The guy has a point though - of all my mp3 players and walkmans and discmans and radios, none have been so dangerious to my hearing (and pain-causing) as my ipod, due to it's poor design.
The front, back, top, and bottom, are shaped identically, so when I put my hand in my pocket to skip songs, it is not always apparent what part of the machine I will be touching. The control settings lock the volume adjust sensitivity to menu select sensitivity, so the only way to turn down the speed at which the volume will leap to maximum is to make the menu navigation difficult and timeconsuming to use. The volume setting changes whenever the scrollwheel is touched, or even brushed through fabric. The hold switch is little use here - it has to be off to skip songs or make intentional changes to the volume.
The result of all of these things is that, unlike every other portable music player I've ever owned (which is a lot), the ipod painfully spontaneously blasts up to full volume frequently, despite no intention on my part to change the volume. Just trying to take the thing out of your pocket can blast your ears.
If you're not used to better designed mp3 players, it might seem like something the user should go the extra mile to try to avoid, but good design should Just Work. Looking at other devices, it's a completely unnecessary design flaw. For a quick fix, it's trivial to uncouple the volume sensitivity from the menu sensitivity, compared to the user difficulty to not accidentally change the volume when using the device normally (such as skipping songs without unpacking it). Flash over substance makes for sucky design.
However I don't think it's worth suing over. More like just taking it back to the store, get the purchase refunded and buy something with better ergonomics.
Printing images confuses people. Much of that is that often even the people they turn to for help don't understand the difference between DPI and PPI. I find that people click when it is explained as "it takes many dots to draw a single pixel, since a combination of four colours of dots, plus the white space between them, needs to be printed in order to produce a colour at a location, ie a pixel". Image resolution also needs to be conceptually seperated from print size, since any res can be printed at any size, but might look poor, or conversely, make the computer chug.
Another one that no-doubt you'll already have covered, is the difference between memory (ram) and memory (hard drive). To many people, there is only "memory" in their computers, measured in Mb (or Gb), and they make poor upgrade decisions because they have heard that more memory will fix their problem, so they go out and buy the wrong kind, or they delete things off the drive to free up "memory" when RAM is their bottleneck.
Another one: "The upcoming version of Mac/Windows/whatever is so revolutionary it is going to crush the other" has been said every year for 20 years and beyond. It was rubbish then, it's rubbish now, and twenty years from now it will still be rubbish, yet such words come earnestly from the mouths of many experts that people turn to for advice. Give the readers some tools to realise when the supposed expert's own ideological blinkers/commitments are unduly influencing the advice and suggestions they give.
This article isn't useless. Seeing the lengths someone will go to to get less than a quarter of the functionality that I take for granted in the tablet-PC that I'm writing this on... it gives me warm fuzzies.
My first impression was "cool!" which unfortunately quickly faded due to reasons that are largely mitigated by it being a quick late entry. So, well done. As always, bonus points for getting it done, instead of losing interest half way through:)
Not that you or anyone will care, but forums are for the spouting of opinions;
-Putting ipod in a chunky old geiger case: Cool -Putting a geiger counter in ipod case: Cool -Putting ipod in geiger case, but then turning around and trying to make the chunky geiger case look like an ipod: Kind of leaves only the worst of both worlds:-/
But yeah, actually getting off one's ass and doing it counts for lots.:)
Minor correction: Screens are PPI (pixels per inch), not DPI. You need many dots to create a pixel (a pixel is the desired colour at the location, a dot is a sub-pixel element, usually one of only four colours (eg CMYK), many of which need to be used together, along with gaps between them, to create a pixel).
PPI and DPI are not interchangeable or equivalent terms - an order of magnitude often seperates them:-)
Uh, why do you think windows is at fault here? If sony designed a rootkit for linux or any other OS, it would likewise get the admin to authorise it root access on the grounds that it needed to install some driver or other for the software they wanted to install (Sony is/was considered reputable and trustworthy by most).
Linux would be just as rooted as windows.
What sony did would work just as well on any other OS as it did on windows. The only defenses are either a) educated/paranoid users, or b) users not operating with full priveledges. Neither of these conditions are universal in Linux or Windows or pretty much anything else for that matter.
If you explicitly authorise a rootkit to root your box, the label on your OS doesn't mean squat.
I may be wrong, but it doesn't seem like tablet edition works that way. If a keylogger could capture the data contents of a cut and paste, then it would probably grab ink, but AFAIK keyloggers don't do that, they'd just log the keypresses that triggered the paste proceedure.
I have a tablet PC, I normally use the keyboard for text entry, and use the pen as a mouse and for art, since I type quicker than I write, but hey, maybe I should start using handwriting more often. Keylog that!:-)
I still doubt the added expense of a PV roof would ever even pay for itself.
Somewhat related, you might be shocked to know that PV roofs already pay for themselves for many motorists, even on today's gas-powered cars and SUVs, because (among other reasons) a cheap-ass $60 roof panel is a hell of a lot cheaper than being stranded with a flat battery. You can walk into almost any car parts store and buy one right off the shelf.
This assumes a storage mechanism of some sort, which greatly complicates the issue
I think you have it backwards if you're seriously proposing that any consumer car would not have a storage mechanism.
OK, I'll concede that it's theoretically possible (though on the very ragged edge of probability) to run some future vehicle on sun power alone for short distances
Irrelevant. The guy was never suggesting a car would be run entirely from solar, he was saying it would be financially worthwhile to put a solar panel into the roof.
And depending on where you live and your driving habits, he's almost certainly right.
I still doubt the added expense of a PV roof would ever even pay for itself.
Looking at how quickly photovoltiacs can pay for themselves right now, I suspect otherwise.
What I'm saying is, people act like these things have zero impact.
Seems to have potentially better-than-zero impact to me: Stick it on the office roof, and in addition to generating power it 1) saves power by reducing transmission line-loss, 2) saves some more power by casting a shadow on the roof, reducing energy wasted on A/C.
Not much of an environmental impact, since the entire area is already paved and inhabited by humans. Possibly a few fried flying animals, but in the city basically means it helps fight pests too, another bonus, unless you're the guy pushing the broom.
I mean - I'm trying to think of an "impact" here, but everything seems to no only be zero, but be better than zero:-)
Oh wait - I got one - one will be put on an older building, the type with an ornate facade, and then someone will complain that the dish is ugly and kick up a storm.:-)
I might not have explained that very well - I'll put it another way: 18 horsepower charging energy input for 8 hours in no way suggests a limit of 18 horsepower engine power for one hour's driving.
Even cars primarily designed to run directly off cells almost always have on-board energy storage, even if not very much, and all consumer cars have on-board storage - solar is basically unworkable for a (useful) car otherwise, so it seems silly to theorise from the assumption that a consumer car would lack energy storage. It's like pointing out a solar car with square wheels would have terrible efficiency, certainly it's true, but it's not at all relevant in the real world where cars are built with round wheels:-)
Sunlight has an approximate maximum of 1.4kW per square meter. Even assuming ideal conditions and perfect conversion with an array the size of a large van roof (2m x 5m = 10m^2), you only get 14kW which is 18.77 horsepower. My VW Vanagon has a hard time climbing hills with 95 horsepower. Sunlight is too dilute to push around anything resembling a normal automobile.
Uh, 14kW solar power does NOT equal 18.77 horsepower. For example, if on average you drive an hour or two a day, even in less than ideal conditions you'll have far more power than that availible.
And in a consumer vehicle, solar would only be only one source of power availible to the driver anyway. If you want to drive for 10 hours after dark, you'd probably fill the tank with hydogen, or gasoline and do it that way.
(And in practice, electric engines are far gruntier than combustion engines - even when both deliver similar horsepower. That's why supermachines, like the biggest and most powerful trucks in the world are electric. Combustion engines just suck when a lot of grunt is required in addition to the variable loading that you get in a land vehicle. So they run a combustion generator in it's optimal operating range, which transfers the power to an electric engine that can supply the torque without crapping out whenever the loading or speed changes.)
Photovoltaics are basically large chips, they use the same nasty chemicals and lots of electricity.
No, this is misleading at best, and false at worst. You would have great difficulty in finding any solar cells that took the same kind of energy to make as chips, because the reality is that (precisely because of the energy and chemicals involved) it's cheaper to make solar cells from the waste left-overs from the semiconductor industry than it is to refine them from scratch.
The "nasty chemicals and lots of energy" that went into solar cells, didn't, because most of it went into semiconductor manufacture, and as such would have happened whether the waste products were used for solar cells or simply dumped into landfill.
So you could equally argue that solar cells reclaim that energy and those chemicals, in addition to to the energy they produce from the sun, since the only alternative is pouring most of that energy and chemicals straight into landfill.
Like I said, nothing of significance. With the amount of scrutiney Iraq has been under, if this is the best there is, Case Closed.
There was also sometimes a noticable absense of the contradictory evidence that later emerged, evidence which defeased things that initially seemed indefeasible. In that sense, it was a good article for leading people to mistaken conclusions though.
I think this is true. The people that ea_spouse was talking about are more or less the low level cogs in the machine, the nameless hord that do the bidding of the true designers/stars.
I don't think this is generally the case. In my experience, the "true designer/star" is really more of a PR/media construction. When the cameras are off, or the journalists have left, the guy stops performing and is part of the team again, and if he isn't pulling the same hours during an ugly crunch, the other people get very resentful. If he's not pulling the same hours, chances are it's because he's not a key player - "true designers" are key and work crunch, distant/higher level management might not. The line between the two can become blurred - there are people who straddle management and production enough to qualify as being somewhat immune from crunch, while doing a lot of media interview stuff, and career wise it's probably pretty sweet, but their contribution to the game is not as large as you'd think - you hear so much about their key contributions because they're the person doing the interview. They're a bit like "stars", but rarely the "designers".
In the global warming debate, there was postulation, then announcement, and finally the research.
No, global warming was initially a prediction based on observation "Hmmm - if this effect we're observing in the lab holds true to the wider atmosphere, current artificial gas emissions would affect the global climate".
Then more research followed, and the conclusion was reached. The conclusion predicted climate change. At that point, it was announced. (Not only does this follow "postulate-research-announce", but it would be wrong to not announce the results, since the results predict problems ahead, potentially big ones.
"Judging from our models and lab work (and we may be wrong) climate changes will happen and we would expect to see them start to become noticeable in ten to fifty years, and continue to get worse, becoming problematic or even disasterious"
Fast forward ten to fifteen years, and the predicted effects are appearing as predicted.
You seem to be confusing individual scientific studies with a branch of science. Saying climate science announced before researching is like saying Edison announced (and unveiled) a working lightbulb before making it, since subsequent people are still building better and more definitive lightbulbs. The Final Lightbulb does not yet exist. And if Edison wated until a hundred years from now to announce, he would have still jumped the gun because two hundred years from now, the definitive lightbulb will still not exist. Improvements will be ongoing.
Many climate science studies are complete, and announcement of the results of a study only follows once the study is complete. The fact that the studies so far all paint a pretty comprehensive picture is evidence that they're probably somewhat accurate and should be taken notice of, not that they've jumped the gun because entirely seperate lines of research are ongoing.
global temperature fluctuation is natural.
Uh... that makes everything worse, not better. Remember - climate change didn't come from observing climate change, it was predicted from gas experiments long before any change was expected to be observable, and subsequent studies confirmed man-made gas quanitites were almost certain to be more than sufficient. It is known that man-made changes are going to happen (barring some massive intervention), which means any natural temperature fluctuation on top of our changes just means any problems are likely to be that much worse.
Now, if I had one or two A4-sized electronic paper sheets, with a touch screen on top so I can make annotations with my stylus, then I would be able to stop using dead trees for studying...
They already exist. They're called Tablet-PCs. I'm writing this with a stylus now on an A4-sized screen:-). I really bought mine for art, and I normally just use the keyboard, but I can scribble all over documents if I want to, and I don't have to use the fingerpad or carry a mouse:)
(Actually, while I've found that tablet-PCs are way better than normal laptops, they're still not up there with a good pencil and sheet of paper for many tasks. The dead trees will be with us for some time:-)
It seems like your major beef with the game has more to do with the installation process then the actual game.
This is my beef too, and I imagine it's probably the most common beef - loved the actual game, but would have enjoyed it more if my mood wasn't twisted into a black thundercloud by the time I could play it:-)
I was on dial-up. I bought the DVD thinking I could install it from the DVD like every other game. No, it took hours upon hours. Since I didn't have those hours all at once, and there were bugs, it was days until I could play.
It would be legitimate if it just needed to authenticate, but no, it needed to download hundreds of megs to install - that's really REALLY frustrating on dial-up. You should have those hundreds of megs on the DVD. That's why people buy a media version. If you have broadband, you have less (or no) need to buy the physical media. Selling media that doesn't take the place of a massive download is just crappy.
The frustration of the install ruined the first section of the game for me. As I see it, I hadn't done anything wrong, my only crime was having a dial-up internet connection. Not Cool.
When the theives turn on the laptop, they can't connect it to the internet without entering the logon password. So their only option is a fresh install... meaning the Lo-Jack software is uninstalled.
Do you have to dispense with passwords for LoJack to work?
Do you set up a passsword-free guest account as a kind of honeypot?
Isn't "libertarian" a right-wing thing? I'm sure the "left-wing" "equivalent" would be "anarchist".
Don't take this the wrong way, but it's really funny to watch someone's brain asplode as they try to artificially twist real-world politics down to a mere two pidgeonholes.
The reason you can't do it is because politics is not one-dimensional. The childishly crude left vs right garbage is something you only get in obsolete or broken political systems incapable of supporting anything other than two main parties. Having only a lousy two reference points, a line is the result - and from that is drawn left and right, a retarded one dimensional political concept.
You wouldn't happen to be American by any chance? (Fisher's deduction states: "The more issues a person crudely shoehorns down into a liberal/conservative dichotomy, the more certain you can be that the person is an American":-)
Anyway, if you haven't already seen it, check out Political Compass, which at least expands things to two dimensions, and will make your brain stop hurting:-)
(No offense intended in all this, I'm not exactly being entirely serious here. Hence the liberal sprinkling of smileys:-)
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The guy has a point though - of all my mp3 players and walkmans and discmans and radios, none have been so dangerious to my hearing (and pain-causing) as my ipod, due to it's poor design.
The front, back, top, and bottom, are shaped identically, so when I put my hand in my pocket to skip songs, it is not always apparent what part of the machine I will be touching. The control settings lock the volume adjust sensitivity to menu select sensitivity, so the only way to turn down the speed at which the volume will leap to maximum is to make the menu navigation difficult and timeconsuming to use. The volume setting changes whenever the scrollwheel is touched, or even brushed through fabric. The hold switch is little use here - it has to be off to skip songs or make intentional changes to the volume.
The result of all of these things is that, unlike every other portable music player I've ever owned (which is a lot), the ipod painfully spontaneously blasts up to full volume frequently, despite no intention on my part to change the volume. Just trying to take the thing out of your pocket can blast your ears.
If you're not used to better designed mp3 players, it might seem like something the user should go the extra mile to try to avoid, but good design should Just Work. Looking at other devices, it's a completely unnecessary design flaw. For a quick fix, it's trivial to uncouple the volume sensitivity from the menu sensitivity, compared to the user difficulty to not accidentally change the volume when using the device normally (such as skipping songs without unpacking it). Flash over substance makes for sucky design.
However I don't think it's worth suing over. More like just taking it back to the store, get the purchase refunded and buy something with better ergonomics.
Printing images confuses people. Much of that is that often even the people they turn to for help don't understand the difference between DPI and PPI. I find that people click when it is explained as "it takes many dots to draw a single pixel, since a combination of four colours of dots, plus the white space between them, needs to be printed in order to produce a colour at a location, ie a pixel". Image resolution also needs to be conceptually seperated from print size, since any res can be printed at any size, but might look poor, or conversely, make the computer chug.
Another one that no-doubt you'll already have covered, is the difference between memory (ram) and memory (hard drive). To many people, there is only "memory" in their computers, measured in Mb (or Gb), and they make poor upgrade decisions because they have heard that more memory will fix their problem, so they go out and buy the wrong kind, or they delete things off the drive to free up "memory" when RAM is their bottleneck.
Another one: "The upcoming version of Mac/Windows/whatever is so revolutionary it is going to crush the other" has been said every year for 20 years and beyond. It was rubbish then, it's rubbish now, and twenty years from now it will still be rubbish, yet such words come earnestly from the mouths of many experts that people turn to for advice.
Give the readers some tools to realise when the supposed expert's own ideological blinkers/commitments are unduly influencing the advice and suggestions they give.
This article isn't useless. Seeing the lengths someone will go to to get less than a quarter of the functionality that I take for granted in the tablet-PC that I'm writing this on... it gives me warm fuzzies.
Mmmmm, warm fuzzies.
My first impression was "cool!" which unfortunately quickly faded due to reasons that are largely mitigated by it being a quick late entry. So, well done. As always, bonus points for getting it done, instead of losing interest half way through :)
:-/
:)
Not that you or anyone will care, but forums are for the spouting of opinions;
-Putting ipod in a chunky old geiger case: Cool
-Putting a geiger counter in ipod case: Cool
-Putting ipod in geiger case, but then turning around and trying to make the chunky geiger case look like an ipod: Kind of leaves only the worst of both worlds
But yeah, actually getting off one's ass and doing it counts for lots.
Minor correction: Screens are PPI (pixels per inch), not DPI. You need many dots to create a pixel (a pixel is the desired colour at the location, a dot is a sub-pixel element, usually one of only four colours (eg CMYK), many of which need to be used together, along with gaps between them, to create a pixel).
:-)
PPI and DPI are not interchangeable or equivalent terms - an order of magnitude often seperates them
Uh, why do you think windows is at fault here? If sony designed a rootkit for linux or any other OS, it would likewise get the admin to authorise it root access on the grounds that it needed to install some driver or other for the software they wanted to install (Sony is/was considered reputable and trustworthy by most).
Linux would be just as rooted as windows.
What sony did would work just as well on any other OS as it did on windows. The only defenses are either a) educated/paranoid users, or b) users not operating with full priveledges. Neither of these conditions are universal in Linux or Windows or pretty much anything else for that matter.
If you explicitly authorise a rootkit to root your box, the label on your OS doesn't mean squat.
I may be wrong, but it doesn't seem like tablet edition works that way. If a keylogger could capture the data contents of a cut and paste, then it would probably grab ink, but AFAIK keyloggers don't do that, they'd just log the keypresses that triggered the paste proceedure.
I have a tablet PC, I normally use the keyboard for text entry, and use the pen as a mouse and for art, since I type quicker than I write, but hey, maybe I should start using handwriting more often. Keylog that! :-)
I still doubt the added expense of a PV roof would ever even pay for itself.
Somewhat related, you might be shocked to know that PV roofs already pay for themselves for many motorists, even on today's gas-powered cars and SUVs, because (among other reasons) a cheap-ass $60 roof panel is a hell of a lot cheaper than being stranded with a flat battery. You can walk into almost any car parts store and buy one right off the shelf.
This assumes a storage mechanism of some sort, which greatly complicates the issue
I think you have it backwards if you're seriously proposing that any consumer car would not have a storage mechanism.
OK, I'll concede that it's theoretically possible (though on the very ragged edge of probability) to run some future vehicle on sun power alone for short distances
Irrelevant. The guy was never suggesting a car would be run entirely from solar, he was saying it would be financially worthwhile to put a solar panel into the roof.
And depending on where you live and your driving habits, he's almost certainly right.
I still doubt the added expense of a PV roof would ever even pay for itself.
Looking at how quickly photovoltiacs can pay for themselves right now, I suspect otherwise.
What I'm saying is, people act like these things have zero impact.
:-)
:-)
Seems to have potentially better-than-zero impact to me: Stick it on the office roof, and in addition to generating power it 1) saves power by reducing transmission line-loss, 2) saves some more power by casting a shadow on the roof, reducing energy wasted on A/C.
Not much of an environmental impact, since the entire area is already paved and inhabited by humans. Possibly a few fried flying animals, but in the city basically means it helps fight pests too, another bonus, unless you're the guy pushing the broom.
I mean - I'm trying to think of an "impact" here, but everything seems to no only be zero, but be better than zero
Oh wait - I got one - one will be put on an older building, the type with an ornate facade, and then someone will complain that the dish is ugly and kick up a storm.
I might not have explained that very well - I'll put it another way: 18 horsepower charging energy input for 8 hours in no way suggests a limit of 18 horsepower engine power for one hour's driving.
:-)
Even cars primarily designed to run directly off cells almost always have on-board energy storage, even if not very much, and all consumer cars have on-board storage - solar is basically unworkable for a (useful) car otherwise, so it seems silly to theorise from the assumption that a consumer car would lack energy storage. It's like pointing out a solar car with square wheels would have terrible efficiency, certainly it's true, but it's not at all relevant in the real world where cars are built with round wheels
Sunlight has an approximate maximum of 1.4kW per square meter. Even assuming ideal conditions and perfect conversion with an array the size of a large van roof (2m x 5m = 10m^2), you only get 14kW which is 18.77 horsepower. My VW Vanagon has a hard time climbing hills with 95 horsepower. Sunlight is too dilute to push around anything resembling a normal automobile.
Uh, 14kW solar power does NOT equal 18.77 horsepower.
For example, if on average you drive an hour or two a day, even in less than ideal conditions you'll have far more power than that availible.
And in a consumer vehicle, solar would only be only one source of power availible to the driver anyway. If you want to drive for 10 hours after dark, you'd probably fill the tank with hydogen, or gasoline and do it that way.
(And in practice, electric engines are far gruntier than combustion engines - even when both deliver similar horsepower. That's why supermachines, like the biggest and most powerful trucks in the world are electric. Combustion engines just suck when a lot of grunt is required in addition to the variable loading that you get in a land vehicle. So they run a combustion generator in it's optimal operating range, which transfers the power to an electric engine that can supply the torque without crapping out whenever the loading or speed changes.)
Photovoltaics are basically large chips, they use the same nasty chemicals and lots of electricity.
No, this is misleading at best, and false at worst. You would have great difficulty in finding any solar cells that took the same kind of energy to make as chips, because the reality is that (precisely because of the energy and chemicals involved) it's cheaper to make solar cells from the waste left-overs from the semiconductor industry than it is to refine them from scratch.
The "nasty chemicals and lots of energy" that went into solar cells, didn't, because most of it went into semiconductor manufacture, and as such would have happened whether the waste products were used for solar cells or simply dumped into landfill.
So you could equally argue that solar cells reclaim that energy and those chemicals, in addition to to the energy they produce from the sun, since the only alternative is pouring most of that energy and chemicals straight into landfill.
Like I said, nothing of significance. With the amount of scrutiney Iraq has been under, if this is the best there is, Case Closed.
There was also sometimes a noticable absense of the contradictory evidence that later emerged, evidence which defeased things that initially seemed indefeasible. In that sense, it was a good article for leading people to mistaken conclusions though.
Here are pages and pages and pages of information about the connection.
Uh, those pages and pages just confirm there was no connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
If that's the best that is out there, case closed.
I think this is true. The people that ea_spouse was talking about are more or less the low level cogs in the machine, the nameless hord that do the bidding of the true designers/stars.
I don't think this is generally the case. In my experience, the "true designer/star" is really more of a PR/media construction. When the cameras are off, or the journalists have left, the guy stops performing and is part of the team again, and if he isn't pulling the same hours during an ugly crunch, the other people get very resentful. If he's not pulling the same hours, chances are it's because he's not a key player - "true designers" are key and work crunch, distant/higher level management might not. The line between the two can become blurred - there are people who straddle management and production enough to qualify as being somewhat immune from crunch, while doing a lot of media interview stuff, and career wise it's probably pretty sweet, but their contribution to the game is not as large as you'd think - you hear so much about their key contributions because they're the person doing the interview. They're a bit like "stars", but rarely the "designers".
In the global warming debate, there was postulation, then announcement, and finally the research.
No, global warming was initially a prediction based on observation "Hmmm - if this effect we're observing in the lab holds true to the wider atmosphere, current artificial gas emissions would affect the global climate".
Then more research followed, and the conclusion was reached. The conclusion predicted climate change. At that point, it was announced. (Not only does this follow "postulate-research-announce", but it would be wrong to not announce the results, since the results predict problems ahead, potentially big ones.
"Judging from our models and lab work (and we may be wrong) climate changes will happen and we would expect to see them start to become noticeable in ten to fifty years, and continue to get worse, becoming problematic or even disasterious"
Fast forward ten to fifteen years, and the predicted effects are appearing as predicted.
You seem to be confusing individual scientific studies with a branch of science. Saying climate science announced before researching is like saying Edison announced (and unveiled) a working lightbulb before making it, since subsequent people are still building better and more definitive lightbulbs. The Final Lightbulb does not yet exist. And if Edison wated until a hundred years from now to announce, he would have still jumped the gun because two hundred years from now, the definitive lightbulb will still not exist. Improvements will be ongoing.
Many climate science studies are complete, and announcement of the results of a study only follows once the study is complete. The fact that the studies so far all paint a pretty comprehensive picture is evidence that they're probably somewhat accurate and should be taken notice of, not that they've jumped the gun because entirely seperate lines of research are ongoing.
global temperature fluctuation is natural.
Uh... that makes everything worse, not better. Remember - climate change didn't come from observing climate change, it was predicted from gas experiments long before any change was expected to be observable, and subsequent studies confirmed man-made gas quanitites were almost certain to be more than sufficient. It is known that man-made changes are going to happen (barring some massive intervention), which means any natural temperature fluctuation on top of our changes just means any problems are likely to be that much worse.
Now, if I had one or two A4-sized electronic paper sheets, with a touch screen on top so I can make annotations with my stylus, then I would be able to stop using dead trees for studying...
:-). I really bought mine for art, and I normally just use the keyboard, but I can scribble all over documents if I want to, and I don't have to use the fingerpad or carry a mouse :)
:-)
They already exist. They're called Tablet-PCs. I'm writing this with a stylus now on an A4-sized screen
(Actually, while I've found that tablet-PCs are way better than normal laptops, they're still not up there with a good pencil and sheet of paper for many tasks. The dead trees will be with us for some time
It was within a few days of release. The quickest I've ever bought a game.
It seems like your major beef with the game has more to do with the installation process then the actual game.
:-)
This is my beef too, and I imagine it's probably the most common beef - loved the actual game, but would have enjoyed it more if my mood wasn't twisted into a black thundercloud by the time I could play it
I was on dial-up. I bought the DVD thinking I could install it from the DVD like every other game. No, it took hours upon hours. Since I didn't have those hours all at once, and there were bugs, it was days until I could play.
It would be legitimate if it just needed to authenticate, but no, it needed to download hundreds of megs to install - that's really REALLY frustrating on dial-up. You should have those hundreds of megs on the DVD. That's why people buy a media version. If you have broadband, you have less (or no) need to buy the physical media. Selling media that doesn't take the place of a massive download is just crappy.
The frustration of the install ruined the first section of the game for me. As I see it, I hadn't done anything wrong, my only crime was having a dial-up internet connection. Not Cool.
Pure crap. Saddam was paying PLO terrorists.
What did PLO terrorists have to do with 9/11?
AFAIK, all the evidence both then and now, says "nothing".
When the theives turn on the laptop, they can't connect it to the internet without entering the logon password. So their only option is a fresh install... meaning the Lo-Jack software is uninstalled.
Do you have to dispense with passwords for LoJack to work?
Do you set up a passsword-free guest account as a kind of honeypot?
Isn't "libertarian" a right-wing thing? I'm sure the "left-wing" "equivalent" would be "anarchist".
:-)
:-)
:-)
Don't take this the wrong way, but it's really funny to watch someone's brain asplode as they try to artificially twist real-world politics down to a mere two pidgeonholes.
The reason you can't do it is because politics is not one-dimensional. The childishly crude left vs right garbage is something you only get in obsolete or broken political systems incapable of supporting anything other than two main parties. Having only a lousy two reference points, a line is the result - and from that is drawn left and right, a retarded one dimensional political concept.
You wouldn't happen to be American by any chance?
(Fisher's deduction states: "The more issues a person crudely shoehorns down into a liberal/conservative dichotomy, the more certain you can be that the person is an American"
Anyway, if you haven't already seen it, check out Political Compass, which at least expands things to two dimensions, and will make your brain stop hurting
(No offense intended in all this, I'm not exactly being entirely serious here. Hence the liberal sprinkling of smileys