Look, not to butt in on this argument, but there's more than one person out there resisting the **AA. Some of them are taking a legal, change-from-within approach. Some of them are taking a civil-disobedience level illegal approach, with or without a good reason. Some of them are taking an all-out middle finger approach. You can't simply claim that all people who are anti-copyright-as-it-stands are guilty of crimes because that is simply not true.
If repetition with the expectation of change is insane, then our political system (voting) and Windows (rebooting) are both insane. Expository speech and writing are insane. Exercise and practice are insane. Repeat after me: history is complicated, and the world and the people in it are different today. No revolution, no crisis, no war is the same as any that have gone before it except when painted with the broadest of strokes.
The French weren't trying to remove $deity from society, they were trying to eliminate the abuses of a privileged class of oppressors, which happened to include both nobility and clergy. Your average political priest in that era was as bad as a corrupt politician of today. Now, the guy giving sermons in the corner church was probably a genuinely nice guy, but his boss's boss was probably a right bastard. I can't really say anything about the nobility of the time, but clearly the people in charge were committing some major fuckups in order for the largely passive populace to rise up in such spectacular fashion.
The Soviet Union was working from a book whose author felt that the dominion of organized religion was holding back humanity from taking responsibility for their lives and taking action for the betterment of themselves. In a typical overreaction, the positives of an organized morality were ignored in order to act against the negatives of proscribed thought and actions. In other words, the Church was judged as a whole and judged harshly rather than making any serious attempt at changing what leadership saw as wrong with it.
I don't know if you are being intentionally Christian-centric, but there are plenty of countries with tumultuous histories and non-Christian populations that are doing just fine today. I would add that there are many millions of professed atheists who are not suffering from depression or alcoholism, so the belief in a deity is not the only source of hope or inspiration. It is also not necessary to be given moral rules from on high; many common religious moral rules are fairly obvious even from an atheist perspective as good things, rules that reduce the unpleasantness in the world and lead to a better life personally as well as collectively. Mathematics (game theory specifically) often supports various ideas such as the Golden Rule without having to fall back on a supreme being.
You make a good argument, so rather than mod you down inappropriately I thought it best to answer the anon. Thanks for making me think:)
You might be shocked at just how much data is transmitted unencrypted or otherwise in violation of protocol. Besides, knowing the 'party of interest' is sending messages of a certain length at a certain time to a certain destination (or over a certain frequency and power) is highly useful data in its own right.
(troll) How terrible for you to have four, yes four, whole providers to choose from. What a rough experience it must have been to deal with a company operating under reasonable amounts of competition. (untroll)
We must have been one of the lucky 'important' accounts, because Dell let our onsite certified tech (our employee) sign off on bad caps, get an RMA number by email sight unseen, and get replacement motherboards shipped before the bad ones even made it back to Dell. They can be okay to work with for large accounts, but I wouldn't buy a computer from them even if it came with free oral sex.
As for ISP's, the more the merrier. If there are two or more in your area, you always have the option of threatening to switch and taking all of your friends with you (not to mention talking anyone else whose computer you get talked into fixing into switching). The very same companies that perform so well with competitors become right bastards when they are the only game in town. Verizon can go to hell for what they did to Alltel though, and thanks to Viaero for picking up the slack.
Like all posts about Microsoft products vs. open-source products, this post (the one you're reading right now) and its parent boil down to anecdotal evidence and personal preference. So, with the understanding that this is my opinion and not the intentional start of a flame war, read on.
What exactly about Excel makes Calc look like a joke? My anecdotal experience is that it is at least twice as fast and I can find things in fairly logical places instead of a stupid ribbon. I use Calc for eve online industry calculations, which mirror fairly closely the actual data gathering, analysis, and projection work of a real business. What's your anecdotal experience?
If your people needed training to switch from Microsoft Office to Open Office, then they also needed training to be able to use the present version of Microsoft Office vs. the previous version of Microsoft Office, which is still nothing compared to the training costs of Vista/Win7.
Two other things to consider: if you have the latest and greatest MS product, you'll be saving in a format that only that version can read (at first, anyway). If you have the latest and greatest Open Office, you'll be saving in a format that both Open Office and Microsoft Office (any fairly recent version) can read. When you switch up with MS, you'll have the inevitable horde of people saving in the new, incompatible format and customers who can't open their documents without paying the Microsoft upgrade tax. Second, the site license is the real reason we still use Microsoft Office in business. Early adopters amongst customers or contractors will mean that someone in the enterprise needs to have the latest Microsoft offering to be able to read or convert their files. If one person needs it, why not several? If several people have it, we'd better do a site license 'cause the BSA swat team might show up for an audit. So, businesses talk themselves into the site license to avoid jackbooted thuggery. Once you have a site license, there's no reason to switch.
Besides, trying to force a switch to OO is pointless... roll it out alongside Microsoft Office and let the people with a clue get on with things while the rest lag behind.
What is the integer part of 0.9? What is the integer part of 0.999? What is the integer part of 0.999...? Logically your statement is correct, but the actual outcome is dependent on how exactly you define your floor function. If you define it as the integer part of the number, then the integer part is clearly 0. If you were to first evaluate the number 0.999... to the number 1, then the integer part is clearly 1. While 0.999... approaches 1 (and is demonstrably identical to 1), our method of communicating and processing that number has consequences.
Are there any other significant numbers like this, or is it proper just to treat the number (0.999...) as a special case?
(genuinely curious, and definitely not qualified to argue with you:) )
They report it as 0 grams (not 0%, at least in the US), because they can round anything under 0.5 grams PER SERVING to 0. As always, check the serving sizes and assume the worst (~.5g trans fat per serving). What I wonder is why they have to report sodium content in milligrams but not trans fat.
Admittedly I took the optimist's view in my examples. It depends a lot on what exactly the vessel can actually do and under what conditions. However, throwing those out there press-release style did produce at least a little debate. For those jobs where an aerostat would currently be too expensive, there are edge cases where it would be competitive and if they could capture enough economy of scale the edge broadens. For those jobs where the current breed simply can't perform vs. existing gear, then it is often still within the realm of possibility that it could be done. This is a little like the first time you use a tube of liquid nails; from then on you tend to think of the stuff first when something needs to be stuck to something else (or maybe that's just me). I guess the point is that these guys are going to push ahead with what they have, improve it wherever possible, and sell the hell out of its capabilities. They will try to compete in markets where they may not have the edge, and I think it will be interesting to see what happens.
You've hit it exactly. Consider that this is basically pre-alpha technology and it is already in the ballpark for performance while showing exceptional thermal and mechanical advantages. Provided it can be built to withstand ionizing radiation, you've got a perfect match to spacecraft components. Gyroscopes, accelerometers, stellar orientation, sensor polling and alerts, pressure sensors, heat sensors, atmosphere sensors, all of these things require at least some processing. If all of these things could be handled by neat little durable logic blocks made of this stuff, much of the internal systems of a spacecraft would become both cheaper and more reliable. Protection against high heat, vibration, mechanical stress, and radiation in current silicon tech is expensive, very slow, expensive, time-consuming to validate, and expensive.
There is a market, just not necessarily in the skyscraper size class yet. Build them smaller, but big enough to move a house. My house was moved to its present location decades ago. Aside from permanent structures, consider modular homes (trailer houses). I see four or five of those a week pass through on trucks, and I live in a small town. I also see a lot of wind farm equipment like tower segments, generators, and blades. Instead of running a convoy of 8 trucks plus spotter cars, load it all onto one or two of these lifters. Less than half as many people involved, can fly direct, doesn't impact traffic, and can carry objects larger than 2 highway lanes. Similar benefits apply to things like power substations or rail switching shacks, if you can do it cheaper than a helicopter.
Fit one out with crane equipment like that found at a major port. Now if a freighter has a problem in the open ocean, you can fly one of these to it and offload the cargo to another ship (or ships, more likely). You could also haul out a complete replacement power train, and if new ships were designed with this in mind you would eventually be able to drop-in major components in most ships afloat. Same gear could be deployed to a train derailment, or to replace a malfunctioning locomotive on the track in the middle of nowhere. The way that scale affects LTA craft is very different from how it affects HTA craft like helicopters. If you can build one big enough and fast enough, you could anchor to a sinking ship and keep it afloat, or simply pick it up and haul it to a dry dock. This could be useful for deep-sea salvage, though the existing barge-style ships are quite effective already.
In short, there may not be much of a market right now for moving large buildings, but there are plenty of other markets that such a device could tap.
You must not use any sites that have been forced to host and embed ads because their readership blocks the advertisers. I would much rather be able to allow or deny ads not just by advertiser (doubleclick can burn in hell), but by site as well. Then I could block all the ads on various slashdot links while still allowing ads at sites I like. Wish someone would do that with adblock/noscript.
While I do agree with you in spirit, there is a problem. You put your pants on in your own private property. You search Google by using a semi-public service. Instead of comparing it to how you put your pants on, compare it to someone watching and noting which parking spots you prefer at the supermarket or at work. Creepy but not illegal.
Sometimes the information is used for statistical purposes (people from 9 county prefer the east side of the lot, 22 county prefers the west side). For targeted ads, it's more like having a free parking space downtown, provided you give your name, address, and license plate number. Then they take that and say 'hey, Bob likes to park downtown on Wednesdays, so I'll print up a few flyers with his name and leave them with the attendant to deliver when he gets there.' Then they take the next step and start charging the local shops, as well as exchanging info. Now they can say 'hey, Bob's probably coming back this Wednesday to stop in at the hardware store and the theatre, so I'll print up ads with his name on it for those stores.'
As with many great ideas, this is very easy to misuse. If I work for the parking lot, I know Bob will be at the theatre for two hours once a week, so I know exactly when to ransack his car. If I've bought this behavioral information, now I know when Bob is away from home and where he is at certain times. Now it's getting pretty creepy. From an advertiser's perspective, I can harm them by buying the info and placing my own flyers under his window with better offers. If I'm an unscrupulous advertiser, now I know where bob lives and I can junk-mail and flyer him unto a psychotic break.
To get away from that rampantly over-developed example, let's consider what could be done. If the major players were to offer a search engine that specifically advertised privacy, would you or I bother to use it? It would be a nice step but probably an empty gesture if it came to a court case. Some government org could try to regulate or legislate, make a mess of it, and make it both easier for scams and harder for legitimate advertisers. An industry group could form and try to self-regulate, which is what we see here. Individual users could use the tools available (like firefox and noscript), while the less tech-savvy get bombarded to make up the lost clicks. This already happens. What could possibly be done to stop the avalanche while still making it possible to run an ad-supported site? It is similar to the email spam problem in many ways, and while progress is made against both crapfests, it will never really go away.
Just curious, but isn't it a commercial interest in the modern world when search results are used as part of employee screening? If my name brought up a bunch of scams and raunchy porn in a web search, it is quite possible that a prospective employer would decide not to hire me because of it (in whole or in part). This could be an impact in decisions that directly affect my income.
My guess is that the legal meaning of 'commercial' has little to do with the common meaning, thus leading to my irrelevant conjecture above.
As for filesharing, that will happen whether or not net neutrality is allowed. Destroying the open internet in an attempt to reduce filesharing is dangerously naive.
The group of people supporting network neutrality and the group of scumbag leechers you referred to may overlap a little, but they are by no means the same.
How would you feel if your ISP decides to restrict or entirely block Google in favor of Bing? Now how would you feel if part of that deal was to filter out search results having anything to do with wrongdoing by Microsoft and by your ISP? What if Blockbuster pays more than Netflix, and you have to pay your ISP for a premium package just to get access to a service that you already pay for?
What about news sites? Suppose Wikileaks (or insert your favorite troublemaking info site here) gets classified as a news source which then has to pay the ISP's to allow access. Now suppose that the big players are paying enough in access fees that the small sites can't afford to compete. Suddenly all those little sources of interesting information either dry up or start charging.
Now let's consider social media like Facebook and Twitter. Heavy usage, heavy access fees. Would you use Myspace or Facebook if you had to pay for it? (I don't use either and would be amused to see the sites die, but not at the hands of net neutrality violation)
It seemed like everything they did after taking over Alltel was designed to drive people away. They gave us a few months on the original much more generous plans before booting everyone to overpriced Verizon plans. Viaero has been awesome since I switched, with the same or better plans and coverage as Alltel. It was much much cheaper with Viaero to get unlimited access for both lines compared to any other carrier.
I'm not a shill (and not AC), just a satisfied customer. I'm sure they are probably just as greedy as any other telco, but so far they have treated me very well.
Don't forget to remind them that money spent on space isn't just stacks of hundreds that get burnt up in orbit, never to be seen again. The money gets spent on payroll, services, materials, facilities, research. Once it has been spent on space flight, the recipients go on and pay taxes with it, then spend most of the rest. The people taking their income from said spaceflight-paid people do the same, and so on. This money does not simply disappear.
Of course, that is true of anything on which we spend money but it's a good way to shake someone up if they didn't already know about circulation (ie. most people). In the case of space, the money hits the economy at the level of high-tech or precision companies, research groups, and so on. These are all production capacities that are wasting away in the U.S. and I see people here almost every day pointing that out.
Spending a buck on space is spending a buck on America. *
*provided you live here anyway, and yes I used the evil America instead of U.S.A. Sorry Mexico, Canada and South America, nothing personal.
One would presume that in the process of replicating itself, an invading virus may inadvertently repackage some of the host's dna. If it happened upon a functional viral gene in the midst of a string of intron, it is possible that the gene could be merged with the viral dna of the invader. The result would be a new strain of the invading virus carrying a gene (or many genes) from an extinct virus. This could lead to any number of problems for us, such as an altered protein coat (makes most vaccines useless), increased likelihood of transmission, or the ability to produce toxins (cause to be produced, in the case of a virus) to which our bodies no longer have any resistance. If the right kind of virus and the right kind of bacteria were present in the host at the same time, it is also possible for these genes to cross into other pathogens.
The lorentz factor is only 1.4 at 0.7c. The relativistic doppler effect would then be: z= 1.4(1+v/c)-1
= 1.4(1.7)-1
= 1.38
This is enough redshift to push yellow into the near infrared and to make a medium blue into a medium red... One reasonable estimate of the intergalactic energy density is about 1.8 eV per cm^3. Let's assume a vastly oversized vessel with 25m^2 area in the direction of travel. 1 m^3 is 1x10^6 cm^3, so we encounter 1.8x10^6 eV per m^3 swept. With our 25m^2 surface, we sweep 4.5x10^7 eV per meter of travel. At 0.7c, we travel ~ 2.1x10^8 m/s. Neglecting some ramifications of relativity, we arrive at a figure of roughly 9.45x10^15 eV/s (*1.602x10^-19 j/eV), or 1.51x10^-3 watts (that's 0.00151 watts or about 1.5 milliwatts). I generate more heat than that by breathing, and these numbers are based on a velocity far exceeding 0.2c and a spaceship nosecone the size of a small building. Where exactly is the scary radiation coming from?
Matter is another story entirely, as even interstellar gas and dust will generate enormous heat through impact. For very small particles, it is likely that some form of ionizing beam (perhaps in combination with a powerful magnetic field) could be used to sweep out the craft's immediate path. Whether or not this would work for something as large as a micrometeorite (or worse, some big chunk of rock) is questionable. Either way some manner of electromagnetic funnel or wedge becomes necessary if only to avoid debris, and may as well be adapted to collect reaction mass.
As for getting up to speed, use your supply of antimatter to catalyze deuterium fusion. Keep your deuterium in the form of hydrocarbons, or perhaps as water ice. If that doesn't do the trick for you then bring along a good supply of transuranics and blast it with antiprotons.
The truly difficult part of such a trip is navigation. Even now, with our best technology put to the task, we still have unexpected collisions with space junk. Finding and avoiding all potentially hazardous masses along the flight path with enough time to avoid collision (and enough power to maneuver) is a staggering task. Even if you have a fuel scoop there is no way your scoop could deflect a marble at those speeds, let alone a rogue planetoid with a very low albedo.
For those specific planets, sure. However, the right combination of atmosphere and gravity would result in a human-habitable planet at those ranges. Habitability isn't just mean solar distance, it's whether or not water can exist in all three common states. If you're so far away (or so close) that the gravity + atmosphere required to see water ice and water vapor would render the planet uninhabitable, then you're outside the zone. This is of course probably not the official word on the subject, but the 'zone of habitability' covers situations which do not occur in our solar system but would render recognizable life possible.
A few grams of antimatter. Less, if you use it as an energetic catalyst for fusion rather than just tiny bits of 'earth-shattering kaboom' in a magnetic containment field.
If you're talking about chemical fuel, the short answer is no. If you're talking about nuclear fuel, the short answer is probably not.
Companies are generally taxed only on their profits. Limited liability arrangements are typically only taxed when a shareholder withdraws money, and in that case it is taxed as income. What you would do is have your company own your house, buy your groceries, and pay for your gas (and that of your partner, as you need at least two corporate officers, excepting sole proprietorship which negates the tax advantages). It is possible to work the system such that you end up paying no income tax. It is also a really bad idea to try that. The government is far more serious about their tax income than about anything else, occasionally excepting publicized murder.
That's where I'm living now. We've had three tornadoes in our county this season, and radio was sufficient for all of them. Of course I did take advantage of online weather radar, but even without that our announcers were on the ball enough to let us know what was going on. On the other hand, TV is definitely a superior medium for critical weather information for those that have access. Internet data is far superior to TV if you know what you're looking at. I use all three when available and fall back on radio when we're stuck in the basement.
On one of those occasions, the local station had to cut off because the tornado had touched down too close to their studio and they had to get to the fallout shelter. Nobody was hurt, but it demonstrates that any local coverage is subject to risks. On another of those occasions, the same thing happened to a different station. They used the oft-criticized remote news and weather service. Staff on site were hiding in the basement while people hundreds of miles away were able to safely and accurately relay information over the air.
The main rock station in my high school town had literally 6 songs in heaviest rotation. You could hear the latest top-5 'dance/rock/pop', whatever the hell that was supposed to mean, every hour in the same order. No automation; a live DJ was spinning those CD's, but was required by management to play those six songs every hour. Live operators do not automatically mean better radio. We need to be focusing on better programming, and the additional channels allowed by HD and streaming help give us more chances to provide a wider range of content and satisfy a much larger listenership.
To answer points in another of your comments below: Automation systems are working around limitations in iBiquity code, especially when they are too slow to do something useful like iTunes tagging or image transmission in sideband (forthcoming). Many providers have abandoned the iBiquity importer client and now use their own importer software over the core iBiquity code. The data exports available to a modern station are quite flexible, and there's nothing stopping you from reverse-engineering MPS/SPS data packets if you really wanted to so that you could pipe your export into a custom app and then to your exporter (or direct to your exciter, although that's a different packet format). I know of at least one major group (you probably know who) that sends all PAD to a central location for filtering and monitoring before forwarding back to their exporters, so it is possible. That's basically doing the work from scratch, of course, but your automation provider will be working closely with iBiquity, trying to get them to move features and fix their (mostly eliminated but at one point flat-out ridiculous) collection of bugs and memory leaks. Ask for what you want and let your provider work with them as a fellow software provider. It honestly does get better responses out of them.
You have valid points, and I wish you had logged in. Yours is one of the best comments I've seen here in a while. It doesn't have to be that way though.
Suppose one of the many proposed voucher systems was implemented, along with requirements for private schools similar to those of equal opportunity housing. If the average private school tuition doubled, it would still be barely over half the average cost of a public school student. Students and parents would have a choice of schools, something that tends to increase motivation and commitment. Property taxes could come down (but probably wouldn't). Let government-managed schooling focus on special needs students and non-english teaching assistance among other things. See how much better public schools could perform if even 20% of their students went to private schools instead, and especially if half their administrative staff was no longer necessary. See how much better schools in general can perform when there is competitive pressure to retain students across the board. See how much better specific groups can be educated when they get to go to a school designed for them (everything from gifted to autism-spectrum to schools for the blind, etc., etc.). See how much more enthusiasm and commitment can come from kids when their school excels at what they like to do instead of spending most of their time and energy on pursuits that those kids consider pointless (this would be my finger-pointing at organized sports but it cuts both ways; a given school could just as easily forego a band or academic competitions in favor of sports).
This kind of sweeping change would represent the thin edge of the wedge as far as I'm concerned. Major structural changes are needed in our schools if we expect our society to survive. The majority of people can read, write and do basic math in spite of their education. The majority of people cannot comprehend books written for anything over about a 6th grade reading level even when they actually understand the words. The majority of people want only a comfortable job, an easygoing boss, a steady paycheck, and a nice retirement. People seem to have forgotten how to make something of themselves. There are a host of parasitic companies preying on property taxes and the legal requirement to attend school. This ranges from textbook publishers to educational researchers to advisory groups to test administration and development companies to lobbying groups to school lunch contractors and other third-party services to the grossly overpopulated administrative ranks.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, not to butt in on this argument, but there's more than one person out there resisting the **AA. Some of them are taking a legal, change-from-within approach. Some of them are taking a civil-disobedience level illegal approach, with or without a good reason. Some of them are taking an all-out middle finger approach. You can't simply claim that all people who are anti-copyright-as-it-stands are guilty of crimes because that is simply not true.
If repetition with the expectation of change is insane, then our political system (voting) and Windows (rebooting) are both insane. Expository speech and writing are insane. Exercise and practice are insane. Repeat after me: history is complicated, and the world and the people in it are different today. No revolution, no crisis, no war is the same as any that have gone before it except when painted with the broadest of strokes.
The French weren't trying to remove $deity from society, they were trying to eliminate the abuses of a privileged class of oppressors, which happened to include both nobility and clergy. Your average political priest in that era was as bad as a corrupt politician of today. Now, the guy giving sermons in the corner church was probably a genuinely nice guy, but his boss's boss was probably a right bastard. I can't really say anything about the nobility of the time, but clearly the people in charge were committing some major fuckups in order for the largely passive populace to rise up in such spectacular fashion.
The Soviet Union was working from a book whose author felt that the dominion of organized religion was holding back humanity from taking responsibility for their lives and taking action for the betterment of themselves. In a typical overreaction, the positives of an organized morality were ignored in order to act against the negatives of proscribed thought and actions. In other words, the Church was judged as a whole and judged harshly rather than making any serious attempt at changing what leadership saw as wrong with it.
I don't know if you are being intentionally Christian-centric, but there are plenty of countries with tumultuous histories and non-Christian populations that are doing just fine today. I would add that there are many millions of professed atheists who are not suffering from depression or alcoholism, so the belief in a deity is not the only source of hope or inspiration. It is also not necessary to be given moral rules from on high; many common religious moral rules are fairly obvious even from an atheist perspective as good things, rules that reduce the unpleasantness in the world and lead to a better life personally as well as collectively. Mathematics (game theory specifically) often supports various ideas such as the Golden Rule without having to fall back on a supreme being.
You make a good argument, so rather than mod you down inappropriately I thought it best to answer the anon. Thanks for making me think :)
You might be shocked at just how much data is transmitted unencrypted or otherwise in violation of protocol. Besides, knowing the 'party of interest' is sending messages of a certain length at a certain time to a certain destination (or over a certain frequency and power) is highly useful data in its own right.
(troll)
How terrible for you to have four, yes four, whole providers to choose from. What a rough experience it must have been to deal with a company operating under reasonable amounts of competition.
(untroll)
We must have been one of the lucky 'important' accounts, because Dell let our onsite certified tech (our employee) sign off on bad caps, get an RMA number by email sight unseen, and get replacement motherboards shipped before the bad ones even made it back to Dell. They can be okay to work with for large accounts, but I wouldn't buy a computer from them even if it came with free oral sex.
As for ISP's, the more the merrier. If there are two or more in your area, you always have the option of threatening to switch and taking all of your friends with you (not to mention talking anyone else whose computer you get talked into fixing into switching). The very same companies that perform so well with competitors become right bastards when they are the only game in town. Verizon can go to hell for what they did to Alltel though, and thanks to Viaero for picking up the slack.
Like all posts about Microsoft products vs. open-source products, this post (the one you're reading right now) and its parent boil down to anecdotal evidence and personal preference. So, with the understanding that this is my opinion and not the intentional start of a flame war, read on.
What exactly about Excel makes Calc look like a joke? My anecdotal experience is that it is at least twice as fast and I can find things in fairly logical places instead of a stupid ribbon. I use Calc for eve online industry calculations, which mirror fairly closely the actual data gathering, analysis, and projection work of a real business. What's your anecdotal experience?
If your people needed training to switch from Microsoft Office to Open Office, then they also needed training to be able to use the present version of Microsoft Office vs. the previous version of Microsoft Office, which is still nothing compared to the training costs of Vista/Win7.
Two other things to consider: if you have the latest and greatest MS product, you'll be saving in a format that only that version can read (at first, anyway). If you have the latest and greatest Open Office, you'll be saving in a format that both Open Office and Microsoft Office (any fairly recent version) can read. When you switch up with MS, you'll have the inevitable horde of people saving in the new, incompatible format and customers who can't open their documents without paying the Microsoft upgrade tax.
Second, the site license is the real reason we still use Microsoft Office in business. Early adopters amongst customers or contractors will mean that someone in the enterprise needs to have the latest Microsoft offering to be able to read or convert their files. If one person needs it, why not several? If several people have it, we'd better do a site license 'cause the BSA swat team might show up for an audit. So, businesses talk themselves into the site license to avoid jackbooted thuggery. Once you have a site license, there's no reason to switch.
Besides, trying to force a switch to OO is pointless... roll it out alongside Microsoft Office and let the people with a clue get on with things while the rest lag behind.
What is the integer part of 0.9? What is the integer part of 0.999? What is the integer part of 0.999...?
Logically your statement is correct, but the actual outcome is dependent on how exactly you define your floor function. If you define it as the integer part of the number, then the integer part is clearly 0. If you were to first evaluate the number 0.999... to the number 1, then the integer part is clearly 1. While 0.999... approaches 1 (and is demonstrably identical to 1), our method of communicating and processing that number has consequences.
Are there any other significant numbers like this, or is it proper just to treat the number (0.999...) as a special case?
(genuinely curious, and definitely not qualified to argue with you :) )
They report it as 0 grams (not 0%, at least in the US), because they can round anything under 0.5 grams PER SERVING to 0. As always, check the serving sizes and assume the worst (~.5g trans fat per serving). What I wonder is why they have to report sodium content in milligrams but not trans fat.
Admittedly I took the optimist's view in my examples. It depends a lot on what exactly the vessel can actually do and under what conditions. However, throwing those out there press-release style did produce at least a little debate. For those jobs where an aerostat would currently be too expensive, there are edge cases where it would be competitive and if they could capture enough economy of scale the edge broadens. For those jobs where the current breed simply can't perform vs. existing gear, then it is often still within the realm of possibility that it could be done. This is a little like the first time you use a tube of liquid nails; from then on you tend to think of the stuff first when something needs to be stuck to something else (or maybe that's just me). I guess the point is that these guys are going to push ahead with what they have, improve it wherever possible, and sell the hell out of its capabilities. They will try to compete in markets where they may not have the edge, and I think it will be interesting to see what happens.
You've hit it exactly. Consider that this is basically pre-alpha technology and it is already in the ballpark for performance while showing exceptional thermal and mechanical advantages. Provided it can be built to withstand ionizing radiation, you've got a perfect match to spacecraft components. Gyroscopes, accelerometers, stellar orientation, sensor polling and alerts, pressure sensors, heat sensors, atmosphere sensors, all of these things require at least some processing. If all of these things could be handled by neat little durable logic blocks made of this stuff, much of the internal systems of a spacecraft would become both cheaper and more reliable. Protection against high heat, vibration, mechanical stress, and radiation in current silicon tech is expensive, very slow, expensive, time-consuming to validate, and expensive.
There is a market, just not necessarily in the skyscraper size class yet. Build them smaller, but big enough to move a house. My house was moved to its present location decades ago. Aside from permanent structures, consider modular homes (trailer houses). I see four or five of those a week pass through on trucks, and I live in a small town. I also see a lot of wind farm equipment like tower segments, generators, and blades. Instead of running a convoy of 8 trucks plus spotter cars, load it all onto one or two of these lifters. Less than half as many people involved, can fly direct, doesn't impact traffic, and can carry objects larger than 2 highway lanes. Similar benefits apply to things like power substations or rail switching shacks, if you can do it cheaper than a helicopter.
Fit one out with crane equipment like that found at a major port. Now if a freighter has a problem in the open ocean, you can fly one of these to it and offload the cargo to another ship (or ships, more likely). You could also haul out a complete replacement power train, and if new ships were designed with this in mind you would eventually be able to drop-in major components in most ships afloat. Same gear could be deployed to a train derailment, or to replace a malfunctioning locomotive on the track in the middle of nowhere. The way that scale affects LTA craft is very different from how it affects HTA craft like helicopters. If you can build one big enough and fast enough, you could anchor to a sinking ship and keep it afloat, or simply pick it up and haul it to a dry dock. This could be useful for deep-sea salvage, though the existing barge-style ships are quite effective already.
In short, there may not be much of a market right now for moving large buildings, but there are plenty of other markets that such a device could tap.
You must not use any sites that have been forced to host and embed ads because their readership blocks the advertisers. I would much rather be able to allow or deny ads not just by advertiser (doubleclick can burn in hell), but by site as well. Then I could block all the ads on various slashdot links while still allowing ads at sites I like. Wish someone would do that with adblock/noscript.
While I do agree with you in spirit, there is a problem. You put your pants on in your own private property. You search Google by using a semi-public service. Instead of comparing it to how you put your pants on, compare it to someone watching and noting which parking spots you prefer at the supermarket or at work. Creepy but not illegal.
Sometimes the information is used for statistical purposes (people from 9 county prefer the east side of the lot, 22 county prefers the west side). For targeted ads, it's more like having a free parking space downtown, provided you give your name, address, and license plate number. Then they take that and say 'hey, Bob likes to park downtown on Wednesdays, so I'll print up a few flyers with his name and leave them with the attendant to deliver when he gets there.' Then they take the next step and start charging the local shops, as well as exchanging info. Now they can say 'hey, Bob's probably coming back this Wednesday to stop in at the hardware store and the theatre, so I'll print up ads with his name on it for those stores.'
As with many great ideas, this is very easy to misuse. If I work for the parking lot, I know Bob will be at the theatre for two hours once a week, so I know exactly when to ransack his car. If I've bought this behavioral information, now I know when Bob is away from home and where he is at certain times. Now it's getting pretty creepy. From an advertiser's perspective, I can harm them by buying the info and placing my own flyers under his window with better offers. If I'm an unscrupulous advertiser, now I know where bob lives and I can junk-mail and flyer him unto a psychotic break.
To get away from that rampantly over-developed example, let's consider what could be done. If the major players were to offer a search engine that specifically advertised privacy, would you or I bother to use it? It would be a nice step but probably an empty gesture if it came to a court case. Some government org could try to regulate or legislate, make a mess of it, and make it both easier for scams and harder for legitimate advertisers. An industry group could form and try to self-regulate, which is what we see here. Individual users could use the tools available (like firefox and noscript), while the less tech-savvy get bombarded to make up the lost clicks. This already happens. What could possibly be done to stop the avalanche while still making it possible to run an ad-supported site? It is similar to the email spam problem in many ways, and while progress is made against both crapfests, it will never really go away.
Just curious, but isn't it a commercial interest in the modern world when search results are used as part of employee screening? If my name brought up a bunch of scams and raunchy porn in a web search, it is quite possible that a prospective employer would decide not to hire me because of it (in whole or in part). This could be an impact in decisions that directly affect my income.
My guess is that the legal meaning of 'commercial' has little to do with the common meaning, thus leading to my irrelevant conjecture above.
As for filesharing, that will happen whether or not net neutrality is allowed. Destroying the open internet in an attempt to reduce filesharing is dangerously naive.
The group of people supporting network neutrality and the group of scumbag leechers you referred to may overlap a little, but they are by no means the same.
How would you feel if your ISP decides to restrict or entirely block Google in favor of Bing? Now how would you feel if part of that deal was to filter out search results having anything to do with wrongdoing by Microsoft and by your ISP? What if Blockbuster pays more than Netflix, and you have to pay your ISP for a premium package just to get access to a service that you already pay for?
What about news sites? Suppose Wikileaks (or insert your favorite troublemaking info site here) gets classified as a news source which then has to pay the ISP's to allow access. Now suppose that the big players are paying enough in access fees that the small sites can't afford to compete. Suddenly all those little sources of interesting information either dry up or start charging.
Now let's consider social media like Facebook and Twitter. Heavy usage, heavy access fees. Would you use Myspace or Facebook if you had to pay for it? (I don't use either and would be amused to see the sites die, but not at the hands of net neutrality violation)
It seemed like everything they did after taking over Alltel was designed to drive people away. They gave us a few months on the original much more generous plans before booting everyone to overpriced Verizon plans. Viaero has been awesome since I switched, with the same or better plans and coverage as Alltel. It was much much cheaper with Viaero to get unlimited access for both lines compared to any other carrier.
I'm not a shill (and not AC), just a satisfied customer. I'm sure they are probably just as greedy as any other telco, but so far they have treated me very well.
Don't forget to remind them that money spent on space isn't just stacks of hundreds that get burnt up in orbit, never to be seen again. The money gets spent on payroll, services, materials, facilities, research. Once it has been spent on space flight, the recipients go on and pay taxes with it, then spend most of the rest. The people taking their income from said spaceflight-paid people do the same, and so on. This money does not simply disappear.
Of course, that is true of anything on which we spend money but it's a good way to shake someone up if they didn't already know about circulation (ie. most people). In the case of space, the money hits the economy at the level of high-tech or precision companies, research groups, and so on. These are all production capacities that are wasting away in the U.S. and I see people here almost every day pointing that out.
Spending a buck on space is spending a buck on America. *
*provided you live here anyway, and yes I used the evil America instead of U.S.A. Sorry Mexico, Canada and South America, nothing personal.
One would presume that in the process of replicating itself, an invading virus may inadvertently repackage some of the host's dna. If it happened upon a functional viral gene in the midst of a string of intron, it is possible that the gene could be merged with the viral dna of the invader. The result would be a new strain of the invading virus carrying a gene (or many genes) from an extinct virus. This could lead to any number of problems for us, such as an altered protein coat (makes most vaccines useless), increased likelihood of transmission, or the ability to produce toxins (cause to be produced, in the case of a virus) to which our bodies no longer have any resistance. If the right kind of virus and the right kind of bacteria were present in the host at the same time, it is also possible for these genes to cross into other pathogens.
The lorentz factor is only 1.4 at 0.7c. The relativistic doppler effect would then be:
z= 1.4(1+v/c)-1
= 1.4(1.7)-1
= 1.38
This is enough redshift to push yellow into the near infrared and to make a medium blue into a medium red... One reasonable estimate of the intergalactic energy density is about 1.8 eV per cm^3. Let's assume a vastly oversized vessel with 25m^2 area in the direction of travel. 1 m^3 is 1x10^6 cm^3, so we encounter 1.8x10^6 eV per m^3 swept. With our 25m^2 surface, we sweep 4.5x10^7 eV per meter of travel. At 0.7c, we travel ~ 2.1x10^8 m/s. Neglecting some ramifications of relativity, we arrive at a figure of roughly 9.45x10^15 eV/s (*1.602x10^-19 j/eV), or 1.51x10^-3 watts (that's 0.00151 watts or about 1.5 milliwatts). I generate more heat than that by breathing, and these numbers are based on a velocity far exceeding 0.2c and a spaceship nosecone the size of a small building. Where exactly is the scary radiation coming from?
Matter is another story entirely, as even interstellar gas and dust will generate enormous heat through impact. For very small particles, it is likely that some form of ionizing beam (perhaps in combination with a powerful magnetic field) could be used to sweep out the craft's immediate path. Whether or not this would work for something as large as a micrometeorite (or worse, some big chunk of rock) is questionable. Either way some manner of electromagnetic funnel or wedge becomes necessary if only to avoid debris, and may as well be adapted to collect reaction mass.
As for getting up to speed, use your supply of antimatter to catalyze deuterium fusion. Keep your deuterium in the form of hydrocarbons, or perhaps as water ice. If that doesn't do the trick for you then bring along a good supply of transuranics and blast it with antiprotons.
The truly difficult part of such a trip is navigation. Even now, with our best technology put to the task, we still have unexpected collisions with space junk. Finding and avoiding all potentially hazardous masses along the flight path with enough time to avoid collision (and enough power to maneuver) is a staggering task. Even if you have a fuel scoop there is no way your scoop could deflect a marble at those speeds, let alone a rogue planetoid with a very low albedo.
For those specific planets, sure. However, the right combination of atmosphere and gravity would result in a human-habitable planet at those ranges. Habitability isn't just mean solar distance, it's whether or not water can exist in all three common states. If you're so far away (or so close) that the gravity + atmosphere required to see water ice and water vapor would render the planet uninhabitable, then you're outside the zone.
This is of course probably not the official word on the subject, but the 'zone of habitability' covers situations which do not occur in our solar system but would render recognizable life possible.
A few grams of antimatter. Less, if you use it as an energetic catalyst for fusion rather than just tiny bits of 'earth-shattering kaboom' in a magnetic containment field.
If you're talking about chemical fuel, the short answer is no. If you're talking about nuclear fuel, the short answer is probably not.
Companies are generally taxed only on their profits. Limited liability arrangements are typically only taxed when a shareholder withdraws money, and in that case it is taxed as income. What you would do is have your company own your house, buy your groceries, and pay for your gas (and that of your partner, as you need at least two corporate officers, excepting sole proprietorship which negates the tax advantages). It is possible to work the system such that you end up paying no income tax. It is also a really bad idea to try that. The government is far more serious about their tax income than about anything else, occasionally excepting publicized murder.
That's where I'm living now. We've had three tornadoes in our county this season, and radio was sufficient for all of them. Of course I did take advantage of online weather radar, but even without that our announcers were on the ball enough to let us know what was going on. On the other hand, TV is definitely a superior medium for critical weather information for those that have access. Internet data is far superior to TV if you know what you're looking at. I use all three when available and fall back on radio when we're stuck in the basement.
On one of those occasions, the local station had to cut off because the tornado had touched down too close to their studio and they had to get to the fallout shelter. Nobody was hurt, but it demonstrates that any local coverage is subject to risks. On another of those occasions, the same thing happened to a different station. They used the oft-criticized remote news and weather service. Staff on site were hiding in the basement while people hundreds of miles away were able to safely and accurately relay information over the air.
The main rock station in my high school town had literally 6 songs in heaviest rotation. You could hear the latest top-5 'dance/rock/pop', whatever the hell that was supposed to mean, every hour in the same order. No automation; a live DJ was spinning those CD's, but was required by management to play those six songs every hour. Live operators do not automatically mean better radio. We need to be focusing on better programming, and the additional channels allowed by HD and streaming help give us more chances to provide a wider range of content and satisfy a much larger listenership.
To answer points in another of your comments below:
Automation systems are working around limitations in iBiquity code, especially when they are too slow to do something useful like iTunes tagging or image transmission in sideband (forthcoming). Many providers have abandoned the iBiquity importer client and now use their own importer software over the core iBiquity code. The data exports available to a modern station are quite flexible, and there's nothing stopping you from reverse-engineering MPS/SPS data packets if you really wanted to so that you could pipe your export into a custom app and then to your exporter (or direct to your exciter, although that's a different packet format). I know of at least one major group (you probably know who) that sends all PAD to a central location for filtering and monitoring before forwarding back to their exporters, so it is possible. That's basically doing the work from scratch, of course, but your automation provider will be working closely with iBiquity, trying to get them to move features and fix their (mostly eliminated but at one point flat-out ridiculous) collection of bugs and memory leaks. Ask for what you want and let your provider work with them as a fellow software provider. It honestly does get better responses out of them.
Good luck.
You have valid points, and I wish you had logged in. Yours is one of the best comments I've seen here in a while. It doesn't have to be that way though.
Suppose one of the many proposed voucher systems was implemented, along with requirements for private schools similar to those of equal opportunity housing. If the average private school tuition doubled, it would still be barely over half the average cost of a public school student. Students and parents would have a choice of schools, something that tends to increase motivation and commitment. Property taxes could come down (but probably wouldn't). Let government-managed schooling focus on special needs students and non-english teaching assistance among other things. See how much better public schools could perform if even 20% of their students went to private schools instead, and especially if half their administrative staff was no longer necessary. See how much better schools in general can perform when there is competitive pressure to retain students across the board. See how much better specific groups can be educated when they get to go to a school designed for them (everything from gifted to autism-spectrum to schools for the blind, etc., etc.). See how much more enthusiasm and commitment can come from kids when their school excels at what they like to do instead of spending most of their time and energy on pursuits that those kids consider pointless (this would be my finger-pointing at organized sports but it cuts both ways; a given school could just as easily forego a band or academic competitions in favor of sports).
This kind of sweeping change would represent the thin edge of the wedge as far as I'm concerned. Major structural changes are needed in our schools if we expect our society to survive. The majority of people can read, write and do basic math in spite of their education. The majority of people cannot comprehend books written for anything over about a 6th grade reading level even when they actually understand the words. The majority of people want only a comfortable job, an easygoing boss, a steady paycheck, and a nice retirement. People seem to have forgotten how to make something of themselves. There are a host of parasitic companies preying on property taxes and the legal requirement to attend school. This ranges from textbook publishers to educational researchers to advisory groups to test administration and development companies to lobbying groups to school lunch contractors and other third-party services to the grossly overpopulated administrative ranks.
Let's downsize, shall we?
http://www.google.com/search?q=battery+powered+weather+radio&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t
seriously...