As a cyclist, I'm pretty worried about how safe these auto driving vehicles are; how optimised they are for things in the road. Its one thing to have a car that brakes if you are about to hit something, another to have the thing make steering decisions too.
As a cyclist, I don't see how it could be worse than a human driver. Braking before it hits me would already be an improvement.
The front page hasn't been updated, but if you dig a little deeper, they claim version 0.1 will be released next month. Unfortunately, they seem to be moving at a crawl, and they don't have any immediate plans to integrate PDA synchronization. I don't think SeaMonkey will be any kind of threat to Microsoft until they can pull it all together.
We can change all that by eliminating career politicians. We could have a term limit of 1, and require that X years pass before they can hold office again. And then we pay every congressperson some large amount of money, like $1-10M/year, to attract successful people who can make 6+ figures in the private sector.
Good luck getting the career politicians to vote on that ammendment.
I do like the idea of term limits, but the huge paycheck is a horrible idea. People would start to look at a term in the House like winning the lottery. Congress would be full of charismatic rednecks (even more than it is now) with ZERO accountability to voters and no reason to fulfill their campaign promises.
I think it would be better to pay them nothing. Political service should be looked at as a civic duty. You get in, accomplish what you need to accomplish, and get out. Of course, then you have the problem that nobody has time to learn the system, but that's really more of an education problem.
It's also only $70 a head. It may take me several years and a few thousand dollars to repair my credit, but at least ChoicePoint has to pay the cost a half hour with my lawyer.
Lectures are not an interactive medium. That's recitation. Or maybe private school. When you're sitting in a lecture hall with 300 other students, you can't just ask whatever stupid question pops into your head, unless you want to be the object of hatred of your professor and classmates. It's how tens of thousands of public university students learn. Obviously that's not the entire learning process, but that doesn't make it worthless.
And a telephone with only an earpiece is called a radio.
That's not what the article was about. It was basically an observation that geniuses build on the work of earlier geniuses. It could've been said in about 20 words, but apparently a handful of really stupid examples were necessary to prove the point. Did you know that Isaac Newton already had an education when he invented calculus? Not so impressive now, is he? Also, if scientific advance had stopped after Copernicus, his theories would have been much less useful.
They are Zinc, at least that is the predominant ingredient in their composition
But we make so many of them, it's still a significant waste of copper (close to 1000 tons a year). And as far as I know, they don't get recycled. We just keep making more because so many get thrown away every year. Nickels are even worse, though. We don't mint quite as many, but they have a lot more copper (75%).
Maybe you could use this to improve overall power supply efficiency. Do standard power supplies use separate transformers for each voltage output? If so, the 12V output would have half as many coils as the 5V and a third as many as the 3V. That would make the 12V the most efficient conversion. Assuming the transformer is the biggest source of energy loss, the 96% efficiency conversion from 12V could save you a lot of power for the other two.
Of course, if I'm wrong about the transformers, than that's just stupid.
And that 96% may be exaggerated because the 12V output is run straight through, presumably with ~100% efficiency. Maybe it's not so promising after all.
But what about the other emissions? Coal plants put out a lot of arsenic and radioisotopes, among other things. Releasing it from smoke stacks is bad enough. When it's coming out of exaust pipes on busy streets, we're gonna have some problems.
I put shows on my Tivo all the time. They put out the feature in a software update a few months ago. At the bottom of "Now Playing" it has my computer, and I can transfer files from a folder in "My Documents" (I think it's "My Tivo Files," or something like that). They just have to be in MPEG-2 format, which the.tivo files already are. You can even watch them as they're transferring.
What good are predictions if they're exactly what everyone expects? XBox 360 will do OK, but nothing spectacular. Halo 3 will sell very well. PS3 will debut with a new GTA title that will bring up sales. EA will be universally despised, but they'll still sell a lot of games. Sega will realize people like Sonic games about Sonic. It was basically nothing but platitudes and things that can be reasonably expected, with a lot of status quo tossed in for good measure.
If I'm not mistaken, beam riding missiles are used against airplanes; and over 700 feet, I'm sure the beam of whatever crappy laser they were using would spread enough to hit whatever sensors the plane is equipped with. I'm not saying you're wrong, because the story is definitely sketchy, but it's not as far-fetched as you make it out to be.
It may not be entirely wrong; maybe he just got the facts mixed up. Radar wouldn't put a fighter pilot into evasive maneuvers, but a laser might. Laser guided missiles have been around for a while. They have to have some system that lets them know when their jet is being painted. You just have to have the right kind of laser to freak them out.
I don't think my connection influences that stuff much. It's the other guy's connection that matters. What we need are higher upload rates on consumer broadband packages. Until they catch up, there's not much point in increasing download rates for most of the stuff I do.
You can justify the price of a car, at least to some extent. You have to pay for parts, labor, taxes, etc. It's also pretty straightforward. Extra features cost extra money, and there are financing costs. The question you ignored was how do you justify the pricing of software. You don't buy a per-parking-space license for a car, and you don't have to pay more for other people to drive it (except insurance, which doesn't really have an analog here).
Why did they start with a city that already has a good trip planner? Atlanta has nothing. The best you can do here is get a map of the route for one particular line. If you want to figure out how to get somewhere, you have to go through each route individually. Sometimes you can make educated guesses based on the name they give each one, but good luck finding the right transfers. If Google really wants to impress me, lets see them make some sense of that crap.
200 million consoles, several hundred million controllers, probably a few million hard drives, several hundred million memory cards, lots and lots of ethernet adapters...I don't think 1.86 billion is an unreasonable number. Granted, it's a little silly to count stuff that comes with it in the box, but it's probably technically correct.
Scientists have discovered fossils of tropical animals in the Antarctic region. This means that at some point in history, the arctic and antarctic regions were lush, tropical habitats.
I can't tell if you're joking or not, but it wasn't funny, so I'm going to assume you're an idiot (no offense; it's usually a safe assumption). There are tropical fossils in the Antarctic because Antarctica--the continent--used to be in the tropics (within 23.5 degrees latitude of the equator, or whatever the tilt of the axis was back then). Neither the Arctic nor the Antarctic have ever been tropical regions. That's not to say that I disagree with the rest; humans would probably survive in some numbers if both ice caps melted. But your underlying assumptions are WAY off.
When did they move The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr? I seem to remember it being permanently at 9pm on Friday. The only thing they did to screw it up was move its lead-in (X-files) and wrap up the whole plot at the end of the first season. Or am I completely mixing that all up in my head?
And MadTV is very funny. You just have to TiVo it so you can fast forward through the stupid sketches (just like I do with SNL).
If you are getting your updates via the update server (as any good 1.5 user should be) you aren't counted.
That's assuming the automatic updates are working. I had to do manual updates right up until they fixed the problem in RC1, and that meant downloading from the Firefox page. (The problem was that it would get stuck in a cycle of downloading the upgrade and failing the install.) I still agree with you that it wouldn't lead to a huge inflation of the numbers, but I can't be the only one who's chalked up half a dozen downloads.
I'm pretty sure you should see light before the fusions starts, because it has to get really hot before it happens. Gravity powers the heating as it collapses, until fusion starts and continues the heating. It wouldn't be like flipping a switch. If that were the case, it would probably blow apart the collected gases and have to start over from scratch.
So for some reason, they convert AC line voltage to DC, then back to AC, then back to DC again in the power supplies? That makes no sense. Transformers go from one AC voltage to another (2k to 120). What's the DC step in the middle for?
And people keep talking about the added efficiency of a DC wall outlet, but that conversion isn't free. That's why those adapters you plug into the wall are always warm, even if you're not using them. You'd be using power just to keep the voltage available.
The only way I can see for them to save power with a distribution center is if they skip the transformer, because that takes power, too. But that's not what the guy in the article said. One of us is confused.
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As a cyclist, I'm pretty worried about how safe these auto driving vehicles are; how optimised they are for things in the road. Its one thing to have a car that brakes if you are about to hit something, another to have the thing make steering decisions too.
As a cyclist, I don't see how it could be worse than a human driver. Braking before it hits me would already be an improvement.
The front page hasn't been updated, but if you dig a little deeper, they claim version 0.1 will be released next month. Unfortunately, they seem to be moving at a crawl, and they don't have any immediate plans to integrate PDA synchronization. I don't think SeaMonkey will be any kind of threat to Microsoft until they can pull it all together.
We can change all that by eliminating career politicians. We could have a term limit of 1, and require that X years pass before they can hold office again. And then we pay every congressperson some large amount of money, like $1-10M/year, to attract successful people who can make 6+ figures in the private sector.
Good luck getting the career politicians to vote on that ammendment.
I do like the idea of term limits, but the huge paycheck is a horrible idea. People would start to look at a term in the House like winning the lottery. Congress would be full of charismatic rednecks (even more than it is now) with ZERO accountability to voters and no reason to fulfill their campaign promises.
I think it would be better to pay them nothing. Political service should be looked at as a civic duty. You get in, accomplish what you need to accomplish, and get out. Of course, then you have the problem that nobody has time to learn the system, but that's really more of an education problem.
It's also only $70 a head. It may take me several years and a few thousand dollars to repair my credit, but at least ChoicePoint has to pay the cost a half hour with my lawyer.
Lectures are not an interactive medium. That's recitation. Or maybe private school. When you're sitting in a lecture hall with 300 other students, you can't just ask whatever stupid question pops into your head, unless you want to be the object of hatred of your professor and classmates. It's how tens of thousands of public university students learn. Obviously that's not the entire learning process, but that doesn't make it worthless.
And a telephone with only an earpiece is called a radio.
That's not what the article was about. It was basically an observation that geniuses build on the work of earlier geniuses. It could've been said in about 20 words, but apparently a handful of really stupid examples were necessary to prove the point. Did you know that Isaac Newton already had an education when he invented calculus? Not so impressive now, is he? Also, if scientific advance had stopped after Copernicus, his theories would have been much less useful.
They are Zinc, at least that is the predominant ingredient in their composition
But we make so many of them, it's still a significant waste of copper (close to 1000 tons a year). And as far as I know, they don't get recycled. We just keep making more because so many get thrown away every year. Nickels are even worse, though. We don't mint quite as many, but they have a lot more copper (75%).
Maybe you could use this to improve overall power supply efficiency. Do standard power supplies use separate transformers for each voltage output? If so, the 12V output would have half as many coils as the 5V and a third as many as the 3V. That would make the 12V the most efficient conversion. Assuming the transformer is the biggest source of energy loss, the 96% efficiency conversion from 12V could save you a lot of power for the other two.
Of course, if I'm wrong about the transformers, than that's just stupid.
And that 96% may be exaggerated because the 12V output is run straight through, presumably with ~100% efficiency. Maybe it's not so promising after all.
But what about the other emissions? Coal plants put out a lot of arsenic and radioisotopes, among other things. Releasing it from smoke stacks is bad enough. When it's coming out of exaust pipes on busy streets, we're gonna have some problems.
I put shows on my Tivo all the time. They put out the feature in a software update a few months ago. At the bottom of "Now Playing" it has my computer, and I can transfer files from a folder in "My Documents" (I think it's "My Tivo Files," or something like that). They just have to be in MPEG-2 format, which the .tivo files already are. You can even watch them as they're transferring.
What good are predictions if they're exactly what everyone expects? XBox 360 will do OK, but nothing spectacular. Halo 3 will sell very well. PS3 will debut with a new GTA title that will bring up sales. EA will be universally despised, but they'll still sell a lot of games. Sega will realize people like Sonic games about Sonic. It was basically nothing but platitudes and things that can be reasonably expected, with a lot of status quo tossed in for good measure.
If I'm not mistaken, beam riding missiles are used against airplanes; and over 700 feet, I'm sure the beam of whatever crappy laser they were using would spread enough to hit whatever sensors the plane is equipped with. I'm not saying you're wrong, because the story is definitely sketchy, but it's not as far-fetched as you make it out to be.
It may not be entirely wrong; maybe he just got the facts mixed up. Radar wouldn't put a fighter pilot into evasive maneuvers, but a laser might. Laser guided missiles have been around for a while. They have to have some system that lets them know when their jet is being painted. You just have to have the right kind of laser to freak them out.
I don't think my connection influences that stuff much. It's the other guy's connection that matters. What we need are higher upload rates on consumer broadband packages. Until they catch up, there's not much point in increasing download rates for most of the stuff I do.
You can justify the price of a car, at least to some extent. You have to pay for parts, labor, taxes, etc. It's also pretty straightforward. Extra features cost extra money, and there are financing costs. The question you ignored was how do you justify the pricing of software. You don't buy a per-parking-space license for a car, and you don't have to pay more for other people to drive it (except insurance, which doesn't really have an analog here).
Music classes and choirs. My high school choir did a great rendition of "Fuck the Police." There wasn't a dry eye in the house.
Why did they start with a city that already has a good trip planner? Atlanta has nothing. The best you can do here is get a map of the route for one particular line. If you want to figure out how to get somewhere, you have to go through each route individually. Sometimes you can make educated guesses based on the name they give each one, but good luck finding the right transfers. If Google really wants to impress me, lets see them make some sense of that crap.
200 million consoles, several hundred million controllers, probably a few million hard drives, several hundred million memory cards, lots and lots of ethernet adapters...I don't think 1.86 billion is an unreasonable number. Granted, it's a little silly to count stuff that comes with it in the box, but it's probably technically correct.
Scientists have discovered fossils of tropical animals in the Antarctic region. This means that at some point in history, the arctic and antarctic regions were lush, tropical habitats.
I can't tell if you're joking or not, but it wasn't funny, so I'm going to assume you're an idiot (no offense; it's usually a safe assumption). There are tropical fossils in the Antarctic because Antarctica--the continent--used to be in the tropics (within 23.5 degrees latitude of the equator, or whatever the tilt of the axis was back then). Neither the Arctic nor the Antarctic have ever been tropical regions. That's not to say that I disagree with the rest; humans would probably survive in some numbers if both ice caps melted. But your underlying assumptions are WAY off.
Please raise your hand if you ever tried to smash a brick wall reenacting a scene from Mario Bros.
It left me paralyzed from the neck down, you insensitive clod.
When did they move The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr? I seem to remember it being permanently at 9pm on Friday. The only thing they did to screw it up was move its lead-in (X-files) and wrap up the whole plot at the end of the first season. Or am I completely mixing that all up in my head?
And MadTV is very funny. You just have to TiVo it so you can fast forward through the stupid sketches (just like I do with SNL).
If you are getting your updates via the update server (as any good 1.5 user should be) you aren't counted.
That's assuming the automatic updates are working. I had to do manual updates right up until they fixed the problem in RC1, and that meant downloading from the Firefox page. (The problem was that it would get stuck in a cycle of downloading the upgrade and failing the install.) I still agree with you that it wouldn't lead to a huge inflation of the numbers, but I can't be the only one who's chalked up half a dozen downloads.
Digg.com had this article posted six hours ago.
I'm pretty sure you should see light before the fusions starts, because it has to get really hot before it happens. Gravity powers the heating as it collapses, until fusion starts and continues the heating. It wouldn't be like flipping a switch. If that were the case, it would probably blow apart the collected gases and have to start over from scratch.
So for some reason, they convert AC line voltage to DC, then back to AC, then back to DC again in the power supplies? That makes no sense. Transformers go from one AC voltage to another (2k to 120). What's the DC step in the middle for?
And people keep talking about the added efficiency of a DC wall outlet, but that conversion isn't free. That's why those adapters you plug into the wall are always warm, even if you're not using them. You'd be using power just to keep the voltage available.
The only way I can see for them to save power with a distribution center is if they skip the transformer, because that takes power, too. But that's not what the guy in the article said. One of us is confused.