Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome
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Firefox 8.0 Released
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I am also getting crashes since version 6, never really got them before. Apart from that, I'm typically having to kill plugin-container.exe at least once a day to unfreeze Firefox. I wonder if I screwed up my profile somehow to deserve all this. The problem is that I don't want to lose all the saved passwords in my old profile. Is there a way to import just those into a new profile and start clean?
Yeah, in the US, we waste our talented youth by letting them get lured from STEM into banking. Sure they become bazillionaires, but their talent doesn't do a single valuable thing for society.
If it's 880 square kilometers, it means it won't melt for a damn long time, and once it separates from Antarctica it won't be covered by all the treaties that forbid development there. It will just be a big chunk of ice in international waters. If it managed to float to a warmer place, it would actually make a pretty nice platform for a small country. I wouldn't move there, but that's because I don't like libertarians, not because I don't like ice.
So it appears that it's quite common that engineers and scientists run foreign countries. It's only we Americans who find this noteworthy, because our country is almost always run by lawyers - and I don't just mean our presidents. Sixty of our 100 senators are former lawyers. I can't help but think that lawyers have a very different approach to leadership than do scientists and engineers, and the thought doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. I'm not saying that lawyers can't be good and wise leaders. But what I am saying is that when government becomes an institution of lawyers, they inevitably import the institutional culture of lawyerism into government. Maybe that's why their governing feels more like a shifting battle of prosecution v. defense (though the sides occasionally change) where most of the energy is devoted to matters of procedure, rhetoric, strategy and "winning" rather than just doing the right thing for the country. Lawyers are people who are used to working on behalf of paying clients, and they must defend those clients to the hilt, not caring about whether they are actually right or wrong. That's as it should be. Now, of course the lawyers who move into government will tell you that "the American people" are their new clients, but in effect, I think it's the paying interest groups who buy our governing lawyers. So government is a battle of interest groups, each armed with a paid group of politician-lawyer-advocates who are expected to not worry about who's actually right. Their job is to win, or at least to keep "the other side" from winning. My foreign friends often ask my why the US only has two viable political parties. Could it be that because in the courtroom there are only two sides, and our politicians couldn't wrap their heads around a system that works differently? I feel like when the history of the decline of our country is written, something like this will be a part of the analysis.
Yeah, I'm afraid you're right and I don't like it. Antivirus programs now are an incredible PITA already - in many cases, they degrade the system more than do viruses. If this really is tick-tock in the security area, I dread to contemplate what "tock" the security companies will come up with in answer to this kind of thing.
France also export a lot of electricity to their neighbors and have just about the lowest per-kWh prices in Europe. It's French power (plus new brown coal burning plants, yuck!) that will make up for the impending loss of nuclear plants in Germany. I bet the story of Belgium will be somewhat similar.
So MS didn't buy Netscape. They just destroyed it, and for many years, MSIE was basically the new Netscape. Furthermore, in destroying Netscape, MS made for themselves a browser which was, at the time, quite good. So thought strangling Netscape cost them some money, there was a payoff: a well-written (as opposed to Netscape 4) modern browser.
What would they have done had they bought Netscape? They would have declared victory in browser space ten years earlier. Remember how it worked out for MS when they announced that they're going to stop releasing major upgrades for IE (because they thought the browser market was theirs)? That's when the open source rabble really moved in. So why should we think the same scene wouldn't have played out ten years earlier? It might have been a wonderful thing for the open web.
You may be confused about the meaning of 'consider'. Haven't you considered and quickly dismissed many things, with good reasons? Just because the process goes quickly doesn't mean the option wasn't considered and justifiably rejected.
I would really like us to start working (conceptually for the first few decades) on a colonization ship that we would send, ASAP, to the nearest habitable extrasolar planet we find. Yes, it would be slow, and if all goes well, ships launched later will beat it to the destination, perhaps by centuries. But not all might go well, and if it doesn't, I'd like the comfort of knowing that there's a place far away where humanity (and other life) got a clean start.
Of course, a ship that we could power with this century's technology (nuclear explosions) would be slow. It would take centuries to reach its destination. Obviously, it couldn't have people on board. But it could have all the genetic material to make people, as well as things like wheat, ladybugs, gut bacteria and all the other flora and fauna we'd like to bring with us. It would all be in deep freeze during the journey, and hatched once the ship has arrived. The first humans would gestate in artificial wombs and be raised by robotic parents with advanced parenting AI. This is another technology which isn't available, but it's not a century away, either. All the stuff would have to be very heavily shielded, because centuries of exposure to cosmic rays can do a lot of damage. I would propose doing this with many layers of microscopically thin sheets of lead, which could be laser etched with machine readable pits to contain all the valuable data that our civilization has produced. There would be some redundancy so that damaged sections could be recovered based on what's read off from the intact sections.
I think the most serious technological challenge to pulling this off would be in the field of robotics. We would need more or less autonomous robots to scout the planet, land, harvest resources and build factories for their own replication, as well as a habitat suitable for the biologicals. This would be quite a challenge, but it's almost entirely a software (AI) problem, and I don't think it will go unsolved for all that long.
The nukes would only start exploding once the whole thing is well clear of Earth. Don't forget that space is radioactive as fuck. A couple of thousand nukes will make exactly zero difference. The (already radioactive) solar wind will quickly sweep that stuff into interstellar space.
Excatly! Even the superconductor itself is YBCuO, which has been well known since 1986. It's the first "Type 2" superconductor to have been discovered. Back then things were going so fast that many people thought a room-temperature superconductor was going to be discovered within a reasonable amount of time. So it is indeed sad that 25 years later, we've basically made no real progress.
Yeah, and it sucks. I think that's relevant. I have some music that relaxes me, but it only succeeds because it's good. That, and only that, can make the listening experience pleasant, and it has to be pleasant on some level to be relaxing. This is not a pleasant song to listen to. Make it not suck and they might have something.
Why else would he have said to a room of politicians including then-president Bush "Reality clearly has a liberal bias."? Yup, the universe spins left. He called it.
Wait, are you saying that society is actually better off because we're susceptible to miserable degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's? If so, you're an asshole. But despite that, I don't wish it on you to watch your parents succumb to Alzheimer's.
Several friends have exercise bikes that provide magnetic resistance. Basically, most of the hardware for the making of a dynamo/generator is inside, right? These things are pretty expensive already, so it wouldn't cost much more to make that energy actually usable - as in, you could feed it back into the grid just by plugging in your exercise bike into a socket. Then an app would keep track of how many megawatt hours you generated with your own muscles - an extra source of motivation!
But what would really be cool is a bike like this in a house that's off the grid. When your wind turbine isn't spinning, the sun is down and your battery reserves are low, you could still maintain essential house functions by just... exercising. Lance Armstrong can generate 500 Watts of power for about an hour. A mere mortal can comfortably do 150 Watts for much longer intervals. That's certainly enough to power your wireless router, refrigerator/freezer, iPad and LED light bulb and still charge up some batteries.
As an AMD fan who hasn't bought an AMD cpu for a few years, I sure hope you're right. But there's something familiar in what you say: AMD fans looking forward to the next generation as the time when the real competition with Intel will be reignited. Well, Bulldozer is the next generation, and so far there's nothing there to cheer about. So let's hope for the generation after that, that's how this works, right?
Yeah, and they're half jackals! And they're not cloned. The jackals and Siberian huskies were bred "naturally", which in Russia probably involves some romantic music and a dogbowl full of vodka. If this Korean dog really has such a great nose, they should breed it with the Sulimov dogs, which are probably even better at odor discrimination, but possibly less good at working with people (being half jackals). For now I pity the fool who flies into Moscow with a bag of cocaine in his underpants.
This stuff absorbs 80% of the visible light that hits your window. That might be fine in places where the sun shines very intensely - it's about the same transparency and very dark sunglasses. However, I would not want this on my windows during already-dark New York winters!
I think that when people hear £50m they think it's basically bottomless money with which we can fulfill any scientific fantasy. But think about it this way: There are London mansions that cost more - without staff, equipment, operating costs, or anything else that actually produces science. Granted, Manchester is a cheaper market. Still, £50m is pretty small potatoes by the standards of big science.
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I am also getting crashes since version 6, never really got them before. Apart from that, I'm typically having to kill plugin-container.exe at least once a day to unfreeze Firefox. I wonder if I screwed up my profile somehow to deserve all this. The problem is that I don't want to lose all the saved passwords in my old profile. Is there a way to import just those into a new profile and start clean?
Yeah, in the US, we waste our talented youth by letting them get lured from STEM into banking. Sure they become bazillionaires, but their talent doesn't do a single valuable thing for society.
If it's 880 square kilometers, it means it won't melt for a damn long time, and once it separates from Antarctica it won't be covered by all the treaties that forbid development there. It will just be a big chunk of ice in international waters. If it managed to float to a warmer place, it would actually make a pretty nice platform for a small country. I wouldn't move there, but that's because I don't like libertarians, not because I don't like ice.
So it appears that it's quite common that engineers and scientists run foreign countries. It's only we Americans who find this noteworthy, because our country is almost always run by lawyers - and I don't just mean our presidents. Sixty of our 100 senators are former lawyers. I can't help but think that lawyers have a very different approach to leadership than do scientists and engineers, and the thought doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. I'm not saying that lawyers can't be good and wise leaders. But what I am saying is that when government becomes an institution of lawyers, they inevitably import the institutional culture of lawyerism into government. Maybe that's why their governing feels more like a shifting battle of prosecution v. defense (though the sides occasionally change) where most of the energy is devoted to matters of procedure, rhetoric, strategy and "winning" rather than just doing the right thing for the country. Lawyers are people who are used to working on behalf of paying clients, and they must defend those clients to the hilt, not caring about whether they are actually right or wrong. That's as it should be. Now, of course the lawyers who move into government will tell you that "the American people" are their new clients, but in effect, I think it's the paying interest groups who buy our governing lawyers. So government is a battle of interest groups, each armed with a paid group of politician-lawyer-advocates who are expected to not worry about who's actually right. Their job is to win, or at least to keep "the other side" from winning. My foreign friends often ask my why the US only has two viable political parties. Could it be that because in the courtroom there are only two sides, and our politicians couldn't wrap their heads around a system that works differently? I feel like when the history of the decline of our country is written, something like this will be a part of the analysis.
Yeah, I'm afraid you're right and I don't like it. Antivirus programs now are an incredible PITA already - in many cases, they degrade the system more than do viruses. If this really is tick-tock in the security area, I dread to contemplate what "tock" the security companies will come up with in answer to this kind of thing.
France also export a lot of electricity to their neighbors and have just about the lowest per-kWh prices in Europe. It's French power (plus new brown coal burning plants, yuck!) that will make up for the impending loss of nuclear plants in Germany. I bet the story of Belgium will be somewhat similar.
So MS didn't buy Netscape. They just destroyed it, and for many years, MSIE was basically the new Netscape. Furthermore, in destroying Netscape, MS made for themselves a browser which was, at the time, quite good. So thought strangling Netscape cost them some money, there was a payoff: a well-written (as opposed to Netscape 4) modern browser.
What would they have done had they bought Netscape? They would have declared victory in browser space ten years earlier. Remember how it worked out for MS when they announced that they're going to stop releasing major upgrades for IE (because they thought the browser market was theirs)? That's when the open source rabble really moved in. So why should we think the same scene wouldn't have played out ten years earlier? It might have been a wonderful thing for the open web.
You may be confused about the meaning of 'consider'. Haven't you considered and quickly dismissed many things, with good reasons? Just because the process goes quickly doesn't mean the option wasn't considered and justifiably rejected.
Ah yes, here it is!
I would really like us to start working (conceptually for the first few decades) on a colonization ship that we would send, ASAP, to the nearest habitable extrasolar planet we find. Yes, it would be slow, and if all goes well, ships launched later will beat it to the destination, perhaps by centuries. But not all might go well, and if it doesn't, I'd like the comfort of knowing that there's a place far away where humanity (and other life) got a clean start.
Of course, a ship that we could power with this century's technology (nuclear explosions) would be slow. It would take centuries to reach its destination. Obviously, it couldn't have people on board. But it could have all the genetic material to make people, as well as things like wheat, ladybugs, gut bacteria and all the other flora and fauna we'd like to bring with us. It would all be in deep freeze during the journey, and hatched once the ship has arrived. The first humans would gestate in artificial wombs and be raised by robotic parents with advanced parenting AI. This is another technology which isn't available, but it's not a century away, either. All the stuff would have to be very heavily shielded, because centuries of exposure to cosmic rays can do a lot of damage. I would propose doing this with many layers of microscopically thin sheets of lead, which could be laser etched with machine readable pits to contain all the valuable data that our civilization has produced. There would be some redundancy so that damaged sections could be recovered based on what's read off from the intact sections.
I think the most serious technological challenge to pulling this off would be in the field of robotics. We would need more or less autonomous robots to scout the planet, land, harvest resources and build factories for their own replication, as well as a habitat suitable for the biologicals. This would be quite a challenge, but it's almost entirely a software (AI) problem, and I don't think it will go unsolved for all that long.
Thanks for the link. I agree, it's a much better configuration than Orion.
The nukes would only start exploding once the whole thing is well clear of Earth. Don't forget that space is radioactive as fuck. A couple of thousand nukes will make exactly zero difference. The (already radioactive) solar wind will quickly sweep that stuff into interstellar space.
Excatly! Even the superconductor itself is YBCuO, which has been well known since 1986. It's the first "Type 2" superconductor to have been discovered. Back then things were going so fast that many people thought a room-temperature superconductor was going to be discovered within a reasonable amount of time. So it is indeed sad that 25 years later, we've basically made no real progress.
Yeah, and it sucks. I think that's relevant. I have some music that relaxes me, but it only succeeds because it's good. That, and only that, can make the listening experience pleasant, and it has to be pleasant on some level to be relaxing. This is not a pleasant song to listen to. Make it not suck and they might have something.
Why else would he have said to a room of politicians including then-president Bush "Reality clearly has a liberal bias."? Yup, the universe spins left. He called it.
No, the obvious questions are: 1. Will it power a death ray laser? and 2. Does it work with shark blood?
Wait, are you saying that society is actually better off because we're susceptible to miserable degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's? If so, you're an asshole. But despite that, I don't wish it on you to watch your parents succumb to Alzheimer's.
In case you wondered this, check out what could be the world's greatest article abstract: Can apparent superluminal neutrino speeds be explained as a quantum weak measurement?
Seriously, it's worth clicking, and understanding the abstract doesn't require advanced physics knowledge.
But what would really be cool is a bike like this in a house that's off the grid. When your wind turbine isn't spinning, the sun is down and your battery reserves are low, you could still maintain essential house functions by just ... exercising. Lance Armstrong can generate 500 Watts of power for about an hour. A mere mortal can comfortably do 150 Watts for much longer intervals. That's certainly enough to power your wireless router, refrigerator/freezer, iPad and LED light bulb and still charge up some batteries.
As an AMD fan who hasn't bought an AMD cpu for a few years, I sure hope you're right. But there's something familiar in what you say: AMD fans looking forward to the next generation as the time when the real competition with Intel will be reignited. Well, Bulldozer is the next generation, and so far there's nothing there to cheer about. So let's hope for the generation after that, that's how this works, right?
Yeah, and they're half jackals! And they're not cloned. The jackals and Siberian huskies were bred "naturally", which in Russia probably involves some romantic music and a dogbowl full of vodka. If this Korean dog really has such a great nose, they should breed it with the Sulimov dogs, which are probably even better at odor discrimination, but possibly less good at working with people (being half jackals). For now I pity the fool who flies into Moscow with a bag of cocaine in his underpants.
Seriously, that reprinted Esquire article is an amazing document. I can't believe it's 40 years old!
This stuff absorbs 80% of the visible light that hits your window. That might be fine in places where the sun shines very intensely - it's about the same transparency and very dark sunglasses. However, I would not want this on my windows during already-dark New York winters!
I think that when people hear £50m they think it's basically bottomless money with which we can fulfill any scientific fantasy. But think about it this way: There are London mansions that cost more - without staff, equipment, operating costs, or anything else that actually produces science. Granted, Manchester is a cheaper market. Still, £50m is pretty small potatoes by the standards of big science.
A very good point, very nicely made. Your education is serving you well.