People have been condensing things like this for humor for years. Ophelia's last line: "Glub!" And remember the story about consensing the Lord's Prayer into a text message? (I think it had lines like "God, UR GR8")
So we take something that's been used for humor, and use it for Cliffs Notes instead. Big whoop. No one is going to think that the summaries are the original works. I mean, anyone who has taken a logic class has come up with "2B v ~2B"
Although it does remind me of the time in high school when we were reading Romeo and Juliet aloud in class. I read Mercutio's "Queen Mab" speech, got through the whole thing, then looked at the footnotes, and had the reaction, "I said what?!?!?" (From then on, I read the footnotes with the text, not afterward.)
The thing is, raw economic costs are never all of it. Given two resources, one finite and one renewable, even if it is more expensive to exploit the renewable resource, in the long term you'll be better off with it.
As far as mainstream science knows, fossil fuels are a finite resource. Oil and coal are going to become more scarce, and eventually there won't be enough to use. There's certainly disagreement on how much is left, but pretty much everyone agrees that reserves are finite and probably won't outlast the century.
But geologic hot spots aren't likely to change significantly within human life time, and in most cases we could follow them when they moved. We're not going to run out of sunlight anytime soon. And wind patterns are stable in some areas, though that's certainly subject to climate change.
To put it in economic terms, the finite resource is kind of like a loan, but the renewable resource is more like an investment. You take out the loan -- using fossil fuels to power the industrial revolution -- so you can make investments in something that will continue to bring in revenue when you've paid off the loan.
The issue with scaling and corrosion isn't that it'll escape and damage the environment -- it's that it'll damage the power plant itself. Most power plants work by burning something to heat water, vaporize it, and use the steam to turn a turbine. At least one form of geothermal power involves plugging pipes into the ground where magma is naturally heating water and vaporizing it. In other words, hot springs. But since it's ground water, it's full of minerals that can cause scaling in the pipes. And since it's ground water from a volcanic area, it's generally full of corrosive materials that, again, damage the pipes.
Sometimes it does. Or, more precisely, it'll say something like "This is the 2nd item in the XYZ series" under Product Details, and link to a series page. It's not quite a direct link to what's next, but it does tell you where it is in the sequence and direct you to a hub.
The term I usually use to describe The Register is "journalistic snark." I considered "equal-opportunity curmudgeon" at one point, but curmudgeonly doesn't convey the self-satisfied attitude that generally comes through in their articles.
Just last night I was saying one of our local papers -- also called The Register -- would be much more interesting if it were like this site...
The services is mentioned early on in the list of hosted services. But the review is of software someone might use for a self-hosted blog, and it seems to me that creating an LJ clone* to power a single person's journal is kind of overkill.
*I'll admit I have no idea what it takes to install the LJ server software. For all I know it could be a 5-minutes install like WordPress, or it might take three days.
My wife and I have been re-watching Babylon 5 with some friends who hadn't seen it before. Sometimes it's hard to remember that it first hit the air 12 years ago. As primitive as the CGI effects are by today's standards, you get used to it after a while. But one look at some of the guest stars' and extras' hairstyles and you instantly know this isn't a current show. I even picked up the first script book, and the commentary in the introductions really drives the point home.
When they launched, the television landscape was vastly different from what we have today. It took them years to get a green light because networks were convinced there was no market for TV sci-fi that wasn't Star Trek, and there was already a Star Trek show on TV. There were still plenty of independent stations that aired mainly shows in syndication, either first-run or second-run. There was no UPN or WB. Cable was something you got for movies, or maybe CNN. Satellite dishes were 6 feet across and prohibitively expensive. The idea of downloading TV off the Internet was ridiculous, although you could see it coming when MP3s hit late in the show's run. Even DVDs were new when the series wrapped up in 1998.
So while it doesn't seem that old when considered within the larger span of TV history, a lot has changed. And to really put those 12 years in perspective, the stereotypical 14-year-old Internet geek (and the stereotypical 14-year-old LiveJournal goth) were only 2 when the show started.
People just aren't willing to spend money purely in the name of Science. There needs to be a concrete reason for it.
Yeah. It's kind of funny how there's all this really interesting science you can get from exposures in various wavelengths of lights, spectroscopy, etc, but when it comes down to it, all the average person sees -- or wants to see, for that matter -- are the pretty pictures.
Not that I have anything against pretty pictures -- I've got the Astronomy Picture of the Day on my daily rotation -- but as much as they appeal to our sense of awe, they get hard to justify when you start looking at the expenditure. (Then some studio spends $250 million making a summer movie, making you wonder what our priorities are...)
The obvious solution to the software patents problem is to just reject them on principle. But here's another thought: How about speeing up the cycle on software patents, aprticularly Internet-related ones?
Standard patents last, what, 20 years? And it usually takes a year or two (sometimes longer) to get approved, by which time everyone has either moved on (if it's specific enough to be worth patenting) or it's become so widespread that it threatens to throw a wet banket over the entire Internet. (Think Eolas.)
Suppose we limit software patents to 3 years, max, with an approval time in months instead of years. (Assuming, of course, that we can find some way to pay for more reviewers to adequately process them within that timeframe and not just rubber-stamp them to fill a quota.)
That takes care of most of the patent-as-weapon problem, and the dredge-up-an-old-broad-patent business method. If someone wants to profit from a patent, they have to enforce it immediately, and it will generally be the people who actually did the work, not some holding company that bought out a bankrupt start-up's patent portfolio.
All that's left is finding a way to prevent them from being used as a weapon against open-source projects. Perhaps a cap on royalties paid by non-profits?
I stopped shopping at Amazon when they received the One-Click patent and switched exclusively to Barnes and Noble's online store for several years. After the dot-com crash, I decided that online-only stores needed all the help they could get, and switched back to Amazon.
And let's face it, Amazon.com has consistently been a big innovator in e-commerce. They developed, popularized, or combined a lot of techniques that have been widely imitated -- because they work.
But to see them going back to this patent nonsense... I'm seriously torn. On one hand I think it's insane, and I'd like to give my money to someone else, but on the other hand, Amazon's done a lot of good too -- and I have to wonder just what effect a boycott would have.
If these are the same people who worked on the show I heard about last year -- and Modesto tracks with that -- this show started out as a musical of the just original film.
Unfortunately the only title I can remember hearing is "Don't Cry For Me, Princess Leia."
Nah, the Enlightenment is too rational, too secular. No matter how many religious trappings there were in science at the time, it was still the Age of Reason. Kansas seems to want to turn back the clock to pre-Enlightenment thinking.
It's interesting that the debate has been cast this way. As far as I can tell, the only thing the ID camp objects to is evolution/abiogenesis. What other science are they battling?
You might find this essay interesting. In particular:
Intelligent Design is part of a calculated strategy that [founder] Johnson calls the "Wedge," referring to the tool used to split a solid object--in this case, the cornerstone of biological science. According to a document that appeared on the Discovery Institute's Web site in 1999, the goal of this plan is "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies."
That would have consequences in every realm of science except possibly pure mathematics. Physics and astronomy could be in serious trouble. Evolution itself has close ties with geology, though ID doesn't seem to have any issues with the timeframe. At least it's not the young-earth creationist crowd gaining power. It's astonishing how many people reject the big bang theory not on scientific bases, but on supposed inconsistencies with creationism. This despite the fact that the big bang is more compatible with creationism than, say, the steady-state model.
But it is dishonest in the extreme to claim that evolution has explained the origin of life when even Francis Crick gave up and threw in with the panspermia faction -- and if that's not faith I don't know what is.
It's also dishonest to claim that evolution even claims to explain the origin of life. It's never made such a claim. It only claims to explain the origin of species. It claims to explain how and why life changes from one form to another.
There are certainly theories about the origin of life, but Darwinian evolution doesn't come into play until after life has gotten started.
It's kind of like the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution explains how the United States has developed since it was founded, but it doesn't explain how or why we broke away from England.
Aggregating RSS feeds based on keywords is easy. Separating them into positive and negative comments, and separating useful feedback from random spouting off, is a lot harder, especially in software.
Slashdot Mirror
People have been condensing things like this for humor for years. Ophelia's last line: "Glub!" And remember the story about consensing the Lord's Prayer into a text message? (I think it had lines like "God, UR GR8")
So we take something that's been used for humor, and use it for Cliffs Notes instead. Big whoop. No one is going to think that the summaries are the original works. I mean, anyone who has taken a logic class has come up with "2B v ~2B"
Although it does remind me of the time in high school when we were reading Romeo and Juliet aloud in class. I read Mercutio's "Queen Mab" speech, got through the whole thing, then looked at the footnotes, and had the reaction, "I said what?!?!?" (From then on, I read the footnotes with the text, not afterward.)
The thing is, raw economic costs are never all of it. Given two resources, one finite and one renewable, even if it is more expensive to exploit the renewable resource, in the long term you'll be better off with it.
As far as mainstream science knows, fossil fuels are a finite resource. Oil and coal are going to become more scarce, and eventually there won't be enough to use. There's certainly disagreement on how much is left, but pretty much everyone agrees that reserves are finite and probably won't outlast the century.
But geologic hot spots aren't likely to change significantly within human life time, and in most cases we could follow them when they moved. We're not going to run out of sunlight anytime soon. And wind patterns are stable in some areas, though that's certainly subject to climate change.
To put it in economic terms, the finite resource is kind of like a loan, but the renewable resource is more like an investment. You take out the loan -- using fossil fuels to power the industrial revolution -- so you can make investments in something that will continue to bring in revenue when you've paid off the loan.
The issue with scaling and corrosion isn't that it'll escape and damage the environment -- it's that it'll damage the power plant itself. Most power plants work by burning something to heat water, vaporize it, and use the steam to turn a turbine. At least one form of geothermal power involves plugging pipes into the ground where magma is naturally heating water and vaporizing it. In other words, hot springs. But since it's ground water, it's full of minerals that can cause scaling in the pipes. And since it's ground water from a volcanic area, it's generally full of corrosive materials that, again, damage the pipes.
Whether geothermal energy is worth it depends entirely on the location. IIRC, Iceland does well with it.
How geologically active is Australia? Are there any places where hot springs and the like can be tapped on a large enough scale?
Consider the number of people who run like heck when they hear anything that sounds vaguely technical.
Now which sounds more technical: keywords or tags?
Sometimes the name is important.
"I think so, Brain, but if they called them 'Sad Meals,' kids wouldn't want them."
Sometimes it does. Or, more precisely, it'll say something like "This is the 2nd item in the XYZ series" under Product Details, and link to a series page. It's not quite a direct link to what's next, but it does tell you where it is in the sequence and direct you to a hub.
Q: How can you tell a blonde has been shopping on Amazon using your computer?
A: There's spray paint on the screen.
The term I usually use to describe The Register is "journalistic snark." I considered "equal-opportunity curmudgeon" at one point, but curmudgeonly doesn't convey the self-satisfied attitude that generally comes through in their articles.
Just last night I was saying one of our local papers -- also called The Register -- would be much more interesting if it were like this site...
Is there any software with functionality to make the average blog worth reading?
More importantly, does it work on the rest of the web too?
OK, it's early in the discussion (~25 posts right now), but all the top-level comments seem to fall into one of two groups:
1. Not another blog story!
2. Why didn't they write up my personal favorite?
Anyone have any thoughts on the three tools they actually reviewed?
The service or the software?
The services is mentioned early on in the list of hosted services. But the review is of software someone might use for a self-hosted blog, and it seems to me that creating an LJ clone* to power a single person's journal is kind of overkill.
*I'll admit I have no idea what it takes to install the LJ server software. For all I know it could be a 5-minutes install like WordPress, or it might take three days.
My wife and I have been re-watching Babylon 5 with some friends who hadn't seen it before. Sometimes it's hard to remember that it first hit the air 12 years ago. As primitive as the CGI effects are by today's standards, you get used to it after a while. But one look at some of the guest stars' and extras' hairstyles and you instantly know this isn't a current show. I even picked up the first script book, and the commentary in the introductions really drives the point home.
When they launched, the television landscape was vastly different from what we have today. It took them years to get a green light because networks were convinced there was no market for TV sci-fi that wasn't Star Trek, and there was already a Star Trek show on TV. There were still plenty of independent stations that aired mainly shows in syndication, either first-run or second-run. There was no UPN or WB. Cable was something you got for movies, or maybe CNN. Satellite dishes were 6 feet across and prohibitively expensive. The idea of downloading TV off the Internet was ridiculous, although you could see it coming when MP3s hit late in the show's run. Even DVDs were new when the series wrapped up in 1998.
So while it doesn't seem that old when considered within the larger span of TV history, a lot has changed. And to really put those 12 years in perspective, the stereotypical 14-year-old Internet geek (and the stereotypical 14-year-old LiveJournal goth) were only 2 when the show started.
People just aren't willing to spend money purely in the name of Science. There needs to be a concrete reason for it.
Yeah. It's kind of funny how there's all this really interesting science you can get from exposures in various wavelengths of lights, spectroscopy, etc, but when it comes down to it, all the average person sees -- or wants to see, for that matter -- are the pretty pictures.
Not that I have anything against pretty pictures -- I've got the Astronomy Picture of the Day on my daily rotation -- but as much as they appeal to our sense of awe, they get hard to justify when you start looking at the expenditure. (Then some studio spends $250 million making a summer movie, making you wonder what our priorities are...)
It's just so nice to see a media corporation recognize that legit uses of peer-to-peer exist. The fact that they're actually using it is even better.
The obvious solution to the software patents problem is to just reject them on principle. But here's another thought: How about speeing up the cycle on software patents, aprticularly Internet-related ones?
Standard patents last, what, 20 years? And it usually takes a year or two (sometimes longer) to get approved, by which time everyone has either moved on (if it's specific enough to be worth patenting) or it's become so widespread that it threatens to throw a wet banket over the entire Internet. (Think Eolas.)
Suppose we limit software patents to 3 years, max, with an approval time in months instead of years. (Assuming, of course, that we can find some way to pay for more reviewers to adequately process them within that timeframe and not just rubber-stamp them to fill a quota.)
That takes care of most of the patent-as-weapon problem, and the dredge-up-an-old-broad-patent business method. If someone wants to profit from a patent, they have to enforce it immediately, and it will generally be the people who actually did the work, not some holding company that bought out a bankrupt start-up's patent portfolio.
All that's left is finding a way to prevent them from being used as a weapon against open-source projects. Perhaps a cap on royalties paid by non-profits?
Just some thoughts.
I stopped shopping at Amazon when they received the One-Click patent and switched exclusively to Barnes and Noble's online store for several years. After the dot-com crash, I decided that online-only stores needed all the help they could get, and switched back to Amazon.
And let's face it, Amazon.com has consistently been a big innovator in e-commerce. They developed, popularized, or combined a lot of techniques that have been widely imitated -- because they work.
But to see them going back to this patent nonsense... I'm seriously torn. On one hand I think it's insane, and I'd like to give my money to someone else, but on the other hand, Amazon's done a lot of good too -- and I have to wonder just what effect a boycott would have.
Or better yet, the string tribute to Nine Inch Nails.
Seriously, WTF?
"Hello, my baby!
Hello, my honey!
Hello my ragtime gaaaal!"
OK, it wasn't a stormtrooper, but still...
If these are the same people who worked on the show I heard about last year -- and Modesto tracks with that -- this show started out as a musical of the just original film.
Unfortunately the only title I can remember hearing is "Don't Cry For Me, Princess Leia."
Nah, the Enlightenment is too rational, too secular. No matter how many religious trappings there were in science at the time, it was still the Age of Reason. Kansas seems to want to turn back the clock to pre-Enlightenment thinking.
to allow yourself to get to the stage where you're a whole hour out of synchronisation with the Sun seems to be mad.
And yet we do so 6 months out of the year, and starting in 2007 we'll do it for even longer.
Seriously, though, at least when we switch to daylight saving time (or summer time as they call it across the pond) the offset is easy to account for.
You might find this essay interesting. In particular:
That would have consequences in every realm of science except possibly pure mathematics. Physics and astronomy could be in serious trouble. Evolution itself has close ties with geology, though ID doesn't seem to have any issues with the timeframe. At least it's not the young-earth creationist crowd gaining power. It's astonishing how many people reject the big bang theory not on scientific bases, but on supposed inconsistencies with creationism. This despite the fact that the big bang is more compatible with creationism than, say, the steady-state model.
But it is dishonest in the extreme to claim that evolution has explained the origin of life when even Francis Crick gave up and threw in with the panspermia faction -- and if that's not faith I don't know what is.
It's also dishonest to claim that evolution even claims to explain the origin of life. It's never made such a claim. It only claims to explain the origin of species. It claims to explain how and why life changes from one form to another.
There are certainly theories about the origin of life, but Darwinian evolution doesn't come into play until after life has gotten started.
It's kind of like the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution explains how the United States has developed since it was founded, but it doesn't explain how or why we broke away from England.
You know, as soon as I hit "submit" I knew, just knew it was only a matter of time before someone said that!
Umm... because they're analyzing it?
Aggregating RSS feeds based on keywords is easy. Separating them into positive and negative comments, and separating useful feedback from random spouting off, is a lot harder, especially in software.