You're absolutely right. $53 Billion is enough to connect Paris to Strasbourg with high speed rail, upgrade the stations along the way, and buy the rolling stock to run on that route. Since every major US municipality will want to get their beak wet in that $53 Billion, its effect on our rail network will be basically undetectable. For a country of our size, that figure needs to be about an order of magnitude higher if it's to make a real difference to how people move around. Unfortunately, our country would rather pour that kind of money into wars.
Nobody said that high speed rail would replace all airplane travel, not even all continental airplane travel. It's supposed to replace airplane travel for trips of under 400 miles. But mainly it's supposed to replace driving, and in general to replace the use of fossil fuels for transportation and use electricity instead (hopefully generated by clean sources like hydro, wind and nuclear).
Very informative video. If I understood it right, they are happy to let you keep your defective motherboard - which still has two SATA-3 ports that work perfectly well - and use it until April, at which point they will swap it out with a new one. If this is the deal, then that's actually very customer-friendly. From the blurb, I had the impression that if you want to participate in this rebate, you have to send back your mobo now, and your fancy Sandy Bridge CPU will just sit unused on your desk for almost three months, which in computer time is a good fraction of forever.
Can they really desolder the chipset and solder on a new one, and do all this with acceptable reliability? These things are at least seven layer circuit boards. Do all the chipset pins even go through all the layers to make desoldering possible?
Interesting. If the price were right, I might be interested. But if they were going to do that, it would have saved them lots of trouble to offer this to existing owners along with a large refund. I mean, if you bought a Sandy Bridge chip, you don't want to wait until April to have a board to plug it into, right?
Wouldn't it make more sense to offer some sort of a substantial rebate and a correctly functioning SATA raid PCI-E card? Some of these motherboards - that are clearly getting scrapped - were very fancy. This seems like a terrible waste, since those boards basically worked.
This is a good point. Also, it's possible that too-rich, too-old, undermotivated managers are at the heart of Microsoft's apparent stagnation. It won't hurt them to bring in some younger, hungrier talent.
Or they could just keep releasing gimpy males each year to offset their disadvantage. The idea isn't necessarily to reduce the number of female mosquitoes. It's to drive down their average age - because in order to transmit a disease, they first have to bite a human carrier and then someone else who gets infected. Shorter-lived mosquitoes have a much smaller chance of doing both.
Re:dont leak to the wrong people
on
Openleaks Goes Live
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Yeah, my thought exactly. For all the limitations of Julien Assange, he's not a narc, he won't pass your name to the authorities, and he will try to get your leak out there and make sure that people actually notice. Alternatives to Wikileaks might also do the same, but I wouldn't want to be the first to test the waters. I definitely hope that these guys turn out to be legit though. Competition in leaks would be a very good thing for everybody. Still, let's not ignore that Assange and Wikileaks have a huge head start.
Um, the NYT are all too eager to kiss the asses of the people in power, and you know they would sell out their leakers in a heartbeat for a pat on the head from their corporate masters. Not in a million years would I leak any information to an NYT leak site. For all the many faults of Julien Assange, at least you know he's not gonna sell you out and that he'll try to really distribute the information he gets.
Look, I love astronomy far more than the average person, but live stargazing - especially in cloudy England - is just about the dullest thing I can think of to bring out what's interesting in the field. As the ancients noted, the stars basically do nothing if you watch them live. They admired this "permanence" and its contrast with the wanderings of the planets and the transience of events on Earth. But that's exactly why there is no point is watching the stars "live"!
Thanks for this information, I wish I could mod! Anyway, that's crazy expensive. Really, you could only justify costs like that if you had a day-long moving private party in that railroad car. Actually, that sounds like it would be a pretty fun part of, say, a wedding!
I think it will paint for you a picture of a very unusual person, clearly flawed but also clearly motivated by a quest for righteousness. I think he wants to stop wars more even than he wants to release information. He is certainly not doing this for money or comfort, though I hope he eventually finds both. He wants desperately to make an impact, and he was enraged at the Guardian for wanting to release the leaks on a different schedule because he wanted to optimize the timing for the sake of maximum impact. Yeah, it was stupid to threaten to sue and claim "ownership" - but even the article says that he later backed down from this, after a great deal of coffee and wine. Haven't we all said stupid things while overworked, stressed and sleep deprived? I don't think this episode should be taken to reveal too much about Assange. The article linked above is more informative, though also not exactly flattering.
This seems like a gimmick, but I have a fantasy that might actually be feasible - not for me, but for truly rich people. The idea would be to convert old railroad cars into luxury traveling apartments. There is plenty of room in one of those things for very comfortable living if the interior is designed ergonomically. The way I picture it, cities could "beautify" some of their defunct freight stations into rail car parks - parking lots for luxury rail apartments.
Occupants could then negotiate transport of their apartment by attaching it to various freight trains at competitive prices. Moving freight by rail is pretty cheap, so this sort of "migration" might actually be pretty affordable once you've bought/rented one of these rolling apartments. I picture this working especially well on a continent like Europe, where there is lots of rail and lots to see. Next year, the rail tunnel under the Bosphorus will mean that you can take a rail car from Scotland to the Middle East on standard gauge rail. If China comes through on its plan to build a railroad across Asia into Turkey, that would extend the mobility of these apartments even farther.
Of course, you could argue that shipping container apartments might be more practical and less constrained geographically, but that's just much less romantic.
If Honeycomb were a tablet-only fork of Android, I don't think it would have been given a version name of "2.4" - i.e., the successor of 2.3, which we have on our phones. If it weren't a phone operating system, but a first release of a tablet-only system, it would have a different version number.
Don't they have something more important to be working on?
How much time do you think this took? Do you think someone billed the government a day's work to compile this list? If I ask you about the worst science movies ever and you answer, does this make you an irresponsible employee? (Hint: you probably shouldn't answer this question, or even read it - oh, oops!) My point is that this takes an instant, and it's not at all out of line given that educating the public is an explicit part of NASA's mission.
Hey, he gave this place a chance! I mean, as the manager, you'd rather have the guy come to your store with a bar scanner rather than not come at all, right?
Agreed. Specifically Newegg is basically the one retailer that I will willingly vouch for. I have years of experience with them, and I've never been ripped of or mistreated. Occasionally when I have to be in the mall, I'll sneak off to browse in Best Buy (it's next to a big shoe store, if you catch my drift), and when the sales people bug me there, I always think to myself "yeah, right, like I'll buy this crap at these prices!"
What are you talking about? I'm not missing any codecs, most certainly not the h264 codec. I really want this functionality and not having it is something that might get me to give up on Firefox. Just like the grandparent, I also installed the plugin, restarted Firefox and tried to test things - and got nothing. I'm using Win7-64 and my codecs are most certainly in order. What's going on?
Good; wise words. However M-theory (the new name for string theory) is a cluster of freakishly many theories, each of which predicts a different sort of universe. Many of these are still consistent with the data we have, and for whatever data we could ever get, I'm sure there will be some M-theory that's consistent with that data. So M-theory as a cluster is basically immune to any kind of empirical falsification. This might sound like a good thing, but it's just the opposite.
It's not just physics. The whole insistence on a rigid distinction between theories and hypotheses, in any field, is a sign of a ignorance of fundamental things about how science works. Anyone who's read Popper (whose stuff is almost 100 years old now) would understand.
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You're absolutely right. $53 Billion is enough to connect Paris to Strasbourg with high speed rail, upgrade the stations along the way, and buy the rolling stock to run on that route. Since every major US municipality will want to get their beak wet in that $53 Billion, its effect on our rail network will be basically undetectable. For a country of our size, that figure needs to be about an order of magnitude higher if it's to make a real difference to how people move around. Unfortunately, our country would rather pour that kind of money into wars.
Nobody said that high speed rail would replace all airplane travel, not even all continental airplane travel. It's supposed to replace airplane travel for trips of under 400 miles. But mainly it's supposed to replace driving, and in general to replace the use of fossil fuels for transportation and use electricity instead (hopefully generated by clean sources like hydro, wind and nuclear).
+1 Awesome
Very informative video. If I understood it right, they are happy to let you keep your defective motherboard - which still has two SATA-3 ports that work perfectly well - and use it until April, at which point they will swap it out with a new one. If this is the deal, then that's actually very customer-friendly. From the blurb, I had the impression that if you want to participate in this rebate, you have to send back your mobo now, and your fancy Sandy Bridge CPU will just sit unused on your desk for almost three months, which in computer time is a good fraction of forever.
Can they really desolder the chipset and solder on a new one, and do all this with acceptable reliability? These things are at least seven layer circuit boards. Do all the chipset pins even go through all the layers to make desoldering possible?
Interesting. If the price were right, I might be interested. But if they were going to do that, it would have saved them lots of trouble to offer this to existing owners along with a large refund. I mean, if you bought a Sandy Bridge chip, you don't want to wait until April to have a board to plug it into, right?
Wouldn't it make more sense to offer some sort of a substantial rebate and a correctly functioning SATA raid PCI-E card? Some of these motherboards - that are clearly getting scrapped - were very fancy. This seems like a terrible waste, since those boards basically worked.
This is a good point. Also, it's possible that too-rich, too-old, undermotivated managers are at the heart of Microsoft's apparent stagnation. It won't hurt them to bring in some younger, hungrier talent.
What's the most innovative product of 2010? The Kinect. It's not even a contest.
Or they could just keep releasing gimpy males each year to offset their disadvantage. The idea isn't necessarily to reduce the number of female mosquitoes. It's to drive down their average age - because in order to transmit a disease, they first have to bite a human carrier and then someone else who gets infected. Shorter-lived mosquitoes have a much smaller chance of doing both.
Yeah, my thought exactly. For all the limitations of Julien Assange, he's not a narc, he won't pass your name to the authorities, and he will try to get your leak out there and make sure that people actually notice. Alternatives to Wikileaks might also do the same, but I wouldn't want to be the first to test the waters. I definitely hope that these guys turn out to be legit though. Competition in leaks would be a very good thing for everybody. Still, let's not ignore that Assange and Wikileaks have a huge head start.
Yeah, I guess that's a pretty weird name for an aerospace engineer. It sounds more like a Star Wars bounty hunter name.
Um, the NYT are all too eager to kiss the asses of the people in power, and you know they would sell out their leakers in a heartbeat for a pat on the head from their corporate masters. Not in a million years would I leak any information to an NYT leak site. For all the many faults of Julien Assange, at least you know he's not gonna sell you out and that he'll try to really distribute the information he gets.
Look, I love astronomy far more than the average person, but live stargazing - especially in cloudy England - is just about the dullest thing I can think of to bring out what's interesting in the field. As the ancients noted, the stars basically do nothing if you watch them live. They admired this "permanence" and its contrast with the wanderings of the planets and the transience of events on Earth. But that's exactly why there is no point is watching the stars "live"!
Does the BBC also have a "live watching paint dry" show?
Thanks for this information, I wish I could mod! Anyway, that's crazy expensive. Really, you could only justify costs like that if you had a day-long moving private party in that railroad car. Actually, that sounds like it would be a pretty fun part of, say, a wedding!
First read this article:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=all
I think it will paint for you a picture of a very unusual person, clearly flawed but also clearly motivated by a quest for righteousness. I think he wants to stop wars more even than he wants to release information. He is certainly not doing this for money or comfort, though I hope he eventually finds both. He wants desperately to make an impact, and he was enraged at the Guardian for wanting to release the leaks on a different schedule because he wanted to optimize the timing for the sake of maximum impact. Yeah, it was stupid to threaten to sue and claim "ownership" - but even the article says that he later backed down from this, after a great deal of coffee and wine. Haven't we all said stupid things while overworked, stressed and sleep deprived? I don't think this episode should be taken to reveal too much about Assange. The article linked above is more informative, though also not exactly flattering.
This seems like a gimmick, but I have a fantasy that might actually be feasible - not for me, but for truly rich people. The idea would be to convert old railroad cars into luxury traveling apartments. There is plenty of room in one of those things for very comfortable living if the interior is designed ergonomically. The way I picture it, cities could "beautify" some of their defunct freight stations into rail car parks - parking lots for luxury rail apartments.
Occupants could then negotiate transport of their apartment by attaching it to various freight trains at competitive prices. Moving freight by rail is pretty cheap, so this sort of "migration" might actually be pretty affordable once you've bought/rented one of these rolling apartments. I picture this working especially well on a continent like Europe, where there is lots of rail and lots to see. Next year, the rail tunnel under the Bosphorus will mean that you can take a rail car from Scotland to the Middle East on standard gauge rail. If China comes through on its plan to build a railroad across Asia into Turkey, that would extend the mobility of these apartments even farther.
Of course, you could argue that shipping container apartments might be more practical and less constrained geographically, but that's just much less romantic.
If Honeycomb were a tablet-only fork of Android, I don't think it would have been given a version name of "2.4" - i.e., the successor of 2.3, which we have on our phones. If it weren't a phone operating system, but a first release of a tablet-only system, it would have a different version number.
Don't they have something more important to be working on?
How much time do you think this took? Do you think someone billed the government a day's work to compile this list? If I ask you about the worst science movies ever and you answer, does this make you an irresponsible employee? (Hint: you probably shouldn't answer this question, or even read it - oh, oops!) My point is that this takes an instant, and it's not at all out of line given that educating the public is an explicit part of NASA's mission.
Hey, he gave this place a chance! I mean, as the manager, you'd rather have the guy come to your store with a bar scanner rather than not come at all, right?
Agreed. Specifically Newegg is basically the one retailer that I will willingly vouch for. I have years of experience with them, and I've never been ripped of or mistreated. Occasionally when I have to be in the mall, I'll sneak off to browse in Best Buy (it's next to a big shoe store, if you catch my drift), and when the sales people bug me there, I always think to myself "yeah, right, like I'll buy this crap at these prices!"
What are you talking about? I'm not missing any codecs, most certainly not the h264 codec. I really want this functionality and not having it is something that might get me to give up on Firefox. Just like the grandparent, I also installed the plugin, restarted Firefox and tried to test things - and got nothing. I'm using Win7-64 and my codecs are most certainly in order. What's going on?
Good; wise words. However M-theory (the new name for string theory) is a cluster of freakishly many theories, each of which predicts a different sort of universe. Many of these are still consistent with the data we have, and for whatever data we could ever get, I'm sure there will be some M-theory that's consistent with that data. So M-theory as a cluster is basically immune to any kind of empirical falsification. This might sound like a good thing, but it's just the opposite.
It's not just physics. The whole insistence on a rigid distinction between theories and hypotheses, in any field, is a sign of a ignorance of fundamental things about how science works. Anyone who's read Popper (whose stuff is almost 100 years old now) would understand.