Forgot your password?

typodupeerror

Comment: Re:"lost" water? (Score 1) 295

by Leuf (#39047287) Attached to: In Hot Water: The Effects of Even Modern Nuke Plants On Water

In the same way as if you were diverting the water for irrigation or drinking water, the water doesn't disappear it re-enters the system somewhere else. The people (and ecosystem, but no one really gives a damn) downstream have less of it.

Now if you had a plant that was fed by a river that came down from mountains just to the west of the plant, and the prevailing winds were east to west, then some of the condensate would tend to end up right back into the river.

Comment: Re:Do you ever wonder... (Score 2) 158

by Leuf (#38972335) Attached to: BigDog Robot Gets Much Bigger
Why would you ever not want to be at war for a whole month? What's needed is a genetically engineered horse or mule that is patented and requires genetically engineered food that is also patented (You wouldn't want the enemy to be able to just steal your $100k horse and be able to feed it with grass, would you?). Then the military will buy millions of them.

Comment: Easier solution (Score 5, Funny) 668

by Leuf (#38710394) Attached to: New Cable Designed To Deter Copper Thieves
Pirates use the copper in the lines to steal trillions of dollars worth of copyrighted materials. By stealing the copper, you are stealing the copyrighted materials that were transferring across them. Since we can't determine exactly how much copyrighted material was in the copper at the time, we need to assume it's at least 10 million dollars worth per foot. Since we'll never be able to recover this money from thieves desperate enough to steal copper, we simply need to authorize the RIAA and MPAA to shoot anyone suspected of stealing copper on sight.

Comment: Re:The little guy is screwed. (Score 4, Insightful) 413

by Leuf (#38660444) Attached to: Amazon To Collect Indiana Sales Tax In 2014

A zip code isn't enough to calculate a tax rate. There are county level taxes and country boundaries are not necessarily zip code boundaries. So you have to know what county the address is located in.

Furthermore, certain items are tax exempt or taxed at different rates, and not every jurisdiction has the same exemptions and rates. So you may not only need a database of rates at every level of government, but also a database of what is taxable for every level of government of every jurisdiction in the country.

Furthermore, certain jurisdictions have tax holidays so you somehow need to find these out for every jurisdiction in the country every day, while you check to see if anyone has changed their tax rate(s).

So what makes more sense, having every individual find their own solution to this problem, or have the entity responsible for the problem and receiving the money come up with a single solution and indemnify the businesses that use it against any inaccuracies present in the database?

Comment: Peer Criticism (Score 1) 505

by Leuf (#38644254) Attached to: JRR Tolkien Denied Nobel Due To Low Quality Prose

It's funny when you pull back the veil to see these guys being petty snobs. Oh, Robert Frost is an old fart, no award for him.

Recently I've seen George RR Martin ("The American Tolkien") completely dismiss all the critical reader reviews on Amazon of his last 2 books as being from trolls, saying he only cares about the opinion of his peers. There's nothing like the internet for giving you the non-sugarcoated truth of what people think, because they'll say things they would never say to your face.

Comment: Mythbusters to the rescue (Score 1) 891

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8E5dUnLmh4/

The problem is when one car is bigger than the other, this is much worse for the smaller car than the smaller car hitting a wall. This is the problem with SUVs, even the people who don't necessarily want to drive a larger vehicle may buy a larger vehicle to protect their family in the event of an SUV hitting them. A sub-compact with a 5 star front impact rating can still get munched in a head on collision with an SUV.

Comment: Re:Not a great example of a data dump (Score 3, Insightful) 643

by Leuf (#38612000) Attached to: What a Black Box Data Dump Looks Like
So, you read the data and tried to interpret it, but didn't RTFA or look at the picture of the mangled car? Here's a hint, a 2g crash does not result in the right front tire being separated from what used to be a car. It was severe enough to bend the A pillars, but that probably happened while the car was flipping over twice. Yeah, it was probably just the stereo though.

Comment: Photography basics (Score 2) 402

by Leuf (#38605276) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Mirrorless, Interchangeable Lens Camera Advice?

The basics of photography are a simple equation made to appear complicated by using obscure notation.

Exposure = Shutter Speed x Aperture x Sensitivity

Exposure is the total amount of light captured, and the camera attempts to guess at what the correct exposure is. When it's guess is not what you had in mind you use Exposure Compensation to tell it what you want, or go to full manual mode and take control, though the camera will still show you how far you are away from what it thinks.

The reason why you can change different parameters is that in addition to affecting exposure they also have additional effects on the image.

Sensitivity is the simplest since it is just the gain applied. The tradeoff for increasing the gain is more noise and therefore less image quality, but otherwise doesn't change the image.

Shutter Speed affects how motion is captured, including your own motion while holding the camera.

Aperture is the most complicated. First it's expressed in an obscure form such as f/2.8 that you can't plug into our equation, but just know that one click of the dial when you change the aperture has the same effect as one click on the dial when you control the shutter as far as the exposure is concerned. What it affects in the image is called the Depth of Field, which is how far in front and behind the plane of focus will be sharp. But Depth of Field is also affected by the distance to the focal plane and the focal length of the lens. This is where there is no substitute for experience. The smaller the aperture (bigger f number) the more depth of field.

One of the main reasons for using a dslr is that the image sensor is larger, which means you use longer actual focal length lenses than a compact camera. This in turn gives you less depth of field for the equivalent field of view. A compact camera with a small sensor gives you very little control over the depth of field except at very close focus distances.

That's it. The various modes of the camera are just about which of the variables you are going to control and which you are going to let the camera control. But only in Manual mode will the camera not balance the exposure out for you, so don't be afraid to turn the dial away from Auto or Program. I use Aperture Priority 90% of the time, since that's the one that has the most effect on the image.

Comment: Re:Get it in writing (Score 2) 848

by Leuf (#38510196) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Handing Over Personal Work Without Compensation?
"Before you actually start coding" Yeah, except you missed the part where the submitter said he was explicitly told he wouldn't be paid for it but has already done it anyway. I have no idea what the problem is here. If they cared about being paid then they shouldn't have done the work without an agreement to be paid. Having done the work, they can either withhold it out of spite of their own stupidity or use it.

I don't believe there really IS a GAS SHORTAGE.. I think it's all just a BIG HOAX on the part of the plastic sign salesmen -- to sell more numbers!!

Working...