"baud" , named after Émile Baudot, is bits per second, not bytes.
The baud rate is a measure of 'symbols' per second, where a symbol might be more than one bit, in which case the baud rate is lower than the bit rate. It's a form of compression, where a single state change on a wire can supply more bits, something regularly used by dial-up modems in the good old days.
no longer Turing complete but, they hope, less likely to lock up a printer (since PS doesn't necessarily halt)
That appears to be a veiled reference to (and a wild misunderstanding of) the Halting Problem....
The results show that ants adopt specific traffic strategies (platoon formation, quasi-constant speed and no overtaking maneuvers) that help avoid jam phenomena, even at high density.
Scientific American comments on the research:
They found that the ants don’t jam because they travel in groups of three to 20 that move at nearly constant rates while keeping good distances between one another—and they don’t speed up to pass others. Human drivers at rush hour are hardly inclined to follow such rules.
The Scientific American article points out that humans generally are
maximizing the interests of individuals, [whereas] self-driving cars [...] could have more cooperative programming.
It concludes by quoting a mathematical physicist (not involved in this specific study) from the University of Tokyo:
Today’s drivers can learn at least one thing from ants to avoid causing a traffic jam, Nishinari says: don’t tailgate. By leaving room between their car and the one ahead of them, drivers can absorb a wave of braking in dense traffic conditions that would otherwise be amplified into a full-blown “phantom” traffic jam with no obvious cause.
So it seems if we were less greedy when confronted with traffic, perhaps we could all get home sooner.
> There's only one ellipse in the original article [...]
The singular of ellipses is ellipsis. An ellipse is a curve on a plane.
g
You tell 'im.....
I recently spent a month in the UK, and for that subscribed to GiffGaff (https://www.giffgaff.com/). For 20 UKP (a discount from 25 because I was referred by a friend) I got "unlimited" data, text and calling in the EU. In reality, that's 20 gigs unrestricted data, then it's throttled. With no WiFi where I was staying, I tethered a laptop and tablet. I ended up using about 15 gigs of data, including a trip over to Belgium, where everything still worked.
As a Canadian, these are excellent prices, but I'm sure you could do better.
g
There comes a point when your lost time becomes significant too: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com...
> Unix don't currently ever return 23:59:60 as a valid time for any normal time related system call
I'm not sure I'd agree with that. If you look at the contents of struct tm, as returned by various time-related calls, you'll see:
int tm_sec;
That's 60, and not 59, for a reason. If leap seconds are added at midnight in your time zone, then you could see the 60.
g
"I will make no bargains with terrorist hardware." -- Peter da Silva
