I wonder more people using headphones is also a result of the move from dedicated offices to cubicle farms. A lot of the offices I've worked in were so noisy and distracting, I've often used headphones not because I felt like listening to music, but to drown out the noise.
I've seriously considered getting a pair of ear protection headphones like an airport worker and just using those. Or noise cancellation headphones.
But I've always wondered how we know that the speed of light is the same regardless, that the gravitational constant is constant throughout space and time.
There are actually some scientisst that have proposed a Variable Speed of Light theory. In their theory, the speed of light decreases over time. In other words it was much faster in the early universe. The cool thing about it is, once you make that assumption a lot of other things are suddenly explainable (for example, you don't need inflation in the early universe anymore).
João Magueijo has written a book about it called "Faster Than The Speed of Light, The Story of a Scientific Speculation". There is also a BBC documentary about it called "Einsteins Biggest Blunder".
IPv6 will give almost everybody practically static addresses, the ultimate undeleteable cookie. So the EU regulation will be futile very soon.
That problem has been solved by RFC 4941, otherwise known as the Privacy Extensions. Most OSes support it, though I believe some don't enable it by default. IIRC the iPhone is one of the devices that doesn't support it, but that should be fixable once IPv6 becomes more widespread.
So the job of the 800 break horse power internal combustion engine is to deliver fuel into the rocket engine (not the jet engine). But the rocket is a solid fuel booster (essentially a glorified fireworks motor). Err wait, what? What do you need a fuel pump for a solid fuel rocket booster?
It's not a pure solid fuel rocket. It contains solid fuel, but then they pump hydrogen peroxide thru the rocket as an oxidizer. That's being pumped by the F1 engine. Seeing how it has to pump one ton of HTP in 22 seconds, you can see why they need that much power for the pump. More details on the rocket engine.
Let's also not forget the tragedy of Babylon 5. They said they were canceling at season 4, so the creators had to rush the show's plot, then they decided afterward to renew a 5th season, so they had to make up new crap completely outside the realm of the original planned plot line.
Babylon 5 ran on PTEN for four seasons. When they didn't renew it for season 5, it moved to TNT for the final season. One canceled it, and another picked it up. Not only did the networks not do what you described, SciFi had nothing to do with it.
The Arduino won? I didn't even know there was a contest!
There are lots of microcontrollers and boards out there: Basic Stamps, PICs, 68HC11s, Parallax Propellors. You can get some for as little as $3 each. There's probably more stuff out there for Basic Stamps than for the Arduino. There's definitely more PIC related stuff.
Basic stamps and PICs used to get a lot of usage in hobbyist projects, but that has changed in the last couple of years. First it started shifting from PIC to Atmel, and then to the (Atmel based) Arduino. It's been a while since I've seen a new project that someone had chosen PIC for.
IMHO the move to Atmle may have been partially due to the PICs super annoying architecture (bank switching for every other operation, for starters). The Arduino of course has a big advantage for people who don't want (or can't) design their own PCBs.
If look at Projects on Make, or elsewhere online, you'll see Arduino being used in the majority of the newer projects.
An alternative theory is that the speed of light used to be much higher in the early universe (like 60x higher). This is known as the variable speed of light (VSL) concept. There is a documentary from 2000 called "Einstein's Biggest Blunder", that gives a good overview of how it was developed.
If the universe started with a big bang, with all matter originated in an extremely compact volume, and if it's radius can't expand faster than light, then there should be no points in the universe beyond what we can see (as limited by light speed.) What am I missing?
The current theory that tries to explain this is called Inflation. Basically, it assumes that after the Big Bang there was a period of Inflation where space time itself expanded faster than the speed of light.
I don't know what Intel is putting into those chips, but I am highly doubtful it is the way the article states it.
Chip real estate is expensive. So Intel is going to put a complete 3G module on the CPU and use it only for this feature? And to top it off, it has some kinda of separate battery, cause you know, it works when the chip is off? Nonsense.
This is probably some feature that gets build into the AMT support of some chipsets, maybe on Laptops that have a 3G connection already.But the way they are describing this? I call BS on that.
I wonder if a real-life-real-drivers 70 mpg car is what will actually arrive, or if such promises will dissolve like Chevy's promises about the Volt did.
It boggles my mind that 25 years later most cars I can buy in the US get half of what my 25 year old car got. If that. It also means that getting 70 shouldn't be impossible. Thats 3.3l/100km, and it's been done.
I'm not familiar with the details of delicious.com, but Xmarks syncs your bookmarks, history, open tabs and passwords across multiple browsers. I find the password sync in particular to be invaluable, but you can disable each of the four options depending on your preference. I'll miss them.
The Cri-cri (short for cricket) is the smallest twin-engined manned aircraft in the world, designed in the early 1970s by French aeronautical engineer Michel Colomban, the Cri-cri aircraft is the world's smallest twin-engine.
Well, it hasn't really been broadcasting continuously, as it went suddenly offline two months ago. This was previously discussed on slashdot at the time. It *had* been broadcasting continuously for 20 years until then, however.
"technical training or two-year schools, which have been embraced in Europe for decades."
Telling Americans to do something because Europe's been doing it is a lot like telling a 5-year-old not to go near the cookie jar.
They are also omitting the fact that Europe has meaningful alternatives to universities, with apprenticeships in the dual education system. I've often felt that that's whats lacking in the US.
The house-sized battery can hold four megawatts of power for up to eight hours.
I wasn't sure what that was supposed to mean. Does the battery discharge in 8 hours if you don't use the energy?
The original NPR article http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125561502 leads me to think they are saying that the consumption of the town is 4MW and the battery can feed it for 8 hours, so it holds 32MW (or less, since the 4MW is the peak load).
On an unrelated note, why does the inhabitat article have four links, which all go to the same popsci article? Does the author get paid by the link?
A lot of these speed tests always compare javascript performance, which I have to say matters less for me on a day to day usage than other things.
At the end of the article (10 pages later), they do break it out into categories. The winner of the 'page load' category is: Firefox.
I care about other things as well, startup times for example (won by Opera), but if I had to pick one most important category for me, it's page load times. YMMV, obviously.
For those of you who, like me, had never heard of Pixel Qi, its apparently a screen manufacturer thats the commercial offshoot of the OLPC project: Pixel Qi
On a different note, I like that it has an SD slot. That way you can upgrade memory for close to the cost of the actual flash. Not holding my breath for Apples tablet to have one.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder more people using headphones is also a result of the move from dedicated offices to cubicle farms. A lot of the offices I've worked in were so noisy and distracting, I've often used headphones not because I felt like listening to music, but to drown out the noise.
I've seriously considered getting a pair of ear protection headphones like an airport worker and just using those. Or noise cancellation headphones.
But I've always wondered how we know that the speed of light is the same regardless, that the gravitational constant is constant throughout space and time.
There are actually some scientisst that have proposed a Variable Speed of Light theory. In their theory, the speed of light decreases over time. In other words it was much faster in the early universe. The cool thing about it is, once you make that assumption a lot of other things are suddenly explainable (for example, you don't need inflation in the early universe anymore).
João Magueijo has written a book about it called "Faster Than The Speed of Light, The Story of a Scientific Speculation". There is also a BBC documentary about it called "Einsteins Biggest Blunder".
Which phones out there get vendor supplied updates after 3 years? Certainly not any that I've ever owned.
My company got me a Droid Eris (I had no choice). 6 months later, no update to Android 2.2. (Maybe 8. Whatever)
I'm not sure why Apple is getting dinged for not supporting a 3 year old phone. No one that I know of supports 3 year old phones.
Computer World did an interesting comparison of which companies have offered upgrades to Froyo, and for how many of their phones.
Even the highest score (HTC) was only 50%. Here is the breakdown:
HTC: 50%
Motorola: 15.4%
Samsung: 11%
Dell: 0%
LG: 0%
Sony: 0%
IPv6 will give almost everybody practically static addresses, the ultimate undeleteable cookie. So the EU regulation will be futile very soon.
That problem has been solved by RFC 4941, otherwise known as the Privacy Extensions. Most OSes support it, though I believe some don't enable it by default. IIRC the iPhone is one of the devices that doesn't support it, but that should be fixable once IPv6 becomes more widespread.
So the job of the 800 break horse power internal combustion engine is to deliver fuel into the rocket engine (not the jet engine). But the rocket is a solid fuel booster (essentially a glorified fireworks motor). Err wait, what? What do you need a fuel pump for a solid fuel rocket booster?
It's not a pure solid fuel rocket. It contains solid fuel, but then they pump hydrogen peroxide thru the rocket as an oxidizer. That's being pumped by the F1 engine. Seeing how it has to pump one ton of HTP in 22 seconds, you can see why they need that much power for the pump. More details on the rocket engine.
Let's also not forget the tragedy of Babylon 5. They said they were canceling at season 4, so the creators had to rush the show's plot, then they decided afterward to renew a 5th season, so they had to make up new crap completely outside the realm of the original planned plot line.
Babylon 5 ran on PTEN for four seasons. When they didn't renew it for season 5, it moved to TNT for the final season. One canceled it, and another picked it up. Not only did the networks not do what you described, SciFi had nothing to do with it.
The Arduino won? I didn't even know there was a contest! There are lots of microcontrollers and boards out there: Basic Stamps, PICs, 68HC11s, Parallax Propellors. You can get some for as little as $3 each. There's probably more stuff out there for Basic Stamps than for the Arduino. There's definitely more PIC related stuff.
Basic stamps and PICs used to get a lot of usage in hobbyist projects, but that has changed in the last couple of years. First it started shifting from PIC to Atmel, and then to the (Atmel based) Arduino. It's been a while since I've seen a new project that someone had chosen PIC for.
IMHO the move to Atmle may have been partially due to the PICs super annoying architecture (bank switching for every other operation, for starters). The Arduino of course has a big advantage for people who don't want (or can't) design their own PCBs.
If look at Projects on Make, or elsewhere online, you'll see Arduino being used in the majority of the newer projects.
An alternative theory is that the speed of light used to be much higher in the early universe (like 60x higher). This is known as the variable speed of light (VSL) concept. There is a documentary from 2000 called "Einstein's Biggest Blunder", that gives a good overview of how it was developed.
If the universe started with a big bang, with all matter originated in an extremely compact volume, and if it's radius can't expand faster than light, then there should be no points in the universe beyond what we can see (as limited by light speed.) What am I missing?
What you describe is known as the Horizon Problem
The current theory that tries to explain this is called Inflation. Basically, it assumes that after the Big Bang there was a period of Inflation where space time itself expanded faster than the speed of light.
I don't know what Intel is putting into those chips, but I am highly doubtful it is the way the article states it.
Chip real estate is expensive. So Intel is going to put a complete 3G module on the CPU and use it only for this feature? And to top it off, it has some kinda of separate battery, cause you know, it works when the chip is off? Nonsense.
This is probably some feature that gets build into the AMT support of some chipsets, maybe on Laptops that have a 3G connection already.But the way they are describing this? I call BS on that.
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html Here, I'm guessing. It's a worthwhile watch.
That's the newer TED tallk. There is also an older one from 2006: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
He's now updated his post with a tweet from someone at Nasa that the press conference is not about proof of life:
I'm sad to quell some of the @kottke-induced excitement about possible extraterrestrial life. I've seen the Science paper. It's not that
Democratic fundraiser at Google CEO Marissa Meyer's home
Eric Schmidt might be surprised to find that Google has a new CEO ;)
I know this is Slashdot, but could we get basic facts right in the summary? Marissa Mayer is a Google VP, not the CEO
I know, I must be new here...
A range of 375 miles at 55 mph is seven hours of driving at speed
According to this German article the car was driving 130km/h, which is more like 80 mph. Which makes this even more impressive.
I wonder if a real-life-real-drivers 70 mpg car is what will actually arrive, or if such promises will dissolve like Chevy's promises about the Volt did.
I used to drive an 85 VW Golf Diesel, that Car reliably got (actually got, under real world driving conditions) 47 mpg (5l/100km). That's a car that was build 25 years ago. Volkswagen also sold the Lupo 3L which got 78 miles per US gallon or 94 miles per Imperial gallon
It boggles my mind that 25 years later most cars I can buy in the US get half of what my 25 year old car got. If that. It also means that getting 70 shouldn't be impossible. Thats 3.3l/100km, and it's been done.
delicious.com solved this for me a long time ago.
What did Xmarks do that delicious does not?
I'm not familiar with the details of delicious.com, but Xmarks syncs your bookmarks, history, open tabs and passwords across multiple browsers. I find the password sync in particular to be invaluable, but you can disable each of the four options depending on your preference. I'll miss them.
The Cri-cri (short for cricket) is the smallest twin-engined manned aircraft in the world, designed in the early 1970s by French aeronautical engineer Michel Colomban, the Cri-cri aircraft is the world's smallest twin-engine .
At first I thought the writer of the summary had simply messed up when editing and repeated the same thing twice. But when you check wikipedia, it has the same mistake, even down to the space in front of the period: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Colomban_Cri-cri&oldid=383417426
At least when you copy and paste verbatim from wikipedia, read the sentence and see if it makes sense.
Google Satellite Picture of the site. Unfortunately it's darkened by the cloud, so its hard to see much. The Wikipedia Picture of the site is a little brighter.
Well, it hasn't really been broadcasting continuously, as it went suddenly offline two months ago. This was previously discussed on slashdot at the time. It *had* been broadcasting continuously for 20 years until then, however.
My answer is for us as publishers to actually sell unfinished games
Isn't that what they are already doing? Definitely most MMOs ship in that state.
"technical training or two-year schools, which have been embraced in Europe for decades."
Telling Americans to do something because Europe's been doing it is a lot like telling a 5-year-old not to go near the cookie jar.
They are also omitting the fact that Europe has meaningful alternatives to universities, with apprenticeships in the dual education system. I've often felt that that's whats lacking in the US.
The house-sized battery can hold four megawatts of power for up to eight hours.
I wasn't sure what that was supposed to mean. Does the battery discharge in 8 hours if you don't use the energy?
The original NPR article http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125561502 leads me to think they are saying that the consumption of the town is 4MW and the battery can feed it for 8 hours, so it holds 32MW (or less, since the 4MW is the peak load).
On an unrelated note, why does the inhabitat article have four links, which all go to the same popsci article? Does the author get paid by the link?
the battery would cost 25M, while a second transmission line would cost 60M. o_O
But they are building both!. The second transmission line will be done by 2012.
A lot of these speed tests always compare javascript performance, which I have to say matters less for me on a day to day usage than other things.
At the end of the article (10 pages later), they do break it out into categories. The winner of the 'page load' category is: Firefox.
I care about other things as well, startup times for example (won by Opera), but if I had to pick one most important category for me, it's page load times. YMMV, obviously.
Shortcut to summary: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-chrome-opera,2558-10.html
For those of you who, like me, had never heard of Pixel Qi, its apparently a screen manufacturer thats the commercial offshoot of the OLPC project: Pixel Qi
On a different note, I like that it has an SD slot. That way you can upgrade memory for close to the cost of the actual flash. Not holding my breath for Apples tablet to have one.