The GP was replying to someone who insinuated that the US is in similar shape regarding separation of church and state.
I just read all the postings in the thread, and you are correct. The GP didn't quote the insinuation or refer to it, and the insinuation was below my threshold so I didn't see it.
How many people have you seen executed in the name of religion lately?
Me, personally? None.
But in Muslim countries where they follow Islamic law, there are lots of religious crimes for which people are executed.
In this case, the crime is "apostasy", or leaving the faith. I don't know of any person in recent history being executed for leaving the Christian faith in any of its variations; but in Islamic law apostasy can be and is punished by death.
Another crime for which one can be executed under Islamic law: homosexuality. Note that I am not saying I personally consider homosexuality a crime (I don't), I am saying that under Islam this is a crime, it is punishable by death, and this actually happens in the real world.
So, either you need to find an explanation for why the above examples are not executions "in the name of religion" or you need to consider your point invalidated.
Most audiophiles don't spend like this. It's a misrepresentation
No doubt you are correct. How many people even have this kind of money to burn, let alone are willing to burn it on $2000 power cords?
those who foam at the mouth over this topic are fools. This includes you.
Oh, I'm not foaming at the mouth. I'm shaking my head sadly that there is anyone who buys in on this stuff.
Still, I guess I can't deny that I'm a fool; an Anonymous Coward said so, and that's that.
What you're saying is no different than the troll article run on MSNBC not too long ago saying that gamers spend roughly 17000 dollars per year on their habit. You're bullshit post is keeping bullshit "journalism" alive.
This is such a strange paragraph that I am powerless to respond to it. Well done sir! Or Ma'am as it may be.
I'm a big headphones fan. I spend in the area of 500-1000 dollars on a set of headphones and they'll last me more than 4 years.
Rather than return abuse for abuse, I'll just comment that this sounds pretty sensible to me. Really nice headphones will make a bigger difference than any other single thing in your system, and the really cheap headphones aren't as good as the expensive ones.
That to me is being an audiophile, not any of the shit that you or the little extremist bitches upthread posted.
See, the problem here is that you don't get to decide what words mean. There is a community of audiophiles who are downright silly, and there is a community of vendors who cater to them (at great expense). I never said, anywhere, that all audiophiles delude themselves or all audiophiles are silly and spend too much on equipment. And I never intended to imply that anyone who considers himself an audiophile must be a fool.
As another poster noted, there are the objectivist audiophiles, which is a fancy way of saying people who believe measurements actually work and who like to listen to nice equipment; and subjectivist audiophiles, who are the silly ones. I think "objectivist audiophile" describes me, and perhaps you as well.
Sorry I raised your blood pressure. But note that all I really did was post URLs that exist to web sites that exist. I didn't make any of this stuff up; I am not The Onion.
It's a fair point. I would call myself an objectivist audiophile. I like nice-sounding equipment.
I second your endorsement of Sean Olive. He knows way more than I do about this stuff, and JJ Johnston respects him also.
I went to a lecture from Sean Olive where he described his efforts to make an objective metric on how "good" an audio speaker is. First they trained a bunch of people as critical listeners. Then they tested the listeners on various speakers, and made sure that the listeners pretty much agreed on which ones sounded good. Then they took a bunch of objective measurements of speakers (using about 64 microphones all around the speaker, and testing in an anechoic chamber). Finally they tried to find an equation that would use the objective data to compute a goodness metric (my words, I forget what he called it) that agreed with the listeners. That seems like pretty air-tight work to me.
Machina Dynamica. Oh man. I really wonder if the guy running this site even believes in his own products, or if he is gleefully exploiting the gullible. Products include "The Clever Little Clock" which seems to be an ordinary travel alarm clock with magical powers, "The Super Intelligent Chip" which not only improves the sound of your CDs, but does so permanently (by altering the structure of the CD in some hand-waving "quantum" fashion), his new product, "The Quantum Temple Bell", a decorated bell you walk around your house ringing and your audio sounds better, and my favorite "The Teleportation Tweak" where he calls you and plays magical tones through your phone, and your audio sounds better afterward. http://www.machinadynamica.com/
Audiophiles are not known for using controlled, double-blind testing. That's a problem, because you can actually control a lot about how you hear things. In short, if you expect something to sound different, you can actually hear a difference; not imagine you hear a difference, actually hear a difference.
JJ Johnston gave a presentation, Why Do We Hear What We Hear?. (PowerPoint, but LibreOffice should open it just fine.) If you look at slides 14 and 16 you will see him explaining the above points.
With double-blind testing, the audiophile will not be able to tell the difference between a $2 cable from monoprice.com and a $1000 cable from some audiophile scam web site. Without the double-blind, a confident audiophile will hear differences that favor the expensive cable.
The crazy thing, and I'm not making this up, is that some audiophiles claim that double-blind testing "doesn't work". They claim that you introduce errors that mask the superiority of the expensive equipment.
P.S. If you would like to have quality audio gear, and you would like to see the gear tested scientifically, you have to check out the NorthWest AV Guy blog. He bought a $1000+ DAC/amplifier that audiophiles like and that tests well objectively, and then he designed a very inexpensive headphone amp that in double-blind testing cannot be distinguised from the expensive one... and he open-sourced the design; you can build one if you like, or buy one pre-built. He uses professional test gear, and for example he showed that the Sansa Clip really is a good-sounding media player (which plays Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, by the way). Check it out. (And NWAudioGuy, if I ever meet you in person, I'll buy you lunch or something.)
So now we have gone from "unit tests have no value and are just double the work LOL" to "unit tests don't solve every problem".
I agree: unit tests don't solve every problem. I said I'm happy every time an assert catches a bug; I didn't say I never use the debugger anymore.
things most often break in the integration of all those pieces...not just isolated individual pieces you wrote the unit tests for.
Don't you have unit tests that exercise the whole system? I do.
I work with audio, and I have unit tests that run reference files through the system and then verify that the output is close to what was expected. This is an end-to-end unit test, which will catch bugs in the I/O layer, bugs in the processing code, etc. etc.
Ah, unit tests... twice the code, twice the time vs a statically typed language.
Wow, what a terrible attitude you have. You sound smug about it, too.
Learning to work in Python exposed me to the unit-tests way of doing things, and once I understood just how useful they are, I started doing them in my plain old C code as well.
Unit tests free your mind. You can completely re-write your core components, and if you have good unit tests and they pass, you don't need to fret over whether you have introduced some subtle bug that will bite you later.
For C and C++ developers, unit tests in combination with assert() can find all sorts of bugs for you.
I haven't done a scientific study, so I don't have any actual metrics for you, but I am completely convinced that the time I spent in making good unit tests has been repaid by the bugs the unit tests caught for me.
Right when you have written new code, and the code and its corner cases are fresh in your mind, you can easily whip out a few good unit tests that will make sure the code is good. It doesn't take anything near "twice the time". Then, when you run your unit tests, they never get bored and they always cover all your code. And they catch things.
And you might be a tough loner, slinging the code and never making mistakes, but what if you have to work with others who might not be as awesome as you are? "Before you commit your changes to the repository, make sure the unit tests all pass." And you have fewer problems.
I love seeing an assert() fire; that's one bug I didn't have to run down by hand in the debugger. Maybe you really love running the debugger? I'd rather leave work earlier.
Dynamic languages have different strengths and weaknesses than static languages. The best advice I can give you is: deal with it.
Best practice in a dynamic language includes automated unit tests for your code, for example. I don't use JavaScript so I can't tell you all the best practices and developer idioms for JavaScript, but I have heard that the best book is the O'Reilly reference book and that anything by Crockford is worth reading.
Note that lots of other Slashdotters are already giving you very similar advice to what I wrote.
You must be pretty disappointed bymost fiction then.
No.
Great (or even good) novels don't depend on you liking the characters, they just have to be believable, or at least interesting.
There is a category of stories where this statement is true. Police procedurals, old-school "idea" science fiction... any story where what is going on is the important thing, or where the setting is the important thing. Consider the classic story "The Wabbler". There aren't even any characters in that story; there is a robot, too simple to even have any personality. The story works only because what is going on is interesting.
Heinlein commented that there are only a tiny handful of story types: "Boy Meets Girl", "The Man Who Learned Better", and "The Little Tailor". In keeping with the whimsical nature of these titles, I call stories where the plot or location is the most important part "Travelogue" stories.
But stories like that can also have strong characters. Some police procedurals have generic police detectives, but the most popular ones have quirky, interesting ones.
Most of the characters in Brave New World or 1984 aren't people you'd want as friends.
Brave New World definitely qualifies as a Travelogue story IMHO. I've only read it once, a long time ago, but I don't remember connecting with any of the characters; I only was interested in the imagined brave new world. So I'll agree with you on this one.
1984 works as a Travelogue, but Winston Smith is definitely a strong character with whom I made a connection. I don't feel I'm very much like him, but I was rooting for him, which made the ending that much more powerful. So I'll disagree with you on this one.
Now you consider Star Wars: A New Hope. Full of "sense of wonder", it could qualify as a Travelogue story. But we connect with Luke. We connect with Leia. The droids, Han and Chewie, Ben Kenobi... all strong characters with whom we can easily get some sort of emotional investment. Vader s a strong anti-hero, interesting to watch, and it's satisfying to see him spinning away at the end. Had the characters been flat (like in The Phantom Menace) the movie might still have won fans on its strength as a view into a nifty fantasy milieu, but it wouldn't be in the top 20 most popular movies at IMDB as it is (#17 when I just checked).
In any event, I guess I should make my statement stronger: It's hard to read a novel when the experience of reading it is unpleasant. I not only did not connect with the characters in Windup Girl, I'm tired of reading about them. That's bad.
A friend told me the book was great. It won Hugo and Nebula awards, more evidence that it's great. But I am stopped reading it and I'm finding it difficult to make myself pick it up again.
My main complaint is that I'm around ten chapters in, and so far I don't like anyone. Maybe I should like Emiko, but I haven't seen much of her. But the business exec is harsh, people around him are plotting to stab him in the back, the union that controls the matodonts is corrupt and obnoxious, Thai government officials are corrupt and obnoxious... I find the book unpleasant to read.
Reading this book made me think: in any story you need to make a connection with at least one of the major characters. Usually it should be a positive connection: you are rooting for the hero and want him/her to triumph. Sometimes it can be a negative connection: you start to really want to see the character's plans foiled.
In my favorite stories, there is not just one but several characters I connect with, and usually right from the first chapter. Not so this book.
And, like another Slashdotter commented, I have to wonder why solar power doesn't seem important. The concept of treadle-operated office computers is kind of cool, but it doesn't really make sense to me. Business desktop computers of the 90's were less powerful than today's ARM or SOC computers, so you ought to be able to run business computers 100 years from now on sunlight. Especially in Thailand!
If you love steampunk sort of stuff, then the "bio-punk" in this novel might capture your imagination. I certainly found the background and the technology more interesting than the characters. Global warming has made the seas rise, and fossil fuels are depleted, so the technology is all different. They use "mastodonts" to wind "kink-springs", and these "kink-springs" are sold to anyone who needs portable power without putting carbon emissions into the atmosphere. So airships run on kink-spring power, and sailing ships ply the oceans, and nobody can afford to operate airplanes or motorized ships anymore. (You might think the Internet would be hugely important, since it is so much cheaper to ship bits through a cable than to move humans around, but it doesn't figure much into the chapters I read.)
It wouldn't matter even if there were oceans of high grade crude oil on the moon. Look at the Saturn V- the entire thing is one big fuel canister
You are perfectly correct that petroleum from space will never make sense with Saturn V technology.
However, that huge canister of fuel was for lifting stuff out of Earth gravity. If you assume we have the infrastructure for petroleum collection in space, you should agree that it's a lot easier to convince a canister of petroleum to fall down to Earth than to lift hardware away from Earth. Gravity is helping you when it's time to deliver the cargo.
So now the question is whether you can get that infrastructure in place. You don't want to try to do it the Saturn V way, where everything goes to space in one launch of a heavy lifter. You will want to send things up in pieces and assemble them in orbit; you will want a space station with fuel and oxygen and water storage, you will want spaceships that go from orbit to orbit and never enter atmosphere (build them right and they last a long time), you will want truly reusable "space pickup trucks" that can ferry small loads up from Earth to orbit, cheaply and reliably... in short, you want a rational set of building blocks, where each gram you lift out of Earth gravity gives you as much benefit as you can manage, vs. Saturn V where everything lifts in one launch and everything is thrown away after one launch.
I don't know if petroleum will be that big a deal. But there's a lot of stuff out there in space, and it's easy for me to imagine it being mined. It's an old SF trope that space miners will build large parabolic mirrors and concentrate sunlight to smelt ore out of rocks, then deliver relatively pure hunks of metal to Earth. Maybe that will actually pencil out someday.
There are no "smart phones" that provide decent telephony function.
I completely disagree. Before I got my Droid 2 phone (Android phone from Verizon) I didn't think that a smartphone would be much different from a boring phone. And, I really loved my old Motorola StarTac flip-phone; I was reluctant to go from that to the comparatively massive Droid 2.
Here is what I have found:
It's kind of nice to dial just by clicking on the screen. I mostly dialed numbers directly on my StarTac, with only a few numbers coded into numbered memory slots; now I look up my friend, point with my finger, and the phone dials. It's really a large step forward in usability.
It's also really nice to call businesses that are not in my contacts. I Google search for, say, Joe's Plumbing, then click on the phone number in the search results with my finger. Sometimes Google even puts a GUI button in there, "call 425-555-1212" The Phone app launches with that number pre-loaded, and I just hit the big green "initiate call" icon.
Google Voice Search is also really nice. I pull out my phone, hit that icon, and say "call James Johnston at home". And by golly the voice recognition works, it looks up the name in my contacts, and dials for me. I like this so much, I want a hardware button on the side of the phone to trigger the Google Voice Search feature.
Google Voice Search even works with businesses and other names not in my contacts, although it's much less reliable. The voice recognition doesn't do well with words that are not in Google's word list, but sound sort of like words that are. So if I try to search for "Vetco Electronics" it matches as "Petco Electronics" which isn't very useful. (However, for words that are in the list, or words that sound nothing like any word in the list, it works well. I can ask it to search for "Umpqua Bank" and it nails it. Hmmm, I suppose "Umpqua" could be in the list, but it seems unlikely.)
Not really exclusive to a smartphone, but the Droid 2 is the first phone I have had with a really usable speakerphone function. I bought a Bluetooth hands-free headset so I could legally talk while driving; I never use it, I just use the speakerphone function.
In short, I'm quite pleased with my Droid 2 as a phone.
On the one hand you can in many jurisdictions legally shoot (take the life of) someone that trespasses your land/ house or car
That's actually not true. At all.
I have studied this issue, including taking an all-day class taught by Massad Ayoob. Nobody is ever allowed to "take the life of" another person. A person is only allowed to shoot someone (i.e., use potentially lethal force) to stop that person when he is causing an immediate, otherwise unavoidable danger of death or grave bodily harm to the innocent.
If you see a guy holding a knife and running towards another person, and you have reason to believe he is planning to use that knife (e.g. he is shouting "Bitch! I'll kill you!"), you are probably legally in the clear to shoot him, if that is the only way you can stop him.
If you see a guy plunge a knife into another person, and then he flings the knife on the ground and runs away, you are not clear to shoot him. You aren't allowed to do anything unless there is an immediate danger; you certainly aren't allowed to punish someone yourself.
If you shoot someone and he keels over, you are not allowed to continue shooting him. If you have stopped him by shooting him, you no longer are clear to shoot him. If he then grabs for a gun or something, the imminent danger is back and you could shoot him again.
And while you are generally allowed to use "reasonable" force to stop a theft in progress, potentially lethal force is never authorized in defense of mere property.
And even if you obey the above guidelines, you may be hauled into court on criminal charges; you will probably win, but you will still have to pay for a lawyer and it's a big deal. And you might lose. In some places (like Washington, D.C. or New York City) you may be charged with gun control law violations even if what you did with the gun saved a life. And even if you avoid or are cleared of criminal charges, you may be hauled into court on civil charges from the person you shot or his surviving family.
Too late for this discussion really, but the Wall Street Journal just published an editorial on this subject. The title of the editorial: "No Need to Panic About Global Warming"
Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.
AGW proponents claim that the science is "settled" and that "nobody" who isn't a crank or a shill for evil big business disagrees. These 16 people disagree.
You sound like the guy who wasn't affected by the collapse of the credit default swap market, because he personally hadn't invested in any.
I'm afraid I don't follow the metaphor.
Going forward until the effects of carbon dioxide pollution is addressed, it is going to impact your life more than any other event.
I'm not convinced. Clearly you are.
By the way, do you realize that my comment was saying that the measures to fight carbon release won't hurt me personally as much as those measures will hurt most of the people in the USA? I didn't say that a global warming doom scenario won't hurt me, I said the steps AGW proponents want won't hurt me (too much).
It may do so indirectly and you may be too thoughtless to notice, but rest assured you will be affected far more dramatically than you currently realize.
Not good enough. You want to convince me, these vague words won't do it. Make a specific, testable prediction please.
For example, in 2005, UNEP predicted that 50 million people would be forced to flee their homes by 2010 due to flooding caused by global warming. That prediction didn't work out so the new prediction is that 150 million people will be displaced by flooding by 2050. This seems safely far in the future.
I'm sure if I looked, I could find some crazy "expert" making some predictions about how an ice age will doom us all unless we do something to make the Earth warmer. So don't just quote "the experts". Tell me about the predictions that have been proven correct.
What are the testable predictions of the AGW proponents that have panned out?
By the way, I do not thank you for calling me "thoughtless". I don't believe I have insulted you (I don't even know you) and I believe my comments here on Slashdot have been polite and focused on the issues. Can you discuss this issue politely? Maybe you should try it.
You talk about trillions of dollars being lost addressing the problem
Correct.
and therefore we should do nothing but let the fossil fuel industry dictate to us the fate of the planet.
Incorrect. I never said that; you are just putting words in my mouth.
I didn't actually propose anything, but a reasonable person reading what I wrote might correctly infer that I would be in favor of studying the issue and studying geoengineering approaches to solving the issue.
I claim that (0) the proposed remedies to global warming would cause trillions of dollars worth of harm and (1) the current level of proof isn't adequate to convince me that the trillions are warranted. So, you can find a remedy that costs less, or you can find more proof that is convincing, and either way you have answered this pair of objections.
Without addressing the issue, eventually, there won't be enough food being shipped anywhere to need trucks.
Please provide some sort of reference to back up this idea.
P.S. I note that my original post, which had been modded up to 5, has now been modded down to 2. At least you chose to discuss the issue rather than just modding me down.
Carbon credits are merely a capitalist proposal on how to deal with carbon reduction - nothing more, nothing less.
And if we must impose Draconian limits on carbon emissions, I do think a market in credits is a good way to go. Markets tend to work better than top-down controls.
And the "trillions of dollars of harm to the economy" is of course a pack of nonsense.
I'm not an expert on this stuff, but I found some numbers on the Internet. They should serve for a back-of-the-envelope sort of calculation.
According to this report, the cost to the USA of complying with the Kyoto Protocol would be on the order of 4% of GDP. According to Wikipedia, the GDP of the USA is over 14 trillion dollars per year. That means it would cost half a trillion dollars per year, every year, just to comply with Kyoto.
I skimmed that report and I don't believe that the 4% number includes jobs lost (for example, the coal miners, the truckers put out of work because the costs of running a truck are so much higher, etc.). The actual costs would thus be higher.
And Kyoto, by itself, is not enough to satisfy the people who are really worried about AGW.
Saving energy is saving money in the age of peak oil.
Everyone wants to save money where they can. We replaced our windows with modern double-pane windows, sealed and filled with argon, to save energy. So I don't argue this statement, by itself. But it's kind of irrelevant to this discussion.
A really effective plan to curtail carbon emissions in the USA would need to do something about the coal plants that produce the majority of electricity. According to this page, coal power produces almost 50% of all the carbon emissions in the USA, generating about 1.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.
What will you do to get rid of the carbon dioxide from those coal plants? Shut down half of them and quadruple the cost of electricity to encourage people to conserve energy? Tear them down and build nuclear power plants? (I'd be in favor of that; cleaner air right away, and cheaper power in the long run. But it will cost a lot of up-front money to build all those nuke plants, and one or two people will object, so you had better plan on hiring lawyers to help push the project forward.)
You cannot seriously propose to replace those coal plants with solar or wind power, because you won't get anywhere near enough power. And coal and nuclear power plants can operate continuously, while wind and solar plants seldom operate at 100% capacity.
You can't replace them with hydro power, because all the good hydro locations have already been built; and environmentalists hate the damage a dam does to the ecosystem of a river, so good luck building any new ones, let alone enough to replace 1500 coal plants.
So then, having solved the coal plants, you have to solve the other half of the problem: trucks and cars. All-electric vehicles are currently not practical for general use; the batteries are expensive and charging times are slow. If you want to either force people to use electric cars, or subsidize the cars to encourage people, either way it will cost a lot.
Or, you could just quadruple the price of gasoline and diesel, using taxes. That would encourage people to drive less. But that will cost a lot.
Hybrid vehicles are already being sold (the Prius is rather popular) so, given that saving energy is saving money, the government doesn't need to do anything; those cars are already selling. But they don't have zero carbon dioxide emissions, just somewhat less than non-hybrid vehicles.
So as I said, if you are going to do something really effective to actually reduce carbon
0) Has the Earth been getting warmer? (It's pretty clear that this one has been answered: yes.)
1) What is driving the warming? Do we actually understand it? Do we have computer models that, ten years ago, correctly predicted the temperatures we actually experienced in the past decade? Which matters more: CO2, sunspots, clouds? Is the data open and independently corroborated?
2) Will the warming continue, level off, or reverse to a cooling trend (or even an ice age)?
3) If the warming will continue, in what ways will it be bad and in what ways will it be good?
4) If the bad outweighs the good, and we deem global warming to be a major problem, then what is the most effective way to address the problem? Can we solve it with any sort of geoengineering? (Making clouds, locking up carbon in fast-growing plants or algae or something, space-based mirrors, etc.) If the geoengineering is feasible, would it cost less than other proposed plans for carbon regulation?
5) If global warming is happening, we understand it, it is bad, and we can't solve it with geoengineering, what steps should we take now?
6) Is there universal agreement as to the steps we should take now? Will China and India join in the effort?
The AGW proponents claim we understand everything completely now, and no geoengineering efforts will even be considered; we must go straight to carbon credits and such. And if you don't agree with the official AGW position from all steps 0 through 6, you are a "denier" to be ridiculed.
The AGW proponents seriously propose measures that will cause literally trillions of dollars of harm to the economy. That's literal trillions of dollars of increased costs, jobs destroyed, and other harm. This is not theoretical harm, it is harm to actual human beings.
Any effective scheme to reduce carbon emissions must necessarily drive up the cost of driving things around on trucks, because trucks run on carbon-based fuels. Anything that drives up the cost of trucking drives up the cost of everything: food, clothing, all the necessities. And keeping your home warm in the winter requires burning carbon-based fuels, unless you have electric heat and live near a hydro plant or a nuclear power plant. So there will be more people out of a job, and the cost of food will go up, and the cost of heating a home will go up. This is a serious thing to propose, and I expect a high level of proof and a high level of agreement before I will personally be in favor of this. The AGW proponents have not met this high standard yet.
(And before you get snippy with me: even Draconian carbon-control schemes won't hurt me personally, very much. I live in an area where a major chunk of our power is from hydroelectric, I work in an industry that doesn't depend on the cost of energy, and I'm upper-middle class and can afford to pay more for food, heat and everything else. So my own ox isn't being Gored as much as I expect others will be.)
I want to use the device as a Nook, in addition to other stuff. If I do this bootable CM7 install, can I then install the Nook app for Android and use that? I don't want to be constantly popping out the MicroSD card and popping it back in again.
If I can install the Nook app, then I'm sold; I'll try this.
Is there any down-side to running off SD? Is it slower or anything like that? (I think my MicroSD card is Class 10, pretty fast.)
Thanks for the information!
P.S. Oh wow. The community has figured out how to get the Nook Tablet to boot custom software from the MicroSD! Won't be long before it's fully unlocked. I hope the Nook Tablet has Bluetooth hardware like the Nook Color has.
My problem wasn't that I couldn't find info on how to root a Nook Color. My problem was that I found a whole bunch of different guides that use a whole bunch of different tools with different instructions. The one I actually tried didn't work well for me.
The one I'm using is an SD card image called "ClockworkMod Recovery"; this has a "rooting" tool that modifies the flash on the NC itself. I can boot the SD card but it doesn't provide an Android environment, just a menu of things I can do.
I don't know why it didn't work. I had to downgrade my system from 1.3 to 1.01; maybe the downgrade wasn't complete? Maybe my attempt to wipe it clean after the downgrade didn't work?
Since someone here had a good result, I thought I would ask him what he did. If he's booting from SD card, I'll do that.
Do you have a rooted Nook Color? Are you using the boot-from-sdcard mode? Can you give me any specific advice?
Then, one day, I was using someone else's computer. I used "rm" with the expectation that it would prompt me, but this person never bothered to set it up that way, and I had the fearful experience of worrying whether it was deleting too much. I hadn't been too careless that time, but it got me thinking. It's dangerous to use "rm" when I really mean "rm -i"; habits are strong things.
So I made a change that I still use. I now alias "r" as "rm -i". "r" by itself does not have default behavior on most computers. Now if I absent-mindedly type "r *.txt" on someone else's computer, I get "r: command not found" and I edit the command to say "rm -i".
I suppose I should have used "rmi" or something like that, just in case I am a guest somewhere that "r" was aliased to something crazy. In practice, it hasn't been a problem. I use more aliases than most people seem to; they seem to be content with the defaults. I seem to be the only one I know who likes one-letter aliases.
Hmm, I guess I might accidentally run the R statistics package someday?
I guess you are being funny, but if you read TFA you will find that they shipped prototype phones to volunteers. For example, their volunteer in Kenya works as a security guard and was well able to get sunlight for his phone (lots of sun plus he sits in one place a lot so he could just leave the phone in the sun a lot).
Basically this project just cost Nokia the cost of knocking out a few prototypes and shipping them. I'll bet their engineers had an idea about how well it would work, but now that they have tried it, they have data on exactly how well it does or doesn't work.
I agree. Never mind our wildest fantasies about completely destroying copyright or whatever; politics is the art of the possible.
I think it is possible to set up a system where a corporation (or an individual) can keep renewing the copyright forever, but if they fail to renew the work becomes public domain. Then Disney will keep "Steamboat Willy" locked up forever, but obscure works by long-defunct companies or individuals will lapse into the public domain.
Even this would require a huge push. For example, games companies don't want all the old abandonware to become actually legal to use; if there is a really decent shoot-em-up you can grab for free, will you buy this year's hot shoot-em-up? But I think this is possible, and it is the best single thing I can think of that is possible.
From what I've read, it's not "as needed", but is rate-limited -- and that rate is different for individuals.
According to Udo Erasmus's book, the conversion is rate-limited but your body can convert Omega 3 fast enough to keep up with its needs. If you are deficient in Omega 3 and you start eating some every day to restore the deficiency, the book said that it should probably take you a month to convert everything your body needs, but after that month you should stay current.
Slashdot Mirror
The GP was replying to someone who insinuated that the US is in similar shape regarding separation of church and state.
I just read all the postings in the thread, and you are correct. The GP didn't quote the insinuation or refer to it, and the insinuation was below my threshold so I didn't see it.
steveha
How many people have you seen executed in the name of religion lately?
Me, personally? None.
But in Muslim countries where they follow Islamic law, there are lots of religious crimes for which people are executed.
In this case, the crime is "apostasy", or leaving the faith. I don't know of any person in recent history being executed for leaving the Christian faith in any of its variations; but in Islamic law apostasy can be and is punished by death.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy#Islam
Another crime for which one can be executed under Islamic law: homosexuality. Note that I am not saying I personally consider homosexuality a crime (I don't), I am saying that under Islam this is a crime, it is punishable by death, and this actually happens in the real world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_and_Islam#Legal_status_in_modern_Islamic_nations
So, either you need to find an explanation for why the above examples are not executions "in the name of religion" or you need to consider your point invalidated.
steveha
Most audiophiles don't spend like this. It's a misrepresentation
No doubt you are correct. How many people even have this kind of money to burn, let alone are willing to burn it on $2000 power cords?
those who foam at the mouth over this topic are fools. This includes you.
Oh, I'm not foaming at the mouth. I'm shaking my head sadly that there is anyone who buys in on this stuff.
Still, I guess I can't deny that I'm a fool; an Anonymous Coward said so, and that's that.
What you're saying is no different than the troll article run on MSNBC not too long ago saying that gamers spend roughly 17000 dollars per year on their habit. You're bullshit post is keeping bullshit "journalism" alive.
This is such a strange paragraph that I am powerless to respond to it. Well done sir! Or Ma'am as it may be.
I'm a big headphones fan. I spend in the area of 500-1000 dollars on a set of headphones and they'll last me more than 4 years.
Rather than return abuse for abuse, I'll just comment that this sounds pretty sensible to me. Really nice headphones will make a bigger difference than any other single thing in your system, and the really cheap headphones aren't as good as the expensive ones.
That to me is being an audiophile, not any of the shit that you or the little extremist bitches upthread posted.
See, the problem here is that you don't get to decide what words mean. There is a community of audiophiles who are downright silly, and there is a community of vendors who cater to them (at great expense). I never said, anywhere, that all audiophiles delude themselves or all audiophiles are silly and spend too much on equipment. And I never intended to imply that anyone who considers himself an audiophile must be a fool.
As another poster noted, there are the objectivist audiophiles, which is a fancy way of saying people who believe measurements actually work and who like to listen to nice equipment; and subjectivist audiophiles, who are the silly ones. I think "objectivist audiophile" describes me, and perhaps you as well.
Sorry I raised your blood pressure. But note that all I really did was post URLs that exist to web sites that exist. I didn't make any of this stuff up; I am not The Onion.
steveha
It's a fair point. I would call myself an objectivist audiophile. I like nice-sounding equipment.
I second your endorsement of Sean Olive. He knows way more than I do about this stuff, and JJ Johnston respects him also.
I went to a lecture from Sean Olive where he described his efforts to make an objective metric on how "good" an audio speaker is. First they trained a bunch of people as critical listeners. Then they tested the listeners on various speakers, and made sure that the listeners pretty much agreed on which ones sounded good. Then they took a bunch of objective measurements of speakers (using about 64 microphones all around the speaker, and testing in an anechoic chamber). Finally they tried to find an equation that would use the objective data to compute a goodness metric (my words, I forget what he called it) that agreed with the listeners. That seems like pretty air-tight work to me.
steveha
$300 power cord containing $15 worth of parts:
http://gizmodo.com/371536/300-audiophile-grade-power-cable-is-really-worth-15
$1000 power cord on sale for a mere $750:
http://www.essentialsound.com/essence-power-cord/index.htm
$2000 power cord:
http://www.dedicatedaudio.com/inc/sdetail/125/24045
$695 cable for digital signals... that's right, a $700 S/PDIF cord:
http://www.lessloss.com/digital-cables-c-70.html?zenid=l5tu6jq73toh5mk09a315pkid0
Machina Dynamica. Oh man. I really wonder if the guy running this site even believes in his own products, or if he is gleefully exploiting the gullible. Products include "The Clever Little Clock" which seems to be an ordinary travel alarm clock with magical powers, "The Super Intelligent Chip" which not only improves the sound of your CDs, but does so permanently (by altering the structure of the CD in some hand-waving "quantum" fashion), his new product, "The Quantum Temple Bell", a decorated bell you walk around your house ringing and your audio sounds better, and my favorite "The Teleportation Tweak" where he calls you and plays magical tones through your phone, and your audio sounds better afterward.
http://www.machinadynamica.com/
steveha
Audiophiles are not known for using controlled, double-blind testing. That's a problem, because you can actually control a lot about how you hear things. In short, if you expect something to sound different, you can actually hear a difference; not imagine you hear a difference, actually hear a difference.
JJ Johnston gave a presentation, Why Do We Hear What We Hear?. (PowerPoint, but LibreOffice should open it just fine.) If you look at slides 14 and 16 you will see him explaining the above points.
With double-blind testing, the audiophile will not be able to tell the difference between a $2 cable from monoprice.com and a $1000 cable from some audiophile scam web site. Without the double-blind, a confident audiophile will hear differences that favor the expensive cable.
The crazy thing, and I'm not making this up, is that some audiophiles claim that double-blind testing "doesn't work". They claim that you introduce errors that mask the superiority of the expensive equipment.
P.S. If you would like to have quality audio gear, and you would like to see the gear tested scientifically, you have to check out the NorthWest AV Guy blog. He bought a $1000+ DAC/amplifier that audiophiles like and that tests well objectively, and then he designed a very inexpensive headphone amp that in double-blind testing cannot be distinguised from the expensive one... and he open-sourced the design; you can build one if you like, or buy one pre-built. He uses professional test gear, and for example he showed that the Sansa Clip really is a good-sounding media player (which plays Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, by the way). Check it out. (And NWAudioGuy, if I ever meet you in person, I'll buy you lunch or something.)
steveha
So now we have gone from "unit tests have no value and are just double the work LOL" to "unit tests don't solve every problem".
I agree: unit tests don't solve every problem. I said I'm happy every time an assert catches a bug; I didn't say I never use the debugger anymore.
things most often break in the integration of all those pieces...not just isolated individual pieces you wrote the unit tests for.
Don't you have unit tests that exercise the whole system? I do.
I work with audio, and I have unit tests that run reference files through the system and then verify that the output is close to what was expected. This is an end-to-end unit test, which will catch bugs in the I/O layer, bugs in the processing code, etc. etc.
Of course you'll never get 100% coverage. (Although SQLite claims 100% branch test coverage!)
steveha
Ah, unit tests... twice the code, twice the time vs a statically typed language.
Wow, what a terrible attitude you have. You sound smug about it, too.
Learning to work in Python exposed me to the unit-tests way of doing things, and once I understood just how useful they are, I started doing them in my plain old C code as well.
Unit tests free your mind. You can completely re-write your core components, and if you have good unit tests and they pass, you don't need to fret over whether you have introduced some subtle bug that will bite you later.
For C and C++ developers, unit tests in combination with assert() can find all sorts of bugs for you.
I haven't done a scientific study, so I don't have any actual metrics for you, but I am completely convinced that the time I spent in making good unit tests has been repaid by the bugs the unit tests caught for me.
Right when you have written new code, and the code and its corner cases are fresh in your mind, you can easily whip out a few good unit tests that will make sure the code is good. It doesn't take anything near "twice the time". Then, when you run your unit tests, they never get bored and they always cover all your code. And they catch things.
And you might be a tough loner, slinging the code and never making mistakes, but what if you have to work with others who might not be as awesome as you are? "Before you commit your changes to the repository, make sure the unit tests all pass." And you have fewer problems.
I love seeing an assert() fire; that's one bug I didn't have to run down by hand in the debugger. Maybe you really love running the debugger? I'd rather leave work earlier.
steveha
Dynamic languages have different strengths and weaknesses than static languages. The best advice I can give you is: deal with it.
Best practice in a dynamic language includes automated unit tests for your code, for example. I don't use JavaScript so I can't tell you all the best practices and developer idioms for JavaScript, but I have heard that the best book is the O'Reilly reference book and that anything by Crockford is worth reading.
Note that lots of other Slashdotters are already giving you very similar advice to what I wrote.
P.S. Hmm, doing a Google search for "JavaScript best practices" found this: http://www.javascripttoolbox.com/bestpractices/
steveha
You must be pretty disappointed bymost fiction then.
No.
Great (or even good) novels don't depend on you liking the characters, they just have to be believable, or at least interesting.
There is a category of stories where this statement is true. Police procedurals, old-school "idea" science fiction... any story where what is going on is the important thing, or where the setting is the important thing. Consider the classic story "The Wabbler". There aren't even any characters in that story; there is a robot, too simple to even have any personality. The story works only because what is going on is interesting.
Heinlein commented that there are only a tiny handful of story types: "Boy Meets Girl", "The Man Who Learned Better", and "The Little Tailor". In keeping with the whimsical nature of these titles, I call stories where the plot or location is the most important part "Travelogue" stories.
But stories like that can also have strong characters. Some police procedurals have generic police detectives, but the most popular ones have quirky, interesting ones.
Most of the characters in Brave New World or 1984 aren't people you'd want as friends.
Brave New World definitely qualifies as a Travelogue story IMHO. I've only read it once, a long time ago, but I don't remember connecting with any of the characters; I only was interested in the imagined brave new world. So I'll agree with you on this one.
1984 works as a Travelogue, but Winston Smith is definitely a strong character with whom I made a connection. I don't feel I'm very much like him, but I was rooting for him, which made the ending that much more powerful. So I'll disagree with you on this one.
Now you consider Star Wars: A New Hope. Full of "sense of wonder", it could qualify as a Travelogue story. But we connect with Luke. We connect with Leia. The droids, Han and Chewie, Ben Kenobi... all strong characters with whom we can easily get some sort of emotional investment. Vader s a strong anti-hero, interesting to watch, and it's satisfying to see him spinning away at the end. Had the characters been flat (like in The Phantom Menace) the movie might still have won fans on its strength as a view into a nifty fantasy milieu, but it wouldn't be in the top 20 most popular movies at IMDB as it is (#17 when I just checked).
In any event, I guess I should make my statement stronger: It's hard to read a novel when the experience of reading it is unpleasant. I not only did not connect with the characters in Windup Girl, I'm tired of reading about them. That's bad.
steveha
A friend told me the book was great. It won Hugo and Nebula awards, more evidence that it's great. But I am stopped reading it and I'm finding it difficult to make myself pick it up again.
My main complaint is that I'm around ten chapters in, and so far I don't like anyone. Maybe I should like Emiko, but I haven't seen much of her. But the business exec is harsh, people around him are plotting to stab him in the back, the union that controls the matodonts is corrupt and obnoxious, Thai government officials are corrupt and obnoxious... I find the book unpleasant to read.
Reading this book made me think: in any story you need to make a connection with at least one of the major characters. Usually it should be a positive connection: you are rooting for the hero and want him/her to triumph. Sometimes it can be a negative connection: you start to really want to see the character's plans foiled.
In my favorite stories, there is not just one but several characters I connect with, and usually right from the first chapter. Not so this book.
And, like another Slashdotter commented, I have to wonder why solar power doesn't seem important. The concept of treadle-operated office computers is kind of cool, but it doesn't really make sense to me. Business desktop computers of the 90's were less powerful than today's ARM or SOC computers, so you ought to be able to run business computers 100 years from now on sunlight. Especially in Thailand!
If you love steampunk sort of stuff, then the "bio-punk" in this novel might capture your imagination. I certainly found the background and the technology more interesting than the characters. Global warming has made the seas rise, and fossil fuels are depleted, so the technology is all different. They use "mastodonts" to wind "kink-springs", and these "kink-springs" are sold to anyone who needs portable power without putting carbon emissions into the atmosphere. So airships run on kink-spring power, and sailing ships ply the oceans, and nobody can afford to operate airplanes or motorized ships anymore. (You might think the Internet would be hugely important, since it is so much cheaper to ship bits through a cable than to move humans around, but it doesn't figure much into the chapters I read.)
steveha
It wouldn't matter even if there were oceans of high grade crude oil on the moon. Look at the Saturn V- the entire thing is one big fuel canister
You are perfectly correct that petroleum from space will never make sense with Saturn V technology.
However, that huge canister of fuel was for lifting stuff out of Earth gravity. If you assume we have the infrastructure for petroleum collection in space, you should agree that it's a lot easier to convince a canister of petroleum to fall down to Earth than to lift hardware away from Earth. Gravity is helping you when it's time to deliver the cargo.
So now the question is whether you can get that infrastructure in place. You don't want to try to do it the Saturn V way, where everything goes to space in one launch of a heavy lifter. You will want to send things up in pieces and assemble them in orbit; you will want a space station with fuel and oxygen and water storage, you will want spaceships that go from orbit to orbit and never enter atmosphere (build them right and they last a long time), you will want truly reusable "space pickup trucks" that can ferry small loads up from Earth to orbit, cheaply and reliably... in short, you want a rational set of building blocks, where each gram you lift out of Earth gravity gives you as much benefit as you can manage, vs. Saturn V where everything lifts in one launch and everything is thrown away after one launch.
I don't know if petroleum will be that big a deal. But there's a lot of stuff out there in space, and it's easy for me to imagine it being mined. It's an old SF trope that space miners will build large parabolic mirrors and concentrate sunlight to smelt ore out of rocks, then deliver relatively pure hunks of metal to Earth. Maybe that will actually pencil out someday.
steveha
steveha
There are no "smart phones" that provide decent telephony function.
I completely disagree. Before I got my Droid 2 phone (Android phone from Verizon) I didn't think that a smartphone would be much different from a boring phone. And, I really loved my old Motorola StarTac flip-phone; I was reluctant to go from that to the comparatively massive Droid 2.
Here is what I have found:
In short, I'm quite pleased with my Droid 2 as a phone.
steveha
On the one hand you can in many jurisdictions legally shoot (take the life of) someone that trespasses your land/ house or car
That's actually not true. At all.
I have studied this issue, including taking an all-day class taught by Massad Ayoob. Nobody is ever allowed to "take the life of" another person. A person is only allowed to shoot someone (i.e., use potentially lethal force) to stop that person when he is causing an immediate, otherwise unavoidable danger of death or grave bodily harm to the innocent.
If you see a guy holding a knife and running towards another person, and you have reason to believe he is planning to use that knife (e.g. he is shouting "Bitch! I'll kill you!"), you are probably legally in the clear to shoot him, if that is the only way you can stop him.
If you see a guy plunge a knife into another person, and then he flings the knife on the ground and runs away, you are not clear to shoot him. You aren't allowed to do anything unless there is an immediate danger; you certainly aren't allowed to punish someone yourself.
If you shoot someone and he keels over, you are not allowed to continue shooting him. If you have stopped him by shooting him, you no longer are clear to shoot him. If he then grabs for a gun or something, the imminent danger is back and you could shoot him again.
And while you are generally allowed to use "reasonable" force to stop a theft in progress, potentially lethal force is never authorized in defense of mere property.
And even if you obey the above guidelines, you may be hauled into court on criminal charges; you will probably win, but you will still have to pay for a lawyer and it's a big deal. And you might lose. In some places (like Washington, D.C. or New York City) you may be charged with gun control law violations even if what you did with the gun saved a life. And even if you avoid or are cleared of criminal charges, you may be hauled into court on civil charges from the person you shot or his surviving family.
I'm not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice, etc.
steveha
Too late for this discussion really, but the Wall Street Journal just published an editorial on this subject. The title of the editorial: "No Need to Panic About Global Warming"
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577171531838421366.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
The editorial was signed by 16 people:
AGW proponents claim that the science is "settled" and that "nobody" who isn't a crank or a shill for evil big business disagrees. These 16 people disagree.
P.S. Freeman Dyson isn't completely sold on the need for urgent measures to control carbon release into the atmosphere, either. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson#Global_warming
steveha
You sound like the guy who wasn't affected by the collapse of the credit default swap market, because he personally hadn't invested in any.
I'm afraid I don't follow the metaphor.
Going forward until the effects of carbon dioxide pollution is addressed, it is going to impact your life more than any other event.
I'm not convinced. Clearly you are.
By the way, do you realize that my comment was saying that the measures to fight carbon release won't hurt me personally as much as those measures will hurt most of the people in the USA? I didn't say that a global warming doom scenario won't hurt me, I said the steps AGW proponents want won't hurt me (too much).
It may do so indirectly and you may be too thoughtless to notice, but rest assured you will be affected far more dramatically than you currently realize.
Not good enough. You want to convince me, these vague words won't do it. Make a specific, testable prediction please.
For example, in 2005, UNEP predicted that 50 million people would be forced to flee their homes by 2010 due to flooding caused by global warming. That prediction didn't work out so the new prediction is that 150 million people will be displaced by flooding by 2050. This seems safely far in the future.
I'm sure if I looked, I could find some crazy "expert" making some predictions about how an ice age will doom us all unless we do something to make the Earth warmer. So don't just quote "the experts". Tell me about the predictions that have been proven correct.
What are the testable predictions of the AGW proponents that have panned out?
By the way, I do not thank you for calling me "thoughtless". I don't believe I have insulted you (I don't even know you) and I believe my comments here on Slashdot have been polite and focused on the issues. Can you discuss this issue politely? Maybe you should try it.
You talk about trillions of dollars being lost addressing the problem
Correct.
and therefore we should do nothing but let the fossil fuel industry dictate to us the fate of the planet.
Incorrect. I never said that; you are just putting words in my mouth.
I didn't actually propose anything, but a reasonable person reading what I wrote might correctly infer that I would be in favor of studying the issue and studying geoengineering approaches to solving the issue.
I claim that (0) the proposed remedies to global warming would cause trillions of dollars worth of harm and (1) the current level of proof isn't adequate to convince me that the trillions are warranted. So, you can find a remedy that costs less, or you can find more proof that is convincing, and either way you have answered this pair of objections.
Without addressing the issue, eventually, there won't be enough food being shipped anywhere to need trucks.
Please provide some sort of reference to back up this idea.
P.S. I note that my original post, which had been modded up to 5, has now been modded down to 2. At least you chose to discuss the issue rather than just modding me down.
steveha
Well, FUD you too, then.
Carbon credits are merely a capitalist proposal on how to deal with carbon reduction - nothing more, nothing less.
And if we must impose Draconian limits on carbon emissions, I do think a market in credits is a good way to go. Markets tend to work better than top-down controls.
And the "trillions of dollars of harm to the economy" is of course a pack of nonsense.
I'm not an expert on this stuff, but I found some numbers on the Internet. They should serve for a back-of-the-envelope sort of calculation.
According to this report, the cost to the USA of complying with the Kyoto Protocol would be on the order of 4% of GDP. According to Wikipedia, the GDP of the USA is over 14 trillion dollars per year. That means it would cost half a trillion dollars per year, every year, just to comply with Kyoto.
I skimmed that report and I don't believe that the 4% number includes jobs lost (for example, the coal miners, the truckers put out of work because the costs of running a truck are so much higher, etc.). The actual costs would thus be higher.
And Kyoto, by itself, is not enough to satisfy the people who are really worried about AGW.
Saving energy is saving money in the age of peak oil.
Everyone wants to save money where they can. We replaced our windows with modern double-pane windows, sealed and filled with argon, to save energy. So I don't argue this statement, by itself. But it's kind of irrelevant to this discussion.
A really effective plan to curtail carbon emissions in the USA would need to do something about the coal plants that produce the majority of electricity. According to this page, coal power produces almost 50% of all the carbon emissions in the USA, generating about 1.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.
What will you do to get rid of the carbon dioxide from those coal plants? Shut down half of them and quadruple the cost of electricity to encourage people to conserve energy? Tear them down and build nuclear power plants? (I'd be in favor of that; cleaner air right away, and cheaper power in the long run. But it will cost a lot of up-front money to build all those nuke plants, and one or two people will object, so you had better plan on hiring lawyers to help push the project forward.)
You cannot seriously propose to replace those coal plants with solar or wind power, because you won't get anywhere near enough power. And coal and nuclear power plants can operate continuously, while wind and solar plants seldom operate at 100% capacity.
You can't replace them with hydro power, because all the good hydro locations have already been built; and environmentalists hate the damage a dam does to the ecosystem of a river, so good luck building any new ones, let alone enough to replace 1500 coal plants.
So then, having solved the coal plants, you have to solve the other half of the problem: trucks and cars. All-electric vehicles are currently not practical for general use; the batteries are expensive and charging times are slow. If you want to either force people to use electric cars, or subsidize the cars to encourage people, either way it will cost a lot.
Or, you could just quadruple the price of gasoline and diesel, using taxes. That would encourage people to drive less. But that will cost a lot.
Hybrid vehicles are already being sold (the Prius is rather popular) so, given that saving energy is saving money, the government doesn't need to do anything; those cars are already selling. But they don't have zero carbon dioxide emissions, just somewhat less than non-hybrid vehicles.
So as I said, if you are going to do something really effective to actually reduce carbon
0) Has the Earth been getting warmer? (It's pretty clear that this one has been answered: yes.)
1) What is driving the warming? Do we actually understand it? Do we have computer models that, ten years ago, correctly predicted the temperatures we actually experienced in the past decade? Which matters more: CO2, sunspots, clouds? Is the data open and independently corroborated?
2) Will the warming continue, level off, or reverse to a cooling trend (or even an ice age)?
3) If the warming will continue, in what ways will it be bad and in what ways will it be good?
4) If the bad outweighs the good, and we deem global warming to be a major problem, then what is the most effective way to address the problem? Can we solve it with any sort of geoengineering? (Making clouds, locking up carbon in fast-growing plants or algae or something, space-based mirrors, etc.) If the geoengineering is feasible, would it cost less than other proposed plans for carbon regulation?
5) If global warming is happening, we understand it, it is bad, and we can't solve it with geoengineering, what steps should we take now?
6) Is there universal agreement as to the steps we should take now? Will China and India join in the effort?
The AGW proponents claim we understand everything completely now, and no geoengineering efforts will even be considered; we must go straight to carbon credits and such. And if you don't agree with the official AGW position from all steps 0 through 6, you are a "denier" to be ridiculed.
The AGW proponents seriously propose measures that will cause literally trillions of dollars of harm to the economy. That's literal trillions of dollars of increased costs, jobs destroyed, and other harm. This is not theoretical harm, it is harm to actual human beings.
Any effective scheme to reduce carbon emissions must necessarily drive up the cost of driving things around on trucks, because trucks run on carbon-based fuels. Anything that drives up the cost of trucking drives up the cost of everything: food, clothing, all the necessities. And keeping your home warm in the winter requires burning carbon-based fuels, unless you have electric heat and live near a hydro plant or a nuclear power plant. So there will be more people out of a job, and the cost of food will go up, and the cost of heating a home will go up. This is a serious thing to propose, and I expect a high level of proof and a high level of agreement before I will personally be in favor of this. The AGW proponents have not met this high standard yet.
(And before you get snippy with me: even Draconian carbon-control schemes won't hurt me personally, very much. I live in an area where a major chunk of our power is from hydroelectric, I work in an industry that doesn't depend on the cost of energy, and I'm upper-middle class and can afford to pay more for food, heat and everything else. So my own ox isn't being Gored as much as I expect others will be.)
steveha
I want to use the device as a Nook, in addition to other stuff. If I do this bootable CM7 install, can I then install the Nook app for Android and use that? I don't want to be constantly popping out the MicroSD card and popping it back in again.
It looks like that shouldn't be a problem:
http://forum.cyanogenmod.com/topic/30549-nook-color-app/
If I can install the Nook app, then I'm sold; I'll try this.
Is there any down-side to running off SD? Is it slower or anything like that? (I think my MicroSD card is Class 10, pretty fast.)
Thanks for the information!
P.S. Oh wow. The community has figured out how to get the Nook Tablet to boot custom software from the MicroSD! Won't be long before it's fully unlocked. I hope the Nook Tablet has Bluetooth hardware like the Nook Color has.
http://liliputing.com/2012/01/nook-tablet-can-now-run-cwm-recovery-boot-from-sd-cards.html
steveha
My problem wasn't that I couldn't find info on how to root a Nook Color. My problem was that I found a whole bunch of different guides that use a whole bunch of different tools with different instructions. The one I actually tried didn't work well for me.
The one I'm using is an SD card image called "ClockworkMod Recovery"; this has a "rooting" tool that modifies the flash on the NC itself. I can boot the SD card but it doesn't provide an Android environment, just a menu of things I can do.
I don't know why it didn't work. I had to downgrade my system from 1.3 to 1.01; maybe the downgrade wasn't complete? Maybe my attempt to wipe it clean after the downgrade didn't work?
Since someone here had a good result, I thought I would ask him what he did. If he's booting from SD card, I'll do that.
Do you have a rooted Nook Color? Are you using the boot-from-sdcard mode? Can you give me any specific advice?
steveha
I have a Nook Color and I'm trying to root it. I'm having weird problems so I want to wipe it and try again.
Could you please tell me what tools you used for your successful rooting of your NC?
steveha
I used to alias "rm" as "rm -i".
Then, one day, I was using someone else's computer. I used "rm" with the expectation that it would prompt me, but this person never bothered to set it up that way, and I had the fearful experience of worrying whether it was deleting too much. I hadn't been too careless that time, but it got me thinking. It's dangerous to use "rm" when I really mean "rm -i"; habits are strong things.
So I made a change that I still use. I now alias "r" as "rm -i". "r" by itself does not have default behavior on most computers. Now if I absent-mindedly type "r *.txt" on someone else's computer, I get "r: command not found" and I edit the command to say "rm -i".
I suppose I should have used "rmi" or something like that, just in case I am a guest somewhere that "r" was aliased to something crazy. In practice, it hasn't been a problem. I use more aliases than most people seem to; they seem to be content with the defaults. I seem to be the only one I know who likes one-letter aliases.
Hmm, I guess I might accidentally run the R statistics package someday?
steveha
I guess you are being funny, but if you read TFA you will find that they shipped prototype phones to volunteers. For example, their volunteer in Kenya works as a security guard and was well able to get sunlight for his phone (lots of sun plus he sits in one place a lot so he could just leave the phone in the sun a lot).
Basically this project just cost Nokia the cost of knocking out a few prototypes and shipping them. I'll bet their engineers had an idea about how well it would work, but now that they have tried it, they have data on exactly how well it does or doesn't work.
steveha
I agree. Never mind our wildest fantasies about completely destroying copyright or whatever; politics is the art of the possible.
I think it is possible to set up a system where a corporation (or an individual) can keep renewing the copyright forever, but if they fail to renew the work becomes public domain. Then Disney will keep "Steamboat Willy" locked up forever, but obscure works by long-defunct companies or individuals will lapse into the public domain.
Even this would require a huge push. For example, games companies don't want all the old abandonware to become actually legal to use; if there is a really decent shoot-em-up you can grab for free, will you buy this year's hot shoot-em-up? But I think this is possible, and it is the best single thing I can think of that is possible.
steveha
From what I've read, it's not "as needed", but is rate-limited -- and that rate is different for individuals.
According to Udo Erasmus's book, the conversion is rate-limited but your body can convert Omega 3 fast enough to keep up with its needs. If you are deficient in Omega 3 and you start eating some every day to restore the deficiency, the book said that it should probably take you a month to convert everything your body needs, but after that month you should stay current.
steveha