Comment Re:Just tell me (Score 1) 463
You are probably the only one in the world who uses that definition of 'exponential'. The exponential function has the property exp(x+1)=2.7*exp(x), which is completely analogous to your geometric series.
You are probably the only one in the world who uses that definition of 'exponential'. The exponential function has the property exp(x+1)=2.7*exp(x), which is completely analogous to your geometric series.
"the ebola death curve is exponential. Production and distribution of vaccines, and of antibodies by transfusion, is at best geometric."
Geometric is essentially the same as exponential. The only difference is that geometric is in discrete steps and exponential can also describe fractional steps. So, what did you really mean here?
Resting and waking heart rate are often confused
It would have been helpful if you explained the difference. Google is not very helpful for "waking heart rate", but "resting heart rate" seems to be the one that you have when you wake up in the morning.
I was using an old netbook (Atom N270) as a home media server, keeping it running Ubuntu Desktop 9.something. But it was too much of a pain to maintain: keeping it on mains power for a year seems to break the battery-charge-level monitoring, which makes the internal battery useless as a UPS. Too many processes insisted on writing to files every 5 minutes, which was spinning up the hard disk all the time. Also, it got uncomfortably hot with the lid closed all the time.
So I got a second-hand thin client (Via 1 GHz CPU, 1 GB internal flash drive, 1 GB RAM, gigabit ethernet) for 75 euros, installed Ubuntu Server 12.04 and a USB hard disk that has a auto spin-down feature. The 1 GiB "SSD" turned out to be too small for OS and log files, so I augmented it with a 4 GB USB thumb drive, while cursing that it is very hard to find one that performs well on lots of small writes (With 4 kB random block write tests, the throughput of most sticks is less than 0.01 MB/s). This thing takes about 13 W of power while idle (26 euros/year at our rates) and last time I looked, there are no alternatives on the market that have comparable horsepower for much less watts. The server hosts media files (MiniDLNA) and backups (snapshots) of the various computers/tablets/phones. Once or twice a year, I sync the disk with an external USB drive. If my house goes up in flames, all will be gone.
Since my media storage is mostly audio, a 1 TB drive is plenty. When I read here from people that have 40 TB of storage in NAS arrays, I wonder what they are hoarding. At 5 GB per hour of video, that's 8000 hours!
Ubuntu 12.04 server sucks for a headless server. I think it was waiting for a keypress after an unclean boot. (There was a comment on a forum of a guy who had to drive 100 miles to a datacenter to attach a keyboard and press Enter). That one was solved, but now it just hangs during filesystem checking at boot time - some bad boot-order dependency.
Network: ethernet in living room (A/V center) and work room (desktop/printer); wifi elsewhere. Visitors get the wifi password. Non-media file transfers and backups are always over ssh. (It t1urns out that the gigabit ethernet was overkill; the VIA CPU can barely saturate a 100 Mbps ethernet line, with the faster SSH cipher (arcfour).
"your body isn't absorbing every calorie you put into it. Your body absorbs until it has what it needs"
Consider what happens if a lactose-intolerant person drinks a glass or two of milk: about 25 g of carbohydrates that their body can't absorb. It will lead to flatulence and diarrhea as a result of gut bacteria feasting on those unused calories and the inability of the body to extract water effectively from a sugar solution.
The fact that this is an abnormal response shows that the normal thing is to absorb every calorie.
"I don't know if the plant really needs the caffeine for something else"
I've been told that it's basically an insecticide. Arabica plants contain less caffeine than robusta plants, and are therefore more sensitive to pests. Naturally caffeine-free plants would be a pain to cultivate.
" I always just use split horizon DNS, and put everything under the corporate domain name, thus eliminating the problem."
I have something like that at home, a registered domain name example.com and a portion *.home.example.com that was only resolvable from my lan.
Then, a few months back, I upgraded to the new Linux Mint LTS, which did all queries simultaneously to my ISP (fallback DNS) and my LAN DNS, using the first response. Sometimes the ISP was faster, resulting in 'nonexistent host' errors.
It took me an hour to figure out what was wrong and how to repair it (networkmanager.conf, disable dnsmasq). Sigh. I wasn't the first to have this problem. The devs didn't really see the problem. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubu...
"you could run it repeatedly on a data source until you were down to a single bit."
That's why you need two distinct compression algorithms. Sometimes one will work better, sometimes the other. While repeatedly compressing, don't forget to write down in which sequence you need to apply the decompression. I believe this can compress abitrary data down to zero bits, if you are patient enough.
"Advanced driving courses teach vehicle dynamics, skid control, proper reactionary techniques to road hazards, proactive hazard evaluation, and so on; they cost $300 here, and you can go all the way to $1500 for driving/racing combined classes"
That's cheap. Here in Netherlands, a regular driving license will cost you around 30 hours(*) of instruction, plus 10 or so hours to study the traffic rules in all kinds of edge cases, and about 1500 euros for instruction, theory exam, and driving exam. It doesn't include skid control.
Traffic fatalities (per capita) are a factor 3 lower in Netherlands and Germany, compared to the US.
(*) it took me more like 75 hours of instruction and considerably more money... started at later age and generally bad body coordination/multitasking....
From TFA (2nd link): "Your CEO, and each officer, may be fined up to $1,000,000"
Now that's refreshing! Corporate misbehavior resulting in personal fines for the management. I could think of a few more cases where that would be a good idea.
"I know people who are losing two hours of their life a day commuting each way, "
I commute well over 2 hours, 4 days per week. I don't see it as lost time. I'm reading slashdot and other sites in the train like now (plenty of space since I travel after the peak hours). In addition, 15 km of cycling per day, which is my only exercise. Fortunately the climate over here allows cycling.
But the idea of driving a car for 2 h/day horrifies me...
"just start charging per ip $1 per ip per year should be sufficient"
And who should benefit from the $4B/yr revenue? The American government because ICANN is in the US?
Don't panic.