cpleppert

If the safety mechanisms are failing catastrophically then how will the bomb even detonate? The timing mechanisms have to execute perfectly to get a full power detonation and should be designed to become inert in a catastrophic breakup anyway. If any part of the switching mechanism becomes damaged the bomb should should/could be designed not to be able to detonate without relying on any electrical switches.

That was another incident.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Tybee_Island_mid-air_colli...

>>Interesting article. I read it, and then saw the footnote.

I have to disagree. It was meandering and had little to offer in terms of evidence, facts or actual policy prescriptions and was instead filled with anecdotes that somehow ended up supporting policy positions already supported by the Manhattan Institute. The author jumps from charter schools to federally funded highways in a span of a sentence right at the end. Not a lot of evidence is offered that local regulation is somehow strangling entrepreneurship nor is his idea of denying federally supported bonds to over regulated entities ever elucidated in any fashion. (Maybe because sticking local communities with higher taxes is rather counterproductive in the first place). So basically he spends most of piece talking about the 'entrepreneur' as a mythical entity that deserves to be supported by a verifiable buffet of policies that aren't really explained. So the Think of the Children!! argument rehashed.

The article reads exactly like a lot of cookie cutter political writing these days that say absolutely nothing about anything of concrete importance but are just couched to ideological compatriots that enjoy light reading from authors who will appeal to their political vanity while safely holding all the 'bad' ideas at arms length by appealing to the most simplistic possible explanations of problems; while you the reader are serenaded for easily understanding what your political 'enemies' cannot.

>>Yes, they should be. Then, you should uninstall the custom trackpad driver that does that, because that's not a built-in gesture.

How many people are going to be able to: 1)diagnose the problem(the driver) 2) figure out they need a new driver 3) find a driver for the bundled hardware that will work the way they want(assuming it exists) 4) uninstall the bundled driver 5) install the new one

If something isn't easily fixable for 99% of computer users its broken because they don't even know where to start.

The same thing is wrong with the backup solutions microsoft has. They are all either 1) are too heavy weight and brittle or 2) do nothing useful. People aren't going to take the time to go install third party full system backup software when it isn't clear it will even work for them and they don't know how it will work when they need to recover something. It is just another thing they have to manage on their computer.

Compare that to Time Machine. It usually just works, and when it doesn't it is better than nothing. Plus people understand exactly how it works. Lost something? Go Star Wars! Simple and effective.

I've been to Zambia and the short answer is basically they have 1) government corruption 2) and don't have anything else besides copper. So even though you have a participatory political system the copper companies get insanely good deals and nothing is spent on education for example.

Besides Botswana they are actually doing really well for a sub-saharan African country. The politics have been a mess for a long time, basically two parties have dominated politics for the past forty years(one after the other) so you had a quasi single party state but a reasonable rule of law to keep things from getting out of hand and a fair electoral system for the past twenty years or so.

I'm not sure I buy the claim that the government doesn't do anything. Basically, it was explained to me that no one wants to upset the factions with political influence. Paradoxically, Botswana has a much more closed political system yet doesn't seem to have the problems with corruption Zambia has.

>>For every person trying hard and working to improve their life, there is usually a matching person not giving a damn and enjoying the freedom that not having to work gives them. Do they live in a nice house and drive a nice car? Nope. But they live as well as any college student in any fair sized college town, and had Playstations and X-Boxes long before I did.

I would love to see statistical evidence of this phenomenon. The unemployment rate for labor force participants (which you need to be to collect welfare) is 17% so I'm not sure how you get from there to 50%. Out of ALL people living in poverty 59% don't have job which isn't surprising considering a lot are young or elderly or performing other familial responsibilities.

As for living as well as any college student in any fair sized town I have a hard time understanding how that could possibly be true.

>>Also, most poor people (78%) don't have even one job, let alone two (nor are they even looking for one).

First of all, that isn't right from the data you linked to. 59% of people below the poverty line don't have a job or aren't in the labor force(Table 6). Secondly, it turns out that not everyone in a family is a wage earner so there is no way to extrapolate from that data point to how many are just living off welfare.

If you look at table 1 in the bls report you can see that those in poverty & and in the labor force without a job were 17%.

If you aren't using caps lock as your control key, I feel sorry for your poor little finger. That being said, if you want more convenient keyboard shortcuts(or just more) control is your friend. It isn't used very much for mac os x applications and even in developer oriented ones you usually can work around conflicts pretty easily.

For a lot of these shortcuts I don't really see the point as you want your hands on the home row almost all the time.

I can't imagine there won't be major improvements to conventional high speed rail that will be able to run on existing lines. This requires an entirely new track that can't be used for anything else and the trainset itself can't be upgraded as easily as it is tied to the track. These will be also limited by the noise they produce; even if they can go faster in theory noise pollution is going to be a major issue as is. I'm not sure they have solved most of the tunnel boom problem; a major requirement in Japan.

So I wouldn't expect there will be a lot of room for improvement of this design over the next 30-60 years. It will probably cost a lot more than expected as well. Comparatively, there are a lot of new technologies that could deliver major improvements in transportation efficiency and speed without the large capital investment of a maglev line over the next 30-60 years from traditional rail to self-driving cars to new aircraft.

I'm really skeptical of the wisdom of this project to be honest. If you want a maglev design you might as well go with a near-vacuum tunnel and more than triple your speed rather than just increase it by 50%. This would also have the advantage of eliminating the noise issue. I believe China is looking at something like that.

The difference with TI's calculator was there was a social motivation/aspect to programming them. Everyone had them and it was very easy to get started.There are programming environments for the iPad but it is a lot harder to share programs as not everyone has one and even if they do they need another level of indirection to get the program. The calculator is also much more prevalent/easy to use in the classroom.

My first program was a quadratic equation solver that everyone at my school used. I remember a couple people tried to imitate and improve on my program but I crushed them with new features and a better interface. I don't think I could do that with the iPad.

The technology is also a lot more complex and daunting with the iPad. You have the paradox of choice in choosing how you want to program it. You can't easily share programs with others and TIBasic, just due to its simplicity and the lack of design knowledge and effort for the user interface is a lot easier for a kid to pick up and start using.

One thing that isn't mentioned in the article is that if you wanted direct control over the screen you had to program in assembly; I don't even think they had programming language support for it at the time. It made it a lot harder to use than the regular TiBasic.

>>I think that this guy is saying that Wal-Mart can't do what Costco does because it has more SKUs and thus a higher density of employees. But TJ's density is much higher still, and it pays like Costco does.

It isn't the density per se, it is the density of a a much larger store that doesn't have the margins that trader joes has. They are two fundamentally different business models. Retails stores targeted at upscale consumers can afford to spend on salaries to give the service that their customers want. Wal-Mart needs low prices and lots of products to satisfy theirs.

>>Did you notice the data point in the article that Costco makes $2 billion in membership revenue and yet makes $1.7 billion in profit, which means they effectively lose money on their sales?

I'm pretty sure the revenue isn't net. It would mean they have absurd retail margins on their members and negative ones on every other product sold; which doesn't make a lot of sense.

>>In fact, a little known feature of Costco's business model is their ability to sell all their stock well before their suppliers require payment for goods (Net 30)? This means they have an effectively _negative_ cash conversion cycle, or in other words, their suppliers are paying to stock their products.

That could just be their way of handling stocking fees. They handle a lot of merchandise they can't afford to stick into inventory.

Microsoft's problem is that the marginal advantage of going with its dominant products (Windows and Office) is very low with cloud and mobile devices as opposed to PCs.

Microsoft's strategy of trying to leverage its desktop monopoly in applications to build a similar monopoly(or at least a very strong critical mass in mobile applications) has two critical drawbacks: 1. desktop and mobile applications aren't magically interchangeable, and where they are, desktop users don't like the new interface 2.mobile applications aren't just about functionality, they provide value based on the ecosystem they are connected to. This ecosystem is completely portable among application platforms 3. mobile applications aren't as complex as desktop applications

So I think that the Windows 8 strategy is actually counterproductive.

Nothing about Microsoft's troubles is a surprise. It could have moved aggressively to build new markets but instead it chose to view every opportunity as a way to extend its core products of Windows and Office. If no disruptive technologies came along this might have been a good strategy but we all know the changes in the technology space over the last 10+ years.

Microsoft's core competencies aren't built around blue ocean innovation at all. So changing the strategy will require significant risk. There isn't a magical solution here.

>>We've had personal computers for nigh-on three or four decades now, and the fact that they're still treated in popular culture as magic black boxes is a failing on our part as techies for not educating better the rest of the population. We probably did it to curry favor, to enjoy the power of knowing something they didn't, but damned if it isn't going to bite us in the end.

No, people don't know enough about computers because it it isn't a priority for them. There is no other 'reason.' Not because they don't have critical thinking skills or because they have become infantilized by iProducts.

This applies to any field, the general public if they haven't studied in that field doesn't know how it works. Think about the vaccine autism epidemic that has put babies lives at risk because they refuse to have their kids vaccinated contrary to all medical evidence. If people would put their lives at risk over a rumor how can people be expected to know how computers work?

0% of what you claim to be responding to is what he actually said. For someone that claims to be want to carefully evaluate the information presented to him you might want to figure out what he actually said.

PGN isn't a format designed for parsing convenience. PGN is the exact notation any chess player uses for writing down games. I would never write down 1.e2-e4 for instance when simply 1.e4 is totally apparent. I find it very confusing when too much information is presented in this case. In the same vein, whenever you are presenting chess notation to a human it is preferable to not show the long notation. So any time you would want to display the notation of a chess game(which is pretty much everytime) you would need to parse the game with a program that understands the rules to produce the shorter notation.

the battle of words isn't a battle of who can make the most inflammatory historical comparison of their opponents

>>Pelosi and others who support the NSA surveillance dragnet are American fascists.

No they aren't. It is rather strange to call Pelosi a right wing xenophobic ultranationalist....

I just automatically hit escape or press cmd/ctrl+r to try again; works 95 percent of the time

This isn't a surprise at all. You need total control over layout and UI elements. SVG has a lot of advantages over canvas, specifically it can take advantage of hardware acceleration and doesn't have the text layout quirks that canvas does.

If you think about what it would take to build a User Interface toolkit you would use in a desktop application in HTML5 you can see lots of problems. There is simply too much abstraction in HTML5 to do what Apple may have wanted to do. Cross-browser quirks are unavoidable and performance can be very difficult to get right especially with interactions in the DOM. Even if you can get performance right there may be issues with producing the exact layout in each browser or the designers intention in the first place.

So this is a rewrite of a Washington Post article? Why not just link to the original article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-gr...

That is a nice triplet of reasons but all of them occur after the decline of the silk road in the mid-fourteenth century with the devastation of the black death that economically weakened Europe and directly contributed to the the fragmentation of the mongol empire.

The real trade with china didn't begin until silver mining took off in the 1550s. Before that, spices and the trade with the 'indies'(India) were the primary trading interests. Most maps didn't even get the eastern half of the Indian ocean correct until the mid-1600s and from the east the pacific ocean was a mystery for longer.

Silver was the item that the chinese intensively desired for monetary reasons as multiple experiments with paper money failed due to runaway inflation and they lacked precious metals of their own. Almost 40% of the silver mined in the late 16th century ended up in china.

Their is no 'RT' strategy to speak of. Microsoft decided to use a desktop operating system in tablet devices instead of using a mobile os like everyone else.

So instead of having to make a single adjustment for applications(larger screen) microsoft built an entirely new interface and APIs to support that interface. New applications built for that interface are designed to replace traditional desktop applications and work well a variety of screensizes and both with and without touch input. The motivation behind this decision was to leverage windows' market penetration to build momentum for their mobile strategy. This isn't so much a strategy as an overwhelming desire to always leverage windows when entering a new market segment. It is a crutch that makes true innovation impossible.

The problem is that this 'strategy' is impossible. There is no such thing as a magical toolkit that can do what Microsoft wants. Instead, you have massive consumer confusion and applications that don't work well on non-touchscreen devices. Now Microsoft has to support new 'Modern/Metro' applications going forward on Windows for the foreseeable future. It takes resources away from the traditional desktop experience.

Imagine if Microsoft had simply taken Windows Phone and adapted it to a larger screen size. It would have used the same API and provided a considerably better experience for consumers(without any confusion) at virtually new development cost or adoption of a new toolkit/application experience for the desktop. The only thing microsoft would have lost was the ability to run mobile applications on the desktop. A dubious benefit to say the least.

RT was an interesting strategy and most people in Steve Ballmer's shoes would have taken the same bet. I strongly disagree as I know many other people did as well.

I'm pretty sure that not all the drivers(especially graphic ones) fully support PAE. Server versions of PAE would be much easier to support than making sure drivers for win32 would be compatible in a PAE environment.

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/gg4...

Typically, device drivers must be modified in a number of small ways. Although the actual code changes may be small, they can be difficult. This is because when not using PAE memory addressing, it is possible for a device driver to assume that physical addresses and 32-bit virtual address limits are identical. PAE memory makes this assumption untrue.

The guy wrote an article on his 'idea' back in 2011 in a newspaper:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/25/cancer-e... where he explicitly uses Haeckel as evidence for his theory: A century ago the German biologist Ernst Haekel pointed out that the stages of embryo development recapitulate the evolutionary history of the animal. Human embryos, for instance, develop, then lose, gills, webbed feet and rudimentary tails, reflecting their ancient aquatic life styles.

Of course this is total pseudoscience and I'm floored someone is receiving money for coming up with this. His descriptions of cancer (after two years of apparent study) simply do not make sense in any context.

Cancer's adaptation to anaerobic respiration has been know for a long time and isn't some magical 'atavism' or 'safe mode' but a necessity for a tumor.

>According to the article they are simply comparing gene expression from cancer cells to ancient lifeforms, which would directly support the theory.

No it wouldn't. Cancer expresses fundamental genes critical to all multicellular organisms. That is already known so the fact that cancer expresses 'older' genes doesn't prove anything.

It is very clear from the press release and also form his own article on his 'theory' from 2011 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/25/cancer-e... that he doesn't understand evolution.

Consider this nugget of wisdom that is 100% pseudoscience: A century ago the German biologist Ernst Haekel pointed out that the stages of embryo development recapitulate the evolutionary history of the animal. Human embryos, for instance, develop, then lose, gills, webbed feet and rudimentary tails, reflecting their ancient aquatic life styles.

That is wrong, it has been know to be wrong for a hundred years at least and basing a theory on it is ridiculous.

There are a lot of weaknesses in the design that haven't been worked out regardless of the technical merit of the engine. Reusable vehicles are tremendously expensive and Sabre has to peform perfectly not only on the engine but the vehicle as well to get any return on its investment.

Although the sabre is more efficient operating in the atmosphere than a conventional rocket engine the vehicle itself will have to spend the cost of having wings, strengthening the vehicle to operate in several orientations on ascent, operating in the atmosphere for longer than a conventional rocket(which costs fuel and requires the vehicle to be shaped in a way that just isn't as efficient as a conventional rocket), and being able to withstand reentry temperatures(more weight) not to mention not being able to get rid of dead weight on ascent. The reusable components of the engine also weigh a lot more as well. If you go through everything it doesn't look like that great a win; and that is if everything works perfectly.

The space shuttle never came close to its projections and this vehicle is far more technically ambitious in every possible way. I just don't think that their projections of even $10-15 billion in development costs are even remotely realistic. Last time I checked their business plan suggested they could break even if satellite launch costs didn't come down and the volume of launches of large satellites increase.

You can edit my response and change the 'why' to 'how.' Doesn't matter. The author still posits no mechanism for why the distribution that Hubble observed holds for every galaxy in the sky nor does he ever address this point at all. He doesn't say it isn't relevant or can be explained in a simpler way he just ignores the evidence.

So given a proposed explanation that explains observed phenomena the author claims nothing at all except that it would be consistent (if you get rid of the observed phenomena) to not have the theory. That is a nonsensical argument that begs the question.

I.e. if gravity didn't exist apples would still be red Q.E.D. gravity is unnecessary

> Where was the opposite claimed? I don't see it.

He wants to say that because galaxies don't break apart but the universe does somehow there is an arbitrary limit on the size of objects that 'break apart.'(Do you think some other object other than the universe if being referred to here? What is breaking apart that is larger than galaxies and would remotely make sense here?)

This is rather strange because gravity(and the atomic forces) are far stronger than cosmological expansion so his 'point' doesn't make sense.

That doesn't make sense at all. The whole point of cosmological expansion is to explain relations between redshift and distance. That is what was suggested to Hubble back in the 1920's when he plotted this relationship. If you don't hypothesize any global relationship between these two values then every galaxy just happens to have a larger velocity depending on distance. The link doesn't explain why this would happen.

I'm a little concerned about some of the other stated problems that the 'theory' tries to solve. For instance,

>>They believe that sufficiently large objects stretch or break apart, and proffer explanations as to why smaller objects, like galaxies, don’t do likewise.

Spacetime isn't an object! I think gravity is a great explanation why galaxies don't break apart..

I'm not sure we disagree. Cosmological redshift doesn't rule out additional changes in observed frequency that compound due to the ones we observe by the expansion of the universe. Hubble originally explained his observed redshifts in other galaxies entirely due to the doppler effect but changed his mind when he observed a correlation between the distance of a receding galaxy and its redshift. If the doppler effect could explain cosmological redshift then galaxies would seem to have to 'know' how far they were from the observer!

If you go back and see the original 46 galaxies that hubble plotted by comparing observed redshift to the distance hubble had observed you can see considerable 'scatter' in the observations. This scatter is due to the Doppler effect.

The velocity distance relationship in hubble's law isn't due to the doppler effect but a model that relates recessional velocity to the general expansion of the universe.