Comment Maybe it's just me ... (Score 2) 131
But I find that kind of awesome. :)
Kind of.
Comment Listen in (Score 5, Informative) 205
Among the advantages of owning a minivan is that it becomes easy to carry your own children, plus a few of their friends. You get to know those friends, and listen to your kids' conversations with them. Often, the kids sort of forget you are there and converse "normally". You gain a window into their lives at school you otherwise would never have enjoyed.
Sneaky trick: if you turn on the radio with the fader balanced toward the rear seats, the kids will speak louder without even realizing it.
Comment Re:NASA has become small indeed... (Score 1) 108
It's a matter of funding.
Looking at the chart at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... and in particular the inflation-adjusted line there tells you pretty much what the story was: at the peak of the Apollo program NASA's budget was about $40 billion/year in today's dollars (the red line in that graph is in 1996 dollars). NASA's budget today is less than $18 billion/year.
Or to put it in relative-to-the-economy terms, in 1966 NASA was 4% of Federal budget expenditures. 4% of the 2013 US expenditures (actual, not requested) would be $138 billion, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2...
I bet if you funded NASA at that level (even just the inflation-adjusted one; I understand that the overall budget structure is quite different now from what it was in 1966, so the $138 billion number is pretty much meaningless), I bet it could produce results a lot quicker than it can at current funding levels...
Comment The next eruption (Score 2) 105
My prediction:
The next eruption, if it happens within the next couple of years, will be blamed on this experiment. This will happen regardless of any scientific support for such blame.
New Class of Stars Are Totally Metal, Says Astrophysicist 119
KentuckyFC writes Stars form when clouds of gas and dust collapse under their own gravity, generating enough heat and pressure to fuse the atoms inside them together. When this cloud of dust and gas is the remnants of a supernova, it can contain all kinds of heavy elements in addition to primordial hydrogen, helium and lithium. Now one astrophysicist has calculated that a recently discovered phenomenon of turbulence, called preferential concentration, can profoundly alter star formation. He points out that turbulence is essentially vortices rotating on many scales of time and space. On certain scales, the inertial forces these eddies create can push heavy particles into the calmer space between the vortices, thereby increasing their concentration. In giant clouds of interstellar gas, this concentrates heavy elements, increasing their gravitational field, attracting more mass and so on. The result is the formation of a star that is made entirely of heavy elements rather than primordial ones. Astrophysicists call the amount of heavy elements in a star its "metallicity". Including preferential concentration in the standard model of star formation leads to the prediction that 1 in 10,000 stars should be totally metal. Now the race is on to find the first of this new class of entirely metal stars.
Comment Re:I've got a great idea! (Score 1) 89
That would take a lot more development effort, since plug-ins depend on a lot of functionality being present in-process with them that's based on libraries that make up a good bit of that 54MB.
On Mac, the plugin process is the same binary as the 32-bit Firefox process...
Comment Once past 50, you're fucked. (Score 2) 370
I'm feeling this. I worked for Netscape back in the 90's. I'm considerig trimming that from my resume simply because it make me look too old-school. There is definite discrimination amongst up and coming companies. It's incredibly frustrating for me, a guy in his early 50's. I know a metric shit-ton of stuff, and especially the shortest path to get to the goal. Do I get hired, or even a reply on sending in a resume? No. My long work history stretching back to 1983 has me handcuffed.
Comment Re:I've got a great idea! (Score 1) 89
You mean have it download both versions, on 64-bit, right? It's not a matter of choosing: you need a 32-bit process to run the plug-ins in, and a 64-bit one for the actual browsing.
This is doable, and being worked on; it's just not been a top priority for various reasons.
Comment Re:I've got a great idea! (Score 1) 89
Mac OS supports shipping both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries in a single executable. That's what Firefox on Mac does.
That _is_ a viable solution on Windows, albeit with multiple executables, but it about doubles the size of the download. Unfortunately, Windows users are very sensitive to the download size for their web browsers; past experiments have shown uptake dropping rapidly as the download size increases.
Comment Basically a toy (Score 1) 85
As a "real" tandem person (see here), I must say this thing looks like a toy to me. Of course, it is also far less expensive than the bikes made by serious tandem bike companies, who often make bikes with derailer and brake systems that alone cost as much as this monstrosity.
We've had our tandem going 60-70mph (down mountain roads). There's no way I would trust this thing for such riding. Maybe it is OK for some gentle cruises, but that's it. And furthermore, there's a far better design for front-stoker visibility.
Comment Re:Did they restore "delay image loading"? (Score 1) 270
You're very welcome!
Comment Table salt (Score 1) 82
replacement for many filament materials made today from imperishable substances such as fiberglass, plastic, and metal. And all this from a substance that requires only water, wood cellulose, and common table salt to create it
I would hate to be the poor bastard in the factory whose job it is to stand there shaking the salt cellar all day.
Comment Re:Did they restore "delay image loading"? (Score 4, Informative) 270
Do you mean the "Load images automatically" setting?
The preference for that seems to still be in about:config. It's called "permissions.default.image" and the values are documented as:
Comment Entering students too young (Score 4, Insightful) 325
The median time to get a Ph.D. is nine years.
I think students who enter are often doing so by default. Education has been their life unto that point, they have always been outstanding students, and they enjoy it. They are too young and inexperienced to realize how long 9 years is and what they'll be missing (or perhaps they are too optimistic about their personal chances of being an outlier).
Comment Re:Frequent auctions (Score 1) 382
defeating the HFTs basically comes down to adding a delay to multi-exchange transactions such that the transaction reaches each exchange at the same time.
Budish shows in his paper how that is not true. Basically, it works only if very little of the total volume is on a delayed exchange.
The stock exchanges are engaged in the same sort of crap with the HFTs, selling them special access and trade types that other investors do not have.
I don't see a problem with that. Back in the old days of floor trading, the floor traders had special access everyone else lacked. And they behaved very badly compared to what we now see with HFTs.
If our regulatory agencies were more competent, this would have been dealt with years ago instead of letting it fester as long as it has.
They are careful, not incompetent. The gut reaction of lots of people is that any middleman is a parasite. The reaction in the American West to the rise of hardware and lumber specialists during the late 19th century (fueled by general stores) is an excellent example with similar popular political outrage behind it. I'm glad the regulators did nothing about it.
