If you calculate in the payment that Amazon makes to the author, the break-point is actually $1.99. Books under $1.99 get 35% and books $1.99 and over get 70% profit to their authors. He should have read the terms and done the math a bit more carefully as he'd have made twice the money, even with half the sales.
350,000 X.99 X 0.35 = 121,275 175,000 X 1.99 X 0.70 = 243,775
If you are selling it for 99 cents, you're actually throwing away profit, because under $2 is the actual magic price-point where people impulse by almost anything these days. You'd probably see closer to 200,000 sales or more at that price, since due to inflation, most people would still buy something for $1.99 on a whim just as readily as they would for 99 cents.
The price floor won't be 99 cents, it'll be $1.99, or until Amazon changes its payment schedule.
So I guess we have a new version of the addage "DWB", which is "Typing While Brown".
Also, the Government needs to feel useful and basically has a bunch of people up at or near the top yelling at the poor workers to "find me some terrorists". But there are nearly none to be found, as to be honest, it's only a mere handful of people who are even trying to do anything. The rest seem to have given up or lost interest. ie - they know who almost all of the real ones are, but their bosses are still holding their feet to the fire as they are mostly political appointments or politicians and the like and are delusional or paranoid about the real state of things, having never actually been in the CIA or FBI. Neither have I, but I'd certainly not pretend to know better than real agents and keep asking for something they tell me they aren't finding.
So they have to invent ways to look and keep busy for the most part, to keep their jobs, which leads to instances like this. The real issue is the politicians who watch too much cable news and are far too paranoid.
True, but if I wanted a review from a customer, I'd put "customer review" in the field. The AI for the search engine is cumbersome and never seems to give the right results. Some web sites simply don't appear at all unless you literally type in the actual site - and these are multi-million dollar firms that while they have a web presence, don't pay Google for ad space or block the crawlers, which is becoming more and more common.
Where it gets to be the worst, though, is if you are looking for a specific article or item. Like a certain type of screw or coating or something - business to business type stuff. It's almost useless for that as the clutter is immense. The search engine should have a commercial only option as well as a non-commercial one for research and articles.
The problem is that content sites and review sites and blogs and so on should be automatically excluded from all searches unless you explicitly but in words like "sale" or "review" in the search. (or have a non-commercial web sites only check box).
5 pages of reviews of a computer part that are actually all "reviews" left by consumers on shopping sites are useless when you really just want the obvious review of the part that was done by a computer review site. Their search engine also is worthless because by the time you get to page 4, you've hit the wall and are in the bit-bin of rubbish responses and sites in Malaysia and so on. It's basically "3 pages of our quick content/web spider results for this week and the rest is random filler that we've not actually searched in years". ie - their "search" feature actually doesn't seem to be searching anything in depth from what I can tell - if it's not in the immediate cache/first few pages, it's just a simple keyword search of a couple of the words you typed in with no relevance to anything at all.
Another good example - Let's say you want new car pricing. If you call several of the main sites Cars direct and several other companies they all use the same actual call center/back-end service. TrueCar and Overstock.com uses it as well, but both post the results in front of you without the telephone games. I had three companies call me back when I was looking for a vehicle recently, but the receptionist doing the transfers when I called back for the three companies was the same woman.
"New car buying service" returns the typical results but TrueCar isn't on the first 15 pages. Overstock.com also uses the exact same service - and both seem to be far better at most importantly, keeping on top of actual local dealer inventories. It also doesn't appear in the first 15 pages. The same thing happens if you type in almost any combination of common terms. Google simply returns no usable results aside from those who have paid them to place their ads.
If the Media goes into too insane of a frenzy, people won't trust either them or the politicians. That's pretty much normal for the rest of the world. Somehow in the U.S., people seem to have an irrational desire to blindly trust those in power. While their default view should be one of not trusting those in power or being suspicious of them at the least as the default stance, they seem to have this cultural conditioning or psychological need (you could write a book on it easily I bet) to have someone to worship or put on a pedestal. A hero who fights for them and so on.
I think maybe we've all been reading too many comics and watching too many TV shows, because the world is a place where those in power are usually corrupt.
I didn't say that they had to GET the clearance. Merely undergo a similar level background check. Let the voters decide which one of them is the lesser of the two evils based upon everything that they have done.
Most activists have no issue with the things that they have done, and usually see it as a point of pride(and the press almost always knows about it anyways). It's the supposedly squeaky clean type who actually has a dozen skeletons that they are hiding that is the real issue.
In all seriousness, though, shouldn't all people be required to undergo this sort of back ground check before they are even able to be placed on any ballot or appointed to any position? And yes, I know about it - most people don't. I have a relative who had to get "God level" clearance as he put it and they asked his grade school teachers about him. No joke - they dug and dug and dug, then made some new holes and dug some more.
Anyone who can pass all of that should be fairly safe to be elected and shouldn't have any surprises that make it into the press.
Well, yes, there's that angle to consider as well...
Perhaps if they also get the same security clearances? Oh, wait - that might be a GREAT idea. I can just imagine what a top level security clearance background check on a typical official would bring up. If they can deal with that, they deserve to be given a break.
In fact, you'd probably WANT some of these people on the flights in case something actually happened. Making it so hard that they would rather drive there instead is not necessarily the brightest option.
And, if they can put you on a no-fly list, they can certainly check for things like this. People like Senators, military officials, and so on and so on should simply be exempt. How about a "express/no body cavity search check list"(with proper RFID backed badge/etc, of course)
Nope. But it is amazing how many people get their shorts in a knot over this stuff. A little common sense and an understanding of basic legal issues goes a long way - or would for most of the people here.
And, of course, there is nothing to say that you cannot take a GPL program and package it with other programs, a few utilities, some nice value-added extras, and sell it for a profit. This happens all the time. RedHat and Wine being notable - open source but it's worth buying the CD and support, IMO. Especially if you are in a multi-user environment where a CD helps immensely.
Now, the program in question is really doing nothing that wrong, legally(borderline fraudulent advertising tactics aside, of course). They just are doing a piss-poor job of it that nobody in their right mind would pay for. There is no "added value" and their customer support stinks from what I can gather.
I used to work as an Apple tech years ago and the sheer number of things that we saw and had to deal with on their laptops was actually far worse than the typical PC competitors. Special screws or tools(Mac Mini anyone?), impossible locations, nothing marked with arrows... It was a major fight for us in the service department to even do our job. By comparison, the old OS8/9 Apple laptops, as unreliable as they were, came apart in minutes. Usually there were 6-8 screws, a couple near the keyboard, and the thing simply came apart in two pieces(with the screen cable to be dealt with, but that's common on all laptops).
They simply design these things with the same idea of planned obsolescence as you'd find in a typical cell phone. Put together in a factory by mostly robots and shipped out as a "magic brick" that you just toss every couple of years.
True, but they don't factor in the fact that the Earth's albedo will drastically change once the ice caps melt. 5C higher temperatures in the summer alone would be enough to make birds and insects simply fall out of the sky in some areas, and 10C would be pretty much lead to a collapse of much of the Earth's ecosystem aside from insects and marine animals. Hotter temperatures also would create massive storms and fires, which while not being able to kill off life on the planet, would certainly cause severe problems for humans. 80% of human civilization lies in areas that rising oceans alone would put in danger.
My calculations come out to roughly a 2-3% increase in the sun's energy reaching the Earth's surface being enough to kill off most human life.(or force us underground). Even 1-2% more is a disaster at this point due to humans messing up our environment. Of course, an artificial ring would block about 1% of the energy and give us plenty of breathing room and also make global warming no longer an issue. We could make one in as little as 50 years with today's technology.
It's a terribly small amount - a few mm a year due to friction and added mass due to debris being picked up by our atmosphere.
http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/2006-07/1152815859.As.r.html This is the relevant calculation/formulas. You also have to calculate in the Earth's albedo. Currently it is at ~0.367(that page is slightly off as human structures and pollution also contribute some), but with the ice caps melted, it will be ~0.13(that page is also slightly off because such high heat would also melt ice in glaciers and high altitudes as well). If we set a maximum to the upper limit of 328K instead of 373K (because we're talking about human life and 55C is pretty much the limit of what we can tolerate - 100C is a silly limit, it should be changed to 55C), the inner edge of the "habitable zone" relative to life on Earth for *Humans* is fairly close to our current orbit. We're really "this" close to a greenhouse scenario and most people don't get how something as large and as permanent in their minds, as the Earth is, can be turned into an unlivable mess in a very short time. Even if it's not immediate, it will mean that most of the equator regions will become deserts and too hot to support any sort of stable ecosystem. This means we could see the equatorial rain forests simply vanishing in a few million years(if we don't cut them down first, though that does increase albedo). Oxygen levels drop as well as UV radiation increasing due to our messing with ozone levels, resulting in us having to live underground or in domed cities. We simply are absorbing more energy that we are reflecting back into space at that point. This might not even take 1 million years with human activity added to the equation.
IMO, the only way that we can solve this is to build an artificial ring to block roughly 1-2% of the sun's energy. Everything else just isn't going to solve the issue of the sun getting hotter and the albedo changing. Nothing we do will matter if we can't make less energy hit the surface once the ice caps melt.
Luminosity has nothing to do with it. All we need is a few degrees more and life becomes impossibly harsh.
The Earth is slowly moving towards the Sun. Very very slowly, mind you. The habitable zone will have moved almost past Earth. The combination of forces means that in a bit over 60 million years, we'll be in a greenhouse cycle that will feed on itself, regardless of other forces. This might take another 100 million years to complete, but life as we know it won't be possible long before everything turns into a acidic hell. It's a pretty delicate balance that we have right now,and a few more percent energy from the Sun will be enough to start the cycle.
Earth will slowly start to turn into Venus. What happens in 3-6 billion years is a moot point.
The problem is that while the habitable zone is larger than we previously thought, the Earth is dangerously close to the inner edge of it. (~0.75AU ~2.0 AU) It only takes a small nudge of 2-3% at this point to create a greenhouse scenario, which means we simply lose and die out barring finding another place to live. I suppose we could make a orbital ring/shield to block 5-10% of the sun's energy, but that's just delaying the inevitable.
Most of this research is unfortunately not online and you have to read the originals or find it in books. It's not very popular to talk about it, though, as it gets confused and lost in the mountains of greenhouse gas pseudo-science. If you say "global warming" or "greenhouse" you typically don't think of or bring up results about solar aging.
Actually, the earth will simply get too hot to support life in about another 40 million years. Given the amount of water vapor that the evaporating oceans would create and the fact that the Earth won't have run down its internal magnetic field, as happened to Mars(magnetic field collapsed - atmosphere got blown away), we're looking at another Venus type scenario. In fact, Venus probably had life itself several billion years ago(since it's about the same size and composition originally as the Earth, there's no reason not to assume life didn't also start there at one time), but as the Sun got hotter as it aged, well, we can see what happened.
In fact, the Sun will make life nearly unbearable in as few as 5 million years. We might have to live underground or under the sea to escape the intense UV radiation and summer heat that could easily top 140-150 degrees.
As for life, well, I suspect that there's "life" on every planet with water on it. Every single one. But considering that it took our planet 3-4 billion years to develop even basic life forms, well, there's a lot of luck involved with finding anything at our level or close to it. We could find 1000 worlds with life on them and not find anything remotely capable of communicating with us. And anything much more advanced than we are would simply use communication methods that didn't use radio waves. Just the implications and speed of research into quantum entanglement(among many other technologies being developed or researched) makes it pretty clear that instant (or effectively FTL) point to point communications are less than a century away. We're really looking for a bunch of weak signals in a 100-200 year window. Out of billions of years.
There are plenty of vehicles that can get you to a good box office hit. You just need to chose the right ones and keep the budget low. The trick is to blend it with another genre.
- Godzilla is always good. Big stompy monsters always are a classic. - Anything with realistic aliens/other worlds also is good - Avatar 2 could easily be told as a more grim and dirty story without any real problem. Nature is not kind, gentle, or pretty. Even science fiction like Serenity was easy - the plot almost writes itself. - Anything with realistic disasters is also good. Just as long as it isn't the idiots at the Sci-Fi channel doing it on zero budget with the same ending every time. - Conan and similar epic smash the monsters type stuff never gets old, either. But it does need to be more about the acting. Very few if any special effects is the rule here. The Lord of the Rings series is a perfect example - the CGI didn't feel like overt in your face CGI. There was very little flashy effects. - Kung-Fu (which is fantasy - heh) never gets old, either. - Super-archaeologist/inventor/scientist saves-the-world is always a good thing.
Instead of trying to reinvent old junk, they need to be making NEW junk. It's as if the people running the studios brains all stopped in 1999 and now they don't do anything new at all. If nothing else works, just grab any of the things out of Japan, Korera, or China and run with it. 1: No more video game tie-ins unless it's very well done and makes a little sense. Tomb Raider or Uncharted would be watchable. Diablo 2/3 would be a disaster. Great game, but a disaster in the making on film. Prey also would suck. Dialog and puzzles are human. Firing off thousands of bullets isn't much to work with unless it's a war movie. 2: Make new characters. Hire unknowns. Take a page from George Lucas when he was starting out (and ignore everything afterwards) - low tech and a good story beats flashy and written by corporate wage-slaves and professional script writers. Do not reinvent the wheel. 3: Unless you are Stan Lee, don't attempt to make an old classic movie or comic book over again. Even Paramount finally figured out that you needed a reboot of the Trek franchise. Now, if they would only make a TV series of/with that cast... Reboots and new stuff are fine. But never go backwards.
Those that you know about. Those that you don't know about yet.
Thankfully, idiots make up 98%+ of the ones out there, but there are some that you never see, never know about, and are usually doing it as part of their normal job for whatever agency or government that is hiring them.
Of course, they aren't interested in us normal folk, so it's really us vs the idiots. And some days I wonder how they can be doing so well. Then I see my neighbor and it makes quite a lot of sense...
They say that they can recover anything, but if the surface is sand-blasted or otherwise ground away, well, it's gone. Shoot, even writing all 0s and then nuking the partition and fat tables will fry the data well enough, but destroying a drive is so much more fun. And a lot quicker, as well.;)
As for the idiot in question, yes, there's backups of this guy's stuff online and elsewhere - he's not getting off. Nothing you do via email or online or blackberry/etc is ever "gone". And the courts assume you're guilty as charged if they catch you destroying evidence like this. The penalties for destruction of electronic data in legal cases are quite severe, as in simply proceed to arbitrary judgment and sentencing, because you just lost your case. Shoot, the penalties for simply not keeping adequate backups of such data are almost as bad.
But for normal data deletion, my favorite method is to take off the cover, remove or park the head mechanism, and dump in a teaspoon or so of diatamaceous earth. Let the motor spin for a minute or so. This is best done if you prepare beforehand and have the screws off. Get it running, park the heads, dump the sand/etc in and quickly close the cover. Makes impressive noises as well. Always a hit with bystanders.:)
Sometimes I take the platters apart and rub them with some sandpaper. Then there's always the 5 lb sledgehammer, though glass fragments can be an issue. (sharp doesn't begin to cover platter material - it's tempered and simply brutal stuff to try to clean up)
What's your favorite way to take care of your old drives?
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If you calculate in the payment that Amazon makes to the author, the break-point is actually $1.99. Books under $1.99 get 35% and books $1.99 and over get 70% profit to their authors. He should have read the terms and done the math a bit more carefully as he'd have made twice the money, even with half the sales.
350,000 X .99 X 0.35 = 121,275
175,000 X 1.99 X 0.70 = 243,775
If you are selling it for 99 cents, you're actually throwing away profit, because under $2 is the actual magic price-point where people impulse by almost anything these days. You'd probably see closer to 200,000 sales or more at that price, since due to inflation, most people would still buy something for $1.99 on a whim just as readily as they would for 99 cents.
The price floor won't be 99 cents, it'll be $1.99, or until Amazon changes its payment schedule.
So I guess we have a new version of the addage "DWB", which is "Typing While Brown".
Also, the Government needs to feel useful and basically has a bunch of people up at or near the top yelling at the poor workers to "find me some terrorists". But there are nearly none to be found, as to be honest, it's only a mere handful of people who are even trying to do anything. The rest seem to have given up or lost interest. ie - they know who almost all of the real ones are, but their bosses are still holding their feet to the fire as they are mostly political appointments or politicians and the like and are delusional or paranoid about the real state of things, having never actually been in the CIA or FBI. Neither have I, but I'd certainly not pretend to know better than real agents and keep asking for something they tell me they aren't finding.
So they have to invent ways to look and keep busy for the most part, to keep their jobs, which leads to instances like this. The real issue is the politicians who watch too much cable news and are far too paranoid.
True, but if I wanted a review from a customer, I'd put "customer review" in the field. The AI for the search engine is cumbersome and never seems to give the right results. Some web sites simply don't appear at all unless you literally type in the actual site - and these are multi-million dollar firms that while they have a web presence, don't pay Google for ad space or block the crawlers, which is becoming more and more common.
Where it gets to be the worst, though, is if you are looking for a specific article or item. Like a certain type of screw or coating or something - business to business type stuff. It's almost useless for that as the clutter is immense. The search engine should have a commercial only option as well as a non-commercial one for research and articles.
The problem is that content sites and review sites and blogs and so on should be automatically excluded from all searches unless you explicitly but in words like "sale" or "review" in the search. (or have a non-commercial web sites only check box).
5 pages of reviews of a computer part that are actually all "reviews" left by consumers on shopping sites are useless when you really just want the obvious review of the part that was done by a computer review site. Their search engine also is worthless because by the time you get to page 4, you've hit the wall and are in the bit-bin of rubbish responses and sites in Malaysia and so on. It's basically "3 pages of our quick content/web spider results for this week and the rest is random filler that we've not actually searched in years". ie - their "search" feature actually doesn't seem to be searching anything in depth from what I can tell - if it's not in the immediate cache/first few pages, it's just a simple keyword search of a couple of the words you typed in with no relevance to anything at all.
Another good example - Let's say you want new car pricing.
If you call several of the main sites Cars direct and several other companies they all use the same actual call center/back-end service. TrueCar and Overstock.com uses it as well, but both post the results in front of you without the telephone games. I had three companies call me back when I was looking for a vehicle recently, but the receptionist doing the transfers when I called back for the three companies was the same woman.
"New car buying service" returns the typical results but TrueCar isn't on the first 15 pages. Overstock.com also uses the exact same service - and both seem to be far better at most importantly, keeping on top of actual local dealer inventories. It also doesn't appear in the first 15 pages. The same thing happens if you type in almost any combination of common terms. Google simply returns no usable results aside from those who have paid them to place their ads.
If the Media goes into too insane of a frenzy, people won't trust either them or the politicians. That's pretty much normal for the rest of the world. Somehow in the U.S., people seem to have an irrational desire to blindly trust those in power. While their default view should be one of not trusting those in power or being suspicious of them at the least as the default stance, they seem to have this cultural conditioning or psychological need (you could write a book on it easily I bet) to have someone to worship or put on a pedestal. A hero who fights for them and so on.
I think maybe we've all been reading too many comics and watching too many TV shows, because the world is a place where those in power are usually corrupt.
I didn't say that they had to GET the clearance. Merely undergo a similar level background check. Let the voters decide which one of them is the lesser of the two evils based upon everything that they have done.
Most activists have no issue with the things that they have done, and usually see it as a point of pride(and the press almost always knows about it anyways). It's the supposedly squeaky clean type who actually has a dozen skeletons that they are hiding that is the real issue.
In all seriousness, though, shouldn't all people be required to undergo this sort of back ground check before they are even able to be placed on any ballot or appointed to any position? And yes, I know about it - most people don't. I have a relative who had to get "God level" clearance as he put it and they asked his grade school teachers about him. No joke - they dug and dug and dug, then made some new holes and dug some more.
Anyone who can pass all of that should be fairly safe to be elected and shouldn't have any surprises that make it into the press.
Well, yes, there's that angle to consider as well...
Perhaps if they also get the same security clearances? Oh, wait - that might be a GREAT idea. I can just imagine what a top level security clearance background check on a typical official would bring up. If they can deal with that, they deserve to be given a break.
In fact, you'd probably WANT some of these people on the flights in case something actually happened. Making it so hard that they would rather drive there instead is not necessarily the brightest option.
And, if they can put you on a no-fly list, they can certainly check for things like this. People like Senators, military officials, and so on and so on should simply be exempt. How about a "express/no body cavity search check list"(with proper RFID backed badge/etc, of course)
Don't give them any ideas.
Nope. But it is amazing how many people get their shorts in a knot over this stuff. A little common sense and an understanding of basic legal issues goes a long way - or would for most of the people here.
And, of course, there is nothing to say that you cannot take a GPL program and package it with other programs, a few utilities, some nice value-added extras, and sell it for a profit. This happens all the time. RedHat and Wine being notable - open source but it's worth buying the CD and support, IMO. Especially if you are in a multi-user environment where a CD helps immensely.
Now, the program in question is really doing nothing that wrong, legally(borderline fraudulent advertising tactics aside, of course). They just are doing a piss-poor job of it that nobody in their right mind would pay for. There is no "added value" and their customer support stinks from what I can gather.
I used to work as an Apple tech years ago and the sheer number of things that we saw and had to deal with on their laptops was actually far worse than the typical PC competitors. Special screws or tools(Mac Mini anyone?), impossible locations, nothing marked with arrows... It was a major fight for us in the service department to even do our job. By comparison, the old OS8/9 Apple laptops, as unreliable as they were, came apart in minutes. Usually there were 6-8 screws, a couple near the keyboard, and the thing simply came apart in two pieces(with the screen cable to be dealt with, but that's common on all laptops).
They simply design these things with the same idea of planned obsolescence as you'd find in a typical cell phone. Put together in a factory by mostly robots and shipped out as a "magic brick" that you just toss every couple of years.
150F, though, is simply too hot for most animals with a circulatory system to survive unless they spend most of the day underground.
True, "life" will adapt, but large mammals including ourselves, will long be extinct.
True, but they don't factor in the fact that the Earth's albedo will drastically change once the ice caps melt. 5C higher temperatures in the summer alone would be enough to make birds and insects simply fall out of the sky in some areas, and 10C would be pretty much lead to a collapse of much of the Earth's ecosystem aside from insects and marine animals. Hotter temperatures also would create massive storms and fires, which while not being able to kill off life on the planet, would certainly cause severe problems for humans. 80% of human civilization lies in areas that rising oceans alone would put in danger.
My calculations come out to roughly a 2-3% increase in the sun's energy reaching the Earth's surface being enough to kill off most human life.(or force us underground). Even 1-2% more is a disaster at this point due to humans messing up our environment. Of course, an artificial ring would block about 1% of the energy and give us plenty of breathing room and also make global warming no longer an issue. We could make one in as little as 50 years with today's technology.
It's a terribly small amount - a few mm a year due to friction and added mass due to debris being picked up by our atmosphere.
http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/2006-07/1152815859.As.r.html
This is the relevant calculation/formulas. You also have to calculate in the Earth's albedo. Currently it is at ~0.367(that page is slightly off as human structures and pollution also contribute some), but with the ice caps melted, it will be ~0.13(that page is also slightly off because such high heat would also melt ice in glaciers and high altitudes as well). If we set a maximum to the upper limit of 328K instead of 373K (because we're talking about human life and 55C is pretty much the limit of what we can tolerate - 100C is a silly limit, it should be changed to 55C), the inner edge of the "habitable zone" relative to life on Earth for *Humans* is fairly close to our current orbit. We're really "this" close to a greenhouse scenario and most people don't get how something as large and as permanent in their minds, as the Earth is, can be turned into an unlivable mess in a very short time. Even if it's not immediate, it will mean that most of the equator regions will become deserts and too hot to support any sort of stable ecosystem. This means we could see the equatorial rain forests simply vanishing in a few million years(if we don't cut them down first, though that does increase albedo). Oxygen levels drop as well as UV radiation increasing due to our messing with ozone levels, resulting in us having to live underground or in domed cities. We simply are absorbing more energy that we are reflecting back into space at that point. This might not even take 1 million years with human activity added to the equation.
IMO, the only way that we can solve this is to build an artificial ring to block roughly 1-2% of the sun's energy. Everything else just isn't going to solve the issue of the sun getting hotter and the albedo changing. Nothing we do will matter if we can't make less energy hit the surface once the ice caps melt.
Luminosity has nothing to do with it. All we need is a few degrees more and life becomes impossibly harsh.
The Earth is slowly moving towards the Sun. Very very slowly, mind you. The habitable zone will have moved almost past Earth. The combination of forces means that in a bit over 60 million years, we'll be in a greenhouse cycle that will feed on itself, regardless of other forces. This might take another 100 million years to complete, but life as we know it won't be possible long before everything turns into a acidic hell. It's a pretty delicate balance that we have right now,and a few more percent energy from the Sun will be enough to start the cycle.
Earth will slowly start to turn into Venus. What happens in 3-6 billion years is a moot point.
The problem is that while the habitable zone is larger than we previously thought, the Earth is dangerously close to the inner edge of it. (~0.75AU ~2.0 AU) It only takes a small nudge of 2-3% at this point to create a greenhouse scenario, which means we simply lose and die out barring finding another place to live. I suppose we could make a orbital ring/shield to block 5-10% of the sun's energy, but that's just delaying the inevitable.
Most of this research is unfortunately not online and you have to read the originals or find it in books. It's not very popular to talk about it, though, as it gets confused and lost in the mountains of greenhouse gas pseudo-science. If you say "global warming" or "greenhouse" you typically don't think of or bring up results about solar aging.
Actually, the earth will simply get too hot to support life in about another 40 million years. Given the amount of water vapor that the evaporating oceans would create and the fact that the Earth won't have run down its internal magnetic field, as happened to Mars(magnetic field collapsed - atmosphere got blown away), we're looking at another Venus type scenario. In fact, Venus probably had life itself several billion years ago(since it's about the same size and composition originally as the Earth, there's no reason not to assume life didn't also start there at one time), but as the Sun got hotter as it aged, well, we can see what happened.
In fact, the Sun will make life nearly unbearable in as few as 5 million years. We might have to live underground or under the sea to escape the intense UV radiation and summer heat that could easily top 140-150 degrees.
As for life, well, I suspect that there's "life" on every planet with water on it. Every single one. But considering that it took our planet 3-4 billion years to develop even basic life forms, well, there's a lot of luck involved with finding anything at our level or close to it. We could find 1000 worlds with life on them and not find anything remotely capable of communicating with us. And anything much more advanced than we are would simply use communication methods that didn't use radio waves. Just the implications and speed of research into quantum entanglement(among many other technologies being developed or researched) makes it pretty clear that instant (or effectively FTL) point to point communications are less than a century away. We're really looking for a bunch of weak signals in a 100-200 year window. Out of billions of years.
There are plenty of vehicles that can get you to a good box office hit. You just need to chose the right ones and keep the budget low. The trick is to blend it with another genre.
- Godzilla is always good. Big stompy monsters always are a classic.
- Anything with realistic aliens/other worlds also is good - Avatar 2 could easily be told as a more grim and dirty story without any real problem. Nature is not kind, gentle, or pretty. Even science fiction like Serenity was easy - the plot almost writes itself.
- Anything with realistic disasters is also good. Just as long as it isn't the idiots at the Sci-Fi channel doing it on zero budget with the same ending every time.
- Conan and similar epic smash the monsters type stuff never gets old, either. But it does need to be more about the acting. Very few if any special effects is the rule here. The Lord of the Rings series is a perfect example - the CGI didn't feel like overt in your face CGI. There was very little flashy effects.
- Kung-Fu (which is fantasy - heh) never gets old, either.
- Super-archaeologist/inventor/scientist saves-the-world is always a good thing.
Instead of trying to reinvent old junk, they need to be making NEW junk. It's as if the people running the studios brains all stopped in 1999 and now they don't do anything new at all. If nothing else works, just grab any of the things out of Japan, Korera, or China and run with it.
1: No more video game tie-ins unless it's very well done and makes a little sense. Tomb Raider or Uncharted would be watchable. Diablo 2/3 would be a disaster. Great game, but a disaster in the making on film. Prey also would suck. Dialog and puzzles are human. Firing off thousands of bullets isn't much to work with unless it's a war movie.
2: Make new characters. Hire unknowns. Take a page from George Lucas when he was starting out (and ignore everything afterwards) - low tech and a good story beats flashy and written by corporate wage-slaves and professional script writers. Do not reinvent the wheel.
3: Unless you are Stan Lee, don't attempt to make an old classic movie or comic book over again. Even Paramount finally figured out that you needed a reboot of the Trek franchise. Now, if they would only make a TV series of/with that cast... Reboots and new stuff are fine. But never go backwards.
There are only two types.
Those that you know about.
Those that you don't know about yet.
Thankfully, idiots make up 98%+ of the ones out there, but there are some that you never see, never know about, and are usually doing it as part of their normal job for whatever agency or government that is hiring them.
Of course, they aren't interested in us normal folk, so it's really us vs the idiots. And some days I wonder how they can be doing so well. Then I see my neighbor and it makes quite a lot of sense...
They say that they can recover anything, but if the surface is sand-blasted or otherwise ground away, well, it's gone. Shoot, even writing all 0s and then nuking the partition and fat tables will fry the data well enough, but destroying a drive is so much more fun. And a lot quicker, as well. ;)
As for the idiot in question, yes, there's backups of this guy's stuff online and elsewhere - he's not getting off. Nothing you do via email or online or blackberry/etc is ever "gone". And the courts assume you're guilty as charged if they catch you destroying evidence like this. The penalties for destruction of electronic data in legal cases are quite severe, as in simply proceed to arbitrary judgment and sentencing, because you just lost your case. Shoot, the penalties for simply not keeping adequate backups of such data are almost as bad.
But for normal data deletion, my favorite method is to take off the cover, remove or park the head mechanism, and dump in a teaspoon or so of diatamaceous earth. Let the motor spin for a minute or so. This is best done if you prepare beforehand and have the screws off. Get it running, park the heads, dump the sand/etc in and quickly close the cover. Makes impressive noises as well. Always a hit with bystanders. :)
Sometimes I take the platters apart and rub them with some sandpaper. Then there's always the 5 lb sledgehammer, though glass fragments can be an issue. (sharp doesn't begin to cover platter material - it's tempered and simply brutal stuff to try to clean up)
What's your favorite way to take care of your old drives?
The old Sony electronics were quite nice. But so where the old Pioneer receivers as well - I still hope to own a SX-1980 some day.
"In other news, Google removes all links to the MPAA and everything related to their clients and supporters."
They could yank these fools chain so hard. I don't think even Apple has the balls to go against Google in any serious way.