What's really exciting about the iPhone's new resolution is that we're approaching the point where higher rez doesn't make any difference. We might be there already for lots of people with subaverage visual acuity, or just getting near for those with supervision. Since marketers will keep pushing for higher rez even after it can't make a visible difference, because they can sell the numbers to the ignorant and the gullible, we will soon have enough resolution that nobody will see the difference if it went any higher. At which point the marketing will start to switch to some other visual feature that actually looks different for the money.
I'd love to see display tech finally start to get off the grid. Patterns that aren't a regular grid, because the eye can see the grid itself, or that there's some kind of grid, even when the individual pixels can't be distinguished from their neighbors. Or off the grid of time, with pixels updating at times not strictly synced with each other on a frame clock. The retina's image sensing cells are in a stochastic distribution around a sinusoidal rosette, each independently signaling over the optic nerve at about 40Hz. So once framerates are above 80Hz (the usual Nyquist frequency doubling limit), the time grid itself will be the limit, not the rate of the grid. The colorspace itself is a grid that's pretty regular throughout R, G and B, even though the eye sees in a very uneven colorspace that's really Yellow/Blue and Red/Green in axes, and mostly greens. 16.8M colors is probably the color resolution, but far too many non-green colors are indistinguishable in displays, while there aren't nearly enough greens to look like natural colors.
When we get off those grids, in space and time, these displays will start to jump in realism again. We're now at the point where just investing in higher resolution is no longer making any real difference. The rest of the grids await mastery.
Orbital aerogel manufacture seems like a great win on so many levels. Growing it in vacuum means when its surface is sealed it insulates at something like R-13, even with the internal structure ("haywire") we get at Earth's surface. If orbit's microgravity and micropressure means we can make it even less dense, it could possibly deliver closer to R-20. And without directly powering any evacuation process. Possibly a micro deposition coating, in which case thick sheets could be so not-dense (we'd have to finally use a better word than "light" or "airy":) that they'd float in Earth's atmosphere anywhere near the surface. If we could manufacture carbon fiber/nanotube frames in orbit, we could build blimps filled with vacuum. We could fill them with other cargo and dump them into the atmosphere. A really sophisticated industry would have powered blimps finding their way to ships, or directly to ports.
It all sounds so much like the SF from the 1920s that I'll continue:). Charging the aerogels as ultracapacitors with orbital solar power could send them all the way to their destination, and possibly with power to spare once there. Where blimps could be dismantled, or shed some skin, delivering cheap and extremely effective insulation. If orbit let us orient the strands in parallel while keeping the insulating and mechanical strength, we might get usable windows (possibly even without even colored depths, if the strands were separated wider than visible wavelengths). If the world could afford aerogel windows at 5-20x the R-value of glass for the same price, our energy consumption for heating and cooling could be cut by the amount of excess Greenhouse gas pushing the atmosphere out of its familiar cycles. And of course the rest of the benefits, including whatever we packaged in them, would transform the world's industry, and therefore its labor and environment.
I just hope it's America that leads the way, instead of one of our foreign competitors. If I were Putin, I know where I'd be investing my country's space, engineering and energy momentum. And I bet China's mafia thinks the same thing.
I won't be surprised when a future US government privatizes the ISS or a successor in a giant subsidy to some corporation. I'd hope the American public would get a better return than just the usual honor of subsidizing someone else's private enterprise, but if the corporation were (at least mainly, as in taxes and jobs) American, it would probably be worth keeping American enterprise in the forefront instead of its usual tendency to lag behind any risk.
What would be really cool would be an American Moon base run like an American city, with a public government and lots of private enterprise. A base for humans, who like gravity and large open spaces. I'd love to see a big solar plant beaming power back to Earth, occupied by humans, operating and servicing automated orbital satellites including factories.
If you'd follow the link to the aerogel Wikipedia article I gave in my original post, you'd see that your cherrypicked poor example isn't what I'm talking about. Moreover, I'm talking about manufacturing an even better aerogel in space, which you conveniently ignore. And besides, the Space Shuttles have been successfully reentering the atmosphere without burning up because they're covered in the previous generation aerogel tiles.
The current aerogel for skylights is already (US units) R-10.5:inch at $10:foot^2, instead of R-2 to R-3 for the best double-pane glass windows. For skylights that's cheap enough to put 3-4 inches thick and still save a lot of money in lighting without losing money in heating under an otherwise R-40 roof. If orbital manufacture produced truly clear material cheaply in large volumes, the amount of energy saved in buildings would be far vaster than the amount of energy to launch the factories and pull in the silicon stocks. Especially if it cost nearly nothing to drop the products in the ocean, which could package heavier and much higher value products like drugs and chips. Or even aerogel ultracapacitors charged with the ample solar power in space.
If you actually knew what aerogels were, instead of looking for lame terrestrial versions, you'd understand why orbital manufacturing them is exciting.
I do hope you realize that wars are won or lost when one side surrenders. Which is what the US did. Many years after we should have left that country to its own civil war.
Thank you for demonstrating just why the Vietnam War was such a fiasco: even 40 years later, you're still fighting it, after we lost it. You think the killing was "the good part", and that the people who got you out of there were "almost treasonous". You and your war did more to undermine this country than practically anything ever done by it, up to its repeat performance in Iraq. The people who insist on fighting those wars for corporate crony war profiteers are the traitors.
You really don't know what you're talking about. This article is about the current economics of travel to and from space, which is within reach of industry. What I posted is about a material developed for space, which has extremely valuable properties. Like windows that lose 20% or less the heat that even double-pane/argon/low-e windows currently do, if their inner structure can be oriented properly, which seems likely in microgravity/near-vacuum. Extremely valuable stuff, especially while we're in an energy crisis best countered by conservation. Produced at very low costs in very high volumes in space, once the R&D costs are recovered, at a quality impossible on Earth without costing far more than we can afford.
As for "unlimited energy", that's the most promising benefit of human presence in space, beyond scientific knowledge and inspiring human achievement. Solar satellites or moon bases. Fusion plants or even fission plants safely located on the far side of the Moon. Gravity pumps in orbit; more exotic technologies once we're out there looking further into the future from the tech we brought with us.
The future includes sophisticated software on massively parallel networks of computers. Engineered microbes and other DNA structures. Stemcells and hormone therapies. Thousands of avenues of invention, including lots in space.
Just because it's beyond your comprehension, because you're stuck in some 1950s/60s shortsightedness, doesn't mean it's not out there for us to do for ourselves. And we will. And people like you who don't comprehend it will get hauled along with us. So do yourself a favor and either get smart, or shut up.
Aerogels were developed by NASA for insulation in space. They are closely related to the ceramic tiles NASA invented to shield the Space Shuttles during reentry - over and over again, without damage. They also have very tough mechanical properties, even when made at the surface of the Earth. Evidently you know nothing about them, even though I helpfully included a link to a detailed description of their properties and history.
That is why I say they could be dropped from space without harm. So yes, you are talking shit again.
So how long before a corporation launches a factory into (relatively) permanent orbit, for manufacturing in microgravity and near-vacuum? Will factories like that be able to dump their products back into the ocean for collection by delivery ships?
I want to see if aerogels can be made in orbit not just cheaply, but with their internal structure oriented so they can be regular windows. They're such good insulators, and have such small mass per surface area that they could probably be dropped from orbit into the ocean without any extra packaging. Or as packaging containing other, more fragile stuff made in orbit and then the aerogel reused for its own applications once it's collected at the surface.
For one thing, Vietnam isn't China. Vietnam fought China after it defeated the US (which was after it defeated France), and beat China back out of its borders, too.
For another thing, Vietnam's government is a very hands-off government. If anything the main problem for Vietnamese people is their government's failure to lead and protect them from people with private power. For all its styling itself a "Communist" government, Vietnam's actual government is quite far in practice from anything like the totalitarian control that is essential to orthodox Communism.
I don't find this story's inferences about Chinese(-style) spyware credible. I'd bet the regulation is just some placeholder for something nobody has, or even knows what it is. And it's more likely to be some kind of crony app that gets mandated so some bureaucrat's family makes money. Which would make it just as much like the US as like China.
FaceTime, live video chat from one iPhone 4 to another. It is Wi-Fi only at the moment, but they're working with carriers to expand that in the future.
That statement implies that not only AT&T, but other carriers, will be carrying the iPhone. Which other carriers? That fact would be by far the biggest news about the new iPhone. And one step away from the total vertical monopoly Jobs has managed to lock people into if they want to "Think Different" about their phone.
The reason we have flat rate data connections for our wired Internet is because the edge of the Internet has competition between ISPs, and because the Internet itself was started as a lot of independent networks cooperating for complete coverage.
But since the time when the Internet started, it has grown to have much less competition at the edges (telcos killed DSL competitors, and broadband is usually at best a cableco/telco duopoly), while the backbones have consolidated to cooperate in a cartel to keep prices high and investment in speed low.
Mobile phone telcos got going right as the Internet corps got into full swing away from that original business model. They were stuck with the legacy of flat-rate Internet (though they're working to get past it), but did everything they could to keep wireless Internet as monopolistic as possible.
If every mobile phone could connect to any wireless network whose frequency the device can transceive on, without special "roaming" charges or plain lockout, the wireless networks would look a lot more like the Internet, and encourage the flat rate pricing. Telcos especially could be set up to bill the device's own company without a special fee, as their entire voice industry has been based on billing the telco of the incoming call when it reaches the recipient, who are usually on different networks. Such a system would be much cheaper to bill at flat rates, instead of charging for each connection, especially from moving vehicles passing through different networks in a single session.
When the wireless "last mile" is operated like the wired Internet, it will be ready for Internet style flat rate billing. But until telcos are forced to share their market of mobile users, they will never operate that way.
The governors of the states affected didn't do anything but collude with oil/gas corps before the catastrophe. Now they're shifting blame off themselves by blaming someone else. Even when they're right to blame someone else, that doesn't mean their spin is at all accurate, because it's designed to falsely avoid getting any blame on themselves.
Note that the governors in question, of all 5 Gulf Coast states, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, are all Republicans who were in power when Bush/Cheney (both oilmen) were running the country. They made money under Cheney's energy policy, and pushed back the inevitable consequences of catastrophe, just like they did in the financial system. And now they will take as much "Big Government" as they can get, after working to shrink government to small enough that they could "drown it in a bathtub". That is how they roll.
You and I have clashed in the past. But I agree with your post 100%. Especially the insight that wells must have relief wells drilled beforehand. And that only government in competition with business can make that happen.
Vegas slot machines max out at 93.42%, and are mostly below 93% payouts. I don't see any reason to believe that some Cripple Creek casino has better odds than Vegas.
Using correct blackjack basic strategy brings dealer advantage down to 0.5%, which is a payout of 99% before card counting makes it a reliable money maker over time.
The amount of oil flowing from the rupture is important to know in stopping it, in most of the techniques used.
The "top kill" technique countered the spew pressure with a greater pressure of mud pumped in against it, but not enough extra pressure to burst the damaged pipes. The pressure of the spew is exactly proportional to the flow rate, and the flow rate is exactly proportional to the volume over time.
So when BP performed the top kill, BP knew the spew pressure, therefore the volume.
Other techniques also know the flow rate, like the various collection domes they've been trying.
It's not true that BP doesn't know the volume. What is true is that the public knowing the volume makes it harder for BP to pretend it's less.
Slashdotters are better than the general public at understanding that this BP rupture's quantity of spewing oil is very serious and damaging, even where it isn't obvious on Gulf Coast beaches.
So you should look at who is downplaying it. And then remember next time they tell you something how seriously low their credibility is. That they cannot be trusted. Their usual lying isn't usually as obvious as it is here.
The $11M payout is the absolute #1 marketing that keeps people coming to the slots at casinos. It probably takes that casino less than a year to make $11M profit on its slots - maybe less than a month. Once it becomes known as the "indian giver" casino, slots players will go elsewhere in droves. If it got known as the "unearned jackpot casino", it would attract even more slots players. Slots have terrible odds, so its profitability is directly proportional to such simplistic logic that drives marketing.
This casino will lose much more than $11M by showing its market how it operates, rather than by just paying this unexpected marketing fee. Evidently slots operators aren't much smarter than their customers.
I'm not bothering to point out the corruption and worthlessness of anyone else except Barlow. Everything I said about him is true.
"Nancy Pelosi" is the kind of crap red herring boogeyman who scares you Republicans. I mean "libertarians". By which I mean corporate anarchists. Kool aid kings.
JP Barlow likes to talk a lot about politics. But what's he actually done? He is a Republican. He helped Dick Cheney get elected to the House of Representatives from Wyoming.
Yeah, Barlow helped start EFF, but he's had nothing real to do with it since then. Yeah, Barlow wrote some songs for the Grateful Dead, but they were for Bob Weir, who's an idiot (though I loved the GD, and saw them over 100 times).
Barlow is an opportunist, who's got a real talent for being where the action is. But he and his Republican buddies have broken the political system. Because they hate government. They're corporate anarchists, hiding behind the brand name "libertarian".
For example, a tweaked Motorola Droid can hit 52 Mflop/s, which is more than 15 times faster than the CPUs used in the 1979 Cray-1.
Cray's approach to supercomputing wasn't just to make the CPU fast. Indeed, he outcompeted faster CPUs by making all of his computers fast, so no power in the machine was wasted waiting for something else. Especially IO and memory were his focus for throughput. A Droid's CPU is bottlenecked by the rest of the device.
This unfair comparison isn't just whining about missing Cray's point. There's a lot of power in that Droid that the SW can't exploit, because its bottlenecks leave the fast parts waiting. Not only does that slow them down, but it wastes electrical energy. Which is the biggest problem in mobile devices.
LINPACK isn't the best way to measure supercomputers, and "nanocomputers" like mobile phones could be better if they learned something from Cray's research 40 years ago.
All the market bubbles in the lifetimes of everyone alive to read this post have been noticed as they arrived, and usually foreseen. Indeed, most of them have been created, to be exploited.
The problem is deflating the bubble before it pops. While we probably know how to do that, doing so fails to make those who see and create them as rich as just letting "nature" take its course. And those people are in charge.
Trying to fix "no one could have anticipated X would catastrophically fail" is just further supporting the fallacy that no one could have, or did, anticipate it.
Internet searches aren't child molestation. Child molestation is a sex act. So the EU must monitor every sex act to prevent child molestation. Otherwise it's just wasting everyone's time while the real killers run free!
Slashdot Mirror
What's really exciting about the iPhone's new resolution is that we're approaching the point where higher rez doesn't make any difference. We might be there already for lots of people with subaverage visual acuity, or just getting near for those with supervision. Since marketers will keep pushing for higher rez even after it can't make a visible difference, because they can sell the numbers to the ignorant and the gullible, we will soon have enough resolution that nobody will see the difference if it went any higher. At which point the marketing will start to switch to some other visual feature that actually looks different for the money.
I'd love to see display tech finally start to get off the grid. Patterns that aren't a regular grid, because the eye can see the grid itself, or that there's some kind of grid, even when the individual pixels can't be distinguished from their neighbors. Or off the grid of time, with pixels updating at times not strictly synced with each other on a frame clock. The retina's image sensing cells are in a stochastic distribution around a sinusoidal rosette, each independently signaling over the optic nerve at about 40Hz. So once framerates are above 80Hz (the usual Nyquist frequency doubling limit), the time grid itself will be the limit, not the rate of the grid. The colorspace itself is a grid that's pretty regular throughout R, G and B, even though the eye sees in a very uneven colorspace that's really Yellow/Blue and Red/Green in axes, and mostly greens. 16.8M colors is probably the color resolution, but far too many non-green colors are indistinguishable in displays, while there aren't nearly enough greens to look like natural colors.
When we get off those grids, in space and time, these displays will start to jump in realism again. We're now at the point where just investing in higher resolution is no longer making any real difference. The rest of the grids await mastery.
Orbital aerogel manufacture seems like a great win on so many levels. Growing it in vacuum means when its surface is sealed it insulates at something like R-13, even with the internal structure ("haywire") we get at Earth's surface. If orbit's microgravity and micropressure means we can make it even less dense, it could possibly deliver closer to R-20. And without directly powering any evacuation process. Possibly a micro deposition coating, in which case thick sheets could be so not-dense (we'd have to finally use a better word than "light" or "airy" :) that they'd float in Earth's atmosphere anywhere near the surface. If we could manufacture carbon fiber/nanotube frames in orbit, we could build blimps filled with vacuum. We could fill them with other cargo and dump them into the atmosphere. A really sophisticated industry would have powered blimps finding their way to ships, or directly to ports.
It all sounds so much like the SF from the 1920s that I'll continue :). Charging the aerogels as ultracapacitors with orbital solar power could send them all the way to their destination, and possibly with power to spare once there. Where blimps could be dismantled, or shed some skin, delivering cheap and extremely effective insulation. If orbit let us orient the strands in parallel while keeping the insulating and mechanical strength, we might get usable windows (possibly even without even colored depths, if the strands were separated wider than visible wavelengths). If the world could afford aerogel windows at 5-20x the R-value of glass for the same price, our energy consumption for heating and cooling could be cut by the amount of excess Greenhouse gas pushing the atmosphere out of its familiar cycles. And of course the rest of the benefits, including whatever we packaged in them, would transform the world's industry, and therefore its labor and environment.
I just hope it's America that leads the way, instead of one of our foreign competitors. If I were Putin, I know where I'd be investing my country's space, engineering and energy momentum. And I bet China's mafia thinks the same thing.
I won't be surprised when a future US government privatizes the ISS or a successor in a giant subsidy to some corporation. I'd hope the American public would get a better return than just the usual honor of subsidizing someone else's private enterprise, but if the corporation were (at least mainly, as in taxes and jobs) American, it would probably be worth keeping American enterprise in the forefront instead of its usual tendency to lag behind any risk.
What would be really cool would be an American Moon base run like an American city, with a public government and lots of private enterprise. A base for humans, who like gravity and large open spaces. I'd love to see a big solar plant beaming power back to Earth, occupied by humans, operating and servicing automated orbital satellites including factories.
If you'd follow the link to the aerogel Wikipedia article I gave in my original post, you'd see that your cherrypicked poor example isn't what I'm talking about. Moreover, I'm talking about manufacturing an even better aerogel in space, which you conveniently ignore. And besides, the Space Shuttles have been successfully reentering the atmosphere without burning up because they're covered in the previous generation aerogel tiles.
The current aerogel for skylights is already (US units) R-10.5:inch at $10:foot^2, instead of R-2 to R-3 for the best double-pane glass windows. For skylights that's cheap enough to put 3-4 inches thick and still save a lot of money in lighting without losing money in heating under an otherwise R-40 roof. If orbital manufacture produced truly clear material cheaply in large volumes, the amount of energy saved in buildings would be far vaster than the amount of energy to launch the factories and pull in the silicon stocks. Especially if it cost nearly nothing to drop the products in the ocean, which could package heavier and much higher value products like drugs and chips. Or even aerogel ultracapacitors charged with the ample solar power in space.
If you actually knew what aerogels were, instead of looking for lame terrestrial versions, you'd understand why orbital manufacturing them is exciting.
I do hope you realize that wars are won or lost when one side surrenders. Which is what the US did. Many years after we should have left that country to its own civil war.
Thank you for demonstrating just why the Vietnam War was such a fiasco: even 40 years later, you're still fighting it, after we lost it. You think the killing was "the good part", and that the people who got you out of there were "almost treasonous". You and your war did more to undermine this country than practically anything ever done by it, up to its repeat performance in Iraq. The people who insist on fighting those wars for corporate crony war profiteers are the traitors.
Congratulations, you're an ancient stereotype.
You really don't know what you're talking about. This article is about the current economics of travel to and from space, which is within reach of industry. What I posted is about a material developed for space, which has extremely valuable properties. Like windows that lose 20% or less the heat that even double-pane/argon/low-e windows currently do, if their inner structure can be oriented properly, which seems likely in microgravity/near-vacuum. Extremely valuable stuff, especially while we're in an energy crisis best countered by conservation. Produced at very low costs in very high volumes in space, once the R&D costs are recovered, at a quality impossible on Earth without costing far more than we can afford.
As for "unlimited energy", that's the most promising benefit of human presence in space, beyond scientific knowledge and inspiring human achievement. Solar satellites or moon bases. Fusion plants or even fission plants safely located on the far side of the Moon. Gravity pumps in orbit; more exotic technologies once we're out there looking further into the future from the tech we brought with us.
The future includes sophisticated software on massively parallel networks of computers. Engineered microbes and other DNA structures. Stemcells and hormone therapies. Thousands of avenues of invention, including lots in space.
Just because it's beyond your comprehension, because you're stuck in some 1950s/60s shortsightedness, doesn't mean it's not out there for us to do for ourselves. And we will. And people like you who don't comprehend it will get hauled along with us. So do yourself a favor and either get smart, or shut up.
Aerogels were developed by NASA for insulation in space. They are closely related to the ceramic tiles NASA invented to shield the Space Shuttles during reentry - over and over again, without damage. They also have very tough mechanical properties, even when made at the surface of the Earth. Evidently you know nothing about them, even though I helpfully included a link to a detailed description of their properties and history.
That is why I say they could be dropped from space without harm. So yes, you are talking shit again.
So how long before a corporation launches a factory into (relatively) permanent orbit, for manufacturing in microgravity and near-vacuum? Will factories like that be able to dump their products back into the ocean for collection by delivery ships?
I want to see if aerogels can be made in orbit not just cheaply, but with their internal structure oriented so they can be regular windows. They're such good insulators, and have such small mass per surface area that they could probably be dropped from orbit into the ocean without any extra packaging. Or as packaging containing other, more fragile stuff made in orbit and then the aerogel reused for its own applications once it's collected at the surface.
"Not quite"? In fact I think that you just agreed with exactly what I said.
For one thing, Vietnam isn't China. Vietnam fought China after it defeated the US (which was after it defeated France), and beat China back out of its borders, too.
For another thing, Vietnam's government is a very hands-off government. If anything the main problem for Vietnamese people is their government's failure to lead and protect them from people with private power. For all its styling itself a "Communist" government, Vietnam's actual government is quite far in practice from anything like the totalitarian control that is essential to orthodox Communism.
I don't find this story's inferences about Chinese(-style) spyware credible. I'd bet the regulation is just some placeholder for something nobody has, or even knows what it is. And it's more likely to be some kind of crony app that gets mandated so some bureaucrat's family makes money. Which would make it just as much like the US as like China.
That statement implies that not only AT&T, but other carriers, will be carrying the iPhone. Which other carriers? That fact would be by far the biggest news about the new iPhone. And one step away from the total vertical monopoly Jobs has managed to lock people into if they want to "Think Different" about their phone.
The reason we have flat rate data connections for our wired Internet is because the edge of the Internet has competition between ISPs, and because the Internet itself was started as a lot of independent networks cooperating for complete coverage.
But since the time when the Internet started, it has grown to have much less competition at the edges (telcos killed DSL competitors, and broadband is usually at best a cableco/telco duopoly), while the backbones have consolidated to cooperate in a cartel to keep prices high and investment in speed low.
Mobile phone telcos got going right as the Internet corps got into full swing away from that original business model. They were stuck with the legacy of flat-rate Internet (though they're working to get past it), but did everything they could to keep wireless Internet as monopolistic as possible.
If every mobile phone could connect to any wireless network whose frequency the device can transceive on, without special "roaming" charges or plain lockout, the wireless networks would look a lot more like the Internet, and encourage the flat rate pricing. Telcos especially could be set up to bill the device's own company without a special fee, as their entire voice industry has been based on billing the telco of the incoming call when it reaches the recipient, who are usually on different networks. Such a system would be much cheaper to bill at flat rates, instead of charging for each connection, especially from moving vehicles passing through different networks in a single session.
When the wireless "last mile" is operated like the wired Internet, it will be ready for Internet style flat rate billing. But until telcos are forced to share their market of mobile users, they will never operate that way.
The governors of the states affected didn't do anything but collude with oil/gas corps before the catastrophe. Now they're shifting blame off themselves by blaming someone else. Even when they're right to blame someone else, that doesn't mean their spin is at all accurate, because it's designed to falsely avoid getting any blame on themselves.
Note that the governors in question, of all 5 Gulf Coast states, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, are all Republicans who were in power when Bush/Cheney (both oilmen) were running the country. They made money under Cheney's energy policy, and pushed back the inevitable consequences of catastrophe, just like they did in the financial system. And now they will take as much "Big Government" as they can get, after working to shrink government to small enough that they could "drown it in a bathtub". That is how they roll.
You and I have clashed in the past. But I agree with your post 100%. Especially the insight that wells must have relief wells drilled beforehand. And that only government in competition with business can make that happen.
Good to agree :).
Please cite your stats.
Vegas slot machines max out at 93.42%, and are mostly below 93% payouts. I don't see any reason to believe that some Cripple Creek casino has better odds than Vegas.
Using correct blackjack basic strategy brings dealer advantage down to 0.5%, which is a payout of 99% before card counting makes it a reliable money maker over time.
The amount of oil flowing from the rupture is important to know in stopping it, in most of the techniques used.
The "top kill" technique countered the spew pressure with a greater pressure of mud pumped in against it, but not enough extra pressure to burst the damaged pipes. The pressure of the spew is exactly proportional to the flow rate, and the flow rate is exactly proportional to the volume over time.
So when BP performed the top kill, BP knew the spew pressure, therefore the volume.
Other techniques also know the flow rate, like the various collection domes they've been trying.
It's not true that BP doesn't know the volume. What is true is that the public knowing the volume makes it harder for BP to pretend it's less.
Slashdotters are better than the general public at understanding that this BP rupture's quantity of spewing oil is very serious and damaging, even where it isn't obvious on Gulf Coast beaches.
So you should look at who is downplaying it. And then remember next time they tell you something how seriously low their credibility is. That they cannot be trusted. Their usual lying isn't usually as obvious as it is here.
The $11M payout is the absolute #1 marketing that keeps people coming to the slots at casinos. It probably takes that casino less than a year to make $11M profit on its slots - maybe less than a month. Once it becomes known as the "indian giver" casino, slots players will go elsewhere in droves. If it got known as the "unearned jackpot casino", it would attract even more slots players. Slots have terrible odds, so its profitability is directly proportional to such simplistic logic that drives marketing.
This casino will lose much more than $11M by showing its market how it operates, rather than by just paying this unexpected marketing fee. Evidently slots operators aren't much smarter than their customers.
I'm not bothering to point out the corruption and worthlessness of anyone else except Barlow. Everything I said about him is true.
"Nancy Pelosi" is the kind of crap red herring boogeyman who scares you Republicans. I mean "libertarians". By which I mean corporate anarchists. Kool aid kings.
Corporate anarchists are people who want to eliminate government, creating a power vacuum that corporations fill.
It's not worthless ranting. You should be paying closer attention.
JP Barlow likes to talk a lot about politics. But what's he actually done? He is a Republican. He helped Dick Cheney get elected to the House of Representatives from Wyoming.
Yeah, Barlow helped start EFF, but he's had nothing real to do with it since then. Yeah, Barlow wrote some songs for the Grateful Dead, but they were for Bob Weir, who's an idiot (though I loved the GD, and saw them over 100 times).
Barlow is an opportunist, who's got a real talent for being where the action is. But he and his Republican buddies have broken the political system. Because they hate government. They're corporate anarchists, hiding behind the brand name "libertarian".
Cray's approach to supercomputing wasn't just to make the CPU fast. Indeed, he outcompeted faster CPUs by making all of his computers fast, so no power in the machine was wasted waiting for something else. Especially IO and memory were his focus for throughput. A Droid's CPU is bottlenecked by the rest of the device.
This unfair comparison isn't just whining about missing Cray's point. There's a lot of power in that Droid that the SW can't exploit, because its bottlenecks leave the fast parts waiting. Not only does that slow them down, but it wastes electrical energy. Which is the biggest problem in mobile devices.
LINPACK isn't the best way to measure supercomputers, and "nanocomputers" like mobile phones could be better if they learned something from Cray's research 40 years ago.
All the market bubbles in the lifetimes of everyone alive to read this post have been noticed as they arrived, and usually foreseen. Indeed, most of them have been created, to be exploited.
The problem is deflating the bubble before it pops. While we probably know how to do that, doing so fails to make those who see and create them as rich as just letting "nature" take its course. And those people are in charge.
Trying to fix "no one could have anticipated X would catastrophically fail" is just further supporting the fallacy that no one could have, or did, anticipate it.
Internet searches aren't child molestation. Child molestation is a sex act. So the EU must monitor every sex act to prevent child molestation. Otherwise it's just wasting everyone's time while the real killers run free!
Never play a game you can't win, son.