Just to nitpick, this was my area of research in grad school. Heat transport by the Gulf Stream directly isn't the whole story, or even the major part of it. The sea surface temperatures off of England and continental Europe really aren't fantastically warmer than the west coast of North America at the same latitude, but its climate is somewhat warmer on the whole. Most of the warmth in these regions has to do with the jet stream rather than the Gulf Stream. The big storms that the north Atlantic is famous for are what actually transports a lot of heat to Europe. Now to what extent the jet stream is dependent upon the Gulf Stream is a different and much more complicated matter.
The short and bitterly cold winter in the midwest was an outlier in an otherwise very mild winter. That was weather at work, specifically the result of the polar jet stream taking a meander to the south. On average the winter was warm and mild as predicted for an El Nino year. That's the big difference, predicting things like a 2-week cold snap in an otherwise mild winter is hard because weather is a chaotic system in the short term. This applies to things like the huge snowstorms in the northeast as well.
Climatology deals with seasonal averages over years at a time, so what the models are telling us is that in general the southwestern US is going to become drier, precipitation in the midwest is going to become more erratic and extreme, and winters will in general be milder with more extreme deviations from the mean. Which in the end doesn't look good for daily weather forecasting, but the long-term models are doing pretty well. It's doubtful we'll ever have weather forecast models that are good more than about 36 hours in advance, but they're a very different breed from what climatology is all about.
Nice to know that I wasted years of my life studying climatology in grad school. Thank you Mr. Armchair Expert. Now I'll just suggest maybe you look up the difference between predicting the weather and predicting climate. Weather is a highly chaotic system on a day to day basis and it's very difficult to model the interactions below the meso-scale for any length of time with great success because the necessary model resolution is computationally intensive. Climate on the other hand is about broad trends and statistical averages.
I spent a great deal of time modeling the jet streams in grad school and had a model that could fairly accurrately predict under what conditions the jet stream split in two (as the southern hemisphere jet stream does often and the northern hemisphere does occasionally). Most people would call that a successful climate model, and the results are quite believable. Does it mean I could tell you if it would rain on a particular day? No. Could I tell you under what general conditions you're likely to have a rainy winter? Yes. That's the difference between climate and weather.
They didn't destroy the ozone layer because we stopped emitting them in such large quantities, and now some of the damage caused is beginning to reverse. People who say we cried wolf over acid rain, the ozone, ddt, etc. are being disingenuous. These disasters didn't come about because we did something and the policy worked.
In this case isn't not GIGO, it's good data in trash out. Every one of our existing models is flawed and inaccurate.
Care to back that up? I've actually worked with the models. While every model makes assumptions, even quite simplistic models can give you useful information about the functioning of a complicated system. And believe it or not, our current climate models have made verifiable predictions, which makes it a little easier to think we must be doing something right with them. There are a few large scale atmospheric oscillations that were predicted by models and then later confirmed in historical data.
I'd honestly be more concerned with global warming killing the jet stream than this. The jet stream is largely the result of low-altitude/surface-level thermal gradients (ie the equator to pole temperature difference). Given that most climate models predict the poles will warm significantly more than the equator, if they turn out to be correct I'd say that's far more troubling to the jet stream than a few big kites.
Alternatively, why not just make a glove that vibrates in the presence of magnetic fields? This could actually be a really cool use of magnetorestrictive materials, and you get to avoid the complications of having a physical implant (MRIs, rotting fingers, etc).
You did notice the article is only talking about UK numbers, right? The PAL region extends outside the UK, so that 300,000 also includes the rest of the EU for starters. So, yes, the UK did buy 70k Xbox 360s and Microsoft did ship 300k to the PAL region, but that doesn't mean they didn't also sell out in the UK or the larger PAL area.
I work for a company where most of us make a pretty good income, and I'm in the minority of people who own HDTVs. The vast majority of people don't have them in the US.
Actually, being the same sort of gamer as the OP, the real issue comes down to "Why would I pay more for product X which has features I don't use when I can get just what I want from product Y for less?" It's all well and good for the PS3 to appeal to the "hardcore" gamer, but as a casual gamer, I can't see any reason why I'd want to pay an extra $350 for a PS3 with a ton of features I won't use when a Wii can provide me with a quick hour of gaming here and there.
Does it occur to you that perhaps they want to appeal to a variety of different markets? Does it occur to you that perhaps they want to give different consumers different things, and that perhaps they are attempting to use multiple revenue models to support different sorts of costumers?
While it's all well and good to try to appeal to a variety of markets, my suspicion is that Sony will have a tough time convincing the "casual" gamers to buy an expensive product that does more than they want or need. Given it seems casual gamers are the larger market, I'd say the sales figures are going to be drastically impacted by price, at least when compared to a system like the Wii or even PS2.
2. How does Boeing "secretly" patent "The so-called 'uninterruptible autopilot system'"
Boeing has "secretly" patented all sorts of classified technology, as have most companies working in the Defense/Intelligence industries. The classified patent system has been in place for a while. Just because something is patented doesn't mean it's publicly available knowledge.
One doesn't have to be comfortable with math to teach it any more than an english teacher needs to be literate. Teachers have answer books to help them. Unlike english, math is easy for a moron to teach since the answer is either exactly right, or it's wrong. There's no comprehension needed to perform at that level.
If you're talking about teaching simple math, you're probably correct. Most people intuitively understand things like addition and subtraction. The point at where this is no longer valid is when you're talking about teaching advanced math concepts in high school, which is where the real shortage occurs. If you're a math teacher trying to teach calculus you'd better be comfortable with the concept of integration if you want to have any hope of explaining it to a student who has never seen it before. Advanced mathematics isn't as simple as right/wrong, it's teaching a certain way of thinking.
I'd be surprised if Pluto weren't warming, given it is just past perihelion and it has some quirky orbital parameters. Funny how when things get closer to the sun they warm up a bit. I'd also point out neither article mentions anything to do with the sun getting hotter, and both have quite plausible explanations for the observed trends on both bodies. These articles in no way supports your "OMG it's a conspiracy!" distortion field, unless you believe the astronomers are in on it with the climatologists and geologists.
Also, if you bother to check your history, James Hansen didn't pull this out of his ass and a bunch of climatologists suddenly said "Brilliant! We can finally crush ExxonMobile/Shell/BP/Chevron!!!". There was quite a bit of review and discussion early on, it's just that the theory that best explained the observations survived, which is how good science works.
PS: I did climate modeling in grad school. If you think it's so bloody simple and we're all just idiots, let's see you build a model than predicts anything useful.
I'd just like to point out that computers were used for "real" engineering long before they became ubiquitous in the workplace or home. Why do you think FORTRAN is one of the oldest computing languages in existence?
There are several popular & established gaming genres that do not lend themselves well to a wand controller:
I have to wholeheartedly disagree with this statement.
racing/driving games,..., flight sims
You clearly haven't played Excite Truck on the Wii. To me, holding the wii remote sideways and tilting to steer feels much more natural than trying to steer with an analog thumbstick. I don't even like racing games and I find it to be very fun. To address the flight sims, I see two options: one is to use the thumbstick on the nunchuck to steer (which is the route it seems Blazing Angels is going to take), or go with the sideways configuration and use a combination of tilt/roll of the remote to handle roll and pitch (seeing as yaw on a real airplane is mostly a combination of these two I don't see a need for a true 'yaw' in the style of space flight sims). The cow racing game in Wii Play even has a good example of using the latter control style (except roll controls speed instead).
...shooters...
How is the application not obvious to shooters? Analog thumbstick for movement, wii remote for aiming, plus there are ten easily accessible buttons (6 normal + 4 with the d-pad). After seeing the potential I can't imagine going back to trying to aim with an analog stick, it's just sucky.
...and fighting games to name a few. Games where a handled-object are used seem to be the best & most obvious fit.
Fighting games I concur could be tricky. We'll see how well the port of MK: Armaggeddon goes this summer before I pass judgment on that genre. Plus, I can see a lot of genres opening up that traditionally sucked on consoles, like any kind of RTS or turn-based strategy game, since the wii remote is a perfectly functional pointer. I know some people disagree because its pointing isn't perfect, but as long as there is an on-screen cursor it's really not any more difficult to adjust to than a mouse.
Slashdot Mirror
The term you're looking for is red giant. Red dwarfs are just regular stars even smaller than our own, and the name comes from their reddish spectra.
You mean you couldn't find a way to mention that they tend to secrete high velocity jets of material?
Well, they don't tend to attract things any more than any other object with mass. They just happen to be a little more secretive.
Just to nitpick, this was my area of research in grad school. Heat transport by the Gulf Stream directly isn't the whole story, or even the major part of it. The sea surface temperatures off of England and continental Europe really aren't fantastically warmer than the west coast of North America at the same latitude, but its climate is somewhat warmer on the whole. Most of the warmth in these regions has to do with the jet stream rather than the Gulf Stream. The big storms that the north Atlantic is famous for are what actually transports a lot of heat to Europe. Now to what extent the jet stream is dependent upon the Gulf Stream is a different and much more complicated matter.
The short and bitterly cold winter in the midwest was an outlier in an otherwise very mild winter. That was weather at work, specifically the result of the polar jet stream taking a meander to the south. On average the winter was warm and mild as predicted for an El Nino year. That's the big difference, predicting things like a 2-week cold snap in an otherwise mild winter is hard because weather is a chaotic system in the short term. This applies to things like the huge snowstorms in the northeast as well.
Climatology deals with seasonal averages over years at a time, so what the models are telling us is that in general the southwestern US is going to become drier, precipitation in the midwest is going to become more erratic and extreme, and winters will in general be milder with more extreme deviations from the mean. Which in the end doesn't look good for daily weather forecasting, but the long-term models are doing pretty well. It's doubtful we'll ever have weather forecast models that are good more than about 36 hours in advance, but they're a very different breed from what climatology is all about.
Nice to know that I wasted years of my life studying climatology in grad school. Thank you Mr. Armchair Expert. Now I'll just suggest maybe you look up the difference between predicting the weather and predicting climate. Weather is a highly chaotic system on a day to day basis and it's very difficult to model the interactions below the meso-scale for any length of time with great success because the necessary model resolution is computationally intensive. Climate on the other hand is about broad trends and statistical averages.
I spent a great deal of time modeling the jet streams in grad school and had a model that could fairly accurrately predict under what conditions the jet stream split in two (as the southern hemisphere jet stream does often and the northern hemisphere does occasionally). Most people would call that a successful climate model, and the results are quite believable. Does it mean I could tell you if it would rain on a particular day? No. Could I tell you under what general conditions you're likely to have a rainy winter? Yes. That's the difference between climate and weather.
They didn't destroy the ozone layer because we stopped emitting them in such large quantities, and now some of the damage caused is beginning to reverse. People who say we cried wolf over acid rain, the ozone, ddt, etc. are being disingenuous. These disasters didn't come about because we did something and the policy worked.
I'd honestly be more concerned with global warming killing the jet stream than this. The jet stream is largely the result of low-altitude/surface-level thermal gradients (ie the equator to pole temperature difference). Given that most climate models predict the poles will warm significantly more than the equator, if they turn out to be correct I'd say that's far more troubling to the jet stream than a few big kites.
Yes, I believe a DeLorean connected to a large cable and going precisely 88 mph does the trick...
Alternatively, why not just make a glove that vibrates in the presence of magnetic fields? This could actually be a really cool use of magnetorestrictive materials, and you get to avoid the complications of having a physical implant (MRIs, rotting fingers, etc).
Eh, I could care less about the total numbers, I'm just a logic nazi. The original post was (whether intentionally or not) misleading.
Again, that 70k is for the UK, not Europe at large, so this is a faulty comparison.
You did notice the article is only talking about UK numbers, right? The PAL region extends outside the UK, so that 300,000 also includes the rest of the EU for starters. So, yes, the UK did buy 70k Xbox 360s and Microsoft did ship 300k to the PAL region, but that doesn't mean they didn't also sell out in the UK or the larger PAL area.
I work for a company where most of us make a pretty good income, and I'm in the minority of people who own HDTVs. The vast majority of people don't have them in the US.
Actually, being the same sort of gamer as the OP, the real issue comes down to "Why would I pay more for product X which has features I don't use when I can get just what I want from product Y for less?" It's all well and good for the PS3 to appeal to the "hardcore" gamer, but as a casual gamer, I can't see any reason why I'd want to pay an extra $350 for a PS3 with a ton of features I won't use when a Wii can provide me with a quick hour of gaming here and there.
While it's all well and good to try to appeal to a variety of markets, my suspicion is that Sony will have a tough time convincing the "casual" gamers to buy an expensive product that does more than they want or need. Given it seems casual gamers are the larger market, I'd say the sales figures are going to be drastically impacted by price, at least when compared to a system like the Wii or even PS2.
Boeing has "secretly" patented all sorts of classified technology, as have most companies working in the Defense/Intelligence industries. The classified patent system has been in place for a while. Just because something is patented doesn't mean it's publicly available knowledge.
If you're talking about teaching simple math, you're probably correct. Most people intuitively understand things like addition and subtraction. The point at where this is no longer valid is when you're talking about teaching advanced math concepts in high school, which is where the real shortage occurs. If you're a math teacher trying to teach calculus you'd better be comfortable with the concept of integration if you want to have any hope of explaining it to a student who has never seen it before. Advanced mathematics isn't as simple as right/wrong, it's teaching a certain way of thinking.
I'd be surprised if Pluto weren't warming, given it is just past perihelion and it has some quirky orbital parameters. Funny how when things get closer to the sun they warm up a bit. I'd also point out neither article mentions anything to do with the sun getting hotter, and both have quite plausible explanations for the observed trends on both bodies. These articles in no way supports your "OMG it's a conspiracy!" distortion field, unless you believe the astronomers are in on it with the climatologists and geologists.
Also, if you bother to check your history, James Hansen didn't pull this out of his ass and a bunch of climatologists suddenly said "Brilliant! We can finally crush ExxonMobile/Shell/BP/Chevron!!!". There was quite a bit of review and discussion early on, it's just that the theory that best explained the observations survived, which is how good science works.
PS: I did climate modeling in grad school. If you think it's so bloody simple and we're all just idiots, let's see you build a model than predicts anything useful.
I'd just like to point out that computers were used for "real" engineering long before they became ubiquitous in the workplace or home. Why do you think FORTRAN is one of the oldest computing languages in existence?
Most people wouldn't find numbers 3 and 4 to necessarily be bad...
Electric shower? That sounds like a Darwin award waiting to happen...
I have to wholeheartedly disagree with this statement.
You clearly haven't played Excite Truck on the Wii. To me, holding the wii remote sideways and tilting to steer feels much more natural than trying to steer with an analog thumbstick. I don't even like racing games and I find it to be very fun. To address the flight sims, I see two options: one is to use the thumbstick on the nunchuck to steer (which is the route it seems Blazing Angels is going to take), or go with the sideways configuration and use a combination of tilt/roll of the remote to handle roll and pitch (seeing as yaw on a real airplane is mostly a combination of these two I don't see a need for a true 'yaw' in the style of space flight sims). The cow racing game in Wii Play even has a good example of using the latter control style (except roll controls speed instead).
How is the application not obvious to shooters? Analog thumbstick for movement, wii remote for aiming, plus there are ten easily accessible buttons (6 normal + 4 with the d-pad). After seeing the potential I can't imagine going back to trying to aim with an analog stick, it's just sucky.
Fighting games I concur could be tricky. We'll see how well the port of MK: Armaggeddon goes this summer before I pass judgment on that genre. Plus, I can see a lot of genres opening up that traditionally sucked on consoles, like any kind of RTS or turn-based strategy game, since the wii remote is a perfectly functional pointer. I know some people disagree because its pointing isn't perfect, but as long as there is an on-screen cursor it's really not any more difficult to adjust to than a mouse.
*whooosh* You might want to have your sarcasm detector fixed, it seems to be malfunctioning.
Really? Target in West Hollywood had two of the 60gb models when I was there last night. Probably still there today if you're lucky.