The only difference would be that the Hitchhikers Guide is an offline standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom that only goes online for updates, while Wikipedia is entirely online and is updated constantly. We're screwed if internet goes down in our more relaxed civilization on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy...:)
Not that it happens a lot, but every user of internet knows the helpless feeling of being offline or having no direct internet access.
Writing this made me decide to download all of wikipedia. There must be an easy way to do that... and it is surely worth the gigabytes (estimate: about 3.5 million articles, 100 kb per article on average (really random estimate)-> 350 GB).
I should probably add that the kids didn't do this in the game, but outside the game with actual contact between the kids (they were in the same school)... although the items were only digital.
There was a case in the Netherlands where kids obtained some items in Runescape through extortion of another kid. This is also punishable just like "normal" theft according to the judge (if you can call theft normal).
Regarding point 2, the electromagnetic spectrum goes from Gamma rays, through X-rays, UV, visible light, IR, to radio waves. Those are all photons. And they're also all waves.
It's just that we like to think of radio as waves, and X-ray and gamma as particles. In the end, all of them are both: both wave and particle.
Hmm... of course the station needs to get money from somewhere. I always thought that record companies pay stations to play their songs. Radio is the best add for a song (and music is a product that is advertised on radio). Why advertise anything else when radio is almost 100% advertisement?:D
I immediately admit that I am not aware of the business model of radio in 2009 (both internet or the good ol' fashioned one with photons hitting your antenna).
In the ideal case, the record company should be omitted. Bands who want to be known give their songs to a station which broadcasts it. Band becomes famous, and people pay for the concert. But then again, I also believe in Utopia:D
I'd be willing to pay money for any program that filters out adds (without making too many mistakes). I've always wondered why this doesn't exist for TV. And I wondered what you should play during the adds... a random mp3 from your computer perhaps?
Alternatively, you can also switch to another station:D
Well... at least the Dutch didn't make the natives in the East Indies go (almost) extinct. I'm not saying they did the right thing over there, but I don't agree with the claim that they're the very worst colonizers (both from the point of view of profit for the mother country or from the point of view of leaving the natives in peace and letting them keep their culture).
However, it is worth mentioning that the Dutch were the largest slave traders. But they bought and sold slaves all over the world (not only in their own colonies).
And I've installed Ubuntu precisely _because_ it has pretty much everything pre-installed...
I find this "research" about as surprising as any investigation where you'd find that people who own a truck often need to transport stuff, and people who in stead own a smaller vehicle often also don't transport a lot of goodies. (We need to exclude Americans from this comparison).
*Yays* for preinstalled programs, and for the packagemanager with its limited options but ease of use:)
If you think that it's bad that some executives do some calculations... think of the possible results when non-engineers attempt to do engineering jobs.
The moment I step into a project, the standard 1st task is to correct all the mistakes that were made so far by the people who wrote the project proposal (and started to calculate too) and the lab guys. No offense to them, they do good work, but they would save us all time if they'd let _me_ do _my_ work.
After that's done, I then to proceed to do the calculations in a programming language like Matlab (Octave)... which is much faster, more free and will hide mistakes much more professionally. *hides*
"Apparent magnitude" is the measure for brightness that astronomers use.
Read more here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude
The magnitude 6 means (according to wikipedia) it's between the brightness of the faintest stars observable with the naked eye and the planet Uranus.
The measure has no SI units like joules, meters or something like that. It's a relative scale.
I believe that this is not the first flying car as stated in the article. As early as the 1950 were there flying cars.
The article further fails to mention the real fuel efficiency. 500 miles on 1 tank - quite remarkable if the tank is 1 liter... but if it's a 200 liter tank, then it's not very efficient, is it?
And as mentioned in the article: you still need to take off from a normal airport, and not from your driveway or garden. So... how much sense does it make to spend 200,000 on the flying car when a Cessna costs about half of that, and a car too?
I'm just trying to find arguments other than "I don't want more airplanes" - noise, safety and the poor birds are some other standard arguments against this contraption.
Sorry for being negative. Donuts, anyone?
Isn't wasting time the whole point of playing a computer game? It's not a bad thing to waste time sometimes. If you don't want to waste time, I suggest to press "quit".
I would have liked to know how much more the computer uses when it is booting up (or closing down). I might turn the computer off when going for lunch, but with the data presented in the short article, I cannot determine how long you have to be away from the pc to make it worth to shut down the pc.
It boots in under 1 minute, so the time I lose by booting is negligible (I have to boot my head as well after lunch, and focus on coffee - that takes at least a minute as well).
A lawsuit against Nintendo for a broken TV? What is next? A lawsuit against football manufacturers for broken windows? When I was a kid, I learned that toys can be used to break stuff. It is a valuable lesson.
There will not be a single source of biomass to replace all fossil fuels. Also, that is not desirable: then the whole world would need to be planted with the same crop. (Although I can see some enthusiasm for a world with only coffee).
There are many, many sources of waste materials containing any form of carbon - those can all be converted into a fuel. Obviously, one should always consider the energy needed to make the fuel, and to transport it to where it is needed. If transport is too expensive, I suggest making electricity (rather cheap to transport that).
Biodiesel can be used in any regular diesel engine.
Gasoline is replaced best by (bio)ethanol.
Fischer Tropsch fuels can replace both, although it is easier to make diesels (Fischer Tropsch = gasify biomass to CO and H2, then make a fuel from that over a catalyst).
In my crystal ball I see some fool who does not turn off the sound on the PC in an office.
By law, offices of companies over a certain size must accommodate people whose disability requires sound to do their jobs.
Unfortunately, history has shown that many people also still have digital camera's that make the *click* noise
By law, camera phones must make the click noise when operated within some countries to help fight voyeurism.
That is true, perhaps even in most European countries. However, fools that simply fail to turn off the sound are a lot more common than the disabled people requiring sounds on the pc to work.
Also, note that I was not making a comment about traffic lights making ticking noises. Those are useful. But the average user does not require sound except for listening music or watching movies on a pc... and you can debate whether that is desirable at work.
Reply is (slightly) off topic from main article. Apologies.
In my crystal ball I see some fool who does not turn off the sound on the PC in an office.
Unfortunately, history has shown that many people also still have digital camera's that make the *click* noise, so I have no hope that this will not disturb the peace.
With a large amount of computers all over the world running spyware and having a virus... and with well over 90% of emails that are spam, didn't we all lose the cyberwar years ago?
Under the assumption that it has no propulsion of its own, it should be easy to determine where it came from.
That's the beauty of the vacuum of space... things move rather predictable. So predictable in fact that the position of all kinds of objects is known for the next couple of centuries. We should be able to make a stab at where this thing came from.
Slashdot Mirror
Music industry is not very useful in the age of internet. They have no added value. Why do a music-industry "Bail-out"???
Music industry, car industry (for cars with internal combustion) - it's all a bit obsolete.
To me this feels like doing a bailout for steam engine locomotives.
Old stuff just disappears. Accept it.
The original article is about "what if" the calculations are wrong. Slashdot seems to suggest that they're proven wrong. Quite a difference.
My bank card never runs out of battery, which is quite nice.
Also, I get it for free from the bank.
The only difference would be that the Hitchhikers Guide is an offline standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom that only goes online for updates, while Wikipedia is entirely online and is updated constantly. We're screwed if internet goes down in our more relaxed civilization on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy... :)
Not that it happens a lot, but every user of internet knows the helpless feeling of being offline or having no direct internet access.
Writing this made me decide to download all of wikipedia. There must be an easy way to do that... and it is surely worth the gigabytes (estimate: about 3.5 million articles, 100 kb per article on average (really random estimate)-> 350 GB).
I should probably add that the kids didn't do this in the game, but outside the game with actual contact between the kids (they were in the same school)... although the items were only digital.
There was a case in the Netherlands where kids obtained some items in Runescape through extortion of another kid. This is also punishable just like "normal" theft according to the judge (if you can call theft normal).
Link to article in Dutch: http://www.parool.nl/parool/nl/7/Misdaad/article/detail/38458/2008/10/21/Rechter-straft-jongens-voor-afpersen-in-computerspel.dhtml
Thanks for the correction. It's a silly mistake.
Regarding point 2, the electromagnetic spectrum goes from Gamma rays, through X-rays, UV, visible light, IR, to radio waves. Those are all photons. And they're also all waves.
It's just that we like to think of radio as waves, and X-ray and gamma as particles. In the end, all of them are both: both wave and particle.
Why advertise anything else?
People hear music, like it, buy the CD or visit the concert.
Hmm... of course the station needs to get money from somewhere. I always thought that record companies pay stations to play their songs. Radio is the best add for a song (and music is a product that is advertised on radio). Why advertise anything else when radio is almost 100% advertisement? :D
I immediately admit that I am not aware of the business model of radio in 2009 (both internet or the good ol' fashioned one with photons hitting your antenna).
In the ideal case, the record company should be omitted. Bands who want to be known give their songs to a station which broadcasts it. Band becomes famous, and people pay for the concert. But then again, I also believe in Utopia :D
I'd be willing to pay money for any program that filters out adds (without making too many mistakes).
I've always wondered why this doesn't exist for TV.
And I wondered what you should play during the adds... a random mp3 from your computer perhaps?
Alternatively, you can also switch to another station :D
Well... at least the Dutch didn't make the natives in the East Indies go (almost) extinct. I'm not saying they did the right thing over there, but I don't agree with the claim that they're the very worst colonizers (both from the point of view of profit for the mother country or from the point of view of leaving the natives in peace and letting them keep their culture).
However, it is worth mentioning that the Dutch were the largest slave traders. But they bought and sold slaves all over the world (not only in their own colonies).
*gets distracted and runs off to the coffeemachine*
Now... what was I doing?
And I've installed Ubuntu precisely _because_ it has pretty much everything pre-installed...
I find this "research" about as surprising as any investigation where you'd find that people who own a truck often need to transport stuff, and people who in stead own a smaller vehicle often also don't transport a lot of goodies. (We need to exclude Americans from this comparison).
*Yays* for preinstalled programs, and for the packagemanager with its limited options but ease of use :)
If you think that it's bad that some executives do some calculations... think of the possible results when non-engineers attempt to do engineering jobs. The moment I step into a project, the standard 1st task is to correct all the mistakes that were made so far by the people who wrote the project proposal (and started to calculate too) and the lab guys. No offense to them, they do good work, but they would save us all time if they'd let _me_ do _my_ work. After that's done, I then to proceed to do the calculations in a programming language like Matlab (Octave)... which is much faster, more free and will hide mistakes much more professionally. *hides*
"Apparent magnitude" is the measure for brightness that astronomers use. Read more here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude The magnitude 6 means (according to wikipedia) it's between the brightness of the faintest stars observable with the naked eye and the planet Uranus. The measure has no SI units like joules, meters or something like that. It's a relative scale.
I believe that this is not the first flying car as stated in the article. As early as the 1950 were there flying cars. The article further fails to mention the real fuel efficiency. 500 miles on 1 tank - quite remarkable if the tank is 1 liter... but if it's a 200 liter tank, then it's not very efficient, is it? And as mentioned in the article: you still need to take off from a normal airport, and not from your driveway or garden. So... how much sense does it make to spend 200,000 on the flying car when a Cessna costs about half of that, and a car too? I'm just trying to find arguments other than "I don't want more airplanes" - noise, safety and the poor birds are some other standard arguments against this contraption. Sorry for being negative. Donuts, anyone?
Isn't wasting time the whole point of playing a computer game? It's not a bad thing to waste time sometimes. If you don't want to waste time, I suggest to press "quit".
I would have liked to know how much more the computer uses when it is booting up (or closing down). I might turn the computer off when going for lunch, but with the data presented in the short article, I cannot determine how long you have to be away from the pc to make it worth to shut down the pc. It boots in under 1 minute, so the time I lose by booting is negligible (I have to boot my head as well after lunch, and focus on coffee - that takes at least a minute as well).
A lawsuit against Nintendo for a broken TV? What is next? A lawsuit against football manufacturers for broken windows? When I was a kid, I learned that toys can be used to break stuff. It is a valuable lesson.
There will not be a single source of biomass to replace all fossil fuels. Also, that is not desirable: then the whole world would need to be planted with the same crop. (Although I can see some enthusiasm for a world with only coffee). There are many, many sources of waste materials containing any form of carbon - those can all be converted into a fuel. Obviously, one should always consider the energy needed to make the fuel, and to transport it to where it is needed. If transport is too expensive, I suggest making electricity (rather cheap to transport that).
Biodiesel can be used in any regular diesel engine. Gasoline is replaced best by (bio)ethanol. Fischer Tropsch fuels can replace both, although it is easier to make diesels (Fischer Tropsch = gasify biomass to CO and H2, then make a fuel from that over a catalyst).
In my crystal ball I see some fool who does not turn off the sound on the PC in an office.
By law, offices of companies over a certain size must accommodate people whose disability requires sound to do their jobs.
Unfortunately, history has shown that many people also still have digital camera's that make the *click* noise
By law, camera phones must make the click noise when operated within some countries to help fight voyeurism.
That is true, perhaps even in most European countries. However, fools that simply fail to turn off the sound are a lot more common than the disabled people requiring sounds on the pc to work. Also, note that I was not making a comment about traffic lights making ticking noises. Those are useful. But the average user does not require sound except for listening music or watching movies on a pc... and you can debate whether that is desirable at work. Reply is (slightly) off topic from main article. Apologies.
In my crystal ball I see some fool who does not turn off the sound on the PC in an office. Unfortunately, history has shown that many people also still have digital camera's that make the *click* noise, so I have no hope that this will not disturb the peace.
With a large amount of computers all over the world running spyware and having a virus... and with well over 90% of emails that are spam, didn't we all lose the cyberwar years ago?
Under the assumption that it has no propulsion of its own, it should be easy to determine where it came from. That's the beauty of the vacuum of space... things move rather predictable. So predictable in fact that the position of all kinds of objects is known for the next couple of centuries. We should be able to make a stab at where this thing came from.