Saying it's probably just a strange/rare coincidence, without any evidence what it was or wasn't, is just as loony as the nut job conspiracy theories... In other words, this article is a whole lot of nothing, while Wired tries to fill page space.
It's true none of the proposed conspiracy theories pan out, but that's pretty much just par for the course. But hey, at least they're trying. Dismissing it all as "coincidence" is about the same as saying it's a nondescript "conspiracy".
It might as well be possible that there's (*gasp*) something we don't know about the ocean environment that is occurring to cause this, rather than it just being a statistical anomaly.
And that's the point. 100 years ago. This isn't 1908.
No, that's not the point. What magical thing happened in the past century that was supposed to make the whole world a shiny happy place?
What makes you think that, because things have progressed in the west, they would or should in the east at the same time, or otherwise about as fast?
There's always a more liberal country somewhere... Wherever you happen to live, I'm sure there's PLENTY of laws that others find unjust, primitive, or otherwise outmoded by several decades.
Every one of the major religions requires that you believe things that the available evidence indicates are false.
You proved there is no God? Good job. I look forward to reading your findings in a few peer-reviewed journals...
It is also usually pointless to argue with a person of faith because they have by definition already eschewed logic.
It's great how atheists are convinced everyone who believes something different from them must be wrong and irrational to disagree. Gee, that sounds somehow familiar...
If you'd care to prove that every religion is wrong... get started. Facts only, try to avoid the all too common mischaracterizations. Otherwise, quite trying to pretend that what you are right, and what you believe is the only rational thing to believe. There'd be a huge outcry if people of any particular religion did it, but when atheists do it, nothing.
Granted there's now a copy of you running around but that's all it is, a copy. It isn't you.
What are we, if not our collection of memories? If there's a perfectly identical copy of you, how is it NOT you. What is this intangible property of yours that makes one "you", and one the "copy"?
The current projected price for an LA to SF conventional high-speed train is on the order of $30billion. That's for 500 miles and only going through the fairly small mountains around San Francisco.
I think you need to touch up on your geography.
Have you heard of Big Bear? Wrightwood? Arrowhead? Any of the other famous peaks in the San Bernardino mountain range? How do you plan to go north from LA without getting over those?
Ever heard of the Cajon Pass? Hint: It's where nearly EVERY US train derailment has occurred in the past several decades. It's the steepest and most treacherous stretch of train tracks in the country, and THAT is how EVERY northbound train gets out of L.A.
In fact there's a plan for a maglev to Las Vegas which ends just north of the San Bernardino mountains, instead of going all the way to L.A., specifically because of the difficulty and massive expense of constructing a new route through the area.
NY-LA is 5x as long, and has the freaking Rocky Mountains in the way.
If you head south-west from L.A., you can take the route around the southern tip, and avoid the Rocky Mountains entirely. It's not even a very long detour, as L.A. is so far south already.
Maglev could support a very large number of passengers per year, but its also very expensive, so it needs those passengers. To get so many passengers, you can't cater primarily to travellers, you need to cater to commuters, who will only start appearing if the travel time is less than one hour or something like that.
There are a tiny number of commuter flights running, around the country now. They aren't popular, and a maglev would be worse. Cross-country flights, however, are quite popular.
Commuter trains are already a messy proposition, because there's a huge surge of traffic at the start and end of the day, and very, very little traffic the rest of the time. Such uneven utilization is horrible for both return on investment, and equipment/infrastructure utilization. Travels are only too happy to leave at just about any time, around the clock, provided they get a discounted ticket out of it. No such balancing of traffic is possible with daily commuters.
Commuters expect very low prices. If the round trip is expensive, people either stick with a slightly lower paying job, or pick up and move to the new area. A maglev would need to have rather high ticket prices to make up the construction, development, and operational costs... More so than an airline. Travelers wouldn't mind paying high prices for just occasional trips, particularly if it means they can be more comfortable, and get to their destination in less time.
It would appear, on the basis of available evidence, that the Slashdot consensus doesn't give two bits about IP rights as applied to software, but thinks they are really, really important when applied to the distinctive branding on cardboard boxes.
It's not the cardboard, it's the fraud... It's tricking people into buying an illegal copy, when they think they're getting the real thing.
Many on/. don't see a problem with private, home (or educational) copyright infringement, but care very much about actual theft, as in depriving the copyright holder of legitimate sales.
This isn't exactly an inconsistent stance. There are a great many pieces of software that are offered (by the copyright holder) for non-profit home or educational use free of charge. It's also probably fair to say that this is mostly because commercial, for-profit use of copyrighted software makes up the significant majority of software sales anyhow, so it's not a big concession to make.
Like the previous deals on nuclear power, this is an attempt to bribe India away from getting too friendly with China and Iran, and buying U.S. arms instead of Russian.
China and India are likely to be very serious rivals, rather than friends. Both have huge populations, and are developing countries trying to break into high-tech. Being right next to each hurts rather than helps.
Iran seems an extremely unlikely partner as well. India is an open democracy, with a far freer society, and are not predominately Muslim. I also don't see much that Iran could offer India to begin with, as India is technologically much further along.
Russia... Maybe... Though India has much stronger economic ties with the English speaking western world than it does with Russia. Are Indian car makers trying to buy the Range Rover and Jaguar brands so that they can sell such branded vehicles to Russia? China? Iran? Not likely.
the concept of human dignity does not apply to a one month old blob in a human woman, whose human dignity in turn is imperiled by those who consider the blob inside her the equal of a full human child
If 1 month doesn't count... at what point does it? A month after birth (some cultures believe this)? How about just a 1 day grace period after birth to kill off an unwanted baby? If not, how about 1 day before? A week before? A month? 2? 3?
Personally, I have to admire those who oppose abortion entirely, because their beliefs are, at least, self-consistent.
The main problem I see with abortion supporters, is that they seem to want it both ways... A mother can abort her child whenever she wants to, BUT if someone assaults a mother and causes a miscarriage, everyone wants the guy behind bars, forever. It's completely hypocritical.
By all means, set a date. Tell us all exactly how many days old a fetus can be before killing it is murder, and before that time, it doesn't matter any more than a bloody nose.
My other issue is the fact that fathers have absolutely no say about whether the prospective mother does or doesn't have an abortion of their child. Setting the above date should largely resolve that, as the father can covertly do whatever he wants to cause the mother to abort the fetus, and face only misdemeanor charges, while neither is allowed to do anything after the cut-off date.
Since when does "changing" equate to "rewriting history"?
Yes, several hundred years ago, the Catholic Church would happily torture and kill people, in an attempt to save their souls. I suggest you look at any other organization from that time period, and try to claim they have a better record.
In modern history, however, the Church has disavowed such practices. They have never denied what happened.
we (America) should have offered to pay 80% of the ticket costs for domestic traveled, and then dropped it monthly (60-40-20-0). It actually would have been much cheaper
No, it would have resulted in the airlines raising their ticket prices by 80%, and then lowering them by 20% monthly...
Money is money, whatever the awkward scheme you use to give it.
It's not 1.5V, it's not in some standard device size, and not sold over the counter at retail stores. That is sold specifically for experts and smaller companies designing and making their own battery packs. You can't use it in ANYTHING in it's current form.
If you look hard enough, you can find all manner of dangerous things online that are not for, and would NEVER be sold to average consumers.
"Lithium" and "Lithium Ion" are completely and totally different things. Note those "Lithium" batteries are disposable, and NOT rechargeable.
Re:Honest question
on
Hacking Asus EEE
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I would love to see (and willing to pay extra) if for starters standardization appears for laptop batteries and power bricks.
What isn't standardized about batteries and power bricks?
I've got 3 power bricks from different laptops, and they're all almost identical (+/- 1V DC) and power my current laptops just fine. There are a few manufacturers that insist on funky connectors from time to time, but clearly you're happily buying from them despite this, so it must not matter to you as much as you say it does, otherwise you'd only buy the standard units.
Why do I have AAA / AA / C / D cells for my transistor radios and flashlights, but not the same thing for my laptop.
You might notice that you DON'T have Li-Ion AAA/AA/C/D cells... They're too tricky to just have loose cells, and hope users don't do anything stupid with them.
And laptops batteries ARE pretty well standardized, too, though not like you are thinking... If you crack open the casing on two different laptop batteries, you'll see that, though they may be in a different arrangement, and possibly a different number of them, the cells are both physically and electronically identical (give or take a few mAHs depending on age). You can't just swap batteries between laptops, as form factors differ, but if you could, you'd find that feature to be less than desirable, anyhow. It does allow, however, for numerous 3rd parties to compete easily for sales of OEM and after-market batteries, cheaply.
Re:Honest question
on
Hacking Asus EEE
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Why do laptops not have any kind of universal form factor similar to desktops? Is it because of the varying shapes and sizes of the cases?
Laptops are largely standardized. You can swap RAM, miniPCI devices (usually for graphics) WiFi, modems, keyboards, PSUs, etc.
As for motherboards... desktops really aren't standardized either. It's just that ATX is so large to begin with that making cases a few inches larger than an ATX motherboard (...is supposed to be) is hardly noticed, so cases are significantly oversized in both depth and width to ensure every motherboard out there will fit... and nobody cares. With laptops, size is a big selling point, so there's no room for several inches of such a fudge-factor.
When prices on the tech go down much further, so that top of the line motherboards can be made extremely tiny (say, 4" diameter) at only nominal expense over larger boards, you'll see laptops standardized just like desktops were, when the technology advanced to the point where ATX was more than big enough for everybody.
It was competing against the NES, while having infinitely better graphics.
It was the first home gaming system to have controls that weren't incredibly clunky... With most NES games you really had to be heavy handed on the controller, and forget any fine manipulation. (Frankly, I'm amazed how well they did with SMB3--the only real exception).
An absolutely amazing life-span... The "power base converter" for the Genesis allowed you to play SMS games. The Game Gear was really just a portable SMS system. A SMS/GG converter was available as well... The ease of cross-porting SMS and Game Gear games, combined with the large entrenched SMS market in Brazil, meant that games continued to be produced for the SMS for decades. Sonic 1/2/Chaos/3DBlast, Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, etc. etc. Lots of quite "modern" games were available (and playable) on the very old SMS system.
You really can't compare the SMS and NES... NES had more in common with older game systems like Atari than it did with SMS. Meanwhile, the SMS had a tremendous amount in common with later systems like the Genesis.
For magazines, those ads are usually full page and very easy to recognize and skip without reading.
For ad skipping readers, magazines make paid ads look like just another product-review article, that just happens to turn into a glowing endorsement. See "Popular Mechanics"
You proved my point perfectly, a 27" has the same pixels as a 60", so the pixels are smaller and thus less perceptible.
If you sit the exact same distance from your 27" TV as you do from your 60" TV, the pixels will be smaller. However, Smaller != "Less Perceptible".
You might also notice that there is no clarity difference on any computer monitor when you go from 640x480 to 1920x1024 or whatever resolution of choice.
Well, you might be legally blind... OR you might notice there is a huge clarity difference.
The picture just appears smaller the higher up you go with resolution,
No. You can quite easily change the size of fonts and images on the screen, so that there is no size difference even between vastly different resolutions.
You can achieve the same clarity with SD resolutions by changing your encoding format which is pretty much exactly what they are doing with Blue-ray
I happen to be an expert on digital video, yet this sentence is utter gibberish to me.
they also bumped the resolution to make it look better on larger screens which are getting more common.
They bumped the resolution to make it look much better on higher resolution screens... screens of ANY size.
Currently 1920x1080 BluRay movies reencoded to x264 are about 4GB,
A significant percentage of BluRay discs are already encoded with the AVC/h.264 video codec, which is exactly what x264 is. You don't get any benefits from reencoding it, unlike the situation with Divx (MPEG-4 ASP) and DVDs.
With lossless codecs, file size is something you chose before you start encoding. It is NOT a byproduct, and NOT proof of anything. You can set a ridiculously low bitrate, and fit several minutes of 1080p video on a floppy if you want... it'll just look absolutely horrible, because of the low bitrate. This is what happens with low-bitrate reencodes, you get a much smaller file, but you're getting much less visual detail out of it.
Torrents of 1080p movies happen to be approx. 4.5GBs, because that's how much will fit on a cheap, single-layer DVD-R, so that's the file size most everyone prefers. If dual-layer blanks get cheaper, you'll see more 9GB torrents.
TV. Unless you have a 60" or bigger TV you will simply not notice an improvement.
That's completely idiot. A 27" HDTV has just as many pixels on the screen as a 60" HDTV.
Saying a person can't tell the difference between highdef and SD is about the same as saying nobody can see the difference between a 640x480 computer monitor, and a 1920x1024 monitor, unless it's bigger than 60"...
The joke has gotten old and very worn out... Let's try fixing it:
From Beta to MiniDisc to Memory Stick to 3.5-inch floppy disks, to Video8/Hi-8, to Compact Discs, to DAT, to miniDV, to S/PDIF, to DVDs , Sony never successfully pushes a format
There, that's much better... Now you look like an idiot to EVERYONE, not just a few of us that know better.
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Of course all of those arguments have numerous, perfectly sound counter-arguments or explanations.
I couldn't agree more.
Saying it's probably just a strange/rare coincidence, without any evidence what it was or wasn't, is just as loony as the nut job conspiracy theories... In other words, this article is a whole lot of nothing, while Wired tries to fill page space.
It's true none of the proposed conspiracy theories pan out, but that's pretty much just par for the course. But hey, at least they're trying. Dismissing it all as "coincidence" is about the same as saying it's a nondescript "conspiracy".
It might as well be possible that there's (*gasp*) something we don't know about the ocean environment that is occurring to cause this, rather than it just being a statistical anomaly.
No, that's not the point. What magical thing happened in the past century that was supposed to make the whole world a shiny happy place?
What makes you think that, because things have progressed in the west, they would or should in the east at the same time, or otherwise about as fast?
There's always a more liberal country somewhere... Wherever you happen to live, I'm sure there's PLENTY of laws that others find unjust, primitive, or otherwise outmoded by several decades.
As opposed to, say, Christians, who would have murdered a black man for similar offenses, less than a century ago.
You proved there is no God? Good job. I look forward to reading your findings in a few peer-reviewed journals...
It's great how atheists are convinced everyone who believes something different from them must be wrong and irrational to disagree. Gee, that sounds somehow familiar...
If you'd care to prove that every religion is wrong... get started. Facts only, try to avoid the all too common mischaracterizations. Otherwise, quite trying to pretend that what you are right, and what you believe is the only rational thing to believe. There'd be a huge outcry if people of any particular religion did it, but when atheists do it, nothing.
What are we, if not our collection of memories? If there's a perfectly identical copy of you, how is it NOT you. What is this intangible property of yours that makes one "you", and one the "copy"?
I think you need to touch up on your geography.
Have you heard of Big Bear? Wrightwood? Arrowhead? Any of the other famous peaks in the San Bernardino mountain range? How do you plan to go north from LA without getting over those?
Ever heard of the Cajon Pass? Hint: It's where nearly EVERY US train derailment has occurred in the past several decades. It's the steepest and most treacherous stretch of train tracks in the country, and THAT is how EVERY northbound train gets out of L.A.
In fact there's a plan for a maglev to Las Vegas which ends just north of the San Bernardino mountains, instead of going all the way to L.A., specifically because of the difficulty and massive expense of constructing a new route through the area.
If you head south-west from L.A., you can take the route around the southern tip, and avoid the Rocky Mountains entirely. It's not even a very long detour, as L.A. is so far south already.
There are a tiny number of commuter flights running, around the country now. They aren't popular, and a maglev would be worse. Cross-country flights, however, are quite popular.
Commuter trains are already a messy proposition, because there's a huge surge of traffic at the start and end of the day, and very, very little traffic the rest of the time. Such uneven utilization is horrible for both return on investment, and equipment/infrastructure utilization. Travels are only too happy to leave at just about any time, around the clock, provided they get a discounted ticket out of it. No such balancing of traffic is possible with daily commuters.
Commuters expect very low prices. If the round trip is expensive, people either stick with a slightly lower paying job, or pick up and move to the new area. A maglev would need to have rather high ticket prices to make up the construction, development, and operational costs... More so than an airline. Travelers wouldn't mind paying high prices for just occasional trips, particularly if it means they can be more comfortable, and get to their destination in less time.
It's not the cardboard, it's the fraud... It's tricking people into buying an illegal copy, when they think they're getting the real thing.
Many on
This isn't exactly an inconsistent stance. There are a great many pieces of software that are offered (by the copyright holder) for non-profit home or educational use free of charge. It's also probably fair to say that this is mostly because commercial, for-profit use of copyrighted software makes up the significant majority of software sales anyhow, so it's not a big concession to make.
China and India are likely to be very serious rivals, rather than friends. Both have huge populations, and are developing countries trying to break into high-tech. Being right next to each hurts rather than helps.
Iran seems an extremely unlikely partner as well. India is an open democracy, with a far freer society, and are not predominately Muslim. I also don't see much that Iran could offer India to begin with, as India is technologically much further along.
Russia... Maybe... Though India has much stronger economic ties with the English speaking western world than it does with Russia. Are Indian car makers trying to buy the Range Rover and Jaguar brands so that they can sell such branded vehicles to Russia? China? Iran? Not likely.
If 1 month doesn't count... at what point does it? A month after birth (some cultures believe this)? How about just a 1 day grace period after birth to kill off an unwanted baby? If not, how about 1 day before? A week before? A month? 2? 3?
Personally, I have to admire those who oppose abortion entirely, because their beliefs are, at least, self-consistent.
The main problem I see with abortion supporters, is that they seem to want it both ways... A mother can abort her child whenever she wants to, BUT if someone assaults a mother and causes a miscarriage, everyone wants the guy behind bars, forever. It's completely hypocritical.
By all means, set a date. Tell us all exactly how many days old a fetus can be before killing it is murder, and before that time, it doesn't matter any more than a bloody nose.
My other issue is the fact that fathers have absolutely no say about whether the prospective mother does or doesn't have an abortion of their child. Setting the above date should largely resolve that, as the father can covertly do whatever he wants to cause the mother to abort the fetus, and face only misdemeanor charges, while neither is allowed to do anything after the cut-off date.
Since when does "changing" equate to "rewriting history"?
Yes, several hundred years ago, the Catholic Church would happily torture and kill people, in an attempt to save their souls. I suggest you look at any other organization from that time period, and try to claim they have a better record.
In modern history, however, the Church has disavowed such practices. They have never denied what happened.
No, it would have resulted in the airlines raising their ticket prices by 80%, and then lowering them by 20% monthly...
Money is money, whatever the awkward scheme you use to give it.
It's not 1.5V, it's not in some standard device size, and not sold over the counter at retail stores. That is sold specifically for experts and smaller companies designing and making their own battery packs. You can't use it in ANYTHING in it's current form.
If you look hard enough, you can find all manner of dangerous things online that are not for, and would NEVER be sold to average consumers.
"Lithium" and "Lithium Ion" are completely and totally different things. Note those "Lithium" batteries are disposable, and NOT rechargeable.
What isn't standardized about batteries and power bricks?
I've got 3 power bricks from different laptops, and they're all almost identical (+/- 1V DC) and power my current laptops just fine. There are a few manufacturers that insist on funky connectors from time to time, but clearly you're happily buying from them despite this, so it must not matter to you as much as you say it does, otherwise you'd only buy the standard units.
You might notice that you DON'T have Li-Ion AAA/AA/C/D cells... They're too tricky to just have loose cells, and hope users don't do anything stupid with them.
And laptops batteries ARE pretty well standardized, too, though not like you are thinking... If you crack open the casing on two different laptop batteries, you'll see that, though they may be in a different arrangement, and possibly a different number of them, the cells are both physically and electronically identical (give or take a few mAHs depending on age). You can't just swap batteries between laptops, as form factors differ, but if you could, you'd find that feature to be less than desirable, anyhow. It does allow, however, for numerous 3rd parties to compete easily for sales of OEM and after-market batteries, cheaply.
Laptops are largely standardized. You can swap RAM, miniPCI devices (usually for graphics) WiFi, modems, keyboards, PSUs, etc.
As for motherboards... desktops really aren't standardized either. It's just that ATX is so large to begin with that making cases a few inches larger than an ATX motherboard (...is supposed to be) is hardly noticed, so cases are significantly oversized in both depth and width to ensure every motherboard out there will fit... and nobody cares. With laptops, size is a big selling point, so there's no room for several inches of such a fudge-factor.
When prices on the tech go down much further, so that top of the line motherboards can be made extremely tiny (say, 4" diameter) at only nominal expense over larger boards, you'll see laptops standardized just like desktops were, when the technology advanced to the point where ATX was more than big enough for everybody.
Many more points for SMS:
It was competing against the NES, while having infinitely better graphics.
It was the first home gaming system to have controls that weren't incredibly clunky... With most NES games you really had to be heavy handed on the controller, and forget any fine manipulation. (Frankly, I'm amazed how well they did with SMB3--the only real exception).
An absolutely amazing life-span... The "power base converter" for the Genesis allowed you to play SMS games. The Game Gear was really just a portable SMS system. A SMS/GG converter was available as well... The ease of cross-porting SMS and Game Gear games, combined with the large entrenched SMS market in Brazil, meant that games continued to be produced for the SMS for decades. Sonic 1/2/Chaos/3DBlast, Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, etc. etc. Lots of quite "modern" games were available (and playable) on the very old SMS system.
You really can't compare the SMS and NES... NES had more in common with older game systems like Atari than it did with SMS. Meanwhile, the SMS had a tremendous amount in common with later systems like the Genesis.
For Tivo, TV has pop-up ads.
For adblock, the web has text ads.
For ad skipping readers, magazines make paid ads look like just another product-review article, that just happens to turn into a glowing endorsement. See "Popular Mechanics"
Do I even need to bother with this one?
From TFA: "some 802.11n Draft 2.0-based access points consume up to 18 watts."
From TFA: "802.3af power-over-Ethernet (PoE) switches and power injectors supply about 15 watts of power at the switch port."
No go sit in the corner and think about what you've done...
If you sit the exact same distance from your 27" TV as you do from your 60" TV, the pixels will be smaller. However, Smaller != "Less Perceptible".
Well, you might be legally blind... OR you might notice there is a huge clarity difference.
No. You can quite easily change the size of fonts and images on the screen, so that there is no size difference even between vastly different resolutions.
I happen to be an expert on digital video, yet this sentence is utter gibberish to me.
They bumped the resolution to make it look much better on higher resolution screens... screens of ANY size.
I mean compared to similarly-performing CPUs from other manufacturers.
A significant percentage of BluRay discs are already encoded with the AVC/h.264 video codec, which is exactly what x264 is. You don't get any benefits from reencoding it, unlike the situation with Divx (MPEG-4 ASP) and DVDs.
With lossless codecs, file size is something you chose before you start encoding. It is NOT a byproduct, and NOT proof of anything. You can set a ridiculously low bitrate, and fit several minutes of 1080p video on a floppy if you want... it'll just look absolutely horrible, because of the low bitrate. This is what happens with low-bitrate reencodes, you get a much smaller file, but you're getting much less visual detail out of it.
Torrents of 1080p movies happen to be approx. 4.5GBs, because that's how much will fit on a cheap, single-layer DVD-R, so that's the file size most everyone prefers. If dual-layer blanks get cheaper, you'll see more 9GB torrents.
That's completely idiot. A 27" HDTV has just as many pixels on the screen as a 60" HDTV.
Saying a person can't tell the difference between highdef and SD is about the same as saying nobody can see the difference between a 640x480 computer monitor, and a 1920x1024 monitor, unless it's bigger than 60"...