You seem to have missed my point... Show me any place in this story that it says ID will be taught in Kansas schools now. "critical of evolution" is as close as it gets, that I can see.
1)It said that schools should present evolution as a flawed theory. This has the effect of students looking at evolution and saying "oh, it's not good enough to explain what we see...". A side effect of this is that the students now become more receptive to kooky ideas like Intelligent Design.
That's really ridiculous. When there isn't a working scientific theory for a subject, that doesn't make people's heads explode. There are lots of things we don't understand about our physical world, and yet I don't see crazy theories taking root...
If it's left as a question mark, valid hypotheses will come along to fill the void. That's exactly how evolution came about. If you instead tell people that some exception-filled theory is 100% accurate, you get a discrediting of science as a whole, and alternative theories that don't match-up get rejected out of hand by "respected" scientists. There have been inumerable times in the past that hypotheses, which turn-out to be valid theories, have been rejected out of hand because of this.
Science is SUPPOSED TO stand-up to scrutiny and debate, REMEBER?
First off, the slashdot summary says that the schoolboard is allowing the teaching of arguments that are critical of evolution. How in the world could that be a bad thing? Science is supposed to stand-up to scrutiny, isn't it? It's supposed to be debated on it's merits, not blindly memorized and reguritated on a test in a biology class.
The MSNBC story has got to be one of the worst news articles I've ever read. It mentions intelligent design repeatedly, as if evolution has been thrown out of schools, but it doesn't say anything about what is actually in this "standard".
This whole information-free story is just an excuse for ranting and ravings... I can hardly believe comments saying this is the Inquisition all over again, are actually being modded up.
If you look at games the GPU is far more important than the CPU,
And gaming is the killer app for Apple machines and OS X of course, so your argument isn't pointless crap at all...
which leaves heavy CPU use to media encoders, compilers and scientic processing. That's not really a big share of the market.
Media encoders is probably a rather big share of the market. In fact, it's probably a very big share of the APPLE market.
Besides, those are just the things that immediately came to your mind, not an exhaustive list. How about compression? How about image manipulation? How about numerous forms of encryption? How about HD video playback with CPU-intensive codecs like H.264 (Apple's preferred codec).
Basicly, an Intel machine does pretty much everything a computer user wants to do, so does an AMD.
Only if your definition of a computer user is someone who only checks their e-mail and surfs the web. Or if you are giving CPU-heavy applications an unlimited ammount of time to complete. It's not like that in the real world.
Your misunderstanding is absolutely incredible. I hate the Mythbusters as much as anybody, but you're just spouting nonsense.
Except that isn't the myth. The myth is that food is safe to eat after 5 seconds on the floor.
No, that's not even close to the myth. The myth is that food that has fallen (onto the floor, ground, etc) is safe if it has been touching for less than 5 seconds. If the myth was that eating food off the floor is safe, it wouldn't have "5 seconds" in it's title. It also would be a complete waste of space, because bacterial growth varies from one person's floor to another, so you can't make any such blanket statement.
If you want to complain about the mythbusters, just bring up how their data proved that droping a hammer reduces the surface tension of water before you fall in yourself. Or their complete ignorance on how to rip an axle from a car (hint: using cable is like using a large rubberband).
Actually, heavy weapons would just make ships more valuable targets for pirates.
Yes, that's why aircraft carriers and battleships get hijacked all the time... The heavy weaponry isn't a deterrent, is it? It's a VALUABLE TARGET, right?
Start making sense... It would make the ships a slightly more valuable target, but it would be FAR more dangerous and difficult to take-on that ship in the first place.
It's better to have an LRAD, which is effective at repelling the pirates, but not a weapon they'd be able to use effectively.
That's ridiculous. Pirates will find a way to make use of any weapon they get their hands on.
It's absolutely ASTONISHING the number of people who have responded to me, clearly without actually clicking on the story. All with the exact same response...
if you try to export materials from the Moon to Earth you're likely get some busy body government official telling you that you don't have the legal right to sell those materials.
That's where targeting systems come in handy:-)
It takes only a fraction as much fuel to lift a huge chunk of rock off the moon into orbit, than it would from Earth...
Aim a giant moon-rock at Washington, give it a little push, and your government problems are solved.
Not all health clubs have a TV facing the exercise gear, and even if they do, the odds that it will be showing something you would want to watch are not terrific.
All reasonable points that you could have made in response to his comment, rather than completely ignoring what he said.
Whenever someone says "The iPod's screen is too small," I just remind them of the Gameboy Advance, which kids and adults alike don't seem to mind staring at for hours at a time.
Problem is, TV is not designed for a screen that small... gameboy games are.
In a GB game, Mario takes up maybe 1/8th of the screen. In a TV show, you're going to see lots of wide shots where focus (the person) happens to be 1/100th of the frame, which might mean a particle of dust on a 2.5" screen may make you unable to see it.
Then there's the issue of contrast... Even the animation you see on TV doesn't have the kind of very simple, clear contrast that GB games have. Live-action will have almost no contrast by comparison, making it impossible to see where one object ends, and another begins.
I think it's just a mental paradigm shift for a lot of people to adjust from turning on a TV and flipping through channels to catch something, to downloading what you want to see and watching it whenever you want.
Not by much. People rent movies, buy DVDs of TV shows, use Tivo and other DVRs, set their VCRs to record, etc.
DVB-H, DVB-T...GSM, CDMA...110V/60Hz, 220V/50Hz...why does there always seem to be a slight yet significant difference in what should otherwise be a universal te3chnology when it comes to the North American and the rest of the world?
Mainly politics. Which side is more at fault is highly debatable.
220 vac would make more sense, as the same amount of power can be delivered with less current and less heat loss,
Why not go up to 550volts then? Where's the upper limit to this argument? I sincerely doubt the heat loss is at all significant, since it's distributed over distance at much higher voltages, and only stepped-down to 110/220 near your home. And besides, the lower Hz probably also negates that (small) benefit somewhat. Incidentally, higher voltages also require better electrical insulation on wires, built into 220v switches, etc.
I also have to point out that the 110v American standard was around first, and it was Europe that decided to use a conflicting standard.
Two different types of digital broadcast television, so global electronics manufacturers have to build two different types of equipment or build in the capability to accept either one.
Well, for starters, there's the issue of refresh-rates. America, having a 60Hz grid, produced 60Hz TVs. While Europe, having a 50Hz grid, produced 50Hz TVs.
Those differences have simply propogated into the digital TV standards now. HDTV supports framerates of ~24fps/~30fps/~60Hz to match NTSC and film content, but no 25fps for PAL content. HDTV includes resolutions like 480 for NTSC, but not 576 for PAL. I don't know as much about DVB, but I have no doubt it sports similar limitations.
Granted that CDMA is superior in some respects (power requirements and bandwidth come to mind) but why be a telecommunications island?
Because the US is physically an island, at least relative to the rest of the world. Europeans aren't going to just casually drive across the border, and find that they can't make calls or plug-in their appliances. It's a great-enough distance, with a huge natural barrier, that visiting foreigners don't need to factor into technical decisions very much.
The situation is gradually improving, though. It may very well be that as electronics gets cheaper, the differences will be so small that every device made will simply support both, for the same price (or possibly cheaper) than the region-specific versions.
DVDs can be played on players of a different standard. DVD players themselves, are software switchable between outputting PAL or NTSC. Computer power supplies are easily switchable from one voltage to the other (and some don't even need you to throw the switch). etc.
Or alternatively, you can make the size of the screen completely irrelevant by just bringing it closer to your eyes.
Just like blowing-up a low-res picture, it usually doesn't work well. You may start to see the actual structure of the screen. You may get a headache very quickly because of the bright backlight being so close to your eyes. etc.
When some Jonathan Ives type cooks up "TV Glasses" that don't look as "stylish and comfortable" (and headache-inducing) as this, then we'll be getting someplace.
Not at all. Glasses are far to cumbersome to be used in public places. You really need a screen that doesn't block much of your vision, doesn't need to be mounted on your head, and can be moved out of you way instantly.
My TV is way bigger than my PC, located in a far more confortable room.
Bolted to the floor, is it? Illegal for you to buy another cheap PC, is it?
if you could have video-on-demand on your TV you wouldn't dream of giving the above answer.
I would. Of course I have a computer hooked-up to my large TV, in my comfortable room, operated by remote. And in-fact, it's been like that for years now.
I know I'm missing out on great things, like VOD fees higher than the cost of renting a movie (and yet no extras). A terrible selection of only a few lowsy blockbusters to chose from. etc.
This way we can each follow our own and with more diversity comes more tollerance right?
No. There's nothing about diversity that inherently breeds tolerance.
It would most likely turn into a "My God is more powerful than your god," argument.
For a completely insane example, look at the intolerance between Jews, Muslims, and Christians. All three worshipping the very same God, with their holy books being largely identical, and yet they can't get along.
Running any version of Windows and Linux in VM spaces
Yes, because gaming on Windows under a VM is going to give you the ultra-fast response you want.
And dual-booting will be perfectly easy... OS X's native filesystem is NTFS isn't it? And even if it wasn't, games on Windows don't take up much space on the hard drive, and laptops come with such massive hard drives these days that dedicating 20GBs to a Windows partition would barely even be noticed...
On a computer, widescreen is much less useful than on a TV.
No, the two are about equal, actually. Widescreen TVs are often displaying video that wastes the extra space, just as widescreen computer displays are sometimes using apps that waste the extra space.
High-screen, that would be handy, because then you can see more of the document you are typing.
You get the same ammount of area whether it's tall or wide. With print-previewing documents, you're correct, but I don't think most people type most of their documents in print-preview mode anyhow. I certainly don't.
For things like text documents, HTML, etc, it will wrap to whatever your viewpoint is. For things like still images and videos, widescreen is very appropriate. In fact, for most everything, widescreen is at least just as good as fullscreen.
Besides, there is a HUGE advantage to reading documents on wider screens... You see, having to scroll from side-to-side twice for each line you read is infinitely more annoying than having to scroll-down once for every 40 lines or so. I'll take a wider screen anyday.
Since he's doing the press-release thing with no real evidence to support his claims, I can't see any reason to put any credibility in this. We should all just be ignoring him.
That said, I'd be quite open to hearing about cases of quantum physics or relativity being broken. There are already numbers of cases where either one doesn't quite match reality. Most common being black holes, speed of light, etc.
Well-established and repeatedy proven scientific theories have been wrong in the past, again and again. Flatly saying that the current theories are right shows a great deal of ignorance of how science works, and of history... But what do I know? You can go back to pretending that you have the slightest idea what gravity really is now.
I want a solid state drive; sick of mechanical breakdowns
You're sick of mechanical breakdowns, so you want to replace it with something far less reliable, that will frequently have non-mechanical breakdowns.
and especially the noise.
Whaaa? Hard drives are getting much quieter each generation. My 7200RPM 40GB hard drive is extremely quiet. Even with just one very quiet fan in the system, you still wouldn't hear it (except for the inital spin-up). My 160GB hard drive is slightly quieter still, and yeh I added rubber washers to make it slighter quieter (for HTPC use).
Unless you use a completely fanless computer, or are using very old hard drives, I can't understand how anyone can be complaining about hard drive noise these days. You can also use hdparm's "acoustic management" option, to quiet hard drives even further (at the expense of some performance).
I'm getting really tired of hyper-speed, super cheap drives that fail after a year.
They only fail after a year if they are in a rather enclosed space, with no airflow. Get a case with accomodations for a 80/92/120mm fan in-front of the hard drive areas, and you'll have far fewer problems.
Additionally, you should spend a bit more and buy from Seagate. They are typically lower power than others, and they have 5-year warranties on everything, which bodes well for their reliability.
I'd imagine that most users are in the same boat.
You'd imagine wrong. How long do you think it would take you to completely back-up your slow 5400 RPM hard drive? Are you even doing any backups?
But hard drive speed is a grossly overrated and mostly unneeded attribute.
Not true at all. Many people are spending hundreds of dollars getting faster CPUs and RAM, when they are actually HDD I/O-bound. HDD is the biggest bottleneck for most uses of computers. I know my 7200RPM hard drive is much slower than I'd like, for editing and re-compressing video. It would be much less painful if I didn't have to wait so long to write a 4GB video to disk. And 4GBs is nothing. DVDs hold 9GBs, and people are burning them left and right.
Capture a TV show, edit out the commercials, and burn it to DVD... If you're fairly fast at the editing, you'll find waiting for the hard drive to catch-up to be a big annoyance, and a big waste of your time. 9GBs of RAM isn't exactly a practical alternative.
Be glad that you don't need speed, but don't tell the rest of the world that THEY don't.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to have missed my point... Show me any place in this story that it says ID will be taught in Kansas schools now. "critical of evolution" is as close as it gets, that I can see.
That's really ridiculous. When there isn't a working scientific theory for a subject, that doesn't make people's heads explode. There are lots of things we don't understand about our physical world, and yet I don't see crazy theories taking root...
If it's left as a question mark, valid hypotheses will come along to fill the void. That's exactly how evolution came about. If you instead tell people that some exception-filled theory is 100% accurate, you get a discrediting of science as a whole, and alternative theories that don't match-up get rejected out of hand by "respected" scientists. There have been inumerable times in the past that hypotheses, which turn-out to be valid theories, have been rejected out of hand because of this.
Science is SUPPOSED TO stand-up to scrutiny and debate, REMEBER?
First off, the slashdot summary says that the schoolboard is allowing the teaching of arguments that are critical of evolution. How in the world could that be a bad thing? Science is supposed to stand-up to scrutiny, isn't it? It's supposed to be debated on it's merits, not blindly memorized and reguritated on a test in a biology class.
The MSNBC story has got to be one of the worst news articles I've ever read. It mentions intelligent design repeatedly, as if evolution has been thrown out of schools, but it doesn't say anything about what is actually in this "standard".
This whole information-free story is just an excuse for ranting and ravings... I can hardly believe comments saying this is the Inquisition all over again, are actually being modded up.
WILL YOU PLEASE SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!
I'm getting so incredibly tired of hearing this same crap over and over again.
Intel has been having supply problems lately. There have been mentions of it in the press, repeatedly.
Meanwhile, AMD is opening a new fab, has a contract with 3rd parties to produce chips if AMD needs them to do so, etc.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=158117&cid=13
And gaming is the killer app for Apple machines and OS X of course, so your argument isn't pointless crap at all...
Media encoders is probably a rather big share of the market. In fact, it's probably a very big share of the APPLE market.
Besides, those are just the things that immediately came to your mind, not an exhaustive list. How about compression? How about image manipulation? How about numerous forms of encryption? How about HD video playback with CPU-intensive codecs like H.264 (Apple's preferred codec).
Only if your definition of a computer user is someone who only checks their e-mail and surfs the web. Or if you are giving CPU-heavy applications an unlimited ammount of time to complete. It's not like that in the real world.
No, that's not even close to the myth. The myth is that food that has fallen (onto the floor, ground, etc) is safe if it has been touching for less than 5 seconds. If the myth was that eating food off the floor is safe, it wouldn't have "5 seconds" in it's title. It also would be a complete waste of space, because bacterial growth varies from one person's floor to another, so you can't make any such blanket statement.
If you want to complain about the mythbusters, just bring up how their data proved that droping a hammer reduces the surface tension of water before you fall in yourself. Or their complete ignorance on how to rip an axle from a car (hint: using cable is like using a large rubberband).
http://www.snopes.com/food/tainted/dropped.asp
http://www.colostate.edu/Orgs/safefood/NEWSLTR/v8
http://www.readymademag.com/feature_9_eatoffthefl
http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/09/16/five_second0
http://www.google.com/search?q=5+second+rule
Yes, that's why aircraft carriers and battleships get hijacked all the time... The heavy weaponry isn't a deterrent, is it? It's a VALUABLE TARGET, right?
Start making sense... It would make the ships a slightly more valuable target, but it would be FAR more dangerous and difficult to take-on that ship in the first place.
That's ridiculous. Pirates will find a way to make use of any weapon they get their hands on.
The fact that my comment got moderated up as "insightful" rather than "funny" just goes to show how evil /.ers really are...
It's absolutely ASTONISHING the number of people who have responded to me, clearly without actually clicking on the story. All with the exact same response...
That's where targeting systems come in handy
It takes only a fraction as much fuel to lift a huge chunk of rock off the moon into orbit, than it would from Earth...
Aim a giant moon-rock at Washington, give it a little push, and your government problems are solved.
No, no... This isn't even pictures of a new AMD processor... it's pictures of the SOCKET where the processor will go.
It's more like pr0n pictures of a bra or a bikini, without anyone wearing them...
Now that's just being pedantic...
All reasonable points that you could have made in response to his comment, rather than completely ignoring what he said.
Problem is, TV is not designed for a screen that small... gameboy games are.
In a GB game, Mario takes up maybe 1/8th of the screen. In a TV show, you're going to see lots of wide shots where focus (the person) happens to be 1/100th of the frame, which might mean a particle of dust on a 2.5" screen may make you unable to see it.
Then there's the issue of contrast... Even the animation you see on TV doesn't have the kind of very simple, clear contrast that GB games have. Live-action will have almost no contrast by comparison, making it impossible to see where one object ends, and another begins.
Not by much. People rent movies, buy DVDs of TV shows, use Tivo and other DVRs, set their VCRs to record, etc.
Mainly politics. Which side is more at fault is highly debatable.
Why not go up to 550volts then? Where's the upper limit to this argument? I sincerely doubt the heat loss is at all significant, since it's distributed over distance at much higher voltages, and only stepped-down to 110/220 near your home. And besides, the lower Hz probably also negates that (small) benefit somewhat. Incidentally, higher voltages also require better electrical insulation on wires, built into 220v switches, etc.
I also have to point out that the 110v American standard was around first, and it was Europe that decided to use a conflicting standard.
Well, for starters, there's the issue of refresh-rates. America, having a 60Hz grid, produced 60Hz TVs. While Europe, having a 50Hz grid, produced 50Hz TVs.
Those differences have simply propogated into the digital TV standards now. HDTV supports framerates of ~24fps/~30fps/~60Hz to match NTSC and film content, but no 25fps for PAL content. HDTV includes resolutions like 480 for NTSC, but not 576 for PAL. I don't know as much about DVB, but I have no doubt it sports similar limitations.
Because the US is physically an island, at least relative to the rest of the world. Europeans aren't going to just casually drive across the border, and find that they can't make calls or plug-in their appliances. It's a great-enough distance, with a huge natural barrier, that visiting foreigners don't need to factor into technical decisions very much.
The situation is gradually improving, though. It may very well be that as electronics gets cheaper, the differences will be so small that every device made will simply support both, for the same price (or possibly cheaper) than the region-specific versions.
DVDs can be played on players of a different standard. DVD players themselves, are software switchable between outputting PAL or NTSC. Computer power supplies are easily switchable from one voltage to the other (and some don't even need you to throw the switch). etc.
Just like blowing-up a low-res picture, it usually doesn't work well. You may start to see the actual structure of the screen. You may get a headache very quickly because of the bright backlight being so close to your eyes. etc.
Not at all. Glasses are far to cumbersome to be used in public places. You really need a screen that doesn't block much of your vision, doesn't need to be mounted on your head, and can be moved out of you way instantly.
Nicely done. You quote one sentence, and then completely ignored the next sentence, in which he addressed exactly the issue you are bringing up.
Very insightful.
Bolted to the floor, is it? Illegal for you to buy another cheap PC, is it?
I would. Of course I have a computer hooked-up to my large TV, in my comfortable room, operated by remote. And in-fact, it's been like that for years now.
I know I'm missing out on great things, like VOD fees higher than the cost of renting a movie (and yet no extras). A terrible selection of only a few lowsy blockbusters to chose from. etc.
No. There's nothing about diversity that inherently breeds tolerance.
It would most likely turn into a "My God is more powerful than your god," argument.
For a completely insane example, look at the intolerance between Jews, Muslims, and Christians. All three worshipping the very same God, with their holy books being largely identical, and yet they can't get along.
Yes, because gaming on Windows under a VM is going to give you the ultra-fast response you want.
And dual-booting will be perfectly easy... OS X's native filesystem is NTFS isn't it? And even if it wasn't, games on Windows don't take up much space on the hard drive, and laptops come with such massive hard drives these days that dedicating 20GBs to a Windows partition would barely even be noticed...
</MASSIVE-SARCASM>
No, the two are about equal, actually. Widescreen TVs are often displaying video that wastes the extra space, just as widescreen computer displays are sometimes using apps that waste the extra space.
You get the same ammount of area whether it's tall or wide. With print-previewing documents, you're correct, but I don't think most people type most of their documents in print-preview mode anyhow. I certainly don't.
For things like text documents, HTML, etc, it will wrap to whatever your viewpoint is. For things like still images and videos, widescreen is very appropriate. In fact, for most everything, widescreen is at least just as good as fullscreen.
Besides, there is a HUGE advantage to reading documents on wider screens... You see, having to scroll from side-to-side twice for each line you read is infinitely more annoying than having to scroll-down once for every 40 lines or so. I'll take a wider screen anyday.
Extrodinary claims require extrodinary evidence...
Since he's doing the press-release thing with no real evidence to support his claims, I can't see any reason to put any credibility in this. We should all just be ignoring him.
That said, I'd be quite open to hearing about cases of quantum physics or relativity being broken. There are already numbers of cases where either one doesn't quite match reality. Most common being black holes, speed of light, etc.
Well-established and repeatedy proven scientific theories have been wrong in the past, again and again. Flatly saying that the current theories are right shows a great deal of ignorance of how science works, and of history... But what do I know? You can go back to pretending that you have the slightest idea what gravity really is now.
If you want help, you need to explain further... Journal entries are good for that kind of thing.
You're sick of mechanical breakdowns, so you want to replace it with something far less reliable, that will frequently have non-mechanical breakdowns.
Whaaa? Hard drives are getting much quieter each generation. My 7200RPM 40GB hard drive is extremely quiet. Even with just one very quiet fan in the system, you still wouldn't hear it (except for the inital spin-up). My 160GB hard drive is slightly quieter still, and yeh I added rubber washers to make it slighter quieter (for HTPC use).
Unless you use a completely fanless computer, or are using very old hard drives, I can't understand how anyone can be complaining about hard drive noise these days. You can also use hdparm's "acoustic management" option, to quiet hard drives even further (at the expense of some performance).
They only fail after a year if they are in a rather enclosed space, with no airflow. Get a case with accomodations for a 80/92/120mm fan in-front of the hard drive areas, and you'll have far fewer problems.
Additionally, you should spend a bit more and buy from Seagate. They are typically lower power than others, and they have 5-year warranties on everything, which bodes well for their reliability.
You'd imagine wrong. How long do you think it would take you to completely back-up your slow 5400 RPM hard drive? Are you even doing any backups?
Not true at all. Many people are spending hundreds of dollars getting faster CPUs and RAM, when they are actually HDD I/O-bound. HDD is the biggest bottleneck for most uses of computers. I know my 7200RPM hard drive is much slower than I'd like, for editing and re-compressing video. It would be much less painful if I didn't have to wait so long to write a 4GB video to disk. And 4GBs is nothing. DVDs hold 9GBs, and people are burning them left and right.
Capture a TV show, edit out the commercials, and burn it to DVD... If you're fairly fast at the editing, you'll find waiting for the hard drive to catch-up to be a big annoyance, and a big waste of your time. 9GBs of RAM isn't exactly a practical alternative.
Be glad that you don't need speed, but don't tell the rest of the world that THEY don't.