And that 'or' there isn't exclusive. I looked around a bit a few years ago for a good TrueType (or similar) font designer package, and while my search wasn't exaustive, about the only 'good' package I could find was Fontographer, and its an expensive, unmaintained package. Functional, yes, but its feels like it hasn't been updated in many years.
As has been pointed out, while an app like this is useful, its hard to make money from it because its not very valued. What I'd like to see is a distributed p2p version. Maybe using a scheme similar to what FreeNet uses for serial publications (each version of the publication includes links to the pre-generated key to the next few versions, queries for those versions fail until they are published). Since the requirement for FreeNet-like anonymity isn't there the performance and routing could be much better, and the publishing method allows for hosting whatever kind of content is required (web pages, message boards, etc).
Distributed hosting of content like this would be a great thing to have working, it eliminates the need for ad-supported services. The load is shared by the members resources. The more members logged in, the more resources are available to support them.
Wow. I read a few of those articles and immediately thought 'This is ad copy, these guys are selling something'. Pretty quick comes up an article about how governments are stockpiling Tamiflu, which might not be effective against bird flu anyway. Oh, but the author has researched some herbal antiviral supliments and they are really powerful and better than Tamiflu anyway. Oh, look, some nice google ads for some herbal antiviral supliments.
Don't miss the other articles, like "Vitamins are deadly!...and other nonsense you will hear in the mainstream press"
Then I notice the authors bio at the bottom of the page. He's a health nut with thousands of hours of studying nutrition etc etc, and has written all these books, etc, etc, and then:
On the other hand, if the US was not indebited to other nations, would they be more likely to feel obligated to build up a military to rival that of the US? It may be that US military power is partly counterbalanced by economic dependence. The result is a sole superpower that can keep do most of the military heavy-lifting when the UN decides its necessary, but that is effectively powerless against its creditors.
All we have to do over the next few hundred years is complete the corporate take-over of the US government and then have China acquire it in a massive merger.
While I believe the study was for a 100 or 1000 square mile area, and there are other effects, such as added surface wind turbulance effecting evaporation rates and such, I would expect any such effects to be much smaller than what we get from dumping automotive and coal exaust into the air.
But such things should still be considered when evaluating new technology. After all, when the industrial revolution started, who knew dumping all that crap into the air would have the effect that it appears to have had.
you'd need 1.4 million acres for all of the US's energy needs. That's about 2300 square miles or 6000 square kilometers, or about 1.5 Rhode Islands. We have many deserts that are larger than that.
And of course, desert ecosystems are so (robust/worthless) that coating them in power plants won't piss of any enviromental lobbiest.
Regarding wind power. There was a fairly recent study that showed that there/may/ be some weather effects from very large windmill installations. Nothing concrete yet as far as predictions, but at least this one simulation showed a regional temperature increase due to windfarms.
I think what you mean is not that solar power wouldn't work on Earth, but that photovoltaics using the current technology won't work. Which probably isn't true. With some careful design considerations and with some minor concessions its not difficult to generate all the electricity a household needs entirely with photovoltaics.
Personally I think that existing technology for households (high thermal mass or earth-sheltered construction with passive solar heating and photovoltaics, extensive natural lighting and high efficency electrical power usage, along with waste recycling) and biodiesel for most vehicles (along with greater availability of cheap, small commuter vehicles, so people can have their SUV when they need it, but also have a high effiency vehicle for normal commuting) is the most workable solution. All of this is well within current technological limits.
I think that the key factor to making it work is not the technology, but the human will to do so. If people really wanted to convert to clean, renewable energy, they would find or create the resources and economic power to get it done. As it is, not enough people care enough to do any of the work themselves. Instead most of us stand around waiting for someone else to get us all onto green power.
Yep yep. Thats all I've got, so I have two accounts, one I use online and just transfer money to when I need it, and I make the bank issue me a new card every three months.
So what you're saying is that this thing needs to be capabile enough to go around hiding Screaming Meanies in the corners, so it can hide itself before they go off?
Just hang the 20-kilo bag over where you will be sleeping. It won't take very many mornings before your reflexive response to the covers disappering will be to get the hell out of the way, hopefully with a good shot of fight-or-flight adrenelin to keep you awake.
For assistance falling asleep, consider meditation. I find that what really keeps me awake is thinking. Over the years I've practiced a basic form of meditation in which i simply supress the constant stream of thoughts most of us experiance during the day. When I do this I generally fall asleep within a couple of minutes.
It might help to practice with an EEG for biofeedback. The OpenEEG project is a useful source for hardware and software for setting up your own home EEG. You can order the assembled hardware if you aren't up to building it yourself. It is said that after several weeks of meditation practice with EEG feedback many people can achieve meditation as deep as many 20-year practitioners (as show by EEG traces on said practitioners).
Other suggestions regarding regular scheduals, not spending time in bed for activities other than sleeping (and sex, if you're into that), and regular exersize will likely help extablish a normal routine as well.
Personally, I find that exersize shortly before bed helps me to fall asleep quickly (usually 30-45 minutes of weight training or nekkid aerobics with the wife). Evidently I'm a bit different than most people in this respect, but it might be worth a try.
For waking up in the morning, you might find a Screaming Meanie effective. Fair warning though, if a cat sleeps on your bed at night, you may want to sleep in jeans.
How about Cory Doctorow's exellent novelDown and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which is currently one of the finalists for this year's Nebula Award for Best Novel?
It would be great if it won the Nebula Award, then even more people would get some exposure to the Creative Commons.
Note that when you call 911 from a Vonage line the people who end up handling the call cannot access your location information, so if you need assistance, you better know where you are.
This is all covered in detail, more than once, in the terms of service Vonage provides. They beat you over the head with the 911 info, you can't miss it if you are paying attention at all.
It is pretty dumb that there are not yet any hooks into the emergency system that they can access. Its not their fault, its a problem with the system, and I'm sure they would be more than happy to fix it from their end if they could.
Having been in a number of adult 'bookstores' in San Antonio (the 'Adult Bookstore' chain and the 'Adult Megaplex' near I35 and 410 north SA), I can say as a primary source that you can indeed buy dildos in San Antonio, Texas. They tend to be thinly veiled as containers for lubes and such, or sold as 'personal massagers' for 'hard to reach areas', but they are available.
Similarly, you can find a wide selection of 'water pipes' and 'right angle, bottom vented incense burners' at many 'gift shops'. Some are even so diverse as to carry both whipped cream dispensers in the party supplies section and equipment for the managment of diabetic conditions as well.
Not in most areas. Thirty of the states have laws specificly allow mothers to breastfeed in public, 15 specificly expempt breastfeeding from indecency laws, and 10 have legislation relating to breastfeeding in the workplace.
When we were living in Texas (one of the states with provisions to allow public breastfeeding) my wife would sit on the furnature often provided in womens public restrooms to feed our children and was often given disapproving looks and several times was asked by other customers to stop or go somewhere else. We found this very strange because at no time was the breast ever in sight of anyone but the child, as she, like most people, drapes a blanked over her sholder and the child. These women would get upset not because they could see a breast, but simply because they knew the child was breastfeeding.
It was entertaining to tell them to stuff it. On a few occasions they were so irked that they went and got store managment. Most of the time managment would tell them to stuff it as well, but once the manager actually asked her to stop. It was immensly satisfying to pull out a copy of an article from a local newspaper about the issue that cited the laws that allowed it.
the number of partitions for any number ending in 4 or 9 is divisible by 5
Please forgive my non-mathmatician question, but when I think of numbers I don't think of them as 'ending' in anything in particular. If we were to use a unique symbol for every number (the way I see them in my mind), how would this change the description of these patterns? If we were to write everthing in hex would there be other interesting patterns?
Hmm. I like both. The batteries on my book never run out, its ok if the toddler runs off with it and throws it down the stairs or in the bathtub, and if I accidentally leave it somewhere, its ok.
If I want to search for something, I prefer having the text on the computer. Its also easier to pull out passages to quote in a paper or email.
As for the feel, I don't know. When I read good fiction my awareness is transported into the story, I'm barely aware that I'm sitting somewhere looking at text, much less if that text is printed on a stack of paper or glowing from an LCD. If its techical or philosophical I'm generally working too hard to grasp the material to really care what the text smells or feels like. On the other hand, I do like having my favorite books displayed on a shelf.
I enjoy and appreciate both forms, but what I find most useful is the text itself, the form is of lesser consideration.
This would be great if I could click a link to send the selected book to the on-demand printer of my choice, complete with payment to the copyright holder. Not useful for widely popular stuff, but useful for works that will sell in low volumns.
Slashdot Mirror
3) Tools are either expensive or crap.
And that 'or' there isn't exclusive. I looked around a bit a few years ago for a good TrueType (or similar) font designer package, and while my search wasn't exaustive, about the only 'good' package I could find was Fontographer, and its an expensive, unmaintained package. Functional, yes, but its feels like it hasn't been updated in many years.
Whats the 'cutting edge' in font development?
As has been pointed out, while an app like this is useful, its hard to make money from it because its not very valued. What I'd like to see is a distributed p2p version. Maybe using a scheme similar to what FreeNet uses for serial publications (each version of the publication includes links to the pre-generated key to the next few versions, queries for those versions fail until they are published). Since the requirement for FreeNet-like anonymity isn't there the performance and routing could be much better, and the publishing method allows for hosting whatever kind of content is required (web pages, message boards, etc).
Distributed hosting of content like this would be a great thing to have working, it eliminates the need for ad-supported services. The load is shared by the members resources. The more members logged in, the more resources are available to support them.
Yes, but only if you can get fire ants.
Wow. I read a few of those articles and immediately thought 'This is ad copy, these guys are selling something'. Pretty quick comes up an article about how governments are stockpiling Tamiflu, which might not be effective against bird flu anyway. Oh, but the author has researched some herbal antiviral supliments and they are really powerful and better than Tamiflu anyway. Oh, look, some nice google ads for some herbal antiviral supliments.
...and other nonsense you will hear in the mainstream press"
Don't miss the other articles, like "Vitamins are deadly!
Then I notice the authors bio at the bottom of the page. He's a health nut with thousands of hours of studying nutrition etc etc, and has written all these books, etc, etc, and then:
In the technology industry, Adams is president and CEO of a well known email marketing software company.
Yes, thats right, he's a spammer (evidently a very healthy one, but a spammer none-the-less).
Read it, but keep the BS detector powered up.
On the other hand, if the US was not indebited to other nations, would they be more likely to feel obligated to build up a military to rival that of the US? It may be that US military power is partly counterbalanced by economic dependence. The result is a sole superpower that can keep do most of the military heavy-lifting when the UN decides its necessary, but that is effectively powerless against its creditors.
All we have to do over the next few hundred years is complete the corporate take-over of the US government and then have China acquire it in a massive merger.
Powered endoskeletons, what fun that would be. The concept is well-explored in Timothy Zahn's Cobra series. Not a bad read.
While I believe the study was for a 100 or 1000 square mile area, and there are other effects, such as added surface wind turbulance effecting evaporation rates and such, I would expect any such effects to be much smaller than what we get from dumping automotive and coal exaust into the air.
But such things should still be considered when evaluating new technology. After all, when the industrial revolution started, who knew dumping all that crap into the air would have the effect that it appears to have had.
you'd need 1.4 million acres for all of the US's energy needs. That's about 2300 square miles or 6000 square kilometers, or about 1.5 Rhode Islands. We have many deserts that are larger than that.
And of course, desert ecosystems are so (robust/worthless) that coating them in power plants won't piss of any enviromental lobbiest.
Regarding wind power. There was a fairly recent study that showed that there /may/ be some weather effects from very large windmill installations. Nothing concrete yet as far as predictions, but at least this one simulation showed a regional temperature increase due to windfarms.
I think what you mean is not that solar power wouldn't work on Earth, but that photovoltaics using the current technology won't work. Which probably isn't true. With some careful design considerations and with some minor concessions its not difficult to generate all the electricity a household needs entirely with photovoltaics.
Personally I think that existing technology for households (high thermal mass or earth-sheltered construction with passive solar heating and photovoltaics, extensive natural lighting and high efficency electrical power usage, along with waste recycling) and biodiesel for most vehicles (along with greater availability of cheap, small commuter vehicles, so people can have their SUV when they need it, but also have a high effiency vehicle for normal commuting) is the most workable solution. All of this is well within current technological limits.
I think that the key factor to making it work is not the technology, but the human will to do so. If people really wanted to convert to clean, renewable energy, they would find or create the resources and economic power to get it done. As it is, not enough people care enough to do any of the work themselves. Instead most of us stand around waiting for someone else to get us all onto green power.
Yep yep. Thats all I've got, so I have two accounts, one I use online and just transfer money to when I need it, and I make the bank issue me a new card every three months.
Its not perfect, but its better than nothing.
Or, if you don't like the idea of potentially waking up wet, rig it to dump on your wife or most expensive computer if you don't disable it.
So what you're saying is that this thing needs to be capabile enough to go around hiding Screaming Meanies in the corners, so it can hide itself before they go off?
Just hang the 20-kilo bag over where you will be sleeping. It won't take very many mornings before your reflexive response to the covers disappering will be to get the hell out of the way, hopefully with a good shot of fight-or-flight adrenelin to keep you awake.
For assistance falling asleep, consider meditation. I find that what really keeps me awake is thinking. Over the years I've practiced a basic form of meditation in which i simply supress the constant stream of thoughts most of us experiance during the day. When I do this I generally fall asleep within a couple of minutes.
It might help to practice with an EEG for biofeedback. The OpenEEG project is a useful source for hardware and software for setting up your own home EEG. You can order the assembled hardware if you aren't up to building it yourself. It is said that after several weeks of meditation practice with EEG feedback many people can achieve meditation as deep as many 20-year practitioners (as show by EEG traces on said practitioners).
Other suggestions regarding regular scheduals, not spending time in bed for activities other than sleeping (and sex, if you're into that), and regular exersize will likely help extablish a normal routine as well.
Personally, I find that exersize shortly before bed helps me to fall asleep quickly (usually 30-45 minutes of weight training or nekkid aerobics with the wife). Evidently I'm a bit different than most people in this respect, but it might be worth a try.
For waking up in the morning, you might find a Screaming Meanie effective. Fair warning though, if a cat sleeps on your bed at night, you may want to sleep in jeans.
No magnetic field required:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/vdg2.htm
Brushes on the moving belt transfer charge from the bottom to the top, potentially building up a large static voltage at the top insulated terminal.
Yes, thats true, but I think you've missed the single biggest reason for doing this.
World's Biggest Van Der Graaf Generator.
This idea has serious potential.
How about Cory Doctorow's exellent novelDown and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which is currently one of the finalists for this year's Nebula Award for Best Novel?
It would be great if it won the Nebula Award, then even more people would get some exposure to the Creative Commons.
Note that when you call 911 from a Vonage line the people who end up handling the call cannot access your location information, so if you need assistance, you better know where you are.
This is all covered in detail, more than once, in the terms of service Vonage provides. They beat you over the head with the 911 info, you can't miss it if you are paying attention at all.
It is pretty dumb that there are not yet any hooks into the emergency system that they can access. Its not their fault, its a problem with the system, and I'm sure they would be more than happy to fix it from their end if they could.
Now now, its not the land of polygamy anymore. God told them not to do that anymore after they were denied statehood 4 times.
Having been in a number of adult 'bookstores' in San Antonio (the 'Adult Bookstore' chain and the 'Adult Megaplex' near I35 and 410 north SA), I can say as a primary source that you can indeed buy dildos in San Antonio, Texas. They tend to be thinly veiled as containers for lubes and such, or sold as 'personal massagers' for 'hard to reach areas', but they are available.
Similarly, you can find a wide selection of 'water pipes' and 'right angle, bottom vented incense burners' at many 'gift shops'. Some are even so diverse as to carry both whipped cream dispensers in the party supplies section and equipment for the managment of diabetic conditions as well.
Is it illegal to breast feed in public in the USA
Not in most areas. Thirty of the states have laws specificly allow mothers to breastfeed in public, 15 specificly expempt breastfeeding from indecency laws, and 10 have legislation relating to breastfeeding in the workplace.
When we were living in Texas (one of the states with provisions to allow public breastfeeding) my wife would sit on the furnature often provided in womens public restrooms to feed our children and was often given disapproving looks and several times was asked by other customers to stop or go somewhere else. We found this very strange because at no time was the breast ever in sight of anyone but the child, as she, like most people, drapes a blanked over her sholder and the child. These women would get upset not because they could see a breast, but simply because they knew the child was breastfeeding.
It was entertaining to tell them to stuff it. On a few occasions they were so irked that they went and got store managment. Most of the time managment would tell them to stuff it as well, but once the manager actually asked her to stop. It was immensly satisfying to pull out a copy of an article from a local newspaper about the issue that cited the laws that allowed it.
From TFA:
the number of partitions for any number ending in 4 or 9 is divisible by 5
Please forgive my non-mathmatician question, but when I think of numbers I don't think of them as 'ending' in anything in particular. If we were to use a unique symbol for every number (the way I see them in my mind), how would this change the description of these patterns? If we were to write everthing in hex would there be other interesting patterns?
Hmm. I like both. The batteries on my book never run out, its ok if the toddler runs off with it and throws it down the stairs or in the bathtub, and if I accidentally leave it somewhere, its ok.
If I want to search for something, I prefer having the text on the computer. Its also easier to pull out passages to quote in a paper or email.
As for the feel, I don't know. When I read good fiction my awareness is transported into the story, I'm barely aware that I'm sitting somewhere looking at text, much less if that text is printed on a stack of paper or glowing from an LCD. If its techical or philosophical I'm generally working too hard to grasp the material to really care what the text smells or feels like. On the other hand, I do like having my favorite books displayed on a shelf.
I enjoy and appreciate both forms, but what I find most useful is the text itself, the form is of lesser consideration.
This would be great if I could click a link to send the selected book to the on-demand printer of my choice, complete with payment to the copyright holder. Not useful for widely popular stuff, but useful for works that will sell in low volumns.