99.9% of the UAVs in the sky are ISR-only, like the Protoss Observer, not weapon platforms

Only on Slashdot is the function of a fictitious video game entity used to explain a real-world military system.

I'm afraid that I don't understand, since I'm not a Starcraft player. Can you use a car analogy instead?

Exactly.

I was always considered one of those "promising" science students. I have undergraduate degrees in both biology and engineering, and a Ph.D. in "Computation and Neural Systems". My best stay-in-science career path was a low-paying postdoctoral fellowship that would have required me to move to a very flat and uninteresting city in the Midwest.

As much as I loved science, I stayed in Los Angeles, became a freelance software developer, and am making more than twice a postdoc's salary working roughly half a week's hours freelance. I even do a little science in my spare time. I could have made a similar amount working in engineering or science for a company, but then I'd be working 50-60 hour weeks on someone else's projects.

  TFA's conclusion - at least the part about science jobs being overpaid and underworked - is certainly no surprise to me.

Personal philosophy: some day, all TVs will be HD, including the cheap ones. And then if you want your videos to take advantage of your hardware, you'd have to go back and buy them again.

I've always acquired media in the highest quality format I could. I ripped all my CDs to 240kb/sec VBR MP3s in the late 90's, even though it meant buying a larger hard drive back then, just so that I wouldn't have to rip them all in the future if I wanted them higher quality later on.

As soon as the HD format war started, I stopped buying DVDs until BD won and I could afford a BD player, because I wanted the longest time possible before my media was obsolete.

(Though admittedly, I don't even buy very many discs. I find I don't frequently watch them more than once or twice anyway.)

I'm no fan of mainstream or historical religions either, and agree with nearly all of what you said. But:

Scientology refuses to even tell you what they believe without you spending large amounts of money. If you "convert", you do so without any knowledge or even opportunity to examine their beliefs. The beliefs, such as they are, are not revealed until after you've emptied your bank account for them.

Pretty much all "actual religions" are happy -- overeager, even -- to tell you what they believe. Their holy books are publicly available. Only this one charges you many thousands of dollars to learn what your own religion's beliefs are if you convert.

Using the same base across all measurements is really convenient - parent is correct about that.

But GP is also correct in that it is super convenient for your measurement base to have many factors. A unit comprising 10 smaller units can be smoothly divided in half, but not in thirds or fourths. For that purpose, 12 is a much more useful number than 10. You guys are debating the orthogonal advantages of two different systems: both are correct.

So the ideal would be a base 12 metric system, with all units scaling by twelves and grosses, ideally paired with a base-12 arithmetic system.

Sadly, that's a pipe dream. The cultural inertia of base 10 is so strong we don't even think about it --- it makes the "strong" US attachment to imperial units look weak.

Several times I've come close to buying PSP games, because they're not so clearly marked - and once I actually screwed up and did it. I now own $14.99 worth of software I don't even own the hardware to play.

Would be really nice if I could have a "Just turn off all the PSP content, ok?" setting.

While I'm no fan of nukes, your logic is seriously flawed: it assumes that the little, ongoing conflicts didn't exist before nukes made world wars obsolete. But of course they did.

There are hardly fewer of the small, regional wars going on now (and since WWII) than there were in the centuries and millennia before. That problem is as old as civilization, MAD certainly did not create it.

Oil drippings and tire residue occluding the glass was my first thought.

And my second thought, given that I live in Los Angeles, is that during the best-sunlight parts of the day, bumper-to-bumper traffic covers a lot of the road surface a lot of the time.

That said, if it DID work, this would be an awesome technology, since it means not paving over *another* huge fraction of the countryside to lay solar panels. But I fear the efficiency won't be what the theorists hope.

I think this is right, plus I'd add one more: ask HER. And, ask *yourself*. Making a relationship work is a collaboration between two people, and those two people know how they work better than anyone else does. Books - particularly self-help books - are sold to fearful people who hope that a simple recipe will make everything work for them.

In any case, OP is asking the wrong question. You're in a relationship NOW. What makes that relationship work? The same things that make it work - and that would continue to keep it working - are the things that will make a marriage work. Getting married doesn't change the people, all it does is add a paper contract to a pre-existing relationship.

People who expect marriage to change themselves and/or their partner are destined for grief.

Found it. Wager size caps are based only on how many games you have completed, historically. They start at $50/game, and go up in steps to $500/game once you have completed 30+ ranked games.

http://www.bringit.com/rules/

Anyway, I'm assuming/hoping it's a sort of ladder system and that the size of wagers is capped at each level.

Their FAQ page makes it clear that it's a ladder system. Win enough times, and you automatically go up a rank.

Doesn't say anything about wager sizes, however (that I could see in an admittedly shallow read-through).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdDj0Syzrn8

F*** with her, and she'll shoot you in the toodles.

I am looking at Unison, and it looks interesting ... I may end up using it.

However, I'm also considering setting up FileVault on my laptop, because I don't want client data compromised if my laptop gets stolen.

What's the chance of getting a sync tool like unison working while one (or both) of the computers in questions uses FileVault?

Large industries operate with those kind of numbers all the time. How many power plants have been constructed over the years, and what did it cost?

The worldwide auto industry produces roughly 50 million cars a year. That works out to ~1.6 per second. Scary statements like "OMG We have to make one every EIGHT MINUTES" are peanuts to large-scale industrial production: we make cars roughly 750 times faster than you're saying we'd need to build turbines.

Wind towers every 375 feet for the whole length of the Atlantic Coastline and stacked 38 rows deep

The aesthetic impact of that is the only part of your post that gives me any concern. The rest is perfectly doable.

There's also a worry about losing information about the process of manufacturing the film itself, which is of interest for historical reasons but also possibly for future technological purposes:

        What if someone needs to recreate Kodachrome for an accurate historical reproduction of a photograph?
        What if society ever has to rebuild from a serious collapse? If all our extant documentation is how to make digital cameras, it will take longer to get photography going again.
        What if we need to take pictures during/after a nuclear war, when EMPs have knocked out most electronic technology?

My hope/wish is that companies that mothball old technologies in favor of newer ones would release into the public domain all documentation on the design and process of those technologies. If Kodak isn't making money off it anymore, that's fine, but it would be nice to have the blueprints and chemistry publicly documented for posterity.