"If you ever wonder why lawyers get paid so much, it's the same reason porn stars do. It's not a difficult job, but you wouldn't want to tell your family that you spend all day producing gibberish."
But...what you said was in no way more clear or concise than NYCL's summary.
Apple is anything but customer-friendly. Check out the iPod support forums and watch for courteous, informative posts about Nano bugs being deleted. Call Apple customer support, tell them your Nano won't shut off (it probably won't if you have a 1st gen Nano), go through the reset and restore hoops, then send in your iPod for repair when they say they've never heard of this problem. Get the iPod back a couple weeks later with a note saying they couldn't reproduce the problem. Confirm that it's impossible to turn the iPod off, and thus that Apple definitely saw the problem and lied in their response. Discover the thousands of other users online confirming that this seems to be a problem with most Nanos.
I was hoping to see more automation. Sure, you can buy SEM systems that can handle automated analysis of silicon wafers at various stages of their processing from smooth surface to chip, but where are the _programmable_ tools that will let me set up fifty structured thin films in geometries that _I_ select and leave them to be analyzed overnight?
I don't agree with some of the things Steve says here. I'm a supporter of nuclear power and I worry that the taxation on stock transactions, while on some levels satisfying, would cripple the liquidity of American markets (I HATE the way the financial sector works, but I'm afraid it's a horribly complex monster that will respond chaotically and massively to any serious change).
On the other hand, I'm really impressed, almost shocked, but how candid his answers are. I don't think I've ever heard a politician respond to questions with even a tenth of Steve's directness. Wow. My instinctual reaction is to expect Steve to lose badly, though, because no one so honest and intelligent ever seems to serve in a national office.
Would have ===> would've (written) ====> would've (as the way most people say it when speaking aloud) ===> would of (increasingly common mistake in writing)
The GP's complaint against transitions is that they serve no functional purpose. One reply pointed out that in some very limited cases, they do (before/after photos benefit from a crossfade), which is reasonable. Your reply equates transitions with video and audio, which is absolutely unreasonable in the framework of the GP's post. Video and audio have obvious utility. Transitions are almost always decoration, and I agree with the GP that they're usually a distraction from the material.
Please show me how the illiterate, uneducated 13 year old children from 1858 are more mature than the 20 year old children today. I don't want a "common wisdom" (i.e. bullshit) answer, I want some real evidence. Don't have any?
Ever wondered why educated people are far less likely to have a gun in the house?
When I applied for beam time at one of these facilities (Argonne in Illinois through the standard review process, not in these new nanotech-for-hire labs) about six months ago, I competed with fifty-nine other proposals. Three of the proposals were given beam time for that beam cycle, and there are only three cycles per year.
When a new beamline opened up at Berkeley National Labs recently it was first-come-first-serve for the first few months, when it was sort of a secret. After a couple months of running sort of in secret, without any public announcement of the new equipment, there was a sudden explosion of awareness (probably someone blabbed about it) and within a very short period it was booked for the rest of the year, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
In summary, first-come-first-serve wouldn't work unless there were five hundred of these facilities. University research groups alone could take up all the time available even if the price were $10k/week, and there would be two universities willing to pay but unable to get time for every one that did.
The device doesn't determine whether the power provided to it comes from coal or nuclear plants. Your local energy market does. There is no correlation between a choice of hard drive and power production methods. Accordingly, the power producer shouldn't be considered in this discussion.
I recently lived in nearby Berkeley, where the cell phone reception is generally terrible because the city government has blocked installation of new transceivers for something like a decade, due to fear of health effects. I imagine the people of Sebastopol who complained about the wifi are probably the same way about cell phones.
The 360 and PS3 are a bit slower with a little lower settings than my 18-month old mid price PC. The PC was a $500 upgrade of my 4 year old system (which was in turn a $500 upgrade of my 6 year old system, etc), and is about 1/2 the speed it would be if I spent $180 to put in an 8800GT. On my PC, Oblivion has 16x more pixels in each texture than on my 360 and PS3, draw distance is much higher than on my 360 or PS3, resolution is 1600x1200 (vs 720p or 1080p on the consoles, I'm not sure which mode they render in Oblivion), and I'm forcing AA and HDR to be on. The framerates are about the same between the systems, with a slight edge going to my PC, especially outside.
I alternate between the three systems. I'm currently in a 360 kick, and honestly when I'm console gaming it's almost always 360, but I'm sure I'll swing back to the PC within a few weeks now that I have it set up to output to my 52" LCD. PC Gamers with high end systems will always have a graphical advantage over consoles and midrange systems will have the advantage through 3/4 of the console product cycle. The important difference to me isn't graphics; it's games. Mass Effect was the original game that started my recent console binge, and then I played a bunch of rather low quality but still fun games like Halo 3 and Gears of War and then a lot of Oblivion on each system, just to compare them. Good PC games tend to beat good console games for quality of writing and nuance of gameplay, but at least half the time I just want a popcorn blockbuster game where I sit back and watch 1-dimensional characters do something simple. I'd hate to give up either type of gaming permanently.
You allude to one of the most annoying facets of the fanboy wars in your post. If I criticize anything Apple, I'm always called a Microsoft fan. Yeah, I use Windows, and yeah, I'm fairly happy with it. No, I have no emotional attachment whatsoever to MS. I've used OSX, XP, Ubuntu, and KDE, and XP does what I need while the others don't. For me, it just works. I'm not switching to Vista for the same reason I'm not switching to OSX: I'm NOT an OS fanboy, and accordingly I'm not willing to give up functionality to fulfill my pseudo-religious needs.
Okay, no one in a modded-up post on this story understands the concept. Buckyballs look like soot. You have a tank filled with this soot in your car. Then you flow very high pressure hydrogen gas over them for awhile (this has been done for years with carbon nanotubes, which offer more storage but because they only confine in 2 dimensions, unlike the balls, they don't provide the capillary forces necessary to make this easy). Hydrogen then adsorbs (notice ADsorbs, not ABsorbs) onto the inner surfaces of the Buckyballs. Capillary forces, like those that cause liquid to be drawn into a straw, allow the hydrogens to live essentially as liquids inside the balls, meaning that when you remove the high pressure hydrogen flow, the hydrogren in the buckyballs doesn't all immediately fly out. Hydrogen leaks out of the balls slowly, becoming a gas and maintaining a roughly constant pressure in the tank, and you then siphon off the hydrogen that you want to power your car. You can control the leakage rate by changing the temperature.
You then reuse the Buckyballs by flowing hydrogen gas over them when they're empty. They're 100% reusable storage, not tiny gas tanks. Someone mod this up so that the dozens of "oh nos, Buckyballs hurt teh environments" posts go away.
I had the same reaction when I read the summary, but on reading the article it sounds like the car is required to use gasoline. If not, how would they convert their 100 mpg requirement into electric-car terms? I can imagine several possibilities, but none seem really neutral.
It's not really fair (or in the spirit of the competition) to disallow electric cars, but it's not fair to say they get infinite mpg, either. Do we measure their cost in electricity, or in fossil fuel burning to generate that power? That would be difficult, since it varies from market to market. Instead, it sounds like the X people are just banning them.
Note: I only read the CNN article. If someone finds more specific information on electrics, let me know.
Sure, it's less exciting on a sci-fi-this-is-awesome level, but it seems to me like the most practical of the X prizes. This is the first that could very conceivably have a massive effect on worldwide transportation and even politics and the global economy in the next decade. What other x prize is tied so closely to the major environmental concerns of the day?
Maybe fewer people will follow the prize closely, but I suspect that more will follow its aftermath.
I think that the nature of the religion changed as the show went on (it seemed more like personal spirituality and less like a cool ancient mythology). I agree with your comment, though. I had forgotten about all the one-offs because they were...well, forgettable.
Given the massive positive response to BSG, I'd say that the show's performance answers your question. Critically, it's been frequently regarded as a masterpiece. For a show on Sci Fi, ratings have even been quite good. The only problem is that it costs a lot to make it, and when Sci Fi can instead fund horribly written, poorly acted, comparatively dirt cheap shows like Atlantis and get ratings even on the same order of magnitude, they're financially better off doing so, at least in the short term. Still, four seasons is nothing for BSG to be ashamed of. I don't think many of us look at Farscape and say, "What a terrible waste of time. Four seasons? Why'd they even bother?"
I think that a lot of the backlash against BSG in the last season was the product of the discomfort a lot of us geeks have toward religion being mixed into our scifi.
I think that BSG's main mistake, if I can call it that, is being off the air for so long between seasons. It really breaks up the narrative flow and serves to make us effectively forget what the cliffhangars from the previous season were.
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"If you ever wonder why lawyers get paid so much, it's the same reason porn stars do. It's not a difficult job, but you wouldn't want to tell your family that you spend all day producing gibberish."
But...what you said was in no way more clear or concise than NYCL's summary.
Apple is anything but customer-friendly. Check out the iPod support forums and watch for courteous, informative posts about Nano bugs being deleted. Call Apple customer support, tell them your Nano won't shut off (it probably won't if you have a 1st gen Nano), go through the reset and restore hoops, then send in your iPod for repair when they say they've never heard of this problem. Get the iPod back a couple weeks later with a note saying they couldn't reproduce the problem. Confirm that it's impossible to turn the iPod off, and thus that Apple definitely saw the problem and lied in their response. Discover the thousands of other users online confirming that this seems to be a problem with most Nanos.
Then tell me Apple is customer-friendly.
The parent should be modded insightful, not just funny.
I was hoping to see more automation. Sure, you can buy SEM systems that can handle automated analysis of silicon wafers at various stages of their processing from smooth surface to chip, but where are the _programmable_ tools that will let me set up fifty structured thin films in geometries that _I_ select and leave them to be analyzed overnight?
'When you see something decline with increasing velocity, it's a concern.'
No, it's called gravity!
I don't agree with some of the things Steve says here. I'm a supporter of nuclear power and I worry that the taxation on stock transactions, while on some levels satisfying, would cripple the liquidity of American markets (I HATE the way the financial sector works, but I'm afraid it's a horribly complex monster that will respond chaotically and massively to any serious change).
On the other hand, I'm really impressed, almost shocked, but how candid his answers are. I don't think I've ever heard a politician respond to questions with even a tenth of Steve's directness. Wow. My instinctual reaction is to expect Steve to lose badly, though, because no one so honest and intelligent ever seems to serve in a national office.
Good luck, Steve.
It's an interesting error and pretty widespread.
Would have ===> would've (written) ====> would've (as the way most people say it when speaking aloud) ===> would of (increasingly common mistake in writing)
Their own piracy cost them over $205 billion last year. It's not so funny now, is it?
The GP's complaint against transitions is that they serve no functional purpose. One reply pointed out that in some very limited cases, they do (before/after photos benefit from a crossfade), which is reasonable. Your reply equates transitions with video and audio, which is absolutely unreasonable in the framework of the GP's post. Video and audio have obvious utility. Transitions are almost always decoration, and I agree with the GP that they're usually a distraction from the material.
Please show me how the illiterate, uneducated 13 year old children from 1858 are more mature than the 20 year old children today. I don't want a "common wisdom" (i.e. bullshit) answer, I want some real evidence. Don't have any?
Ever wondered why educated people are far less likely to have a gun in the house?
When I applied for beam time at one of these facilities (Argonne in Illinois through the standard review process, not in these new nanotech-for-hire labs) about six months ago, I competed with fifty-nine other proposals. Three of the proposals were given beam time for that beam cycle, and there are only three cycles per year.
When a new beamline opened up at Berkeley National Labs recently it was first-come-first-serve for the first few months, when it was sort of a secret. After a couple months of running sort of in secret, without any public announcement of the new equipment, there was a sudden explosion of awareness (probably someone blabbed about it) and within a very short period it was booked for the rest of the year, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
In summary, first-come-first-serve wouldn't work unless there were five hundred of these facilities. University research groups alone could take up all the time available even if the price were $10k/week, and there would be two universities willing to pay but unable to get time for every one that did.
I'd say about 20% of car drivers had their "datalink" go dead already. We let those morons drive, so why can't we let evil robots fly?
The device doesn't determine whether the power provided to it comes from coal or nuclear plants. Your local energy market does. There is no correlation between a choice of hard drive and power production methods. Accordingly, the power producer shouldn't be considered in this discussion.
I recently lived in nearby Berkeley, where the cell phone reception is generally terrible because the city government has blocked installation of new transceivers for something like a decade, due to fear of health effects. I imagine the people of Sebastopol who complained about the wifi are probably the same way about cell phones.
Crysis still doesn't play very well on these cards.
The 360 and PS3 are a bit slower with a little lower settings than my 18-month old mid price PC. The PC was a $500 upgrade of my 4 year old system (which was in turn a $500 upgrade of my 6 year old system, etc), and is about 1/2 the speed it would be if I spent $180 to put in an 8800GT. On my PC, Oblivion has 16x more pixels in each texture than on my 360 and PS3, draw distance is much higher than on my 360 or PS3, resolution is 1600x1200 (vs 720p or 1080p on the consoles, I'm not sure which mode they render in Oblivion), and I'm forcing AA and HDR to be on. The framerates are about the same between the systems, with a slight edge going to my PC, especially outside.
I alternate between the three systems. I'm currently in a 360 kick, and honestly when I'm console gaming it's almost always 360, but I'm sure I'll swing back to the PC within a few weeks now that I have it set up to output to my 52" LCD. PC Gamers with high end systems will always have a graphical advantage over consoles and midrange systems will have the advantage through 3/4 of the console product cycle. The important difference to me isn't graphics; it's games. Mass Effect was the original game that started my recent console binge, and then I played a bunch of rather low quality but still fun games like Halo 3 and Gears of War and then a lot of Oblivion on each system, just to compare them. Good PC games tend to beat good console games for quality of writing and nuance of gameplay, but at least half the time I just want a popcorn blockbuster game where I sit back and watch 1-dimensional characters do something simple. I'd hate to give up either type of gaming permanently.
You allude to one of the most annoying facets of the fanboy wars in your post. If I criticize anything Apple, I'm always called a Microsoft fan. Yeah, I use Windows, and yeah, I'm fairly happy with it. No, I have no emotional attachment whatsoever to MS. I've used OSX, XP, Ubuntu, and KDE, and XP does what I need while the others don't. For me, it just works. I'm not switching to Vista for the same reason I'm not switching to OSX: I'm NOT an OS fanboy, and accordingly I'm not willing to give up functionality to fulfill my pseudo-religious needs.
Okay, no one in a modded-up post on this story understands the concept. Buckyballs look like soot. You have a tank filled with this soot in your car. Then you flow very high pressure hydrogen gas over them for awhile (this has been done for years with carbon nanotubes, which offer more storage but because they only confine in 2 dimensions, unlike the balls, they don't provide the capillary forces necessary to make this easy). Hydrogen then adsorbs (notice ADsorbs, not ABsorbs) onto the inner surfaces of the Buckyballs. Capillary forces, like those that cause liquid to be drawn into a straw, allow the hydrogens to live essentially as liquids inside the balls, meaning that when you remove the high pressure hydrogen flow, the hydrogren in the buckyballs doesn't all immediately fly out. Hydrogen leaks out of the balls slowly, becoming a gas and maintaining a roughly constant pressure in the tank, and you then siphon off the hydrogen that you want to power your car. You can control the leakage rate by changing the temperature.
You then reuse the Buckyballs by flowing hydrogen gas over them when they're empty. They're 100% reusable storage, not tiny gas tanks. Someone mod this up so that the dozens of "oh nos, Buckyballs hurt teh environments" posts go away.
Awesome. I'd mod you up if I could, because that's important information.
I had the same reaction when I read the summary, but on reading the article it sounds like the car is required to use gasoline. If not, how would they convert their 100 mpg requirement into electric-car terms? I can imagine several possibilities, but none seem really neutral.
It's not really fair (or in the spirit of the competition) to disallow electric cars, but it's not fair to say they get infinite mpg, either. Do we measure their cost in electricity, or in fossil fuel burning to generate that power? That would be difficult, since it varies from market to market. Instead, it sounds like the X people are just banning them.
Note: I only read the CNN article. If someone finds more specific information on electrics, let me know.
Sure, it's less exciting on a sci-fi-this-is-awesome level, but it seems to me like the most practical of the X prizes. This is the first that could very conceivably have a massive effect on worldwide transportation and even politics and the global economy in the next decade. What other x prize is tied so closely to the major environmental concerns of the day?
Maybe fewer people will follow the prize closely, but I suspect that more will follow its aftermath.
I think that the nature of the religion changed as the show went on (it seemed more like personal spirituality and less like a cool ancient mythology). I agree with your comment, though. I had forgotten about all the one-offs because they were...well, forgettable.
Don't forget the same cave, same factory to represent all industrialized worlds, and the costumes for the nazi planet.
Given the massive positive response to BSG, I'd say that the show's performance answers your question. Critically, it's been frequently regarded as a masterpiece. For a show on Sci Fi, ratings have even been quite good. The only problem is that it costs a lot to make it, and when Sci Fi can instead fund horribly written, poorly acted, comparatively dirt cheap shows like Atlantis and get ratings even on the same order of magnitude, they're financially better off doing so, at least in the short term. Still, four seasons is nothing for BSG to be ashamed of. I don't think many of us look at Farscape and say, "What a terrible waste of time. Four seasons? Why'd they even bother?"
I think that a lot of the backlash against BSG in the last season was the product of the discomfort a lot of us geeks have toward religion being mixed into our scifi. I think that BSG's main mistake, if I can call it that, is being off the air for so long between seasons. It really breaks up the narrative flow and serves to make us effectively forget what the cliffhangars from the previous season were.