Um, it's not "your job". Your job is working at McDonalds. Maybe if you had taken a subject other than English Literature, and not racked up a $100,000 debt, you'd be able to get a different job. However, that would require some intelligence,common-sense, and motivation - skills that appear to be readily available in India.
Serious question from a non-USAian, does that $3.7 Trillion include military hardware (tanks, aircraft, guns etc) and all of the aircraft built for export by companies like Boeing?
Well, let's see... it's stuff that's manufactured... and it's stuff that's manufactured in the US.
No, that stuff is included in the figures for the Kazakhstan manufacturing sector.
Ah, ok. Yes, we're definitely talking about different things. Thanks for clarifying. No, I don't think using salt for home energy storage would be a particularly good idea. Perhaps if you own a ranch out in the boonies, a bunch of solar panels and some salt would prove to be an effective long-term solution (though you'd probably be better off going with geothermal). For your average house in a town or city, I don't see it working very well.
I don't get why you're using heat-of-fusion as your reference. You should be looking at heat capacity. With a melting-point of 48 degrees, you're less than half-way to the boiling point. And the whole idea is to keep the salt molten so you can pump it from place to place, so who gives a shit about the heat-of-fusion?
Of course, it also seems rather silly to use a material with such a low melting/boiling point. Since the end-goal is to boil water in order to drive a steam turbine, you - at the very least - want a material that can be heated to over 100 degrees celsius. Try something like this, instead.
It was amazing how many fragments you'd have to launch in order to reliably hit someone even 20 feet away. Expanding radius of a sphere and all that.
This would be why a fragmentation grenade is designed to launch hundreds of fragments. A lot of people seem to think that the only fragmentation is whatever pieces the casing breaks up into; in reality, the casing causes very little fragmentation. The interior of the grenade contains a metallic wrap which is designed to fragment into hundreds of pieces, each smaller than a toothpick. You'd have a hell of a time replicating that in your quake mod.
Unfortunately no one will be thinking twice before re-enacting their own version of chicken little and calling the police for every little thing.
Yeah. Goddamn busybodies. Who do they think they are? "Responsible Citizens"? Pah! They should mind their own damn business. If it's not you being mugged, raped, or blown up, why would you want to get involved? Just let it be.
UK People of a certain age look upon any strange object as a possible threat because of years and years of the IRA (and more latterly the RIRA) leaving bombs in rubbish bins (AKA "trash cans) and the like.
Ok, but why did a guy in the UK call the German police?
Isn't this the very goal of terrorism? To disrupt our daily activities with irrational fear?
Yeah, because dem terrorizers are teh EEEVIL and have no personal goals or desires other than to terrify us.
Seriously, this sophomoric view of good-vs-evil - and the associated "DA TERRORISTS HAVE WON!!!" bullshit - just blows my mind. It's like claiming that the goal of child molesters is to make us worry and hide the kids, or that the goal of bank robbers is to scare us into increasing security. There has to be something massively wrong with your understanding of human nature in order for you to come to those types of conclusions.
How many tons of lumber are needed for a house? 10? Still, you get to reuse it every day.
The average house uses about 20,000 kWh per year. Wood produces somewhere around 4,000 kWh per tonne. So you'd need 5 tonnes per year, or around 30 lbs of wood per day to produce the electricity consumed by your house. The 20k is a high estimate, at that. A young couple with no kids, living in a small apartment, would probably consume a quarter of that.
In other words, not exactly 10 tonnes per day, no.
I should, however, note that his "1 tonne of salt per house per day" figure seems a bit fishy.
First, a successful guerrilla movement must have an unassailable base - a base secure not only from direct physical assault, but from attack in other forms as well, including psychological attack.
None of our enemies currently have this. Pakistan is getting a little restless, so the situation could change in the future, but this has not been an issue so far.
Second, the guerrilla must have a technologically sophisticated enemy. The greater this sophistication, the greater this alien force would rely on forms of communications and logistics that must necessarily present vulnerabilities to the irregular.
This is just stupid. Greater sophistication decreases vulnerability.
Third, the enemy must be sufficiently weak in numbers so as to be unable to occupy the disputed territory in depth with a system of interlocking fortified posts.
Yes, this is usually the main problem.
Fourth, the guerrilla must have at least the passive support of the populace, if not its full involvement.
Again, not really a problem in the most recent conflicts. Iraq had too many factions for any one particular group to have "passive support of the populace", and in Afghanistan the Taliban has very little support, though they have been successful at terrifying significant fractions of the populace into not opposing them.
Fifth, the irregular force must have the fundamental qualities of speed, endurance, presence and logistical independence.
This doesn't really mean much. You can rephrase it as "the irregular force must be an irregular force".
Sixth, the irregular must be sufficiently advanced in weaponry to strike at the enemy's logistics and signals vulnerabilities."
This hasn't been an issue for western nations in a long, long time. Even in Vietnam, logistics and comms weren't significantly impacted by enemy action. These days the "irregulars" we face depend solely on shifting political opinion rather than achieving military goals like disrupting communications abilities or supply chains.
Conclusion: T.E. Lawrence lived in a completely different era. In his time, "communications" still meant messengers on horseback, and maybe telegraph lines running through the desert. While a couple of his observations are still valid today, the majority are just a quaint reflection on the attitudes and tactics of ancient armies. They have as much bearing on combat today as the musings of a caveman would have had on the armies of Lawrence's time.
This kinda proves that Google is not really a "search engine" per se, as if we needed any verification of that..
The hell? Are you reading the same article as the rest of us?
I guess we all have to send out our own crawlers to actually find anything outside the advertising realm. It's not that I mind seeing Twitter or similar removed, but I always wonder about the truly valuable stuff that's not being indexed because there's no ad link or contract involved.
This has nothing to do with advertising, and little to do with indexing. In order for the "real-time search" to be viable, Google needs Twitter to send them a constant stream of all tweets. Twitter has decided to stop doing so, ergo Google can no longer provide the "real-time search" functionality for twitter. They can, and do, continue to provide indexing of tweets - it's just that they now index them the same way they index the vast majority of the internet, meaning there's a significant delay between the time a tweet is posted and the time it becomes available through a google search.
I get that you're on some strange crusade against google, and that's fine, but it's no excuse for making up half-baked nonsense.
Right. And Native Americans are noble peace-loving people who lived happy, healthy lives, in harmony with the environment.
People are people. It doesn't really matter what culture they're from - our basic urges, desires, and shortcomings are the same. Don't believe the hype.
It is ok to jail/hurt someone who hurts people, but is it right to hurt someone who doesn't want to help someone? To me the answer is obvious, but to most people in the US the answer seems to be the opposite of my opinion.
Depends. I more or less agree with you, but evolutionary pressures have driven us to develop the tendency to punish not only those who directly harm the tribe, but also those who refuse to help the tribe. In small tribes, you could simply banish those who were useless - in modern society, we don't really have that option. Public shaming would have been one way to deal with such issues... however, in the Internet Era, public shaming can be more harmful than imprisonment. I'm not sure how to deal with it in the modern context; in the absence of a workable and moral solution I'm inclined to do nothing, which is where we apparently agree.
I can't think of any time when saving money was considered 'cool'. Smart, sure, but then again 'smart' was rarely 'cool', either. Most societies idolize overblown displays of wealth and physical ability, not thrift and intelligence.
Gnome hardware-acceleration worked just fine, as did XFCE with compiz-fusion running for effects, so I doubt it was a driver issue. It was only KDE that was slow as hell.
I've gotten rid of linux entirely at the moment, because I can't figure out a way to do whole-disk encryption and have both linux and windows running on the same drive. Truecrypt works for windows, and linux has it's own solutions, but none of them work for both. Next time I install linux, I'll try getting rid of the "semantic desktop garbage" and see if it helps. Thanks!
It's worse than windows. I tried KDE for all of 3 days, on a laptop which had Windows 7 and Ubuntu (Gnome) already installed. It ran slower than Windows 7 in pretty much every task, and FAR slower than gnome.
When your GUI slows down a linux install to the point that even Windows seems speedy in comparison, you've REALLY fucked things up.
They didn't get any of the "government bailout money" at all. There was a loan program cobbled together during the "W" Bush administration and pushed through by the major auto companies that had very low interest rates for electric vehicle production.
Ah, ok. I just remember that they received some $400+ million, and it happened around the same time as the bailouts of GM-et-al. And it was a pretty big deal because the loan was something like twice as big as the value of the company. Not sure that there's much of a difference seeing as the bailouts are all technically "loans", too, but thanks for the correction, anyway.
If you have ever received a student loan, you have likely received money from the government under similar terms. Is that a "bailout"?
Never had a student loan. I don't really like the idea of borrowing money to pay for a piece of paper, and hoping I'll make enough cash afterwards to pay it back. As to whether they're bailouts... I dunno, now that I think about it, that term doesn't really have a very clear-cut meaning. If a student can't afford to go to university without the loan... maybe it would be a bailout. It's money given or lent to a person or company who would otherwise fail. So yeah, I guess they could be, if you use a very loose meaning of the definition:)
I dunno about that. They received quite a bit of government bailout money - otherwise they'd have probably been out of business already. I hope they do well, and I think they have a decent chance, but they're certainly not "a long way" from going out of business.
Yea, obviously it's not perfect. I've given up on waiting for the media to get any tech-story right. But he wanted confirmation from a different news source, and this certainly qualifies. Plus, despite it's flaws, it's definitely an article which informs the reader about the actual issue at hand, instead of pretending it's some super-hacker doing computer-vooodoo.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, it's not "your job". Your job is working at McDonalds. Maybe if you had taken a subject other than English Literature, and not racked up a $100,000 debt, you'd be able to get a different job. However, that would require some intelligence,common-sense, and motivation - skills that appear to be readily available in India.
Serious question from a non-USAian, does that $3.7 Trillion include military hardware (tanks, aircraft, guns etc) and all of the aircraft built for export by companies like Boeing?
Well, let's see ... it's stuff that's manufactured ... and it's stuff that's manufactured in the US.
No, that stuff is included in the figures for the Kazakhstan manufacturing sector.
Why would you need an electric can opener?
To open electric cans. Duh.
Ah, ok. Yes, we're definitely talking about different things. Thanks for clarifying. No, I don't think using salt for home energy storage would be a particularly good idea. Perhaps if you own a ranch out in the boonies, a bunch of solar panels and some salt would prove to be an effective long-term solution (though you'd probably be better off going with geothermal). For your average house in a town or city, I don't see it working very well.
I don't get why you're using heat-of-fusion as your reference. You should be looking at heat capacity. With a melting-point of 48 degrees, you're less than half-way to the boiling point. And the whole idea is to keep the salt molten so you can pump it from place to place, so who gives a shit about the heat-of-fusion?
Of course, it also seems rather silly to use a material with such a low melting/boiling point. Since the end-goal is to boil water in order to drive a steam turbine, you - at the very least - want a material that can be heated to over 100 degrees celsius. Try something like this, instead.
It was amazing how many fragments you'd have to launch in order to reliably hit someone even 20 feet away. Expanding radius of a sphere and all that.
This would be why a fragmentation grenade is designed to launch hundreds of fragments. A lot of people seem to think that the only fragmentation is whatever pieces the casing breaks up into; in reality, the casing causes very little fragmentation. The interior of the grenade contains a metallic wrap which is designed to fragment into hundreds of pieces, each smaller than a toothpick. You'd have a hell of a time replicating that in your quake mod.
Unfortunately no one will be thinking twice before re-enacting their own version of chicken little and calling the police for every little thing.
Yeah. Goddamn busybodies. Who do they think they are? "Responsible Citizens"? Pah! They should mind their own damn business. If it's not you being mugged, raped, or blown up, why would you want to get involved? Just let it be.
UK People of a certain age look upon any strange object as a possible threat because of years and years of the IRA (and more latterly the RIRA) leaving bombs in rubbish bins (AKA "trash cans) and the like.
Ok, but why did a guy in the UK call the German police?
Isn't this the very goal of terrorism? To disrupt our daily activities with irrational fear?
Yeah, because dem terrorizers are teh EEEVIL and have no personal goals or desires other than to terrify us.
Seriously, this sophomoric view of good-vs-evil - and the associated "DA TERRORISTS HAVE WON!!!" bullshit - just blows my mind. It's like claiming that the goal of child molesters is to make us worry and hide the kids, or that the goal of bank robbers is to scare us into increasing security. There has to be something massively wrong with your understanding of human nature in order for you to come to those types of conclusions.
tl;dr version: "No"
I can put lipstick on a pig and say it's Lindsay Lohan but I don't think I'd get many takers. ;)
You'd get more takers if you left out the Lindsay Lohan comparison.
How many tons of lumber are needed for a house? 10? Still, you get to reuse it every day.
The average house uses about 20,000 kWh per year. Wood produces somewhere around 4,000 kWh per tonne. So you'd need 5 tonnes per year, or around 30 lbs of wood per day to produce the electricity consumed by your house. The 20k is a high estimate, at that. A young couple with no kids, living in a small apartment, would probably consume a quarter of that.
In other words, not exactly 10 tonnes per day, no.
I should, however, note that his "1 tonne of salt per house per day" figure seems a bit fishy.
Well, a quick overview:
First, a successful guerrilla movement must have an unassailable base - a base secure not only from direct physical assault, but from attack in other forms as well, including psychological attack.
None of our enemies currently have this. Pakistan is getting a little restless, so the situation could change in the future, but this has not been an issue so far.
Second, the guerrilla must have a technologically sophisticated enemy. The greater this sophistication, the greater this alien force would rely on forms of communications and logistics that must necessarily present vulnerabilities to the irregular.
This is just stupid. Greater sophistication decreases vulnerability.
Third, the enemy must be sufficiently weak in numbers so as to be unable to occupy the disputed territory in depth with a system of interlocking fortified posts.
Yes, this is usually the main problem.
Fourth, the guerrilla must have at least the passive support of the populace, if not its full involvement.
Again, not really a problem in the most recent conflicts. Iraq had too many factions for any one particular group to have "passive support of the populace", and in Afghanistan the Taliban has very little support, though they have been successful at terrifying significant fractions of the populace into not opposing them.
Fifth, the irregular force must have the fundamental qualities of speed, endurance, presence and logistical independence.
This doesn't really mean much. You can rephrase it as "the irregular force must be an irregular force".
Sixth, the irregular must be sufficiently advanced in weaponry to strike at the enemy's logistics and signals vulnerabilities."
This hasn't been an issue for western nations in a long, long time. Even in Vietnam, logistics and comms weren't significantly impacted by enemy action. These days the "irregulars" we face depend solely on shifting political opinion rather than achieving military goals like disrupting communications abilities or supply chains.
Conclusion: T.E. Lawrence lived in a completely different era. In his time, "communications" still meant messengers on horseback, and maybe telegraph lines running through the desert. While a couple of his observations are still valid today, the majority are just a quaint reflection on the attitudes and tactics of ancient armies. They have as much bearing on combat today as the musings of a caveman would have had on the armies of Lawrence's time.
This kinda proves that Google is not really a "search engine" per se, as if we needed any verification of that..
The hell? Are you reading the same article as the rest of us?
I guess we all have to send out our own crawlers to actually find anything outside the advertising realm. It's not that I mind seeing Twitter or similar removed, but I always wonder about the truly valuable stuff that's not being indexed because there's no ad link or contract involved.
This has nothing to do with advertising, and little to do with indexing. In order for the "real-time search" to be viable, Google needs Twitter to send them a constant stream of all tweets. Twitter has decided to stop doing so, ergo Google can no longer provide the "real-time search" functionality for twitter. They can, and do, continue to provide indexing of tweets - it's just that they now index them the same way they index the vast majority of the internet, meaning there's a significant delay between the time a tweet is posted and the time it becomes available through a google search.
I get that you're on some strange crusade against google, and that's fine, but it's no excuse for making up half-baked nonsense.
Necessity is a mother. If there's anyone who can make it profitable, it's the Japs.
There's plenty we can and do do without catastrophically damaging our environment.
Yep. Like deep-sea mining for rare earths.
5% cheaper earbuds for you is not worth trashing millions of cubic meters of ocean.
Your attitude is annoying.
Right. And Native Americans are noble peace-loving people who lived happy, healthy lives, in harmony with the environment.
People are people. It doesn't really matter what culture they're from - our basic urges, desires, and shortcomings are the same. Don't believe the hype.
It is ok to jail/hurt someone who hurts people, but is it right to hurt someone who doesn't want to help someone? To me the answer is obvious, but to most people in the US the answer seems to be the opposite of my opinion.
Depends. I more or less agree with you, but evolutionary pressures have driven us to develop the tendency to punish not only those who directly harm the tribe, but also those who refuse to help the tribe. In small tribes, you could simply banish those who were useless - in modern society, we don't really have that option. Public shaming would have been one way to deal with such issues ... however, in the Internet Era, public shaming can be more harmful than imprisonment. I'm not sure how to deal with it in the modern context; in the absence of a workable and moral solution I'm inclined to do nothing, which is where we apparently agree.
I can't think of any time when saving money was considered 'cool'. Smart, sure, but then again 'smart' was rarely 'cool', either. Most societies idolize overblown displays of wealth and physical ability, not thrift and intelligence.
Gnome hardware-acceleration worked just fine, as did XFCE with compiz-fusion running for effects, so I doubt it was a driver issue. It was only KDE that was slow as hell.
I've gotten rid of linux entirely at the moment, because I can't figure out a way to do whole-disk encryption and have both linux and windows running on the same drive. Truecrypt works for windows, and linux has it's own solutions, but none of them work for both. Next time I install linux, I'll try getting rid of the "semantic desktop garbage" and see if it helps. Thanks!
It's worse than windows. I tried KDE for all of 3 days, on a laptop which had Windows 7 and Ubuntu (Gnome) already installed. It ran slower than Windows 7 in pretty much every task, and FAR slower than gnome.
When your GUI slows down a linux install to the point that even Windows seems speedy in comparison, you've REALLY fucked things up.
They didn't get any of the "government bailout money" at all. There was a loan program cobbled together during the "W" Bush administration and pushed through by the major auto companies that had very low interest rates for electric vehicle production.
Ah, ok. I just remember that they received some $400+ million, and it happened around the same time as the bailouts of GM-et-al. And it was a pretty big deal because the loan was something like twice as big as the value of the company. Not sure that there's much of a difference seeing as the bailouts are all technically "loans", too, but thanks for the correction, anyway.
If you have ever received a student loan, you have likely received money from the government under similar terms. Is that a "bailout"?
Never had a student loan. I don't really like the idea of borrowing money to pay for a piece of paper, and hoping I'll make enough cash afterwards to pay it back. As to whether they're bailouts ... I dunno, now that I think about it, that term doesn't really have a very clear-cut meaning. If a student can't afford to go to university without the loan ... maybe it would be a bailout. It's money given or lent to a person or company who would otherwise fail. So yeah, I guess they could be, if you use a very loose meaning of the definition :)
Tesla is a long way from going out of business
I dunno about that. They received quite a bit of government bailout money - otherwise they'd have probably been out of business already. I hope they do well, and I think they have a decent chance, but they're certainly not "a long way" from going out of business.
It takes a special kind of ignorance to go around implying a link between a persons economic situation and their environmental beliefs.
Somehow I doubt that corpses have much in the way of life signs.
Yea, obviously it's not perfect. I've given up on waiting for the media to get any tech-story right. But he wanted confirmation from a different news source, and this certainly qualifies. Plus, despite it's flaws, it's definitely an article which informs the reader about the actual issue at hand, instead of pretending it's some super-hacker doing computer-vooodoo.