It's not in the US, for starters (though granted that's a complex of 5 circa 170MW stations). Neither is the largest single plant in the world in the USA either, that's in the Philippines. Uncle Sam clocks in at number 6, with Salton Sea - which I think the parent post is referring to. The US does have the largest total installed power, however, at around 3GW.
Salton Sea itself has a pretty toxic seabed, with arsenic, selenium, DDT and lead amongst other things. It's right on top of the San Andreas fault and has been of environmental concern long before we started building geothermal stations. Oh, and it's evaporating.
Pretty much all geothermal power plants simply dump the water back where they found it, so the vast majority of the contaminants go back underground and don't cause any additional problems. Dissolved gas from the steam can cause some problems, but similarly you can either filter/extract this or re-inject it underground.
As for cleaning turbines, there are efforts by CalEnergy to extract some of the more useful materials from the waste water, like zinc. Additional benefits are the materials being very pure - commercial grade - so you don't need to waste more energy on refinement. Arsenic, it's nasty stuff, but surely more easily stored than nuclear waste for example (not to open that can of worms)? You just put it in big sealed vats and hide it away, or you export it for use in industrial processes, for example as a dopant for the semiconductor industry. I think the effort of cleaning/switching the blades out every once in a while is worth it, personally.
You'll learn to write good reports with practice, two or three years of a degree does it for most people. Far, far more important than proposal writing is presentation. You can write the best statement of purpose in the world, but unless you can deliver it to the interviewer without sending them to sleep, it's worthless. English would help, but it's not really the right sort of training. It's very good if you want to know how to critique a text and structure your arguments, however unless you are really interested in some quite obscure literature, I would give it a miss. You would get more out of taking a heavy CS/Maths/Eng route and joining a debating society.
If you want to improve your written skills, buy some books and start reading. Most of the people I know who can't write very well also don't really read anything or they only read tabloids. And by reading I mean novels, not just dry, verbose text books.
Didn't Hotel Dusk do something similar? The way the game played probably facilitated this, but I seem to remember getting occasional flashbacks to the previous bits of the story.
Mostly I find that games like Oblivion/Morrowind/Fallout (notice the Bethesda pattern here?) with good journal systems work for me. That way I can glance at my active quests and see a quick history of what I was supposed to be doing. There is nothing more infuriating than picking up a game a month down the line and not having the foggiest as to where to go. This also solves the timeline issue mentioned a few posts down the thread. All your journal entries are sortable by time or quest so you can see what you did right from the very beginning.
As for grinding, if you have to grind for hours, that's poor balancing. The best role playing games (looking at Golden Sun, Mother here) have it so that you can *just* beat the next boss if you're a bit smart and know how to play. Otherwise you need to fight a few more people, level up a bit and so on. If you have to do that for every single boss then it becomes a chore and makes the game boring. Obviously you don't want to go the opposite way and make the game so easy that no one has any trouble getting past the bosses. There are also lots of tricks developers can use like placing a few easy challenges after the boss to give you more confidence. Pokemon was a pretty good example of good grinding, or at least addictive grinding - up until you got to level 70 and it became so dull beating the same people again and again to scrape to LVL100.
But compared to the current gen and especially the Wii this thing ought to be a monster but then of course the question becomes "Will anybody make serious games for the Wii?" since Nintendo has been courting the casual gamer crowd for so long. I just don't picture the loyal Nintendo fans really caring that much about Crysis, it just isn't a Nintendo style game experience.
Return to the Gamecube era? Wasn't too long ago that you could buy a console, get the best of the cross-platform releases and still enjoy the Nintendo classics.
Most of the people I know with a Wii have multiple consoles or a gaming computer. They still play "serious" games, but the Wii just isn't powerful enough to run them. If it could, I'm sure no self-respecting publisher would think twice about pushing their games onto a platform with around 80 million consoles.
Ryanair have made inroads because it's a British/Irish company and oddly enough we're one of very few island nations in Europe. As a result, trains to the continent are a lot more expensive than trains within the continent. So it's no surprise that a budget airline is popular. I know people in most of the countries in the EU and all of them would take the train over flying anywhere on the mainland. The US has the downside of being huge, but the distance between, large neighbouring cities isn't that much. Say, New York - Boston or New York - Washington, both under 250 miles which is well under two hours by modern electric rail. Amtrak quote around $200 and over 3 hours for a fast service. For comparison, we're bringing in a high speed rail line from London to Edinburgh (around 400 miles) that will do the job in just over 2 hours. The tickets will be steep, but I imagine an advance ticket will cost £50-60.
Flying in itself is highly unprofitable. On the average Easyjet flight, only two seats are making a profit (source was an ATC manager, but it's likely to be true). The rest is made up flogging you perfume in duty free, exorbitant check in/baggage charges, overpriced sandwiches and car rentals/health insurance. Ryanair are god-awful to fly with and most of the time it's cheaper to fly with a reputable airline after all the hidden costs. Not to mention they rarely, if ever, fly to the airport you need to go to.
There is nothing really similar to Ryanair, there are many budget airlines and imitators, but nothing comes close to their abrasiveness.
WMAP, Herschel and Planck are currently there. It's a useful spot for deep space monitoring because the Earth is always partially blocking radiation from the sun, and it [L2] is always in the same place relative to the Earth. Although Wikpedia doesn't say it, the L2 point is also the least energy intensive route to exit a 2-body system (neglecting doing things like slingshots). I would imagine that this is the reason that L2 was chosen rather than out of some deep interest in the point itself.
Either that or they're kamikazi-ing into our space telescopes...
I actually had a go at this a while ago. Orange UK ran a competition where you had to guess the amount of money (single denomination coins) in a tube. People were allowed one guess a day, to be posted on the relevant Twitted feed with a certain hashtag. The correct guess, or the closest to it after a number of days won the contents of the tube. The amount was somewhere in the hundreds of pounds.
I tried two main methods to this, the first was to make an educated guess. Certain clues like the height of the tube (including base), etc were given so it was fairly easy to guess it was a standard 2m acrylic tube. The diameter was guessed based on the high res picture they gave - again, standard diamater found by Google. Packing efficiency I had to do manually with a glass and £30 worth of ten pence coins from the bank which got a ballpark estimate of £460.
Secondly I devised a way to farm people's guesses and then base a more educated guess from what they were saying. I wrote the script in PHP, automated with jQuery, running on a virtual server on my laptop which parsed the RSS feed of that hashtag, extracted each guess and stored them in a database with the timestamp so things weren't collected twice. A quick and dirty page worked out and displayed a number of averages and so on. I had a number of friends who were each given a guess by me to post each day; I offered a small fraction of the bounty, you understand. After I located where I thought the average was, I worked out where to guess (either side of other people) such that if the total was within a certain range, we would definitely win. The strategy was to pick prices spiralling outwards from the chosen average, so that over time the range stayed continuous, but increased steadily. Obviously some guesses were made filling in gaps where other annoying members of the public had chosen!
The results were pretty interesting. People guessed over an extremely wide spread, guesses ranging from the thousands to the hundreds. Each day a new clue was given, including two clues that provided upper and lower bounds on the total. These were the results:
http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/2407/screenshot20110518at220.png, x-axis is # guesses, y-axis is in pounds. Error bars were estimated (not sure why they're on there tbh), the blue line is the simple average and the black line is a moving average of 10 guesses. Removed are guesses that were clearly mistakes, £2221 reposted as £222.1 for instance and duplicate guesses.
Average (all): £480.22
Average (£0-755.40): £406.12
Average (£100-755.40, narrowing averaging range to known limits): £419.18
So, going on that, I'd covered between about £450 and £520. Unfortunately the actual result was £380 - bummer. The problem is, of course, knowing where to take your average. I'm not a statistician, and while I deal with a lot of statistical distribution, error analysis and confidence intervals, this isn't my strong point. I chose to discard stupid entries (in the thousands of pounds) and that predicted the result to within £20; this works to a point, but how far do you go, do you discard incorrect low prices too? Anecdotal evidence says you should go for a total average - hence my bets around £480.
As to crowd wisdom, it was interesting being able to see the guesses where they came in and also how varied they were. The standard dev was huge, so I didn't pay much notice to it - something like £300. Clearly some people were being influenced, and as clues were given the results changed accordingly. TFA seems accurate then, but it was an interesting experiment and I nearly won 400 quid from Orange!
You'd think so, but I'm not sure it would be a problem.
Lego has fairly simple shapes - one if its many strengths - but you need loads of them to make decent structures. There may be a market producing spare bricks when yours break or if you lose one little block in your kit. I don't think I've ever broken a Lego brick, but I have lost lots over the years. Simply for convenience that might win, but I imagine that Lego will still be cheaper when bought as a kit. Lego is moulded and using a very specific process which is why each brick fits perfectly - you need a relatively high level of precision to print the smooth sides and connectors. It's a combination of high temperature and high pressure which means you get a good brick every time and their defect rate is supposedly around 20 per million bricks. Really, you're never going to achieve that sort of success with a desktop printer.
Tabletop games are on the opposite end, they don't require any fancy colours when printed, but the models are generally fairly well detailed. Detail means expensive and honestly you'd be better off just making a mould of one of each of the standard figurines and then casting more yourself.
So, it's feasible that this will allow people to produce custom parts for their Lego sets and a new breed of Skaven, but realistically Lego and Games Workshop have no need to worry just yet.
I never mocked or opposed Chile or Cuba? When did I ever say that?
To my shores? I live in Britain, thank-you very much and whenever I've needed it, the healthcare system was responsive and gave the desired results.
The NHS has a lot of problems, largely due to managers rather than doctors running a healthcare operation and doing a pretty poor job of it. It didn't help that Labour poured money at it for years with minimal effect. Hopefully the recent Con-Lib plans to shake things up a bit will help, but I haven't got high hopes.
This is beside the point, you totally missed the point of my post (by the sound of your response you didn't actually bother to read it) which was: if you don't pay tax in an economy where public services rely on it, you don't deserve to receive those services.
In some countries, like my own sunny Britain, those taxes pay for your healthcare. They also, largely, keep the streets free of crime, citizens educated and generally stops the nation from grinding to a halt. Although people often complain about rich people, it's those rich people who prop up the poor. Anyone who doesn't pay tax should take a long hard think about what that means. And I mean tax evaders, rather than tax avoiders which is perfectly reasonable.
The world over, you get what you pay for. Some countries have higher taxes, but you pay for less public services (cf. Scandinavia) and some have lower taxes, but you pay for a lot more (cf. America). It evens out and in both cases, you actually pay the same - the difference is who you pay.
Public services in Western countries are usually the biggest items on a nation's budget, often much higher than the usually lauded defence budgets.
Essentially, if you don't pay tax, don't expect the police to come when someone decides to burgle your home, don't expect the fire brigade to come when your poolhouse burns down and don't expect to drive on a single smooth road, the list goes on.
I can only think of something where you might want to input something ridiculously large like an image (or similar matrix of information with millions of points) so you could perform statistical analysis on a per-pixel basis. The pixel example would be for an image, but if you wanted to store something like, say, some parameter at a grid point and you wanted to compare those parameters between a load of different grids. It seems a very laborious way of doing things, but maybe if each point is storing a lot of data, it's easier to have a database where you can run "SELECT row1000col2000 FROM Things" (where row1000col2000 contains a blob or something) and get a long list instead of comparing a load of arrays.
In the example of an image, you could feasibly run into hundreds of millions of columns (assuming you want to store your data in one table and not a table per comparison object and of course for some obscure reason you're storing each pixel in a field) with astronomical cameras.
Failing that, never underestimate government and/or military databases. Heck, even someone like Google could probably find a use for a 2 billion column table.
You're forgetting that although the current research into the Standard Model (et al) hasn't given us much directly in the way of tangible technology, the getting there has spun off a lot of extremely important technology. The WWW is an obvious one, as is an increased knowledge of superconducting materials. We also use particle accelerators for medical purposes, synchrotron radiation (mid 1940's) is incredibly useful for irradiating things and we've got to the point where we can scale the technology down to a level where you don't need a warehouse to perform experiments.
CERN brought us advances in grid computing as well as the aforementioned WWW and continues to fuel this area of research. There are also dedicated research groups in CERN who deal with medical applications for Hadrons.
Similar arguments apply for NASA - oh, what has the human space flight program ever done for the world - well, nothing if you take it at face value, but if you look at the technological developments required to actually achieve what we have, they're worth a lot more than we paid to send astronauts into space.
This is all ignoring the fact that we spend far, far, far, far more money on the defence budget (speaking as a UK citizen, the US is similarly and more disproportionate) which again, churns out some decent research, but also utterly dwarfs the budget for say, the Tevatron.
Fair point, kudos for Microsoft for poor naming convention.
You can usually save a bit of cash getting an OEM copy. The Home and Student copy (just they key) in the UK costs £75 inc VAT which isn't outrageous. 99% of people don't need Access or Publisher at home and can get by with Exchange for their emails, or even Windows Live Mail. Of course people use Thunderbird, etc as well.
Office Pro 2010 is around £160, key only, which is still a good deal.
Assuming you don't need to upgrade office at all, unless they bring out a new file format, I'm happy to pay £150 for it.
Prices from www.scan.co.uk
I remembering Microsoft distributing Outlook 98 for free. Now you don't even get Outlook with the Home and Student edition, but have to fork over some major cash.
The problem is that people do so, instead of using an e-mail client instead.
No, you ALL miss the point. How are you going to explain having a HDD or partition full of "garbage"? Nobody with half a brain will believe you there's nothing encrypted in the noise.
Both Mac and I presume Linux both have options within the operating system to overwrite free space with random data. I have my Empty Trash settings in OS X set to secure erase things when I delete them. One would presume this is filling up the empty space on my drive with random data. Windows as far as I'm aware does not have this facility (at least it's not as well publicised) although there are plenty of free applications that will clean up your free space with Gutmann passes, etc.
Were I to be questioned about it, I could provide a believable and - for now - truthful alibi. I don't do it because I have anything to hide, but every now and again I blam the free space on my disk just to make sure there's no personal information (I've needed to make scans of my passport and other ID documents which I no longer require, for instance) that can be recovered in the event that I sell the laptop or it gets stolen.
To sum up, it's plausible to have random data on your hard drive and it's perfectly deniable. What would be suspicious is a file on its own that appears to contain only random data.
I was under the impression that plausible deniability involved encrypting something twice, providing the password to unlock the first layer and having a hidden layer underneath that you could keep secret, assuming that your interrogators would not think that you'd hidden more. Naturally the problem with this is that you'd need to have something pretty damn good in the first layer to provide the illusion that there was nothing else.
As for steganography, the key is storing the data in plain sight, is it not? So you would need to store the data in such a way that even if your attacker can open your JPEG and analyse its binary "code" form, it is not possible to determine that there is hidden data there.
The trouble with storing random data is that it needs to be statistically random. Consider the most basic, a substitution cipher. It is easy to attack since the frequency of letters such as E or S occur often within the English language and you can perform a frequency attack on it to try to break it. More advanced encryption methods try to mask this and also to attempt to mask any patterns that may occur during the encryption process. The last thing you want is for someone to be able to run your file through some code that has been trained (say using a neural net or another machine learning method) to identify patterns present in data encrypted using your encryption algorithm. Programs like TrueCrypt have been designed specifically to address this problem and attempt to minimise traces of the encryption algorithm itself (like not leaving behind headers, for instance).
If I had to hide anything, I would just encrypt it and stash it inside some program's DLL directory (install the program at the same time you encrypt the data to avoid obvious time differences). If it's an obscure application like an old game, who's to argue that that file shouldn't be there? Hell, use your steganography technique and hide your data inside a game save file - at worst you'll try to open it and it'll appear corrupt in the game - at best you could be sneaky and store your secret data within the game's world somehow.
That's not the whole story. The actual size of the HST sensor is something like 45mm square (or maybe diagonally).
Hubble takes amazing pictures for a few reasons.
1. It's got an 8 foot (2.4m) collecting mirror, so its light gathering prowess is amazing compared to normal cameras - like most telescopes. This means that the sensor is only effective because Hubble can direct so much light onto it.
2. It tracks the sky - like motorised ground based telescopes it is incredibly good at pointing in the same place for extended periods of time. So it can take longer exposures to get more light in. The Deep Field was taken with exposure times of roughly 1200 seconds, for instance. I assume it could expose for longer if it was at a Lagrange point and didn't have to contend with orbiting the Earth.
3. It's in space.. so there is very little in the way of light pollution (besides the sun!) and no atmospheric diffraction limit.
Presumably they also make "panoramas" of the images to make them appear larger in print. The famous "Pillars of Heaven" shot is certainly not one image.
It's not only Adobe, it's the website developers themselves. The benefit that Android has is that it can view websites that are flash enabled, optimised or not. If the websites are optimised then there's the potential for some really great rich content. As it stands, the problem is not necessarily that Flash is bad (even if it's bloated as hell), it's that people are trying to view websites that aren't designed for mobile screens. The difference is, when a company brings out a flash page optimised for mobile devices, Android will be able to read it and IPhone OS won't.
People don't complain about viewing websites that aren't designed for phones because nowadays the designers have implemented a handheld version of the stylesheet. With Flash there simply hasn't been any demand for it, and as more people use Flash 10.1 on their phones, I predict that this problem should go away (mostly).
Slashdot Mirror
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Cerro_Prieto_Geothermal_Power_Station
It's not in the US, for starters (though granted that's a complex of 5 circa 170MW stations). Neither is the largest single plant in the world in the USA either, that's in the Philippines. Uncle Sam clocks in at number 6, with Salton Sea - which I think the parent post is referring to. The US does have the largest total installed power, however, at around 3GW.
Salton Sea itself has a pretty toxic seabed, with arsenic, selenium, DDT and lead amongst other things. It's right on top of the San Andreas fault and has been of environmental concern long before we started building geothermal stations. Oh, and it's evaporating.
Pretty much all geothermal power plants simply dump the water back where they found it, so the vast majority of the contaminants go back underground and don't cause any additional problems. Dissolved gas from the steam can cause some problems, but similarly you can either filter/extract this or re-inject it underground.
As for cleaning turbines, there are efforts by CalEnergy to extract some of the more useful materials from the waste water, like zinc. Additional benefits are the materials being very pure - commercial grade - so you don't need to waste more energy on refinement. Arsenic, it's nasty stuff, but surely more easily stored than nuclear waste for example (not to open that can of worms)? You just put it in big sealed vats and hide it away, or you export it for use in industrial processes, for example as a dopant for the semiconductor industry. I think the effort of cleaning/switching the blades out every once in a while is worth it, personally.
All the links from TFA lead to full papers (caveat, I'm on a University network, but arxiv should be accessible anywhere):
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1107.0607v1
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1107.1276v1
http://warp.rice.edu/trac/attachment/wiki/Asilomar2010_FullDuplex/MDAsilomar2010.pdf
http://warp.rice.edu/trac/attachment/wiki/Asilomar2011_FullDuplex/Everett11FullDuplexDirectionalDiveristy.pdf
At the risk of being a hypocrite... :)
You'll learn to write good reports with practice, two or three years of a degree does it for most people. Far, far more important than proposal writing is presentation. You can write the best statement of purpose in the world, but unless you can deliver it to the interviewer without sending them to sleep, it's worthless. English would help, but it's not really the right sort of training. It's very good if you want to know how to critique a text and structure your arguments, however unless you are really interested in some quite obscure literature, I would give it a miss. You would get more out of taking a heavy CS/Maths/Eng route and joining a debating society.
If you want to improve your written skills, buy some books and start reading. Most of the people I know who can't write very well also don't really read anything or they only read tabloids. And by reading I mean novels, not just dry, verbose text books.
Arguing on the internet helps too.
I guess it depends which syllable you stress. One you might find in a deli, the other's a type of sticky boat. Your choice...
Googondola? Sounds like a type of cheese.
Didn't Hotel Dusk do something similar? The way the game played probably facilitated this, but I seem to remember getting occasional flashbacks to the previous bits of the story.
Mostly I find that games like Oblivion/Morrowind/Fallout (notice the Bethesda pattern here?) with good journal systems work for me. That way I can glance at my active quests and see a quick history of what I was supposed to be doing. There is nothing more infuriating than picking up a game a month down the line and not having the foggiest as to where to go. This also solves the timeline issue mentioned a few posts down the thread. All your journal entries are sortable by time or quest so you can see what you did right from the very beginning.
As for grinding, if you have to grind for hours, that's poor balancing. The best role playing games (looking at Golden Sun, Mother here) have it so that you can *just* beat the next boss if you're a bit smart and know how to play. Otherwise you need to fight a few more people, level up a bit and so on. If you have to do that for every single boss then it becomes a chore and makes the game boring. Obviously you don't want to go the opposite way and make the game so easy that no one has any trouble getting past the bosses. There are also lots of tricks developers can use like placing a few easy challenges after the boss to give you more confidence. Pokemon was a pretty good example of good grinding, or at least addictive grinding - up until you got to level 70 and it became so dull beating the same people again and again to scrape to LVL100.
But compared to the current gen and especially the Wii this thing ought to be a monster but then of course the question becomes "Will anybody make serious games for the Wii?" since Nintendo has been courting the casual gamer crowd for so long. I just don't picture the loyal Nintendo fans really caring that much about Crysis, it just isn't a Nintendo style game experience.
Return to the Gamecube era? Wasn't too long ago that you could buy a console, get the best of the cross-platform releases and still enjoy the Nintendo classics. Most of the people I know with a Wii have multiple consoles or a gaming computer. They still play "serious" games, but the Wii just isn't powerful enough to run them. If it could, I'm sure no self-respecting publisher would think twice about pushing their games onto a platform with around 80 million consoles.
Ryanair have made inroads because it's a British/Irish company and oddly enough we're one of very few island nations in Europe. As a result, trains to the continent are a lot more expensive than trains within the continent. So it's no surprise that a budget airline is popular. I know people in most of the countries in the EU and all of them would take the train over flying anywhere on the mainland. The US has the downside of being huge, but the distance between, large neighbouring cities isn't that much. Say, New York - Boston or New York - Washington, both under 250 miles which is well under two hours by modern electric rail. Amtrak quote around $200 and over 3 hours for a fast service. For comparison, we're bringing in a high speed rail line from London to Edinburgh (around 400 miles) that will do the job in just over 2 hours. The tickets will be steep, but I imagine an advance ticket will cost £50-60.
Flying in itself is highly unprofitable. On the average Easyjet flight, only two seats are making a profit (source was an ATC manager, but it's likely to be true). The rest is made up flogging you perfume in duty free, exorbitant check in/baggage charges, overpriced sandwiches and car rentals/health insurance. Ryanair are god-awful to fly with and most of the time it's cheaper to fly with a reputable airline after all the hidden costs. Not to mention they rarely, if ever, fly to the airport you need to go to.
There is nothing really similar to Ryanair, there are many budget airlines and imitators, but nothing comes close to their abrasiveness.
In Soviet Russia, ATM withdraws you!
WMAP, Herschel and Planck are currently there. It's a useful spot for deep space monitoring because the Earth is always partially blocking radiation from the sun, and it [L2] is always in the same place relative to the Earth. Although Wikpedia doesn't say it, the L2 point is also the least energy intensive route to exit a 2-body system (neglecting doing things like slingshots). I would imagine that this is the reason that L2 was chosen rather than out of some deep interest in the point itself. Either that or they're kamikazi-ing into our space telescopes...
I think Apple's reluctant reaction to the recent malware outbreak shows that they don't give a wet slap where people download software from.
I actually had a go at this a while ago. Orange UK ran a competition where you had to guess the amount of money (single denomination coins) in a tube. People were allowed one guess a day, to be posted on the relevant Twitted feed with a certain hashtag. The correct guess, or the closest to it after a number of days won the contents of the tube. The amount was somewhere in the hundreds of pounds.
I tried two main methods to this, the first was to make an educated guess. Certain clues like the height of the tube (including base), etc were given so it was fairly easy to guess it was a standard 2m acrylic tube. The diameter was guessed based on the high res picture they gave - again, standard diamater found by Google. Packing efficiency I had to do manually with a glass and £30 worth of ten pence coins from the bank which got a ballpark estimate of £460.
Secondly I devised a way to farm people's guesses and then base a more educated guess from what they were saying. I wrote the script in PHP, automated with jQuery, running on a virtual server on my laptop which parsed the RSS feed of that hashtag, extracted each guess and stored them in a database with the timestamp so things weren't collected twice. A quick and dirty page worked out and displayed a number of averages and so on. I had a number of friends who were each given a guess by me to post each day; I offered a small fraction of the bounty, you understand. After I located where I thought the average was, I worked out where to guess (either side of other people) such that if the total was within a certain range, we would definitely win. The strategy was to pick prices spiralling outwards from the chosen average, so that over time the range stayed continuous, but increased steadily. Obviously some guesses were made filling in gaps where other annoying members of the public had chosen!
The results were pretty interesting. People guessed over an extremely wide spread, guesses ranging from the thousands to the hundreds. Each day a new clue was given, including two clues that provided upper and lower bounds on the total. These were the results:
http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/2407/screenshot20110518at220.png, x-axis is # guesses, y-axis is in pounds. Error bars were estimated (not sure why they're on there tbh), the blue line is the simple average and the black line is a moving average of 10 guesses. Removed are guesses that were clearly mistakes, £2221 reposted as £222.1 for instance and duplicate guesses.
Average (all): £480.22
Average (£0-755.40): £406.12
Average (£100-755.40, narrowing averaging range to known limits): £419.18
So, going on that, I'd covered between about £450 and £520. Unfortunately the actual result was £380 - bummer. The problem is, of course, knowing where to take your average. I'm not a statistician, and while I deal with a lot of statistical distribution, error analysis and confidence intervals, this isn't my strong point. I chose to discard stupid entries (in the thousands of pounds) and that predicted the result to within £20; this works to a point, but how far do you go, do you discard incorrect low prices too? Anecdotal evidence says you should go for a total average - hence my bets around £480.
As to crowd wisdom, it was interesting being able to see the guesses where they came in and also how varied they were. The standard dev was huge, so I didn't pay much notice to it - something like £300. Clearly some people were being influenced, and as clues were given the results changed accordingly. TFA seems accurate then, but it was an interesting experiment and I nearly won 400 quid from Orange!
You'd think so, but I'm not sure it would be a problem.
Lego has fairly simple shapes - one if its many strengths - but you need loads of them to make decent structures. There may be a market producing spare bricks when yours break or if you lose one little block in your kit. I don't think I've ever broken a Lego brick, but I have lost lots over the years. Simply for convenience that might win, but I imagine that Lego will still be cheaper when bought as a kit. Lego is moulded and using a very specific process which is why each brick fits perfectly - you need a relatively high level of precision to print the smooth sides and connectors. It's a combination of high temperature and high pressure which means you get a good brick every time and their defect rate is supposedly around 20 per million bricks. Really, you're never going to achieve that sort of success with a desktop printer.
Tabletop games are on the opposite end, they don't require any fancy colours when printed, but the models are generally fairly well detailed. Detail means expensive and honestly you'd be better off just making a mould of one of each of the standard figurines and then casting more yourself.
So, it's feasible that this will allow people to produce custom parts for their Lego sets and a new breed of Skaven, but realistically Lego and Games Workshop have no need to worry just yet.
What about something like Ferric Chloride (PCB Etchant), easy to obtain and you could simply sponge it over the disc surface?
I never mocked or opposed Chile or Cuba? When did I ever say that? To my shores? I live in Britain, thank-you very much and whenever I've needed it, the healthcare system was responsive and gave the desired results. The NHS has a lot of problems, largely due to managers rather than doctors running a healthcare operation and doing a pretty poor job of it. It didn't help that Labour poured money at it for years with minimal effect. Hopefully the recent Con-Lib plans to shake things up a bit will help, but I haven't got high hopes. This is beside the point, you totally missed the point of my post (by the sound of your response you didn't actually bother to read it) which was: if you don't pay tax in an economy where public services rely on it, you don't deserve to receive those services.
In some countries, like my own sunny Britain, those taxes pay for your healthcare. They also, largely, keep the streets free of crime, citizens educated and generally stops the nation from grinding to a halt. Although people often complain about rich people, it's those rich people who prop up the poor. Anyone who doesn't pay tax should take a long hard think about what that means. And I mean tax evaders, rather than tax avoiders which is perfectly reasonable.
The world over, you get what you pay for. Some countries have higher taxes, but you pay for less public services (cf. Scandinavia) and some have lower taxes, but you pay for a lot more (cf. America). It evens out and in both cases, you actually pay the same - the difference is who you pay.
Public services in Western countries are usually the biggest items on a nation's budget, often much higher than the usually lauded defence budgets.
Essentially, if you don't pay tax, don't expect the police to come when someone decides to burgle your home, don't expect the fire brigade to come when your poolhouse burns down and don't expect to drive on a single smooth road, the list goes on.
I can only think of something where you might want to input something ridiculously large like an image (or similar matrix of information with millions of points) so you could perform statistical analysis on a per-pixel basis. The pixel example would be for an image, but if you wanted to store something like, say, some parameter at a grid point and you wanted to compare those parameters between a load of different grids. It seems a very laborious way of doing things, but maybe if each point is storing a lot of data, it's easier to have a database where you can run "SELECT row1000col2000 FROM Things" (where row1000col2000 contains a blob or something) and get a long list instead of comparing a load of arrays.
In the example of an image, you could feasibly run into hundreds of millions of columns (assuming you want to store your data in one table and not a table per comparison object and of course for some obscure reason you're storing each pixel in a field) with astronomical cameras.
Failing that, never underestimate government and/or military databases. Heck, even someone like Google could probably find a use for a 2 billion column table.
Also, this: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/science/benefits/
You're forgetting that although the current research into the Standard Model (et al) hasn't given us much directly in the way of tangible technology, the getting there has spun off a lot of extremely important technology. The WWW is an obvious one, as is an increased knowledge of superconducting materials. We also use particle accelerators for medical purposes, synchrotron radiation (mid 1940's) is incredibly useful for irradiating things and we've got to the point where we can scale the technology down to a level where you don't need a warehouse to perform experiments.
CERN brought us advances in grid computing as well as the aforementioned WWW and continues to fuel this area of research. There are also dedicated research groups in CERN who deal with medical applications for Hadrons.
Similar arguments apply for NASA - oh, what has the human space flight program ever done for the world - well, nothing if you take it at face value, but if you look at the technological developments required to actually achieve what we have, they're worth a lot more than we paid to send astronauts into space.
This is all ignoring the fact that we spend far, far, far, far more money on the defence budget (speaking as a UK citizen, the US is similarly and more disproportionate) which again, churns out some decent research, but also utterly dwarfs the budget for say, the Tevatron.
Fair point, kudos for Microsoft for poor naming convention. You can usually save a bit of cash getting an OEM copy. The Home and Student copy (just they key) in the UK costs £75 inc VAT which isn't outrageous. 99% of people don't need Access or Publisher at home and can get by with Exchange for their emails, or even Windows Live Mail. Of course people use Thunderbird, etc as well. Office Pro 2010 is around £160, key only, which is still a good deal. Assuming you don't need to upgrade office at all, unless they bring out a new file format, I'm happy to pay £150 for it. Prices from www.scan.co.uk
I remembering Microsoft distributing Outlook 98 for free. Now you don't even get Outlook with the Home and Student edition, but have to fork over some major cash. The problem is that people do so, instead of using an e-mail client instead.
http://www.microsoft.com/student/office/en-us/default.aspx Erm... you do get Outlook with the student version...
Both Mac and I presume Linux both have options within the operating system to overwrite free space with random data. I have my Empty Trash settings in OS X set to secure erase things when I delete them. One would presume this is filling up the empty space on my drive with random data. Windows as far as I'm aware does not have this facility (at least it's not as well publicised) although there are plenty of free applications that will clean up your free space with Gutmann passes, etc.
Were I to be questioned about it, I could provide a believable and - for now - truthful alibi. I don't do it because I have anything to hide, but every now and again I blam the free space on my disk just to make sure there's no personal information (I've needed to make scans of my passport and other ID documents which I no longer require, for instance) that can be recovered in the event that I sell the laptop or it gets stolen.
To sum up, it's plausible to have random data on your hard drive and it's perfectly deniable. What would be suspicious is a file on its own that appears to contain only random data.
I was under the impression that plausible deniability involved encrypting something twice, providing the password to unlock the first layer and having a hidden layer underneath that you could keep secret, assuming that your interrogators would not think that you'd hidden more. Naturally the problem with this is that you'd need to have something pretty damn good in the first layer to provide the illusion that there was nothing else.
As for steganography, the key is storing the data in plain sight, is it not? So you would need to store the data in such a way that even if your attacker can open your JPEG and analyse its binary "code" form, it is not possible to determine that there is hidden data there.
The trouble with storing random data is that it needs to be statistically random. Consider the most basic, a substitution cipher. It is easy to attack since the frequency of letters such as E or S occur often within the English language and you can perform a frequency attack on it to try to break it. More advanced encryption methods try to mask this and also to attempt to mask any patterns that may occur during the encryption process. The last thing you want is for someone to be able to run your file through some code that has been trained (say using a neural net or another machine learning method) to identify patterns present in data encrypted using your encryption algorithm. Programs like TrueCrypt have been designed specifically to address this problem and attempt to minimise traces of the encryption algorithm itself (like not leaving behind headers, for instance).
If I had to hide anything, I would just encrypt it and stash it inside some program's DLL directory (install the program at the same time you encrypt the data to avoid obvious time differences). If it's an obscure application like an old game, who's to argue that that file shouldn't be there? Hell, use your steganography technique and hide your data inside a game save file - at worst you'll try to open it and it'll appear corrupt in the game - at best you could be sneaky and store your secret data within the game's world somehow.
That's not the whole story. The actual size of the HST sensor is something like 45mm square (or maybe diagonally). Hubble takes amazing pictures for a few reasons. 1. It's got an 8 foot (2.4m) collecting mirror, so its light gathering prowess is amazing compared to normal cameras - like most telescopes. This means that the sensor is only effective because Hubble can direct so much light onto it. 2. It tracks the sky - like motorised ground based telescopes it is incredibly good at pointing in the same place for extended periods of time. So it can take longer exposures to get more light in. The Deep Field was taken with exposure times of roughly 1200 seconds, for instance. I assume it could expose for longer if it was at a Lagrange point and didn't have to contend with orbiting the Earth. 3. It's in space.. so there is very little in the way of light pollution (besides the sun!) and no atmospheric diffraction limit. Presumably they also make "panoramas" of the images to make them appear larger in print. The famous "Pillars of Heaven" shot is certainly not one image.
It's not only Adobe, it's the website developers themselves. The benefit that Android has is that it can view websites that are flash enabled, optimised or not. If the websites are optimised then there's the potential for some really great rich content. As it stands, the problem is not necessarily that Flash is bad (even if it's bloated as hell), it's that people are trying to view websites that aren't designed for mobile screens. The difference is, when a company brings out a flash page optimised for mobile devices, Android will be able to read it and IPhone OS won't.
People don't complain about viewing websites that aren't designed for phones because nowadays the designers have implemented a handheld version of the stylesheet. With Flash there simply hasn't been any demand for it, and as more people use Flash 10.1 on their phones, I predict that this problem should go away (mostly).