Re: But...
He's probably holding it wrong.
47 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Aug 2007
I commute almost 2 hours every day, and actually regularly travel long distance (400km) to the onsite office - say once or twice a week. We have GPS loggers in company cars, and we get the report at the end of each month. During an average month I spend around ~100 hours behind the wheel on work-related trips. I have found out that during the daily commute there's not much to be gained by speeding (extreme speeding yields "time savings" to the order of 5 minutes - totally not worth it). On the other hand, the long-distance weekly travel is mainly a highway route, moderate speeding there can easily shave HALF an hour off each trip, saving me six to eight hours monthly. That's one night's worth of sleep, or two afternoons with kids.
I have absolutely no problem sticking to the limit inside cities, and actually go a lot less in some places. What I DO have a problem with, on the other hand, are speed traps on motorways, where there's negligible risk in speeding to all participants (see Germany etc...). And what really triggers me is the stupid laws - I could live without radar detectors, almost noone uses those anyway. But why do I have to cripple my satnav to make it legal to drive through stupid fucked-up places like France?
And let's not forget the unforgettable czech delicacy - syrečky (olomoucké tvarůžky for some):
http://www.halusky.co.uk/czech-slovak-foods/olom-tvarozky-smelly-cheese-80g.html#.VHMOW_mG_ks
Actually very nice and not THAT smelly (comparable to gorgonzola, but a bit "cleaner" smell). Be prepared to let them ripen a bit:-)
Almost no fat and full of protein. Best served on freshly baked bread with butter, with a pinch of salt and pepper on top.
Yeah.... nah. There's a tiny bit of difference between multi-million publicly funded failed projects (i.e. funded with the money TAKEN from you, over which you don't have any governance anymore) and employing someone to do something useful for you (i.e. entering a voluntary, mutually beneficial, two-sided contract).
I actually have had to be in a similar position for a good few years (my eyes are still watering at all the missed opportunities), and my arse is fine without my head in it, thank you. What I'd describe as retarded though is taking loans to fill up the tank for a 50 mile commute, and then not having 50 pences to afford something to eat.
Also how does one "steal from the public purse", doing a job that someone is willing to pay for?
Yes and no, but you got me wrong. What I tried to suggest was that instead of marxist finger-pointing a stake-burning, one should actually DO something about the situation he finds himself in. And by that I mean trying to secure additional income, using whatever opportunities arise.
First, if I don't have the money to pay the rent, I have to move somewhere cheaper; and no, don't even try to tell me that "somewhere cheaper" means "the other coast", North Korea, or under the bridge.
Second, if I don't make enough to make ends meet, then I have to either get a better job (you know, Silicon Valley style), or, use what is available and change my career completely. If you see "filthy rich six-figure fat bastard", you also see a lot of money for his expenses. It's this money that is used to create jobs and pay people for doing useful work, and ultimately to reduce the "income imbalance". See the six-figure salary not as a problem, but as a solution.
The yuppy CEO and his salary IS NOT the cause of poorer people's low income, as the commentard above me tried to suggest. Granted, not everyone can afford to buy or develop property. But actually building a nice house using your own hands is not that difficult and/or expensive, and you do usually get advance payment. My comment was all about that mindset. And thank you in advance for another hundred downwotes, you commie barstewards:-)
When the rents go obscene, you should be buying/building new accomodation to get rich quick, not whine about income inequality. Rest assured that the jobs you mentioned, supposedly "beneath me, the rich fuck" actually are REDUCING the income inequality by redistributing the "six-figure salary" among the "all you poor people". That also means that "all you poor folks" can not get "priced right the fuck out" of the area, because sooner or later someone needs to get these jobs done, and pays more to get you to do it even with the not insignificant travel expense. Or, you know, someone could actually start a business doing those "beneath me" jobs in the area, employing some people and actually reducing the income inequality even more. Way to phrase your argument BTW.
Slightly OT: That is all very nice, actually very valid points. But then you remember that the guys at Opera did the Symbian/Nokia thing just a year ago: "Let's see, we got arguably the best browser on the market, with a low-percentage but solidly rising usage, I suggest we scrap it and build a crippled Chromium skin." We'll soon see how that plays out. And I don't think it will be anything like the time Samsung told itself "fsck the tv sets, let's start making mobile handsets".
Ok, some already mentioned the easy ones:
+1 for longer mobile battery life
+1 for 4:3 aspect ratio displays sporting higher resolutions (it's really sad when your 15-year-old "SXGA+" 1400x1024 HP laptop has a better screen than 90% of current production)
- native 3D acceleration support in virtual machines
And some also mentioned the sci-fi fantasy ones:
+1 for Star Trek-style transporters
+1 for antigravity space-lifts
+1 for workable, "portable" fusion
And of course my own "close to real" wishlist:
- "rectenna" style solar cells and LEDs (not going to happen anytime soon)
- photosynthesis-style methanol/ethanol/....ol backyard air fuel synthesis, in a self-contained commercial unit - there actually is at least one company which tried to generate funding / scam enough money from unsuspecting geezers to realize this
- GMO algae/moss/plants for slow Mars terraforming
The literal translation to Czech would be something like "psí koule", pronounced like [psee cole-eh] - literally dog's balls). This has however the unfortunate negative connotation in some colloquial contexts (and is not used frequently in Czech in and of itself).
To describe something good and staying in the testicular context, you would say that "<...> má koule" [mah cole-eh], lit. <something> has balls. The primary meaning is that the so-described something/someone has a strong, outstanding, positive characteristic, mainly used as a synonym for bravery (same as in English, i.e. someone can have balls), but can also be used to mean strong taste etc. (for example a meal, a drink or a music piece can "have balls" in Czech).
To express that something posesses a unique, excellent quality, bestowed upon it by its creator, you'd say it's "hrozně dobrý" (awfully good), "kurva pěkný" ([an expletive meaning "a prostitute" used as a superlative for the next word] nice) or "boží" (godly).
if you get v&, you are pretty well fscked no matter what. You have almost no rights, and the few rights that remain are designed to be, can be and will be used against you.
God forbid you are innocent, because then they will get you either on encryption or non-cooperation. And of course in the "course of justice" your life is pretty much destroyed. Your kit is confiscated and will be returned damaged and/or incomplete some time in the future. You cannot do your job, because you have restricted computer access restraint placed upon you.
Welcome to the free world.
Bollocks - I have clocked over a hundred flights across the northeastern quartersphere, and on every single one of those flights I have heard SMS beeps during landing from baggage compartments and pockets of people who forgot to switch the damn buggers off before take-off. Is that enough for a statistic?
What is wrong with going over the speed limit on a highway? Last time i checked, the speed of sound was considerably higher than that to allow the "thundering at 160 km/h" connotation. 200 km/h is nothing to sneer at in traffic, sure, but also very manageable in a modern car on a good highway. Which has been also noted in the article - the poor bloke managed to drive for quite a distance with no serious trouble (apart from sitting in a car from hell, going "over 9000" km/h, unable to stop or decelerate, just waiting to smash somewhere at high speed).
Actually, 900GeV is really right. GeV is not a velocity unit, it is an energy unit actually (equivalent to Joules after the division by elementary charge). When colliding head on, the energies of the particles would add up - it's the same as the car analogy, not using speed but rather kinetic energy (E = 1/2mv^2). So the mass as well as the velocity of the particle matter in these calculations. On the other hand, it's true that the velocities would add up only to the total possible by relativity velocity equations.
eV (electron-volts) are used for the unit because Joules are suitable for much bigger objects than elementary particles (18 orders of magnitude larger). Useful for car collisions and electricity consumption, but too large for single protons;-)
900GeV is only about 1.4 * 10^-7 Joules. For comparison, 9mm semi-auto pistol bullet has a muzzle energy of about 600 Joules, and a Porsche sports car doing 200km/h on a highway has a kinetic energy of about 0.5 Giga-Joules (or, in CERN-units, 3.2 * 10^15 TeV). Take that LHC:-)!
Here's one for ya: exactly HOW do you actually access the internet to , ummm, i dunno, DOWNLOAD a bloody browser without the bloody browser? Or is it me and the "no-IE8" actually means that they just haven't put the shortcut on the desktop? I suppose I could use the classic telnet client tricks for something like "Lynx" emulation, or just try to input the address to the "address bar" of the "Windows Explorer".
The "flames and other symptoms" is really just air, bits of the projectile and chunks of the barrel turned into plasma and expanding through the barrel. The electromagnetic hell which occurs in the "barrel" at the time of shooting causes this. Ever saw an arc welder in action? Related principle, same effect, yet no gunpowder either. Try to imagine a 64GigaJoule arc welder, trying to weld two rails few cm apart, separated by an iron slug and held firmly in place by the gun harness, back together. In a few nanoseconds.
"Everyone runs Torrents over uTP and then all ISP's can just throttle that (or block it completely) and that will kill off P2P without ISP's having to invest in vast sums of money for auto-traffic shapers."
Well, from the looks of it, uTP is nothing more than an application layer over UDP, good luck blocking that (along with all the VoIP, WoW, streaming and such).
Short answer? First, you probably won't be able to run AutoCAD on Linux, and second, there's a linux version of Thunderbird, no hacks needed (at least not the extraordinary ones:-]). Visit the Mozilla Thunderbird download page http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/all.html and pick up the linux version. Be sure to have the requirements installed (GTK libs etc.).
As for the .exe problem, try wine. It's a fairly capable windows emulator for linux. You just *might* be able to run CAD on it, but i strongly doubt it. Another option is installing some kind of a virtual machine software (VMWare comes to mind), buy yourself a copy of Windows and install that on the virtual machine. But that kind of defeats the purpose of having linux in the first place...
Yes, I can see your pain, being in the middle of Prague and all... but I have disposed of this problem by using a "czech QWERTY" layout instead. So when switching to czech (being a programmer, I don't type accented symbols very much at all), I don't have to re-train my brain to the goddamn awful QWERTZ layout.
QWERTZ btw comes unto us from the beloved country of Germany, among other fantastic things like latex use in movies and big beautiful blonde women eating bratwursts. Meh. Mine's the zellow one with y's and z's all mixed up.
I know of a project like this in late 90's, developed for czech army at CTU FEE Prague. They got to Mach 5 or so muzzle velocity, the supervising officer was VERY pleased, and decided to move the project to military development facility. The gun was able to fire about two times, before the "barrel" (two rails, actually - hence the "railgun" moniker:-)) fused together.
The "flame" (flash) is actually plasma emission, aka lightning; the gun works by two means - mainly Lorentz force induced by a spike current in the rails pulling the slug, and a plasma discharge (a small lightning, actually) induced by an artificial short circuit (very thin wire between the rails, which at the time of "firing" vaporizes instantly and induces a lightning arc) behind the slug.
It is called it "plasma cannon". And the tech is already nearing battlefield deployment, the USofA being the obvious technology leaders.
to Simon Ball: they were not objecting until after it passed through the parliament. It is a standard procedure here, so to say, to give a sh*t about laws until it's too late to change them (or too late to bribe and/or talk one's way out of punishment). And when politicians saw the loud opposing minority, they decided to score some points and turned around too.
And I'm not saying the law should be changed (at least, not this way), I'm all for harsher fines and repercussions. The other way ("laissez-faire") didn't obviously work out, and frankly, with czech people, never will.
Ok, i'll get my coat, then.
>Only in Spain do you get road traffic deaths figures published on TV *every >weekend*.
Not only in Spain. Here in the Czech Republic it is really very similar.
"Points system" was enacted almost precisely a year ago, and the situation is already much worse than before. The totals are shown in monday morning news - usually more than 10 deaths - and those numbers are for the weekend ONLY. Week stats are not shown, possibly because the numbers would be frighteningly high. Suffice to say that for the first seven months of 2007, there were already 612 deaths. That means more than 0.01% of the whole 10M or so of people in Czech Rep. die every year on the roads.
This situation stems from two facts: first, there's inherent disrespect of all "seemingly stupid" (read: correcting our already mad behavior) laws in the czech society, and second, the new "points system law" got VERY severe beating from all sides and parties - drivers (OMG the fines are way too high!!), policemen (OMG so much more work!!!), parliament (if the drivers don't like it, and everyone drives, we don't like it too; never mind the fact that MP's seem also to strangely like drunk driving), government (OMG, some brownie points in this definitely, let's thrash it too). All this has made the new law nothing but a piece of toilet paper (used).