Because: 1) Stills can and do explode. In my part of the UK, illegal moonshine was a bit of a trend in my grandparent's generation, and they've got many a tale of exploding farm sheds. 2) Because it's easy to accidentally make poison if you don't do it just right (by brewing a high quantity of methanol or other non-edible alcohols instead of ethanol). 3) It's far more valuable when you're done, and you're less able to consume your entire output without outside help (selling home-brew is always illegal in the UK, but you're far less likely to try to sell your home-brew bramble wine than you are moonshine vodka).
For the record, it'll only land you in prison if you don't have a licence. In order to get a licence, you need to prove you're competent, that you're distilling safely, and that you're correctly reporting (and paying taxes on) all sales. Personally, I think that's a licensing scheme worth keeping...
Brewing is easy. I make wine all the time out of any fruit or vegetable that I come into possession of in large enough quantities. I find beer trickier, but I think that's just because I'm a picky ale drinker.
Distilling, on the other hand, is not (that's what you'd need to do to make a tequila). It's pretty dangerous in terms of exploding stills, pretty dangerous in terms of poisonous final product, and it's also probably illegal depending on your jurisdiction (in the UK, you need a licence). That's not to say don't do it, but it's a bit of a different ball game.
Human beings are not outside nature and its methods of determining which species are worthy of survival.
By that logic, our ability to bring back extinct species (based principally on how cool they look) is also "not outside nature and its methods of determining which species are worthy of survival."
You can either use the "we're all part of the plan" argument to justify everything humans do as a-OK, or you can accept there is no grand scheme and everything we do can have consequences- positive or negative.
I say bring the mammoths back. We killed them, nothing else has filled their niche, and they're pretty awesome. And isn't being able to do awesome things one of the benefits of being the planet's dominant species?
Although to defend the meme- FSN was an "experimental" (read "novelty") GUI that people only remember because of Jurassic Park. It looks and acts nothing like conventional UNIX interfaces. It is still mock-worthy that the child would see a monitor with FSN running and instantly recognise that it's UNIX, and know how to operate the park's complex proprietary security systems.
I prefer Unity to Gnome 3 by a long way. Unity in it's later guises has grown on me a bit; I still prefer XFCE (via Xubuntu) in a straight choice, but Unity isn't awful.
Not true. You still pay for the full cost of the phone, even if it's as part of your monthly payments. Cheaper is cheaper whatever the payment method.
I've just checked the Carphone Warehouse website. Cheapest iPhone deal is £33 a month for 24 months. Cheapest Galaxy S III is £28 for 24 months. So that's £120 cheaper over the cost of the contract. Both are "free" up front.
Although it couldn't do anything about the Irans and North Koreas of this world (stable door after the horse has bolted), you could see it as an investment for the future. There are 200 or so nations in the world, 95% of them don't have nuclear programmes. Any one of them could, in the next few years, take a mad one and start a nuclear programme. If you can get them to sign up to this now, while it's not a thought in their mind, you help to head off the problem for the future.
On the other hand, there are a huge number of nations that are in absolutely no position to have a nuclear programme of their own, for financial or technical reasons. For countries like that, this scheme would give them access to nuclear power, membership of the nuclear club, without them having to renounce anything except for hypothetical things.
I mean, maybe Haiti thinks nuclear power would solve their power needs. Haiti isn't going to be developing enriched uranium reactors independently any time soon, and even if they wanted to they'd meet an impenetrably hostile diplomatic wall. This scheme would be fuel on tap for them, with none of the hassle.
"Vehicles that can fly" is a pretty huge incremental step from "Vehicles that can't fly". It's a big leap like that which we tend to call "innovation". Little steps aren't innovation- even though they're often even more useful. The Wright Brother innovated when they managed to put together the first working aeroplane- but it wasn't all that useful. When someone took their plane and made minor incremental improvements to speed, durability, capacity, etc. they weren't innovating, but they did create something truly valuable. When Boeing made the Jumbo Jet it wasn't an "innovation" (it's just a bigger version of what they already built)- but it was damned clever and useful.
Indeed, I was under the impression (different country, different legal systems, but still) that it was the job of the judge (and/or other court staff) to keep the jury informed on points of law- not the job of the lawyers of the plaintiff and defendant.
That is, the plaintiff says "under [some law] the following situation means we should win", and the defendant says "but [some law] means that the following situation means we should win". The judge then ensures that the relevant laws are explained to the jury in such a way that they're able to understand them and make a decision based on the facts.
What I'm really saying is- if TFA is true, that's a failing of the judge. If the jury were able to wildly misinterpret a key point of law, leading them to make a poor decision on the outcome of the case, then the judge hasn't done their job. The jury, who might never have heard of "prior art" before the case, should fully understand what it is and how to interpret it by this point in the trial. If some shmo is spouting off from his personal experience, or stuff he read on the internet, or stuff that his uncle told him when he was a kid, then something's definitely gone wrong.
Unless I'm much mistaken, Earth's tides are mostly a result of the Earth-Moon gravitational interactions, not Earth-Sun. Obviously there will be some effects, but not major ones.
If there were liquid water on a moon orbiting a giant planet orbiting two stars (one of which is tiny), I'd assume the gravitational pull of the planet would more or less completely overwhelm the gravity from the two stars.
If you can undercut an entire planet then I'd call that a worthwhile business opportunity. Can't see how a space elevator helps much, but there's plenty worth lifting off the moon.
Well there's kind of problem number 2 with this business plan. Building a space elevator on Earth is attractive because the cost of rocket fuel to lift payload into Earth orbit is very large- a space elevator there for pays for itself over time, as once it's built the lifts are "free".
Same problem doesn't apply to the Moon. Lifting things from the lunar surface is already cheap and easy in terms of conventional rocketry due to the weak gravity and no atmosphere. So although the space elevator is easier to build, the payback is much smaller.
If we wanted to lift material from the Lunar surface into orbit, we already could- that's the easy bit. But the other bits (finding something worth lifting, building mines to extract it, etc.) haven't come together, so we've never bothered.
I used to work in an admin team at a big company (that is, office admin, not IT admin). Nothing exciting- processing communications from customers, making changes to accounts, etc. The kind of thing that a majority of office workers are probably doing some variant of. Not content creation, video editing or science, just turning the wheels of corporate bureaucracy.
In order to do this job, I would have around 5 separate specialist programmes open at any time (account management stuff, mainframe terminals, etc.). I'd also have multiple Word documents, and multiple Excel spreadsheets open. I'd also have at least half a dozen web pages open at the same time with reference material and look-up pages (this was before we moved away from IE6, so 6 different windows- now it would obviously be in tabs). Plus Outlook, occasional PDFs, and assorted other office bric-a-brac. We ran fairly solid mid-range commercial HP desktops, and they weren't very old (a couple of years mostly), and they still ran slowly and jerkily under that load.
I can't imagine trying to do all that work under a less powerful machine; it would have been unbearable. There is no way we could have switched to a Samsung Galaxy with a dockable keyboard.
That sort of thing is the meat-and-veg of corporate computing. Until either mobile devices catch up with desktops enough to deal with that, or software bloat eases up enough that running a dozen programmes on a low power device isn't a problem, old-fashioned CPU & RAM stats are still going to be relevant. And there's still no cheaper way to get a lot of CPU & RAM than in a traditional bulky desktop case.
A) Not often. I've got plenty to keep me busy, and things I want to do that I never get a chance to do. B) When I am, what's wrong with that? Boredom isn't all that bad. Being alive and bored is better than not being alive at all. Or to put it another way- have you ever been bored on a Saturday afternoon and so decided to kill yourself? If not, then it's not really relevant.
Because drilling dozens of miles into solid rock isn't exactly trivial. Doable, obviously, but it'd be very difficult to move a colossal drilling rig out to Mars, set it up, and have it drill consistently for months at a time. Remember that Curiosity, the biggest and most complicated lander ever sent to Mars, is slightly smaller than a Mini Cooper and can roll along at a top speed of centimetres per second.
Far easier to go down a convenient deep hole than arbitrarily make a new one. Less disruptive too- better to make observations of things in situ rather than drilling and pulverising and transporting.
Also, the caves are interesting in their own right. Making observations of how the caves formed is important science that you won't get by drilling a big bore hole (the opposite is true too). There might even be life in those caves, safe and sheltered from the surface (even if only cave slime); again, not something you might see by drilling a big hole.
You're conflating "second world" with "not a superpower". Which is stupid, because the USSR was considered a "second world" country and a superpower, while most of the European countries would be considered firmly "first world" while not being anything like superpowers.
Not that the Cold War lingo really means much these days however you spin it.
The Mars Climate Orbiter (a NASA mission) cost $330 million and failed completely. Sometimes these things happen in space exploration. One year out of a two year mission isn't awful for a fledgling space programme like India's, and for that sort of cost.
That would only matter if you're comparing two different hardware set-ups. If Win7 and Win8 are on identical machines (or better yet- both installed on the same machine, dual boot or sequentially), then power-on to desktop is the more meaningful measure.
As the GP said, there's no reason why the logo would be displayed at exactly the same point of the boot-up process in both OSs. Case and point- my Xubuntu box boots from logo to desktop in about 3 seconds, but only because the Xubuntu logo only seems to appear at the very end of the boot-up process, moments before it's completed. If I went from "moment the Grub option was selected" to desktop, I'd get a considerably different result.
My mum is a bit of a computer dunce, but she works as a secretary. Her job involves having Quickbooks, Excel, and emails from customers open at the same time side by side, so she can compare and amend. If Excel and Outlook went Metro (both being MS products, that sounds likely), she'll find her job considerably more difficult.
If "moving to the new system will make my job more difficult" is a sentence that can be used honestly, something has gone terribly wrong.
We're in the same position as the US, and most other democracies for that matter. There are three big parties to vote for, and all three have near identical policies. And what differences there are on paper disappear as soon as they're in power. Aside from the main three, you've then got a choice of incoherent extremists (like UKIP, the BNP, or the various Communist variants) or single issue parties (like the Greens or Pirates).
On voting day, it's tricky to see how you use your vote in a way that brings about the right sort of changes. Various combos of votes have been tried over the decades, and nothing's really worked yet...
It's not one channel. For that $230 a year, there are 10 TV channels, 10 national radio stations (and around 50 local ones), plus the website (including the comprehensive news and sport sections, equal to any daily newspaper). They're also in charge of certain public services, such as televising parliament sessions (BBC Parliament is one of the channels- no commercial station would broadcast wall-to-wall parliamentary debate, so it is a unique service).
Excluding the print and local stuff, at about $2.30 per national broadcast per year I'd say it's pretty good value most years.
Slashdot Mirror
Because:
1) Stills can and do explode. In my part of the UK, illegal moonshine was a bit of a trend in my grandparent's generation, and they've got many a tale of exploding farm sheds.
2) Because it's easy to accidentally make poison if you don't do it just right (by brewing a high quantity of methanol or other non-edible alcohols instead of ethanol).
3) It's far more valuable when you're done, and you're less able to consume your entire output without outside help (selling home-brew is always illegal in the UK, but you're far less likely to try to sell your home-brew bramble wine than you are moonshine vodka).
For the record, it'll only land you in prison if you don't have a licence. In order to get a licence, you need to prove you're competent, that you're distilling safely, and that you're correctly reporting (and paying taxes on) all sales. Personally, I think that's a licensing scheme worth keeping...
Brewing is easy. I make wine all the time out of any fruit or vegetable that I come into possession of in large enough quantities. I find beer trickier, but I think that's just because I'm a picky ale drinker.
Distilling, on the other hand, is not (that's what you'd need to do to make a tequila). It's pretty dangerous in terms of exploding stills, pretty dangerous in terms of poisonous final product, and it's also probably illegal depending on your jurisdiction (in the UK, you need a licence). That's not to say don't do it, but it's a bit of a different ball game.
Maybe I'm not as hardcore as you, but if I saw this I wouldn't leap to the conclusion that I was looking at a UNIX system:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaRHU1XxMJQ
Let's see...
Don't make the velociraptors 5 times normal size and super intelligent?
Don't have the zoo's security system hooked up to a desktop computer operated by a single corrupt guy with no-one checking what he's doing?
Check to see if the dinosaurs can change sex before creating hundreds of them and setting them loose barely supervised in a jungle?
Have as your game keepers / security detail something more substantial than one guy with a rifle?
When you invent a world changing technology, do some basic scientific research with it first before using it to build a theme park?
Human beings are not outside nature and its methods of determining which species are worthy of survival.
By that logic, our ability to bring back extinct species (based principally on how cool they look) is also "not outside nature and its methods of determining which species are worthy of survival."
You can either use the "we're all part of the plan" argument to justify everything humans do as a-OK, or you can accept there is no grand scheme and everything we do can have consequences- positive or negative.
I say bring the mammoths back. We killed them, nothing else has filled their niche, and they're pretty awesome. And isn't being able to do awesome things one of the benefits of being the planet's dominant species?
Although to defend the meme- FSN was an "experimental" (read "novelty") GUI that people only remember because of Jurassic Park. It looks and acts nothing like conventional UNIX interfaces. It is still mock-worthy that the child would see a monitor with FSN running and instantly recognise that it's UNIX, and know how to operate the park's complex proprietary security systems.
I prefer Unity to Gnome 3 by a long way. Unity in it's later guises has grown on me a bit; I still prefer XFCE (via Xubuntu) in a straight choice, but Unity isn't awful.
Gnome 3 I just can't get on board with.
Not true. You still pay for the full cost of the phone, even if it's as part of your monthly payments. Cheaper is cheaper whatever the payment method.
I've just checked the Carphone Warehouse website. Cheapest iPhone deal is £33 a month for 24 months. Cheapest Galaxy S III is £28 for 24 months. So that's £120 cheaper over the cost of the contract. Both are "free" up front.
Although it couldn't do anything about the Irans and North Koreas of this world (stable door after the horse has bolted), you could see it as an investment for the future. There are 200 or so nations in the world, 95% of them don't have nuclear programmes. Any one of them could, in the next few years, take a mad one and start a nuclear programme. If you can get them to sign up to this now, while it's not a thought in their mind, you help to head off the problem for the future.
On the other hand, there are a huge number of nations that are in absolutely no position to have a nuclear programme of their own, for financial or technical reasons. For countries like that, this scheme would give them access to nuclear power, membership of the nuclear club, without them having to renounce anything except for hypothetical things.
I mean, maybe Haiti thinks nuclear power would solve their power needs. Haiti isn't going to be developing enriched uranium reactors independently any time soon, and even if they wanted to they'd meet an impenetrably hostile diplomatic wall. This scheme would be fuel on tap for them, with none of the hassle.
"Vehicles that can fly" is a pretty huge incremental step from "Vehicles that can't fly". It's a big leap like that which we tend to call "innovation". Little steps aren't innovation- even though they're often even more useful. The Wright Brother innovated when they managed to put together the first working aeroplane- but it wasn't all that useful. When someone took their plane and made minor incremental improvements to speed, durability, capacity, etc. they weren't innovating, but they did create something truly valuable. When Boeing made the Jumbo Jet it wasn't an "innovation" (it's just a bigger version of what they already built)- but it was damned clever and useful.
Indeed, I was under the impression (different country, different legal systems, but still) that it was the job of the judge (and/or other court staff) to keep the jury informed on points of law- not the job of the lawyers of the plaintiff and defendant.
That is, the plaintiff says "under [some law] the following situation means we should win", and the defendant says "but [some law] means that the following situation means we should win". The judge then ensures that the relevant laws are explained to the jury in such a way that they're able to understand them and make a decision based on the facts.
What I'm really saying is- if TFA is true, that's a failing of the judge. If the jury were able to wildly misinterpret a key point of law, leading them to make a poor decision on the outcome of the case, then the judge hasn't done their job. The jury, who might never have heard of "prior art" before the case, should fully understand what it is and how to interpret it by this point in the trial. If some shmo is spouting off from his personal experience, or stuff he read on the internet, or stuff that his uncle told him when he was a kid, then something's definitely gone wrong.
Unless I'm much mistaken, Earth's tides are mostly a result of the Earth-Moon gravitational interactions, not Earth-Sun. Obviously there will be some effects, but not major ones.
If there were liquid water on a moon orbiting a giant planet orbiting two stars (one of which is tiny), I'd assume the gravitational pull of the planet would more or less completely overwhelm the gravity from the two stars.
Yeah, people who use them should be punished.
Intended?
If you can undercut an entire planet then I'd call that a worthwhile business opportunity. Can't see how a space elevator helps much, but there's plenty worth lifting off the moon.
Well there's kind of problem number 2 with this business plan. Building a space elevator on Earth is attractive because the cost of rocket fuel to lift payload into Earth orbit is very large- a space elevator there for pays for itself over time, as once it's built the lifts are "free".
Same problem doesn't apply to the Moon. Lifting things from the lunar surface is already cheap and easy in terms of conventional rocketry due to the weak gravity and no atmosphere. So although the space elevator is easier to build, the payback is much smaller.
If we wanted to lift material from the Lunar surface into orbit, we already could- that's the easy bit. But the other bits (finding something worth lifting, building mines to extract it, etc.) haven't come together, so we've never bothered.
I used to work in an admin team at a big company (that is, office admin, not IT admin). Nothing exciting- processing communications from customers, making changes to accounts, etc. The kind of thing that a majority of office workers are probably doing some variant of. Not content creation, video editing or science, just turning the wheels of corporate bureaucracy.
In order to do this job, I would have around 5 separate specialist programmes open at any time (account management stuff, mainframe terminals, etc.). I'd also have multiple Word documents, and multiple Excel spreadsheets open. I'd also have at least half a dozen web pages open at the same time with reference material and look-up pages (this was before we moved away from IE6, so 6 different windows- now it would obviously be in tabs). Plus Outlook, occasional PDFs, and assorted other office bric-a-brac. We ran fairly solid mid-range commercial HP desktops, and they weren't very old (a couple of years mostly), and they still ran slowly and jerkily under that load.
I can't imagine trying to do all that work under a less powerful machine; it would have been unbearable. There is no way we could have switched to a Samsung Galaxy with a dockable keyboard.
That sort of thing is the meat-and-veg of corporate computing. Until either mobile devices catch up with desktops enough to deal with that, or software bloat eases up enough that running a dozen programmes on a low power device isn't a problem, old-fashioned CPU & RAM stats are still going to be relevant. And there's still no cheaper way to get a lot of CPU & RAM than in a traditional bulky desktop case.
Subway Analogy Guy? Oh god, not another lame gimmick joke account. I'm not sure I have the energy to ignore another one of you!
(Or I could just set you to -1, but that always seems almost fatally harsh. I'm not sure I could bring myself to do that to my worst enemy)
A) Not often. I've got plenty to keep me busy, and things I want to do that I never get a chance to do.
B) When I am, what's wrong with that? Boredom isn't all that bad. Being alive and bored is better than not being alive at all. Or to put it another way- have you ever been bored on a Saturday afternoon and so decided to kill yourself? If not, then it's not really relevant.
Because drilling dozens of miles into solid rock isn't exactly trivial. Doable, obviously, but it'd be very difficult to move a colossal drilling rig out to Mars, set it up, and have it drill consistently for months at a time. Remember that Curiosity, the biggest and most complicated lander ever sent to Mars, is slightly smaller than a Mini Cooper and can roll along at a top speed of centimetres per second.
Far easier to go down a convenient deep hole than arbitrarily make a new one. Less disruptive too- better to make observations of things in situ rather than drilling and pulverising and transporting.
Also, the caves are interesting in their own right. Making observations of how the caves formed is important science that you won't get by drilling a big bore hole (the opposite is true too). There might even be life in those caves, safe and sheltered from the surface (even if only cave slime); again, not something you might see by drilling a big hole.
You're conflating "second world" with "not a superpower". Which is stupid, because the USSR was considered a "second world" country and a superpower, while most of the European countries would be considered firmly "first world" while not being anything like superpowers.
Not that the Cold War lingo really means much these days however you spin it.
The Mars Climate Orbiter (a NASA mission) cost $330 million and failed completely. Sometimes these things happen in space exploration. One year out of a two year mission isn't awful for a fledgling space programme like India's, and for that sort of cost.
That would only matter if you're comparing two different hardware set-ups. If Win7 and Win8 are on identical machines (or better yet- both installed on the same machine, dual boot or sequentially), then power-on to desktop is the more meaningful measure.
As the GP said, there's no reason why the logo would be displayed at exactly the same point of the boot-up process in both OSs. Case and point- my Xubuntu box boots from logo to desktop in about 3 seconds, but only because the Xubuntu logo only seems to appear at the very end of the boot-up process, moments before it's completed. If I went from "moment the Grub option was selected" to desktop, I'd get a considerably different result.
My mum is a bit of a computer dunce, but she works as a secretary. Her job involves having Quickbooks, Excel, and emails from customers open at the same time side by side, so she can compare and amend. If Excel and Outlook went Metro (both being MS products, that sounds likely), she'll find her job considerably more difficult.
If "moving to the new system will make my job more difficult" is a sentence that can be used honestly, something has gone terribly wrong.
We're in the same position as the US, and most other democracies for that matter. There are three big parties to vote for, and all three have near identical policies. And what differences there are on paper disappear as soon as they're in power. Aside from the main three, you've then got a choice of incoherent extremists (like UKIP, the BNP, or the various Communist variants) or single issue parties (like the Greens or Pirates).
On voting day, it's tricky to see how you use your vote in a way that brings about the right sort of changes. Various combos of votes have been tried over the decades, and nothing's really worked yet...
It's not one channel. For that $230 a year, there are 10 TV channels, 10 national radio stations (and around 50 local ones), plus the website (including the comprehensive news and sport sections, equal to any daily newspaper). They're also in charge of certain public services, such as televising parliament sessions (BBC Parliament is one of the channels- no commercial station would broadcast wall-to-wall parliamentary debate, so it is a unique service).
Excluding the print and local stuff, at about $2.30 per national broadcast per year I'd say it's pretty good value most years.
In other words- it's not really like PBS.