Other posters have covered the concept of spreading the force and deformation, for a quick example imagine this:
Pick up a piece standard letter paper. Stretch it out and you could easily punch through it, or even just poke a hole through it with your finger (ie: bullet). Now take an entire ream of paper (200-400 sheets?) and attempt to do the same.
Kevlar has the advantage that it has longer fibers than paper, and is stronger. Therefore you don't need an entire ream-thick stack of kevlar, but only several dozen layers to achieve the same effect.
our car is NOT worth the money you paid for it. The moment you drive it out of the shop, it looses a lot of its value.
Actually, my car IS worth the money I paid for it, and the moment I drive it off the lot, it depreciates along a nice slow curve.
With respect to how I veiw the worth of my money and property. Why would I try to sell a car the moment I drove it off the lot? I determined that the car I was purchasing was worth the money I was giving for it, therefore, to me, it is worth exactly that.
You can be conservative and socially liberal as well. Don't believe the trolls that tell you that if you are a liberal, you must be for ANYTHING proposed by another self proclaimed liberal. The reverse is also true, you can be conservative and not... Oh how do they put it, 'view Somalia as a libertarian paradise.'
As for usability, I'm assuming that, if only because the ADA could otherwise torpedo their chance of being purchased by a single public school district, they'll have a "don't use red/green for important distinctions" mode available at least optionally, if not by default.
ADA doesn't cover colorblindness. It's not deemed to be a sufficient impairment. Sufficient enough to cut you out of a lot of jobs apparantly, but not sufficient that you need protection.
The first immediate con I can see of this is...usability. If I'm colourblind - I'm not going to be very thrilled about this.
I'm colorblind. VERY few of us have issues that people with normal vision imagine us to have. Granted there are times when it can be annoying, but for most applications, it just isn't a big deal. The advantage of a color display is that you can often program it to display colors which we can see, or perform a lot of other tweaks.
Basic rule of thumb to anyone out there and wants to make your charts more readable? This won't solve the problem for all colorblind people, but it will help a great deal. Avoid Purple in conjunction with red/blue. And more importantly, use different line types in graphs (---,...,***) or the one's with triangles/squares, etc.
Not only will that make a lot of colorblind people happy, but when you go into the conference room with the projector that is worn out and therefore has terrible colors, it will make EVERYONE happy.
What I don't get is why someone would spend $150 on a calculator when you could get a netbook with a gig of RAM and 180 gigs of drive space with a dual core processor for the price of two of them. Kubuntu comes with a scientific calculator, and it's a free OS you can replace Windows with or install dual-boot.
I just don't know why anyone would buy a calculator, period.
They don't allow laptops into most exam rooms. There has always been a lot of places which had restrictions on graphing calculators, and required you to have standard 8(?) function calculators, or they would wipe the internal memory in a few cases.
It's probably why calculators didn't really improve much over the years, if you improved them, even if it lowered the cost, you would ironically reduce your potential market.
This sounds interesting. Do you happen to have plans online anywhere?
It is interesting, and I'm of the opinion that it seems too good to be true. I always hate the claims like, "I built this house for just $300*!"
*I also happened to have my own crane, a few extra boxes of shingles, and 10 tons of extra bricks leftover from a previous construction project
$2000 for an electric vehicle when DIY kits (obviously a bit marked up) run for over $5k not including the cost of the vehicle chassis, makes the claim dubious.
Can the government also mandate that someone text me when I've eaten too much or when I spend too much money at a bar?
If you go to a bar where the typical tab is on the order of $40-60. Wouldn't the establishment be taking on some risk if they allowed a single person to rack up a tab of $14,000? I would also assume that such a tab also involved the destruction (consumption) of a significant volume of physical commodities.
When I knowingly went over just a few hundred megabytes my bill went from $50.00 to $750.00.
Anyone defending the practice must also figure out a way to defend bills like this.
I'd have no issue with them if the penalty for going over your 5gig limit was the cost of another 5 gig contract, but as you said, a few megabytes over and you were charged for the equivalent of an additional 14 contracts for an overage which is a fraction of a single contract.
If your bill were $100 due to that overage, I could still slighly understand the complaint (as $50 for a few megs is still a lot) but it would at least be in the same ballpark of cost and not the next continent.
You could really mess with them and try to sneak it onto a government vehicle that is likely to visit high-security locations (like, say, a vehicle that will go to the nearest military base). When you show up in court (assuming you show up in court), you just say something like, "Oh, I was just trying to give it back to the government" and then sue them for warrantless surveillance and whatnot.
Or they might just throw you in a military prison somewhere.
Having one on my car would be a real hoot.
Holy crap, THE SIGNAL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE BUILDING!
A former FBI agent commented on one of the stories that this is a rather old model, the newer ones hook in in the engine compartment directly to power and don't need batteries, so it might be harder then you think.
Well, to get to the power they would have to patch into some wires, or go in through the hood. Ignoring the fact that they do not own the gasoline that powers my vehicle, the interior of my vehicle is not a public place.
A god with limitless power would never need to test anything.
In my simulation, I have limitless power, but I'd like to see what the genetic algorithm churns out.
I could decide that at a certain time t, I liked the output, and was curious to see what would happen if I took that output, and placed it at some time less than t.
To the simulation, it would seem as if I have limitless power to do whatever I wish, alter time etc, even though in my own reality, I'm just a person running a simulation.
I take public transit to and from work every day, thanks. It takes me 25 minutes door to door if I don't stop for coffee on my way in. And no, I don't live in New York.
So where DO you live? And how far are you traveling?
In the DC area (Best mass transit I've experienced in the states to date), if I wanted to do Door to Door commuting from my house in Springfield to Crystal City, here is how it would work:
I get up at a specific time, walk to the bus stop (5 minutes). I wait for the bus (5 minutes). Then I ride the bus to the Springfield Franconia station (30 minutes). I then wait for a train (usually one waiting, so 2-3 minutes). I ride this to Crystal City (30 minutes) and walk to my office (5 minutes).
Door to door, that is 1 hour 7 minutes on a perfect minimum delay day.
If I drive, it is 11 miles, and takes me 30-50 minutes (30 low traffic, 50 high traffic)
Not going to happen, its to much of a leap. Doing so would lock up the economy, almost no one could drive. And in more remote areas that would mean not go to work/go to malls/etc basically you would be a hermit. hmm a world without cars... at least polution wouldn't be as bad in some areas
What defines it to be too much of a leap? It will go so far until the standard of living drops BELOW what people are willing to tolerate. Only then will anything get done to curtail the increased pain of living.
Recongize that at that point, there will also be a great deal of people who had their standard of living reduced to below levels they would accept long before it was felt by the majority of the population (actually more than the majority because you won't even have 100% of those affected actually agree with what must be done).
So the result is that it will trend toward people being miserable all for the misguided notion of increasing government revenue and getting those evil horrible people who parked 31cm instead of less than 30cm from the curb.
Having someone physically follow you around is different to simply being watched. I would feel much more awkward with someone following me around all day, whether with camera or not, than I would at being observed via CCTV and Satellites all day, which is already a possibility.
The lack of technological capability to perform an action now does not mean we should ignore potential for abuse in the future.
Being observed is completely different to being physically followed by a stranger, which elicits a fight or flight response, or simply would feel "strange", and above all be a waste of government resources. Plus, who is watching the watcher in that case? If the watcher does something wrong, there is no accountability. Whereas at least with CCTV the watcher cannot rape you from behind a screen.
What if it wasn't a stranger? What if it was your guardian government agent assigned to you at birth to follow you around and make sure you aren't doing any bad things? Maybe a device like in Ender's Game which is attached to you and monitors you directly?
Obviously a bit of an extreme example, but so is your rape stranger.
Why would you reactivate/repair the satellite? The GP is saying to harvest the rare materials from the defunct satellites, not repurpose the entire satellite.
You would probably get more benefit from that than the minuscule amounts of materials that go into creating them. Rare is relative with respect to these minerals.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm still trying to figure out why steel scuba tanks cost *more* than aluminum ones, though, looking at the spot prices for each of those metals.
Aluminum is easier to work with. Lower melting point, it's less demanding for machining, and a few other factors.
But at least Sony isn't ruining the environment like Monsanto is.
Well, they might be ruining the environment, but it's a side effect, not the business model. ;)
Other posters have covered the concept of spreading the force and deformation, for a quick example imagine this:
Pick up a piece standard letter paper. Stretch it out and you could easily punch through it, or even just poke a hole through it with your finger (ie: bullet). Now take an entire ream of paper (200-400 sheets?) and attempt to do the same.
Kevlar has the advantage that it has longer fibers than paper, and is stronger. Therefore you don't need an entire ream-thick stack of kevlar, but only several dozen layers to achieve the same effect.
and can get the unique code by asking the Smartwater boffins to analyse it.
They trained birds to analyze DNA coded paste? Not the method I would employ but it's damned impressive.
our car is NOT worth the money you paid for it. The moment you drive it out of the shop, it looses a lot of its value.
Actually, my car IS worth the money I paid for it, and the moment I drive it off the lot, it depreciates along a nice slow curve.
With respect to how I veiw the worth of my money and property. Why would I try to sell a car the moment I drove it off the lot? I determined that the car I was purchasing was worth the money I was giving for it, therefore, to me, it is worth exactly that.
Ok, this worrys me a bit if used in another application.
What if this were used to mark protesters at a rally?
Normally I'm a moderately liberal individual,
You can be conservative and socially liberal as well. Don't believe the trolls that tell you that if you are a liberal, you must be for ANYTHING proposed by another self proclaimed liberal. The reverse is also true, you can be conservative and not... Oh how do they put it, 'view Somalia as a libertarian paradise.'
Thanks for responding in a civil manner even though I was a bit snarky.
When you get down to it, any 'radio' is broadcasting if you define the area of measurement narrowly enough.
But then again, this is Slashdot, where people keep repeating things they heard whether they actually know what they're talking about or not.
Your right, you don't know what you are talking about. An AP is NOT radio broadcasting in the scope of the regulation you posted.
As for usability, I'm assuming that, if only because the ADA could otherwise torpedo their chance of being purchased by a single public school district, they'll have a "don't use red/green for important distinctions" mode available at least optionally, if not by default.
ADA doesn't cover colorblindness. It's not deemed to be a sufficient impairment. Sufficient enough to cut you out of a lot of jobs apparantly, but not sufficient that you need protection.
The first immediate con I can see of this is...usability. If I'm colourblind - I'm not going to be very thrilled about this.
I'm colorblind. VERY few of us have issues that people with normal vision imagine us to have. Granted there are times when it can be annoying, but for most applications, it just isn't a big deal. The advantage of a color display is that you can often program it to display colors which we can see, or perform a lot of other tweaks.
Basic rule of thumb to anyone out there and wants to make your charts more readable? This won't solve the problem for all colorblind people, but it will help a great deal. Avoid Purple in conjunction with red/blue. And more importantly, use different line types in graphs (---,...,***) or the one's with triangles/squares, etc.
Not only will that make a lot of colorblind people happy, but when you go into the conference room with the projector that is worn out and therefore has terrible colors, it will make EVERYONE happy.
What I don't get is why someone would spend $150 on a calculator when you could get a netbook with a gig of RAM and 180 gigs of drive space with a dual core processor for the price of two of them. Kubuntu comes with a scientific calculator, and it's a free OS you can replace Windows with or install dual-boot.
I just don't know why anyone would buy a calculator, period.
They don't allow laptops into most exam rooms. There has always been a lot of places which had restrictions on graphing calculators, and required you to have standard 8(?) function calculators, or they would wipe the internal memory in a few cases.
It's probably why calculators didn't really improve much over the years, if you improved them, even if it lowered the cost, you would ironically reduce your potential market.
This sounds interesting. Do you happen to have plans online anywhere?
It is interesting, and I'm of the opinion that it seems too good to be true. I always hate the claims like, "I built this house for just $300*!"
*I also happened to have my own crane, a few extra boxes of shingles, and 10 tons of extra bricks leftover from a previous construction project
$2000 for an electric vehicle when DIY kits (obviously a bit marked up) run for over $5k not including the cost of the vehicle chassis, makes the claim dubious.
Can the government also mandate that someone text me when I've eaten too much or when I spend too much money at a bar?
If you go to a bar where the typical tab is on the order of $40-60. Wouldn't the establishment be taking on some risk if they allowed a single person to rack up a tab of $14,000? I would also assume that such a tab also involved the destruction (consumption) of a significant volume of physical commodities.
When I knowingly went over just a few hundred megabytes my bill went from $50.00 to $750.00.
Anyone defending the practice must also figure out a way to defend bills like this.
I'd have no issue with them if the penalty for going over your 5gig limit was the cost of another 5 gig contract, but as you said, a few megabytes over and you were charged for the equivalent of an additional 14 contracts for an overage which is a fraction of a single contract.
If your bill were $100 due to that overage, I could still slighly understand the complaint (as $50 for a few megs is still a lot) but it would at least be in the same ballpark of cost and not the next continent.
you must run through a lot of cell phones if it can kill anything within 10 feet.
Maybe he has a shielded box/glove compartment?
Too many variables. 1/2 gallon of gas either way would more than make up the difference
It is possible, though unlikely, that you could top off all your fluids to a known level just before weighing the vehicle.
Even then, I'd wager most vehicles have 1-2 lbs of dirt on their exterior/undercarriage which would also make any measurements moot.
You could really mess with them and try to sneak it onto a government vehicle that is likely to visit high-security locations (like, say, a vehicle that will go to the nearest military base). When you show up in court (assuming you show up in court), you just say something like, "Oh, I was just trying to give it back to the government" and then sue them for warrantless surveillance and whatnot.
Or they might just throw you in a military prison somewhere.
Having one on my car would be a real hoot.
Holy crap, THE SIGNAL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE BUILDING!
Just kidding, I don't work for the FBI...
A former FBI agent commented on one of the stories that this is a rather old model, the newer ones hook in in the engine compartment directly to power and don't need batteries, so it might be harder then you think.
Well, to get to the power they would have to patch into some wires, or go in through the hood. Ignoring the fact that they do not own the gasoline that powers my vehicle, the interior of my vehicle is not a public place.
A god with limitless power would never need to test anything.
In my simulation, I have limitless power, but I'd like to see what the genetic algorithm churns out.
I could decide that at a certain time t, I liked the output, and was curious to see what would happen if I took that output, and placed it at some time less than t.
To the simulation, it would seem as if I have limitless power to do whatever I wish, alter time etc, even though in my own reality, I'm just a person running a simulation.
I take public transit to and from work every day, thanks. It takes me 25 minutes door to door if I don't stop for coffee on my way in. And no, I don't live in New York.
So where DO you live? And how far are you traveling?
In the DC area (Best mass transit I've experienced in the states to date), if I wanted to do Door to Door commuting from my house in Springfield to Crystal City, here is how it would work:
I get up at a specific time, walk to the bus stop (5 minutes). I wait for the bus (5 minutes). Then I ride the bus to the Springfield Franconia station (30 minutes). I then wait for a train (usually one waiting, so 2-3 minutes). I ride this to Crystal City (30 minutes) and walk to my office (5 minutes).
Door to door, that is 1 hour 7 minutes on a perfect minimum delay day.
If I drive, it is 11 miles, and takes me 30-50 minutes (30 low traffic, 50 high traffic)
Not going to happen, its to much of a leap. Doing so would lock up the economy, almost no one could drive. And in more remote areas that would mean not go to work/go to malls/etc basically you would be a hermit. hmm a world without cars... at least polution wouldn't be as bad in some areas
What defines it to be too much of a leap? It will go so far until the standard of living drops BELOW what people are willing to tolerate. Only then will anything get done to curtail the increased pain of living.
Recongize that at that point, there will also be a great deal of people who had their standard of living reduced to below levels they would accept long before it was felt by the majority of the population (actually more than the majority because you won't even have 100% of those affected actually agree with what must be done).
So the result is that it will trend toward people being miserable all for the misguided notion of increasing government revenue and getting those evil horrible people who parked 31cm instead of less than 30cm from the curb.
Having someone physically follow you around is different to simply being watched. I would feel much more awkward with someone following me around all day, whether with camera or not, than I would at being observed via CCTV and Satellites all day, which is already a possibility.
The lack of technological capability to perform an action now does not mean we should ignore potential for abuse in the future.
Being observed is completely different to being physically followed by a stranger, which elicits a fight or flight response, or simply would feel "strange", and above all be a waste of government resources. Plus, who is watching the watcher in that case? If the watcher does something wrong, there is no accountability. Whereas at least with CCTV the watcher cannot rape you from behind a screen.
What if it wasn't a stranger? What if it was your guardian government agent assigned to you at birth to follow you around and make sure you aren't doing any bad things? Maybe a device like in Ender's Game which is attached to you and monitors you directly?
Obviously a bit of an extreme example, but so is your rape stranger.
Don't you mean pedantically tragic?
No. Someone has to care for it to be tragic.
Why would you reactivate/repair the satellite? The GP is saying to harvest the rare materials from the defunct satellites, not repurpose the entire satellite.
You would probably get more benefit from that than the minuscule amounts of materials that go into creating them. Rare is relative with respect to these minerals.