Of course. That's very common approach and there are many such power plants ("storage"). But as you can imagine, this cannot be built anywhere, cheaply enough and in large enough quantities.
Well, it means, that the viewer can read the sign, which is quite practical. For example, in Czech dubbed TV series (like The Simpsons), a narrator has to read every sign that has any meaning to the plot, which would be quite weird, if you weren't used to it, and then even surprised that this is not the case in the original version. (As a bonus, it makes the video even more redundant, so you can take the whole episode, rip the audio track, and just listen to it :-))
Of course. Mostly for private communication with friends and with BitlBee gateway. But it seems that many OSS project have freenode channels, that are very active, and not only that. There's very active #haskell channel on freenode, #xmonad, there are various fedora channels, there's an unofficial channel for students of the faculty where I study now, even channels like #lgbtreddit.
I don't see any decline of IRC use in any foreseeable future.
Of course it's not true, it's not even a hyperbole, it's simply completely false. Nokia was, for most of the 20th century, large industrial group, making many various things, consumer electronics and telecommunications equipment included. It wasn't like some backward poor finnish rubber-makers in the late 70's or 80's decided to get in a new business, not even remotely.
It'd be nice to have some export feature. After few months, if I will use this, you are going to have quite a lot of entries from me, and all of them are important to me, I don't want to lose them, so I'd like to be able to easily make backups to my own computer.
I'm not involved with the fs, I just used it for a few weeks, after that, It started to hit some bugs in the code (kernel BUG macro, looked quite serious). And fsck was segfaulting. It was just my laptop, nothing fancy, I was using just compression, no subvolumes or anything more complicated. I'm not convinced it's stable enough for any serious use, unfortunately. (mostly 2.6.34 version)
So maybe the computers will be humans. Was there any thinking involved in writing your comment? I think that anyone would say yes. But if you were a computer (and why you couldn't be just a computer, nothing less than autopsy can convince me), then you'd have to say no. That's strange, and would make word think completely useless.
Google Translate can give you at least basic idea. (Though it fails at quite interesting places.)
I don't know, FB page is a bad format for this -- it's flat and limited discussion, with artists making just few remarks about the overall design. And rating just a screenshot of the site… I guess that the idea is interesting, but the execution… isn't that great.
(Ah, I'm wrong as usual. Sorry. They are making much more elaborate critics at different pages and notes. That FB format is really bad.)
Well, a friend of mine died (he was about 20) last week and within few days, somebody set up a memorial facebook group and it seems to work quite well, I don't think that anybody feels any need for anything else. On the other hand, nobody gave this any serious thought, he's still online on IRC, nobody turned off his computer yet, I think… This bother me much more, if I just suddenly died, what would happen with all my online stuff? 1000memories is just a tombstone. I'd rather like to have some kind of dead men switch, a place to put my passwords and keys for survivors. But I guess that we still have some kind of old-fashioned offline services for the last wills :-)
Well, it seems that Singapore, as a model city state in that article, has much stronger military forces than many much larger and more populated countries.
It's kind of silly California, 'we', Bay Area, are the best and greatest of all, you need us, bow before us. This sounds too one-sided and most likely, it's not that simple.
Anyway, except this reasoning, I'm very keen on the idea of city states, I'd like to try something like that, the city I live in is most likely the first thing I try to identify with, and it is perhaps the authority that affects my life the most (and I even can't vote in the city where I live now…).
Significant… it is. It's an important transport link for the Russian economy, and not only it, it even carries some exports from the Far East to Europe. Also, it's a major engineering work, even though mostly unrelated to usual hacker news topics, it should make it at least somehow significant and interesting here.
Awe-inspiring… well, depends. I don't think that a construction and operating of a 10,000 kms long railway line should be dismissed as something trivial and not worth of any attention.
I watched it entirely. It had a great advantage of being taken from the cab, which is quite different experience from anything you can see from a window of a passenger car (of course, you can get something similar at the other side, but in a modern train, most likely a driving car with another driver's cab (unaccessible) occupies that space, and if not, then there are just quite small and narrow windows in the rear door), especially live. It's worth watching even if you already knew the route as a passenger.
On the other hand, it had a disadvantage of Bergensbanen being mostly just a long long row of endless tunnels. Seeing a name of the tunnel, it's length in kilometers and then watching 15 minutes of darkness… isn't quite interesting.
The only similar effect that I've ever experienced was that after few hours of continuous playing of Frozen Bubble, I saw everything insanely blocky. Even quite round shapes were looking like blocks. But that was over within few minutes.
I play tetris a lot, but when doing so, I don't think about it. Tetris is a game that you can play without actually thinking about it. I play ltris, and if I play another variant that has different colors for different shapes, or some other minor difference, I'm completely screwed. In fact, I play tetris in order to be able to think about something else, it employs my hands and I can clearly think about something I want. The game itself is just a complete routine.
(And by the way, I can play tetris completely in my head, without a computer. Just close eyes and imagine playing it. And it actually feels like playing tetris. Shapes randomly appearing at the top, that I try to place as I would in the real game, then they make rows, disappear, and after some time, it gets so fast that it overwhelms me and I lose :-))
Filling covers of the books with ads is very common (I can find them in many books printed in the last 100 years, mostly textbooks, technical manuals and paperbacks, of course), but I haven't seen ads anywhere else, yet.
Well, this kind of question is usually asked when someone is trying to force me some specific moral rules or kind of behavior, based on an idea, that if I believe in God, I'm somehow obliged to accept some specific set of moral rules (not that there were just a single one) or respect authority of some church or so on. In that case, I say no, to avoid it.
Otherwise, it's just a personal feeling about an English word. Which doesn't have much meaning to me. I have some workable idea about what God should be for me, I can even believe in it, but I guess it wouldn't make any sense to you or anybody else -- and I still remain an atheist :-)
From my experience, this seems to be mostly an issue of configuration, which is impossible to get right, because it's incredibly painful and hostile. He mentions this issue. (Of course, most likely, there are issues with the actual rendering too.)
I wish there was a rule that every chart used as any kind of argument must have both its axes described. If not, it's worthless. This one is. (Not to mention that you should also mention the source.)
It does. How dangerous they actually are? If it was that common for them to cause serious disruptions in the operations of our desktops and laptops, where are these faults? I mean, in the last 10 years, I simply can't remember any experience of a sudden and irreproducible computer failure that couldn't be quite convincingly attributed to something else.
I'm sure that this can happen to me, that in any particular moment, my memory can get corrupted by these rays, or something else, and then, the computer can misbehave or crash. And if I really wanted to be sure that it will not, I'd need to have some kind of protection against it. But compared to many other possible faults, is it really anything more than a very very rare and minor reason of a computer failure that I simply can just discard on my laptop, which is nowhere near a "critical and vital" system?
I don't say that cosmic rays cannot happen (well, they absolutely certainly do, I mean whether they can cause memory corruption that actually make some difference in the running system), but this is quite strange. No such faults were happening before this single incident and now, there many similar faults happening regularly? Why should I suspect the cosmic rays (was there any reason for such a sudden change in their activity and visibility of it?) and not an hardware fault?
I don't know, personally, I'm frustrated by Posterous too.
They're adding one useless features after another, but that email posting still cannot get even such a basic thing as paragraphs right. Just piles of br's after each line. And they are converting every nonascii character to HTML escape sequences. So after each post, I have to edit unreadable crap full of HTML escapes to put there at least that paragraphs (because otherwise, with larger font sizes, there'd be line break because of whole text-field width and then, after just a word or two, because of those hard breaks in HTML).
On the benefit side, there are things like TypeKit, which seems quite useless to me, as I couldn't find any way to explicitly display only fonts that have Czech diacritics characters, which is essential to me. Facebook like buttons that I don't want… And so on. It's quite tiresome. At first, I liked Posterous because it was easy to setup and worked really well, but I'm getting quite weary of all those, seemingly unimportant, deficiencies.
You can take any content published on the web and use it as your own… Sure, it's a very good idea to have some kind of verification (like "post this code on the site"? some kind of email verification? or at least send a mail to some contact on the copied site to inform the legitimate owner?), but still… you can just use copy&paste anyway. People are very skilled in it.
NM 0.8 allows you to make a connection system-wide, so it is not dependent on the nm-applet running (it writes keys in /etc, otherwise, wireless passwords are stored in user's keyring) and it connects to that network whenever it's available. (It's the same with wired ethernet connections, they are also managed with NM, yet you don't need nm-applet, when you plug the cable in, there's a system Eth profile, which just runs DHCP query and connects you; only if you wanted a static IP or some other different setting, you'd have to make your own connection profile or change the system-wide one).
That's completely wrong (and never was right). NetworkManager is a system-wide deamon and it's user interface is pretty much just a single applet, which you can run absolutely anywhere. There is also a CLI now (nmcli).
(I've been using xmonad and NM on my laptop since xmonad 0.3 or something like that, which should be 3 years now, wow.)
In Germany, there is also a problem that many of these new lines are expected to have mixed traffic on them, meaning both fast passenger trains and freight trains. This makes them much more expensive than they would have to be, as both types of traffic have quite different expectations. Passenger trains need curves with very large diameters (~ speed^2 relation, even 7 km diameters) in order to allow the high speeds. Freight trains aren't that fast, so they don't need such a large diameters of the curves, but they can't handle as steep gradients. 4% slope is perfectly OK for an HS passenger train, but at least impractical for a freight traffic.
French HS train lines are for passenger traffic only, they can be (and are) built adjacent to existing highways and so. And of course. They are built as whole new lines, instead of the (not only) German patchwork.
Btw. you are missing HS railways in Spain, where it is built in a similar manner to France, there are already complete operational routes, and the service seems to be very successful as well.