Comment Re:Guns are don't kill people (Score 1) 371
It's worse than that - Black-Scholes *does* make an assumption about the distribution of "more than x", and in that specific situation the assumption is catastrophically wrong.
It's worse than that - Black-Scholes *does* make an assumption about the distribution of "more than x", and in that specific situation the assumption is catastrophically wrong.
Voice applications are also screwed with more than 200ms delay because of the psychological effects of any echo.
The fractional reserve system is what makes money not quite like an IOU. If you have unregulated reserve rates, then the GP is literally correct - money is created when it is lent. The money did not exist before the bank decided to lend.
You couldn't do the plumbing directly, but you could make holes for it which you could line with a flexible membrane after the fact. The water industry already does something like this for rehabilitating old pipework.
Putting in a wiring harness would be an utter sod, though.
You may find this enlightening:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the_U.S._government
Why on *earth* would you expect that? It's a *completely* different technology, with completely different failure modes.
Well, almost everyone is saying how reliable SSDs are because they have no moving parts to wear out. Also, since I do not really care about the speed, the only reason I would buy a SSD (instead of a cheaper HDD) would be reliability. If that SSD failed before a hard drive that has been already spinning for 7 years, I would be disappointed.
SSD lifetimes aren't measured in years, they're measured in *writes*. If you had an SSD powered on for 10 years but never written to, it might well have another 10 years left in it (barring failures that are common to all electronic devices, that is). Keeping a platter spinning for that long would be asking for trouble.
That being said, the reliability of an SSD isn't so much in that they last for a long time, it's that you can know with a fair degree of precision *for your use case* when they are going to fail *after*, so you can budget to replace them *before they fail*. This is necessary because, unlike hard drives which often fail gradually while giving you a chance to pull your data off, SSDs fail instantly and completely.
Hardly. Backup drives of either sort fail, just like primary storage of either sort.
It's not about the backup, or the data. When I buy something, I want it to last (especially if it is expensive), because I do not like paying for stuff that breaks soon.
Even if I make a backup three times a day, when the drive beaks, my computer crashes. Then, I have to order a new drive and wait a day for it to arrive (hopefully, the drive did not break on Friday afternoon). When it arrives, I have to install it, restore the backup and restart my PC. Oh, I also had to pay for the new drive.
Well, I could buy two drives and keep one as a spare, but then I will be paying twice the money for the same space and some part of the hassle still remains. On a desktop, I could use RAID1 but I would still need to buy two drives. Laptops usually do not have the space or the battery capacity to afford RAID1.
Same is true for other devices (for example power supplies).
Ok, here's a little economics for you: convenience costs money. Between the two extremes of paying as little as possible and having as little downtime as possible, you have to find a point where you are comfortable with the amount you are spending, the downtime you incur when it happens, and how predictable that downtime is. As you've placed yourself on the former extreme, you're saying that your personal time to recover from a downtime, and your ability to predict when that will be, is worth less to you than the money it would cost you to mitigate your situation.
SSDs cost more than HDDs, so I would expect them to last longer
Why on *earth* would you expect that? It's a *completely* different technology, with completely different failure modes.
(and since my hard drives are quite reliable, a SSD would have to work at least 10 years). As the technology is new, nobody knows how long SSDs will last, so I will have to wait and see.
The technology isn't that new: right now you can pay extra to get SSD drives which are guaranteed for a given number of writes. How long they last will depend on your usage patterns, but I've seen specs for drives which are guaranteed for *years* of continuous writes. Not only that, but *they'll tell you when they need replacing*.
You can easily compensate for light placement if you've got a target object of known shape (and optical properties) in the scene. I use a three-sided pyramid with a right-angled apex; it makes the maths almost trivial, and it's very easy to fold a decent one out of printer paper if you haven't got a premade one handy.
JRuby master already has invokedynamic support; it's apparently about 40% faster on Java7 than on Java6.
For a photo that includes artwork still in copyright, yes, the photo you take in the museum is covered by the painter's copyright. It's *also* covered by yours.
For reference photos of artwork, whether the photographer gets copyright or not actually depends on the jurisdiction. They don't in the US, thanks to a case in the 90s, but they do in Europe. That's why, for instance, MOMA has two different licensing arrangements: they use artres.com for the US, and scalarchives.com for everywhere else.
It is slightly embarrassing (especially in light of all the "Don't nerds know this already?" traffic upthread) that yours is the first comment I've seen to mention this.
I find the assumption that one's career should consist of only one language quite sad.
Considering that the same person is responsible for both, I think you'd have to ask him, but I suspect that the lessons learnt from one informed the other.
It looks like it's printed in parts and assembled, so presumably if you wanted to replace the worn parts you'd just print those. Or you could print them in some sort of hard-wearing ceramic separately, or something. There are many ways to skin that cat.
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.