The most plausible work I've seen on the subject is based on Durda & Kring's recent work on giant impacts and heat of re-entry. Based on the size of the Chixculub (sp?) impact crater, they concluded that the heat of re-entering rock on ballistic trajectories would have heated almost the entire atmosphere to incandescence. This is global warming of a sort, I suppose.
I've seen talks by archaeobiologists who assert that the dinosaurs were simply broiled by the heat coming from the atmosphere. That theory nicely explains why small, burrowing creatures suddenly took off and why the seas weren't as strongly affected by the land: anything small enough to hide in a burrow, or agile enough to swim deep underwater for a few days survived (at least in numbers large enough to propagate); everything else was cooked. It is also consistent with the fossil record, which shows huge amounts of charcoal cinders near the K-T boundary wherever you look, and a drastic change in the types of pollen present.
Disclaimer: I am not a paleontologist, I'm only an astrophysicist.
I have very much enjoyed the iPod Nano as a book viewer -- the Notes section lets you read Project Gutenberg texts, and the device's form factor is great for always having handy and stealing moments here and there to read. The big problem with the Notes feature is that the text files are limited to 4KB. That makes it a hassle to put the text into the ipod because you have to use split(1) or a similar utility to break it up. That seemed really stupid and shortsighted to me. But, as always, Apple is crazy like a fox -- limiting Notes to 4KB means they can charge more for the book-reading feature later.
Unfortunately, Apple marketing is getting too good for its own good. They're starting to manipulate markets like Microsoft does, by limiting features that they could easily choose to make available.
DRM is distasteful because it elevates corporate information to the level of classified state secrets. With the DMCA, for the first time it became illegal to investigate something that you own -- for example a DVD. Until the DMCA passed, if you owned a physical object you were allowed to investigate it, dissect it, and ultimately understand it completely subject only to the limits of your own equipment and understanding.
After the DMCA, inquisitive people became criminals.
Yuppie kids or their parents also produce more in a day than people in Brazil produce in a year.
Not necessarily true. This is a common fallacy about mature capitalist societies. In a poor capitalist society, the most successful strategy to get wealthy is to create wealth, and capitalism rewards wealth-creators with more political power (in the form of money), establishing a nice positive feedback loop. But there are other paths to wealth as well. Those paths involve concentrating wealth without actually creating any new wealth, and their presence in every capitalist society to date shows that nobody has yet managed to align personal incentives with societal incentives.
In a mature society that has lots of money floating around, there's a certain instability to the system: if a comparatively small group of people collect enough wealth, then it becomes quite difficult to "break through" the cartels and become wealthy oneself. The incentives then tend to create an uberclass of, well, crooks and an underclass of exploited workers.
The Toyota Prius has a very nice automotive computing system with high def screen, speech recognition, bluetooth phone access, and a zillion other features. No Redmond involvement at all...
[... embeded-walmart description deleted] Basically, I am capitalizing on the success of Walmart because I am able to "embed" a Walmart into my own store.
Well, actually, (A) the protocol was designed with that sort of thing in mind -- specifically, including other peoples' scientific illustrations in your own web page (hence the stateless IMG tag) -- and (B) Walmart has an easy way of preventing you from doing that. That easy way is called the "referrer" tag: when you ask for a piece of data, your browser TELLS WALMART WHO SENT YOU, thereby making it extremely easy for them to decide whether they want to serve you the data.
No, the links weren't costing him money, handing out the data to anyone who asked was costing him money.
You might as well stand outside a football stadium handing out hotdogs to anyone who asks, and then complain when some people who aren't going to the game eat your hotdogs.
If you're handing them out to anyone who asks nicely, then you don't really have a reason to complain when someone you don't like gets one. Even if somone down the street is shouting out "Hey -- ask that guy for a hotdog! He'll give you one!".
The answer is to refrain from feeding the people you don't want to.
The problem is not that the defendant was sending customers to knock on the plaintiff's server. The problem is that the plaintiff's server was serving documents to those deadbeats. This is like handing out free food at the door to anyone who asks, and then complaining when the soup kitchen nearby starts sending people to your door. The solution is to stop feeding people you don't want to feed, not to sue someone for sending people your way.
No, actually, they pretty much broke the internet. There are well-established ways of preventing linking from outside pages (using cookies, checking referrer: tags, etc.).
A link isn't a copy of the information it links to. A link is instructions for where to find someone else's server that is willing to give you the information. Outlawing links is like outlawing giving directions.
If someone is linking to your site from outside and that annoys you, the solution isn't to take that person to court -- it's to stop serving data to people coming from outside your site. That's 90% of what the referrer: tag is for.
Most Microsoft software sucks. I don't know where they went wrong, but some time between "Olympic Decathlon" and Microsoft Windows v1, they got on the wrong track and never found it again.
The problem is that little to no thought gets put into architecture or the long-term consequences of making a particular design decision. The result is public catch-phrases like "Microsoft LookOut" and "Internet Exploder", and of course the untold millions of man-hours lost due to systems being Pwnz0red. I believe this is a result of creating a horrifically complex big ball of mud and then treating the UI as a sort of afterthought, a glossy sheen. The resulting product looks nice from a distance but in fact is is just a dorodango - a highly polished ball of mud.
The problem with that architecture model is that nothing is ever stable. There's too much complexity to test properly, so only the most common pathways are tested and/or optimized -- but anything out of the ordinary is extremely difficult to do.
Why is it that Microsoft Windows has so many "assistants" and "helpers" and "wizards" -- active agents to guide you through basic tasks? They are a symptom that the UI is deeply flawed. There are effectively no wizards in MacOS X or in Ubuntu -- the UI is designed well enough not to need them.
Some units within Microsoft seem to do well. The Word group used to turn out first rate stuff, and the group editing tools in 21st century versions of Word are very good. But that is an exception -- most of the stuff just sucks.
The problem is the "death of a million cuts" -- by the time you've tested for it, it's too late. Each UWB device slightly degrades the radio spectrum around it for more conventional narrowband devices. One or two or even a thousand such devices in a square mile might be OK -- but by the time you've got a hundred thousand or a million of these things deployed in an urban core, it's too late to back out.
You can see the effect of progressive RF contamination by testing the range of (say) a CB rig in San Jose, California versus Tracy, California. Both have similar topography but vastly different levels of background RF noise in the 20-30 MHz band. (for what it's worth, a pair of car-mount Radio Schlock CB rigs with 1/4-wave antennae will work at up to about 35 miles in the California Central Valley, but only up to about 3 miles in Silicon Valley).
Whoa, sorry -- should'a looked it up first. The smallest U.S. coin ever minted was 5 mills. So says Cecil Adams. But the smallest unit of accounting is officially the mill -- so the fueling stations are actually not allowed to advertise $1.4999/gal -- they'd have to advertise $1.500/gal if they did that.
Back when the dollar was worth more than 30 seconds of skilled labor, people reckoned prices in dollars, cents, and mills. If I recall right, the early United States even had mill coins. Gasoline is still reckoned in dollars, cents, and mills per gallon, rounded to cents at the end of the transaction. That's why every fueling station gives you the prices as "$1.549/gal" or some such -- those nine mills per gallon add up after a while...
Cell phones are so heavily engineered for size, it's hard to imagine that the listening device was anything other than software -- most phones simply don't have room to hide a separate mic.
... place the phone next to any sort of audio equipment. My RAZR spews so much crap all over the spectrum that it's easy to tell when it is talking to the tower -- if it's next to my car stereo, my computer speakers, my clock radio, or a zillion other things I get treated to a characteristic pattern of buzzes as it negotiates with and/or broadcasts to the cell phone net.
To find out if your phone is being used for eavesdropping, just keep it near your stereo.
No, no, no, QAM gives you 96 bits for 16 *cycles*. It's just a way of cramming more information into each symbol in the channel, just like anything else. Once you've converted all the way down to bits you can't do anything fancy like phase modulation -- that is something you do to an analog symbol, not to a digital bit. The bit count already takes into account all the phase/shape/amplitude information you can cram into the channel.
... in confusing number of colors with number of bits. Each of your pixels doesn't store 255*255*255 bits, only one of 255*255*255 values (about 24 bits). You have overestimated the capacity by a small factor of 700,000.
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For example, the Reed Reactor Facility isn't.
As others have mentioned, it's probably the data source they happen to be using.
The most plausible work I've seen on the subject is based on Durda & Kring's recent work on giant impacts and heat of re-entry. Based on the size of the Chixculub (sp?) impact crater, they concluded that the heat of re-entering rock on ballistic trajectories would have heated almost the entire atmosphere to incandescence. This is global warming of a sort, I suppose.
I've seen talks by archaeobiologists who assert that the dinosaurs were simply broiled by the heat coming from the atmosphere. That theory nicely explains why small, burrowing creatures suddenly took off and why the seas weren't as strongly affected by the land: anything small enough to hide in a burrow, or agile enough to swim deep underwater for a few days survived (at least in numbers large enough to propagate); everything else was cooked. It is also consistent with the fossil record, which shows huge amounts of charcoal cinders near the K-T boundary wherever you look, and a drastic change in the types of pollen present.
Disclaimer: I am not a paleontologist, I'm only an astrophysicist.
I burn and re-rip them. The metadata survive the process.
You can do that now - just use emusic.com.
I have very much enjoyed the iPod Nano as a book viewer -- the Notes section lets you read Project Gutenberg texts, and the device's form factor is great for always having handy and stealing moments here and there to read. The big problem with the Notes feature is that the text files are limited to 4KB. That makes it a hassle to put the text into the ipod because you have to use split(1) or a similar utility to break it up. That seemed really stupid and shortsighted to me. But, as always, Apple is crazy like a fox -- limiting Notes to 4KB means they can charge more for the book-reading feature later.
Unfortunately, Apple marketing is getting too good for its own good. They're starting to manipulate markets like Microsoft does, by limiting features that they could easily choose to make available.
DRM is distasteful because it elevates corporate information to the level of classified state secrets. With the DMCA, for the first time it became illegal to investigate something that you own -- for example a DVD. Until the DMCA passed, if you owned a physical object you were allowed to investigate it, dissect it, and ultimately understand it completely subject only to the limits of your own equipment and understanding.
After the DMCA, inquisitive people became criminals.
That sucks.
Not necessarily true. This is a common fallacy about mature capitalist societies. In a poor capitalist society, the most successful strategy to get wealthy is to create wealth, and capitalism rewards wealth-creators with more political power (in the form of money), establishing a nice positive feedback loop. But there are other paths to wealth as well. Those paths involve concentrating wealth without actually creating any new wealth, and their presence in every capitalist society to date shows that nobody has yet managed to align personal incentives with societal incentives.
In a mature society that has lots of money floating around, there's a certain instability to the system: if a comparatively small group of people collect enough wealth, then it becomes quite difficult to "break through" the cartels and become wealthy oneself. The incentives then tend to create an uberclass of, well, crooks and an underclass of exploited workers.
My first-gen Prius sustains 90MPH all day if asked to. The top speed is set by a governor at 100 MPH.
The Toyota Prius has a very nice automotive computing system with high def screen, speech recognition, bluetooth phone access, and a zillion other features. No Redmond involvement at all...
Sure. But then door latches aren't trustworthy either. That doesn't stop people from closing doors.
More importantly, it's pretty simple to include a cryptographic cookie authenticating the session. Most places that care, do.
Well, actually, (A) the protocol was designed with that sort of thing in mind -- specifically, including other peoples' scientific illustrations in your own web page (hence the stateless IMG tag) -- and (B) Walmart has an easy way of preventing you from doing that. That easy way is called the "referrer" tag: when you ask for a piece of data, your browser TELLS WALMART WHO SENT YOU, thereby making it extremely easy for them to decide whether they want to serve you the data.
No, the links weren't costing him money, handing out the data to anyone who asked was costing him money.
You might as well stand outside a football stadium handing out hotdogs to anyone who asks, and then complain when some people who aren't going to the game eat your hotdogs.
If you're handing them out to anyone who asks nicely, then you don't really have a reason to complain when someone you don't like gets one. Even if somone down the street is shouting out "Hey -- ask that guy for a hotdog! He'll give you one!".
The answer is to refrain from feeding the people you don't want to.
The problem is not that the defendant was sending customers to knock on the plaintiff's server. The problem is that the plaintiff's server was serving documents to those deadbeats. This is like handing out free food at the door to anyone who asks, and then complaining when the soup kitchen nearby starts sending people to your door. The solution is to stop feeding people you don't want to feed, not to sue someone for sending people your way.
No, actually, they pretty much broke the internet. There are well-established ways of preventing linking from outside pages (using cookies, checking referrer: tags, etc.).
A link isn't a copy of the information it links to. A link is instructions for where to find someone else's server that is willing to give you the information. Outlawing links is like outlawing giving directions.
If someone is linking to your site from outside and that annoys you, the solution isn't to take that person to court -- it's to stop serving data to people coming from outside your site. That's 90% of what the referrer: tag is for.
loads of examples exist in the 1980s USENET archives. I wonder how they thought they'd get this one through?
Most Microsoft software sucks. I don't know where they went wrong, but some time between "Olympic Decathlon" and Microsoft Windows v1, they got on the wrong track and never found it again.
The problem is that little to no thought gets put into architecture or the long-term consequences of making a particular design decision. The result is public catch-phrases like "Microsoft LookOut" and "Internet Exploder", and of course the untold millions of man-hours lost due to systems being Pwnz0red. I believe this is a result of creating a horrifically complex big ball of mud and then treating the UI as a sort of afterthought, a glossy sheen. The resulting product looks nice from a distance but in fact is is just a dorodango - a highly polished ball of mud.
The problem with that architecture model is that nothing is ever stable. There's too much complexity to test properly, so only the most common pathways are tested and/or optimized -- but anything out of the ordinary is extremely difficult to do.
Why is it that Microsoft Windows has so many "assistants" and "helpers" and "wizards" -- active agents to guide you through basic tasks? They are a symptom that the UI is deeply flawed. There are effectively no wizards in MacOS X or in Ubuntu -- the UI is designed well enough not to need them.
Some units within Microsoft seem to do well. The Word group used to turn out first rate stuff, and the group editing tools in 21st century versions of Word are very good. But that is an exception -- most of the stuff just sucks.
And that, of course, is the very tragedy of the radio commons that the FCC was chartered to avoid... :-)
The problem is the "death of a million cuts" -- by the time you've tested for it, it's too late. Each UWB device slightly degrades the radio spectrum around it for more conventional narrowband devices. One or two or even a thousand such devices in a square mile might be OK -- but by the time you've got a hundred thousand or a million of these things deployed in an urban core, it's too late to back out.
You can see the effect of progressive RF contamination by testing the range of (say) a CB rig in San Jose, California versus Tracy, California. Both have similar topography but vastly different levels of background RF noise in the 20-30 MHz band. (for what it's worth, a pair of car-mount Radio Schlock CB rigs with 1/4-wave antennae will work at up to about 35 miles in the California Central Valley, but only up to about 3 miles in Silicon Valley).
Whoa, sorry -- should'a looked it up first. The smallest U.S. coin ever minted was 5 mills. So says Cecil Adams. But the smallest unit of accounting is officially the mill -- so the fueling stations are actually not allowed to advertise $1.4999/gal -- they'd have to advertise $1.500/gal if they did that.
Sure there is.
Back when the dollar was worth more than 30 seconds of skilled labor, people reckoned prices in dollars, cents, and mills. If I recall right, the early United States even had mill coins. Gasoline is still reckoned in dollars, cents, and mills per gallon, rounded to cents at the end of the transaction. That's why every fueling station gives you the prices as "$1.549/gal" or some such -- those nine mills per gallon add up after a while...
Good advice except for even larger companies like United Airlines, who have freqently demonstrated that they do not answer complaint correspondence.
Cell phones are so heavily engineered for size, it's hard to imagine that the listening device was anything other than software -- most phones simply don't have room to hide a separate mic.
... place the phone next to any sort of audio equipment. My RAZR spews so much crap all over the spectrum that it's easy to tell when it is talking to the tower -- if it's next to my car stereo, my computer speakers, my clock radio, or a zillion other things I get treated to a characteristic pattern of buzzes as it negotiates with and/or broadcasts to the cell phone net.
To find out if your phone is being used for eavesdropping, just keep it near your stereo.
No, no, no, QAM gives you 96 bits for 16 *cycles*. It's just a way of cramming more information into each symbol in the channel, just like anything else. Once you've converted all the way down to bits you can't do anything fancy like phase modulation -- that is something you do to an analog symbol, not to a digital bit. The bit count already takes into account all the phase/shape/amplitude information you can cram into the channel.
... in confusing number of colors with number of bits. Each of your pixels doesn't store 255*255*255 bits, only one of 255*255*255 values (about 24 bits). You have overestimated the capacity by a small factor of 700,000.