Look at your numbers. You're talking about climate changes taking place over 10,000 to 100,000 years. The current climate changes are theorized to take place over a few hundred years.
Let's do a little thought experiment. Say that the current climate change takes place over 250 years. That's 50 times faster than for the smallest timespan you cited.
Now get in your car. Drive 1mph into a concrete barrier. (Hope you didn't damage your bumper.)
Okay, now drive 50mph into that concrete barrier. When you get out of the hospital (IF you get out of the hospital) let's talk a little about the difference between gradual climate change and rapid climate change.
I'm looking for a product just like this -- an MP3 player with its own hard drive, so I don't need to have my power-hungry computer running. Ideally, it would also stream like the Squeezebox (and really ideally it would stream AAC-plus).
I haven't seen such a product. This one comes fairly close, but lacks many essential features. The Blackbird seems to be the best option currently, but at $500 I feel like I might as well buy a Mac Mini and write my own controller software.
If anyone has a good overview of this sort of product, I'd sure like to see it!
You brought up this example of how the media gives undue credence to fringe positions, and as far as I can see have brought (in the course of half a dozen posts) exactly one piece of corroboration, a link to a (pretty visibly) right-wing blog which had to have its initial numbers corrected by a commenter.
At the very least, you have to admit this isn't a case of the media amplifying a fringe position in the name of balance. Because if it is, I have my own ideas about whose position is on the fringe.
I might use eMusic if they upped their bitrate, which they apparently plan to do. In the meantime, I refuse to listen to 128k MP3s, much less buy them.
SFMOMA currently has an exhibit with a heavy emphasis on computers. But I think it's instructive -- very few of the pieces could ever be construed as "graphic design." Without seeing the show in question, it's hard to say whether it was unfairly painted or whether it really was graphic design masquerading as art. But I think you're going to be fighting an uphill battle if your computer-generated art isn't some sort of statement about technology itself. Using a digital canvas just isn't very thought provoking in itself.
If you make Google your home page, just highlight the term, press Ctrl+N, paste in the search box, and hit enter. In Opera under Linux (fast new window creation, 2 button copy and paste) this process takes about 2 seconds.
There are any number of ways this functionality could be achieved with equal convenience to the user. I personally like the idea of "Google search" or even an XML-determined list of links, popping up upon right-clicking on a word. Microsoft's strategy is (IMO) a typically heavy-handed attempt to wrest control from page creators. If you don't think Microsoft will start selling spots in their default listings, I think you're seriously deluded.
Who's going to provide the Smart Tag parser for this tough, technical document? If it's really all that tough and technical, the best (often the only) candidate is the person who wrote the document.
So basically, it's more effective for the document author to provide a Smart Tag parser for the user to download and install, than it is to simply put the links in the document in the first place?
The cord should have some sort of self-destruct feature. The real threat is the top of the cord -- it's more massive, higher in the gravity well, and is constantly pulled planetward by cord below it. By cutting the cord, you ensure the top will strike later and more softly. The bottom, of course, will strike sooner and harder, but that's an easy trade-off. Cutting into many pieces would also spread out the impact time, turning a single cataclysm into a sustained round of heavy abuse. And since the cuts would be planned, most of the falling objects will have a predetermined size and mass, and a somewhat predictable impact profile. With good enough simulation, much of the cord might be cut into pieces such that they fall in "safe" areas.
The top would probably still be bad news, though. I think the best strategy would be to cut off the biggest possible piece from the top and tow it back into orbit, and chop the bottom into the smallest practical pieces and get away from the impact path.
An example popular with the greens is environmental dumping; for slashdot, the example is spam. Both impose huge costs on everybody for small benefit to a few individuals.
That is a brilliant example! The next time I hear a techno-libertarian wax poetic about the unalloyed good that is capitalism, I'll be sure to ask about spam.
Remember, we're not the biggest polluters to inhabit Earth--that honor belongs to early photosynthetic bacteria that "polluted" the air with oxygen. That turned out real bad, didn't it?:-)
Yes, they polluted themselves and most of the other life on the planet into extinction.
Obviously people can't destroy the planet. Even leaving a single population of bacteria alive will virtually guarantee another rich ecosystem in a few hundred million years. But we can destroy ourselves, and that's what I care about.
I believe that UV levels recorded in southern Chile over the past few decades, along with the fact that it has for centuries been populated by fair-skinned people who are now having trouble handling the UV exposure, is quite good evidence that the ozone hole is either a new or a newly-enlarged phenomenon.
Also, I'm curious about what your NASA scientist actually thinks about the ozone hole, now that he and the rest of the world have spent twice as long looking at it.
Slashdot has always been heavily libertarian. Or maybe they're just louder. I suspect a bit of both. What I still haven't grokked is how the prevailing philosophy can be simultaneously libertarian and anti-corporate. "These corporations are evil and constantly abuse us, but the most important thing in the world is that we allow them to continue unmolested!"
ValueJet and Alaska Air both pleased people by increasing the likelihood that they would die. Jet passengers are not mechanics, and are not privy to maintenance histories or cargo manifestos. Until you can offer a way for the free market to address these kinds of situations (apart from hoping the companies lose business after they kill people, which demonstrably does not happen) I will remain extremely skeptical of the "corporations will line up with our interests" dogma.
I think Carr's preface is specifically to address this. People have lost the ability or motivation to integrate knowledge into understanding. They believe ridiculous crap even when the disclaimers are in plain sight. If there's a valid argument against his solution, it's that we should work on helping people think rather than coping with their inability to do so.
look at Japan. The most violent anime, twisted porn, and violent video games. Yet a low crime rate.
The thing is, I really don't think I'd call Japanese culture "healthy." To me it seems like the violent Japanese media doesn't spark wild behavior because the conformist and repressive Japanese culture overpowers it.
I think the worst is Jessica, who looks all dowdy and motherly, with no grace or self-control at all. Actually, that goes for almost everybody -- the characters look and act like mall-going, bar-hopping, SUV-driving "just folks" rather than highly trained and disciplined people who regularly rely on their wits and cunning to survive.
And the desert shots were just painful. It's distracting to me when the lighting in the painting on the screen five feet behind the characters is completely different from that on the characters faces, or there's a clear horizontal demarcation between two completely different colors of sand. My favorite shot was at night, a blue cast on everything -- except the dunes behind the characters, which looked like they were still in daylight.
This show really makes me wish I were a dot-com billionaire; then I could afford to have a good version of this thing made.
How are you going to get a Jeep into those tunnels? How are you going to deal with the heavily armed humans who recognize you on sight?
Skynet had airships for the surface. And kick-ass airships they were. But to root out the humans it had to get into their hideouts.
Agree, though, that any AI would rather be in space. I read a great story by David Brin once, in which monstrous AIs lived in orbit and had a bunch of clever technologies to keep themselves at superconducting temperatures. IIRC, they'd yoked humanity into economic slavery by being basically much smarter than people, which I find a much more plausible and frightening scenario than the Terminator.
will be their maneuverability. A computer that can not only take a 10g turn, but retain full combat effectiveness while doing so, is going to have an enormous advantage over a human pilot.
If Qt is as portable as they claim (and the number of variants indicates) the best solution wouldn't be Qt/Embedded, but another Qt wrapped around something lighter than X, but more powerful than embedded. Qt/Berlin?
The difference is, Star Wars never pretended to be "real" -- it was myth, plain and simple. When you're telling a story about real times and places, there's an expected continuity. Everything is taking place in *this* universe, where NBC is a tv network, New York is a city, and g is 9.8 m/s^2. Could you watch The Godfather if they were all Hungarian Jews? Why is it that historical fiction is meticulously researched down to the kind of gut in the violins, but science fiction so routinely and thoroughly brutalizes everything scientific?
What gets me is the stuff that's so simple to get right, and they just don't bother. Is it really so hard to look up "nematode" or "DNA?"
Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it) this rarely dooms otherwise-good movies -- it usually goes hand in hand with bad characters, bad dialog, and the general badness that seems to permeate most science fiction.
Quite frankly, if you aren't capable of reading simple instructions and following an arrow to the right hole, and if you won't ask for help if you're confused, then you deserver what you get.
Quite frankly, if you can't spell deserve and won't consult a spell-checker, you deserve to be ridiculed.
Once again, I'm amazed at the number of posts riddled with errors (not to mention the number of times in this thread I've seen the words "Hit the post button by accident") which insist that only stupid people make mistakes.
(PS. I fixed a simple mistake in my own post after previewing. Good thing it wasn't a ballot!)
I think that this anecdote only solidifies the senile stereotype of Floridians.
It's the "stereotype of senile Floridians" -- if "Floridians" is even a word, which I doubt. Why don't you learn the fucking language before ranting about how stupid other people are?
Sorry, but the spectre of Slashdot posters dissing old people whose bodies and minds have dulled over the years, while simultaneously demonstrating such carelessness and/or ignorance despite being (for the most part) in the flush of their own abilities, is pretty sickening.
These blind old fogies should take a little time and READ before they sign something (or in this case, punch a whole).
Why don't you take a little time and READ before you submit your posts? Christ, are you really so fucking stupid that you can't tell the difference between a whole and a hole???
I just find it funny that so many of the posts calling the Palm Beach voters stupid and careless have such obvious spelling and grammar mistakes.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at your numbers. You're talking about climate changes taking place over 10,000 to 100,000 years. The current climate changes are theorized to take place over a few hundred years.
Let's do a little thought experiment. Say that the current climate change takes place over 250 years. That's 50 times faster than for the smallest timespan you cited.
Now get in your car. Drive 1mph into a concrete barrier. (Hope you didn't damage your bumper.)
Okay, now drive 50mph into that concrete barrier. When you get out of the hospital (IF you get out of the hospital) let's talk a little about the difference between gradual climate change and rapid climate change.
I'm looking for a product just like this -- an MP3 player with its own hard drive, so I don't need to have my power-hungry computer running. Ideally, it would also stream like the Squeezebox (and really ideally it would stream AAC-plus).
I haven't seen such a product. This one comes fairly close, but lacks many essential features. The Blackbird seems to be the best option currently, but at $500 I feel like I might as well buy a Mac Mini and write my own controller software.
If anyone has a good overview of this sort of product, I'd sure like to see it!
You brought up this example of how the media gives undue credence to fringe positions, and as far as I can see have brought (in the course of half a dozen posts) exactly one piece of corroboration, a link to a (pretty visibly) right-wing blog which had to have its initial numbers corrected by a commenter.
At the very least, you have to admit this isn't a case of the media amplifying a fringe position in the name of balance. Because if it is, I have my own ideas about whose position is on the fringe.
I might use eMusic if they upped their bitrate, which they apparently plan to do. In the meantime, I refuse to listen to 128k MP3s, much less buy them.
Also, I found eMusic's selection pretty limited.
Cool, thanks for the heads-up.
I'm only using 0.5, but it's still way slower that Moz on Windows, or Opera on FreeBSD.
SFMOMA currently has an exhibit with a heavy emphasis on computers. But I think it's instructive -- very few of the pieces could ever be construed as "graphic design." Without seeing the show in question, it's hard to say whether it was unfairly painted or whether it really was graphic design masquerading as art. But I think you're going to be fighting an uphill battle if your computer-generated art isn't some sort of statement about technology itself. Using a digital canvas just isn't very thought provoking in itself.
If you make Google your home page, just highlight the term, press Ctrl+N, paste in the search box, and hit enter. In Opera under Linux (fast new window creation, 2 button copy and paste) this process takes about 2 seconds.
There are any number of ways this functionality could be achieved with equal convenience to the user. I personally like the idea of "Google search" or even an XML-determined list of links, popping up upon right-clicking on a word. Microsoft's strategy is (IMO) a typically heavy-handed attempt to wrest control from page creators. If you don't think Microsoft will start selling spots in their default listings, I think you're seriously deluded.
Who's going to provide the Smart Tag parser for this tough, technical document? If it's really all that tough and technical, the best (often the only) candidate is the person who wrote the document.
So basically, it's more effective for the document author to provide a Smart Tag parser for the user to download and install, than it is to simply put the links in the document in the first place?
The cord should have some sort of self-destruct feature. The real threat is the top of the cord -- it's more massive, higher in the gravity well, and is constantly pulled planetward by cord below it. By cutting the cord, you ensure the top will strike later and more softly. The bottom, of course, will strike sooner and harder, but that's an easy trade-off. Cutting into many pieces would also spread out the impact time, turning a single cataclysm into a sustained round of heavy abuse. And since the cuts would be planned, most of the falling objects will have a predetermined size and mass, and a somewhat predictable impact profile. With good enough simulation, much of the cord might be cut into pieces such that they fall in "safe" areas.
The top would probably still be bad news, though. I think the best strategy would be to cut off the biggest possible piece from the top and tow it back into orbit, and chop the bottom into the smallest practical pieces and get away from the impact path.
An example popular with the greens is environmental dumping; for slashdot, the example is spam. Both impose huge costs on everybody for small benefit to a few individuals.
That is a brilliant example! The next time I hear a techno-libertarian wax poetic about the unalloyed good that is capitalism, I'll be sure to ask about spam.
Remember, we're not the biggest polluters to inhabit Earth--that honor belongs to early photosynthetic bacteria that "polluted" the air with oxygen. That turned out real bad, didn't it? :-)
Yes, they polluted themselves and most of the other life on the planet into extinction.
Obviously people can't destroy the planet. Even leaving a single population of bacteria alive will virtually guarantee another rich ecosystem in a few hundred million years. But we can destroy ourselves, and that's what I care about.
I believe that UV levels recorded in southern Chile over the past few decades, along with the fact that it has for centuries been populated by fair-skinned people who are now having trouble handling the UV exposure, is quite good evidence that the ozone hole is either a new or a newly-enlarged phenomenon.
Also, I'm curious about what your NASA scientist actually thinks about the ozone hole, now that he and the rest of the world have spent twice as long looking at it.
Slashdot has always been heavily libertarian. Or maybe they're just louder. I suspect a bit of both. What I still haven't grokked is how the prevailing philosophy can be simultaneously libertarian and anti-corporate. "These corporations are evil and constantly abuse us, but the most important thing in the world is that we allow them to continue unmolested!"
ValueJet and Alaska Air both pleased people by increasing the likelihood that they would die. Jet passengers are not mechanics, and are not privy to maintenance histories or cargo manifestos. Until you can offer a way for the free market to address these kinds of situations (apart from hoping the companies lose business after they kill people, which demonstrably does not happen) I will remain extremely skeptical of the "corporations will line up with our interests" dogma.
I think Carr's preface is specifically to address this. People have lost the ability or motivation to integrate knowledge into understanding. They believe ridiculous crap even when the disclaimers are in plain sight. If there's a valid argument against his solution, it's that we should work on helping people think rather than coping with their inability to do so.
look at Japan. The most violent anime, twisted porn, and violent video games. Yet a low crime rate.
The thing is, I really don't think I'd call Japanese culture "healthy." To me it seems like the violent Japanese media doesn't spark wild behavior because the conformist and repressive Japanese culture overpowers it.
I think the worst is Jessica, who looks all dowdy and motherly, with no grace or self-control at all. Actually, that goes for almost everybody -- the characters look and act like mall-going, bar-hopping, SUV-driving "just folks" rather than highly trained and disciplined people who regularly rely on their wits and cunning to survive.
And the desert shots were just painful. It's distracting to me when the lighting in the painting on the screen five feet behind the characters is completely different from that on the characters faces, or there's a clear horizontal demarcation between two completely different colors of sand. My favorite shot was at night, a blue cast on everything -- except the dunes behind the characters, which looked like they were still in daylight.
This show really makes me wish I were a dot-com billionaire; then I could afford to have a good version of this thing made.
is Paraguay (.py) of course. Stinkin' Perl weenies...
How are you going to get a Jeep into those tunnels? How are you going to deal with the heavily armed humans who recognize you on sight?
Skynet had airships for the surface. And kick-ass airships they were. But to root out the humans it had to get into their hideouts.
Agree, though, that any AI would rather be in space. I read a great story by David Brin once, in which monstrous AIs lived in orbit and had a bunch of clever technologies to keep themselves at superconducting temperatures. IIRC, they'd yoked humanity into economic slavery by being basically much smarter than people, which I find a much more plausible and frightening scenario than the Terminator.
will be their maneuverability. A computer that can not only take a 10g turn, but retain full combat effectiveness while doing so, is going to have an enormous advantage over a human pilot.
If Qt is as portable as they claim (and the number of variants indicates) the best solution wouldn't be Qt/Embedded, but another Qt wrapped around something lighter than X, but more powerful than embedded. Qt/Berlin?
The difference is, Star Wars never pretended to be "real" -- it was myth, plain and simple. When you're telling a story about real times and places, there's an expected continuity. Everything is taking place in *this* universe, where NBC is a tv network, New York is a city, and g is 9.8 m/s^2. Could you watch The Godfather if they were all Hungarian Jews? Why is it that historical fiction is meticulously researched down to the kind of gut in the violins, but science fiction so routinely and thoroughly brutalizes everything scientific?
What gets me is the stuff that's so simple to get right, and they just don't bother. Is it really so hard to look up "nematode" or "DNA?"
Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it) this rarely dooms otherwise-good movies -- it usually goes hand in hand with bad characters, bad dialog, and the general badness that seems to permeate most science fiction.
Quite frankly, if you aren't capable of reading simple instructions and following an arrow to the right hole, and if you won't ask for help if you're confused, then you deserver what you get.
Quite frankly, if you can't spell deserve and won't consult a spell-checker, you deserve to be ridiculed.
Once again, I'm amazed at the number of posts riddled with errors (not to mention the number of times in this thread I've seen the words "Hit the post button by accident") which insist that only stupid people make mistakes.
(PS. I fixed a simple mistake in my own post after previewing. Good thing it wasn't a ballot!)
I think that this anecdote only solidifies the senile stereotype of Floridians.
It's the "stereotype of senile Floridians" -- if "Floridians" is even a word, which I doubt. Why don't you learn the fucking language before ranting about how stupid other people are?
Sorry, but the spectre of Slashdot posters dissing old people whose bodies and minds have dulled over the years, while simultaneously demonstrating such carelessness and/or ignorance despite being (for the most part) in the flush of their own abilities, is pretty sickening.
These blind old fogies should take a little time and READ before they sign something (or in this case, punch a whole).
Why don't you take a little time and READ before you submit your posts? Christ, are you really so fucking stupid that you can't tell the difference between a whole and a hole???
I just find it funny that so many of the posts calling the Palm Beach voters stupid and careless have such obvious spelling and grammar mistakes.