Monsanto continues to push the argument over to whether modified genes are safe. The logical argument against GMOs is not that there is anything wrong with modifying genomes, but in what we have modified them to do, which is to be raised in soils heavily laden with chemicals, Round Up in particular. This has caused a massive increase of such chemicals in our diet. They have been linked to cancer, autism, and a slew of gastrointestinal problems.
"Money" as I think you are meaning being an apportionment of the value of all resources is neither finite nor infinite. Since our own actions can effect future suplies and can affect the relative value of those supplies. This is the economic principal of productivity. The reason that programming is now seen as more important than other fields is that the productivity of our capital investments is limited by the intelligence of the user. Current technology on a hardware basis is more than capable than the human brain, but nobody has yet managed to program AI efficient and adaptable enough to replace human intelligence. When that happens, the rate of advancement will go from the order of c^x to cx^x.
This is how it is supposed to work in our justice system. Before they knew that there was any pron on the drives, you cannot be forced to self incriminate. Once they know there is something there, (in this case by guessing his password on one drive) it is no longer a matter of self incrimination but one of degree, and you can be forced to reveal the password.
The same holds true for a combination lock. If they know you put something illegal in there, through a recording or whatever, they can force you to open it.
Monsanto's monoculture crop is a global disaster waiting to happen. The first disease that comes along which has evolved to target Monsanto's GM plants will wipe out a HUGE portion of the world's food supply
Naaaah, ever heard of bananas? Monsanto GMOs are way more diverse than bananas.
The typical nature of nerds is such that we generally behave oddly in public perception in cases where expected behavior does not match optimal behavior. The example of cutting up a whole piece of meat therefore makes no sense, because it is not optimal behavior.
If you were to cut the meat into little pieces prior to eating, the meat would be cold by the time you were eating the final pieces, which is clearly an unacceptable outcome. On top of this the piece of meat makes logical sense to nerds as some sort of stack or queue. Cutting up the meat is akin to converting the stack into an array before operating on the data. Since you are intending to not sort but eat the pieces, an operation which can be run on either a stack or an array, this clearly makes no sense.
Also I have never heard of this so called "American Style" of eating, whereby the fork is tossed from hand to hand. We do not do that here in Ohio, so I don't know just how "American" it can be. Sounds more like something they would do in Texas.
I see glass as a military device more than anything right now. A simple HUD with the locations of allies overlaid on an aerial map, plus features such as IR camera and text commands. The key feature that makes glass so useful in such an instance is its hands-free nature. This would apply anywhere you are using both hands. The problem is that for most civilians it is not such a hassle to take your phone out.
Labs are a serious issue in my mind. Not for engineers, but for science majors. They break the entire credit hour concept of college. If a normal class is 3-4 credit hours, labs are always 1, but then often require a 5-10 page paper every week, plus the 3 hour lab period. Schools normally require just enough lab classes so that you have 1 per semester, but then with scheduling difficulties, students inevitably have to take multiple labs in the same semester at least once if they want to finish in 4 years. Most students have a part time job, which means this just is not feasible.
I know several people who have gone through this process only to either: A) Find that they could not get student loans for a 5th year which they would need to get the degree. or B) Simply dropout or change majors to complete in 4 years.
These people are genuinely interested in science. When did science become exclusively about writing papers?
I have recently quit WoW, and I dont think that either of those is the problem with WoW. Paid transfers are IMO a good thing, they may have a few too many lower pop servers, but I think that is more a function of loosing subscribers. Neither are raids too hard, unless you are just talking about the hard modes, which I would agree with.
The biggest issue they really have right now is that they killed the leveling experience. They will not get any new people when what people see is that this game is easy enough for a toddler to play. Any class at any level up to 80 can kill an elite mob of their level, something that should at least take a pocket healer, if not a party. In the past, if you found yourself either on a bad realm or unable to progress in raid content, you could always level a new toon, and play a decently satisfying single player game. Now you would rather just unsubscribe than reroll.
The second problem they have is the whole concept of hard modes, which they have gotten locked into. Players want some form of story progression. Quickly progressing through the current raidbosses only to have to fight the same raidbosses with more health and damage is quite simply boring. On top of that, for many of the hardmodes, success had little to do with ability and much more to do with whether or not the boss randomly does two things in a row that automatically kill at least one person, which would cause DPS to be too low to kill the boss. Boss hits everyone for 80% heath, boss hits specific player for 50% heath.4 seconds later. Everyone on vent was frustrated, but everyone knew that it was the designers' fault, not the player. RNG FTL.
The final problem I'll mention and what killed it for me and many in my guild were daily quests. For many of us these are the straw that broke the camel's back. Blizzard had plenty of feedback from the Argent Crusade faction grind that players don't like to be forced to unlock crap with repeatable dailies. They basically copied that exactly for the Firelands patch, without putting in any way around it. For instance, while there were repeatable quests for many factions, you could just wear a tabbard and do 5-mans to grind rep, which was much less painful. With the Firelands patch Blizzard was basically saying to us, "Hey I hear you enjoy doing chores!"
First the thermocouple would transfer heat, so it would not gain you any extra power. The only reason you may want to use a thermocouple would be to cool the bottom some, so that people can service the turbines easier. But it would not do enough to make it worth it.
I do not think it would be expensive, iron and constantan, you would make the entire chimney the thermocouple. But the problem is the height of the chimney.
Such a thermocouple could generate around 2 mV at 35 degrees difference C. The power that voltage generates is dependent on the resistance of the thermocouple (P=V^2/R). I am using p=3E-7 as a rough average resistivity between the iron and constantan (I know that's a vast oversimplification not accounting for temp etc). If the chimney was say 1 meter high and had a crossectional area of 4 m^2 that would mean that the total length for the resistance (up and down) of 2m and an area (half the chimney) of 2m^2. Those would just cancel and R=3E-7. Therefore power would equal a whole 13 watts.
Now while 4m^2 might be fairly accurate for the crossectional area of the this chimney, it needs to be 800m tall, so we only get 17 mW. 17 mW is not cooling anything much at all.
I just took a look at last year's 10k. Their EBITDA (a decent approximation of how much more money a business could have spent, but chose not to) for their wireless segment was 21.8 billion. They invested 9.2 billion in upgrades to their long-term wireless assets. I could not find any further breakdown of the wireless assets to determine which of those are actual infrastructure versus office buildings and whatnot. AT&T could be spending triple what they do on wireless infrastructure without losing money on wireless.
If our government is behind his rape allegations then I hope he is convicted. Seems to me it would be pretty easy to bribe some women to seduce a man and then get evidence to file for rape. If we cannot do that right, then it's a sad state of affairs for the CIA.
The one thing that makes absolutely no sense in all this is that copyright gets extended when new laws come out.
Suppose that copyright is now 50 years. Now supposing that the government thinks that say 100 years is a more optimal time period for copyright. They write a law which changes the time period for copyright law.
Why do the copyright end dates for those works already under copyright change? There is no reason for them to. There is no way that the new law is going to affect whether or not people 50 years ago write more books and music. But clearly the government seems to think that if they keep pushing the date back on existing copyright that they will reach some point where the financial incentive of the new law will convince the Beatles to write another album back in the 1960s. Perhaps they believe that we will soon have time traveling agents, who can inform the artists of the past of their rights.
I have Time Warner in Ohio, and yes they are completely horrible. They probably have the worst set top boxes available, and it is usually better to drive to the local store for customer service than to wait on the phone, regardless of the issue. I highly doubt customer service could be any worse with another company. But based on what I've seen, I am very happy not to have Comcast.
I used to play WoW, and the vast majority of people with connection problems were always Comcast users. It got to the point where we used the term "Comcasted" instead of disconnected. Comcast users D/Ced individually and as a group. Often we would lose a healer or a tank to a Comcast D/C. There were several times when we would lose large chunks of Comcast people. They were the only ISP that I have ever noticed being so blatantly plagued by connection issues. I think that their network must be mismanaged, both on a local and a national level.
As a whole the DSL connections seemed most stable.
c) They were measuring based on the number of torrents not the number of files. A music torrent may be thousands of songs, whereas most video torrents are single movies or episodes.
If you expect your niece to become a vampire or somehow surpass the expiration date of plastic, you can pay a little to get the 2D barcoded plastic sheets engraved in metal sheets or tablets.
"I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted..."
I think we all just assume that they came with no directions, since the first step to setting up your new computer is throwing anything that even slightly resembles directions or a "user guide" in the trash.
Now browser market share in Europe will be determined by what kickbacks and/or threats the computer makers receive from the companies behind the major browsers.
Is that what you meant by non-biased?
1) What you said, and nobody will match Microsoft's incentives.
2) Even if there is no threat/incentive from any browser, most large computer companies will choose to bundle IE, just for the sake of having a similar package to deal with from a tech support standpoint.
I really feel like very few companies will not be packaging IE with Windows 7. Those that do not will be primarily the super low-end PCs, electing to go with something less memory intensive, and the high-end PCs targeted at the gaming and programing users, who would prefer a different browser. Even on the high-end, it will likely just end up packaged with both. (The only thing PC manufacturers would prefer to that would be packaging it with a 30-day trial of IE.)
The great news here though is that this news should mean that it will be relatively easy to uninstall IE on a Windows 7 machine.
As internet traffic continues to increase, ISPs will remember the purpose of USENET. By hosting files locally, USENET cuts down on internet traffic over long distances. I would be willing to bet that at least a few ISPs start toying with the idea of hosting popular bittorrent traffic locally and then preventing that traffic from going outside their local network. This will obviously not happen in the current US marketplace, but perhaps some other countries will start doing it, and our corporations will see the profits that it makes for those involved.
Honestly the perfect place to start this geographically would have been Australia, but from all the Australian ISP horror stories I have read on Slashdot, I'm guessing that's not going to happen.
To me, the 21 million loss on Take-Two looks like small change to a company like EA. The bigger story that jumps off the income statement is one that most companies are dealing with these days, loss of goodwill. EA took a 368 million loss on goodwill impairment. What that means, for those who do not understand goodwill, is that their 2006 acquisition of JAMDAT, which they turned into is now worth 368 million less to them than it is worth on their balance sheet. That basically means they are not making the money on their cellphone business that they expected to be making.
Slashdot Mirror
Monsanto continues to push the argument over to whether modified genes are safe. The logical argument against GMOs is not that there is anything wrong with modifying genomes, but in what we have modified them to do, which is to be raised in soils heavily laden with chemicals, Round Up in particular. This has caused a massive increase of such chemicals in our diet. They have been linked to cancer, autism, and a slew of gastrointestinal problems.
"Money" as I think you are meaning being an apportionment of the value of all resources is neither finite nor infinite. Since our own actions can effect future suplies and can affect the relative value of those supplies. This is the economic principal of productivity. The reason that programming is now seen as more important than other fields is that the productivity of our capital investments is limited by the intelligence of the user. Current technology on a hardware basis is more than capable than the human brain, but nobody has yet managed to program AI efficient and adaptable enough to replace human intelligence. When that happens, the rate of advancement will go from the order of c^x to cx^x.
Move to California. In California the burden of proof is on them if you dispute something.
This is how it is supposed to work in our justice system. Before they knew that there was any pron on the drives, you cannot be forced to self incriminate. Once they know there is something there, (in this case by guessing his password on one drive) it is no longer a matter of self incrimination but one of degree, and you can be forced to reveal the password.
The same holds true for a combination lock. If they know you put something illegal in there, through a recording or whatever, they can force you to open it.
Monsanto's monoculture crop is a global disaster waiting to happen. The first disease that comes along which has evolved to target Monsanto's GM plants will wipe out a HUGE portion of the world's food supply
Naaaah, ever heard of bananas? Monsanto GMOs are way more diverse than bananas.
The typical nature of nerds is such that we generally behave oddly in public perception in cases where expected behavior does not match optimal behavior. The example of cutting up a whole piece of meat therefore makes no sense, because it is not optimal behavior.
If you were to cut the meat into little pieces prior to eating, the meat would be cold by the time you were eating the final pieces, which is clearly an unacceptable outcome. On top of this the piece of meat makes logical sense to nerds as some sort of stack or queue. Cutting up the meat is akin to converting the stack into an array before operating on the data. Since you are intending to not sort but eat the pieces, an operation which can be run on either a stack or an array, this clearly makes no sense.
Also I have never heard of this so called "American Style" of eating, whereby the fork is tossed from hand to hand. We do not do that here in Ohio, so I don't know just how "American" it can be. Sounds more like something they would do in Texas.
I see glass as a military device more than anything right now. A simple HUD with the locations of allies overlaid on an aerial map, plus features such as IR camera and text commands. The key feature that makes glass so useful in such an instance is its hands-free nature. This would apply anywhere you are using both hands. The problem is that for most civilians it is not such a hassle to take your phone out.
So nothing in there but beef? How does it all stick together?
Is this supposed to be a joke? Because I don't get it. Who has not made a burger with ground beef?
Labs are a serious issue in my mind. Not for engineers, but for science majors. They break the entire credit hour concept of college. If a normal class is 3-4 credit hours, labs are always 1, but then often require a 5-10 page paper every week, plus the 3 hour lab period. Schools normally require just enough lab classes so that you have 1 per semester, but then with scheduling difficulties, students inevitably have to take multiple labs in the same semester at least once if they want to finish in 4 years. Most students have a part time job, which means this just is not feasible.
I know several people who have gone through this process only to either:
A) Find that they could not get student loans for a 5th year which they would need to get the degree. or
B) Simply dropout or change majors to complete in 4 years.
These people are genuinely interested in science. When did science become exclusively about writing papers?
The biggest issue they really have right now is that they killed the leveling experience. They will not get any new people when what people see is that this game is easy enough for a toddler to play. Any class at any level up to 80 can kill an elite mob of their level, something that should at least take a pocket healer, if not a party. In the past, if you found yourself either on a bad realm or unable to progress in raid content, you could always level a new toon, and play a decently satisfying single player game. Now you would rather just unsubscribe than reroll.
The second problem they have is the whole concept of hard modes, which they have gotten locked into. Players want some form of story progression. Quickly progressing through the current raidbosses only to have to fight the same raidbosses with more health and damage is quite simply boring. On top of that, for many of the hardmodes, success had little to do with ability and much more to do with whether or not the boss randomly does two things in a row that automatically kill at least one person, which would cause DPS to be too low to kill the boss. Boss hits everyone for 80% heath, boss hits specific player for 50% heath .4 seconds later. Everyone on vent was frustrated, but everyone knew that it was the designers' fault, not the player. RNG FTL.
The final problem I'll mention and what killed it for me and many in my guild were daily quests. For many of us these are the straw that broke the camel's back. Blizzard had plenty of feedback from the Argent Crusade faction grind that players don't like to be forced to unlock crap with repeatable dailies. They basically copied that exactly for the Firelands patch, without putting in any way around it. For instance, while there were repeatable quests for many factions, you could just wear a tabbard and do 5-mans to grind rep, which was much less painful. With the Firelands patch Blizzard was basically saying to us, "Hey I hear you enjoy doing chores!"
Clearly the Republicans were right when they pointed out that gay marriage was a slippery slope. Now we have two people married to a computer?!
First the thermocouple would transfer heat, so it would not gain you any extra power. The only reason you may want to use a thermocouple would be to cool the bottom some, so that people can service the turbines easier. But it would not do enough to make it worth it.
I do not think it would be expensive, iron and constantan, you would make the entire chimney the thermocouple. But the problem is the height of the chimney.
Such a thermocouple could generate around 2 mV at 35 degrees difference C. The power that voltage generates is dependent on the resistance of the thermocouple (P=V^2/R). I am using p=3E-7 as a rough average resistivity between the iron and constantan (I know that's a vast oversimplification not accounting for temp etc). If the chimney was say 1 meter high and had a crossectional area of 4 m^2 that would mean that the total length for the resistance (up and down) of 2m and an area (half the chimney) of 2m^2. Those would just cancel and R=3E-7. Therefore power would equal a whole 13 watts.
Now while 4m^2 might be fairly accurate for the crossectional area of the this chimney, it needs to be 800m tall, so we only get 17 mW. 17 mW is not cooling anything much at all.
I just took a look at last year's 10k. Their EBITDA (a decent approximation of how much more money a business could have spent, but chose not to) for their wireless segment was 21.8 billion. They invested 9.2 billion in upgrades to their long-term wireless assets. I could not find any further breakdown of the wireless assets to determine which of those are actual infrastructure versus office buildings and whatnot. AT&T could be spending triple what they do on wireless infrastructure without losing money on wireless.
If our government is behind his rape allegations then I hope he is convicted. Seems to me it would be pretty easy to bribe some women to seduce a man and then get evidence to file for rape. If we cannot do that right, then it's a sad state of affairs for the CIA.
The one thing that makes absolutely no sense in all this is that copyright gets extended when new laws come out.
Suppose that copyright is now 50 years. Now supposing that the government thinks that say 100 years is a more optimal time period for copyright. They write a law which changes the time period for copyright law.
Why do the copyright end dates for those works already under copyright change? There is no reason for them to. There is no way that the new law is going to affect whether or not people 50 years ago write more books and music. But clearly the government seems to think that if they keep pushing the date back on existing copyright that they will reach some point where the financial incentive of the new law will convince the Beatles to write another album back in the 1960s. Perhaps they believe that we will soon have time traveling agents, who can inform the artists of the past of their rights.
I have Time Warner in Ohio, and yes they are completely horrible. They probably have the worst set top boxes available, and it is usually better to drive to the local store for customer service than to wait on the phone, regardless of the issue. I highly doubt customer service could be any worse with another company. But based on what I've seen, I am very happy not to have Comcast.
I used to play WoW, and the vast majority of people with connection problems were always Comcast users. It got to the point where we used the term "Comcasted" instead of disconnected. Comcast users D/Ced individually and as a group. Often we would lose a healer or a tank to a Comcast D/C. There were several times when we would lose large chunks of Comcast people. They were the only ISP that I have ever noticed being so blatantly plagued by connection issues. I think that their network must be mismanaged, both on a local and a national level.
As a whole the DSL connections seemed most stable.
c) They were measuring based on the number of torrents not the number of files. A music torrent may be thousands of songs, whereas most video torrents are single movies or episodes.
Wow, those links are WAY better than goatse!
If you expect your niece to become a vampire or somehow surpass the expiration date of plastic, you can pay a little to get the 2D barcoded plastic sheets engraved in metal sheets or tablets.
"I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted..."
I think we all just assume that they came with no directions, since the first step to setting up your new computer is throwing anything that even slightly resembles directions or a "user guide" in the trash.
Now browser market share in Europe will be determined by what kickbacks and/or threats the computer makers receive from the companies behind the major browsers.
Is that what you meant by non-biased?
1) What you said, and nobody will match Microsoft's incentives. 2) Even if there is no threat/incentive from any browser, most large computer companies will choose to bundle IE, just for the sake of having a similar package to deal with from a tech support standpoint. I really feel like very few companies will not be packaging IE with Windows 7. Those that do not will be primarily the super low-end PCs, electing to go with something less memory intensive, and the high-end PCs targeted at the gaming and programing users, who would prefer a different browser. Even on the high-end, it will likely just end up packaged with both. (The only thing PC manufacturers would prefer to that would be packaging it with a 30-day trial of IE.) The great news here though is that this news should mean that it will be relatively easy to uninstall IE on a Windows 7 machine.
As internet traffic continues to increase, ISPs will remember the purpose of USENET. By hosting files locally, USENET cuts down on internet traffic over long distances. I would be willing to bet that at least a few ISPs start toying with the idea of hosting popular bittorrent traffic locally and then preventing that traffic from going outside their local network. This will obviously not happen in the current US marketplace, but perhaps some other countries will start doing it, and our corporations will see the profits that it makes for those involved.
Honestly the perfect place to start this geographically would have been Australia, but from all the Australian ISP horror stories I have read on Slashdot, I'm guessing that's not going to happen.
You can also get any company's public filing through EDGAR, which is put in a standardized format, in plain old HTML.
EA's 2009 10-K
To me, the 21 million loss on Take-Two looks like small change to a company like EA. The bigger story that jumps off the income statement is one that most companies are dealing with these days, loss of goodwill. EA took a 368 million loss on goodwill impairment. What that means, for those who do not understand goodwill, is that their 2006 acquisition of JAMDAT, which they turned into is now worth 368 million less to them than it is worth on their balance sheet. That basically means they are not making the money on their cellphone business that they expected to be making.
We will have new, super mosquitoes, who's bite is deadly to humans.
I know how to create more salmon DNA!
I hope for your sake that your fiancee does too.