That person was probably frustrated at you being a lot slower than he wanted. If you did what you did in a UK driving test, it'd be an instant fail (basically anything causing another motorist to slow down unnecessarily, regardless of their speed, is a fail). However, I sympathise with with your turn signal (indicator) point. If someone is not indicating at a roundabout (I forget the US term) I assume they are going straight on. If you don't indicate, you don't tell me where you're going, and I _will_ pull out in front of you if you were turning right but forget to indicate. It helps that I have a crap car that I don't mind being dented a little.
Riding the clutch wears out the clutch - it has a limited lifespan. With manuals you should only use the clutch when starting and stopping, and changing gears, in theory. In practice, most people don't know how to drive or don't care. I fit into the latter a bit, but not too much. I only ride the clutch when I know (or think) that I'm going to moving on _very_ soon. It's very easy to get into the habit of, and you end up controlling everything on the clutch and having to replace it every so often. That's fine if you don't mind the expense.
O/T I actually drive a car that needs you to ride the clutch a bit - a citroen XM manual with a foot handbrake. Unless you have 3 feet, hill starts _need_ you to start with your feet only on the clutch and brake. Once you get used to it, it's no problem - most starts don't even require any accelerator.... it's just hill starts that can be tough to get used to.
I actually drive for a living, and someone asked me to move this van the other day. I had no idea where to start, because I've never driven an automatic. I don't suppose it'd take much to learn, but currently I'm as clueless in an automatic as an automatic driver is in a manual.
The _only_ difference between different scientific theories is the amount of evidence each has. There is no real such thing as a law in science, as Newton's "laws" about gravity attest to. Also, claiming Evolution is untestable is just wrong. It _has_ been tested, it _is_ being used, it is about as close to proven as any biological theory is going to be. Big bang is not as certain, but evidence definately does point that way. String theory there is very little evidence for at all. Lumping Evolution in with String theory is disingenuous at best.
The difference is that the officers were doing a job paid for by you. It is entirely appropriate that the public know where their money is going and who is spending it doing what. If the officers did this in their own private time, there would be a conflict of interest issue, but there would be no reason to leak their details. If the officers did this on your payroll, you have every right to know what they did, why they did it, and if they should have done it. If you are paying for something you have a right to know what people are doing with your money, obviously with certain exceptional limitations, this being far from any of those.
Wikipedia is not, nor ever was intended to be, anything but an online encyclopedia. Including the entire works of human culture that have expired from copyright or are in the public domain otherwise is not what they are about. When asking "Why not include everything?", you are missing the point of an encyclopedia. An obvious example is youtube - if wikipedia included everything, they'd host all of youtube's content too (minus the copyrighted bits), which would be resource intensive and essentially pointless since youtube already does that.
Mathematical proofs, however, I have no problem with being on wikipedia, as long as they are not in the main article - the main article should provide a link. An encyclopedia is about the background and general consensus about a topic, not in depth analysis. Those who want to go in depth should have access to it, but those who want to just skim and learn a little bit should not, under any circumstances, have to wade through acres of mathematical notation to understand what it's about.
The sad truth is that while the music business appears glamorous - and certain parts may be - the business of selling recorded music is unprofitable for everyone. That's right - everyone. Big box retailers move mountains of CDs but it's typically a loss leader designed to get people into the store rather than generate a profit. Offline music only retailers such as Tower Records have largely vanished.
If this is true (I haven't read up on all the figures), then this is what is wrong with the recording industry. If you can't make a profit selling millions of copies of something for £10 which costs (basically) nothing to replicate, and is the work of a few people over less than a year, your business is screwed. Seriously.
Selling music is like selling gravel. It's a commodity.
No, selling music is _not_ like selling gravel. When was the last time itunes ran out of stock of a downloadable song? The entire idea is stupid. If itunes sell me a song which I download, do they no longer have the song?
Why the hell is this modded insightful? Clearly the parent is talking out of their arse. I'm not massively into social networking site, but I do have a facebook account. Last week I went to a friend's birthday party, and now photos are up on facebook of that party. There are no better tools for this kind of thing. It's not about ego, or spamming, or anything like that, it's just about keeping in touch with friends and sharing stuff. I have spent, in my entire life, about 1/2 an hour "getting, maintaining and monitoring" my facebook account. Get a brain, moran.
Wikipedia has that power now. However, there is one big thing that prevents that power from becoming too strong. Anyone can copy it. Anyone can replicate Wikipedia in its entirety, and change the bits they want, and moderate the bits they want. The _only_ thing wikipedia has is its popularity. There is nothing else, Wikipedia as an organisation has 0 true assets, apart from their popularity.
If or when wikipedia gets too corrupt, users will leave. They'll leave to an identical copy of wikipedia without the corrupt bits.
Most of the problem pages on wikipedia are about people or companies. I personally very rarely look up information on people (who aren't long dead) or companies on wikipedia - Wikipedia is never going to be a good source of information on those kinds of things, nor should it aim to be.
Although I agree with most of your post, motorways are the exception, not the rule. There are loads of antiquated laws about what you can take down 99.9% of the roads in the UK. I'm think, for example, that if someone _really_ wanted to drive a flock of sheep through London, they probably could. The north circular, probably the largest road in London still has cattle grids in places. I do know you're allowed to ride a horse _anywhere_ except for motorways.... can't imagine the chaos if people actually started using this right on big congested roads everywhere.
I used to think like you, but I started a new job a couple of weeks ago as a multidrop driver. I have to go to addresses in a 200 mile squared or so area. I know the area ok, but not very well. Maps are useless for this kind of thing, since large scale maps will only get me to a city/town/village, and you can't possibly have decent street maps for that big an area.
It does, however, direct me on some interesting routes (which I'm learning to ignore). A couple of days ago, I got sent down a couple of miles of 8 foot wide single carriageway semi-surfaced road. Fortunately I'm only driving a 5 tonne van...
When was the last time you purchased a one metre waist pair of jeans, or bought a half litre of beer? Not everything is standardised as metric now. Anyway, the GP's point still stands. When the metric system was forced on the populace by the government, more people understood weights in ounces, pounds and stones than did in grammes and kilogrammes. Shops weren't using those weights to try to con people, I'm not sure where you get that idea. If the customer wants something in pounds and ounces, and the retailer wants to sell in pounds and ounces, why on earth does the product also have to be labeled in kg (adding marginally to the cost) too? Another absurd thing is the 568ml cans, which cannot be sold as pints, and the 284ml bottles. Who wants to buy a 2.272 litre container of milk? I'd prefer the 4 pint one.
ps. For any confused Americans, our pints are bigger than your pints, so there;)
The termination shock fluctuates in distance because it's an interaction between the heliosphere of the sun and the interstellar medium. Parts will experience more drag due to magnetic fields, and thus be closer to the sun than other parts of the shock. It fluctuates in time because the sun's output fluctuates in time -- when the solar winds are stronger, the corresponding parts of the termination shock will be further away. So it fluctuates in both time and distance, and depends upon solar activity. Just as the writeup said.
Fluctuate, by definition involves time. Saying "The price of oil fluctuates wildly" is ok, because obviously you mean it fluctuates over time. Saying "The time and price of oil fluctuates wildly" does not make sense. That's what the summary basically said - I personally thought there were weird time effects being implied about the termination shock. It's just a crap use of a word in TFS that doesn't make sense.
Imagine if DirectX required pre-emptive multitasking support. (not hard to do, it actually DOES)
How would you backport that to Windows 3.1?
Noooooo!!!! I just wiped my Linux and Vista partitions on my dual SLI 8800GTX gaming rig to install Windows 3.1. And now you tell me I might not be able to get newer versions of DirectX to work?? Damn Micro$haft!
You are missing the point here. The BBC is not a company. The BBC has a guaranteed source of income - the license fee. This is not affected if it puts stuff online, goes and hides in the corner with regards to the internet, or whatever it decides to do outside of certain parameters. The BBC Mandate is here. If the BBC decided to sit in the corner and ignore the internet, it could.
What I would be much more pissed off about is the fact that all British people watching television pay directly to the BBC, by law, and some (ie those who run Linux, Macs etc) are excluded from some services because of this DRM. People have _already_ paid for the content with their license fees (nearly $300 a year), that is the problem. The BBC is giving preferential treatment to those who have bought a particular American company's operating system, despite those who fund it all paying the same.
Re:Asimov did say it first, and not just in fictio
on
Earth's Moon is a Rarity
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· Score: 2, Interesting
You do realise that this is middle-school physics, don't you?
I certainly wasn't taught about this directly in school at all, 15 years ago or so, and judging by your spelling, I'm from the same place as you (UK). The inverse square law people should know (though it is not, even in places like/., commonly applied knowledge), but extrapolating it to planets etc. is not immediately intuitive. Don't assume people are trolls simple because their field of expertise is not your's (I include amateur expertise in this).
The trouble is that these drives are slower than their normal counterparts (up to 10%), so you'll need more of them. That doesn't sound so bad, and is easily offset by the 40% power savings. However, what is not taken into account here is the production of the drive. I'm willing to bet that the largest part of the CO2 etc. released is released in building the drive, not running it, especially since normal non-green drives only use just over 10W at most (though admittedly I've not actually calculated the CO2 cost of hard drives).
Another very important thing to take into account is the fact that these are Western Digital's figures, not independently verified. I suspect that within server situations, in which the drives will generally have a much higher workload, their power savings will be much less. If, however, they do still offer decent power savings, they will help solve one problem - heat in the server room.
You could also consider getting a straight 5400rpm drive. I've got one in my system (an old Maxtor 160gb), and it is about the quietest drive I've ever (not) heard. It has got a bit louder recently (within the last year or so), but when I got it about 5 years ago (I think - it was brand new and one of the largest capacities you could get, though I think 200gb were available too), I couldn't tell when it was active or not, unless I put my ear right next to it. I don't do anything much that relies on hard drive transfer speed, except gaming in which it only affects load times, so it has been perfect for me.
One problem is that lots of companies have stopped making 3.5" 5400rpm drives, so you can't get them very big. A quick search only found them up to 250gb. That may well be enough for you, it depends on your requirements. Also, I don't know how "green" they are - I presume they must draw less power than 7200 drives, but I'm not sure how they'd stack up against the drive in TFA.
I feel your pain. My local petrol station has diesel at £1.08 a litre. My tank is 70 litres, so filling it up from empty costs over £75... for those in the US, that's over $150 to fill your car. It's not an SUV or anything, either, just a relatively large family car. Fortunately I don't drive that much.
As I just posted, the UK does not use kilometres at all. Everything is done in miles. From the link you posted:
The one significant aspect of measurement on which the UK and Ireland negotiated a derogation for which no date has yet been set is in the use of miles, yards, feet and inches for road traffic purposes.
this is 3 miles for the one country in the world not using metric.
Wait, the US has gone metric too now? Back here in old Blighty, we're still using miles (and stones, and feet and inches, and pints...). I guess we should get with the times.
Slashdot Mirror
That person was probably frustrated at you being a lot slower than he wanted. If you did what you did in a UK driving test, it'd be an instant fail (basically anything causing another motorist to slow down unnecessarily, regardless of their speed, is a fail). However, I sympathise with with your turn signal (indicator) point. If someone is not indicating at a roundabout (I forget the US term) I assume they are going straight on. If you don't indicate, you don't tell me where you're going, and I _will_ pull out in front of you if you were turning right but forget to indicate. It helps that I have a crap car that I don't mind being dented a little.
Riding the clutch wears out the clutch - it has a limited lifespan. With manuals you should only use the clutch when starting and stopping, and changing gears, in theory. In practice, most people don't know how to drive or don't care. I fit into the latter a bit, but not too much. I only ride the clutch when I know (or think) that I'm going to moving on _very_ soon. It's very easy to get into the habit of, and you end up controlling everything on the clutch and having to replace it every so often. That's fine if you don't mind the expense.
O/T I actually drive a car that needs you to ride the clutch a bit - a citroen XM manual with a foot handbrake. Unless you have 3 feet, hill starts _need_ you to start with your feet only on the clutch and brake. Once you get used to it, it's no problem - most starts don't even require any accelerator.... it's just hill starts that can be tough to get used to.
I actually drive for a living, and someone asked me to move this van the other day. I had no idea where to start, because I've never driven an automatic. I don't suppose it'd take much to learn, but currently I'm as clueless in an automatic as an automatic driver is in a manual.
You must be new here. The correct term is "Beowulf Death Cluster".
The _only_ difference between different scientific theories is the amount of evidence each has. There is no real such thing as a law in science, as Newton's "laws" about gravity attest to. Also, claiming Evolution is untestable is just wrong. It _has_ been tested, it _is_ being used, it is about as close to proven as any biological theory is going to be. Big bang is not as certain, but evidence definately does point that way. String theory there is very little evidence for at all. Lumping Evolution in with String theory is disingenuous at best.
Not trying to be (too much of a) pedant here, but can you really have metaphysics about physics?
The difference is that the officers were doing a job paid for by you. It is entirely appropriate that the public know where their money is going and who is spending it doing what. If the officers did this in their own private time, there would be a conflict of interest issue, but there would be no reason to leak their details. If the officers did this on your payroll, you have every right to know what they did, why they did it, and if they should have done it. If you are paying for something you have a right to know what people are doing with your money, obviously with certain exceptional limitations, this being far from any of those.
Wikipedia is not, nor ever was intended to be, anything but an online encyclopedia. Including the entire works of human culture that have expired from copyright or are in the public domain otherwise is not what they are about. When asking "Why not include everything?", you are missing the point of an encyclopedia. An obvious example is youtube - if wikipedia included everything, they'd host all of youtube's content too (minus the copyrighted bits), which would be resource intensive and essentially pointless since youtube already does that.
Mathematical proofs, however, I have no problem with being on wikipedia, as long as they are not in the main article - the main article should provide a link. An encyclopedia is about the background and general consensus about a topic, not in depth analysis. Those who want to go in depth should have access to it, but those who want to just skim and learn a little bit should not, under any circumstances, have to wade through acres of mathematical notation to understand what it's about.
If this is true (I haven't read up on all the figures), then this is what is wrong with the recording industry. If you can't make a profit selling millions of copies of something for £10 which costs (basically) nothing to replicate, and is the work of a few people over less than a year, your business is screwed. Seriously.
No, selling music is _not_ like selling gravel. When was the last time itunes ran out of stock of a downloadable song? The entire idea is stupid. If itunes sell me a song which I download, do they no longer have the song?
Why the hell is this modded insightful? Clearly the parent is talking out of their arse. I'm not massively into social networking site, but I do have a facebook account. Last week I went to a friend's birthday party, and now photos are up on facebook of that party. There are no better tools for this kind of thing. It's not about ego, or spamming, or anything like that, it's just about keeping in touch with friends and sharing stuff. I have spent, in my entire life, about 1/2 an hour "getting, maintaining and monitoring" my facebook account. Get a brain, moran.
IBM _have not lost_ in any way at all here. They never lost. What are you smoking to think they did?
Wikipedia has that power now. However, there is one big thing that prevents that power from becoming too strong. Anyone can copy it. Anyone can replicate Wikipedia in its entirety, and change the bits they want, and moderate the bits they want. The _only_ thing wikipedia has is its popularity. There is nothing else, Wikipedia as an organisation has 0 true assets, apart from their popularity.
If or when wikipedia gets too corrupt, users will leave. They'll leave to an identical copy of wikipedia without the corrupt bits.
Most of the problem pages on wikipedia are about people or companies. I personally very rarely look up information on people (who aren't long dead) or companies on wikipedia - Wikipedia is never going to be a good source of information on those kinds of things, nor should it aim to be.
Although I agree with most of your post, motorways are the exception, not the rule. There are loads of antiquated laws about what you can take down 99.9% of the roads in the UK. I'm think, for example, that if someone _really_ wanted to drive a flock of sheep through London, they probably could. The north circular, probably the largest road in London still has cattle grids in places. I do know you're allowed to ride a horse _anywhere_ except for motorways.... can't imagine the chaos if people actually started using this right on big congested roads everywhere.
I used to think like you, but I started a new job a couple of weeks ago as a multidrop driver. I have to go to addresses in a 200 mile squared or so area. I know the area ok, but not very well. Maps are useless for this kind of thing, since large scale maps will only get me to a city/town/village, and you can't possibly have decent street maps for that big an area.
It does, however, direct me on some interesting routes (which I'm learning to ignore). A couple of days ago, I got sent down a couple of miles of 8 foot wide single carriageway semi-surfaced road. Fortunately I'm only driving a 5 tonne van...
When was the last time you purchased a one metre waist pair of jeans, or bought a half litre of beer? Not everything is standardised as metric now. Anyway, the GP's point still stands. When the metric system was forced on the populace by the government, more people understood weights in ounces, pounds and stones than did in grammes and kilogrammes. Shops weren't using those weights to try to con people, I'm not sure where you get that idea. If the customer wants something in pounds and ounces, and the retailer wants to sell in pounds and ounces, why on earth does the product also have to be labeled in kg (adding marginally to the cost) too? Another absurd thing is the 568ml cans, which cannot be sold as pints, and the 284ml bottles. Who wants to buy a 2.272 litre container of milk? I'd prefer the 4 pint one.
ps. For any confused Americans, our pints are bigger than your pints, so there ;)
The termination shock fluctuates in distance because it's an interaction between the heliosphere of the sun and the interstellar medium. Parts will experience more drag due to magnetic fields, and thus be closer to the sun than other parts of the shock. It fluctuates in time because the sun's output fluctuates in time -- when the solar winds are stronger, the corresponding parts of the termination shock will be further away. So it fluctuates in both time and distance, and depends upon solar activity. Just as the writeup said.
Fluctuate, by definition involves time. Saying "The price of oil fluctuates wildly" is ok, because obviously you mean it fluctuates over time. Saying "The time and price of oil fluctuates wildly" does not make sense. That's what the summary basically said - I personally thought there were weird time effects being implied about the termination shock. It's just a crap use of a word in TFS that doesn't make sense.
Imagine if DirectX required pre-emptive multitasking support. (not hard to do, it actually DOES)
How would you backport that to Windows 3.1?
Noooooo!!!! I just wiped my Linux and Vista partitions on my dual SLI 8800GTX gaming rig to install Windows 3.1. And now you tell me I might not be able to get newer versions of DirectX to work?? Damn Micro$haft!
You are missing the point here. The BBC is not a company. The BBC has a guaranteed source of income - the license fee. This is not affected if it puts stuff online, goes and hides in the corner with regards to the internet, or whatever it decides to do outside of certain parameters. The BBC Mandate is here. If the BBC decided to sit in the corner and ignore the internet, it could.
What I would be much more pissed off about is the fact that all British people watching television pay directly to the BBC, by law, and some (ie those who run Linux, Macs etc) are excluded from some services because of this DRM. People have _already_ paid for the content with their license fees (nearly $300 a year), that is the problem. The BBC is giving preferential treatment to those who have bought a particular American company's operating system, despite those who fund it all paying the same.
You do realise that this is middle-school physics, don't you?
I certainly wasn't taught about this directly in school at all, 15 years ago or so, and judging by your spelling, I'm from the same place as you (UK). The inverse square law people should know (though it is not, even in places like /., commonly applied knowledge), but extrapolating it to planets etc. is not immediately intuitive. Don't assume people are trolls simple because their field of expertise is not your's (I include amateur expertise in this).
I presume it was on porpoise, hence the misspelling.
Heh, "informative" for a post like this, written by an AC. I'd love to have what the mod was smoking.
The trouble is that these drives are slower than their normal counterparts (up to 10%), so you'll need more of them. That doesn't sound so bad, and is easily offset by the 40% power savings. However, what is not taken into account here is the production of the drive. I'm willing to bet that the largest part of the CO2 etc. released is released in building the drive, not running it, especially since normal non-green drives only use just over 10W at most (though admittedly I've not actually calculated the CO2 cost of hard drives).
Another very important thing to take into account is the fact that these are Western Digital's figures, not independently verified. I suspect that within server situations, in which the drives will generally have a much higher workload, their power savings will be much less. If, however, they do still offer decent power savings, they will help solve one problem - heat in the server room.
You could also consider getting a straight 5400rpm drive. I've got one in my system (an old Maxtor 160gb), and it is about the quietest drive I've ever (not) heard. It has got a bit louder recently (within the last year or so), but when I got it about 5 years ago (I think - it was brand new and one of the largest capacities you could get, though I think 200gb were available too), I couldn't tell when it was active or not, unless I put my ear right next to it. I don't do anything much that relies on hard drive transfer speed, except gaming in which it only affects load times, so it has been perfect for me.
One problem is that lots of companies have stopped making 3.5" 5400rpm drives, so you can't get them very big. A quick search only found them up to 250gb. That may well be enough for you, it depends on your requirements. Also, I don't know how "green" they are - I presume they must draw less power than 7200 drives, but I'm not sure how they'd stack up against the drive in TFA.
I feel your pain. My local petrol station has diesel at £1.08 a litre. My tank is 70 litres, so filling it up from empty costs over £75... for those in the US, that's over $150 to fill your car. It's not an SUV or anything, either, just a relatively large family car. Fortunately I don't drive that much.
As I just posted, the UK does not use kilometres at all. Everything is done in miles. From the link you posted :
The one significant aspect of measurement on which the UK and Ireland negotiated a derogation for which no date has yet been set is in the use of miles, yards, feet and inches for road traffic purposes.
this is 3 miles for the one country in the world not using metric.
Wait, the US has gone metric too now? Back here in old Blighty, we're still using miles (and stones, and feet and inches, and pints...). I guess we should get with the times.