You can fit a lot more video, but I was referring to 1080 since that what datajack was on about. The minimum Blu-ray spec is 720x576, which I'm sure you could fit a lot more than 4 hours of onto a 25GB disc, but given datajack's comments about fuzzy blocky messes, I doubt that's going to be HD in his book.
And, yes, codecs are more important than the container, but I was referring to an MP4 codec within a container (sorry if my wording was unclear).
For my own personal use, I own two road-inspected vehicles. A car and a pickup truck.
The car is my tablet - it gets me where I need to go cheaply and comfortably when it's only me (or me and my family or carpooler) and I need to get somewhere with a modest amount of stuff. Technically, I really don't NEED a car. I could drive the truck. But the car gets 50MPG to the truck's 15MPG, it's long-since paid for, and it's cheaper to maintain. So even with annual inspection and taxes and whatnot having the car saves me money. Not a whole lot, but some.
The truck is my netbook/laptop. It gets work done. I have a very long driveway, and live in snow country. The truck is my plow truck. It's also my "go get a half ton of gravel to fix the driveway" truck, my "drive out the 14 miles of logging road to the Appalachian Trail to do maintenance" truck, and my "wife just bought a new piece of furniture and I need to go pick it up" truck, or my "the roads really suck but I still need to get to work" truck. I use it for some practical purpose about once every two weeks. 13 out of those 14 days, I wonder why I have a truck. That one day, I wonder what I'd ever do without one.
If I absolutely had to choose one, it would be the truck. I need it. But the car serves certain purposes better than the truck does, and in my case it's (ever so slightly) cheaper to have both.
Both have four wheels, and can transport me where I need to go. They are as similar to each other as a netbook and a tablet. But the differences are very important.
Similarly, with computing devices, if I had to choose one, it'd have to be a "real" computer. It's not that I type so terribly much more than I consume content, it's that if I was forced to one device it'd have to be something that can do EVERYTHING I want to do, not because it's the absolute best tool for everything.
At home, I have an iPod Touch for checking Facebook and the weather and reading RSS and surfing YouTube, and a real desktop computer for watching TV and doing computer-y things that need more screen space and/or lots of data entry.
I'm a private pilot, and at least one of my friends is about to order an iPad as an electronic kneeboard, and I'm giving it some serious thought. There's a service that offers him approach plates and aviation charts at various levels of details with zoom and pan and "pull up A/FD detail on this airport" with a single tap, all for under $100 a year. Even if it doesn't offer GPS tracking on the maps (he wouldn't depend on it as a primary navigation device anyway, he's got a cockpit GPS for that) it'll save him several hundred dollars a year in chart, plate, and A/FD purchases.
Enough that even the GPS and cell-enabled one will pay for itself in purchases in less than two years.
He's IFR, I'm VFR, so my overall chart purchases aren't that much more than the annual service, so it'll never pay for itself in my case. But there's the convenience. We are located very close to the intersection of the New York, Montreal, and Halifax sectional VFR charts, so for all practical purposes you need to have all three for most flights and swap between them frequently on a lot of flights. This is a pain in the ass, a risk of having an obsolete chart (because the charts all expire on different schedules), and a distraction when flipping across charts. One contiguous chart that is always up to date and covers our area without edges is worth some serious thought.
I don't see any other practical value for the thing for my purposes, but you never know.
About my only gripe is the durability. Obviously, an aviation-designed electronic kneeboard is going to be pretty bulletproof. On the other hand, it's going to cost ten times as much, too, and I can afford one heck of a nice protective case for the cost of 3-4 charts.
On the other hand, a desktop firewall and a server-based firewall has too much of an overlap in terms of their function.
Except that, in one important function, you want that overlap. That function is logging. Don't bother with a firewall without it, agreed, but don't operate without a firewall WITH it.
If someone takes out your primary firewall and starts helping themselves to the contents of local machines, or manages to get one of your users to compromise their own machine and sails through a hole in your corporate firewall, the local firewall logs will probably contain lots of nice information about which machines were compromised, what information may have made it out, etc. As a side effect, they might even slow a hacker down, but maybe not, and you don't really care at that point. You NEED to know what machines were hit. This is not optional.
Sure, it's a "close the barn door after the cows have left" solution, but do you really want your IT department having to say "Gee, Mr. CEO that's about to go on the 5 O'clock news, we only know someone spent time on our network, we have no earthly idea what they might have accessed or made copies of."
I've been in one accident (other driver hit black ice and swerved out in front of us) where a seatbelt not only almost, but very certainly saved my ass. The accident was bad enough that my seat was ripped from the frame and bent forward, and my head ended up 2 feet from the dashboard. I had a seatbelt-shaped bruise across my chest for weeks. A set of ski poles we had loosely laid in the back of the wagon (really, really, really fucking bad idea, by the way) made two neat holes in the windshield, right under the rearview mirror. The hood of the car folded in half and was about 2 feet from the windshield.
Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal, but I've got 20 years of life that I wouldn't have had without wearing that seatbelt that day. I figure I owe them a little plug every now and then.
Now I wear a seatbelt when I pull the car out of the garage to wash it. And I'm quite immune to people laughing about that, too.
I've had a child, and so many other cool things happen since then. Woulda been a shame to have missed it trying . 20 years and counting.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled discussion, already in progress, with my apologies to those offended by the PSA.
but I also prefer my passengers to wear their seatbelts
I require it. If I fuck up and cause an injury, I don't want lawyers sucking me dry because I, as the responsible driver, didn't insist on proper safety precautions for the passengers in my care.
Of course, I'm also a pilot, and we're all type-A personality asshole control freaks that way.:)
But then, Windows allows software to modify some firewall settings, so probably that won't work anyway?
If your main corporate firewall gets compromised, having well-configured necessary-permissions-only firewalls on your local machines might be the difference between discovering the attack and depriving the core switch of power before or after the hackers had time to get to any local machines. This is unlikely, but still possible.
A good local firewall, however, serves a far more important purpose than merely preventing attacks. They offer logging. In general and with decent configuration, that logging can't easily be turned off at the client side (and a hacker will rarely take the time to try and disable it), and even if it does the lack of a log can scream "hacked machine" every bit as loudly as a logged attack.
If your network gets hacked, you go into forensic mode. The most important questions you need to ask are:
1. What machines were touched? 2. What critical data exists on those machines that someone may have obtained a copy of? 3. (if available) What of that information was accessed? 4. (if available) Where did it go?
(1) and (2) are sufficient to justify the existence of local logging firewalls across your entire network. If your main firewalls are hacked, it may well be that the only place that information exists is in the local firewalls.
(3) and (4) would be a really cool bonus. Unlikely, but cool. If you found out that Accounting John's machine got hacked but the hackers only took a copy of a few select bits of his porn collection, then you can breathe a sigh of relief that the financials he had on the machine are safe, reward him for being smart enough to put distracting information on his machine, require that all employees keep a healthy porn collection to distract hackers, and move on.
Actually preventing attacks would be fantastic, but (as you pointed out) somewhat unlikely.
Cohen-Tannoudji did it with atoms. The problem is that atoms are too small to be useful, and "artificial atoms" are too large and subject to interference. DeMille and his team are trying to figure out how to manipulate molecules, which would be large enough to be useful yet small enough to be subject to less interference.
Cohen-Tannoudji certainly laid a lot of the groundwork by developing the technique on atoms, and it's probably true that DeMille and his team are "standing on the shoulders of giants" with this attempt, but they are trying to take the original work and expand on it to make it more useful.
Science writers generally do not use phrases like this when they are targeting a scientific audience. If this were to appear in the Journal "Science", or even in "New Scientist", I'd expect a simple statement of "absolute zero" and if you don't know what it means, by all means go look it up.
However, "Medical Daily" sounds like it's targeted at an audience that might not be expected to know what "absolute zero" means, so it's appropriate to put at least a token explanation, and since it's an American non-scientific publication they'd generally put the temperature in Fahrenheit, not Celsius (which most of their audience would not use) or Kelvin (which many of their audience probably hasn't even heard of).
Blu-Ray HD can fit about 4 hours on a 25GB disc if formatted MPEG4. So a full-on 1080 movie of 90 minutes would be a file of approximately 10GB if containerized in MPEG4. You might be able to do a little better in picking downloadable file formats because downloaded movies don't need to be formatted using one of the Holy Trinity (MPEG2, MPEG4, or VC-1). But let's assume you used MPEG4.
10GB, downloaded over my Comcast 3 megabit connection, would take about 7 to 8 hours (assuming reasonable saturation). Assuming I can get about 1/3 of my capacity, I can pretty much guarantee the movie would be in my hot little hands within 24 hours of the time I decided I wanted it. This is certainly slower than driving down to Hannaford and getting it from RedBox, or popping over to my local rental place and getting it there, but it's a heck of a lot faster than Netflix.
However, you do make a point. If you really, really want full-on 1080, you're probably better off buying a physical disc. You get all the extras, you'll (probably) get it more quickly, you aren't using up hard drive space to store them, etc etc.
Personally, for my purposes, I usually find even 720p to be overkill. DVD-quality is usually more than sufficient for my needs, and I still watch a lot of my TV using analogue signal from my cable provider. On my 24" computer screen, I honestly don't see a lot of difference, and for most of what I watch plain old TV format is fine. Only for things like BBC Planet Earth would I care.
The odds of a student using the entire charge of one without having a convenient opportunity to recharge it are somewhere between none and fat chance in hell.
That's true in the first year, assuming of course Little Jimmy didn't intentionally forget to charge his iPad so he'd have an excuse to get out of mean old Mr. Johnson's boring history class. There is one advantage of a paper book - if the student forgets his/hers, you can pull a spare off the stack and hand it to them so they can attend class, and give them a demerit for forgetting class materials so they have an incentive not to do it again unless they happen to enjoy detention. With a laptop, you could keep a few spare charged batteries at the school in case a student runs out of charge with the same demerit system.
I doubt there are going to be spare iPads hanging about with the proper books loaded up, though I suppose if the units do over-the-air backups during the day you could image a new iPod to be just like Little Jimmy's during homeroom so he's ready for his day when the first class bell rings. The same could be true of units damaged overnight, of course.
I suppose there could be an uncomfortable dunce chair in the corner with the ever-so-stylish cap and a charging cable next to it.:)
Having said that, the actual battery life is certainly not an issue in the first year, probably not in the second, possibly not in the third, but how about when the device starts to age? If you're going to drop $600-800 per student on these things, they damned well better be useful for at least 5 years. Apple is very good at solid quality builds, and I'm sure you'll only lose a percentage of them in 5 years to student abuse, but Li-Ion battery tech just isn't up to the job for a long run like that.
I have a 5-year-old laptop that came with a 5-hour battery, I've babied that battery and treated it pretty well, and it's down to 25 minutes now. Fortunately, being a laptop, I can drop $29.98 (with shipping) on buy.com if I needed to and get a factory-fresh battery and get my 5 hours back. Yank old battery, pop in new one, charge it up, and I'm done.
My newer iPod Touch (8GB, second generation) would cost $106 ($99 plus a $7 "processing fee" to accept my order) plus shipping for a battery replacement, I'd get a wiped refurbished unit (not my own unit with a new battery), and I'd lose access to it for at least a week. At the moment, the iPad replacement seems to be the same price, but as Apple's devices get older the cost of battery replacement seems to go up (original iPod battery replacement is up to $250 now). If the school is smart, they'll have an "IT Guy" who can open them up and swap the batteries and save a few bucks (and not lose access to the hardware), but it's a far more complex operation than "unlock old battery, pull out old battery, push in new battery, lock
Within 5 years, the schools will have to start putting electrical outlets at the student's desks, or start paying for replacement batteries every few years for all the iPads that don't get destroyed by abuse. Schools can't afford for these to be "use it for a year and dispose of it" devices, so the batteries should be considered consumables for such a device.
I assume you mean Alpha Centauri. I tried the demo, years ago, but life soon beckoned and I left the Civ universe. I'm only recently coming back, and I don't get a lot of time to visit.:)
FreeCiv is very much like CivII, though it adds the "borders" feature I first saw in the demo of Alpha Centauri, and there are a bunch of little things. Some slight visual improvements (city walls actually get drawn on the map, etc).
Of course, FreeCiv is also under active development, so they keep adding new features.
Still, I just RTFA, and Civ V does look very beautiful, especially compared to the pixelly CivII-ish gameboard of FreeCiv.
But I don't play for the pretty pictures, and I get precious little time to play at all, so FreeCiv fills my Civ addiction quite nicely and the price is right. If I had a current Windows box, and I had the time to play it, I might buy it.
I remember the first time I encountered an enemy Priest in Microsoft's "Age of Empires" (read: simplified Civilization clone for when a Civ game will take too long, with poorer gameplay but nicer-looking graphics). I hear this strange "heyeyeyey-heyeyeyey" sound and suddenly my primary and very expensively massive defense tower changed to an enemy unit after about 20 seconds.
After that, AoE was all about developing religion first and fastest, at the cost of everything else, and I quickly got bored with it. There was basically little point in doing anything but developing and supporting the most powerful priesthood you could, because that was the key to stealing enemy units. A group of about 5-10 well-equipped Priests could go up against an enemy force of almost any size with very little fear. Put one or two of them "out in front", keep all of the others beyond enemy range but only focused on healing the first one, and start picking off enemy units and converting them to your side one by one. Keep a few pawn units around to draw fire and buy the Priests enough time to convert an enemy unit or two, and it's all over but the waiting.
Deus ex Machina is bad enough in scripted shows and movies. In what are supposed to be strategy games, it sucks. There should never ever be any one unit type that is infinitely effective and indestructible.
Religion may be an actual influence in a human-strategy game, and introducing it is interesting, but when your priests can always convert every resource (including cities and buildings) very rapidly and without fail, what's the point of building any unit except priests? (and workers to keep the gold a-flowin into the Temples so new priests keep popping out, of course).
In that case, stick with Civ 4 or Civ 3 (or 2 or 1). They haven't stopped working. You can still play them.
Don't forget Freeciv, if you are a newbie to the Civilization universe and just want to try it out. It seems to be pretty light on resource requirements, and it's free.
Sorry, he took back the crown. For now. I'm assuming Mitchell isn't dead, or that at least Donkey Kong still exists and there are a few players left out there.
Someone will eventually come by and score 1,064,501 points or more. If this was important enough to Weibe to make the sacrifices he did to reclaim the crown in the first place, it'll almost certainly be just as important to him to win back the crown the next time his score gets beaten.
Hopefully he'll chalk this one up as a victory and move on to other things. Alternatively, maybe his kids will get lucky and Dad will sustain a very, very slight and preferably painless injury, just enough to cost him any possible chance of beating his own score without affecting his dexterity in any other meaningful way. Then if he's lucky enough to still have his children interested in him, he'll develop more of an interest in them.
An increase in population density is beneficial only in that it frees up enough land to support the resource requirements of that population and minimizes the impact of that population.
"Efficiency" has only one really important aspect, honestly, and that is "sustainability". In other words, "can what you are doing be done continuously for as long as necessary without consuming some resource which will run out and for which there is no replacement?" The environment's ability to absorb pollution is part of that resource pool.
In a truly rural society, every person has the space and capacity to feed and support him/herself. You have a family of 4-8 people and 100-200 acres of resources at your disposal, which provides you with enough growing wood that you can harvest what you need for heat building and repairs and still have biomass growing faster than you consume it, enough clearable land to lay down staple food crops without destroying all of your trees, and enough of an animal population to replenish itself quickly enough that you won't harvest it to extinction. It also allows you to separate your drinking water and your septic systems sufficiently that the land can filter out the impurities for you. Population density must be kept low, and if you start engaging in unsustainable behavior you die.
As population densities increase, you might work with a few neighbors to make your resource usage more efficient. If Zeke has a forest that grows back really fast and Jake seems to have a plot of land that grows bigger potatoes, Zeke might trade a few cord of wood a year for a truckload of potatoes from Jake. Hank gets an extra couple of deer that year, so he gives one each to Zeke and Jake in return for something he's got a shortage of. That's the start of interdependence.
Once density reaches a certain point, you have to switch from primarily independence (rural) to primarily interdependence (urban) to keep everyone fed. If your family plot is 4 acres, you aren't going to be able to feed yourself and heat your house and keep your drinkable water and your shit separated. Similarly, in areas where you don't have all the resources you need to survive, you'll have to switch to at least a partly interdependent system to import the resources you need.
As populations continue to increase relative to the fertility of the land you're on, you have to become more interdependent to the point where you are basically importing every resource you need. That resource has to be imported from somewhere, so you have to have some land set aside somewhere to grow/harvest your food and filter your water and process your waste. Chances are, you're paying for most or all of those things to be done for you.
Once you have an "urban" (completely interdependent) population, "efficiency" takes on different meanings, because you are separated from the immediate impacts of your actions (if you overeat, you'll simply buy more food from the store, but you as an individual won't run out of food like you would on a subsistence farm). You can freely engage, as an individual, in "unsustainable" practices, and as long as the majority of the population doesn't do the same the society as a whole is sustainable.
But, more importantly, even though an increase in population density on a continental scale is never good, it inevitably happens. Once you've reached urbanization your best bet is to get the people crammed in as small an area as is feasible using the least resources possible, so you free up the most land around that urban area to provide it with the food and water and other resources it needs.
At some point in urbanization, having individual kitchens in apartments becomes less efficient than a central kitchen.
It takes a lot of energy to package, refrigerate, and cook small amounts of food in millions of individual living spaces, where a few hundred room-sized freezers and automobile-sized ovens could accomplish the same goal in a lot less space, with a lot less waste, using a lot less ene
The problem is, if you get a package delivered they are almost 100% certain to deliver to multiple homes in a trip. Even if they drive a few miles between each house, the major part of the drive out is done with a full vehicle. The big difference is that they can adjust their vehicle size and routes to accommodate the number of packages, whereas you probably can't because you've got only one or two vehicles and can't consolidate trips easily with 5 neighbors.
Each package may be delivered separately to your house, but it's rare that the package delivery van has just your package in it. The vans usually leave the distribution center packed full, with a route designed to empty the van of packages in the fewest miles possible.
If the delivery company has just a few packages in your vicinity, they'll use a very small and efficient vehicle to get them there, or outsource the final mile to USPS or a local courier service or someone else who is more likely to be visiting you on a daily basis, whatever costs them the least in terms of fuel and wages.
The thing is, UPS makes a living figuring out how to get packages in your hands in the most economical way possible, and their three highest expenses are wages, fuel, and vehicle maintenance. Anything they can do to get packages to you in the most efficient manner possible goes directly to their profit margin.
And, of course, if you want to talk environmental, let's talk environmental. How about the impact of building and maintaining the store? One big box outlet is going to consume the building materials and space necessary to build a large apartment complex, consume the energy of at least a few dozen homes, and require that at least 10-15 people or more drive to it every day whether they sell anything or not (employees).
If 500 people living an average of 10 miles away visited the store and bought something today, that would be 500 people driving 20 miles, or 1000 vehicle-miles. If half of those things were small enough to go USPS, then you could save 500 vehicle-miles simply by having the store mail those items. Give UPS a ten-mile radius delivery zone with 250 packages and they'll figure out how to do it in a hell of a lot less than 500 vehicle-miles.
There's a lot to be said for shopping locally. Easier exchanges/returns, look at the physical goods before you buy, supporting the local economy, etc etc.
Environmental impact is not one of them, unless you're talking about something that is produced right at the store, and even then it's a crapshoot.
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You can fit a lot more video, but I was referring to 1080 since that what datajack was on about. The minimum Blu-ray spec is 720x576, which I'm sure you could fit a lot more than 4 hours of onto a 25GB disc, but given datajack's comments about fuzzy blocky messes, I doubt that's going to be HD in his book.
And, yes, codecs are more important than the container, but I was referring to an MP4 codec within a container (sorry if my wording was unclear).
Here in the US it's up to whomever's lawyer has the biggest phallus, and I'm not willing to go bankrupt even if I did win in that comparison.
Car analogy:
For my own personal use, I own two road-inspected vehicles. A car and a pickup truck.
The car is my tablet - it gets me where I need to go cheaply and comfortably when it's only me (or me and my family or carpooler) and I need to get somewhere with a modest amount of stuff. Technically, I really don't NEED a car. I could drive the truck. But the car gets 50MPG to the truck's 15MPG, it's long-since paid for, and it's cheaper to maintain. So even with annual inspection and taxes and whatnot having the car saves me money. Not a whole lot, but some.
The truck is my netbook/laptop. It gets work done. I have a very long driveway, and live in snow country. The truck is my plow truck. It's also my "go get a half ton of gravel to fix the driveway" truck, my "drive out the 14 miles of logging road to the Appalachian Trail to do maintenance" truck, and my "wife just bought a new piece of furniture and I need to go pick it up" truck, or my "the roads really suck but I still need to get to work" truck. I use it for some practical purpose about once every two weeks. 13 out of those 14 days, I wonder why I have a truck. That one day, I wonder what I'd ever do without one.
If I absolutely had to choose one, it would be the truck. I need it. But the car serves certain purposes better than the truck does, and in my case it's (ever so slightly) cheaper to have both.
Both have four wheels, and can transport me where I need to go. They are as similar to each other as a netbook and a tablet. But the differences are very important.
Similarly, with computing devices, if I had to choose one, it'd have to be a "real" computer. It's not that I type so terribly much more than I consume content, it's that if I was forced to one device it'd have to be something that can do EVERYTHING I want to do, not because it's the absolute best tool for everything.
At home, I have an iPod Touch for checking Facebook and the weather and reading RSS and surfing YouTube, and a real desktop computer for watching TV and doing computer-y things that need more screen space and/or lots of data entry.
I'm a private pilot, and at least one of my friends is about to order an iPad as an electronic kneeboard, and I'm giving it some serious thought. There's a service that offers him approach plates and aviation charts at various levels of details with zoom and pan and "pull up A/FD detail on this airport" with a single tap, all for under $100 a year. Even if it doesn't offer GPS tracking on the maps (he wouldn't depend on it as a primary navigation device anyway, he's got a cockpit GPS for that) it'll save him several hundred dollars a year in chart, plate, and A/FD purchases.
Enough that even the GPS and cell-enabled one will pay for itself in purchases in less than two years.
He's IFR, I'm VFR, so my overall chart purchases aren't that much more than the annual service, so it'll never pay for itself in my case. But there's the convenience. We are located very close to the intersection of the New York, Montreal, and Halifax sectional VFR charts, so for all practical purposes you need to have all three for most flights and swap between them frequently on a lot of flights. This is a pain in the ass, a risk of having an obsolete chart (because the charts all expire on different schedules), and a distraction when flipping across charts. One contiguous chart that is always up to date and covers our area without edges is worth some serious thought.
I don't see any other practical value for the thing for my purposes, but you never know.
About my only gripe is the durability. Obviously, an aviation-designed electronic kneeboard is going to be pretty bulletproof. On the other hand, it's going to cost ten times as much, too, and I can afford one heck of a nice protective case for the cost of 3-4 charts.
On the other hand, a desktop firewall and a server-based firewall has too much of an overlap in terms of their function.
Except that, in one important function, you want that overlap. That function is logging. Don't bother with a firewall without it, agreed, but don't operate without a firewall WITH it.
If someone takes out your primary firewall and starts helping themselves to the contents of local machines, or manages to get one of your users to compromise their own machine and sails through a hole in your corporate firewall, the local firewall logs will probably contain lots of nice information about which machines were compromised, what information may have made it out, etc. As a side effect, they might even slow a hacker down, but maybe not, and you don't really care at that point. You NEED to know what machines were hit. This is not optional.
Sure, it's a "close the barn door after the cows have left" solution, but do you really want your IT department having to say "Gee, Mr. CEO that's about to go on the 5 O'clock news, we only know someone spent time on our network, we have no earthly idea what they might have accessed or made copies of."
Even if the seatbelt doesn't lock, it'll slow you down. In your case, even the partial operation of a single of two redundant systems was sufficient.
That's a perfect example of why you want as many layers as you can afford.
Very off topic (sorry), but...
I've been in one accident (other driver hit black ice and swerved out in front of us) where a seatbelt not only almost, but very certainly saved my ass. The accident was bad enough that my seat was ripped from the frame and bent forward, and my head ended up 2 feet from the dashboard. I had a seatbelt-shaped bruise across my chest for weeks. A set of ski poles we had loosely laid in the back of the wagon (really, really, really fucking bad idea, by the way) made two neat holes in the windshield, right under the rearview mirror. The hood of the car folded in half and was about 2 feet from the windshield.
Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal, but I've got 20 years of life that I wouldn't have had without wearing that seatbelt that day. I figure I owe them a little plug every now and then.
Now I wear a seatbelt when I pull the car out of the garage to wash it. And I'm quite immune to people laughing about that, too.
I've had a child, and so many other cool things happen since then. Woulda been a shame to have missed it trying . 20 years and counting.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled discussion, already in progress, with my apologies to those offended by the PSA.
but I also prefer my passengers to wear their seatbelts
I require it. If I fuck up and cause an injury, I don't want lawyers sucking me dry because I, as the responsible driver, didn't insist on proper safety precautions for the passengers in my care.
Of course, I'm also a pilot, and we're all type-A personality asshole control freaks that way. :)
But then, Windows allows software to modify some firewall settings, so probably that won't work anyway?
If your main corporate firewall gets compromised, having well-configured necessary-permissions-only firewalls on your local machines might be the difference between discovering the attack and depriving the core switch of power before or after the hackers had time to get to any local machines. This is unlikely, but still possible.
A good local firewall, however, serves a far more important purpose than merely preventing attacks. They offer logging. In general and with decent configuration, that logging can't easily be turned off at the client side (and a hacker will rarely take the time to try and disable it), and even if it does the lack of a log can scream "hacked machine" every bit as loudly as a logged attack.
If your network gets hacked, you go into forensic mode. The most important questions you need to ask are:
1. What machines were touched?
2. What critical data exists on those machines that someone may have obtained a copy of?
3. (if available) What of that information was accessed?
4. (if available) Where did it go?
(1) and (2) are sufficient to justify the existence of local logging firewalls across your entire network. If your main firewalls are hacked, it may well be that the only place that information exists is in the local firewalls.
(3) and (4) would be a really cool bonus. Unlikely, but cool. If you found out that Accounting John's machine got hacked but the hackers only took a copy of a few select bits of his porn collection, then you can breathe a sigh of relief that the financials he had on the machine are safe, reward him for being smart enough to put distracting information on his machine, require that all employees keep a healthy porn collection to distract hackers, and move on.
Actually preventing attacks would be fantastic, but (as you pointed out) somewhat unlikely.
Yes, it's been done with atoms. DeMille and his team are attempting to do it at the molecular level, not the atomic level.
Cohen-Tannoudji did it with atoms. The problem is that atoms are too small to be useful, and "artificial atoms" are too large and subject to interference. DeMille and his team are trying to figure out how to manipulate molecules, which would be large enough to be useful yet small enough to be subject to less interference.
Cohen-Tannoudji certainly laid a lot of the groundwork by developing the technique on atoms, and it's probably true that DeMille and his team are "standing on the shoulders of giants" with this attempt, but they are trying to take the original work and expand on it to make it more useful.
Why do science writers use this silly phrase?
Science writers generally do not use phrases like this when they are targeting a scientific audience. If this were to appear in the Journal "Science", or even in "New Scientist", I'd expect a simple statement of "absolute zero" and if you don't know what it means, by all means go look it up.
However, "Medical Daily" sounds like it's targeted at an audience that might not be expected to know what "absolute zero" means, so it's appropriate to put at least a token explanation, and since it's an American non-scientific publication they'd generally put the temperature in Fahrenheit, not Celsius (which most of their audience would not use) or Kelvin (which many of their audience probably hasn't even heard of).
Blu-Ray HD can fit about 4 hours on a 25GB disc if formatted MPEG4. So a full-on 1080 movie of 90 minutes would be a file of approximately 10GB if containerized in MPEG4. You might be able to do a little better in picking downloadable file formats because downloaded movies don't need to be formatted using one of the Holy Trinity (MPEG2, MPEG4, or VC-1). But let's assume you used MPEG4.
10GB, downloaded over my Comcast 3 megabit connection, would take about 7 to 8 hours (assuming reasonable saturation). Assuming I can get about 1/3 of my capacity, I can pretty much guarantee the movie would be in my hot little hands within 24 hours of the time I decided I wanted it. This is certainly slower than driving down to Hannaford and getting it from RedBox, or popping over to my local rental place and getting it there, but it's a heck of a lot faster than Netflix.
However, you do make a point. If you really, really want full-on 1080, you're probably better off buying a physical disc. You get all the extras, you'll (probably) get it more quickly, you aren't using up hard drive space to store them, etc etc.
Personally, for my purposes, I usually find even 720p to be overkill. DVD-quality is usually more than sufficient for my needs, and I still watch a lot of my TV using analogue signal from my cable provider. On my 24" computer screen, I honestly don't see a lot of difference, and for most of what I watch plain old TV format is fine. Only for things like BBC Planet Earth would I care.
The odds of a student using the entire charge of one without having a convenient opportunity to recharge it are somewhere between none and fat chance in hell.
That's true in the first year, assuming of course Little Jimmy didn't intentionally forget to charge his iPad so he'd have an excuse to get out of mean old Mr. Johnson's boring history class. There is one advantage of a paper book - if the student forgets his/hers, you can pull a spare off the stack and hand it to them so they can attend class, and give them a demerit for forgetting class materials so they have an incentive not to do it again unless they happen to enjoy detention. With a laptop, you could keep a few spare charged batteries at the school in case a student runs out of charge with the same demerit system.
I doubt there are going to be spare iPads hanging about with the proper books loaded up, though I suppose if the units do over-the-air backups during the day you could image a new iPod to be just like Little Jimmy's during homeroom so he's ready for his day when the first class bell rings. The same could be true of units damaged overnight, of course.
I suppose there could be an uncomfortable dunce chair in the corner with the ever-so-stylish cap and a charging cable next to it. :)
Having said that, the actual battery life is certainly not an issue in the first year, probably not in the second, possibly not in the third, but how about when the device starts to age? If you're going to drop $600-800 per student on these things, they damned well better be useful for at least 5 years. Apple is very good at solid quality builds, and I'm sure you'll only lose a percentage of them in 5 years to student abuse, but Li-Ion battery tech just isn't up to the job for a long run like that.
I have a 5-year-old laptop that came with a 5-hour battery, I've babied that battery and treated it pretty well, and it's down to 25 minutes now. Fortunately, being a laptop, I can drop $29.98 (with shipping) on buy.com if I needed to and get a factory-fresh battery and get my 5 hours back. Yank old battery, pop in new one, charge it up, and I'm done.
My newer iPod Touch (8GB, second generation) would cost $106 ($99 plus a $7 "processing fee" to accept my order) plus shipping for a battery replacement, I'd get a wiped refurbished unit (not my own unit with a new battery), and I'd lose access to it for at least a week. At the moment, the iPad replacement seems to be the same price, but as Apple's devices get older the cost of battery replacement seems to go up (original iPod battery replacement is up to $250 now). If the school is smart, they'll have an "IT Guy" who can open them up and swap the batteries and save a few bucks (and not lose access to the hardware), but it's a far more complex operation than "unlock old battery, pull out old battery, push in new battery, lock
Within 5 years, the schools will have to start putting electrical outlets at the student's desks, or start paying for replacement batteries every few years for all the iPads that don't get destroyed by abuse. Schools can't afford for these to be "use it for a year and dispose of it" devices, so the batteries should be considered consumables for such a device.
I assume you mean Alpha Centauri. I tried the demo, years ago, but life soon beckoned and I left the Civ universe. I'm only recently coming back, and I don't get a lot of time to visit. :)
FreeCiv is very much like CivII, though it adds the "borders" feature I first saw in the demo of Alpha Centauri, and there are a bunch of little things. Some slight visual improvements (city walls actually get drawn on the map, etc).
Of course, FreeCiv is also under active development, so they keep adding new features.
Still, I just RTFA, and Civ V does look very beautiful, especially compared to the pixelly CivII-ish gameboard of FreeCiv.
But I don't play for the pretty pictures, and I get precious little time to play at all, so FreeCiv fills my Civ addiction quite nicely and the price is right. If I had a current Windows box, and I had the time to play it, I might buy it.
I remember the first time I encountered an enemy Priest in Microsoft's "Age of Empires" (read: simplified Civilization clone for when a Civ game will take too long, with poorer gameplay but nicer-looking graphics). I hear this strange "heyeyeyey-heyeyeyey" sound and suddenly my primary and very expensively massive defense tower changed to an enemy unit after about 20 seconds.
After that, AoE was all about developing religion first and fastest, at the cost of everything else, and I quickly got bored with it. There was basically little point in doing anything but developing and supporting the most powerful priesthood you could, because that was the key to stealing enemy units. A group of about 5-10 well-equipped Priests could go up against an enemy force of almost any size with very little fear. Put one or two of them "out in front", keep all of the others beyond enemy range but only focused on healing the first one, and start picking off enemy units and converting them to your side one by one. Keep a few pawn units around to draw fire and buy the Priests enough time to convert an enemy unit or two, and it's all over but the waiting.
Deus ex Machina is bad enough in scripted shows and movies. In what are supposed to be strategy games, it sucks. There should never ever be any one unit type that is infinitely effective and indestructible.
Religion may be an actual influence in a human-strategy game, and introducing it is interesting, but when your priests can always convert every resource (including cities and buildings) very rapidly and without fail, what's the point of building any unit except priests? (and workers to keep the gold a-flowin into the Temples so new priests keep popping out, of course).
I'll be there as soon as I finish this turn. No, wait, this one. Oh, crap, at this rate I won't make it until Civ VII comes out...
In all seriousness, I'm very happy with FreeCiv. The graphics aren't terribly awesome, but graphics aren't what I play Civilization for, anyway.
In that case, stick with Civ 4 or Civ 3 (or 2 or 1). They haven't stopped working. You can still play them.
Don't forget Freeciv, if you are a newbie to the Civilization universe and just want to try it out. It seems to be pretty light on resource requirements, and it's free.
I tried to do the math, but kept getting an "out of range" error. Can I increase the upper bound by a couple of orders of magnitude, please?
But thinking I was made me feel better.
The first rule of The Placebo Club is that no one talks about.... ahh, shit, I'm out of the Club now.
Sorry, he took back the crown. For now. I'm assuming Mitchell isn't dead, or that at least Donkey Kong still exists and there are a few players left out there.
Someone will eventually come by and score 1,064,501 points or more. If this was important enough to Weibe to make the sacrifices he did to reclaim the crown in the first place, it'll almost certainly be just as important to him to win back the crown the next time his score gets beaten.
Hopefully he'll chalk this one up as a victory and move on to other things. Alternatively, maybe his kids will get lucky and Dad will sustain a very, very slight and preferably painless injury, just enough to cost him any possible chance of beating his own score without affecting his dexterity in any other meaningful way. Then if he's lucky enough to still have his children interested in him, he'll develop more of an interest in them.
An increase in population density is beneficial only in that it frees up enough land to support the resource requirements of that population and minimizes the impact of that population.
"Efficiency" has only one really important aspect, honestly, and that is "sustainability". In other words, "can what you are doing be done continuously for as long as necessary without consuming some resource which will run out and for which there is no replacement?" The environment's ability to absorb pollution is part of that resource pool.
In a truly rural society, every person has the space and capacity to feed and support him/herself. You have a family of 4-8 people and 100-200 acres of resources at your disposal, which provides you with enough growing wood that you can harvest what you need for heat building and repairs and still have biomass growing faster than you consume it, enough clearable land to lay down staple food crops without destroying all of your trees, and enough of an animal population to replenish itself quickly enough that you won't harvest it to extinction. It also allows you to separate your drinking water and your septic systems sufficiently that the land can filter out the impurities for you. Population density must be kept low, and if you start engaging in unsustainable behavior you die.
As population densities increase, you might work with a few neighbors to make your resource usage more efficient. If Zeke has a forest that grows back really fast and Jake seems to have a plot of land that grows bigger potatoes, Zeke might trade a few cord of wood a year for a truckload of potatoes from Jake. Hank gets an extra couple of deer that year, so he gives one each to Zeke and Jake in return for something he's got a shortage of. That's the start of interdependence.
Once density reaches a certain point, you have to switch from primarily independence (rural) to primarily interdependence (urban) to keep everyone fed. If your family plot is 4 acres, you aren't going to be able to feed yourself and heat your house and keep your drinkable water and your shit separated. Similarly, in areas where you don't have all the resources you need to survive, you'll have to switch to at least a partly interdependent system to import the resources you need.
As populations continue to increase relative to the fertility of the land you're on, you have to become more interdependent to the point where you are basically importing every resource you need. That resource has to be imported from somewhere, so you have to have some land set aside somewhere to grow/harvest your food and filter your water and process your waste. Chances are, you're paying for most or all of those things to be done for you.
Once you have an "urban" (completely interdependent) population, "efficiency" takes on different meanings, because you are separated from the immediate impacts of your actions (if you overeat, you'll simply buy more food from the store, but you as an individual won't run out of food like you would on a subsistence farm). You can freely engage, as an individual, in "unsustainable" practices, and as long as the majority of the population doesn't do the same the society as a whole is sustainable.
But, more importantly, even though an increase in population density on a continental scale is never good, it inevitably happens. Once you've reached urbanization your best bet is to get the people crammed in as small an area as is feasible using the least resources possible, so you free up the most land around that urban area to provide it with the food and water and other resources it needs.
At some point in urbanization, having individual kitchens in apartments becomes less efficient than a central kitchen.
It takes a lot of energy to package, refrigerate, and cook small amounts of food in millions of individual living spaces, where a few hundred room-sized freezers and automobile-sized ovens could accomplish the same goal in a lot less space, with a lot less waste, using a lot less ene
The problem is, if you get a package delivered they are almost 100% certain to deliver to multiple homes in a trip. Even if they drive a few miles between each house, the major part of the drive out is done with a full vehicle. The big difference is that they can adjust their vehicle size and routes to accommodate the number of packages, whereas you probably can't because you've got only one or two vehicles and can't consolidate trips easily with 5 neighbors.
Each package may be delivered separately to your house, but it's rare that the package delivery van has just your package in it. The vans usually leave the distribution center packed full, with a route designed to empty the van of packages in the fewest miles possible.
If the delivery company has just a few packages in your vicinity, they'll use a very small and efficient vehicle to get them there, or outsource the final mile to USPS or a local courier service or someone else who is more likely to be visiting you on a daily basis, whatever costs them the least in terms of fuel and wages.
The thing is, UPS makes a living figuring out how to get packages in your hands in the most economical way possible, and their three highest expenses are wages, fuel, and vehicle maintenance. Anything they can do to get packages to you in the most efficient manner possible goes directly to their profit margin.
And, of course, if you want to talk environmental, let's talk environmental. How about the impact of building and maintaining the store? One big box outlet is going to consume the building materials and space necessary to build a large apartment complex, consume the energy of at least a few dozen homes, and require that at least 10-15 people or more drive to it every day whether they sell anything or not (employees).
If 500 people living an average of 10 miles away visited the store and bought something today, that would be 500 people driving 20 miles, or 1000 vehicle-miles. If half of those things were small enough to go USPS, then you could save 500 vehicle-miles simply by having the store mail those items. Give UPS a ten-mile radius delivery zone with 250 packages and they'll figure out how to do it in a hell of a lot less than 500 vehicle-miles.
There's a lot to be said for shopping locally. Easier exchanges/returns, look at the physical goods before you buy, supporting the local economy, etc etc.
Environmental impact is not one of them, unless you're talking about something that is produced right at the store, and even then it's a crapshoot.