for request information. Then it will reply that email with that file segment as the attachment.
There are already GMail accessing softwares (GMail Drive), it shouldn't take much work to modify one. I don't really like the idea of using MIME though.... You can have a standard torrent file; Instead of the tracker address, however, you have the master email node (or a list of backup email accounts list) that let you enter the node.
For the first time in many years, I agree that/. ain't what it used to be.
Blah how does this make the front page? There are million of reasons for these connections.
Maybe he is using a dynamic ip based isp and he just got a new ip? Maybe the last person who used that ip was using bittorrent? Botnets trying to reconnect to this ip?
Aside from those "Remote Desktop" xp screenshots, I noticed there are Hei Long Jiang education committee, UN Development program, China Edu and Research Network, and whatever.
I guess the DoD and the "Chinese intelligence agency" are both attacking his computer.
UN probably sent some people to infiltrate his computer as well.
Wait, Hei Long Jiang is right next to Russia? Maybe the KGB is using China's network to go after him as well!*roll eyes*
Even if they are not bt, they might just as well be port scans.
I admit I shouldn't use the word "float", but it's a slang for "bringing something up from undersea"
More details here. They do a much better job at explaining this-
From the article:
To effect repairs on deep cables, the damaged portion is brought to the surface using a grapple. Deep cables must be cut at the seabed and each end separately brought to the surface, whereupon a new section is spliced in. The repaired cable is longer than the original, so the excess is deliberately laid in a 'U' shape on the sea-bed. A submersible can be used to repair cables that are near the surface.
The grapnel is a metal tool about 46cm by 61cm with a cutter like a fine razor blade and a grabbing tool.
As tension increases and the cable is slowly pulled up, it is cut, grabbed, and half of it is hoisted to the surface.
Dropping the grapnel, dragging the sea bed and recovering the cable can take about 16 hours, Walters said.
They don't drag cables up- The whole thing is too heavy (Yes the cable itself is not very wide, but 100+km of it plus the repeaters every 2km are, as people say, pain in the ass).
The repair crews drag a giant hook (with a ship) near the break point and hope that they can cut the cable into two. The two ends of the cable will float up to the surface, and people replace that segment of the cable.
Does it sounds hideous? Yes. That's why it took 3 months to repair the Asia cable links.
The collective had argued the memory inside a digital audio device such as an iPod is an audio recording medium primarily used to store music, and therefore should be subject to the Canadian Copyright Act. ...It says devices such as the iPod can be classified as a "recording medium" and should be subject to taxation.
Noticed that the collective is arguing that the device is a "recording medium" used to "store music", not "you can listen to it".
In other words, they are putting the tax not because you can listen to it anywhere, but because you can store "their" musics on your "recording medium".
The association better have a very good reason why they want to charge for than 3x for the ipod compared to cd-rws.
Also, why stop with ipod? I can record information on harddrives too! Let's see, a typically hard drive in a computer has 250 gb. Obviously, if a 30gb ipod costs $40, a 250gb computer should cost (250/40) x $40 = $240! We all know computers are the main source of illegally downloaded mp3!
You are right. I should have read more carefully. However, I still don't think this is such an amazing technology. So now you have a (small) gasoline powertrain, a electrical powertrain (battery+motor), and a fuel cell (perhaps the charger for that is on board as well.) I wonder how efficient the car is going to be...
Also, I have been reading news on Ballad for a few years now.While the technologies, such as material engineering, composition, and systems they are using are interesting (I attended a few of their presentations in my university), it is important to note that they have not been much successful in commercializing their technology (other than the few odd buses here and there).
The Prius is equipped with NiMH battery (Toyota will switch over to Lithium ion battery in 2009). This thing from Ford is powered by fuel cell. They are two different things.
With this aside, I wonder why they use onboard alternator to recharge the fuel cell. Making H from H2O through electrolysis is not very efficient (the biggest number I heard is around 40%).
Slashdot Mirror
As an econ. major I am surprised no one has given any reference to cost and benefit analysis.
From a pure minimize cost point of few, there is absolutely no reason NOT to enforce wearing helmets. Here is one of the studies that I analyzed in the past:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1614783/
Barring signicificant difference between Israel and US people (no, getting hit by RPGs don't count), the benefit grossly offset the cost.
So what we have here is Itanium- look good on paper but impossible to be fully utilized.
That constitutes a failure if you ask me.
Actually I hold the exact opposite view. The hardware isn't ready, and by not ready I mean the performance isn't as high as expected due to design issues.
If I am correct Intel doesn't want a repeat of the 1st gen Itanium where on release the brand name is blemished by the less than expected performance. This perception that IA64 is slow continues to haunt Intel up to this day. So by delaying Larrabee, Intel will have time to improve the cpu to the point where on release it will be a killer product (ie. hyped).
It's not as if Intel needs Larrabee in the near future anyway- AMD doesn't have anything significant in the near future as well; even if they do, with Intel's brute engineering capability, they will just pull a Core2 again.
Another possibility is that no game company is able to support Larrabee's architecture. Rather than releasing a product that 1. nothing old can run efficiently on 2. nothing new is designed for, Intel is delaying the release until more developers hop on the gravy train. When that happen, Intel can release the chip and immediately, consumers will be awe by the chip's performance in the newest games.
That's what happened to me.
I used to play MMO frequently. While I would not play 12 hours straight, I played way more than what a healthy human being should devote his time into.
One day, one of my friend got unlimited (legitimate) GM access to one of the most popular MMO game in the world at that time, and I started 'padding' my characters with all sorts of extreme enhancements (+99, set items etc.) It was very fun to begin with.
After 3 days, my addiction was gone- It's like an epiphany- I suddenly jock awake and realized that, all the efforts you threw into the game will only amounts to a few bits in the game bits database.
I never got addicted to another MMO after that.
PS. But then, of course, the same concept also applies to the number on my bank account...but that's another story
(true story)
You haven't seen anything until you personally witness someone who try to jam a brand new SAS HD into a brand new FC HD shelf and broke the HD connector.
A DDNS service (I use no-ip) and TigerVNC should do the trick.
Install the IP monitor software provided by your DDNS provider, and you are done.
The only short-coming is you cannot remotely turn on the computer unless you spend thousands on IP KVM+power equipments.
Or when a pope order a clown to kill himself.
It seems that you have confused knowledge with intelligence.
Change your name to MicroAHoo?
You will get many badly imitated "Hasta la vista" in pseudo-Assuie accent.
Biosphere 2 was an experiment to simulate earth's natural environment and be self-sustainable.
The colony on Mars, on the other hand, needs only to be self-sustainable. This means that they can skip all the "pollinate with bees" crap and concentrate on producing O2 and food via artificial means.
As for moon base, given the nature of the moon- ie radiation, micro meteor, lack of atmosphere, etc. I would say that while a moon base is easier to do in the short run, a Mars base has a much better chance of being sustainable.
As for contamination- don't be silly, of course we have contaminated Mars. The question is, in what ways?
That's pretty bull.
(Yes, IAAIS (I am a Irrigation Specialist), among other things that I do)
I have literally installed and repaired hundreds of lawn sprinkler systems. If the damn thing burst its pipe, chances are either
1) Your lawn is flooded, or
2) Your basement is flooded.
To have a cave that is twice the size of your house due to $20000 worth of potable water (which, by the way, means that your friend needs to have his eyesight checked as well because no one can miss that much water coming out of the ground) implies that there is something wrong with his house' foundation in the first place.
When you build a house, you always try to manage where the waste water from the lawn goes. Either to the storm gutter, or to the street, or you lay a nice gravel/sand lawn bed, or whatever. To have a piece of land so unstable that
1) all the water drains away before anyone noticed
2) creating a basin underneath
implies some serious flaws in the design/construction process.
Admit it: You want to be the sole survivor of an airline disaster. You aren't looking for a disaster to happen, but if it does, you see yourself coming through it. I'm here to tell you that you're not out of touch with reality--you can do it. Sure, you'll take a few hits, and I'm not saying there won't be some sweaty flashbacks later on, but you'll make it. You'll sit up in your hospital bed and meet the press. Refreshingly, you will keep God out of your public comments, knowing that it's unfair to sing His praises when all of your dead fellow-passengers have no platform from which to offer an alternative view.
Let's say your jet blows apart at 35,000 feet. You exit the aircraft, and you begin to descend independently. Now what? First of all, you're starting off a full mile higher than Everest, so after a few gulps of disappointing air you're going to black out. This is not a bad thing. If you have ever tried to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you know what I mean. This brief respite from the ambient fear and chaos will come to an end when you wake up at about 15,000 feet. Here begins the final phase of your descent, which will last about a minute. It is a time of planning and preparation. Look around you. What equipment is available? None? Are you sure? Look carefully. Perhaps a shipment of folded parachutes was in the cargo hold, and the blast opened the box and scattered them. One of these just might be within reach. Grab it, put it on, and hit the silk. You're sitting pretty.
Other items can be helpful as well. Let nature be your guide. See how yon maple seed gently wafts to earth on gossamer wings. Look around for a proportionate personal vehicle--some large, flat, aerodynamically suitable piece of wreckage. Mount it and ride, cowboy! Remember: molecules are your friends. You want a bunch of surface-area molecules hitting a bunch of atmospheric molecules in order to reduce your rate of acceleration.
I screamed.
Forgot to login You know, that would actually be a pretty cool idea. Imagine that instead of using HTTP as the signaling protocol for BitTorrent, you can use those free >1G email accounts (hotmail, Gmail, etc.) as the communication protocol/storage. You just need to use a program to divide a file into pieces and upload these pieces to the account. When other people want a certain piece, their p2p program will email your account with a request. Your p2p account will periodically scan the email account for new email; if it has one, it will parse that email for request information. Then it will reply that email with that file segment as the attachment.
There are already GMail accessing softwares (GMail Drive), it shouldn't take much work to modify one. I don't really like the idea of using MIME though....
You can have a standard torrent file; Instead of the tracker address, however, you have the master email node (or a list of backup email accounts list) that let you enter the node.
This might just work.
Hard work always give you result, but the result may not be the reward you are looking for.
For the first time in many years, I agree that /. ain't what it used to be.
Blah how does this make the front page? There are million of reasons for these connections.
Maybe he is using a dynamic ip based isp and he just got a new ip? Maybe the last person who used that ip was using bittorrent? Botnets trying to reconnect to this ip?
Aside from those "Remote Desktop" xp screenshots, I noticed there are Hei Long Jiang education committee, UN Development program, China Edu and Research Network, and whatever.
I guess the DoD and the "Chinese intelligence agency" are both attacking his computer.
UN probably sent some people to infiltrate his computer as well.
Wait, Hei Long Jiang is right next to Russia? Maybe the KGB is using China's network to go after him as well!*roll eyes*
Even if they are not bt, they might just as well be port scans.
News for nerds, indeed.
I admit I shouldn't use the word "float", but it's a slang for "bringing something up from undersea"
More details here. They do a much better job at explaining this-
From the article:
To effect repairs on deep cables, the damaged portion is brought to the surface using a grapple. Deep cables must be cut at the seabed and each end separately brought to the surface, whereupon a new section is spliced in. The repaired cable is longer than the original, so the excess is deliberately laid in a 'U' shape on the sea-bed. A submersible can be used to repair cables that are near the surface.
Another link from Taipei Times-
The grapnel is a metal tool about 46cm by 61cm with a cutter like a fine razor blade and a grabbing tool. As tension increases and the cable is slowly pulled up, it is cut, grabbed, and half of it is hoisted to the surface. Dropping the grapnel, dragging the sea bed and recovering the cable can take about 16 hours, Walters said.
They don't drag cables up- The whole thing is too heavy (Yes the cable itself is not very wide, but 100+km of it plus the repeaters every 2km are, as people say, pain in the ass).
The repair crews drag a giant hook (with a ship) near the break point and hope that they can cut the cable into two. The two ends of the cable will float up to the surface, and people replace that segment of the cable.
Does it sounds hideous? Yes. That's why it took 3 months to repair the Asia cable links.
The collective had argued the memory inside a digital audio device such as an iPod is an audio recording medium primarily used to store music, and therefore should be subject to the Canadian Copyright Act.
...It says devices such as the iPod can be classified as a "recording medium" and should be subject to taxation.
Noticed that the collective is arguing that the device is a "recording medium" used to "store music", not "you can listen to it".
In other words, they are putting the tax not because you can listen to it anywhere, but because you can store "their" musics on your "recording medium".
Subtle, but boy does it make a huge difference.
For each 700mb cd-rw, the levy is 30 cents.
A 30gb ipod has 30000mb-
30000mb/700mb = 42.9 cdrs
42.9 cdrs x 30 cents = 1286 cents = 12.86 dollars
The association better have a very good reason why they want to charge for than 3x for the ipod compared to cd-rws.
Also, why stop with ipod? I can record information on harddrives too! Let's see, a typically hard drive in a computer has 250 gb. Obviously, if a 30gb ipod costs $40, a 250gb computer should cost (250/40) x $40 = $240! We all know computers are the main source of illegally downloaded mp3!
Crap. Two mistakes in a row. No more 30 hours work and no sleep for me; I am going to sleep.
You are right. I should have read more carefully. However, I still don't think this is such an amazing technology. So now you have a (small) gasoline powertrain, a electrical powertrain (battery+motor), and a fuel cell (perhaps the charger for that is on board as well.) I wonder how efficient the car is going to be...
Also, I have been reading news on Ballad for a few years now.While the technologies, such as material engineering, composition, and systems they are using are interesting (I attended a few of their presentations in my university), it is important to note that they have not been much successful in commercializing their technology (other than the few odd buses here and there).
I wonder how successful they are going to be...
Here
Let this be a lesson to all of us who have websites. Your sacrifice will not be forgiven. RIP
The Prius is equipped with NiMH battery (Toyota will switch over to Lithium ion battery in 2009). This thing from Ford is powered by fuel cell. They are two different things.
With this aside, I wonder why they use onboard alternator to recharge the fuel cell. Making H from H2O through electrolysis is not very efficient (the biggest number I heard is around 40%).