No, it's too little. If you put demand and supply as 2 linear equations on a graph, you'll see they're related.
You're not going to get a perfect relation due to effects outside the market's control (such as non-market copying), but you'll see that 99 cents is too little for something this is in low demand, and 25 cents is too much for something that is in high demand.
Your Economics 101 model - in fact, it's too simple to even qualify for that, they when into much more detail in the Economics 101 course that I did (which is also my sum total of education in economics) - is for a physical commodity with a limited supply. This is digital music and the standard supply/demand curves do not apply. I know that much (and not much more).
I read something recently about a trio of physicists that gave a lecture to a forum of biologists. The lecture was about life on other planets. One of the biologists asked, during the Q&A session at the end, what the physicists would think if a biologist gave a lecture to a forum of physicists about the formation of black holes at the centre of the galaxy. The unstated meaning of the question (which I hope you've already figured out) is that people have a false impression that biology is "easy".
I see the same thing for economics. People have a vague understanding of supply/demand curves and they apply them willy-nilly to everything. They once heard about this guy called Adam Smith and they're smitten with the idea of the "free market". I also once held these ideas which people laughably call Economics 101 until I had actually done Economics 101. I then realised that economics is exactly like biology; people only think it's easy. There's a hell of a lot more to it than you seem to realise.
In this case, one specific problem that should be startingly obvious to everybody is that recordings are not subject to competition. That's a bold statement, so let me clarify what it means. You can get music from multiple musicians, and from multiple record labels, so it seems to have competition, right? Wrong, because the majority of musicians are contractually bound to a single record label. If you want that Britney Spears song then there is a single record label that has monopoly control over her recordings. Back Street Boys is no substitute for Britney Spears; you are forced to buy Britney Spears from a single record label. It is without question that the recording industry is a monopoly market. That means you must immediately discard anything you think you know about supply/demand curves. This is what they call an advanced economics topic and unless you've done Economics 326 then you are not likely to offer any insight.
The interesting thing is that there is some music that is subjected to competition, eg the classical recordings market. I have some classical music and because the composers are (mostly) long dead the scores are no longer in copyright and so there are several competing recordings for a particular piece. Prices can vary from $2 all the way up to $35, depending on the quality of the recording and the skill of the orchestra. I tend to buy in the $10 range which is where my limited musical knowledge putts out and I can no longer hear the difference. Even more interesting, for composers who are not yet dead (eg, Nyman) the prices are all locked at $35. More signs of a monopolised market? I suspect so.
Maybe this is just me, but I've never understood why people need "turnkey solutions" for things like these. Updating your LDAP, Kerberos, NSS and PAM configs manually isn't exactly hard as it is.
Yes, yes it is. Now you can obviously do it. So can I - that's one of the many jobs I do, installing LDAP and Kerberos services for corporate and government clients - but it's not easy. If it was easy then these companies and agencies wouldn't need to hire me. They could do it themselves.
Let's face it. The terminology is confusing. The number of files you need to tweak is many. The interrelationships are complex. There are many pitfalls. It's a steep learning curve. The daemons and utilities often have terse (entirely confusing) error messages. Once you've learnt everything it "isn't exactly hard" but the majority of clients never learn gain the required knowledge. They rely on outside help, like me.
I would very much like to see LDAP and Kerberos become as easy to deploy on Linux as it is on Windows. I've seen brain-damaged monkeys manage to successfully deploy Active Directory. It requires some level of skill to do the same on Linux, and I'm never entirely satisfied that the result is quite as slick and well-integrated as Microsoft Active Directory. Your comment about a "single button" leading to complexity is well taken but the majority of clients would prefer that single button instead of the expensive consultant.
If a $100 laptop was possible, some bottom feeder like Wal-Mart would already be selling it.
The problem is you have a biased view of what a "laptop" means. These $100 "laptops" have no hard drive, no cdrom, slow refresh LCD, and such a pitiful ROM that they'll require embedded software (it's not going to be GNOME or KDE, it will be more like Qtopia).
Think of it like a PDA with a built-in keyboard. You certainly can get those for around $100.
Hey everyone, look at me! I'm running for president, and I'm absolutely *not* a liberal at all.
Well actually, she's not. She's trying to enforce a particular view of morality through federal law. That's about as far from being a liberal as you can get. A liberal tries to maximize rights through law, not reduce them by prohibiting self regulation. She's much closer to the religious right wing than a liberal. Check out Wikipedia::Liberal for a not entirely terrible overview of the meaning.
I have my own theory as to why. No matter what you might think of his personal ethics, Rove is an intelligent and shrewd campaign manager. He recognised that the silent religious majority in America (as opposed to the vocal religious minorities) was the key to winning elections. More than a decade ago he was appealing to religion/morality/puritans to help republicans win elections. The libs and dems have finally figured that out and they're starting to use the same tricks. That's why all the candidates have similar platforms; they're appealing to the religious majority because without their votes they'll never get office. This is Hillary's attempt to appeal to the "victimized" puritans (you'll notice that victimized is actually quoted in the article).
Re:Disappointed by Mac Mini as entertainment cente
on
Mac mini, Apple DVR?
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· Score: 1
So to all those that think the Mac Mini is a good entertainment center choice, I say think again! It's really expensive, the software is terrible, and the hardware issues are a real pain. You know what I did recently? Spent far less money on an XBox and put XBMC on it. It works just the way I expect it to, and with a lot less hassle!
Amen to all your points. I started with the Xbox running XBMC. It works perfectly with my infrared universal remote. It has 5.1 audio and decent video. The MythTV frontend on Xbox is tricky to setup but works brilliantly once you get past that hurdle (Xebian, Lirc and Mythfrontend). I bought a Mac mini and decided to test it out as a potential replacement, with disappointing results. No remote. No 5.1 audio. Video is inferior (fuzzy, washed out, even with calibration). Video playback in the Mac Mythfrontend is choppy if you scale the video (eg, zoomed 16:9). I thought the Xbox was loud but the mini gives it a run for the money (it's normally quiet but the mini's fan kicks in pretty quickly when you're playing video).
I'm not unhappy with the mini because I bought it for other reasons. Also the mini is nifty for having VLC and iTunes on the main hifi system. But overall, an Xbox with XBMC is a far better choice for a video/audio media centre.
It recalled millions of CDs recorded by 52 artists, including Van Zant, Celine Dion, and Neil Diamond. CDs by these artists should have been recalled anyway, rootkit or not.
Nah mate! Neil Diamond will do Crunchy Granola. Good song! Da na na - neh - neh - neh...
My biggest concern is that the methodology drove a glibc upgrade on a production system. In my experience, any methodology that forces a technical disaster like that to occur must be inherently flawed. I wouldn't manually upgrade glibc on my personal systems and I certainly wouldn't dream of doing it on production systems.
I'd like to know if threat-risk assessment was part of the methodology. My own internal TRA suggests that a glibc upgrade is an extreme risk. A chrooted glibc, a parallel glibc, or recompiling the third party application against the existing glibc are minor risks. Why was an extreme risk chosen when minor risks were available? This reeks to me of methodology running rampant over common sense and industry best practise.
Your point is that emissions from the production of nuclear power are comparable to that of wind power generation, aka, next to nothing. Unlike wind, however, nuclear power is economical and appropriate as a large scale general purpose power source.
Both are economical - just look at the commercially profitable windfarms and the companies lining up to produce turbines and the governments investing in offshore and onshore windfarms - but unlike nuclear, wind power does not produce vast volumes of radioactive waste. Also nuclear power is simply trading one non-renewable fuel for another non-renewable fuel. Wind power is renewable.
Nuclear power has been ignored for decades now because of fears about it's safety while instead,
Nonsense. It has been ignored because other power sources were cheaper, primarily because those other power sources do not have the same imperative to contain their waste.
The irony is that there has been ample opportunity to encourage nuclear through economic forces by simply taxing the carbon emissions from fossil fuels. The market would have flocked to nuclear in droves. Yet the USA resists carbon taxes on economic grounds. If it wasn't so appalling it would be laughable.
The future is in renewables. Nuclear power had its chance and it failed miserably. The nuclear industry has had over 50 years and trillions of adjusted dollars to get it right and it still can't compete even with fossil fuels. It's only just cheaper than wind power and that's hardly worth crowing about. Stop harping over the failed dreams from the past - power too cheap to meter, guffaw - and think of the future; wind, hydro, hot rock, solar chimneys and (most important of all) reduced consumption.
But the variations in the Sun's output can not account for the changes in temperature that have been measured.
MYTH: If Earth has warmed since pre-industrial times, it is because the intensity of the sun has increased.
FACT: The sun's intensity does vary. In the late 1970's, sophisticated technology was developed that can directly measure the sun's intensity. Measurements from these instruments show that in the past 20 years the sun's variations have been very small. Indirect measures of changes in sun's intensity since the beginning of the industrial revolution in 1750 show that variations in the sun's intensity do not account for all the warming that occurred in the 20th century and that the majority of the warming was caused by an increase in human-made greenhouse gas emissions.
[IPCC, 2001. Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, pp. 380-82, Table 6.6.]
But hey, what would the IPCC know about climatology.
Mars is thought to be currently undergoing global warming.
It's not the scientists who think that Mars is undergoing global warming, just the ignorant pundits in the blogosphere. The known facts point towards seasonal change.
Thus inferring global warming from a 3 Martian year regional trend is unwarranted. The observed regional changes in south polar ice cover are almost certainly due to a regional climate transition, not a global phenomenon, and are demonstrably unrelated to external forcing. There is a slight irony in people rushing to claim that the glacier changes on Mars are a sure sign of global warming, while not being swayed by the much more persuasive analogous phenomena here on Earth... -- http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=192
But hey, keep repeating those myths if it makes you feel better.
Greenland got its name because, within recorded history, it had a moderate climate with lots of green growing things.
You know, I don't mind when you tell lies about climatology because it seems to the "hip new thing" to do on the Internet, but it really boils my blood when you tell lies about history. Greenland was not called Greenland because it had green growing things. Greenland was called Greenland because Erik the Red couldn't convince settlers to join him there if he called it "bloody cold place with lots of rock and not a fucking green thing in sight".
The name Greenland comes from those Scandinavian settlers. In the Norse sagas, it is said that Eiríkur Rauði (Erik the Red) was exiled from Iceland for murder. He, along with his extended family and slaves, set out in ships to find the land that was rumored to be to the northwest. After settling there, he named the land Greenland in order to attract more people to settle there. -- Wikipedia
What we're pumping into the atmosphere is a total of 0.27% of the Earth's greenhouse gases
To the moderator's that moderated the above comment "interesting", be aware that the 0.27% figure is fabricated. The same figure was rejected by Wikipedia as it was deemed "junk science". The source of the figure is a mining engineer's personal website (Monte Hieb) rather than a scientific journal or paper.
It almost makes you want to say "Sceintists, stop with the global warming stuff, start working on the renewable energy already!".
Unfortunately scientists rarely get to work on whatever they feel like. Typically they work on what their company pays them to do or what the government sponsors. In the case of the company it's the shareholders (that's you) who makes the decisions. In the case of the government it's the voters (also you). So the only way for scientists to work on renewable energy is if the shareholders or the voters say "hey scientists, start working on renewable energy now".
So next time you invest, buy shares in wind power. Next time you vote, choose a politician who will fund renewable energy. Don't think that change occurs from the top down; it almost always occurs from the bottom up.
CO2 in the atmosphere is mainly volcanic in origin, accounting for 97% of the CO2 found in the atmosphere, most of which travels to the oceans. Estimates at CO2's effectiveness as a greenhouse gas vary, but are generally around 10-100 times lower than water weight for weight, leaving a "net" greenhouse effect of man-made CO2 emmissions at less than 1%
The precise figure is around a 0.27% contribution from mankind.
It's usually considered good form to cite the quote, so we can see who said it and what evidence they had for the claim. As it is, the power of google comes to the rescue and I find the original source for your above quote is Wikipedia::Global_warming_controversy which in turn links to Monte Hieb's personal website.
Well, that's OK, a personal website isn't necessarily a bad source of information. We shouldn't be concerned that Mr Hieb has no education in climatology, isn't a scientist nor a doctor, doesn't have any peer reviewed papers, doesn't do research nor experiments, and isn't cited by anybody except the enthusiastic gunslingers of the "global warming is a myth" brigade. All of those details are irrelevant if Mr Hieb gets his facts right. Unfortunately he hasn't got his facts right either. If you google his name the first hit is somebody ripping apart Mr Hieb's claims. You immediately find out that Mr Hieb redefines existing scientific terminology. Tut tut, that's not a good sign.
Here the authors redefine "global warming". While the term usually refers to human caused warming, they use the term to include natural changes as well. A similar redefinition has been used with other environmental problems such as ozone depletion and acid rain. ("Global warming" has been increasingly replaced by the more accurate and inclusive "climate change"). -- http://info-pollution.com/chill.htm
That page goes on further to refute the "facts" asserted by Monte Hieb. Somebody once tried to get Mr Hieb's claims into other pages on Wikipedia but those attempts were... uhhh... rejected. Here's a comment that accompanied one such rejection.
But to turn to the GHG page, which is what this is really about. C says: objects and deletes all sources and documentation that state anything he disagrees with. This in turn is a ref to him trying to insert a dubious value of 95% for the greenhouse effect of water vapour, based upon this source: http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/greenho use_data.html. That page isn't a source: its just some bods pet page. The numbers on it are wrong. All this has been, is being, discussed on the talk page of greenhouse gas. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_fo r_comment/William_M._Connolley
That 95% figure (which is intrinsically linked to your 0.27% figure) isn't supported by the data. The best guess figures are between 60% and 70%. If you continue to google Mr Hieb's name you'll find that pattern repeated over and over; Mr Hieb uses incorrect values, redefines terminology and eventually arrives at incorrect conclusions. But who is Monte Hieb?
Assessment: This example is the crux of the matter, IMO, because it reveals the source of Cortonin's information. The website referenced is the personal website of Monte Hieb. A quick review of Hieb's credentials reveals that he has worked as chief engineer for the West Virginia Office of Miner's Safety. He has done some geological survey work on fossils. There are extensive links from Free Republic's website to Hieb's. WMC refers to him as "just some bod," but cle
Nuclear power produces no greenhouse gases -- none!
That is a pure unadulterated lie. Nuclear reactors do not produce greenhouse gasses but nuclear power does.
Nuclear reactors do not emit greenhouse gasses or ash during normal operation; however the mining and processing of uranium involves emissions. Emissions that arise from whole life cycle are well comparable to wind energy.[51]. -- Wikipedia
Comparable to wind energy. Not zero. Comparable to wind energy.
If you oppose nuclear power, please educate yourself.
Oh the irony, when you made such an immense cockup only a few seconds ago. Get it through your tiny little brain; nuclear power derived from uranium is not the solution.
I'm sure that statement had a lot of empathy. Pot, kettle, and all that shit.
You're a bit late - somebody already spotted that mistake and commented on it - but I'm interested in knowing why you think that's a "Pot Kettle Black" situation. I didn't pass judgement on anybody's spelling. I corrected a factual error in that they claimed that Duck Tape was not the original name. If they'd made a spelling error and I'd said "you should have checked dictionary.com before making such an empathic statement" then you'd have a point. If Wikipedia actually said that Duct Tape was the original name then you'd have a point. But neither of those situations are true.
Were you just really eager to say "Pot, kettle, and all that shit" and couldn't wait for the right moment?
Only on Slashdot would a comment be moderated flamebait for giving quoted material showing that Incessant Diarrhea and Creationism are actually one and the same. I swear Slashdot has the highest proportion of fundamentalist Christians I have ever seen, either on or off the Internet. Even worse are the people who aren't fundamentalist Christians but think that the fundies have a point worth considering.
Actually, you measure THD with a tone generator, a filter, and a voltmeter. Do you even have a EE background?
Yes, I do. I graduated with honours from a leading Australian university several years ago. As part of my studies I not only built this equipment but also did the mathematical derivations to prove the validity of the equipment. I also build audio equipment as a hobby and I really dislike egotistical pissants who use the "Do you even have a blah blah background" pompous statement in an attempt to discredit another person.
Also, which ADC chip are you talking about?
Chip? Who said anything about a chip? What the hell are you talking about?
Second, THD is a primitive measurement.
You were the one who raised THD as a strawman argument against electronic test equipment. You made the claim that audio engineers measure THD by squinting at 8-bit scopes looking for visible clipping.
You are arguing that it is impossible to tell a recording from the original sound, which is obviously not the case.
No, I'm not. Yet another obvious attempt by yourself to divert the attention from your original gaffe. I'm arguing against this claim you made.
simply because the ear is a hell of a lot more sophisticated and sensitive to nonlinearities than any man-made instrument.
Because that statement of yours is pure and utter crap. The human ear has well known boundaries that are easily surpassed by decent test equipment.
I have no idea how you define theory. To me it means a body of knowledge, hypotheses, concepts and ideas.
It doesn't matter how I define a theory. What matters is the material I quoted before, which used NASA's definitions of theory and hypothesis, to show that Incredibly Deranged was a hypothesis. Even the main proponent of Insipid Drivel agreed that it's only a hypothesis as far as the scientific community is concerned. You can blither on about what you think a theory is all you like but that doesn't change the fact that Irrelevant Discourse is a hypothesis.
Type "hypothesis theory" into google and stop wasting everybody's time.
You're going to have to explain to me why.
Because Creationism has already been tested and rejected. When the same hypothesis is proposed and the only difference is the name, it's entirely appropriate to reject the hypothesis as unworthy of further attention.
And you can't sensibly say things like "ID isn't a theory". Of course it is. Maybe you mean it's not a "falsifiable theory" - in which case you need to say what you mean. Statements like this make you look bad.
No, it's not a theory, it's a hypothesis.
Rothschild suggested that Behe's definition was so loose that astrology would come under this definition as well. He also pointed out that Behe's definition of theory was almost identical to the NAS's definition of a hypothesis. Behe agreed with both assertions. -- New Scientist
And that sort of ignorance is exactly the sort of problem that you should be stomping out rather than perpetuating.
So what if an earlier edition of a book was different? That's like criticising special relativity by finding mistakes in early drafts of Einstein's work. It's irrelevant.
No, it's not irrelevant. I don't know what fantastical world you live in, but in the real world the fact that the book used to promote Intelligible Drivel is identical to the book used to promote Creationism - with merely the words "creationism" and "creationists" substituted for words having less association with Christianity - is entirely relevant.
There is no point arguing in support of evolution if you haven't taken the time to even look at the claims of your opponents.
The problem is that they were looked at the last time they pushed their inane fantasies. Back then they called it Creationism. Now they call it Insidious Dribble, or something like that, but all they've done is changed the names.
What more proof do you need than the book they forced into high schools. It was called "Of Pandas and People" and it claims to talk of Incompetent Decisions. But earlier drafts of the book spoke of Creationism.
Forrest compared early drafts of Of Pandas and People to a later 1987 copy, and showed how in several instances the word "creationism" had been replaced by "intelligent design", and "creationist" simply replaced by "intelligent design proponent". -- New Scientist
Creationism was rejected as religious fantasy several decades ago. Now the same Christian Taleban have dressed it up with a new name - but no new ideas - and are trying to pretend it's a new "theory". Well first off the bat, it's not a theory. Second, it's not new. Third, it was rejected last time.
Actually, you can't measure any fidelity-related parameter in audio systems with an oscilloscope (or any other cheap, readily-available instrument)
I'll reservedly agree with that statement.
Quality is very difficult to measure, simply because the ear is a hell of a lot more sophisticated and sensitive to nonlinearities than any man-made instrument.
But that is absolute nonsense. Give me a break. You try to distance yourself from the "audiophile snake oil" yet here you are repeating one of the audiophile myths; that they can hear things that can't be measured.
Anyone can easily hear 1% THD, on any system. You'll see visible distortion on the scope only when it's at about 10% (when you get visible clipping). In fact, most digital scopes use 8-bit ADCs -- try listening to music on an ancient 8-bit soundblaster.
The problem here is that you're using a strawman experiment. Nobody seriously attempts to measure THD by looking at the signal on an 8-bit scope and squinting until they see clipping. You measure THD with a tone generator and a 24-bit ADC which can easily measure THD down to -122dB. I could personally build such a system for a few hundred dollars or you could buy one of the dozens of professional systems on the market.
Test equipment is 100s of times better than your ears. The random noise and non-linearities in an ear are just incredible; fluid moving across the hair cells due to movement of the head, the sound of blood flowing near the ear, pressure buildup in your sinus, damaged hair cells due to exposure to high frequency or loud volumes, tinnitus (ringing) which is normally automatically masked by your brain, etc. The human ability to hear is incredibly imperfect. Anybody who thinks that electronic equipment's ability to reproduce audio hasn't already surpassed our ability to hear that audio has more in common with audiophiles than they might like to admit.
What a moron! He uses CDs! Real audiophiles know that records have a much warmer sound than CDs. CDs are so digital sounding! Real audiophiles stick to analog recording with real tubes.
Records? Tubes? Those are for mere amateurs. A Real Audiophile knows that the best audio reproduction is from a glass jar with a screw top lid. You simply leave the jar open at a concert then quickly screw the lid on when the final song finishes. The residual reverberations of audio in the jar are a perfect reproduction of the original concert. Now admittedly the attenuation is quite high so you need to have perfect Golden Ears to enjoy this exquisite technique. However this shouldn't be a challenge for anybody who dares to claim the title of Real Audiophile.
3M makes DUCT tape not DUCK tape. DUCK tape is made by http://www.duckproducts.com/ in response to so many people mispronouncing the name of a product. The tape was to close gaps in DUCTS not DUCKS.
The tape was created to seal ammunition containers watertight. It was originally called Duck Tape.
It was originally developed during World War II in 1942 under the name "Duck Tape" as a waterproof sealing tape for ammunition casings. Permacel, then a division of Johnson & Johnson, used a rubber-based adhesive to help the tape resist water and a fabric backing to facilitate ripping. Because of these properties, it was also used to quickly repair military equipment, including jeeps, guns, and aircraft. Wikipedia
You really should have checked Wikipedia before making such an empathic statement.
Slashdot Mirror
Did I say it was... checks... no, it seems I didn't.
Perhaps you hit the Reply link on the wrong post. Go back and try again.
Your Economics 101 model - in fact, it's too simple to even qualify for that, they when into much more detail in the Economics 101 course that I did (which is also my sum total of education in economics) - is for a physical commodity with a limited supply. This is digital music and the standard supply/demand curves do not apply. I know that much (and not much more).
I read something recently about a trio of physicists that gave a lecture to a forum of biologists. The lecture was about life on other planets. One of the biologists asked, during the Q&A session at the end, what the physicists would think if a biologist gave a lecture to a forum of physicists about the formation of black holes at the centre of the galaxy. The unstated meaning of the question (which I hope you've already figured out) is that people have a false impression that biology is "easy".
I see the same thing for economics. People have a vague understanding of supply/demand curves and they apply them willy-nilly to everything. They once heard about this guy called Adam Smith and they're smitten with the idea of the "free market". I also once held these ideas which people laughably call Economics 101 until I had actually done Economics 101. I then realised that economics is exactly like biology; people only think it's easy. There's a hell of a lot more to it than you seem to realise.
In this case, one specific problem that should be startingly obvious to everybody is that recordings are not subject to competition. That's a bold statement, so let me clarify what it means. You can get music from multiple musicians, and from multiple record labels, so it seems to have competition, right? Wrong, because the majority of musicians are contractually bound to a single record label. If you want that Britney Spears song then there is a single record label that has monopoly control over her recordings. Back Street Boys is no substitute for Britney Spears; you are forced to buy Britney Spears from a single record label. It is without question that the recording industry is a monopoly market. That means you must immediately discard anything you think you know about supply/demand curves. This is what they call an advanced economics topic and unless you've done Economics 326 then you are not likely to offer any insight.
The interesting thing is that there is some music that is subjected to competition, eg the classical recordings market. I have some classical music and because the composers are (mostly) long dead the scores are no longer in copyright and so there are several competing recordings for a particular piece. Prices can vary from $2 all the way up to $35, depending on the quality of the recording and the skill of the orchestra. I tend to buy in the $10 range which is where my limited musical knowledge putts out and I can no longer hear the difference. Even more interesting, for composers who are not yet dead (eg, Nyman) the prices are all locked at $35. More signs of a monopolised market? I suspect so.
Then you grow up a little more and realise that some laws are wrong, so breaking them is actually right.
Don't confuse "wrong" with "illegal".
NB: not defending this $4.99 iPod barcode scamming nitwit. What he did was both illegal and wrong.
To be fair, the baby was being a dick.
Yes, yes it is. Now you can obviously do it. So can I - that's one of the many jobs I do, installing LDAP and Kerberos services for corporate and government clients - but it's not easy. If it was easy then these companies and agencies wouldn't need to hire me. They could do it themselves.
Let's face it. The terminology is confusing. The number of files you need to tweak is many. The interrelationships are complex. There are many pitfalls. It's a steep learning curve. The daemons and utilities often have terse (entirely confusing) error messages. Once you've learnt everything it "isn't exactly hard" but the majority of clients never learn gain the required knowledge. They rely on outside help, like me.
I would very much like to see LDAP and Kerberos become as easy to deploy on Linux as it is on Windows. I've seen brain-damaged monkeys manage to successfully deploy Active Directory. It requires some level of skill to do the same on Linux, and I'm never entirely satisfied that the result is quite as slick and well-integrated as Microsoft Active Directory. Your comment about a "single button" leading to complexity is well taken but the majority of clients would prefer that single button instead of the expensive consultant.
The problem is you have a biased view of what a "laptop" means. These $100 "laptops" have no hard drive, no cdrom, slow refresh LCD, and such a pitiful ROM that they'll require embedded software (it's not going to be GNOME or KDE, it will be more like Qtopia).
Think of it like a PDA with a built-in keyboard. You certainly can get those for around $100.
Well actually, she's not. She's trying to enforce a particular view of morality through federal law. That's about as far from being a liberal as you can get. A liberal tries to maximize rights through law, not reduce them by prohibiting self regulation. She's much closer to the religious right wing than a liberal. Check out Wikipedia::Liberal for a not entirely terrible overview of the meaning.
I have my own theory as to why. No matter what you might think of his personal ethics, Rove is an intelligent and shrewd campaign manager. He recognised that the silent religious majority in America (as opposed to the vocal religious minorities) was the key to winning elections. More than a decade ago he was appealing to religion/morality/puritans to help republicans win elections. The libs and dems have finally figured that out and they're starting to use the same tricks. That's why all the candidates have similar platforms; they're appealing to the religious majority because without their votes they'll never get office. This is Hillary's attempt to appeal to the "victimized" puritans (you'll notice that victimized is actually quoted in the article).
Amen to all your points. I started with the Xbox running XBMC. It works perfectly with my infrared universal remote. It has 5.1 audio and decent video. The MythTV frontend on Xbox is tricky to setup but works brilliantly once you get past that hurdle (Xebian, Lirc and Mythfrontend). I bought a Mac mini and decided to test it out as a potential replacement, with disappointing results. No remote. No 5.1 audio. Video is inferior (fuzzy, washed out, even with calibration). Video playback in the Mac Mythfrontend is choppy if you scale the video (eg, zoomed 16:9). I thought the Xbox was loud but the mini gives it a run for the money (it's normally quiet but the mini's fan kicks in pretty quickly when you're playing video).
I'm not unhappy with the mini because I bought it for other reasons. Also the mini is nifty for having VLC and iTunes on the main hifi system. But overall, an Xbox with XBMC is a far better choice for a video/audio media centre.
Nah mate! Neil Diamond will do Crunchy Granola. Good song! Da na na - neh - neh - neh...
/obscure?
My biggest concern is that the methodology drove a glibc upgrade on a production system. In my experience, any methodology that forces a technical disaster like that to occur must be inherently flawed. I wouldn't manually upgrade glibc on my personal systems and I certainly wouldn't dream of doing it on production systems.
I'd like to know if threat-risk assessment was part of the methodology. My own internal TRA suggests that a glibc upgrade is an extreme risk. A chrooted glibc, a parallel glibc, or recompiling the third party application against the existing glibc are minor risks. Why was an extreme risk chosen when minor risks were available? This reeks to me of methodology running rampant over common sense and industry best practise.
Both are economical - just look at the commercially profitable windfarms and the companies lining up to produce turbines and the governments investing in offshore and onshore windfarms - but unlike nuclear, wind power does not produce vast volumes of radioactive waste. Also nuclear power is simply trading one non-renewable fuel for another non-renewable fuel. Wind power is renewable.
Nonsense. It has been ignored because other power sources were cheaper, primarily because those other power sources do not have the same imperative to contain their waste.
The irony is that there has been ample opportunity to encourage nuclear through economic forces by simply taxing the carbon emissions from fossil fuels. The market would have flocked to nuclear in droves. Yet the USA resists carbon taxes on economic grounds. If it wasn't so appalling it would be laughable.
The future is in renewables. Nuclear power had its chance and it failed miserably. The nuclear industry has had over 50 years and trillions of adjusted dollars to get it right and it still can't compete even with fossil fuels. It's only just cheaper than wind power and that's hardly worth crowing about. Stop harping over the failed dreams from the past - power too cheap to meter, guffaw - and think of the future; wind, hydro, hot rock, solar chimneys and (most important of all) reduced consumption.
But the variations in the Sun's output can not account for the changes in temperature that have been measured.
But hey, what would the IPCC know about climatology.
It's not the scientists who think that Mars is undergoing global warming, just the ignorant pundits in the blogosphere. The known facts point towards seasonal change.
But hey, keep repeating those myths if it makes you feel better.
You know, I don't mind when you tell lies about climatology because it seems to the "hip new thing" to do on the Internet, but it really boils my blood when you tell lies about history. Greenland was not called Greenland because it had green growing things. Greenland was called Greenland because Erik the Red couldn't convince settlers to join him there if he called it "bloody cold place with lots of rock and not a fucking green thing in sight".
No more lying about history, OK?
To the moderator's that moderated the above comment "interesting", be aware that the 0.27% figure is fabricated. The same figure was rejected by Wikipedia as it was deemed "junk science". The source of the figure is a mining engineer's personal website (Monte Hieb) rather than a scientific journal or paper.
Unfortunately scientists rarely get to work on whatever they feel like. Typically they work on what their company pays them to do or what the government sponsors. In the case of the company it's the shareholders (that's you) who makes the decisions. In the case of the government it's the voters (also you). So the only way for scientists to work on renewable energy is if the shareholders or the voters say "hey scientists, start working on renewable energy now".
So next time you invest, buy shares in wind power. Next time you vote, choose a politician who will fund renewable energy. Don't think that change occurs from the top down; it almost always occurs from the bottom up.
It's usually considered good form to cite the quote, so we can see who said it and what evidence they had for the claim. As it is, the power of google comes to the rescue and I find the original source for your above quote is Wikipedia::Global_warming_controversy which in turn links to Monte Hieb's personal website.
Well, that's OK, a personal website isn't necessarily a bad source of information. We shouldn't be concerned that Mr Hieb has no education in climatology, isn't a scientist nor a doctor, doesn't have any peer reviewed papers, doesn't do research nor experiments, and isn't cited by anybody except the enthusiastic gunslingers of the "global warming is a myth" brigade. All of those details are irrelevant if Mr Hieb gets his facts right. Unfortunately he hasn't got his facts right either. If you google his name the first hit is somebody ripping apart Mr Hieb's claims. You immediately find out that Mr Hieb redefines existing scientific terminology. Tut tut, that's not a good sign.
That page goes on further to refute the "facts" asserted by Monte Hieb. Somebody once tried to get Mr Hieb's claims into other pages on Wikipedia but those attempts were ... uhhh... rejected. Here's a comment that accompanied one such rejection.
That 95% figure (which is intrinsically linked to your 0.27% figure) isn't supported by the data. The best guess figures are between 60% and 70%. If you continue to google Mr Hieb's name you'll find that pattern repeated over and over; Mr Hieb uses incorrect values, redefines terminology and eventually arrives at incorrect conclusions. But who is Monte Hieb?
That is a pure unadulterated lie. Nuclear reactors do not produce greenhouse gasses but nuclear power does.
Comparable to wind energy. Not zero. Comparable to wind energy.
Oh the irony, when you made such an immense cockup only a few seconds ago. Get it through your tiny little brain; nuclear power derived from uranium is not the solution.
You're a bit late - somebody already spotted that mistake and commented on it - but I'm interested in knowing why you think that's a "Pot Kettle Black" situation. I didn't pass judgement on anybody's spelling. I corrected a factual error in that they claimed that Duck Tape was not the original name. If they'd made a spelling error and I'd said "you should have checked dictionary.com before making such an empathic statement" then you'd have a point. If Wikipedia actually said that Duct Tape was the original name then you'd have a point. But neither of those situations are true.
Were you just really eager to say "Pot, kettle, and all that shit" and couldn't wait for the right moment?
Only on Slashdot would a comment be moderated flamebait for giving quoted material showing that Incessant Diarrhea and Creationism are actually one and the same. I swear Slashdot has the highest proportion of fundamentalist Christians I have ever seen, either on or off the Internet. Even worse are the people who aren't fundamentalist Christians but think that the fundies have a point worth considering.
Yes, I do. I graduated with honours from a leading Australian university several years ago. As part of my studies I not only built this equipment but also did the mathematical derivations to prove the validity of the equipment. I also build audio equipment as a hobby and I really dislike egotistical pissants who use the "Do you even have a blah blah background" pompous statement in an attempt to discredit another person.
Chip? Who said anything about a chip? What the hell are you talking about?
You were the one who raised THD as a strawman argument against electronic test equipment. You made the claim that audio engineers measure THD by squinting at 8-bit scopes looking for visible clipping.
No, I'm not. Yet another obvious attempt by yourself to divert the attention from your original gaffe. I'm arguing against this claim you made.
Because that statement of yours is pure and utter crap. The human ear has well known boundaries that are easily surpassed by decent test equipment.
It doesn't matter how I define a theory. What matters is the material I quoted before, which used NASA's definitions of theory and hypothesis, to show that Incredibly Deranged was a hypothesis. Even the main proponent of Insipid Drivel agreed that it's only a hypothesis as far as the scientific community is concerned. You can blither on about what you think a theory is all you like but that doesn't change the fact that Irrelevant Discourse is a hypothesis.
Type "hypothesis theory" into google and stop wasting everybody's time.
Because Creationism has already been tested and rejected. When the same hypothesis is proposed and the only difference is the name, it's entirely appropriate to reject the hypothesis as unworthy of further attention.
No, it's not a theory, it's a hypothesis.
And that sort of ignorance is exactly the sort of problem that you should be stomping out rather than perpetuating.
No, it's not irrelevant. I don't know what fantastical world you live in, but in the real world the fact that the book used to promote Intelligible Drivel is identical to the book used to promote Creationism - with merely the words "creationism" and "creationists" substituted for words having less association with Christianity - is entirely relevant.
The problem is that they were looked at the last time they pushed their inane fantasies. Back then they called it Creationism. Now they call it Insidious Dribble, or something like that, but all they've done is changed the names.
What more proof do you need than the book they forced into high schools. It was called "Of Pandas and People" and it claims to talk of Incompetent Decisions. But earlier drafts of the book spoke of Creationism.
Creationism was rejected as religious fantasy several decades ago. Now the same Christian Taleban have dressed it up with a new name - but no new ideas - and are trying to pretend it's a new "theory". Well first off the bat, it's not a theory. Second, it's not new. Third, it was rejected last time.
I'll reservedly agree with that statement.
But that is absolute nonsense. Give me a break. You try to distance yourself from the "audiophile snake oil" yet here you are repeating one of the audiophile myths; that they can hear things that can't be measured.
The problem here is that you're using a strawman experiment. Nobody seriously attempts to measure THD by looking at the signal on an 8-bit scope and squinting until they see clipping. You measure THD with a tone generator and a 24-bit ADC which can easily measure THD down to -122dB. I could personally build such a system for a few hundred dollars or you could buy one of the dozens of professional systems on the market.
Test equipment is 100s of times better than your ears. The random noise and non-linearities in an ear are just incredible; fluid moving across the hair cells due to movement of the head, the sound of blood flowing near the ear, pressure buildup in your sinus, damaged hair cells due to exposure to high frequency or loud volumes, tinnitus (ringing) which is normally automatically masked by your brain, etc. The human ability to hear is incredibly imperfect. Anybody who thinks that electronic equipment's ability to reproduce audio hasn't already surpassed our ability to hear that audio has more in common with audiophiles than they might like to admit.
Records? Tubes? Those are for mere amateurs. A Real Audiophile knows that the best audio reproduction is from a glass jar with a screw top lid. You simply leave the jar open at a concert then quickly screw the lid on when the final song finishes. The residual reverberations of audio in the jar are a perfect reproduction of the original concert. Now admittedly the attenuation is quite high so you need to have perfect Golden Ears to enjoy this exquisite technique. However this shouldn't be a challenge for anybody who dares to claim the title of Real Audiophile.
The tape was created to seal ammunition containers watertight. It was originally called Duck Tape.
You really should have checked Wikipedia before making such an empathic statement.