Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:We've gone beyond bad science (Score 1) 703

Answering a troll, but what the hell....

A) Probable, but not definite. It depends upon the scale and the speed. After all, we can always wipe ourselves out with a nuclear war before we wipe ourselves out with greenhouse gasses.
B) False, while that would help with the CO2 the immediate unrest caused would be a vastly greater harm to society than using a more reasonable plan. Doing nothing has the potential to cause much greater long-term harm, but an immediate shutdown of all coal plants would be like knocking out all your teeth to prevent cavities, instead of starting to use a toothbrush.
C) Almost certainly not.
D) Possibly, but it's impossible to tell at this point. Local effects like hurricanes shouldn't change much during the initial warming stages.
E) Almost certainly, though where that point is is unknown. If you managed to change the atmosphere of Earth to match that of Venus you'd get such an effect, and would get such an effect before you reached the Venusian composition. How far before is not fully known.
F) False. Increased atmospheric CO2 has already had noticeable effects with ocean acidification.
G) This statement is meaningless. Which mean?
H) False.

Comment Re:Good PR Move (Score 4, Informative) 250

Yep. A big thing people don't get is safety. Have you ever had a cheap multimeter fuse blow and toss shards of glass through the case, avoiding your hand only because you weren't holding the meter there? I have. $100-$200 more for a meter with proper input protection, HRC fuses, a strong case, etc, is well worth the money. There is of course a lot more to Fluke meters' quality than just their input protection, they're ridiculously reliable (Dave Jones took a Fluke 87-V caving, swam with it, dropped it off a 15-meter bridge onto concrete repeatedly, and still didn't break it) and very accurate (for handhelds, good bench meters are of course better than handheld meters.) Fluke makes great equipment. Of course, the other top-end brands make similarly good equipment. Agilent meters are great, etc, etc.

Comment Re:150 tabs? (Score 1) 142

I do not have a left-to-right order to my tabs. I have a hierarchical tree:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/

The relations between the tabs are important to me, bookmarks don't provide a good way to preserve the relational information.

Of course I could store it all in a SQL database and write scripts to manage opening and closing the pages with an HTML viewer or such, but that's far more effort than using the tools already available.

Comment Re:150 tabs? (Score 1) 142

Folders don't quite work. Think of it as an outline Let's say I have tabs A, B, and C. Tab A has children 1 and 2, B has 3 and 4, and C has one child, 5. 1 has I and II and III, 2 has IV and VI, etc.
With folders, there's no way to preserve the links between levels easily, except perhaps naming the folders to match their corresponding tabs. With multiple tabs at one level, each of which has multiple subtabs it's hard to distinguish what came from where, it's just not well-suited to organizing things in this way. It's possible, but not worth the effort.

Comment Re:150 tabs? (Score 4, Insightful) 142

I have tons of tabs open, because bookmarks suck. EG if I'm working on a project with a new framework I might need to reference 3-4 APIs, and 5 classes in each, and 2-3 methods per class in a given hour or two. I want a tab for each method, with a tree of the parent classes and APIs. Tree-Style tabs lets me have that, but Firefox's bookmarks don't. So I leave tabs open. That results in 50-60 tabs or so. Sure, I close the tab group when the project is done, and subsets when I'm done with them, and use different windows to separate different projects/activities, but it results in lots of tabs. "Normal" people use tabs for current pages, I like to have both the current pages and a herarchical history of how I got to those pages. I also open all links in tabs. Tab hierarchies provide a combined history (with list of what lead where,) bookmarks, and tabs, all in one convenient interface. If bookmarks supported this nicely it would be great, but they don't.

Comment Re:Isolation, Reflection and Cross-talk (Score 1) 35

True, light can go through insulation if the opacity is too low, and at small scales the light tunneling across the barrier will become a problem. What you don't get is a direct equivalent to induction that happens in electrical systems, but all the other sources of interference still apply. It's still crosstalk, but not from the cause most often seen in the generally familiar electrical systems.

Comment Re:Isolation, Reflection and Cross-talk (Score 2) 35

"Crosstalk" is a feature of electromagnetic induction: a changing current in one set of wires induces a current in the adjacent set. With light this won't happen at all. You can also have multiple frequency signals across a single wire/fiber optic cable, both will have interference from nearby frequency bands since you can't create ideal filters. These are entirely separate problems, even though they both deal with interference between two (or more) signals.

Slashdot Top Deals

Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny. -- Frank Hubbard

Working...