Hmm. I was under the impression that Canadians didn't need a Visa to be in the United States. I think they need one to work or attend school in the US, and for certain other situations, but not just to _be_ here.
Also because they're mainly talking about food, and while yes, Dollar Tree occasionally carries a few food items (typically in the last aisle), that is a *tiny* fraction of what it sells. Dollar Tree competes with Oriental Trading Company, much more than it competes with Whole Foods.
The niche the dollar stores really fill is the one previously held by the old "five and dime" stores, which I suppose the author of this article is too young to know about. They also compete with pharmacies like Drug Mart and Rite Aid, for certain categories of items (e.g., school supplies, seasonal decorations), but Dollar Tree doesn't have a prescription counter, so I don't suppose they'll be driving the pharmacies out of business entirely.
> Setting default program associations is something that's > been in Windows for 20-something years
This is... ok, not exactly outright wrong, but at least misleading.
I mean, yes, twenty-some years ago, Windows had the ability to set program associations. But that implementation is not in any way related to the current one, except in the most general "there's a way to set program associations" sense that applies just as well to other operating systems.
Microsoft's first implementation of this in Windows was in winfile.exe, which was deeply deprecated in Windows '95 and does not exist at all in any recent version of Windows. The second iteration, in the first version of Windows Explorer, involved the Windows registry and was somewhat more complicated in its implementation but still conceptually similar to the first version: for any given filename extension, you could specify one program that would be used to open it; and that was it. This got redone when Windows Explorer went through its little identity crisis ("Of course it's integrated with the web browser..." "What? Web browser? No, no, no."), leaving a legacy of associations based on things other than the filename extension (in addition to the ones that are based on extension), and at some point gained the ability for programs to register themselves at install time as _capable_ of handling a given file format, so the "Open With..." context menu could offer multiple options. Then the "set program access/defaults" wizard was added to let people specify which of the options should get the double-click action for certain important formats and tasks. That implementation, or a descendant of it, still exists in Windows 7 (I think; unless it was redone another time that I didn't notice) but was never ported over to Eight/Ten, which have their _own_ implementations of file associations, which have gone through changes repeatedly because, frankly, they're unnecessarily complex and thus buggy.
But yeah, sure, just say this is a feature that's been there for twenty years and just suddenly broke unexpectedly. Reality is overrated.
There's a second reason why they do this: they can make renewing your scholarships depend on maintaining a certain GPA, thus motivating students to keep their grades up, which makes the school's stats look better, which makes more students pick that school.
And yes, they have different levels. If they think you can do a 3.5, they give you the scholarship that requires you to do so. If they think you probably can't do 3.5 but can handle 3.0, they give you a different scholarship, with a lower renewal requirement. To squeeze out of you all the academic performance you're capable of.
Yes. The device that does or doesn't kill the cat also collapses the wave function, because it measures or detects the emitted particle. Fundamentally, quantum effects apply at the sub-atomic level. When you try to apply them to macroscopic objects, you get _at best_ a moderately-useful analogy with caveats.
The Chinese one is called "wechat", and nobody in the West uses it, because the TOS basically say that the Chinese Communist Party owns your soul, as well as all of your personal data and human rights. It's supposed to be super convenient, though. So they say. Has every feature you want. Except privacy.
The other one is called "the internet", and you can't really access most of it in China, because it's blocked. I mean, there are a few public-internet sites still reachable from China. Because they cooperate with the censorship. Baidu, for example. Taobao. But you can't use Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, or any other site that's major in the rest of the world. It's all blocked.
By 1991 (let alone 2002), text editors were expected to be able to open arbitrarily large text files and support basic features like syntax highlighting, syntax-based automatic indentation, and grouping symbol matching. Really good ones could already open and edit remote files and send them back to the remote system whenever you hit save. (In 1991 this worked via ftp; by 2002, ssh was supported.) Among other things.
It's more of a fundamental difference in how civil law works. In America, you can put wording in your terms and conditions that ostensibly requires your customers to bend over backwards and kick themselves in the gonads while whistling Dixie, for three hours every Sunday morning. Your customers will then proceed to not bother to read the terms and conditions and not actually do any of the weird junk said terms and conditions supposedly require. As long as you don't try to actually enforce any of it, it'll probably never go to court, and your terms and conditions will probably never be officially ruled unenforceable. A great many American companies have wording in their terms and conditions that would never fly if actually taken to court. No one is very concerned about this, as long as they don't try to actually enforce them.
1-Ceres isn't physically large enough to have more water than Earth. If it were 100% liquid water, it still would amount to less than half the amount of water on Earth. I suppose it could be more than 200% liquid water if we revise our understanding of physics a bit, but I don't think finding a little soda on the surface is sufficiently strong evidence to warrant that.
If we were trying to be rational, we'd be asking how dumb we have to be to believe that a heat wave in northeast England was severe enough to melt a substance that is routinely used in places like Dubai and does not, ordinarily, melt in the summer time there. British weather is quite mild compared to the American Midwest, let alone places that actually get *hot* in the summer. A record-breaking high temperature in England is not as high as the _average_ daytime summer high in, say, Phoenix Arizona.
Clearly, if the story is not an outright fabrication, then it is at least omitting some extremely important information about the cause, which must go well beyond a couple of weeks of hot (by England's standards) weather.
But sure, it must be global warming. Everything is global warming. We're all gonna die unless we revert to an agrarian society. Too bad the Khmer Rouge failed. They were visionaries!
Also, I think Kansas might be at a higher elevation than Lake Michigan, so you'd have to pump the water up. Which adds quite a bit of additional expense.
The Caspian is located in a much more arid region than Lake Michigan. The only reason it was large in the first place, is because it's endorheic, i.e., it doesn't drain to anywhere, and whatever evaporates from it, rains mostly back into its own drainage basin.
Lake Michigan-Huron, in contrast, drains in two directions (via Chicago into, ultimately, the Gulf of Mexico, and via Sarnia into the St. Clair River and thence to Lake Erie. The rate at which it drains via the former outlet (at Chicago) is to some extent human-controlled; but the rate at which it drains at Sarnia is a function of the depth of the lake: if the lake level drops, less water flows downstream to Lake Erie, and if the lake level rises, more water flows downstream to Lake Erie. So any removal of water that you do, that doesn't amount to a substantial fraction of the flow rate of the St. Clair River (about 182,000 cubic feet per second, which comes out to something like 112 billion gallons per day), has zero long-term impact.
The biggest problem with building a pipeline from Lake Michigan to Kansas, is that in order to carry enough water to make a noticeable difference (at either end), it would need to be quite a thick pipe, and building such a thing over that enormous distance is fiscally prohibitive in the extreme. At the prices you'd have to charge the farmers for the water, to make the venture worthwhile, exactly zero of them would willing to buy any of it. Ergo, there's no point building the pipe.
Water just isn't a sufficiently valuable product to pipe over distances that large. Petroleum, yes. Water, no. That's why they're building this plant in Wisconsin.
> why not reuse your own treated water instead of pumping more out?
Temperature, probably. My first guess as to what they're using that much water for, that's going to result in a lot of it evaporating, is cooling. So they want to return the warmed water to the lake and draw out fresh cold water.
And yeah, the amount we're talking about here is tiny. The amount they're talking about evaporating _per day_, is, according to Google, equal to 360,937 cubic feet. Per day. The average flow rate of the St. Clair river (which drains the upper great lakes into the lower great lakes) is around 182,000 cubic feet _per second_. So we're talking here about removing less than two seconds' worth of the river's flow, per day, and that's if _none_ of the evaporated water rains back into the watershed of lakes Michigan and Huron, which in fact most of it will do. (And what doesn't rain there, will rain in the watershed of Lake Erie, i.e., a bit downstream.)
Incidentally, I looked up the flow rate of the St. Clair river. It averages around 182,000 cubic feet per second. So if you wanna have a go at removing enough water from Lake Michigan to be a real problem, you have to aim for a substantial fraction of that.
> how much of that evaporated water will > fall back into the lake as rain too?
Either directly or indirectly, most of it. It's going to evaporate in Wisconsin. Prevailing wind direction in the area is west-to-east. If you start in Wisconsin and go east, you pass over the drainage basin of the upper great lakes. What doesn't fall in Lake Michigan, or a river or lake that drains into it, will fall over Lakes Huron, or a river or lake that drains into it. Which is technically the same lake. (The strait at Mackinac is in fact a strait, not a river.)
Yes, sometimes you will get enough wind out of the northwest to push some of that evaporated water down into the watershed of Lake Erie. (If the plant were further north in Wisconson, this would be negligible, but the proposed location is pretty far south.) Even so, it'll be a small fraction of the whole amount evaporated. Furthermore, transferring water from Lake Michigan to Lake Erie, if you transfer enough to make an actual difference, would (slightly) lower the level of lake Huron, which would result in less water flowing out at Sarnia and downstream to Lake Erie that way. As long as you don't transfer so much as to dry up the St. Clair River, the overall impact is limited by this.
Bear in mind too, this is the Midwest. There is a lot of water. We don't, as a rule, trap rainwater and try to keep it. We route it downstream as efficiently as possible, to prevent flooding. Polluting the lake water would be a problem. But evaporating some of it? Come on. It's going to rain somewhere around 15-20 days next month. You really think the lake's gonna dry up?
No. They're listed in the "Least Concern" category, the same as squirrels and ants. And the people who make those categories are in general pretty far over on the "we need to be very careful about not causing extinctions" side of the issue.
Yeah, the OP is clearly an idiot. The whole premise is nonsense.
If you are even remotely serious about avoiding surveillance, you don't use credit cards or debit cards, you avoid public transport (even free public transport) like the plague, you try not to appear on live television, you don't hang out around major high-security government buildings (White House, Buckingham Palace, Kremlin, etc.), and most important of all, you DO NOT GO to major commercial airports, ever, for any reason.
Maybe longer ago than that, yes. And yes, the dev team is aware of the recent issues with sourceforge and intends to move away from it, but they didn't want to delay the release until they do that, because 12 years is long enough, or somesuch.
As much as I like NetHack (and I really do), it honestly does have a number of widely-acknowledged and somewhat serious shortcomings. Among other things: the chance-to-hit formula is so broken that it causes entire _categories_ of features (such as shields and two-handed weapons) to go mostly unused; Elbereth was severely unbalanced in 3.4.3 (the new version takes several measures to try to fix this -- it remains to be seen if they will be enough, I suspect not); spellcasting roles generally have to spend the first third of the game playing as handicapped melee combat enthusiasts, which is not as intended; the status area of the UI needs some serious improvements -- not least, it should be easier to notice when your hitpoints are getting low; if the Unicode support is good, that'll be news to me (I haven't had time to really look at the new version yet since the release -- the leaked version a year or so ago had preliminary Unicode support that needed help); the score formula is so broken that experienced players almost universally ignore score completely (both major tournaments focus on other things), and getting a _low_ score is substantially more challenging than getting a high one -- which would be one thing if the score system were designed that way, like golf, but it isn't; the last 50% or so of the game in terms of how long it takes you to complete it has the last 2% or so of the plot and interest and anything that matters, leading to situations where players get bogged down and don't play for weeks at a time because they have completed the interesting parts (up through the Castle) but aren't yet close to winning in terms of time investment -- this happens to a _lot_ of players, perhaps the majority of players who are sufficiently experienced to win the game repeatedly. Also, 3.4.3 had a number of rather serious bugs, including a number of crash bugs. Most of those are fixed in the new version. That's a good thing.
There's a reason the variant community is so active, with new variants popping up every few months. People keep seeing things that need to be _fixed_.
> How many streaming music and video services does your preferred media player support?
One. It streams from my playlist. Only. Ever.
> And how can a new streaming music or video service arrange to be > supported in your preferred media player?
Streaming services can go jump in a lake. I listen to what *I* want to listen to. If I wanted to hear random ear-punishing junk somebody else picks without consulting me that doesn't match my tastes at all, I could turn on a radio.
> Finally, how should a browser-based video game play its music > and sound effects?
A) I can't think of any reason for a video game to be browser based. B) When I do play games that have sound and music, I normally
turn the game's sound and music off so I can listen to what *I*
want to listen to, which is generally much better than listening
to video game music.
Slashdot Mirror
Edwin Windsor would not approve.
Hmm. I was under the impression that Canadians didn't need a Visa to be in the United States. I think they need one to work or attend school in the US, and for certain other situations, but not just to _be_ here.
Also because they're mainly talking about food, and while yes, Dollar Tree occasionally carries a few food items (typically in the last aisle), that is a *tiny* fraction of what it sells. Dollar Tree competes with Oriental Trading Company, much more than it competes with Whole Foods.
The niche the dollar stores really fill is the one previously held by the old "five and dime" stores, which I suppose the author of this article is too young to know about. They also compete with pharmacies like Drug Mart and Rite Aid, for certain categories of items (e.g., school supplies, seasonal decorations), but Dollar Tree doesn't have a prescription counter, so I don't suppose they'll be driving the pharmacies out of business entirely.
> Setting default program associations is something that's
> been in Windows for 20-something years
This is... ok, not exactly outright wrong, but at least misleading.
I mean, yes, twenty-some years ago, Windows had the ability to set program associations. But that implementation is not in any way related to the current one, except in the most general "there's a way to set program associations" sense that applies just as well to other operating systems.
Microsoft's first implementation of this in Windows was in winfile.exe, which was deeply deprecated in Windows '95 and does not exist at all in any recent version of Windows. The second iteration, in the first version of Windows Explorer, involved the Windows registry and was somewhat more complicated in its implementation but still conceptually similar to the first version: for any given filename extension, you could specify one program that would be used to open it; and that was it. This got redone when Windows Explorer went through its little identity crisis ("Of course it's integrated with the web browser..." "What? Web browser? No, no, no."), leaving a legacy of associations based on things other than the filename extension (in addition to the ones that are based on extension), and at some point gained the ability for programs to register themselves at install time as _capable_ of handling a given file format, so the "Open With..." context menu could offer multiple options. Then the "set program access/defaults" wizard was added to let people specify which of the options should get the double-click action for certain important formats and tasks. That implementation, or a descendant of it, still exists in Windows 7 (I think; unless it was redone another time that I didn't notice) but was never ported over to Eight/Ten, which have their _own_ implementations of file associations, which have gone through changes repeatedly because, frankly, they're unnecessarily complex and thus buggy.
But yeah, sure, just say this is a feature that's been there for twenty years and just suddenly broke unexpectedly. Reality is overrated.
There's a second reason why they do this: they can make renewing your scholarships depend on maintaining a certain GPA, thus motivating students to keep their grades up, which makes the school's stats look better, which makes more students pick that school.
And yes, they have different levels. If they think you can do a 3.5, they give you the scholarship that requires you to do so. If they think you probably can't do 3.5 but can handle 3.0, they give you a different scholarship, with a lower renewal requirement. To squeeze out of you all the academic performance you're capable of.
Yes. The device that does or doesn't kill the cat also collapses the wave function, because it measures or detects the emitted particle. Fundamentally, quantum effects apply at the sub-atomic level. When you try to apply them to macroscopic objects, you get _at best_ a moderately-useful analogy with caveats.
That's already happened.
The Chinese one is called "wechat", and nobody in the West uses it, because the TOS basically say that the Chinese Communist Party owns your soul, as well as all of your personal data and human rights. It's supposed to be super convenient, though. So they say. Has every feature you want. Except privacy.
The other one is called "the internet", and you can't really access most of it in China, because it's blocked. I mean, there are a few public-internet sites still reachable from China. Because they cooperate with the censorship. Baidu, for example. Taobao. But you can't use Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, or any other site that's major in the rest of the world. It's all blocked.
Though experts suggest both Windows 8 users may notice the effect within the coming months.
By 1991 (let alone 2002), text editors were expected to be able to open arbitrarily large text files and support basic features like syntax highlighting, syntax-based automatic indentation, and grouping symbol matching. Really good ones could already open and edit remote files and send them back to the remote system whenever you hit save. (In 1991 this worked via ftp; by 2002, ssh was supported.) Among other things.
It's more of a fundamental difference in how civil law works. In America, you can put wording in your terms and conditions that ostensibly requires your customers to bend over backwards and kick themselves in the gonads while whistling Dixie, for three hours every Sunday morning. Your customers will then proceed to not bother to read the terms and conditions and not actually do any of the weird junk said terms and conditions supposedly require. As long as you don't try to actually enforce any of it, it'll probably never go to court, and your terms and conditions will probably never be officially ruled unenforceable. A great many American companies have wording in their terms and conditions that would never fly if actually taken to court. No one is very concerned about this, as long as they don't try to actually enforce them.
1-Ceres isn't physically large enough to have more water than Earth. If it were 100% liquid water, it still would amount to less than half the amount of water on Earth. I suppose it could be more than 200% liquid water if we revise our understanding of physics a bit, but I don't think finding a little soda on the surface is sufficiently strong evidence to warrant that.
If we were trying to be rational, we'd be asking how dumb we have to be to believe that a heat wave in northeast England was severe enough to melt a substance that is routinely used in places like Dubai and does not, ordinarily, melt in the summer time there. British weather is quite mild compared to the American Midwest, let alone places that actually get *hot* in the summer. A record-breaking high temperature in England is not as high as the _average_ daytime summer high in, say, Phoenix Arizona.
Clearly, if the story is not an outright fabrication, then it is at least omitting some extremely important information about the cause, which must go well beyond a couple of weeks of hot (by England's standards) weather.
But sure, it must be global warming. Everything is global warming. We're all gonna die unless we revert to an agrarian society. Too bad the Khmer Rouge failed. They were visionaries!
Also, I think Kansas might be at a higher elevation than Lake Michigan, so you'd have to pump the water up. Which adds quite a bit of additional expense.
The Caspian is located in a much more arid region than Lake Michigan. The only reason it was large in the first place, is because it's endorheic, i.e., it doesn't drain to anywhere, and whatever evaporates from it, rains mostly back into its own drainage basin.
Lake Michigan-Huron, in contrast, drains in two directions (via Chicago into, ultimately, the Gulf of Mexico, and via Sarnia into the St. Clair River and thence to Lake Erie. The rate at which it drains via the former outlet (at Chicago) is to some extent human-controlled; but the rate at which it drains at Sarnia is a function of the depth of the lake: if the lake level drops, less water flows downstream to Lake Erie, and if the lake level rises, more water flows downstream to Lake Erie. So any removal of water that you do, that doesn't amount to a substantial fraction of the flow rate of the St. Clair River (about 182,000 cubic feet per second, which comes out to something like 112 billion gallons per day), has zero long-term impact.
The biggest problem with building a pipeline from Lake Michigan to Kansas, is that in order to carry enough water to make a noticeable difference (at either end), it would need to be quite a thick pipe, and building such a thing over that enormous distance is fiscally prohibitive in the extreme. At the prices you'd have to charge the farmers for the water, to make the venture worthwhile, exactly zero of them would willing to buy any of it. Ergo, there's no point building the pipe.
Water just isn't a sufficiently valuable product to pipe over distances that large. Petroleum, yes. Water, no. That's why they're building this plant in Wisconsin.
> why not reuse your own treated water instead of pumping more out?
Temperature, probably. My first guess as to what they're using that much water for, that's going to result in a lot of it evaporating, is cooling. So they want to return the warmed water to the lake and draw out fresh cold water.
And yeah, the amount we're talking about here is tiny. The amount they're talking about evaporating _per day_, is, according to Google, equal to 360,937 cubic feet. Per day. The average flow rate of the St. Clair river (which drains the upper great lakes into the lower great lakes) is around 182,000 cubic feet _per second_. So we're talking here about removing less than two seconds' worth of the river's flow, per day, and that's if _none_ of the evaporated water rains back into the watershed of lakes Michigan and Huron, which in fact most of it will do. (And what doesn't rain there, will rain in the watershed of Lake Erie, i.e., a bit downstream.)
Incidentally, I looked up the flow rate of the St. Clair river. It averages around 182,000 cubic feet per second. So if you wanna have a go at removing enough water from Lake Michigan to be a real problem, you have to aim for a substantial fraction of that.
> how much of that evaporated water will
> fall back into the lake as rain too?
Either directly or indirectly, most of it. It's going to evaporate in Wisconsin. Prevailing wind direction in the area is west-to-east. If you start in Wisconsin and go east, you pass over the drainage basin of the upper great lakes. What doesn't fall in Lake Michigan, or a river or lake that drains into it, will fall over Lakes Huron, or a river or lake that drains into it. Which is technically the same lake. (The strait at Mackinac is in fact a strait, not a river.)
Yes, sometimes you will get enough wind out of the northwest to push some of that evaporated water down into the watershed of Lake Erie. (If the plant were further north in Wisconson, this would be negligible, but the proposed location is pretty far south.) Even so, it'll be a small fraction of the whole amount evaporated. Furthermore, transferring water from Lake Michigan to Lake Erie, if you transfer enough to make an actual difference, would (slightly) lower the level of lake Huron, which would result in less water flowing out at Sarnia and downstream to Lake Erie that way. As long as you don't transfer so much as to dry up the St. Clair River, the overall impact is limited by this.
Bear in mind too, this is the Midwest. There is a lot of water. We don't, as a rule, trap rainwater and try to keep it. We route it downstream as efficiently as possible, to prevent flooding. Polluting the lake water would be a problem. But evaporating some of it? Come on. It's going to rain somewhere around 15-20 days next month. You really think the lake's gonna dry up?
No. They're listed in the "Least Concern" category, the same as squirrels and ants. And the people who make those categories are in general pretty far over on the "we need to be very careful about not causing extinctions" side of the issue.
That sounds expensive to me.
Also, don't publicly threaten to assassinate government officials or blow up schools. They track you especially hard for that sort of thing.
HTH.HAND.
Yeah, the OP is clearly an idiot. The whole premise is nonsense.
If you are even remotely serious about avoiding surveillance, you don't use credit cards or debit cards, you avoid public transport (even free public transport) like the plague, you try not to appear on live television, you don't hang out around major high-security government buildings (White House, Buckingham Palace, Kremlin, etc.), and most important of all, you DO NOT GO to major commercial airports, ever, for any reason.
Maybe longer ago than that, yes. And yes, the dev team is aware of the recent issues with sourceforge and intends to move away from it, but they didn't want to delay the release until they do that, because 12 years is long enough, or somesuch.
As much as I like NetHack (and I really do), it honestly does have a number of widely-acknowledged and somewhat serious shortcomings. Among other things: the chance-to-hit formula is so broken that it causes entire _categories_ of features (such as shields and two-handed weapons) to go mostly unused; Elbereth was severely unbalanced in 3.4.3 (the new version takes several measures to try to fix this -- it remains to be seen if they will be enough, I suspect not); spellcasting roles generally have to spend the first third of the game playing as handicapped melee combat enthusiasts, which is not as intended; the status area of the UI needs some serious improvements -- not least, it should be easier to notice when your hitpoints are getting low; if the Unicode support is good, that'll be news to me (I haven't had time to really look at the new version yet since the release -- the leaked version a year or so ago had preliminary Unicode support that needed help); the score formula is so broken that experienced players almost universally ignore score completely (both major tournaments focus on other things), and getting a _low_ score is substantially more challenging than getting a high one -- which would be one thing if the score system were designed that way, like golf, but it isn't; the last 50% or so of the game in terms of how long it takes you to complete it has the last 2% or so of the plot and interest and anything that matters, leading to situations where players get bogged down and don't play for weeks at a time because they have completed the interesting parts (up through the Castle) but aren't yet close to winning in terms of time investment -- this happens to a _lot_ of players, perhaps the majority of players who are sufficiently experienced to win the game repeatedly. Also, 3.4.3 had a number of rather serious bugs, including a number of crash bugs. Most of those are fixed in the new version. That's a good thing.
There's a reason the variant community is so active, with new variants popping up every few months. People keep seeing things that need to be _fixed_.
> This is the first time that I can think of that a population directly voted in the affirmative to collapse their economy.
In fact, that happens so often, political scientists have a term for it: "populism". It's very popular in some parts of the world.
Mostly not in the /first/ world, admittedly.
> How many streaming music and video services does your preferred media player support?
One. It streams from my playlist. Only. Ever.
> And how can a new streaming music or video service arrange to be
> supported in your preferred media player?
Streaming services can go jump in a lake. I listen to what *I* want
to listen to. If I wanted to hear random ear-punishing junk somebody
else picks without consulting me that doesn't match my tastes at all,
I could turn on a radio.
> Finally, how should a browser-based video game play its music
> and sound effects?
A) I can't think of any reason for a video game to be browser based.
B) When I do play games that have sound and music, I normally
turn the game's sound and music off so I can listen to what *I*
want to listen to, which is generally much better than listening
to video game music.