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You're also more likely to be able to integrate "tree like" photo-voltaics into public spaces than you would flat-panel eye-sores.

I'll second a vote for the Nook Color. I rooted mine, too, with super, super easy instructions from http://nookdevs.com/
I don't read scientific papers, but I work in IT where a significant amount of documentation is in PDF format. The PDF reader from the Android store, which is free, has performed admirably for me. Different PDFs sometimes need different adjustments and I occasionally have to zoom pages to get them to fit right, but I've been very happy. As others have noted, battery life could be improved some, but it's good enough for my use. At least it gets me through an entire day without a problem, and I just charge it up with my iPhone at night.

Also, as others have mentioned, the $250 price was definitely a factor in my choice. As was the ability to read ebooks from both Barnes and Noble, natively, and Amazon, via an Android Kindle app. I didn't want to get locked into a single bookstore for all my ebooks! This was a neat solution to that problem, in my opinion. And, again, it handled PDFs very well without having to do any software gymnastics. Oh, and the Dropbox app makes getting PDFs from any of my PCs to my Nook a piece of cake.
Here's a couple shots from when I first got it:
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5134/5507703665_1ffa034af1_s.jpg
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5178/5508300506_3fa733191a_s.jpg

I'll second a vote for the Nook Color. I rooted mine, too, with super, super easy instructions from http://nookdevs.com/
I don't read scientific papers, but I work in IT where a significant amount of documentation is in PDF format. The PDF reader from the Android store, which is free, has performed admirably for me. Different PDFs sometimes need different adjustments and I occasionally have to zoom pages to get them to fit right, but I've been very happy. As others have noted, battery life could be improved some, but it's good enough for my use. At least it gets me through an entire day without a problem, and I just charge it up with my iPhone at night.

Also, as others have mentioned, the $250 price was definitely a factor in my choice. As was the ability to read ebooks from both Barnes and Noble, natively, and Amazon, via an Android Kindle app. I didn't want to get locked into a single bookstore for all my ebooks! This was a neat solution to that problem, in my opinion. And, again, it handled PDFs very well without having to do any software gymnastics. Oh, and the Dropbox app makes getting PDFs from any of my PCs to my Nook a piece of cake.
Here's a couple shots from when I first got it:
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5134/5507703665_1ffa034af1_s.jpg
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5178/5508300506_3fa733191a_s.jpg

Unfortunately, I don't think he was the first to think of it either. Can anyone say prior art? http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3206/2807030740_25f3f2fa53.jpg

You caught part of it , but even positioning of the flat array versus his "tree" skewed the results. There were times he shows where the tree was not in shade but the flat panel was fully in shade. The claims of increased efficiency ignore using panels that have mechanisms to allow them to track the sun. Plus he isn't measuring the right output of photo cells, he should have measured energy production.

As for his idea of trees, btdt http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3206/2807030740_25f3f2fa53.jpg

Someone with more IT-fu than I want to comment on why my Win7 computer stalls while trying to map NFS shares?

*Comment delivered via Dilbert cartoon*

...a multi storey bike park. The Dutch already do reduce car use. I went on holiday to Amsterdam and it is the only place I've ever seen with a multi-storey bicycle park full from top to bottom with bicycles. There are bicycles absolutely everywhere. Traffic in the city center is very light. Here's a picture http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3562/3321534598_c1ac9ce508_b.jpg

I think you need better examples. Women who bike, and then get pregnant, often continue to bike right up to their due date, or within a week.

I don't see too many young children driving cars, either, but I do see them riding in seats on bikes, in trailers, or on the backs or fronts of cargo bikes, or on tag-alongs, or on big bikes for carrying kids.

Friend of mine has congenital badness of the circulatory system, she thinks she'd be an invalid if not for regular bicycle commutes.

Another friend of mine has nerve pinches that don't let him ride a normal bike, so instead he uses an ElliptiGO. Lack of exercise was contributing to type 2 diabetes; his car was killing him, more or less. Now with some commutes by "bike", it's not.

In your case, perhaps a recumbent tricycle would work, but if not, there is such a thing as a wheelchair, and a car is just a sort of glorified wheelchair.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/metropolitanpolice/

You know you cant go picking races like that but I does appear to be a majority black youths assumably from poor areas going on the photos, etc - and that is just simple statistics from what is available. I'm not a sociologist so I dont know why these things come about. I dont like picking on other races but thats what the pictures show. I think why there are so many seemingly unemployed youths kicking for a fight is the real question.

They are mostly black. But the press, being the politically correct organ it is, is making certain to amplify the exposure of any whites participating. Not that anyone is fooled, other than those that want to be.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/metropolitanpolice/

You know you cant go picking races like that but I does appear to be a majority black youths assumably from poor areas going on the photos, etc - and that is just simple statistics from what is available. I'm not a sociologist so I dont know why these things come about. I dont like picking on other races but thats what the pictures show. I think why there are so many seemingly unemployed youths kicking for a fight is the real question.

I preferred the flares in 1976!
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3618/3462746684_6b04b2b493_b.jpg

I got a decent shot of the aurora resulting from the CMEs here in Montana early Saturday morning. I've collected my aurora shots here.

I have to say that although this was (visually) a moderately strong event, it wasn't even close to some of the auroral storms of the 90's. The power in the auroral oval wasn't very high, either.

I got a decent shot of the aurora resulting from the CMEs here in Montana early Saturday morning. I've collected my aurora shots here.

I have to say that although this was (visually) a moderately strong event, it wasn't even close to some of the auroral storms of the 90's. The power in the auroral oval wasn't very high, either.

I got a decent shot of the aurora resulting from the CMEs here in Montana early Saturday morning. I've collected my aurora shots here.

I have to say that although this was (visually) a moderately strong event, it wasn't even close to some of the auroral storms of the 90's. The power in the auroral oval wasn't very high, either.

I've seen proposals in the $40/ton-CO2 range, which corresponds to about $.40 per gallon of gasoline. We get fluctuations like that just from supply/demand/speculation, so it's not that enormous. Other costs (e.g., auto insurance) are comparable or larger. The cost of the Iraq war came to something like $.70 per gallon.

It's not nothing, and it has to be high enough to change behavior, but it doesn't have to be high enough to destroy the economy. That much "new" tax money flowing into the government could be offset by reduction in some other tax, preferably a regressive one (for example, exempting the first N dollars earned from Medicare or Social Security).

As far as "world-wide" goes, many of the other big players are already doing stuff. Gas taxes in Europe are very high already. China had one-child-per-family (ponder that, next time someone says "but what is China doing?"), and they also have regulations banning fossil-fueled motorcycles from city centers, in favor of e-bikes of various sorts (2010 sales, 28 million, scroll down through the comments here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/4973351342/ ). Even run on coal-powered electricity, a small 2-wheeled e-bike is so efficient that it's a huge win over any car commercially available.

i.e. http://www.flickr.com/photos/32382279@N02/3043826837/

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3027/2503059877_76dc4a82e0.jpg

The above image shows a Tandy 20MHz 386 computer for over $8k dollars U.S. Sure, many will say that DEC was the $10k Unix system, just consider that Intel was built on the success of a Fairchild employee Federico Faggin that created the 4004 micro-processor and this is where the ZiLOG Z80 was spun-off from while Intel went and made the 8008. So there you have it: American companies, outsourced over time, and then when these companies are in their greatest phase they outsource yet again.

Something should be done about outsourcing. Why help a bunch of thieves and murderers around the world when America can sit tight and look pretty for a couple hundred years for sake of not being on it's own island away from the world disease?

Off-topic, but why does the zdnet article use this picture of the Vietnam Memorial (well actually, a picture of a US silver dollar depicting the memorial)? Just because it has a list of names, and the article is about names? Couldn't they have found something a little more appropriate? And it's not like they found the image without knowing what it was, the title on the flickr page clearly states what it is.

Heres a pic of them in testing - http://www.flickr.com/photos/65580523@N07/5969526401/in/photostream

You should be able to put a 100" display up in almost any room; just take anything out of the way and hang the projector from the ceiling on the opposite side of the room. Screens.... any white wall will do. And any flat (must be flat!) white paint will do.

A really large display is just as easy, but you need a building with almost a 2-story exposure. We were super lucky and got an old, empty church on two lots for almost nothing, but I've been in lots of other houses where it was an available choice. We're huge gamers and movie watchers, so there wasn't much con/discussion once we saw that wall. I suppose if there is more conventional decorating / furnishing that's important to someone, this does require the wall to be entirely clear and that might be a project killer... but for us, it's worth it.

I've got a couple friends that have DLP projection systems with newer, brighter projectors, they're really pretty awesome. And they cost less than LCDs, too. this 135" guy is one of those... he started out with a 720p projector, now has a 1080p one. Check out the integrated cabinet/screen he built.

Even the most basic cabinet/screen building skills can save more money than the projector even costs.

As far as maintainance... we use ours every day, and replace the bulb every few years when it dims. Probably amounts to twenty five cents a day, max.

Dark rooms... nighttime, baby. :^) Seriously, I don't watch during the daylight hours, so it's not an issue. But blackout shades are super cheap down at wham-a-lart if you need 'em.

Lazy, I can't help ya with.

You should be able to put a 100" display up in almost any room; just take anything out of the way and hang the projector from the ceiling on the opposite side of the room. Screens.... any white wall will do. And any flat (must be flat!) white paint will do.

A really large display is just as easy, but you need a building with almost a 2-story exposure. We were super lucky and got an old, empty church on two lots for almost nothing, but I've been in lots of other houses where it was an available choice. We're huge gamers and movie watchers, so there wasn't much con/discussion once we saw that wall. I suppose if there is more conventional decorating / furnishing that's important to someone, this does require the wall to be entirely clear and that might be a project killer... but for us, it's worth it.

I've got a couple friends that have DLP projection systems with newer, brighter projectors, they're really pretty awesome. And they cost less than LCDs, too. this 135" guy is one of those... he started out with a 720p projector, now has a 1080p one. Check out the integrated cabinet/screen he built.

Even the most basic cabinet/screen building skills can save more money than the projector even costs.

As far as maintainance... we use ours every day, and replace the bulb every few years when it dims. Probably amounts to twenty five cents a day, max.

Dark rooms... nighttime, baby. :^) Seriously, I don't watch during the daylight hours, so it's not an issue. But blackout shades are super cheap down at wham-a-lart if you need 'em.

Lazy, I can't help ya with.

Projection systems create even less waste, allow for much larger images, and can generally be refurbished with nothing more complicated than a new bulb.

When my family gathers around for a movie, my 200" diagonal display allows me to include several generations. But the actual display hardware only consumes about 1/3 a cubic foot. The "display" is just wall space, which isn't going anywhere or being used for anything else.

Can someone with more knowledge about it light the room?

It tells us something about how the first stars evolved. That puts constraints on the physical models we use for stellar evolution and also of... well, physics. We can't create universes (yet), so the only way to know what happened during the Big Bang is to study what happened shortly thereafter, and to make sure that our theories of physics make predictions that are in accordance with our observations of the early universe. We now have some new observations of the early universe, which we can use to refine our theories.

The universe is 13.7 Gy old. The quazar is 12 Gly away. In 1.7 Gy, we now know that enough of the earliest stars had formed out of the universe's primordial hydrogen/helium, gone through their lives, and blown themselves up as supernovae (I've forgotten my freshman astronomy - can any astronomers confirm/deny that a star not massive enough to become a supernova, but massive to burn carbon into oxygen, can puff off their shells and create planetary nebulae, within a 1.5Gy lifespan?) or (with the preceding caveat in mind) release their oxygen into the mix.

We also know roughly how warm it is around that quasar, which tells us something about the rate at which matter is falling into its accretion disk. That tells us more things about the state of the early universe, and how black holes work, etc.

Is the byproduct of the technology that was developed to discover this something we'll use in our daily lives?

Newton and his silly prisms and figuring out how total internal reflection worked. Some dipshit at Dow Corning dripping molten glass through a funnel and wondering what to do with the really tiny strands of glass stuck to the top of the funnel when the glass ran out. You might be able to use the bendy glass structure and total internal reflection to create one of silly disco-era things, but that's about all it's good for.

Copper wire the only practical communications medium, and tungsten wire is the only practical light source. Lasers? PFFT, just a bunch of silly academicians playing with solid state physics. Way to expensive to stick one into a silly disco-ball lamp, and who'd want a bunch of random dots over every wall in your bedroom?

I'm sorry if you don't want to know what's over the next hill. Some of us think the universe is pretty neat. Others of us think that building cool gadgets is fun, and that the more we know about how the universe works today, the cooler gadgets our descendants will be able to build tomorrow.

Nathanial Burton-Bradford created a 3D red/cyan anaglyph which I posted and explained on my blog (if you pardon the blog spam; here's the direct link to his image w/o an explanation).

I get extremely grumpy when people think better photo gear can save you from poor skills.

subject
photographer
light
lens
camera

Check out flickr's pool of photos made with a manual focus lens you can buy for a tenner (in good condition, beat up ones go cheaper)
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=helios+44&f=hp

My current MacBook Pro I bought in 2007 is on its 4th battery, which now only holds charge for 30 minutes, showing 'health' of 13%, and has had 170 cycles. I really can't be bothered to by a 5th one.

Meanwhile, my MacBook has had over 1,400 cycles and has a health of 80% of its original charge when new.

I'd like a way to fool the firmware in to thinking my cells were fine, I'm pretty certain they are fine, they are just being mis-reported and the chip kills them off.

One battery did do this though: http://www.flickr.com/photos/simonhowes/4901087978/in/photostream

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=oslo&ss=2&s=rec#page=0

Cisco --- No Services

So much more funny as a picture...
... or this one... or this one or this one

Interestingly, these seem to be different locations as well (different exit number, different landscape, different design on sign), do we see a pattern here?

You asked for it.

When I was in elementary and middle school we'd climb, jump, and eat off of this http://www.flickr.com/photos/neurology/946532720/, now it's fenced off.

Rope jungle gym in Amsterdam(30ft): http://www.flickr.com/photos/29041151@N00/5961662333/in/photostream/lightbox/

Rope jungle gym in France(30ft): http://www.flickr.com/photos/ctirpak/2473242331/in/photostream/lightbox/

Rope jungle gym in the USA(12ft): http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinion345/2108323331/lightbox/

Rope jungle gym in Amsterdam(30ft): http://www.flickr.com/photos/29041151@N00/5961662333/in/photostream/lightbox/

Rope jungle gym in France(30ft): http://www.flickr.com/photos/ctirpak/2473242331/in/photostream/lightbox/

Rope jungle gym in the USA(12ft): http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinion345/2108323331/lightbox/

Rope jungle gym in Amsterdam(30ft): http://www.flickr.com/photos/29041151@N00/5961662333/in/photostream/lightbox/

Rope jungle gym in France(30ft): http://www.flickr.com/photos/ctirpak/2473242331/in/photostream/lightbox/

Rope jungle gym in the USA(12ft): http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinion345/2108323331/lightbox/

Wrong planet's moon... perhaps you're thinking of Saturn's Mimas

"No two countries with a mcDonalds have ever gone to war."

Nice idea, but false:

Georgia and Russia

Israel and Lebanon (check out the "McArabia" sandwich!)

NATO vs. Serbia

Yeah, but what about derivative works like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bwjones/5914210045/ or this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bwjones/5914755036/

That second one is fake! I suspect the monkey wasn't there at all!!! He probably just took the picture standing in front of a print of the other picture. Please!!!!!!

Yeah, but what about derivative works like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bwjones/5914210045/ or this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bwjones/5914755036/

That second one is fake! I suspect the monkey wasn't there at all!!! He probably just took the picture standing in front of a print of the other picture. Please!!!!!!

Yeah, but what about derivative works like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bwjones/5914210045/ or this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bwjones/5914755036/

That second one is fake! I suspect the monkey wasn't there at all!!! He probably just took the picture standing in front of a print of the other picture. Please!!!!!!

Yeah, but what about derivative works like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bwjones/5914210045/ or this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bwjones/5914755036/

That second one is fake! I suspect the monkey wasn't there at all!!! He probably just took the picture standing in front of a print of the other picture. Please!!!!!!

Yeah, but what about derivative works like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bwjones/5914210045/ or this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bwjones/5914755036/

Yeah, but what about derivative works like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bwjones/5914210045/ or this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bwjones/5914755036/

ob disc: I used to work at sun.

I heard mr java himself give a talk (I think it was at the java 10th anniv party at the santa clara campus, a few yrs back) and he seemed to say that mobile java (something about south america, too, I didn't quite get that) was a HUGE thing for sun. almost the reason for java to exist (the way he talked about java on mobile phones).

bonus: I found 2 photos that I took from that event:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/221/472512518_4f70840cd2_z.jpg
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/202/472513502_682f02afc2_z.jpg

enjoy ;)

ob disc: I used to work at sun.

I heard mr java himself give a talk (I think it was at the java 10th anniv party at the santa clara campus, a few yrs back) and he seemed to say that mobile java (something about south america, too, I didn't quite get that) was a HUGE thing for sun. almost the reason for java to exist (the way he talked about java on mobile phones).

bonus: I found 2 photos that I took from that event:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/221/472512518_4f70840cd2_z.jpg
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/202/472513502_682f02afc2_z.jpg

enjoy ;)

They missed one of the more interesting facts. One that I didn't know about until I played on an original Donkey Kong arcade that had been embedded into a table in a burrito restaurant in Orono, Maine, and read the instructions. The character's original name was Jumpman.

As with all technological problems someone at Burning Man has already prototyped an elegant solution.

you joke, but its true! its what the counterfeiters do.

I wanted to buy some brand-name trimmer pots (electronic parts) once and the well known brand is 'bourns'. what I ended up with was 'burans' and 'bochen' and 'baores':

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5124/5230789958_5036809ea9_b.jpg

wtf! tell me this was an honest mistake. yeah, right.

well, make this work FOR them, for a change. ignore the bullshit politics and 'make a mistake on the name' so that its not exactly hdmi. in fact, just say its 'hdmi-like' or 'hdmi-compatible'.

I was there, and shot some photos. [flickr letterbox'ed slideshow]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/danperdue/26204311/

You can see a picture of the Irish White House here

If anyone's curious I've got screenshots of the iOS Safari WebApp up.