I've just recently assembled a new gaming PC (to make a long story short, I wanted to upgrade my old machine to a new CPU architecture, which meant also upgrading motherboard and memory, but the upgrade hassle factor was so large that I just ended up buying the rest of the parts and making a new PC) and I've go a Quad Q6600 (G0 stepping, the easier to overclock) running rock-stable at 3.2 GHz, when the stock speed is 2.4 GHz (while, thanks to using a passive water-cooling setup - a Reserator V1, temperatures are below 60C at load and noise is minimal).
My experience is similar to the one described by the guys in the article - for about $1500 (discounting VAT and converting from GBP to USD) I got a high-mid-range gaming machine* capable of running any of the newest games with max settings and 4xAA (anti-aliasing) at the maximum resolution my monitor supports (1280x1024) with lots of horsepower to spare, and which is comparatively as good as a top of the range machine would be 5 years ago (at the time, that's what you would need to run all new games at max setting at that resolution). If I went for the same relative (versus latest games at the time) capabilities 5 years ago the cost would've been at least 2 times as much.
(PS: Even though I've reused my existing water-cooling equipment - worth about $200 if new - some of this is offset by the fact that I got a factory-watercooled graphics board, which is between $50 and $100 more expensive than the stock version: anybody not going for a full water-cooled setup would just get the stock version)
* Specs: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 overclocked to 3.2GHz (watercooled); Nvidia GTS280 (watercooled); 4GB premium (faster) PC2-8500 memory (5-5-5-18) stock speed 1066 MHz (slightly overclocked); 2x250GB SATA2 HDD in Raid 0 configuration (Programs disk) + 1x640GB SATA2 HDD (Data disk); an old Reserator V1 for watercooling with replaced, higher capacity pump.
In the end it all boils down to two things: A) Are man-made greenhouse gases causing an increase in average temperatures around the globe and will they continue to do so? B) If A is true then will the future economic damage due to the raise of sea levels (most coastal cities flooded, decrease in farming land), increase in chaotic weather (more extreme storms, cyclones, sand storms) and increase desertification be offset by short term gains in keeping gas prices down?
It doesn't need to be that the case that A is proven to be true: all you need is that A is possibly true - just do a risk weighted comparison of future climate related costs if A is true versus the benefits of the cheaper average oil prices if your drill in Alaska during the time period when oil is available for extraction there.
A purely economical approach to evaluate the situation (away from the emotional arguments of the "tree huger" and the "every American is entitled to have an SUV/Light-truck" crowds) still indicates that it's a good idea to proceed as if A is true: find a way to reduce man made greenhouse gases just because, if A is true then B will have very, very high costs.
In the end it's the same reasoning why people take insurance: if its possible that "bad things happen" with "huge costs", it's probably a good idea to "pay a little" now to insure against those costs.
Drilling for oil in Alaska doesn't insure against A and B while giving very little benefits in terms of lowered average oil prices simple because the proven reserves in Alaska are not that big and wouldn't last for long - in other words, the solution you propose is likely to be something that keeps gas prices down 10% for 10 years while slightly increases the likelihood that our children will live in a world where all major coastal cities (for example London and New York) are flooded, deserts are a lot bigger, wars over resources (like fertile land and water) are widespread, famine has affected even those in rich nations (alluvial valleys are the most fertile of all land and they'll be the first to be flooded by sea water) and extreme weather events (and associated destruction) are commonplace.
To put things in terms you might understand: all that which you proposed above might result in is that you'll be able to afford driving an SUV for another 10 years while increasing the likelihood that the "American way of life" will be dead in 50.
Re:Engine damage due to cars that are not prepared
on
The Great Ethanol Scam
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in many cases fuel lines or fuel pumps have been destroyed by fuel with increased ethanol content.
This is something well known in the amateur pilot circles - one thing you are taught when you're studying for a Private Pilot license in Europe is that usually normal (car) gas cannot be used in piston engine aircraft (like, for example, the Cessna C150) because it contains alcohol which can damage the fuel lines (in Europe, the most common types of gas usually contain a small amount of alcohol).
That said, it's not a problem for any modern cars - blended fuel has been around more or less since lead was forbidden as an additive on gas and in Europe you need a lot of luck to find fuel with a rating of more than 92 octanes without any alcohol which is not a specialized type for aviation. Me and everybody else have been feeding our cars with the stuff and I've never had (or heard of anybody having) any problems with fuel pumps or fuel lines (actually, with my previous car of 8 years I've never had any engine problems at all).
Lets not forget the other common reason to go to war:
- Being faced with internal dissent and a real possibility of loosing power, portray another nation (or even a minority within your own nation) as "the Enemy" and go to war against them, thus distracting the masses from your own faults as leader, rallying them against somebody else and having a convenient excuse to take on "state of emergency"-like powers which then can be use against your personal internal enemies.
This technique is as widely used in tin-pot-dictatorships as in "democracies" *cough* war on terror *cough*
Actually I think that for a great MMO which can compete with WoW you have to look outside the "Bartle food groups".
Styles of gaming are not just restricted to Achievers, Explorers, Socializers and Killers.
For example Creators (those who make new things for the pleasure of making them) are neither Achievers (since creating is a process not a target), Explorers (there is nothing to explore), Socializers (creation needs not be done with others in mind) nor Killers (kill what?).
Although some of the best Single Player games (mostly the SimXXX type) cater for Creators, very few of the MMOs truly do so (the exception being Second Life and maybe the new Mission creation tools in City Of Heroes). At most, players' creative impulses are catered for slightly in things like housing and character customization.
Another type of playing that is rarely catered for is the Strategist (as in games like Civilization or RTSs). Although some Online games cater for these (like World in Conflict) I know of now MMO that does.
I think that a wider palette of gaming styles for MMO can be found by looking at what drives people in Real Life (tm) and in Single Player games.
Well, a natural evolution of something like this would be for Amazon to have an Internet radio service where music tracks are automatically selected for playing based on user preferences be it by user votes, sales, user contributed play-lists or any other options they might choose - artists that sell via this service would be able to choose if they want their music played on Amazon radio or not.
Actually, such a kind of "automated" Internet radio with a large music catalog backing it could potentially have a near infinite number of channels: just give the listeners "personal radio streams" and a large number of variables they can individual adjust to tweak them (say, music genre, Amazon review stars, year of recording, number of user playlists it is on and more).
If all you got is an LCD monitor with a natural resolution of 1280x1024 (typical for 17-inch ones) then even the cheapest of the graphics boards tested in the article can run Crysis with all settings at max at the best resolution your monitor supports.
Until recently I was running World in Conflict @ 1280x1024 with a 7800 GTS (a high-mid-range card from about 3 years ago) with no problems and it looked great.
My experience of 12 years of gaming in the PC with 3D graphics cards is that, while in the past games coming out at any given time where almost unplayable with a 2 or 3 years old mid-range graphics card, nowadays (unless your monitor is 21-inch or larger) you can keep using your 4-year-old graphics card with the greatest and latest games.
I work in the trading floor in an investment bank. To be able to be productive when doing design and coding I had to get active noise reduction headphones - works like a charm: the other day I even managed to get into "flow" mode.
My personal experience with using passive (no fans) water-cooling with my desktop PC at home (the setup is similar to this: http://www.silent.se/bilder/reserator1_c_p-410.jpg) is that that it's exceptionally effective.
In my setup a cylinder full of water surrounded by fins to dissipate the heat and with a pump to make water flow as the only active element have replaced a big nasty CPU heatsink with a large fan (on a heavily overclocked CPU)* and a set of fans on a single high-end graphics card of the previous generation. At an ambient temperature in the room where this is in of about 20-25C The whole thing idles at 28C and stays at around 60C with everything going on at max - considering that with everything going on at full throttle the system is using almost 400W, it's impressive how efficient it all is.
In practice, "home" water-cooling mostly just uses the water as a heat carrier to quickly move the heat around from the inside of the computer case (and it's constrained airflow) to a place where it is easier to dissipate that heat into the ambient air either with a more efficient radiator and fans (for the active systems) or with an outsized heatsink (like the one I use which has roughly 10 times the surface of the ones it replaces).
In an "industrial" deployment, said heat being carried in the water cold potentially be used/dissipated in many more ways. For example large pipes could transport the hot water coming out of a data-center to the sea or a river and let it be dissipated there (keeping a closed circuit and returning the cool water back for reuse). The actual running costs in terms of active elements for such a system are limited to the cost of running a number of large efficient water pumps that make the water flow around the circuite as opposed to most data-centers out there at the moment that use (less efficient) small fans to move the air out of the blade boxes into the room and then active refrigeration to cool down the air in the room.
* Since the point of my argument is not to show off my "virtual dick", I've moved the relevant stats down here for those that are curious on the details: CPU - Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz which is overclocked to 3.2GHz, GPU - GTS280
I'm not an UK national and I'm living in the UK (London) at the moment.
Judging from the TV, the newspapers and the people around here, I can tell you that the locals have pretty much what they deserve - the average brit is hard-drinking, unpolished and uneducated, easily fobbed by spin, entertained by shallow "celebrity news" and having really short memories. UK politics are those of appearance and of the moment - always chasing the the news that are news now, announcing grand measures while the news are hot and quietly dropping them (or setting things up in such a way that they are bound to fail in the long run) once the news have moved on.
Local politicians are deceitful, untrustworthy an often corrupt. They will say one thing one day, a different thing another day and yet another the following day and people won't even blink twice at it - they just keep on voting on the same crowd for Parliament (either Labour or Tories - same shit, different flies).
London is a rat-race of a city with bad roads, aging public transportation, lack of parking spaces, pollution and where local councils use all sorts of sneaky ways to get money out of people's pockets (Congestion charging, speed cameras for profit, expensive paid parking everywhere, resident parking licenses). Everything around here is expensive except non-specialized services which are done by uneducated emigrants that moved here mostly from the countryside in some third world country or other (the same people whose kids, born in Britain, grow up feeling that they're the bottom of the barrel, neither part of this society nor of their parent's society, and sometimes turn to ideologies like extreme Islam to find a sense of belonging).
Honestly, the only good thing about here (from my point of view) is the good contracting rates payed in finance.
That said, London is an atypical part of Great Britain and at least the English and Welsh countryside (never been to Scotland or Northern Ireland) are quite beautiful.
Funnily enough I've played BF2 on my thirties and had the same experience as you did - using experience plus tactical and strategical ability I could outscore the twitchy players which where probably little over half my age. In UT3 it was a lot harder to keep up since the game relied so much more on fast reactions and pin-point accuracy.
That said, it's perfectly possible to rule the air in BF2 either with choppers or fighter-jets when you're in your thirties as long as you have a joystick: the vehicles have momentum, so fast reactions aren't everything and you need to always be one step ahead of the machine if you want to pull-off the more dangerous moves (mostly high-speed flying and pop-ups/side strafing in confined spaces)
The budget dual core Atom netbook with Win 7 and ION graphics is just down the road. The form factor is attractive, the price is right - and you can even play games.
The whole business model of netbooks is "cheap, portable and with a long-lasting battery" - not exactly a model that leads itself in going in the direction of multi-core & "phat" graphics.
Tiny keyboards and trackballs are completely inadequate for playing games - a DS or PSP is much better for portable gaming.
In the netbook arena expect exactly the opposite move - From x86 to the ARM architecture for significantly lower power consumption. - Even cheaper as the price of the electronics goes further down (the "the price of a chip with the same transistor count halves every 18 months" side of Moore's law).
Such a move would play to two of the biggest the strengths of Linux (multi-architecture, low cost).
The future might very well be populated with sub-$100 netbooks for mobile internet with batteries that go for 12h without recharging (think a merge of a mobile phone and a notebook).
Why the F**K do you want to treat intellectual work different from any other work?
Exactly!! What kind of sense does it make to treat it differently from any other work? You work, you get paid for it. Or you get paid, and do the work. Either way, that's it. Over. Done. There's no reason why anyone should continue to keep getting paid indefinitely for work they did umpteen years ago.
Just to reinforce this point, consider that if other activities worked in the same way as IP everytime you took a dump, you would have to pay the plumber that installed the pipes in your house for "using his work".
Never forget that copyright is actually a government given privilege covering a sub-set of human activities. Those whose main mean of living do not involve doing activities covered by IP laws are actually being discriminated against by those laws.
He's aiming at providing a legal, well balanced way of letting people and small companies create and sell things which use iconography from modern society which is "owned" by famous-individuals / large-companies under trademark and/or copyright laws while at the same time making sure that the owners of the original IP are rewarded.
This would, for example, empower somebody to craft a clay vase with (for example) the Intel logo and sell it while: - Not needing to upfront pay expensive lawyers to agree with Intel Corp on the use of their trademark - Not being sued (assuming Intel Corp had made their trademark sign available under this agreement) by Intel Corp for trademark infringement. - Pay inga percentage of the profits to Intel Corp. - In a standardized manner, making it clear in their work that it's NOT something done by Intel Corp.
At the moment, a huge number of the icons of our culture are actually owned by big companies and things are likely to remain so unless a proper reform is done of IP laws. What the article is proposing is a way of giving society more access to those icons in a way which lets individuals create and profit from derived work, not just large corps.
I would be willing to bet that McDonalds and Panera share more than a few suppliers for their products. I think selectivity in food probably doesn't actually buy you too much in the long run. The human body has evolved to eat some genuinely sick stuff, and even the Golden Arches is a damn site better than a few bits of rib meat from a four day dead Zebra. If there's a problem with McDonalds, and other modern foods, medical science seems more to conclude that the food is actually -too good- for us, and so we get fat. I think the only thing one can do is probably fast one day a week, to simulate the conditions for which we are bred.
One could argue that "The human body has evolved to eat some genuinely sick stuff". Then again, the human body has also evolved for us to live long enough to pass on our genes and help our progeny become independent - that's less than 30 years - anything beyond that is not a significant evolutionary advantage.
Notice how the predominance of cancer is much higher in societies where the average life expectancy is higher than 30 years old...
I for one, would like to live a long time and be as healthy as possible during that period - hence being selective with food is important.
Basically:
If it looks like a cauliflower, a pea, broccoli or a Brussels's sprout then it probably is a cauliflower, pea, broccoli or a Brussels's sprout.
If it's mashed paste of stuff, optionally cooked or baked (like bread, hamburgers, sausages, mash potatoes) then all bets are off and anything can be mixed in.
The more processed a piece of food is, the more likely it's full of all sorts of things that won't harm you on the short term (if it outright killed you or harmed you the manufacturer would be sued and closed) but might harm you on the long term (good luck proving the link between some artificial additive that was in those hamburgers you use to eat when you were a teen and the colon cancer you got 10 years latter).
If you want good healthy food, go for fresh vegetables (and fruit, meat and fish) instead of the processed kind.
In my experience, kids are the only group of people McDonald's is friendly for.
I work on the trading floor in an Investment Bank at the moment and the level of noise around here is way smaller than in your average McDonald's store.
I suppose if you actually like shouting across the table to make yourself heard, then McDonald's is great.
How could you have missed the psychological depth of Manic Miner, a man driven to go ever further surmounting ever harder and ever more dangerous obstacles, the tragic drama of Pac Man, a caricature of a man, forever trapped in a maze pursued by unrelenting foes.
Did you not saw the deep sociological implications of the hive-like mind of the aliens in Space Invaders having unbounded persistence and yet never faltering and never deviating from their group dance.
Did your hearty not skip a beat at the drama of the ball in Pong, unable to follow a path other than that which was set by others it's destiny in the hands of two conflicting personalities.
Don't forget that Virgin Media are part of the Virgin empire which amongst other things also owns a large recording company.
They actually do all kinds of nasty things like port blocking, filtering and keeping logs on your traffic which they'll hand to any "content owner" as soon as they ask for it.
So yeah, your connection might theoretically be high speed, but in practice they will block you from using the extra speed.
There was supposed to be a second control group covering other male contraception methods - such as neutering. That's why a third of the test subjects walked away.
The taxes are on their profit - roughly, it's the difference between their cost of the products/services they sell and what they get payed for those products/services.
If, due to taxes, they increase the amount they charge for those products/services, everything else being the same, their profits would go up and their taxes will go up too.
In practice, all companies already try to have consumers pay the most they are willing to pay, so they don't really have the room to increase prices (if they did, they would've done it already to maximize profits) - any increase in prices would just drive buyers away to the competition or drive them off from buying the product/service.
Taxes on companies barely affect consumers (since if they raise prices they loose customers) - instead they affect shareholders (since dividends are usually issued from whatever money is left after taxes) and CxO income (since they cannot justify quite such high salaries/bonuses anymore).
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Tomshardware just recently did an article where they measure performance of games in PCs with different numbers of cores (link: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/multi-core-cpu,2280.html).
Their conclusion is that at the moment, for the current crop of games the ideal number of cores is 3.
I've just recently assembled a new gaming PC (to make a long story short, I wanted to upgrade my old machine to a new CPU architecture, which meant also upgrading motherboard and memory, but the upgrade hassle factor was so large that I just ended up buying the rest of the parts and making a new PC) and I've go a Quad Q6600 (G0 stepping, the easier to overclock) running rock-stable at 3.2 GHz, when the stock speed is 2.4 GHz (while, thanks to using a passive water-cooling setup - a Reserator V1, temperatures are below 60C at load and noise is minimal).
My experience is similar to the one described by the guys in the article - for about $1500 (discounting VAT and converting from GBP to USD) I got a high-mid-range gaming machine* capable of running any of the newest games with max settings and 4xAA (anti-aliasing) at the maximum resolution my monitor supports (1280x1024) with lots of horsepower to spare, and which is comparatively as good as a top of the range machine would be 5 years ago (at the time, that's what you would need to run all new games at max setting at that resolution). If I went for the same relative (versus latest games at the time) capabilities 5 years ago the cost would've been at least 2 times as much.
(PS: Even though I've reused my existing water-cooling equipment - worth about $200 if new - some of this is offset by the fact that I got a factory-watercooled graphics board, which is between $50 and $100 more expensive than the stock version: anybody not going for a full water-cooled setup would just get the stock version)
* Specs: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 overclocked to 3.2GHz (watercooled); Nvidia GTS280 (watercooled); 4GB premium (faster) PC2-8500 memory (5-5-5-18) stock speed 1066 MHz (slightly overclocked); 2x250GB SATA2 HDD in Raid 0 configuration (Programs disk) + 1x640GB SATA2 HDD (Data disk); an old Reserator V1 for watercooling with replaced, higher capacity pump.
Here's a new meme for Sony:
Sony doesn't want guardrails - what they want is a fence.
An electrified fence, with barbed wire and dogs patrolling it. Ideally one where anybody that tries to cross it will be shot (e.g. three strike laws)
By the way, all of us will be the ones on the inside, trying to get out.
In the end it all boils down to two things:
A) Are man-made greenhouse gases causing an increase in average temperatures around the globe and will they continue to do so?
B) If A is true then will the future economic damage due to the raise of sea levels (most coastal cities flooded, decrease in farming land), increase in chaotic weather (more extreme storms, cyclones, sand storms) and increase desertification be offset by short term gains in keeping gas prices down?
It doesn't need to be that the case that A is proven to be true: all you need is that A is possibly true - just do a risk weighted comparison of future climate related costs if A is true versus the benefits of the cheaper average oil prices if your drill in Alaska during the time period when oil is available for extraction there.
A purely economical approach to evaluate the situation (away from the emotional arguments of the "tree huger" and the "every American is entitled to have an SUV/Light-truck" crowds) still indicates that it's a good idea to proceed as if A is true: find a way to reduce man made greenhouse gases just because, if A is true then B will have very, very high costs.
In the end it's the same reasoning why people take insurance: if its possible that "bad things happen" with "huge costs", it's probably a good idea to "pay a little" now to insure against those costs.
Drilling for oil in Alaska doesn't insure against A and B while giving very little benefits in terms of lowered average oil prices simple because the proven reserves in Alaska are not that big and wouldn't last for long - in other words, the solution you propose is likely to be something that keeps gas prices down 10% for 10 years while slightly increases the likelihood that our children will live in a world where all major coastal cities (for example London and New York) are flooded, deserts are a lot bigger, wars over resources (like fertile land and water) are widespread, famine has affected even those in rich nations (alluvial valleys are the most fertile of all land and they'll be the first to be flooded by sea water) and extreme weather events (and associated destruction) are commonplace.
To put things in terms you might understand: all that which you proposed above might result in is that you'll be able to afford driving an SUV for another 10 years while increasing the likelihood that the "American way of life" will be dead in 50.
This is something well known in the amateur pilot circles - one thing you are taught when you're studying for a Private Pilot license in Europe is that usually normal (car) gas cannot be used in piston engine aircraft (like, for example, the Cessna C150) because it contains alcohol which can damage the fuel lines (in Europe, the most common types of gas usually contain a small amount of alcohol).
That said, it's not a problem for any modern cars - blended fuel has been around more or less since lead was forbidden as an additive on gas and in Europe you need a lot of luck to find fuel with a rating of more than 92 octanes without any alcohol which is not a specialized type for aviation. Me and everybody else have been feeding our cars with the stuff and I've never had (or heard of anybody having) any problems with fuel pumps or fuel lines (actually, with my previous car of 8 years I've never had any engine problems at all).
Lets not forget the other common reason to go to war:
- Being faced with internal dissent and a real possibility of loosing power, portray another nation (or even a minority within your own nation) as "the Enemy" and go to war against them, thus distracting the masses from your own faults as leader, rallying them against somebody else and having a convenient excuse to take on "state of emergency"-like powers which then can be use against your personal internal enemies.
This technique is as widely used in tin-pot-dictatorships as in "democracies" *cough* war on terror *cough*
Actually I think that for a great MMO which can compete with WoW you have to look outside the "Bartle food groups".
Styles of gaming are not just restricted to Achievers, Explorers, Socializers and Killers.
For example Creators (those who make new things for the pleasure of making them) are neither Achievers (since creating is a process not a target), Explorers (there is nothing to explore), Socializers (creation needs not be done with others in mind) nor Killers (kill what?).
Although some of the best Single Player games (mostly the SimXXX type) cater for Creators, very few of the MMOs truly do so (the exception being Second Life and maybe the new Mission creation tools in City Of Heroes). At most, players' creative impulses are catered for slightly in things like housing and character customization.
Another type of playing that is rarely catered for is the Strategist (as in games like Civilization or RTSs). Although some Online games cater for these (like World in Conflict) I know of now MMO that does.
I think that a wider palette of gaming styles for MMO can be found by looking at what drives people in Real Life (tm) and in Single Player games.
Well, a natural evolution of something like this would be for Amazon to have an Internet radio service where music tracks are automatically selected for playing based on user preferences be it by user votes, sales, user contributed play-lists or any other options they might choose - artists that sell via this service would be able to choose if they want their music played on Amazon radio or not.
Actually, such a kind of "automated" Internet radio with a large music catalog backing it could potentially have a near infinite number of channels: just give the listeners "personal radio streams" and a large number of variables they can individual adjust to tweak them (say, music genre, Amazon review stars, year of recording, number of user playlists it is on and more).
If all you got is an LCD monitor with a natural resolution of 1280x1024 (typical for 17-inch ones) then even the cheapest of the graphics boards tested in the article can run Crysis with all settings at max at the best resolution your monitor supports.
Until recently I was running World in Conflict @ 1280x1024 with a 7800 GTS (a high-mid-range card from about 3 years ago) with no problems and it looked great.
My experience of 12 years of gaming in the PC with 3D graphics cards is that, while in the past games coming out at any given time where almost unplayable with a 2 or 3 years old mid-range graphics card, nowadays (unless your monitor is 21-inch or larger) you can keep using your 4-year-old graphics card with the greatest and latest games.
Gaming company executives try to replace content designers with users doing it for free and users stray from "the vision" ...
I work in the trading floor in an investment bank. To be able to be productive when doing design and coding I had to get active noise reduction headphones - works like a charm: the other day I even managed to get into "flow" mode.
My personal experience with using passive (no fans) water-cooling with my desktop PC at home (the setup is similar to this: http://www.silent.se/bilder/reserator1_c_p-410.jpg) is that that it's exceptionally effective.
In my setup a cylinder full of water surrounded by fins to dissipate the heat and with a pump to make water flow as the only active element have replaced a big nasty CPU heatsink with a large fan (on a heavily overclocked CPU)* and a set of fans on a single high-end graphics card of the previous generation. At an ambient temperature in the room where this is in of about 20-25C The whole thing idles at 28C and stays at around 60C with everything going on at max - considering that with everything going on at full throttle the system is using almost 400W, it's impressive how efficient it all is.
In practice, "home" water-cooling mostly just uses the water as a heat carrier to quickly move the heat around from the inside of the computer case (and it's constrained airflow) to a place where it is easier to dissipate that heat into the ambient air either with a more efficient radiator and fans (for the active systems) or with an outsized heatsink (like the one I use which has roughly 10 times the surface of the ones it replaces).
In an "industrial" deployment, said heat being carried in the water cold potentially be used/dissipated in many more ways. For example large pipes could transport the hot water coming out of a data-center to the sea or a river and let it be dissipated there (keeping a closed circuit and returning the cool water back for reuse). The actual running costs in terms of active elements for such a system are limited to the cost of running a number of large efficient water pumps that make the water flow around the circuite as opposed to most data-centers out there at the moment that use (less efficient) small fans to move the air out of the blade boxes into the room and then active refrigeration to cool down the air in the room.
* Since the point of my argument is not to show off my "virtual dick", I've moved the relevant stats down here for those that are curious on the details: CPU - Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz which is overclocked to 3.2GHz, GPU - GTS280
I'm not an UK national and I'm living in the UK (London) at the moment.
Judging from the TV, the newspapers and the people around here, I can tell you that the locals have pretty much what they deserve - the average brit is hard-drinking, unpolished and uneducated, easily fobbed by spin, entertained by shallow "celebrity news" and having really short memories. UK politics are those of appearance and of the moment - always chasing the the news that are news now, announcing grand measures while the news are hot and quietly dropping them (or setting things up in such a way that they are bound to fail in the long run) once the news have moved on.
Local politicians are deceitful, untrustworthy an often corrupt. They will say one thing one day, a different thing another day and yet another the following day and people won't even blink twice at it - they just keep on voting on the same crowd for Parliament (either Labour or Tories - same shit, different flies).
London is a rat-race of a city with bad roads, aging public transportation, lack of parking spaces, pollution and where local councils use all sorts of sneaky ways to get money out of people's pockets (Congestion charging, speed cameras for profit, expensive paid parking everywhere, resident parking licenses). Everything around here is expensive except non-specialized services which are done by uneducated emigrants that moved here mostly from the countryside in some third world country or other (the same people whose kids, born in Britain, grow up feeling that they're the bottom of the barrel, neither part of this society nor of their parent's society, and sometimes turn to ideologies like extreme Islam to find a sense of belonging).
Honestly, the only good thing about here (from my point of view) is the good contracting rates payed in finance.
That said, London is an atypical part of Great Britain and at least the English and Welsh countryside (never been to Scotland or Northern Ireland) are quite beautiful.
Funnily enough I've played BF2 on my thirties and had the same experience as you did - using experience plus tactical and strategical ability I could outscore the twitchy players which where probably little over half my age. In UT3 it was a lot harder to keep up since the game relied so much more on fast reactions and pin-point accuracy.
That said, it's perfectly possible to rule the air in BF2 either with choppers or fighter-jets when you're in your thirties as long as you have a joystick: the vehicles have momentum, so fast reactions aren't everything and you need to always be one step ahead of the machine if you want to pull-off the more dangerous moves (mostly high-speed flying and pop-ups/side strafing in confined spaces)
The whole business model of netbooks is "cheap, portable and with a long-lasting battery" - not exactly a model that leads itself in going in the direction of multi-core & "phat" graphics.
Tiny keyboards and trackballs are completely inadequate for playing games - a DS or PSP is much better for portable gaming.
In the netbook arena expect exactly the opposite move
- From x86 to the ARM architecture for significantly lower power consumption.
- Even cheaper as the price of the electronics goes further down (the "the price of a chip with the same transistor count halves every 18 months" side of Moore's law).
Such a move would play to two of the biggest the strengths of Linux (multi-architecture, low cost).
The future might very well be populated with sub-$100 netbooks for mobile internet with batteries that go for 12h without recharging (think a merge of a mobile phone and a notebook).
The OP was considering the special case of zombies.
Just to reinforce this point, consider that if other activities worked in the same way as IP everytime you took a dump, you would have to pay the plumber that installed the pipes in your house for "using his work".
Never forget that copyright is actually a government given privilege covering a sub-set of human activities. Those whose main mean of living do not involve doing activities covered by IP laws are actually being discriminated against by those laws.
He's aiming at providing a legal, well balanced way of letting people and small companies create and sell things which use iconography from modern society which is "owned" by famous-individuals / large-companies under trademark and/or copyright laws while at the same time making sure that the owners of the original IP are rewarded.
This would, for example, empower somebody to craft a clay vase with (for example) the Intel logo and sell it while:
- Not needing to upfront pay expensive lawyers to agree with Intel Corp on the use of their trademark
- Not being sued (assuming Intel Corp had made their trademark sign available under this agreement) by Intel Corp for trademark infringement.
- Pay inga percentage of the profits to Intel Corp.
- In a standardized manner, making it clear in their work that it's NOT something done by Intel Corp.
At the moment, a huge number of the icons of our culture are actually owned by big companies and things are likely to remain so unless a proper reform is done of IP laws. What the article is proposing is a way of giving society more access to those icons in a way which lets individuals create and profit from derived work, not just large corps.
One could argue that "The human body has evolved to eat some genuinely sick stuff". Then again, the human body has also evolved for us to live long enough to pass on our genes and help our progeny become independent - that's less than 30 years - anything beyond that is not a significant evolutionary advantage.
Notice how the predominance of cancer is much higher in societies where the average life expectancy is higher than 30 years old ...
I for one, would like to live a long time and be as healthy as possible during that period - hence being selective with food is important.
Basically:
If it looks like a cauliflower, a pea, broccoli or a Brussels's sprout then it probably is a cauliflower, pea, broccoli or a Brussels's sprout.
If it's mashed paste of stuff, optionally cooked or baked (like bread, hamburgers, sausages, mash potatoes) then all bets are off and anything can be mixed in.
The more processed a piece of food is, the more likely it's full of all sorts of things that won't harm you on the short term (if it outright killed you or harmed you the manufacturer would be sued and closed) but might harm you on the long term (good luck proving the link between some artificial additive that was in those hamburgers you use to eat when you were a teen and the colon cancer you got 10 years latter).
If you want good healthy food, go for fresh vegetables (and fruit, meat and fish) instead of the processed kind.
In my experience, kids are the only group of people McDonald's is friendly for.
I work on the trading floor in an Investment Bank at the moment and the level of noise around here is way smaller than in your average McDonald's store.
I suppose if you actually like shouting across the table to make yourself heard, then McDonald's is great.
How could you have missed the psychological depth of Manic Miner, a man driven to go ever further surmounting ever harder and ever more dangerous obstacles, the tragic drama of Pac Man, a caricature of a man, forever trapped in a maze pursued by unrelenting foes.
Did you not saw the deep sociological implications of the hive-like mind of the aliens in Space Invaders having unbounded persistence and yet never faltering and never deviating from their group dance.
Did your hearty not skip a beat at the drama of the ball in Pong, unable to follow a path other than that which was set by others it's destiny in the hands of two conflicting personalities.
Don't forget that Virgin Media are part of the Virgin empire which amongst other things also owns a large recording company.
They actually do all kinds of nasty things like port blocking, filtering and keeping logs on your traffic which they'll hand to any "content owner" as soon as they ask for it.
So yeah, your connection might theoretically be high speed, but in practice they will block you from using the extra speed.
This reminds me of all those facts I learned when i was a kid from reading Donald Duck ...
There was supposed to be a second control group covering other male contraception methods - such as neutering. That's why a third of the test subjects walked away.
The taxes are on their profit - roughly, it's the difference between their cost of the products/services they sell and what they get payed for those products/services.
If, due to taxes, they increase the amount they charge for those products/services, everything else being the same, their profits would go up and their taxes will go up too.
In practice, all companies already try to have consumers pay the most they are willing to pay, so they don't really have the room to increase prices (if they did, they would've done it already to maximize profits) - any increase in prices would just drive buyers away to the competition or drive them off from buying the product/service.
Taxes on companies barely affect consumers (since if they raise prices they loose customers) - instead they affect shareholders (since dividends are usually issued from whatever money is left after taxes) and CxO income (since they cannot justify quite such high salaries/bonuses anymore).