"the big numbers pose interesting questions about how the IT community will store and manage this firehose of data" - just like the construction community will house and manage the firehose of over 6 billion people, so to speak.
Everybody takes care of their own bit(s) & backups; there is no single entity dealing with managing 1.2ZB.
I don't care what you're doing - whether it's an anti-abortion flyer, a pro-abortion flyer, an antiwar flyer, a pro-war flyer, or an advertising for your frat/sorostitute group's drinking party. If you're trying to force it into people's hands, or putting it on their cars (which is what WE get all the time where I work)... no. If someone actively takes it from you? Fine. But you don't have the right to force crap into my hands and you don't have the right to fuck with my vehicle. And I'm 100% sure that's the bullcrap they are really referring to.
A somewhat off-topic point, but an honest question: what do you have with your car? If you park it at the campus in autumn and it gets covered with leaves, do you expect the University to get the leaves off of your vehicle? Putting a piece of paper on your car is not forceful. At worst it's littering. Sticking it on would be different, though.
The MacBook Air (like the other 13.3" MacBooks as well) is only a third of an inch more in depth than the 12 inch PowerBook (and actually a bit smaller than the 12 inch iBook), and it's the depth that matters in in cramped conditions. Most of the increased size goes in width, which I don't think will be a problem even on an airplane.
Outdoor-hardening is only one problem. Second is the interaction of multi-speed belts. A slow belt ends in firm ground, no problem, but how do you end the faster belt next to it, and the further faster belts? And you can't have a solid wall next to the fastest belt for risk of injury. And you can't easily do crossings without over/underpasses, which would increase the cost. One could probably have just block-long belts, but then you wouldn't have useful speeds over more than a few blocks. And even with passes, sometimes belts would have to split (one going down under the crossing, the slow other one staying level to the cross-roads), and the barrier between them would be a risk of injury.
Then the maintenance - a section of a belt goes down, the whole belt goes down. If it's one long belt, all the faster belts next to it go down as well because you can't access them. If it isn't one long belt, you suddenly have a belt ending, big injury risk.
If people were willing to accept injuries out of stupidity and a few injuries due to maintenance problems, belts could be feasible. And there's still the cost of moving the belt...
In summary, I don't think that moving the road on a larger scale is such a viable alternative to a stationary road and moving vehicles.
You're not only carrying the 200lb person, but also the belt. Great many moving parts. Weather. Multiple-speed belts (from those SF stories) have bigger safety issues. I'd love to see the multi-belt highways where you cross a few belts and accelerate yourself to 40mph, but it's just not an efficient mode of transport outside. Yet?
So the NASA satellite snaps a picture of the Arctic region, on June 11, and it's dark there? Shouldn't it be the middle of the arctic day?
And many of the other pictures seem simply to show very high clouds at dusk/dawn, the clouds still/already in sunlight but the ground below already/still in the dark. Is the question about why are the clouds up there, or why they shine?
A page set at 100% (default) font size that looks good in Calibri will look oversized in Arial or Helvetica.
Why do you assume that the default font setting in a browser for 100% size looks different in Helvetica than in Calibri? Perhaps the developers actually know their stuff and the default in Helvetica would be 14px, whereas in Calibri 15/16px? On my system, 100% is 18px Helvetica and it sure does not look oversized to me.
When will people learn to embrace the differences between 100% fonts on different systems?
I beg to differ. When you define on YOUR page the font in the stylesheet as Arial or whatever, I would still see it as Helvetica, my preferred font; or maybe I could switch to one of these C fonts, I'll test them. 8-)
Anyway, they propose these fonts because of improved readability and esthetics; you surely can stick with whatever font you prefer, but not all users will actually see your preference.
Where I live, we have a nice little measure of length that is millimeter; 200 micron is a fifth of a millimeter, easy to visualize, not all that abstract. On the other hand, 1/200 of a hair-width is an abstract number, it's probably practically just as invisible as 1/20 or 1/2000 of a hairwidth. If it's invisible, it's abstract, and there's little that can be done about it. So I don't quite see hair width as a useful measure.
And before anyone accuses me of being sexist, note that I've talked about both genders.
Funnily enough, you can still be racist even if you mention all the races you know, so you can be sexist if you talk about both genders, too.
Anyway, since we're talking about (probably mostly) undergrads, yes, they'll be too young to consider settling for what they can get. But if a relationship or two spring up from this thing, it'll be better than nothing.
hax0r_this already said that in an earlier comment, but it's worth repeating: they should make all communications go through a device that will delay them by a few minutes; I expect that it should also vary from 5 to 20 minutes to simulate Mars and Earth being in various parts of their orbits. This should add a lot to the emotional feeling of being far away from the rest of humanity.
So the thingy seems to have an array of microphones that sure look like stethoscope heads. They are replacing one stethoscope plus a trained physician's brain (making a mental image out of various sounds in various places) by many mikes and a computer to show the image. A good evolutionary change there, I'd say.
Did you pay for it yourself, or did your employer pay? If I was paid salary and the employer wouldn't get me the expensive tool I need for my job, I'd spend the 10 work hours getting good with the free tool, and they couldn't complain.
I think humans should go on the back burner until space exploration is much, much, much more of a mature technology. We don't even have casual trips to orbit, much less the moon, much less significant space stations, and much, much less Mars.
I beg to differ.
Let's instead make it easy for cheap, expendable humans (aka adventurers, explorers, treasure hunters) to go out there; they will then pave the road for the rest of us quicker than a thousand probes.
Public or not, what exactly is the W3C doing organizing a conference on Government Transparency in the first place? Shouldn't they be working towards the next set of standards for the Web or something? Or are they losing focus and trying to become the regulators of everything that touches the Web?
It was a workshop, not a conference - difference not only in size. The W3C organizes workshops in order better to judge where standards work should be going, or where the W3C should provide guidance.
The W3C is a standards body that thinks, as opposed to other standards bodies that just provide the name and a voting process.
We don't elect reality. We discover it. Discovery requires that one thing is paramount: observation, and the unbiased interpretation of that observation.
The way I read those parts of what Klaus wrote is that the interpretation of the observation can often become biased, especially where so much is still unknown, and scientists should be stating their bias. In other words, the assumptions made about the unknown variables should be made explicit in scientific findings, and that is already a requirement, albeit not very strictly enforced, perhaps. And maybe not understood very well by the general public, politicians included.
My list for this would be something like: "Computer doesn't boot." Possible reasons: "No Power", "Insufficient power", "Corrupt memory", "Broken circuits", etc. Then you go down that tree further and find the root cause. The most disturbing thing is that they had such a major common-mode failure...whatever happened to the "no single points of failure" mantra?
Where does it say they haven't used the DFMEA docs, or aren't doing it right now? Those on the ground who can't do the checks themselves should be busy working up alternate theories. And what part of "2 of 6 computers in a redundant system failed" implies a "single point of failure" to you?
Good point, just one thing should be noted: the 727s don't simulate zero G, they put you in free fall, which is zero G. Basically, orbiting in ISS, free fall on board of the space plane at 100km and free fall on board a 727 at 15km is the same thing, really, the only difference is how long it can be sustained and what the views are. Certainly the view from 100km (well-enough above the atmosphere) is something to pay premium for. Oh, and then there's the question of how exclusive it is, how many others have done it.
Slashdot Mirror
Even uncommon, there can be enough in specific places (e.g. in hospitals and care homes) to be used profitably.
"the big numbers pose interesting questions about how the IT community will store and manage this firehose of data" - just like the construction community will house and manage the firehose of over 6 billion people, so to speak.
Everybody takes care of their own bit(s) & backups; there is no single entity dealing with managing 1.2ZB.
Questions not so interesting. Move on.
A somewhat off-topic point, but an honest question: what do you have with your car? If you park it at the campus in autumn and it gets covered with leaves, do you expect the University to get the leaves off of your vehicle? Putting a piece of paper on your car is not forceful. At worst it's littering. Sticking it on would be different, though.
The MacBook Air (like the other 13.3" MacBooks as well) is only a third of an inch more in depth than the 12 inch PowerBook (and actually a bit smaller than the 12 inch iBook), and it's the depth that matters in in cramped conditions. Most of the increased size goes in width, which I don't think will be a problem even on an airplane.
Not that Don would need it, I expect, but after this article, his karma is through the roof!
Outdoor-hardening is only one problem. Second is the interaction of multi-speed belts. A slow belt ends in firm ground, no problem, but how do you end the faster belt next to it, and the further faster belts? And you can't have a solid wall next to the fastest belt for risk of injury. And you can't easily do crossings without over/underpasses, which would increase the cost. One could probably have just block-long belts, but then you wouldn't have useful speeds over more than a few blocks. And even with passes, sometimes belts would have to split (one going down under the crossing, the slow other one staying level to the cross-roads), and the barrier between them would be a risk of injury.
Then the maintenance - a section of a belt goes down, the whole belt goes down. If it's one long belt, all the faster belts next to it go down as well because you can't access them. If it isn't one long belt, you suddenly have a belt ending, big injury risk.
If people were willing to accept injuries out of stupidity and a few injuries due to maintenance problems, belts could be feasible. And there's still the cost of moving the belt...
In summary, I don't think that moving the road on a larger scale is such a viable alternative to a stationary road and moving vehicles.
You're not only carrying the 200lb person, but also the belt. Great many moving parts. Weather. Multiple-speed belts (from those SF stories) have bigger safety issues. I'd love to see the multi-belt highways where you cross a few belts and accelerate yourself to 40mph, but it's just not an efficient mode of transport outside. Yet?
So the NASA satellite snaps a picture of the Arctic region, on June 11, and it's dark there? Shouldn't it be the middle of the arctic day?
And many of the other pictures seem simply to show very high clouds at dusk/dawn, the clouds still/already in sunlight but the ground below already/still in the dark. Is the question about why are the clouds up there, or why they shine?
I wonder, what $9.99 product have you bought there ten years ago? 8-)
How about bits?
Why do you assume that the default font setting in a browser for 100% size looks different in Helvetica than in Calibri? Perhaps the developers actually know their stuff and the default in Helvetica would be 14px, whereas in Calibri 15/16px? On my system, 100% is 18px Helvetica and it sure does not look oversized to me.
When will people learn to embrace the differences between 100% fonts on different systems?
Anyway, they propose these fonts because of improved readability and esthetics; you surely can stick with whatever font you prefer, but not all users will actually see your preference.
Where I live, we have a nice little measure of length that is millimeter; 200 micron is a fifth of a millimeter, easy to visualize, not all that abstract. On the other hand, 1/200 of a hair-width is an abstract number, it's probably practically just as invisible as 1/20 or 1/2000 of a hairwidth. If it's invisible, it's abstract, and there's little that can be done about it. So I don't quite see hair width as a useful measure.
Funnily enough, you can still be racist even if you mention all the races you know, so you can be sexist if you talk about both genders, too.
Anyway, since we're talking about (probably mostly) undergrads, yes, they'll be too young to consider settling for what they can get. But if a relationship or two spring up from this thing, it'll be better than nothing.
hax0r_this already said that in an earlier comment, but it's worth repeating: they should make all communications go through a device that will delay them by a few minutes; I expect that it should also vary from 5 to 20 minutes to simulate Mars and Earth being in various parts of their orbits. This should add a lot to the emotional feeling of being far away from the rest of humanity.
So the thingy seems to have an array of microphones that sure look like stethoscope heads. They are replacing one stethoscope plus a trained physician's brain (making a mental image out of various sounds in various places) by many mikes and a computer to show the image. A good evolutionary change there, I'd say.
Hey, my password is... er was YwMCU07D! Damn you hackers!
Did you pay for it yourself, or did your employer pay? If I was paid salary and the employer wouldn't get me the expensive tool I need for my job, I'd spend the 10 work hours getting good with the free tool, and they couldn't complain.
I beg to differ.
Let's instead make it easy for cheap, expendable humans (aka adventurers, explorers, treasure hunters) to go out there; they will then pave the road for the rest of us quicker than a thousand probes.
It was a workshop, not a conference - difference not only in size. The W3C organizes workshops in order better to judge where standards work should be going, or where the W3C should provide guidance.
The W3C is a standards body that thinks, as opposed to other standards bodies that just provide the name and a voting process.
The way I read those parts of what Klaus wrote is that the interpretation of the observation can often become biased, especially where so much is still unknown, and scientists should be stating their bias. In other words, the assumptions made about the unknown variables should be made explicit in scientific findings, and that is already a requirement, albeit not very strictly enforced, perhaps. And maybe not understood very well by the general public, politicians included.
Where does it say they haven't used the DFMEA docs, or aren't doing it right now? Those on the ground who can't do the checks themselves should be busy working up alternate theories. And what part of "2 of 6 computers in a redundant system failed" implies a "single point of failure" to you?
Moderators, I'd say the parent is way overrated.
Good point, just one thing should be noted: the 727s don't simulate zero G, they put you in free fall, which is zero G. Basically, orbiting in ISS, free fall on board of the space plane at 100km and free fall on board a 727 at 15km is the same thing, really, the only difference is how long it can be sustained and what the views are. Certainly the view from 100km (well-enough above the atmosphere) is something to pay premium for. Oh, and then there's the question of how exclusive it is, how many others have done it.