This is just the difference between short and long term investment strategies. When one is young, it makes sense to use long term strategies that minimize risk and go for gradual growth. When one is elderly, long term investment makes no sense anymore. Look backward and see missed opportunities; look forward and see an approaching dead end. The chance to make it big gradually is gone, and the only hope one has left to live one's dreams is explosive growth. It's now or never, so short term, high-risk strategies dominate. Shouldn't this be obvious?
It's the equivalent of the question "What would you do if Earth was going to be gone tomorrow?" Even young people would be unlikely to reply "Invest in 20-year bonds."
I can think of an application. Imagine a room where every wall was covered in this stuff. With a sufficiently complex controller, it wouldn't be 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound anymore, it would be infinity point one surround sound. Of course this would require a whole new means of encoding audio that stores each sound element separately with its own location vector. A problem for movies, but entirely feasible for games.
Proprietary developers want to punish students? I guess he means the corporations - and again, they don't generally give their source for modification, so they might be preventing students from modifying other people's work. Is that punishing them?
I'm guessing you've never read and understood the various EULAs that you've agreed to through the years. They generally prohibit reverse engineering and modification of the code, which, contrary to popular opinion, can be done without access to the source code. I've done it myself, back in the days before EULAs. For example, I once modified a popular 16-bit compiler so that it would utilize 32-bit native integer multiplication and division opcodes, thereby greatly speeding up the code it generated, at the cost of making it require a 32-bit CPU.
There is nothing special about this. I just saw a problem and I fixed it, as I'm sure many people did. However, such benign activities cannot legally be done anymore without running afoul of the software's EULA. These restrictions are absolutely put in place by "proprietary developers", bringing the force of law to bear against their own customers out of nothing but paranoia. They are control freaks, born of a culture of control, and that control should rightly be ceded to me the moment I pay them money for it. But it'll never happen.
I won't even claim to understand what the social mission of schools are supposed to be - prepare students for functioning in society? Prepare them for jobs? Prepare them for college? Prepare them to develop free software? Prepare them for ignoring copyrights?
It's to prepare them to be good and fully-functioning adults. By killing kids' curiosity and generosity by wrapping them in fear of retribution, they are sabotaging that effort. Teaching students that they should just keep their heads down and avoid doing anything that might annoy the software companies is ultimately counterproductive to society.
Many cars are driven by more than one driver, such as a husband and wife, and possibly one or more teenage kids. This means that such a car would need to have the ability to store multiple profiles, so just record one profile while sleepy, one profile while drunk, one profile while fully awake and sober. And perhaps a fourth profile while in a state of blind panic in case you ever have to drive to the emergency room, and maybe one where you've just had too much coffee, etc.
The real difficulty is going to be when a song you like comes on the radio and the car stalls in the middle of the freeway because your brainwaves have just changed. Recording a profile for each song you like would no doubt tax its memory.
Of course, because it's made of many small, rigid granules, some of the thermal conductivity is lost, but diamond can afford to lose a lot because it starts out so very far ahead of other materials. The main advantage of it, and the reason I chose it, is stability over the long term, which is due to the fact that it's almost entirely made up of solids. I didn't want to have to periodically reapply. I wanted something that would stay put and just work.
It's a little known fact, but diamond has the highest thermal conductivity of any substance you're ever likely to encounter, beating silver by a whopping 350%. The only reason it's never used for thermal applications is that forming it into arbitrary shapes is almost beyond mankind's capability, and even if we did manage to do it, the cost would be astronomical. However, if it could somehow be done, and done cheaply, it would be the ultimate heat sink material.
For comparison purposes, gold has about 33% higher thermal conductivity than aluminum, copper beats gold by about 26%, and silver in turn beats copper by about 7%, but not one of them is even in same league as diamond.
This is most likely why diamonds earned the nickname "ice". You know how, at room temperature, metal feels colder than wood or plastic? This is because its higher thermal conductivity pulls the heat out of your hand more quickly. If you were to pick up a large enough diamond, it would feel extremely cold at first, just like a piece of ice.
And what happens if, due to a malfunction, the thruster doesn't shut off when it's supposed to, and it burns for longer than 58 seconds?
People got angry about BP, and before that the Exxon Valdez, but that was after the accidents had already happened. What happens when a greedy grab for extraterrestrial ore inevitably goes awry? And make no mistake; over the long hault, it is inevitable. Even if the first attempt, hell the first five such attempts, go off without a hitch, there would eventually, over many such attempts, be a critical error on a similar mission.
There would be no time for recriminations and lawsuits then.
It's been weeks and still nobody has been able to CONFIRM whether it was a 3rd party charger or not? Seriously, it should take 30 seconds.
Exactly! I've been looking for anything that explicitly states whether the electrocution was caused by a counterfeit charger or a genuine one, and I have yet to find it. Instead I find cleverly worded PR from Cupertino that discusses the potential hazards of knock-off chargers, but without ever specifically stating that the charger in question wasn't one of their theirs. I find this curious.
Google doesn't even have a truly working syntax, any more. You can try and force specific phrase searches all you want and the "AI" or whatever they're using goes out and grabs "similar" terms anyways, to add unnecessary things to your results. You can exclude certain phrases or words all you want BUT if they are one of the "similar" terms to something else you're searching for, they will still show up. Google is totally broken with all of its "smart"-ness!
This is not entirely true. On a search results page, you can click on "Search Tools" and then change the middle dropdown from "All Results" to "Verbatim". This makes Google work much the way it used to in the Good Old Days(tm).
My vote is for All Summer in a Day, a depressing little tale by Ray Bradbury. I first encountered this short story when I was a kid, and it really messed me up.
Assuming that any dynamic backlighting features are disabled, a typical TN panel will use slightly LESS power on an all-white screen than on an all-black screen.
LCD panels comes in more than one flavor. The cheap and common variety is called TN (Twisted Nematic). A TN pixel is transparent/white until power is applied to it, at which point it turns opaque/black. This means that it takes some small amount of power to make a pixel turn black. A less common, more expensive technology is called IPS (In-Plane Switching). An IPS pixel is opaque/black until power is applied, at which point it turns transparent/while. There are also VA (Vertical Alignment) panels, and I don't remember off the top of my head whether they're transparent or opaque when not powered.
I just ran a test with a power meter of my own, and the IPS-based LCD monitor I'm using consumes 17 watts when displaying an all-black image and 21 watts when displaying an all-white image, and the backlight is not responsible for any of that difference. Tests I've done on a previous TN-based LCD monitor have shown an opposite result, as is to be expected. The thing is that TN panels are far more common because they're cheaper to produce. So if the entire world tries to use use dark web pages in order to save power, then a few people with IPS panels will use less, but the vast majority of users will be be browsing on TN panels, and these users will actually be using slightly MORE power. And, given their greater numbers, I suspect the average power usage would actually go up.
And as long as there are any white or brightly colored pixels onscreen, be they part of the taskbar, the browser's title bar, or the web page itself, then dynamic backlighting shouldn't be much of a factor, either. The backlight can't be turned down any dimmer than the brightest pixel. (This excludes LCD monitors with backlights that are capable of zone-dimming, but those are exceedingly rare.)
Even your argument that "everything is a poison in large quantities" is stupid, because it's not the CO2 harming you if you go in the garage and turn on the car - it's the fact you are not getting oxygen. The CO2 itself did not hurt you.
Actually, it's not CO2 nor lack of oxygen that kills in this situation, but rather CO. As I understand it, hemoglobin bonds preferentially to CO over O2. Once a red blood cell has absorbed CO, it doesn't want to let go even when exposed to O2. This means that one can effectively suffocate even when there's plenty of O2 available to breathe.
This is why CO is sometimes used on meat. It keeps the meat bright red and healthy-looking so it will look nice on display in the grocery store. Without it, I think meat would tend more toward purple.
According to a related article at The Register, as recently as October of 2010, Steve Jobs himself publicly called Apple's app store "the easiest-to-use, largest app store in the world, preloaded on every iPhone." So it would appear that even Cupertino is using the phrase app store generically in reference to its competitors. I'd call this tidbit a crushing blow to Apple's case.
Brought to you by the letter I and a spelling nazi;)
I left out the extra i intentionally because it results in a moreproper spelling which also looks more like a real element name, such as titanium or germanium, whereas there are no real element names which end in ainium. The "correction" you suggest is actually an alternate form.
I'm afraid you'll have to turn in your spelling nazi license now.;)
What I don't get is this: if China can produce CFLs at half the price (which doesn't surprise me), then why couldn't they also produce incandescents at half the price? In other words, why hadn't the plant closed long before the advent of CFLs?
My guess is that incandescent bulbs can be made cheaply both in the USA and in China because they contain no environmental pollutants, whereas CFLs, on the other hand, contain mercury, and it's probable that the environmental regulations in China are sufficiently loose to allow them to streamline the manufacturing process in ways that simply cannot be done legally in the USA.
Slashdot Mirror
This is just the difference between short and long term investment strategies. When one is young, it makes sense to use long term strategies that minimize risk and go for gradual growth. When one is elderly, long term investment makes no sense anymore. Look backward and see missed opportunities; look forward and see an approaching dead end. The chance to make it big gradually is gone, and the only hope one has left to live one's dreams is explosive growth. It's now or never, so short term, high-risk strategies dominate. Shouldn't this be obvious?
It's the equivalent of the question "What would you do if Earth was going to be gone tomorrow?" Even young people would be unlikely to reply "Invest in 20-year bonds."
Exactly, because the only thing anyone uses lanthanides for is headphones.
...Wait, what?
I can think of an application. Imagine a room where every wall was covered in this stuff. With a sufficiently complex controller, it wouldn't be 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound anymore, it would be infinity point one surround sound. Of course this would require a whole new means of encoding audio that stores each sound element separately with its own location vector. A problem for movies, but entirely feasible for games.
Proprietary developers want to punish students? I guess he means the corporations - and again, they don't generally give their source for modification, so they might be preventing students from modifying other people's work. Is that punishing them?
I'm guessing you've never read and understood the various EULAs that you've agreed to through the years. They generally prohibit reverse engineering and modification of the code, which, contrary to popular opinion, can be done without access to the source code. I've done it myself, back in the days before EULAs. For example, I once modified a popular 16-bit compiler so that it would utilize 32-bit native integer multiplication and division opcodes, thereby greatly speeding up the code it generated, at the cost of making it require a 32-bit CPU.
There is nothing special about this. I just saw a problem and I fixed it, as I'm sure many people did. However, such benign activities cannot legally be done anymore without running afoul of the software's EULA. These restrictions are absolutely put in place by "proprietary developers", bringing the force of law to bear against their own customers out of nothing but paranoia. They are control freaks, born of a culture of control, and that control should rightly be ceded to me the moment I pay them money for it. But it'll never happen.
I won't even claim to understand what the social mission of schools are supposed to be - prepare students for functioning in society? Prepare them for jobs? Prepare them for college? Prepare them to develop free software? Prepare them for ignoring copyrights?
It's to prepare them to be good and fully-functioning adults. By killing kids' curiosity and generosity by wrapping them in fear of retribution, they are sabotaging that effort. Teaching students that they should just keep their heads down and avoid doing anything that might annoy the software companies is ultimately counterproductive to society.
Many cars are driven by more than one driver, such as a husband and wife, and possibly one or more teenage kids. This means that such a car would need to have the ability to store multiple profiles, so just record one profile while sleepy, one profile while drunk, one profile while fully awake and sober. And perhaps a fourth profile while in a state of blind panic in case you ever have to drive to the emergency room, and maybe one where you've just had too much coffee, etc.
The real difficulty is going to be when a song you like comes on the radio and the car stalls in the middle of the freeway because your brainwaves have just changed. Recording a profile for each song you like would no doubt tax its memory.
What do you think I'm using?
Of course, because it's made of many small, rigid granules, some of the thermal conductivity is lost, but diamond can afford to lose a lot because it starts out so very far ahead of other materials. The main advantage of it, and the reason I chose it, is stability over the long term, which is due to the fact that it's almost entirely made up of solids. I didn't want to have to periodically reapply. I wanted something that would stay put and just work.
If they were really high-end they would be Gold.
It's a little known fact, but diamond has the highest thermal conductivity of any substance you're ever likely to encounter, beating silver by a whopping 350%. The only reason it's never used for thermal applications is that forming it into arbitrary shapes is almost beyond mankind's capability, and even if we did manage to do it, the cost would be astronomical. However, if it could somehow be done, and done cheaply, it would be the ultimate heat sink material.
For comparison purposes, gold has about 33% higher thermal conductivity than aluminum, copper beats gold by about 26%, and silver in turn beats copper by about 7%, but not one of them is even in same league as diamond.
This is most likely why diamonds earned the nickname "ice". You know how, at room temperature, metal feels colder than wood or plastic? This is because its higher thermal conductivity pulls the heat out of your hand more quickly. If you were to pick up a large enough diamond, it would feel extremely cold at first, just like a piece of ice.
...shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
It's a keming problern.
Fixed that for you.
And what happens if, due to a malfunction, the thruster doesn't shut off when it's supposed to, and it burns for longer than 58 seconds?
People got angry about BP, and before that the Exxon Valdez, but that was after the accidents had already happened. What happens when a greedy grab for extraterrestrial ore inevitably goes awry? And make no mistake; over the long hault, it is inevitable. Even if the first attempt, hell the first five such attempts, go off without a hitch, there would eventually, over many such attempts, be a critical error on a similar mission.
There would be no time for recriminations and lawsuits then.
It's been weeks and still nobody has been able to CONFIRM whether it was a 3rd party charger or not? Seriously, it should take 30 seconds.
Exactly! I've been looking for anything that explicitly states whether the electrocution was caused by a counterfeit charger or a genuine one, and I have yet to find it. Instead I find cleverly worded PR from Cupertino that discusses the potential hazards of knock-off chargers, but without ever specifically stating that the charger in question wasn't one of their theirs. I find this curious.
Google doesn't even have a truly working syntax, any more. You can try and force specific phrase searches all you want and the "AI" or whatever they're using goes out and grabs "similar" terms anyways, to add unnecessary things to your results. You can exclude certain phrases or words all you want BUT if they are one of the "similar" terms to something else you're searching for, they will still show up. Google is totally broken with all of its "smart"-ness!
This is not entirely true. On a search results page, you can click on "Search Tools" and then change the middle dropdown from "All Results" to "Verbatim". This makes Google work much the way it used to in the Good Old Days(tm).
My vote is for All Summer in a Day , a depressing little tale by Ray Bradbury. I first encountered this short story when I was a kid, and it really messed me up.
Assuming that any dynamic backlighting features are disabled, a typical TN panel will use slightly LESS power on an all-white screen than on an all-black screen.
LCD panels comes in more than one flavor. The cheap and common variety is called TN (Twisted Nematic). A TN pixel is transparent/white until power is applied to it, at which point it turns opaque/black. This means that it takes some small amount of power to make a pixel turn black. A less common, more expensive technology is called IPS (In-Plane Switching). An IPS pixel is opaque/black until power is applied, at which point it turns transparent/while. There are also VA (Vertical Alignment) panels, and I don't remember off the top of my head whether they're transparent or opaque when not powered.
I just ran a test with a power meter of my own, and the IPS-based LCD monitor I'm using consumes 17 watts when displaying an all-black image and 21 watts when displaying an all-white image, and the backlight is not responsible for any of that difference. Tests I've done on a previous TN-based LCD monitor have shown an opposite result, as is to be expected. The thing is that TN panels are far more common because they're cheaper to produce. So if the entire world tries to use use dark web pages in order to save power, then a few people with IPS panels will use less, but the vast majority of users will be be browsing on TN panels, and these users will actually be using slightly MORE power. And, given their greater numbers, I suspect the average power usage would actually go up.
And as long as there are any white or brightly colored pixels onscreen, be they part of the taskbar, the browser's title bar, or the web page itself, then dynamic backlighting shouldn't be much of a factor, either. The backlight can't be turned down any dimmer than the brightest pixel. (This excludes LCD monitors with backlights that are capable of zone-dimming, but those are exceedingly rare.)
Even your argument that "everything is a poison in large quantities" is stupid, because it's not the CO2 harming you if you go in the garage and turn on the car - it's the fact you are not getting oxygen. The CO2 itself did not hurt you.
Actually, it's not CO2 nor lack of oxygen that kills in this situation, but rather CO. As I understand it, hemoglobin bonds preferentially to CO over O2. Once a red blood cell has absorbed CO, it doesn't want to let go even when exposed to O2. This means that one can effectively suffocate even when there's plenty of O2 available to breathe.
This is why CO is sometimes used on meat. It keeps the meat bright red and healthy-looking so it will look nice on display in the grocery store. Without it, I think meat would tend more toward purple.
It would be easy to defend the statements that the US loves business and the US loves money, though; I think freedom is in third place here, at best.
I'd say it's at least fourth place; you forgot safety.
According to a related article at The Register, as recently as October of 2010, Steve Jobs himself publicly called Apple's app store "the easiest-to-use, largest app store in the world, preloaded on every iPhone." So it would appear that even Cupertino is using the phrase app store generically in reference to its competitors. I'd call this tidbit a crushing blow to Apple's case.
Thanks, Steve! We all app-reciate it.
...You can have my Imperial system of units when you pry it from my cold, dead 10.16cm.
While Google has made it clear that Cr-48 is nothing more than a test prototype...
I'm waiting for the final version, which I presume will be called the C-64. I hope my old "Little Computer People" disk is still viable...
Brought to you by the letter I and a spelling nazi ;)
I left out the extra i intentionally because it results in a more proper spelling which also looks more like a real element name, such as titanium or germanium, whereas there are no real element names which end in ainium. The "correction" you suggest is actually an alternate form.
;)
I'm afraid you'll have to turn in your spelling nazi license now.
...I have some doubts about this - every other "stable transuranic element" story I've heard ended up being a mistake or a hoax.
Personally, I'm hoping it'll turn out that he's discovered unobtanium . That stuff would be so useful...
...have seen hints of what may be the hot, dense state of matter thought to have filled the universe in its first nanoseconds.
Scientists are quoted as saying "My God...it's full of FAIL."
What I don't get is this: if China can produce CFLs at half the price (which doesn't surprise me), then why couldn't they also produce incandescents at half the price? In other words, why hadn't the plant closed long before the advent of CFLs?
My guess is that incandescent bulbs can be made cheaply both in the USA and in China because they contain no environmental pollutants, whereas CFLs, on the other hand, contain mercury, and it's probable that the environmental regulations in China are sufficiently loose to allow them to streamline the manufacturing process in ways that simply cannot be done legally in the USA.
Why no other more reputable service has challenged them in the e-payment space is beyond me.
Both Amazon Payments and Google Checkout are competing with PayPal, but PayPal has a considerable lead to overcome.
Wasn't this already tried in Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook? As I recall, it did wonders for them.
Remember: Those who do not study The Simpsons are doomed to repeat it.