Sounds like a fairly straight forward case of there being a few dodgy units out there to me
It's not just faulty new hardware - all versions of iphone and touches updated to the new OS version are suffering from the problem. It may be that certain applications or combinations of factors cause the CPU to get into an infinite loop in the new OS. It's probably fixable in software once they find the problem. I'm surprised that they haven't found it yet, though, considering the commonality of this problem.
By your reasoning, those exploding laptops batteries were also sloppy engineering and not sloppy QA. Actually, by that definition, everything is sloppy engineering, because anytime something isn't made to spec, it fails because the engineering tolerances aren't loose enough.
Yes, of course that was sloppy engineering. All QA does is find out whether these problems exist. If they do find this sort of overheating problem before release (as good QA should), it's not like the affected batteries are just replaced - they go back to the engineers who then determine whether their specs were off or the manufacturer didn't follow spec.
The main thing i want to know is if they've (finally) fixed the memory issues yet. Namely, if i keep a lot of tabs open for awhile (yes, i know, bad habit) and then close those tabs, will Firefox free up the memory (frequently over a gig of it) without requiring me to shut it down and restart it?
That's been fixed in the Windows client since 3.0.something, but in 3.5 beta I still heard people complaining about it in Linux. For MacOS I have no idea.
BEIJING â" China's state media says the government will postpone enforcement of a new rule mandating all new computers be sold with a filtering software.
The rule was to go into effect starting Wednesday, but the official Xinhua News Agency said in a brief report late Tuesday that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology had decided to delay the plan. It did not say why or give any other details.
Calorie restriction refers to calories of food energy absorbed per day (rate of energy in). "Overweight" refers to accumulate body mass, in the form of fat (accumulation). You use fat at a rate determined by your physiology and physical activity (rate of energy out).
rate of energy in - rate of energy out = rate of accumulation
You can be fat and eat very few calories, or skinny and eat a lot of calories. If your rate in is equal to your rate out, you'll maintain your current weight, whatever that might be.
The study in TFA, however, is probably misleading to most of us because it's a critique of BMI, which only measures weight, not fat content. I know people who are very fit, not crazy body builders, and still considered overweight via BMI because they have too much muscle and not enough fat to match the index's expectations.
While I agree with the statement that Google has not been anticompetitive AND with the statement that competition is "only a click away"*, Google does one thing that still makes them a large company on the order of Microsoft:
Google buys out the competition
Mergers and acquisitions are a matter of course for the technology industry. But when you build your portfolio by simply buying off the leader in a new market space, then you become a holding corporation. That's been the mark of Microsoft for two decades now and it's become the mark of Google as well. Google Groups (DejaNews), Google Docs (Writely), Youtube, Google Analytics (Urchin), Android, etc. all testify to this.
While I'll grant that Google adds their own spin to the products and often integrates them better than acquisitions made by many of their competitors, it still does not change the fact that Google purchases their markets. And that... that is a damning argument against their "we're not that big" statement.
* Ignoring the competitive advantage of Google's massive infrastructure for a moment.
Don't forget Google Earth (Keyhole), Google Privacy Invasion and Total Advertising Monopolization (Doubleclick), Picasa (Idealab), and SketchUp (@Last Software).
G's changes to purchased software aren't always for the better. They improved Dejanews by indexing a lot of older posts that weren't previously covered, but they also made the search function less effective. They made it easier to block web tracking by reducing the number of sites that need to be blacklisted (with the absorption of Doubleclick), but they then tied the data they collect to their own vast database of evil.
Yeah this was my thought too as soon as I read "dry ice". Just freeze it and smack it. I'm sure the reason why not is because the fragments will only cause more damage once in space.
Try this, for educational purposes:
Drop a piece of aluminum or steel into a bucket of liquid nitrogen. Now take it out and drop it on the ground from a height of 6 feet, or hit it with a hammer. Notice it not shattering.
The first time I dropped a 10 pound block of aluminum while taking it out of a nitrogen bucket I expected it to shatter, too. Then I realized I thought that because of hollywood.
Looks like it is not where the serious barebone laptop builder does their shopping.
Not a single one of the three "barebones" notebooks Newegg offers is something I would base a system on. All have either Intel integrated graphics or ATI graphics, no NVidia-based options. Every time I've dealt with ATI's drivers (last was on my ex's Dell Inspiron 600M) it's been a nightmare.
Search for "Clevo" laptop shells. They have graphics from integrated to a 280M, meaning they span the entire range. Sager sells a lot of systems based on Clevo, for instance. Some places will prebuild for you at oddly good prices with a lot of customizability, like choosing which heatsink and thermal paste to use. The same places will give you the prebuilt system with no OS, if you'd like a clean start. Or you can just buy Clevo barebones laptops and put them together yourself.
Windows 7 Home Premium ($49.99) and Windows 7 Professional ($99.99)
That's valid at Best Buy, Amazon, Fry's, etc etc. Yes, it's only for preorders so you can argue its merits as you like, but if you're actually interested in 7, it's the way to get it.
A more relevant questions is: How does the dairy farmer make money using a lower quality, higher cost feed? Profit margins are thin in that business, and a 10% change in feed costs is enough to bankrupt an operation. Unless you are selling your milk to a customer that will pay extra for environmentally correct practices (as in TFA), it doesn't work.
The grass is free, actually. The problem isn't that pastured cows cost more to feed - quite the opposite is true. The problem is that they each need an acre, so production for the same piece of land falls dramatically.
And then we could live with all the health consequences of high-carbohydrate diets. Which, if we take American's obesity trends after the move towards higher-carbohydrate diets since the 1970s, cost a damn sight more than global warming ever could.
Don't be fooled by the diet industry. Diets composed of almost exclusively carbohydrates are common among many the healthiest, most long-lived people in the world. Other extremely healthy people eat mostly fatty meats. Others eat mostly vegetables and fish. There are many paths to healthy eating, but all of them include a few common threads, such as eating less food.
To quote Michael Pollan, "Eat food. Note too much. Mostly plants."
Using Wikipedia entries even if they're properly cited is unacceptable. If he wanted to use Wikipedia as a research tool, that's fine, but he should have read through the materials cited by the Wikipedia article itself and used them as his sources, with proper citation. If the Wikipedia article cited no sources, then it shouldn't have been used at all.
This is what every teacher needs to be emphasizing to students. Wikipedia is not a source. It directs you to potential sources.
Claim: The United States standard railroad gauge derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
Status: False
If you RTFA on snopes, it says that the story is basically true, but not inevitable and not surprising. Immediately following up "Status: False" with an explicit admission that it's almost true, aside from a few minor details tells me that the status should have been listed as something else.
Alaska has a ton of oil and very few people. The Alaska Permanent Fund is an endowment created by the state government that sets aside approximately 25% of the state's proceeds from mineral sales.
The dividends from this endowment are then divvied up and paid to the people living in the state.
Alaska does have the highest net income of Federal government money per capita of any state. Maybe he was referring to that.
Speaking as someone who moved from CA to MI, and who has also lived elsewhere in the country...
1) We've got more coastline than California - and it's fresh water. ---Yes, but I prefer cliffs and the ocean. Still, the MI coast is very nice. I wish that there were mountains here in MI, though. It's so incredibly flat, except for the UP, which is rather remote. In CA you have the ocean on one side, then some 2-4k foot tall mountains, than 2-3 hours to the east are 10-14k peaks. CA also has rain forests, and deserts. I miss the variety.
2) We've got 4 seasons (which is good or bad depending on your preference). ---Winter: Very few people go outside. Plans that involve any travel have a 1/5 chance of needing to be changed unless you are willing to drive on uncleared roads. Many drivers don't think that tailgating should be put on hold when the roads are icy, so there are major delays (okay, only around Detroit) due to countless accidents.
--Spring: Once it stops snowing, things are gray and muddy for 1-2 months before anything green appears. Then plants suddenly appear and they do it with a vengeance. I marvel at the explosion of plant life. The green part of spring lasts about 1-1.5 months before...
-Summer: People spend all their time in the sun and complain (in my town here) about how cold it is whenever the 90% humid air drops below 80 degrees F. Having been deprived of sunlight all winter, many people have an obsession with it now. An odd side effect that I see all across the mid-west is the popularity of tanning salons, and of the very dark tan worn for as much of the year as possible. It leads to a lot of 30 year old people looking 45 because of skin damage.
-Fall: 2-3 months of beautiful weather. My favorite time of the year here.
3) More second homes than any other state (most on the water).
-I'm not surprised to hear this. Nearly everyone I know here has a house "up north"
-No termites, really? I think we do have latrodectus variolus (black widows). We do get flooding, both widespread and localized to a basement when the "sump pump" dies. I'd never even heard of such a thing before I moved here.
5) We do get the occasional tornado, but far less than most of the midwest.
-There are half a dozen tornado warnings here each summer, but only one tornado near town every 30 years.
6) Education: we've got plenty of geek-schools.
-Ann Arbor has a great school (and is a great town). In terms of high schools, I'm a bit less positive. My significant other taught some college classes here and found that a lot of students, even brilliant students, had never written a single research paper in high school. Students who were smart enough to go to any college but who didn't know their way around a bibliography or citation were wronged by their schools. We spoke to some high school teachers who said that the state curriculum dropped research papers when the No Child Left Behind Act appeared. A lot of high schools still teach research papers, but a lot don't, because it's no longer a required topic by the state. I think that's a mistake.
7) Manufacturing. Does anyone care? We can build anything here - tech included
-I wonder how hard it will be to retool factories that have been closed for years to accommodate new goods.
8) We've got an enormous set of technically capable people just waiting for companies to set up shop here.
-That's absolutely true.
Thinking MI makes me sad. I'm definitely an outsider (and in my oddly insular little area I've heard people from elsewhere referred to as Outsiders with a capital O), but I've found enough to like that I've got some affection for the state. I hope that the plans to revive the state with green industries work, but I worry that the decay of places like Detroit may not stop.
... and the study mentioned in the article makes perfect sense. The article is propaganda that intentionally misunderstands what the study is about in order to stir up their readership.
In one of our studies of (mostly queer) sexually active teenagers. One of the key things we look at is condom use knowledge and condom errors. Most people know that they should use a condom if they're having sex, but quite a large swath of the population doesn't know how to *properly* use them and what they do and do not protect against. Some people are perfectly willing to use condoms, but they get frustrated because they're using them wrong, and so the condoms break or come off, and they stop using them out of frustration.
One measure we give is we have 20 different "steps" for using a condom properly, and they're out of order, and some are not real steps. Out of ~250 teenagers, most of whom have taken sex ed, been exposed to safer sex info all their lives, only 6 got that exercise 100% correct (all real steps in proper order, all fake steps removed), and only 42 got all the real steps in the correct order (but kept some of the fake steps). The kids have been taught, but retention isn't so hot - we're coming up with better ways to teach this.
Another measure we have is taking an inventory of experiences with recent condom use, and most of our participants report some level of difficulty with condom use, with most of those reports coming along the lines of it being too confusing to remember all of the steps they were taught while in the heat of the moment etc. They want to use condoms, but they've learned all of that in a very "academic" environment - we're trying to develop interventions that will help teach people how to handle themselves when they're not at their most rational.
A final measure we give which is related to condom use is an HIV & STI knowledge quiz with true, false and "don't know" answers. Most of our participants score 70% or better, but certain segments average scores below 30%. By identifying the lagging segments and then examining what it is that is leading to this dearth of HIV & STI knowledge, we're able to come up with plans to get this information out to those groups because the current techniques clearly aren't working.
It's neither an obvious nor simple area of research, despite what some in this thread will say. $400k to potentially save quite a few lives (or protect the quality of many lives) is a bargain. If you're a wretched excuse for a human being and you think that people who get HIV "deserve" it, you probably don't care that a lifetime of treatment for a single case of HIV infection will run around $400-500k (minimum) so this kind of research is also cost effective from that standpoint.
It sickens me to read mass media criticism of scientific grants based off of an abstract and a bucket full of spin. The GOP doesn't need this right now. They have other problems. Regardless, this is becoming one of their memes. Remember the complaint a few months ago about hundreds of thousands of dollars (or a bit more) spent on an "overhead projector," which turned out to be a planetarium with capabilities equivalent to the one in New York, used for astronomy and public outreach? Remember the mocking complaint about spending money to monitor volcanoes? That one had a well timed eruption in Alaska to give the GOP some media embarrassment, but in all of these cases we're seeing particularly unintelligent and uninformed people passing judgment on grants that passed through multiple layers of peer review with very low rates of proposal acceptance.
This proves that, um, Windows,er, Linux is....um...what the fuck does this prove again?
And why the fuck should I care if there's a 15% difference in performance of Firefox between those two OSes? I use my particular OS for reason that have nothing to do with how well Firefox runs on it.
That 15% could very well be measured in hours when the Slashtard coders get through with their Web 2.0 abominization of Slashdot.
People have been complaining or quite some time about poor performance on slashdot. What is it that shows this poor performance? I don't recall doing anything that isn't instantaneous here.
they have a much higher effective resolution than 1920x1080
For various technical, biological and other reasons, they do not. Remember, what was shot on analog is not what you see in the analog theater. All movies today go from analog to digital (for editing) and back to analog. The "resolution" of the end product is determined not by the amount of grain on the celluloid (obviously better resolution than 1920x1080) but the resolution and printing capabilities of the film printer. This is exacerbated by a repeated duplication of said celluloid. Most movie theaters today will show films of less quality than a good 1080p TV with an HD source.
The crucial point when it comes to quality is not the resolution but the number of scan lines that can be perceived. With a movie going through a number of processes, film to digital, then digital to film, then duplication round after duplication round, a 1080p movie on a good screen might well be of higher quality than an "analog" movie in the movie theater.
So, what is the quality of a typical movie theater you ask (or at least you should). According to an international study named "Image Resolution of 35mm Film in Theatrical Presentation" a typical theater has a 750 scan lines resolution. A very good HD set will typically be about there or a little higher, depending on where you sit.
You can even read about it here.. I am SO looking forward to a TV with 4520 scan lines of resolution.
Very informative, thanks. Most of the theaters near me use 70 mm film - how much will this affect the result?
Firefox is a slow, bloated piece of crap that fails in comparison to Chrome or Safari.
Chrome falls into the "proprietary or whatever" category because it's made by Google. Basically, open source projects that weren't initiated by a commercial vendor suck.
Blender is a joke compared to commercial software in that field.
"I've asked this every time this topic comes up. Can anyone name a SINGLE piece of open source software that does anything better than it's closest closed source (or otherwise "proprietary" via patents or whatever) counterpart?"
FF's closest counterpart is clearly IE, considering marketshare, and FF is certainly better than IE. In terms of memory usage, FF beats Chrome and Safari. In terms of page loading times, nothing beats FF + Adblock Plus. You dismissed Chrome, yourself, and the only things Safari does better than FF is 1) display advertisements and 2) run javascript.
I know a woman who did it for free with her WinMo phone. Being smarter than this guy, however, she brought the location to the police and they happily went together to get the phone. In this case it was being used by a kid in school and the impression I got was that he wasn't very threatening, but taking the risk of skipping the police to appear more macho is dumb.
They might be speaking of the battery usage of GPS rather than battery use of the phone in general. If they were constantly looking for the phone via GPS I can understand their amazement. Try using a handheld GPS device and many of them crap out within hours without a plugin.
The WinMo programs that do this same thing for lost phones only pulse the GPS on at specified intervals (which can be changed remotely). My phone lasts about 3 days with that level of activity, and I think the iPhone would do at least as well, assuming this app has the common sense not to continuously blast data and gps location.
I find it amazing that this much of a stink wasn't made during the Zimbabwean elections...where anti mugabe supporters were being raped and murdered by the thousands Then again, I guess there are no economic interests in that part of Africa, like there are in Iran (read: oil)
I praise the internet for being able to illuminate to us all, the double speak and forked tounge of the supposed 'freedom force (or farce rather)' known as America.
Hypocritical Liars.
My main source of news about the elections in both Iran and Zimbabwe was national public radio, which is about as American as you can get. NPR made a big point about exposing the massive corruption and manipulation of the election in Zimbabwe, and with Iran it is taking a very different path, pointing out that there are allegations of fraud but that the only verifiable story so far is the unrest in Iran itself. The difference in coverage is quite appropriate for the differences in context.
America is many things, but above all else it's diverse. It's not accurate to characterize all Americans of sharing a single interest or world view.
Slashdot Mirror
You're an idiot if you think all ranchers have "those giant farms."
They don't get infected on ranches. They get infected in a CAFO, where they are "finished," i.e. fattened up for slaughter.
Sounds like a fairly straight forward case of there being a few dodgy units out there to me
It's not just faulty new hardware - all versions of iphone and touches updated to the new OS version are suffering from the problem. It may be that certain applications or combinations of factors cause the CPU to get into an infinite loop in the new OS. It's probably fixable in software once they find the problem. I'm surprised that they haven't found it yet, though, considering the commonality of this problem.
By your reasoning, those exploding laptops batteries were also sloppy engineering and not sloppy QA. Actually, by that definition, everything is sloppy engineering, because anytime something isn't made to spec, it fails because the engineering tolerances aren't loose enough.
Yes, of course that was sloppy engineering. All QA does is find out whether these problems exist. If they do find this sort of overheating problem before release (as good QA should), it's not like the affected batteries are just replaced - they go back to the engineers who then determine whether their specs were off or the manufacturer didn't follow spec.
Still only a 93% on acid3. Better, but not good enough.
Good enough for what, exactly?
The main thing i want to know is if they've (finally) fixed the memory issues yet. Namely, if i keep a lot of tabs open for awhile (yes, i know, bad habit) and then close those tabs, will Firefox free up the memory (frequently over a gig of it) without requiring me to shut it down and restart it?
That's been fixed in the Windows client since 3.0.something, but in 3.5 beta I still heard people complaining about it in Linux. For MacOS I have no idea.
The courts could have fought for another decade without denting TPB, but this news is a eulogy.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090630/ap_on_bi_ge/as_china_internet_4
14 mins ago
BEIJING â" China's state media says the government will postpone enforcement of a new rule mandating all new computers be sold with a filtering software.
The rule was to go into effect starting Wednesday, but the official Xinhua News Agency said in a brief report late Tuesday that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology had decided to delay the plan. It did not say why or give any other details.
More calories or less?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction
Calorie restriction refers to calories of food energy absorbed per day (rate of energy in). "Overweight" refers to accumulate body mass, in the form of fat (accumulation). You use fat at a rate determined by your physiology and physical activity (rate of energy out).
rate of energy in - rate of energy out = rate of accumulation
You can be fat and eat very few calories, or skinny and eat a lot of calories. If your rate in is equal to your rate out, you'll maintain your current weight, whatever that might be.
The study in TFA, however, is probably misleading to most of us because it's a critique of BMI, which only measures weight, not fat content. I know people who are very fit, not crazy body builders, and still considered overweight via BMI because they have too much muscle and not enough fat to match the index's expectations.
While I agree with the statement that Google has not been anticompetitive AND with the statement that competition is "only a click away"*, Google does one thing that still makes them a large company on the order of Microsoft:
Google buys out the competition
Mergers and acquisitions are a matter of course for the technology industry. But when you build your portfolio by simply buying off the leader in a new market space, then you become a holding corporation. That's been the mark of Microsoft for two decades now and it's become the mark of Google as well. Google Groups (DejaNews), Google Docs (Writely), Youtube, Google Analytics (Urchin), Android, etc. all testify to this.
While I'll grant that Google adds their own spin to the products and often integrates them better than acquisitions made by many of their competitors, it still does not change the fact that Google purchases their markets. And that... that is a damning argument against their "we're not that big" statement.
* Ignoring the competitive advantage of Google's massive infrastructure for a moment.
Don't forget Google Earth (Keyhole), Google Privacy Invasion and Total Advertising Monopolization (Doubleclick), Picasa (Idealab), and SketchUp (@Last Software).
G's changes to purchased software aren't always for the better. They improved Dejanews by indexing a lot of older posts that weren't previously covered, but they also made the search function less effective. They made it easier to block web tracking by reducing the number of sites that need to be blacklisted (with the absorption of Doubleclick), but they then tied the data they collect to their own vast database of evil.
Yeah this was my thought too as soon as I read "dry ice". Just freeze it and smack it. I'm sure the reason why not is because the fragments will only cause more damage once in space.
Try this, for educational purposes:
Drop a piece of aluminum or steel into a bucket of liquid nitrogen. Now take it out and drop it on the ground from a height of 6 feet, or hit it with a hammer. Notice it not shattering.
The first time I dropped a 10 pound block of aluminum while taking it out of a nitrogen bucket I expected it to shatter, too. Then I realized I thought that because of hollywood.
Looks like it is not where the serious barebone laptop builder does their shopping.
Not a single one of the three "barebones" notebooks Newegg offers is something I would base a system on. All have either Intel integrated graphics or ATI graphics, no NVidia-based options. Every time I've dealt with ATI's drivers (last was on my ex's Dell Inspiron 600M) it's been a nightmare.
Search for "Clevo" laptop shells. They have graphics from integrated to a 280M, meaning they span the entire range. Sager sells a lot of systems based on Clevo, for instance. Some places will prebuild for you at oddly good prices with a lot of customizability, like choosing which heatsink and thermal paste to use. The same places will give you the prebuilt system with no OS, if you'd like a clean start. Or you can just buy Clevo barebones laptops and put them together yourself.
Read this:
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/06/windows-7-pricing-announced-cheaper-than-vista.ars
Windows 7 Home Premium ($49.99) and Windows 7 Professional ($99.99)
That's valid at Best Buy, Amazon, Fry's, etc etc. Yes, it's only for preorders so you can argue its merits as you like, but if you're actually interested in 7, it's the way to get it.
A more relevant questions is: How does the dairy farmer make money using a lower quality, higher cost feed? Profit margins are thin in that business, and a 10% change in feed costs is enough to bankrupt an operation. Unless you are selling your milk to a customer that will pay extra for environmentally correct practices (as in TFA), it doesn't work.
The grass is free, actually. The problem isn't that pastured cows cost more to feed - quite the opposite is true. The problem is that they each need an acre, so production for the same piece of land falls dramatically.
And then we could live with all the health consequences of high-carbohydrate diets. Which, if we take American's obesity trends after the move towards higher-carbohydrate diets since the 1970s, cost a damn sight more than global warming ever could.
Don't be fooled by the diet industry. Diets composed of almost exclusively carbohydrates are common among many the healthiest, most long-lived people in the world. Other extremely healthy people eat mostly fatty meats. Others eat mostly vegetables and fish. There are many paths to healthy eating, but all of them include a few common threads, such as eating less food.
To quote Michael Pollan, "Eat food. Note too much. Mostly plants."
Using Wikipedia entries even if they're properly cited is unacceptable. If he wanted to use Wikipedia as a research tool, that's fine, but he should have read through the materials cited by the Wikipedia article itself and used them as his sources, with proper citation. If the Wikipedia article cited no sources, then it shouldn't have been used at all.
This is what every teacher needs to be emphasizing to students. Wikipedia is not a source. It directs you to potential sources.
http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp
Claim: The United States standard railroad gauge derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
Status: False
If you RTFA on snopes, it says that the story is basically true, but not inevitable and not surprising. Immediately following up "Status: False" with an explicit admission that it's almost true, aside from a few minor details tells me that the status should have been listed as something else.
Uhm, no.
Alaska has a ton of oil and very few people. The Alaska Permanent Fund is an endowment created by the state government that sets aside approximately 25% of the state's proceeds from mineral sales.
The dividends from this endowment are then divvied up and paid to the people living in the state.
Alaska does have the highest net income of Federal government money per capita of any state. Maybe he was referring to that.
Speaking as someone who moved from CA to MI, and who has also lived elsewhere in the country...
1) We've got more coastline than California - and it's fresh water.
---Yes, but I prefer cliffs and the ocean. Still, the MI coast is very nice. I wish that there were mountains here in MI, though. It's so incredibly flat, except for the UP, which is rather remote. In CA you have the ocean on one side, then some 2-4k foot tall mountains, than 2-3 hours to the east are 10-14k peaks. CA also has rain forests, and deserts. I miss the variety.
2) We've got 4 seasons (which is good or bad depending on your preference).
---Winter: Very few people go outside. Plans that involve any travel have a 1/5 chance of needing to be changed unless you are willing to drive on uncleared roads. Many drivers don't think that tailgating should be put on hold when the roads are icy, so there are major delays (okay, only around Detroit) due to countless accidents.
--Spring: Once it stops snowing, things are gray and muddy for 1-2 months before anything green appears. Then plants suddenly appear and they do it with a vengeance. I marvel at the explosion of plant life. The green part of spring lasts about 1-1.5 months before...
-Summer: People spend all their time in the sun and complain (in my town here) about how cold it is whenever the 90% humid air drops below 80 degrees F. Having been deprived of sunlight all winter, many people have an obsession with it now. An odd side effect that I see all across the mid-west is the popularity of tanning salons, and of the very dark tan worn for as much of the year as possible. It leads to a lot of 30 year old people looking 45 because of skin damage.
-Fall: 2-3 months of beautiful weather. My favorite time of the year here.
3) More second homes than any other state (most on the water).
-I'm not surprised to hear this. Nearly everyone I know here has a house "up north"
4) We've don't get earthquakes, hurricanes, forest fires, termites, poisonous spiders/snakes.
-No termites, really? I think we do have latrodectus variolus (black widows). We do get flooding, both widespread and localized to a basement when the "sump pump" dies. I'd never even heard of such a thing before I moved here.
5) We do get the occasional tornado, but far less than most of the midwest.
-There are half a dozen tornado warnings here each summer, but only one tornado near town every 30 years.
6) Education: we've got plenty of geek-schools.
-Ann Arbor has a great school (and is a great town). In terms of high schools, I'm a bit less positive. My significant other taught some college classes here and found that a lot of students, even brilliant students, had never written a single research paper in high school. Students who were smart enough to go to any college but who didn't know their way around a bibliography or citation were wronged by their schools. We spoke to some high school teachers who said that the state curriculum dropped research papers when the No Child Left Behind Act appeared. A lot of high schools still teach research papers, but a lot don't, because it's no longer a required topic by the state. I think that's a mistake.
7) Manufacturing. Does anyone care? We can build anything here - tech included
-I wonder how hard it will be to retool factories that have been closed for years to accommodate new goods.
8) We've got an enormous set of technically capable people just waiting for companies to set up shop here.
-That's absolutely true.
Thinking MI makes me sad. I'm definitely an outsider (and in my oddly insular little area I've heard people from elsewhere referred to as Outsiders with a capital O), but I've found enough to like that I've got some affection for the state. I hope that the plans to revive the state with green industries work, but I worry that the decay of places like Detroit may not stop.
... and the study mentioned in the article makes perfect sense. The article is propaganda that intentionally misunderstands what the study is about in order to stir up their readership.
In one of our studies of (mostly queer) sexually active teenagers. One of the key things we look at is condom use knowledge and condom errors. Most people know that they should use a condom if they're having sex, but quite a large swath of the population doesn't know how to *properly* use them and what they do and do not protect against. Some people are perfectly willing to use condoms, but they get frustrated because they're using them wrong, and so the condoms break or come off, and they stop using them out of frustration.
One measure we give is we have 20 different "steps" for using a condom properly, and they're out of order, and some are not real steps. Out of ~250 teenagers, most of whom have taken sex ed, been exposed to safer sex info all their lives, only 6 got that exercise 100% correct (all real steps in proper order, all fake steps removed), and only 42 got all the real steps in the correct order (but kept some of the fake steps). The kids have been taught, but retention isn't so hot - we're coming up with better ways to teach this.
Another measure we have is taking an inventory of experiences with recent condom use, and most of our participants report some level of difficulty with condom use, with most of those reports coming along the lines of it being too confusing to remember all of the steps they were taught while in the heat of the moment etc. They want to use condoms, but they've learned all of that in a very "academic" environment - we're trying to develop interventions that will help teach people how to handle themselves when they're not at their most rational.
A final measure we give which is related to condom use is an HIV & STI knowledge quiz with true, false and "don't know" answers. Most of our participants score 70% or better, but certain segments average scores below 30%. By identifying the lagging segments and then examining what it is that is leading to this dearth of HIV & STI knowledge, we're able to come up with plans to get this information out to those groups because the current techniques clearly aren't working.
It's neither an obvious nor simple area of research, despite what some in this thread will say. $400k to potentially save quite a few lives (or protect the quality of many lives) is a bargain. If you're a wretched excuse for a human being and you think that people who get HIV "deserve" it, you probably don't care that a lifetime of treatment for a single case of HIV infection will run around $400-500k (minimum) so this kind of research is also cost effective from that standpoint.
It sickens me to read mass media criticism of scientific grants based off of an abstract and a bucket full of spin. The GOP doesn't need this right now. They have other problems. Regardless, this is becoming one of their memes. Remember the complaint a few months ago about hundreds of thousands of dollars (or a bit more) spent on an "overhead projector," which turned out to be a planetarium with capabilities equivalent to the one in New York, used for astronomy and public outreach? Remember the mocking complaint about spending money to monitor volcanoes? That one had a well timed eruption in Alaska to give the GOP some media embarrassment, but in all of these cases we're seeing particularly unintelligent and uninformed people passing judgment on grants that passed through multiple layers of peer review with very low rates of proposal acceptance.
This proves that, um, Windows,er, Linux is....um...what the fuck does this prove again?
And why the fuck should I care if there's a 15% difference in performance of Firefox between those two OSes? I use my particular OS for reason that have nothing to do with how well Firefox runs on it.
That 15% could very well be measured in hours when the Slashtard coders get through with their Web 2.0 abominization of Slashdot.
People have been complaining or quite some time about poor performance on slashdot. What is it that shows this poor performance? I don't recall doing anything that isn't instantaneous here.
they have a much higher effective resolution than 1920x1080
For various technical, biological and other reasons, they do not. Remember, what was shot on analog is not what you see in the analog theater. All movies today go from analog to digital (for editing) and back to analog. The "resolution" of the end product is determined not by the amount of grain on the celluloid (obviously better resolution than 1920x1080) but the resolution and printing capabilities of the film printer. This is exacerbated by a repeated duplication of said celluloid. Most movie theaters today will show films of less quality than a good 1080p TV with an HD source.
The crucial point when it comes to quality is not the resolution but the number of scan lines that can be perceived. With a movie going through a number of processes, film to digital, then digital to film, then duplication round after duplication round, a 1080p movie on a good screen might well be of higher quality than an "analog" movie in the movie theater.
So, what is the quality of a typical movie theater you ask (or at least you should). According to an international study named "Image Resolution of 35mm Film in Theatrical Presentation" a typical theater has a 750 scan lines resolution. A very good HD set will typically be about there or a little higher, depending on where you sit.
You can even read about it here.. I am SO looking forward to a TV with 4520 scan lines of resolution.
Very informative, thanks. Most of the theaters near me use 70 mm film - how much will this affect the result?
Firefox is a slow, bloated piece of crap that fails in comparison to Chrome or Safari.
Chrome falls into the "proprietary or whatever" category because it's made by Google. Basically, open source projects that weren't initiated by a commercial vendor suck.
Blender is a joke compared to commercial software in that field.
"I've asked this every time this topic comes up. Can anyone name a SINGLE piece of open source software that does anything better than it's closest closed source (or otherwise "proprietary" via patents or whatever) counterpart?"
FF's closest counterpart is clearly IE, considering marketshare, and FF is certainly better than IE. In terms of memory usage, FF beats Chrome and Safari. In terms of page loading times, nothing beats FF + Adblock Plus. You dismissed Chrome, yourself, and the only things Safari does better than FF is 1) display advertisements and 2) run javascript.
http://www.mobiletipstricks.com/track-windows-mobile-with-smart-phone-tracker/
Oh wait...that is only if you go Windows Mobile.
I know a woman who did it for free with her WinMo phone. Being smarter than this guy, however, she brought the location to the police and they happily went together to get the phone. In this case it was being used by a kid in school and the impression I got was that he wasn't very threatening, but taking the risk of skipping the police to appear more macho is dumb.
They might be speaking of the battery usage of GPS rather than battery use of the phone in general. If they were constantly looking for the phone via GPS I can understand their amazement. Try using a handheld GPS device and many of them crap out within hours without a plugin.
The WinMo programs that do this same thing for lost phones only pulse the GPS on at specified intervals (which can be changed remotely). My phone lasts about 3 days with that level of activity, and I think the iPhone would do at least as well, assuming this app has the common sense not to continuously blast data and gps location.
I find it amazing that this much of a stink wasn't made during the Zimbabwean elections...where anti mugabe supporters were being raped and murdered by the thousands Then again, I guess there are no economic interests in that part of Africa, like there are in Iran (read: oil)
I praise the internet for being able to illuminate to us all, the double speak and forked tounge of the supposed 'freedom force (or farce rather)' known as America.
Hypocritical Liars.
My main source of news about the elections in both Iran and Zimbabwe was national public radio, which is about as American as you can get. NPR made a big point about exposing the massive corruption and manipulation of the election in Zimbabwe, and with Iran it is taking a very different path, pointing out that there are allegations of fraud but that the only verifiable story so far is the unrest in Iran itself. The difference in coverage is quite appropriate for the differences in context.
America is many things, but above all else it's diverse. It's not accurate to characterize all Americans of sharing a single interest or world view.