Slashdot Mirror

Best cure for an open office plan is a white noise generator. The first time I heard one in an office I was amazed at how quite it was.

A HEPA air cleaner is a smart replacement for an electromechanical white-noise generator, performing an added useful function upon the air its moving, and improving the service life/reliability of lungs and electronic/electromechanical.devices. They are rated in the June, 2012 issue of Consumer Reports.

Best cure for an open office plan is a white noise generator. The first time I heard one in an office I was amazed at how quite it was.

A HEPA air cleaner is a smart replacement for an electromechanical white-noise generator, performing an added useful function upon the air its moving, and improving the service life/reliability of lungs and electronic/electromechanical.devices. They are rated in the June, 2012 issue of Consumer Reports.

Chris Liebing releases a 1-2hr track by different artists, (himself included) every Monday, all mostly similar to the schranz genre he's known for. He talks for a moment at the beginning, midpoint and end. Registration was recently mandated, which I avoid by downloading directly from the release directory; just decrement/increment the 000-padded release number for past/future releases. The current track is http://daten.clr.net/pod/CLRSR170.mp3

One of the artists featured on CLR, Speedy-J, has a page on SoundCloud* with seven lengthy single-track sets available for direct-download. The nine-hour 2010 NYC set is particularly good, though it takes a while to get going; the intro is a good thirty minutes long. =)

Ektoplazm features hundreds of full-CDs, all immediately and freely downloadable as MP3, FLAC and/or WAV, as well as streamed. Most electronica genres are represented here.

* SoundCloud is a good source of truly free music of all genres, though I can't speak to the quality of non-electronic genres. I have no qualms about file-sharing copyrighted works, but I find it fortunate that RIAA seems to have a particular disinterest in electronic music, though not for lack of its available quantity or quality.

Precisely. You are following Peter, Paul, and other people; not Jesus.

Screw that. I'm a Ringo man until the day I die.

Or did you mean "Mary man"?

Given one connotation of that phrase, not a chance.

Precisely. You are following Peter, Paul, and other people; not Jesus.

Screw that. I'm a Ringo man until the day I die.

Or did you mean "Mary man"?

The Nazis were stopped because they blatantly violated (nearly) everyone's rules of Universal Human Rights -- so much so that many of their own detested it.

The Nazis were stopped because they picked a fight with everyone in sight and bit over more than even they could chew, internal resistance was not a major issue until long after they had lost the critical battles of the war. Had Hitler stopped in May 1941, consolidated his forces and concentrated on blockading the UK while holding against the Soviets - who'd be totally crazy to attack - things would be very different. The US like to play up their part in WWII but the Nazis took 80% of the casualties on the Eastern Front, not the Western. Around ten million Soviet soldiers died in desperate defense of Moscow, Stalingrad and the oil fields to the south as well as an extremely harsh winter, that's what broke the Nazi army. You'd be surprised to know how many like racism as long as they're the superior race, and the inferior were quickly silenced.

After he basically said "Yeah LOL go fuck yourself" over the pot petition all should know you'd get more results by writing it on a piece of paper and promptly burning it

That's simplistic. The petition was clearly never going to get wedge issues passed, the petition system was first and foremost an attempt to get the internet generation to ACTUALLY FUCKING VOTE. A distant second goal was maybe to bring new ideas to light.

Why did Obama not legalize pot? Better question: with 74% of the nation having smoked at one point, and a majority saying pot should be legalized, why hasn't EVERY politician jumped on board with legalization? Answer: because people saying it should be legalized don't translate that into voting. Don't blame Obama, blame yourselves.

The robot, called 'Rosemary,' is about the size of a lawn mower and has four extended treaded feet that swivel up and down to help it climb over obstacles.

But after a few hours in the Fukushima Daiichi EZ-Bake-Nuclear Oven, it will morph into this critter: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cc/Mechagodzilla.jpg.

Call it Rosilla. Maybe a real life Roseanne Barr can battle it, while crushing paper houses, and being attacked by plastic model tanks, with fire crackers on their gun barrels?

So what do they do with the highly radioactive robot Rosemary after it crawls out of the reactor? Can they de-radioactivize it, or something like that? Or does it get buried in a concrete coffin for future generations to deal with?

In other words someone watched The Last Starfighter. Not exactly a new concept.

Considering the human degradation involved here, I thought maybe these employers had watched Bumfights .

I swear to the Tech Gods that if ANYONE comes out with "organic technology" I will personally use my homeopathic c-clamp to crush their testicles.

Get clamping, Clamps.

Well I just use the 10k number as a starting point, as I said one could sell it and use a cash for clunkers (or offer special government financing for the poor to get the hogs off the road) that would bring a 15k car into the realm of even those on minimum wage.

Our main disagreement between you and I on this seems to be the method to help the poor have cars. If you only make $8 an hour, you are too poor to be even considering buying a new car. That is not cruel, that's just reality. The LAST thing you would want is the government foisting debt onto the poor. In my view, the way you get those gas hogs off the road is not by having the government blow more money, but by making new cars cheaper to the middle class so those cars exist in greater abundance on the used market. That greater abundance of cheaper, more fuel efficient cars will make the gas hogs unprofitable to keep on the road because people will have an alternative.

But notice how i got modded down for pissing on a sacred cow, the electric car. i do hope you agree that that tech is a dead end with current tech.......

As far as I can see. Electric cars are dead end tech period. Physics itself says that electric cars will always suck because of energy density. Gasoline, Diesel, and even LNG are very energy dense methods of storing energy. Batteries are simply too bulky and heavy to ever compete. Even at 100% effeciency an electric car will still suck because the batteries physically can't store enough energy to matter. Check out the chart.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Energy_density.svg

To electric car proponents: Note that Lithium Ion is the best battery tech we have today and it's at the bottom left of the chart. Then compare with Gasoline. "Better batteries" are not going to solve the problem as we are already at about 50% of the theoretical maximum density from current battery tech. Bettery Tech needs to improve by 30 times to even START competing with gasoline and that is physically impossible. Batteries do lots of things well. Powering a car is not one of them. If you want to build/ buy an electric car, go ahead. Just do not expect me to subsidize it.

Hydrogen is a no-go for numerous reasons as well. The cheapest way to produce it is by cracking natural gas, you might as well just have dual fuel gasoline/LNG powered cars if you are going to try that. Then there are the problems of a hydrogen storage tank vs a natural gas one, again relating to energy density.

We know how to make VERY clean and efficient diesel cars NOW, this can be done with current tech with no major hurdles.

My dad's 1989 Chevy Sprint got 50 MPG without too much effort. They were actually surprisingly safe for front seat passengers, i know several people who totaled theirs, one at 75 mph. (Bit of a death trap for those in the back, but one has to weigh risks.) He parked it out at my uncle's farm about 10 years ago because the clutch wore out. I keep thinking about what it would take to put it on the road again. New clutch and some new hoses is about all I can think of.

Here is a simple solution to the problem which should keep Fox happy.

Yea, comparison with Chernobyl were totally unnecessary. Chernobyl was a limited release from a plant operating a residual power (around 7%).

Chernobly was not a limited release. Saying the core was at 7% power is meaningless in an RBMK reactor because of the positive void coefficient. The RMBK reactor is designed to output about 1.5 GW of power. The last reading on the Chernobly controls was 33 GW of thermal power. What happened at Chernobly was the cooling was flash boiled pockets of steam (voids) in the cooling pipes. The positive void coefficient means that when voids form, the reaction speeds up. This increased reaction rate caused more voids to form which caused the reaction to speed up even more. This positive feedback loop continued until the steam pressure caused a steam explosion. Chunks of the reactor were thrown outside the building through the gapping hole in the roof. The reactor core was actually exposed to air. You can see in photographs the biological shield sitting on its side. The residual heat of the reactor continued to meltdown through several layers of concrete eventually solidifying in the basement of reactor building. The graphite moderator, used in the RMBK design, was also on fire spewing large amounts of radio active ash in the atmosphere.

Okay -- I RTFM'd, and it seems like the author can't really see the forest for the trees.

Sure, UI is important, but if you're worried about us developing a browser monoculture, you need to look at the rendering engine, and not the UI and trademark that is slapped onto the result.

And as things currently stand, a monoculture is already forming around Webkit. On the PC side, KHTML, Konqueror, Safari, and Chrome all use Webkit (as well as numerous more minor browsers). On the mobile side, iOS, Chromebooks, Android, Symbian S60 browser, Blackberry browser (6.0+), HP's webOS, and Amazon's Silk all run on Webkit.

Looking at WikiMedia's stats for April 2012 (link), it appears from my rough calculations that nearly 36% of HTML page hits were from Webkit based browsers -- more than for any other browser engine. When looking at just mobile browsers, Webkit accounts for more than 80% of page hits from mobile devices.

Personally, I don't see this as a bad thing. While it was bad when Microsoft's Triton engine held near total dominance in browser engine use on the Internet (bad because it was tied to a single platform and vendor, and didn't conform to W3C standards well (and in some cases, not at all)), having an Open Source Webkit, which is collaborated on by a wide variety of browser vendors and which does an excellent (and I'd say the best) job of conforming to web standards hold dominance is a good thing. It means we have a single standard that web developers can focus their efforts against (W3C standards that is), while allowing anyone to improve upon it and implement it as they see fit, on a plethora of devices.

Looking at the graph in the article, if you instead break it down by rendering engine, you'll see that at least 80% of their mobile visitors in March were running Webkit based browsers.

So if he's worried about "one browser dominating them all", he's looking at the wrong equation. The concern now isn't that one browser will become dominant; however it appears that one rendering engine will become dominant. IMO it's a good thing in the case of Webkit, due to its standards compliance and open source nature. Sure, you may not have a lot of choice of browsers on your mobile device, but competition between device manufacturers and the fact that virtually all of them ship with browsers based on the same browser engine will ensure a base level of rendering support, good standards compliance, and in the case of features all of them want/need that such changes can be made (where logical) to Webkit itself, and then trickle down to all of the mobile browsers. Looks like a whole lot of win to me.

Which isn't to say that I think lack of choice is a good thing in and of itself -- merely that when your choice is between three different browsers running on the same rendering engine (and many of them the same Javascript engine), will most people even care?

Yaz

As François Truffaut said, "there is no such thing as an anti-war movie because it will invariably look exciting up on screen."

Check out BBC's Threads (1984).

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/
https://thepiratebay.se/search/Threads+1984/0/3/201
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Threads

The Wikimedia browser stats pretty much match the StatCounter ones: 25.36% IE, 24.99% Chrome.

Note that Wikimedia is (a) a top-10 site with a broad general international readership (b) a charity with no direct interest in the question of "which browser wins?" but only in knowing the actual answers, so as to serve the readers.

Nevertheless, their stats could still be inflated artificially by browsers doing pre-rendering, which is where the discrepancy is claimed to come from.

The Wikimedia browser stats pretty much match the StatCounter ones: 25.36% IE, 24.99% Chrome.

Note that Wikimedia is (a) a top-10 site with a broad general international readership (b) a charity with no direct interest in the question of "which browser wins?" but only in knowing the actual answers, so as to serve the readers.

Looking forward to the feelies, where 4D is utterly insufficient...

Just a wild guess, but I'm thinking you're not their target market.

Not quite. Microsoft isn't using surgical precision to target scattered customers hiding in the wilderness. If nothing else, Microsoft's flagship product —which is merely the latest rehash of the operating system developed by and unwittingly freely donated by Digital Equipment Corporation, i.e. NT— is a swiss army knife of desktop operating systems (and fully recognizing this is a tremendously generous characterization of it, boy do I wish that's all it were). Microsoft wants it to be everything to everyone. They want everyone to pay and repay for many many licenses of Windows.

Now... I must digress. I had an emotional reaction to this summary that is epitomized in either some Jackie Chan meme I can't quite articulate, or an as yet unknown Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. meme. I had a similar reaction when Defender was announced. I realize that many of us work with Windows intimately, and need the hostile environment Windows creates in the sense that the unacceptable state a Windows installation inevitably degrades to puts food on the table: Windows is our work, and if it were perfect, we wouldn't have jobs.

But it just seems anathema to me that instead of fixing the product before they sell it to us and our clients, i.e. adjusting Windows such that crapware becomes extinct, Microsoft instead turns around and recognizes that there is this new market here created by a deficit in their flawed product, and now that this market is being exploited by the enterprising individuals that support their flawed product, Microsoft can now step in and directly compete with them. If I didn't know better, and I certainly do, I'd say Microsoft's target market was moronic lemmings.

It just occurred to me that what you meant was GP couldn't be the target market for this "product," the un-OEMing cleansing, because GP no longer uses Windows. And so I apologize to you because ... you are seriously hilarious and I missed it because I am mildly emotional about the announcement of this new "product," and well, look again at those pictures I linked to and try to figure out just what meme belongs.

Car analogy time! Lets imagine that the vehicles coming off Ford's assembly line are immaculate, and pass any white glove test. But (allow me to invent hypothetical) evil Ford OEM distributors for some reason feel it's necessary to cover the cars in a fine dusting of filth that is quite tricky to completely get rid of... the yuk seems to multiply. Oddly, it slows the car down and kills its gas miliage while doing it. And now Ford customers have been complaining that by the time they get their new vehicle, its covered in filth and grime. Enterprising Ford dealers build car washes next to their dealerships to not only satisfy the customer as best they can, but also to make an extra buck. So... when is Ford going to start building signature car washes to compete with the Ford dealers and get into this newly recognized car washing market? While the GP is saying "screw cars! I can't take the filth they attract," I'm (please find the meme for me, I'm tired) saying "Dammit, Ford... you've been selling these filth magnets for ages... when are you going to fix your cars so they can't get dirty??!"

Well... although my metaphor seems to weaken my own argument, because we all know that in reality, cars really do attract dirt and there's nothing anyone can do about it, operating systems are not cars and absolutely can be engineered to not allow OEM CrapWare® (and to a large extent, can be engineered to be self-secure against malware, viruses and the like).

It's inherently an interaction between individual parties. Services that provide social interaction are doing what could otherwise be done with protocols and local servers if not merely clients. Advances in software will burst this bubble.

Indeed, no one company should control all the information, and we well recognize that privacy is a major concern, so we have forces that will push us in the direction of developing the protocols and software.

Or so I think. How are things coming along?

GP's point is that a bunch of guns are prohibited in Canada for the sole reason of looking scary or having unsavory associations - for example, AK or MP5 (we're obviously talking about civilian semi auto versions with 5-round mags here). It's pretty obvious bullshit when AK is "prohibited" (and so is any variation, including Saiga in any caliber!), while Vz 58 is "unrestricted". Or, similarly, FAL being prohibited while M14 is perfectly okay. Or why ARs are always "restricted" regardless of barrel length, while a 18.5" XCR is "unrestricted".

GP's point is that a bunch of guns are prohibited in Canada for the sole reason of looking scary or having unsavory associations - for example, AK or MP5 (we're obviously talking about civilian semi auto versions with 5-round mags here). It's pretty obvious bullshit when AK is "prohibited" (and so is any variation, including Saiga in any caliber!), while Vz 58 is "unrestricted". Or, similarly, FAL being prohibited while M14 is perfectly okay. Or why ARs are always "restricted" regardless of barrel length, while a 18.5" XCR is "unrestricted".

I don't know where either of you are getting your numbers but these may help:
2010 US federal budget breakdown chart
US Military budget (uses 2010 number)
US Federal Budget (uses 2011 number)
Maybe this impressive chart from the New York Times on the 2011 budget
Then there is the XKCD Money poster that also has a federal budget breakdown Simple fact is that we spend more money on social programs than we do on military (hell I'll even toss in the veterans affairs stuff too if that makes you feel better). Yes we could probably cut massive amounts out of the budget but don't pretend that the majority of our federal spending is on the military granted it is a large portion but still not any where near the majority.

Having been around a number of steam engines and people who own them I doubt the problem would be with materials. There are people who, as their hobby, restore old steam engines either the locomotive ones or tractors. The technology is basically the same and the large steam tractors are basically just steam locomotive with different running gear. It doesn't appear that Wikipedia or Wikimedia has very good pictures of them so I think I may need to get some pictures next year at the threshing shows. For things like boilers they were typically made from cast iron, or a very mild steel. The forged parts were typically in things like the running gear, like pistons, shafts, axles, etc. Even today there are people who create small 1/10 or so scale fully functional models from off the shelf materials. They will run run them at similar pressures (150-200 psi) as the full size brethren and will actually forge their own parts as these people seem to have the right background knowledge. As far a forging large parts we still do that but as the need for large forged parts has declined (really how many 400 ton trucks or other comparable sized equipment is needed each year) so has capacity to forge the parts.

The biohazard symbol was the tracing of a 7" reel-to-reel spindle. The radiation symbol is a 10" reel-to-reel spindle.

Obvious to anyone that was an AV geek in the 70s.

The biohazard symbol was the tracing of a 7" reel-to-reel spindle. The radiation symbol is a 10" reel-to-reel spindle.

Obvious to anyone that was an AV geek in the 70s.

If you built the gun barrel 20 KM long, so that it extended into the outer atmosphere and it was an electromagnetic railgun, then you could gradually accellerate a craft and pop it out the top and fire a rocket engine to get an extra boost. It could work. The StarTram project could be more promising. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/StarTram

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/EightTNOs.png

in the last decade, they started to find a lot more plutos. so the question is do we have 10, 16, 54 planets? or do we say "look, pluto doesn't really fit the idea of something large that controls its orbit, so it's not a planet" and so we only have 8 planets

it's a perfectly good decision

If we have a 72-kg (158 lb.) person made mostly out of water, that's about 4,000 moles

What you say doesn't make any sense, as one European mole has a mass of about 100 grams. If one human consisted of 4000 moles, said human would have a mass of about 400kg! Turning it the other way around, one out of 4000 moles making a 72-kg-human would have a mass of just 18g. That must be some significantly smaller species than the European mole!

Dude! Did you use our fine, European, metric mole or did you calculate everything in imperial moles?!

Aww

Harder to notice was that the person at the wheel was not actually driving.

The car is a project of Google, which has been working in secret but in plain view on vehicles that can drive themselves

seven test cars have driven 1,000 miles without human intervention and more than 140,000 miles with only occasional human control

At the point when the article was written 18 months ago, they'd already clocked all those miles, in secret, lending credence to the notion that they enjoy anonymity in this affair. There was slightly more fanfare for the current announcement, simply because they're getting a much bigger sandbox to play in. One does not post a million dollar insurance bond for the entire state of Nevada without someone taking notice.

Also, if you'll look at the full picture of the test vehicle you'll easily see that a minimalist approach was taken to the modifications. The camera on the roof and off-center license plate are the only real hints that something is amiss. And with Google already known for cars with cameras on top, the camera atop the G'car looks rather subdued. As for the rest of your strawman about "a poorly disguised car with no driver," the picture at the top of the article was obviously a mock-up for the photo-op. They've said quite clearly that every test was conducted with both a driver and passenger.

I hope you do realize that Taiwan claims both mainland China and Mongolia. Showing in this map.

The US poor person has healthier food, more comfortable lodgings and much better health by almost any measure than the wealthiest king 200 years ago.

The only one of those that may be plausible may be better healthcare. I don't see many poor people living in something like the Palace of Versaille or eating as voraciously as Louis XIV

Its damned near impossible to BSOD a Windows 7 system with a bad driver, it will just silently kill and restart the driver (as a system should) and make a little note in Action Center about it.

Is there any online documentation on this feature where the OS can silently kill and restart the driver? I can't find any references to that other than for "VPU Recover", which is supported as far back as Windows XP.

I have recently been configuring a webserver running Windows Server 2008 R2, which uses the same kernel, NT 6.1, as Windows 7. It frequently gives a BSOD with error code "STOP: 0xD1". The minidump suggests the problem is due to an interaction between the network card driver and the kernel network libraries. This problem occurs with two different network card adaptors (with different drivers). It would be an huge improvement if Windows would simply restart the drivers rather than BSOD.

Pot is not illegal because its a drug... Our nation is drowning in drugs. Its because the Pharmaceutical business can't monopolize it and make a hundred billion dollars. No chance cheap effective solutions like l-tryptophan for insomnia, or pot for nausea are going to be made available when they can sell you expensive drugs with terrible side effects that require more terrible drugs to cure the side effects with even more terrible side effects, etc., etc., etc.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Tetrahydrocannabinol#Dronabinol

I don't think Big Pharma is entirely to blame. I also blame the DEA's unilateral ability to issue (usually arbitrary and inconsistent) drug scheduling edicts, the lobbies for the prison-industrial complex, and those in government who act on their behalf.

[citation needed]. It's 1.65% according to Wikimedia's stats (includes wikipedia.org traffic - a top 6 site), 5.22% if you include Android.

Here's his citation (according to StatOwl). Aren't statistics cool?

[citation needed]. It's 1.65% according to Wikimedia's stats (includes wikipedia.org traffic - a top 6 site), 5.22% if you include Android.

We will see drunks piss on a cable, then their next of kin sue the station and everyone else upstream.

These problems have already been solved.

The Japanese fast charging standard CHAdeMO has both power delivery as well as a CAN bus data connection in the "nozzle".
A communications channel is opened, and a diagnostic run on the battery system to determine there are no problems before power is even engaged to the pump.

Shorting out the CAN data lines will do nothing. Unless your piss can speak binary using the right protocol and sending the right responses up the line, there will be no power to harm you.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/CHAdeMO_Plug_VacavilleDavisStDC2.jpg

There is no reason to NOT include such a basic safety feature, which is always the case for any such potentially dangerous machinery designed to be fully self serviced by the below average consumer.

Gas stations are already under heavy video surveillance to prevent both vandalism and theft of service. This will not change.

What disturbs me is how politicized science has become. Science should be a discipline of absolutes.

Not science, but social "science". Which includes the study of politics ('nuff said) and shares its mistaken equivalence of victory in an inflamed debate with factual accuracy. Social "science" is and always has been infested with absurd propositions, bad experiments, misinterpretation of results, paucity of data, appalling innumeracy, and unsupported dodgy inferences dressed as fact. Goal-oriented plagiarism to get a doctorate is just par for the course.

Those of us actually in science don't regard social studies as a science for these and many other reasons.

Actually, you could put the nude tanning section on the roof of the First-Class Lounge., which IIRC was accessible to First Class passengers at the time. Just a thought.

OTOH, if you have ever sailed the North Atlantic, at any time of year, you'd know that no sane human being would want to wear a bikini, given the consistent high winds and relatively low temperatures (there's a reason icebergs were hanging around in that region in April, after all...)

http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm

This is probably a more reliable estimate of reality. And I must correct my comment: only ubuntu is significant.

Unaware of the real arguments, i would say: complexity. It would make a critical component more prone to problems.

Please be aware: The control stick in an Airbus is a small joystick today which is not in the "line of sight" of both pilots. You would have to look at it directly or put your hand there to notice it's position:

http://pnaconsult.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/2.293181416.jpg

In Boeing 787 the stick is much bigger:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8a/787-flight-deck.jpg/800px-787-flight-deck.jpg

Linking them makes more sense than in an Airbus.

I have talked to some pilots and they prefer the Airbus way, but i consider them biased in favour of Airbus.

Actually, the particle was formerly known as http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/af/Prince_logo.svg

Maybe the fact that it always seems 50 years away has something to do with this?

They said in 1978 that then current funding levels would never produce a viable power platform. To get one going by today would have required on average $2.5 billion per year by the fusion researchers' own estimates. Actual funding since 1978? $500 million per year. Quite blaming the science for the politicians shortsightedness.

That evacuation never happened, and we do not talk about it.

I just hope that the user interface doesn't include the disaster bar. I know that setting off a volcano in your city center can add excitement and all, but that would be going too far.

I believe you could retain a functional disaster bar by simply installing Windows ME. I think they called it the "start menu", though. You could sandbox your SimCity instances too, and make it (slightly) recursive.

Please forward these worthy suggestions to Watson, the present mayor of Ottawa. I'm sure the mayor can rustle up some Canadian federal support for these fine initiatives.

Successfully making a tasp or droud would probably lead to the end of humanity in a generation or so. At least the end of any non-stone-age parts.

[T]he argument that the hubristic people make is that Earth is the only planet with complex/intelligent life (because to think they're one of billions in a universe with billions of billions is too much to handle).

I think this may likely be (partially) due to the weakness* of the human mind in its ability to handle/visualize large numbers. I have found the pages in the following Wikipedia category somewhat helpful in this regard: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Category:Orders_of_magnitude

* Relative to machines; not other known minds.

For comparison here's the statue of liberty and here's a campground in South Dakota.

The parks service could turn the badlands into a parking lot and far fewer people would be upset about that than if they sold the statue of liberty for scrap metal, but there are other people, myself included, who are far more impressed with natural beauty than a statue. Better to save both than to cut one for something as stupid as "Congress wants to cut the budget and the parks service's lobbyists were the least effective."

Turning back to the situation at UF, sure they could have taken the cuts and eliminated the theater department and scaled back some construction of new labs or dorms, and maybe fewer people would have objected. Then Rick Scott could get back to cutting taxes in peace and easily get re-elected. It might be that lowered corporate taxes ($458 million from the budget last year) will do more good than the theater department would have, but as a crazy liberal, I'd rather take a chance on students.

So let me see if I get this straight. Are you saying that ALL CAPS is newer, or were you saying that you prefer approaches that are so last three decades ago to those that started last decade and are still pervasive and evolving in 2012?

Aluminum was very expensive a hundred years ago. Only the most wealthy could afford an Aluminum tea set. Now, a hundred years later, Aluminum cans cost pennies and are infinitely recyclable.

I watched an interesting BBC documentary the other day, Stuff: A Horizon Guide to Materials . In it, Napoleon Bonaparte was said to have owned an aluminum dinner set, which he permitted no one else to use; his guests had to make do with his silverware set.

The Washington Monument is also topped with aluminum. Quoting Wikipedia:

[...] it was finally completed, with the 100 ounce (2.85 kg) aluminum apex/lightning-rod being put in place on December 6, 1884. The apex was the largest single piece of aluminum cast at the time, when aluminum commanded a price comparable to silver. Two years later, the Hall–Héroult process made aluminum easier to produce and the price of aluminum plummeted, making the once-valuable apex nearly worthless, though it still provided a lustrous, non-rusting apex that served as the original lightning rod.