Nice video. Run the caption through Google translate and you'll see that the person posting the video is the driver. He's making every effort to preserve the ecology around the road he's preparing land for, and diverting the road to protect endangered trees. He's not burning the cut land, either. In other words, he's doing it right, and for the right reasons: providing a route for transportation in the region and keeping Human needs balanced with conservation of Nature.
Yes, it's a fast operation, but it's not cheap - that tractor costs a lot more than manual laborers with machetes and a torch. Maintaining that road is going to have ongoing costs, too, and the area is probably lucky to even be getting that one road. Without a public benefit no such project would be started, it's too expensive.
There is no way to the forest to recover as fast as men can destroy it.
Sure, we can keep it up for long enough to build a road, or carve out a farm. But Nature is patient, and the Brazilians' goal isn't to simply pave the entire forest out of spite. Unfortunately, the farmers, ranchers, and road builders in the Amazon have to annually re-clear the same land they plant on, as the forest is constantly encroaching on their fields, pastures, and roadways. It's a constant, expensive, and difficult battle to keep the land clear for Human use.
I think the reason that there aren't deforestation progress maps in circulation (like I suggested there should be in my original post) is that they'd look like towns being built, farms being planted, and roads being paved to connect communities and bring crops to market. It's easy to knee-jerk and complain about the virgin forest being cut; but it's a lot harder to tell an entire nation that they should restrict population growth, stop growing their economy, and stop producing food because their own land is too valuable for them to use. Or better yet, let them know that you don't trust them to manage their natural resources wisely. <sarcasm>That'll go over well.<\sarcasm>
tl; dr: Sure, we can be very destructive when there's a reason for it. But the people who live there tell me that even with these methods in use it's still getting too expensive to maintain. They're fighting to have food to eat and a place to live. Suggesting that they simply stop trying because we love their land too much is not just naive, it's insulting.
Thanks, that was useful. It gives me somewhere specific to look. Do you by any chance know where I can look for older pictures of the area? I'd like to compare to current overhead photos.
Maybe, the Brazilians you talked to didn't know what they were talking about, and the regrowth isn't at all the same as virgin rainforest?
The undergrowth that thrives in cleared areas is a caricature of a forest."... "Twenty percent of the deforested areas are recovering."
Nevertheless, Almeida is not issuing a general all-clear signal for the rainforest. "Within no more than five years, most of the secondary forests will be burned down or cut down again," he says. Cattle ranchers use the fallow fields as pasture, while farmers plant soybeans or cereal crops.
Once the virgin rainforest is cut down, it might not be tracked any longer as virgin rainforest, even if it grows back. However, most of what grows back is being burnt again every few years. Meanwhile, other people (i.e. not the ones you talked to) are burning additional virgin forest, resulting in a huge net loss.
I think, perhaps, they did. If I'm reading your pasted quote properly, the ecologist speaking (Lawrence?) states that 20% of the cleared areas could be considered "forest" again by his standards. That's a total, debilitating loss for the rancher who wanted to use it for his cattle. Even the "caricature of a forest" Lawrence mentioned first is likely unusable for grazing. It may not be old-growth, virgin forest any longer, but Nature has certainly taken it back from Man. The only disparity I see between the farmer's perspective and the Naturalist's is the definition of "forest". Your quote, in fact, reads like a Naturalist agreeing with the layman's assessment I heard when I was there.
That being said, and granting to you the point that unnecessary clearing of "virgin forest" is wasteful, why is the use of forest land for ranching or farming per se intolerable? Putting it another way, why is it OK for a Kansas farmer to clear his property for planting soybeans but it's not OK if the farmer lives in Manaus? Is the Amazon basin so sacrosanct that it's a sin against Gaia for humans to live there? This attitude among environmentalists is insulting to the dignity of the Brazilian people, and coming from fellow Americans hypocritical at best. Citizens of the United States have little right to tell Brazilian farmers to starve or find other work based solely on gut-instinct protectionism for a specific forest.
Sorry if I'm coming across a bit harsh, but your response resonated with the "ZOMG BURNING TREEZ IS THE SUXXORZ!!!ONE!!" tuning fork; not helpful.
I lived in Brazil for 5 years, and the Brazilians I talked to didn't consider deforestation to be a problem. In fact, the story I'd consistently hear from them is that much of the deforestation is to support grazing for cattle, and that the same acres end up burned year after year because the forest takes back the grasslands as fast as it's burned. They perceive the Amazon as being largely uninhabitable and untameable, taking back roads and farms faster than they can be built. It's considered a national tragedy that so much land in their country cannot be used for farms, homes, roads, or ranches.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for conservation and habitat preservation; my been-there/done-that creds include the t-shirt from the Eco '92 conference in Rio. I simply don't see why the environmentalists who so carefully catalog deforestation can't be bothered to simultaneously chart forest re-growth. It should be simple to overlay forest boundaries on a map of Brazil and show the recession of the forest over time; 232,000 square miles (slightly smaller than the state of Texas) is a dramatic loss, and a good graphic showing where it has happened would be media gold - strong, clear evidence supporting the damage to the ecosystem. The fact that I've never seen such a map supports, in my mind, the Brazilians' assertion that it's not really a problem.
Seriously, if someone can disabuse me of this notion I'd appreciate it. I've taken a bunch of heat over the years because, as a self-indentified conservationist, I haven't bought into the "ZOMG BURNING TREEZ IS THE SUXXORZ!!!ONE!!" philosophy that my environmentalist friends take regarding the Amazon. Can there seriously be no balance found between sustaining the needs of the people and the preservation of our ecology? Because telling that to the people who feel like they're already on the losing side of the battle is just kicking them when they're down.
Calm down, the writer you're referring to is simply misspelling a word he's only heard and never seen written.
Ha'penny is an abbreviation for "half penny", a coin worth 1/2 cent. According to a quick wikipedia check ha'pennies have been minted in Great Britain (including Ireland and Scotland), Australia, New Zealand, and the United States (probably not an exhaustive list). Half penny coins were also issued before decimalization (i.e. before a penny was 1/100 of anything, becoming a "cent"), with varied values.
What the poster you replied to probably meant was 1/2 pennies on the dollar, or purchasing for 1/200th of the original value. I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt, anyways. It makes me sad that neither of you apparently had someone teach you the nursery rhyme "Christmas is Coming", or else you'd know all this already (wow, I think I'm having a "get off my lawn" moment). And I don't know what's going wrong in your life that a simple misspelling leads you to lay the invective on that thick as a response, but I hope your day gets better.
You'll be happy to know, then, that this wasn't a NASA funded study. FTFA:
*As noted by a commenter below, this is not NASA research. As in, it wasn't funded by NASA. One of the author's "day jobs" is with NASA, but as noted by Shawn Domagal-Goldman on his blog "Pale Blue": "It was just a fun paper written by a few friends, one of whom happens to have a NASA affiliation."
Even rocket scientists have hobbies in their spare time...
I'm going to buy it. I'm going to play it with internet connection on. I'm going to be happy in the knowledge that those I'm playing with/against or buying/selling items with will be doing it without cheating.
What makes you think that there will be no cheating? The d2 ladder has been "always-on only" since the beginning, and there's still duping and bots there. Lots. I'm hoping that Blizzard will do better on their new flagship title than they have on its decade-old predecessor, but I'm under no illusion that such success will come because they removed a gameplay option that requires no extra resources (server connections, policing) on their part after the sale.
Which is what exactly? Just let folks buy and sell items on third party websites because they had no way of stopping it? Have a periodic Ruststorm sweep where online players with dupes lose them? That was *real* effective let me tell you. *snort*
Sorry, I'm not sure I understand your argument. You seem to be saying that because Blizzard's policing efforts on D2 ladder failed that they should stop providing a service where policing isn't even offered (and none is expected). I see no way in which the one should cause the other.
Yes, duping was annoying. I hated buying a Mara's and having it disappear because it was duped. I hated even more how my server would crash mid-game because some duper wanted to exploit a server bug so he could sell me a duped Mara's. But this was happening on the battle.net ladder, despite Blizzard's policing efforts. If the game weren't 10 years old (meaning, I don't expect the company to put full resources into it; I'd rather that they finish the sequel) I'd have stopped playing, and I applaud every effort Blizzard did make to stop duping.
What I don't understand is how dropping the single-player and open battle.net components would make the situation any better. SP/open had no connection to the ladder whatsoever, nothing duped or hacked from them ever got to the ladder; so they were not responsible in any way for the economy dilution, gameplay imbalance, or server instability that was caused by duping on the ladder.
The big "economy" that Blizzard wants in on is, I think, things like the Forum Gold exchange on d2jsp.org. I thought it was brilliant how I could sell my ladder-only gear to non-ladder players after a reset and buy new gear for my new ladder character with the proceeds. There was no economy, though, for gear for open battle.net characters, because that market was infinitely inflated. Anyone who wanted anything there could download the d2 trainer software and make it for themselves, and pretty much that's the only way you'd ever see any reasonable quantity of high runes for a single player character. So, again, dropping the single-player mode and the open battle.net component would have no effect on the economy in the policed servers.
If Blizzard wants to stop people from trading on 3rd party websites then they need to offer a suitable in-game replacement, one that offers the same quality of service. Unless Blizzard is going to make it impossible to drop things on the ground as a way of giving them to others there will be no way to stop the d2jsp.org crowd from arranging trades among themselves on whatever terms they choose.
tl;dr version: single player in d2 didn't cause duping on the servers. Single player in d2 didn't cause 3rd party trading sites. Abandoning single player in d3 won't stop either from happening again.
I find it hard to believe that with all the effort car companies go to in protecting the maintenance codes for their vehicles that they'd suddenly see the light and change their ways. I would tag this article "suddenoutbreak..." except that I'm paranoid. Here's what I see happening:
This will replace the engine light blink code/lookup table that I've currently got in my car dash with a voice prompt. The manager who proposed it will get a bonus for replacing a bunch of dummy lights with what amounts to an arduino style hack job. I still won't get full diagnostic codes for the car, but the "check engine" notice will become more annoying. And it will still be less informative than the analog oil pressure/battery voltage/engine RPM gauges cars used to all come with.
I'm getting depressed just thinking about the ways this could go wrong. I'm going to stop while I'm ahead.
I'm running FF5 and that doesn't work for me. If I launch private browsing mode it appears to close all current windows and opens a new one in private mode. The state of the other windows is still retained somewhat; switching back brings me back to the same pages I was on, but dynamic content like flash or embedded video gets reloaded to its default state. The private browsing window is completely destroyed in the process of switching back; the two modes, private and standard, don't display together. A quick search of the firefox online manual suggests that this behavior is by design.
That's actually a solid win for Chrome in my book; I may have to finally try it out.
It was said during a televised interview, and I liked it, so I made it my sig. My memory is that t it was on a major network like C-SPAN, and I assumed that it would be transcribed and on the internet shortly. You're the first person to point out that it's not on Google, and it caught me off guard; I'm kinda sad to suddenly be in [citation needed] territory. It may even bug me enough to change to something I can cite, but I'll keep looking for a while first. Thanks for keeping me honest!
The flaw in your reasoning is that there are very few interesting places in the solar system to go, so despite the very large volume available for navigating around these obstacles it's quite a bit more likely that a later space mission will be aiming for the exact same tiny angular zone as a previous one. It's similar to the current situation with satellites in Earth orbit - I occasionally hear about congestion in the geostationary orbits despite there being lots of potential orbits around the earth, some orbits are simply more desirable than others.
Don't get me wrong, I understand that there are complexities I'm glossing over (consecutive launch opportunities to the same destination not passing through the same space as each other, for example). But when you said:
The only really clogged region (relatively speaking) is earth orbit, and that's because we have so much that we want to do and to leave in a relatively small space.
you glossed over the fact that any well-explored destination in the solar system is destined to become a "clogged region" for exactly the same reason that Earth is now. Compared to the volume of space contained in the Solar System, the interesting destinations represent a "relatively small space" not significantly larger than Earth's orbital zone.
the gene injected to make the dog glow can be substituted with genes that trigger fatal human diseases
Perhaps I'm in too much of a mad scientist mindset, but the summary sounded to me like they were making practice runs for an injectable kill switch for humans. "Mr. Bond, I've altered your DNA, making the serum I hold in my hand a deadly poison only to you." Better yet, if the villain has read his evil overlord list, he'd just tell Bond that the serum is a poison, and modify his minions' DNA so the same serum activates their soldier boosts. Watch and laugh as Bond tries to kill his guards with it, only to make them stronger.
You have to really trust your geneticist if you're going in for recombinant DNA therapy...
Yep. Another like-minded developer made on in homage to Blizzard.
More relevant than even those, however, is the entire fake mall that opened in 2009. Genuine imitation brands only! Get your McDnoald’s hamburgers, Bucksstar Coffee, and a Pizza Huh (not Hut) Pizza all under one roof! A Google search for fake mall also nets a 2007 YouTube video of an all-fake mall; I don't know if it's the same one (YT blocked by firewall).
Really, this Apple store shouldn't surprise anyone.
You are correct that the voltage (as referenced from the negative battery terminal) drops by 0.7V across each LED, but that doesn't make the next one in the series dimmer. Kirchoff comes to the rescue again: his voltage law states that the sum of voltage around a closed circuit is zero.
For our case, that means that the sum of forward voltage across your LEDs plus the voltage drop across your current-limiting resistor will equal the battery voltage. Each LED will have the same voltage drop across it (put a multimeter on the LED's leads and each LED will register 0.7V, +/- manufacturing tolerances). If you have 4 LEDs and a 3V battery pack then the four LEDs will take you a total of 2.8V down from your initial 3V potential, and your circuit current will be determined by Ohm's law and the value of your current-limiting resistor (I=0.2V/R, the current will increase until the potential drop across your resistor is 0.2V). Kirchoff's current law says that the sum of current out of the battery must equal the sum coming back in, and since there is only one circuit path each LED will have the same current across it.
Each LED will experience the same electrical conditions as all of the others: each has a voltage drop of 0.7V per LED, and each sees the same current. Since LED brightness is determined by the current across it, and each LED has the same current because they're in series, then they should all have the same brightness (again, manufacturing tolerances may apply here). Each LED should also have the same brightness as it would if it were alone in a circuit with a 0.9V power supply and the same size resistor. The fact that there are four of them stepping the voltage down from 3V as opposed to just one stepping down from 0.9V doesn't make a difference; at the same current they'll have the same brightness.
It makes me sad to read the following snippet from the article:
Chain multiple LEDs through the conductive dough, and you’ll notice the ones at the end are far dimmer than the first few. That’s because less current is making its way down the series; the current only has one path, and that’s through each LED.
Now a bunch of kids are going to go through life thinking that current gets used up as it goes through the circuit. The same current will be flowing through every component of the circuit; it's only got one path, after all.
Don't get me wrong, I love this article and I'm probably going to try this with my kids, too. It's just that I'm going to teach them Kirchoff's laws while I'm at it.
Back in my younger days as a web developer I swore by the HoT MetaL editor for developing web pages. It allowed me to view and develop my web page in WYSIWYG style, raw HTML, or an intermediate "view tags" mode that was a hybrid of both. It gave closer control over the code than dreamweaver and produced higher quality code than frontpage. I felt like it gave me the flexibility of a notepad-like text editor while leveraging some of the power and ease-of-use of a graphical editor. Unfortunately, the company that made it got bought out and the product got shelved.
I hear that there's a replacement-in-spirit available, though, in the form of XMetaL. It's designed as an XML editor, but if you restricted it to the HTML DTD it may be a useful web editor. I haven't tried it, though, so YMMV.
You wouldn't; the pickups would be inside the sound chamber, not outside. That's the whole point of rejecting outside sound from the space, get a clean recording of what happens inside.
That being said, though, I think the right question for a skeptic would be "wouldn't a completely soundproof room and earphones for the producers/engineers be a better solution than this?", to which the answer is, "yeah, maybe". After all, that's what we're doing now in good studios, and the job's getting done. I'm sure if the unobtanium wallboards hypothesized in this article get made, though, that someone will try them out just for novelty's sake (or to prove how much money they have to spend on bleeding edge tech for their sound rooms). And maybe all the producer needs is a way to tell when the song's over, and the audio diode walls would give some value there.
Unfortunately for the neighbors, the band is more likely to install the walls the other way around. Making a room that can be monitored from the outside (by a sound engineer/producer) while rejecting outside sounds would be ideal for a recording studio.
I'm on Verizon, too, and they have no problem with me daisy-chaining my own router (DD-WRT) onto theirs. I agree that it might be fun to hook straight into their fiber modem with CAT-5 and skip the business of having coax and a second router in the loop, but it's their network and their modem. I'll get more huffy about it if/when I transition to IPv6 and don't want two layers of NAT between me and the network. In the mean time, though, it's trivial to shut off the transmitter for the router they provided and set up one that I can manage competently.
But he was the one to make it work and improve no the design to actual usage and past prototyping
Are we still talking about Captain America's shield? If you've switched to the reactor design, I'll agree with you. Tony was not yet born, though, when WWII was being fought, and Cap. A. already had his shield back then. Don't get me wrong, I'm still giving Tony props for the things he did; I'm also recognizing that he comes from a line of successful engineer/businessmen who had many successes of their own. Whichever Stark is mentioned in the new Captain America trailer is certainly not Tony, and the credit for the shield should go to the correct Stark.
.but when you travel a multitude of different types of creations....of which from what I saw in the movie even included captain americas shield if that was just a preview, although we know stark was not responsible for it in the comics.
I think that was supposed to be Tony's dad or grandfather making the shield. Certainly one of the Starks, but probably not Tony. Just remember the line from the first Iron Man movie: "It's how my dad did it, it's how my grampa did it, and it's worked pretty well so far." He's got quite a legacy to build on, and deep bank accounts to draw from, but he wasn't the one to build all that up.
Inventor of the Teraport transportation system, he started a galaxy spanning war, successfully used a wormhole for time travel, and embeds antimatter into his Officer rank epaulets so that he can use them as antitank rounds/13.75 kiloton bombs as necessary.
Perhaps he's not as prolific as Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne, but he thinks big =)
On the one hand I think you're saying that erotica can be successful (your example grossed $25M in the US, $190M worldwide - not quite in the same league as The Godfather, which grossed $135M domestically & $245M worldwide; but still respectable), which kinda supports what I was trying to say . Perhaps the reason Heavy Metal III isn't getting picked up is because it just doesn't compare well against the other animated erotica available out there.
On the other hand, this one outlier, doesn't make a trend like "summer action blockbuster": I've never heard of anyone looking forward to the "winter animated erotica" season. Other posters saying that cultural acceptance of Barbarella was a product of the 60's probably have a point, and I'd guess that your 1972 film was riding at the tail of that cultural wave. As much as horny men across the nation may want it, I don't expect AMC and Cinemark to fill 2000+ American theaters this year with a cartoon about having sex - that's what I meant by "blockbuster-level".
Regardless, for any director to point at a single film (that he didn't make) and say "they made me fail!" is patently ridiculous. I'd sooner believe that his project is weighed down by failures in his own script, previous movies in the same series (IMDB reports the '81 effort as breaking even on video sales, and its fans routinely ridicule the 2000 film), or cultural norms not accepting that kind of work. Bonus points for all three in this case.
Was there fantasy porn anywhere in Heavy Metal? Even "animated erotica" seems like a bit of a stretch. It's been a while, but IIRC you saw a few pairs of titties, and that was it. Lots of violence, some drug use, and crazy action, and a few seconds of boobie shots make a film "porn" in your mind? Man, maybe we're as screwed up as the Europeans say we are.
Well, let's check your memory... Here's IMDB's content advisory for the movie:
Every adult woman featured in film is topless at one point.
Four animated scenes of sex with clear nudity, including exposed female pubic regions. The 1st segment of the film shows a red head woman and taxi driver at his home have sex. It shows full breasts, nipples, a very exposed vagina. They have graphic sex and orgasm.
Male genitalia featured as well throughout the film.
Perhaps my Pornometer's a bit sensitive, but I think that qualifies. I'm not an expert, but I think that list would have trouble passing the MPAA standard for R rating. For what it's worth, on my personal scale "erotic" starts before the clothes come off, and switches to "porn" when sexual acts are shown on-screen (ie. the purpose of the scene is "let's watch them have sex"), YMMV.
Further, IMDB lists Heavy Metal in the following genres: Animation | Action | Adventure | Comedy | Crime | Fantasy | Horror | Sci-Fi
So there's your fantasy, too.
PS - in the four minutes between your posts did you forget that you had already responded to me?
Slashdot Mirror
Nice video. Run the caption through Google translate and you'll see that the person posting the video is the driver. He's making every effort to preserve the ecology around the road he's preparing land for, and diverting the road to protect endangered trees. He's not burning the cut land, either. In other words, he's doing it right, and for the right reasons: providing a route for transportation in the region and keeping Human needs balanced with conservation of Nature.
Yes, it's a fast operation, but it's not cheap - that tractor costs a lot more than manual laborers with machetes and a torch. Maintaining that road is going to have ongoing costs, too, and the area is probably lucky to even be getting that one road. Without a public benefit no such project would be started, it's too expensive.
There is no way to the forest to recover as fast as men can destroy it.
Sure, we can keep it up for long enough to build a road, or carve out a farm. But Nature is patient, and the Brazilians' goal isn't to simply pave the entire forest out of spite. Unfortunately, the farmers, ranchers, and road builders in the Amazon have to annually re-clear the same land they plant on, as the forest is constantly encroaching on their fields, pastures, and roadways. It's a constant, expensive, and difficult battle to keep the land clear for Human use.
I think the reason that there aren't deforestation progress maps in circulation (like I suggested there should be in my original post) is that they'd look like towns being built, farms being planted, and roads being paved to connect communities and bring crops to market. It's easy to knee-jerk and complain about the virgin forest being cut; but it's a lot harder to tell an entire nation that they should restrict population growth, stop growing their economy, and stop producing food because their own land is too valuable for them to use. Or better yet, let them know that you don't trust them to manage their natural resources wisely. <sarcasm>That'll go over well.<\sarcasm>
tl; dr: Sure, we can be very destructive when there's a reason for it. But the people who live there tell me that even with these methods in use it's still getting too expensive to maintain. They're fighting to have food to eat and a place to live. Suggesting that they simply stop trying because we love their land too much is not just naive, it's insulting.
Thanks, that was useful. It gives me somewhere specific to look. Do you by any chance know where I can look for older pictures of the area? I'd like to compare to current overhead photos.
Maybe, the Brazilians you talked to didn't know what they were talking about, and the regrowth isn't at all the same as virgin rainforest?
The undergrowth that thrives in cleared areas is a caricature of a forest." ... "Twenty percent of the deforested areas are recovering."
Nevertheless, Almeida is not issuing a general all-clear signal for the rainforest. "Within no more than five years, most of the secondary forests will be burned down or cut down again," he says. Cattle ranchers use the fallow fields as pasture, while farmers plant soybeans or cereal crops.
Once the virgin rainforest is cut down, it might not be tracked any longer as virgin rainforest, even if it grows back. However, most of what grows back is being burnt again every few years. Meanwhile, other people (i.e. not the ones you talked to) are burning additional virgin forest, resulting in a huge net loss.
I think, perhaps, they did. If I'm reading your pasted quote properly, the ecologist speaking (Lawrence?) states that 20% of the cleared areas could be considered "forest" again by his standards. That's a total, debilitating loss for the rancher who wanted to use it for his cattle. Even the "caricature of a forest" Lawrence mentioned first is likely unusable for grazing. It may not be old-growth, virgin forest any longer, but Nature has certainly taken it back from Man. The only disparity I see between the farmer's perspective and the Naturalist's is the definition of "forest". Your quote, in fact, reads like a Naturalist agreeing with the layman's assessment I heard when I was there.
That being said, and granting to you the point that unnecessary clearing of "virgin forest" is wasteful, why is the use of forest land for ranching or farming per se intolerable? Putting it another way, why is it OK for a Kansas farmer to clear his property for planting soybeans but it's not OK if the farmer lives in Manaus? Is the Amazon basin so sacrosanct that it's a sin against Gaia for humans to live there? This attitude among environmentalists is insulting to the dignity of the Brazilian people, and coming from fellow Americans hypocritical at best. Citizens of the United States have little right to tell Brazilian farmers to starve or find other work based solely on gut-instinct protectionism for a specific forest.
Sorry if I'm coming across a bit harsh, but your response resonated with the "ZOMG BURNING TREEZ IS THE SUXXORZ!!!ONE!!" tuning fork; not helpful.
OK, time to burn some karma...
I lived in Brazil for 5 years, and the Brazilians I talked to didn't consider deforestation to be a problem. In fact, the story I'd consistently hear from them is that much of the deforestation is to support grazing for cattle, and that the same acres end up burned year after year because the forest takes back the grasslands as fast as it's burned. They perceive the Amazon as being largely uninhabitable and untameable, taking back roads and farms faster than they can be built. It's considered a national tragedy that so much land in their country cannot be used for farms, homes, roads, or ranches.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for conservation and habitat preservation; my been-there/done-that creds include the t-shirt from the Eco '92 conference in Rio. I simply don't see why the environmentalists who so carefully catalog deforestation can't be bothered to simultaneously chart forest re-growth. It should be simple to overlay forest boundaries on a map of Brazil and show the recession of the forest over time; 232,000 square miles (slightly smaller than the state of Texas) is a dramatic loss, and a good graphic showing where it has happened would be media gold - strong, clear evidence supporting the damage to the ecosystem. The fact that I've never seen such a map supports, in my mind, the Brazilians' assertion that it's not really a problem.
Seriously, if someone can disabuse me of this notion I'd appreciate it. I've taken a bunch of heat over the years because, as a self-indentified conservationist, I haven't bought into the "ZOMG BURNING TREEZ IS THE SUXXORZ!!!ONE!!" philosophy that my environmentalist friends take regarding the Amazon. Can there seriously be no balance found between sustaining the needs of the people and the preservation of our ecology? Because telling that to the people who feel like they're already on the losing side of the battle is just kicking them when they're down.
Calm down, the writer you're referring to is simply misspelling a word he's only heard and never seen written.
Ha'penny is an abbreviation for "half penny", a coin worth 1/2 cent. According to a quick wikipedia check ha'pennies have been minted in Great Britain (including Ireland and Scotland), Australia, New Zealand, and the United States (probably not an exhaustive list). Half penny coins were also issued before decimalization (i.e. before a penny was 1/100 of anything, becoming a "cent"), with varied values.
What the poster you replied to probably meant was 1/2 pennies on the dollar, or purchasing for 1/200th of the original value. I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt, anyways. It makes me sad that neither of you apparently had someone teach you the nursery rhyme "Christmas is Coming", or else you'd know all this already (wow, I think I'm having a "get off my lawn" moment). And I don't know what's going wrong in your life that a simple misspelling leads you to lay the invective on that thick as a response, but I hope your day gets better.
You'll be happy to know, then, that this wasn't a NASA funded study. FTFA:
*As noted by a commenter below, this is not NASA research. As in, it wasn't funded by NASA. One of the author's "day jobs" is with NASA, but as noted by Shawn Domagal-Goldman on his blog "Pale Blue": "It was just a fun paper written by a few friends, one of whom happens to have a NASA affiliation."
Even rocket scientists have hobbies in their spare time...
I'm going to buy it. I'm going to play it with internet connection on. I'm going to be happy in the knowledge that those I'm playing with/against or buying/selling items with will be doing it without cheating.
What makes you think that there will be no cheating? The d2 ladder has been "always-on only" since the beginning, and there's still duping and bots there. Lots. I'm hoping that Blizzard will do better on their new flagship title than they have on its decade-old predecessor, but I'm under no illusion that such success will come because they removed a gameplay option that requires no extra resources (server connections, policing) on their part after the sale.
Sorry, I'm not sure I understand your argument. You seem to be saying that because Blizzard's policing efforts on D2 ladder failed that they should stop providing a service where policing isn't even offered (and none is expected). I see no way in which the one should cause the other.
Yes, duping was annoying. I hated buying a Mara's and having it disappear because it was duped. I hated even more how my server would crash mid-game because some duper wanted to exploit a server bug so he could sell me a duped Mara's. But this was happening on the battle.net ladder, despite Blizzard's policing efforts. If the game weren't 10 years old (meaning, I don't expect the company to put full resources into it; I'd rather that they finish the sequel) I'd have stopped playing, and I applaud every effort Blizzard did make to stop duping.
What I don't understand is how dropping the single-player and open battle.net components would make the situation any better. SP/open had no connection to the ladder whatsoever, nothing duped or hacked from them ever got to the ladder; so they were not responsible in any way for the economy dilution, gameplay imbalance, or server instability that was caused by duping on the ladder.
The big "economy" that Blizzard wants in on is, I think, things like the Forum Gold exchange on d2jsp.org. I thought it was brilliant how I could sell my ladder-only gear to non-ladder players after a reset and buy new gear for my new ladder character with the proceeds. There was no economy, though, for gear for open battle.net characters, because that market was infinitely inflated. Anyone who wanted anything there could download the d2 trainer software and make it for themselves, and pretty much that's the only way you'd ever see any reasonable quantity of high runes for a single player character. So, again, dropping the single-player mode and the open battle.net component would have no effect on the economy in the policed servers.
If Blizzard wants to stop people from trading on 3rd party websites then they need to offer a suitable in-game replacement, one that offers the same quality of service. Unless Blizzard is going to make it impossible to drop things on the ground as a way of giving them to others there will be no way to stop the d2jsp.org crowd from arranging trades among themselves on whatever terms they choose.
tl;dr version: single player in d2 didn't cause duping on the servers. Single player in d2 didn't cause 3rd party trading sites. Abandoning single player in d3 won't stop either from happening again.
I find it hard to believe that with all the effort car companies go to in protecting the maintenance codes for their vehicles that they'd suddenly see the light and change their ways. I would tag this article "suddenoutbreak..." except that I'm paranoid. Here's what I see happening:
This will replace the engine light blink code/lookup table that I've currently got in my car dash with a voice prompt. The manager who proposed it will get a bonus for replacing a bunch of dummy lights with what amounts to an arduino style hack job. I still won't get full diagnostic codes for the car, but the "check engine" notice will become more annoying. And it will still be less informative than the analog oil pressure/battery voltage/engine RPM gauges cars used to all come with.
I'm getting depressed just thinking about the ways this could go wrong. I'm going to stop while I'm ahead.
I'm running FF5 and that doesn't work for me. If I launch private browsing mode it appears to close all current windows and opens a new one in private mode. The state of the other windows is still retained somewhat; switching back brings me back to the same pages I was on, but dynamic content like flash or embedded video gets reloaded to its default state. The private browsing window is completely destroyed in the process of switching back; the two modes, private and standard, don't display together. A quick search of the firefox online manual suggests that this behavior is by design.
That's actually a solid win for Chrome in my book; I may have to finally try it out.
Yes, but I can't prove it, sorry =(
It was said during a televised interview, and I liked it, so I made it my sig. My memory is that t it was on a major network like C-SPAN, and I assumed that it would be transcribed and on the internet shortly. You're the first person to point out that it's not on Google, and it caught me off guard; I'm kinda sad to suddenly be in [citation needed] territory. It may even bug me enough to change to something I can cite, but I'll keep looking for a while first. Thanks for keeping me honest!
The flaw in your reasoning is that there are very few interesting places in the solar system to go, so despite the very large volume available for navigating around these obstacles it's quite a bit more likely that a later space mission will be aiming for the exact same tiny angular zone as a previous one. It's similar to the current situation with satellites in Earth orbit - I occasionally hear about congestion in the geostationary orbits despite there being lots of potential orbits around the earth, some orbits are simply more desirable than others.
Don't get me wrong, I understand that there are complexities I'm glossing over (consecutive launch opportunities to the same destination not passing through the same space as each other, for example). But when you said:
you glossed over the fact that any well-explored destination in the solar system is destined to become a "clogged region" for exactly the same reason that Earth is now. Compared to the volume of space contained in the Solar System, the interesting destinations represent a "relatively small space" not significantly larger than Earth's orbital zone.
Perhaps I'm in too much of a mad scientist mindset, but the summary sounded to me like they were making practice runs for an injectable kill switch for humans. "Mr. Bond, I've altered your DNA, making the serum I hold in my hand a deadly poison only to you." Better yet, if the villain has read his evil overlord list, he'd just tell Bond that the serum is a poison, and modify his minions' DNA so the same serum activates their soldier boosts. Watch and laugh as Bond tries to kill his guards with it, only to make them stronger.
You have to really trust your geneticist if you're going in for recombinant DNA therapy...
Yep.
Another like-minded developer made on in homage to Blizzard.
More relevant than even those, however, is the entire fake mall that opened in 2009. Genuine imitation brands only! Get your McDnoald’s hamburgers, Bucksstar Coffee, and a Pizza Huh (not Hut) Pizza all under one roof! A Google search for fake mall also nets a 2007 YouTube video of an all-fake mall; I don't know if it's the same one (YT blocked by firewall).
Really, this Apple store shouldn't surprise anyone.
You are correct that the voltage (as referenced from the negative battery terminal) drops by 0.7V across each LED, but that doesn't make the next one in the series dimmer. Kirchoff comes to the rescue again: his voltage law states that the sum of voltage around a closed circuit is zero.
For our case, that means that the sum of forward voltage across your LEDs plus the voltage drop across your current-limiting resistor will equal the battery voltage. Each LED will have the same voltage drop across it (put a multimeter on the LED's leads and each LED will register 0.7V, +/- manufacturing tolerances). If you have 4 LEDs and a 3V battery pack then the four LEDs will take you a total of 2.8V down from your initial 3V potential, and your circuit current will be determined by Ohm's law and the value of your current-limiting resistor (I=0.2V/R, the current will increase until the potential drop across your resistor is 0.2V). Kirchoff's current law says that the sum of current out of the battery must equal the sum coming back in, and since there is only one circuit path each LED will have the same current across it.
Each LED will experience the same electrical conditions as all of the others: each has a voltage drop of 0.7V per LED, and each sees the same current. Since LED brightness is determined by the current across it, and each LED has the same current because they're in series, then they should all have the same brightness (again, manufacturing tolerances may apply here). Each LED should also have the same brightness as it would if it were alone in a circuit with a 0.9V power supply and the same size resistor. The fact that there are four of them stepping the voltage down from 3V as opposed to just one stepping down from 0.9V doesn't make a difference; at the same current they'll have the same brightness.
It makes me sad to read the following snippet from the article:
Now a bunch of kids are going to go through life thinking that current gets used up as it goes through the circuit. The same current will be flowing through every component of the circuit; it's only got one path, after all.
Don't get me wrong, I love this article and I'm probably going to try this with my kids, too. It's just that I'm going to teach them Kirchoff's laws while I'm at it.
Back in my younger days as a web developer I swore by the HoT MetaL editor for developing web pages. It allowed me to view and develop my web page in WYSIWYG style, raw HTML, or an intermediate "view tags" mode that was a hybrid of both. It gave closer control over the code than dreamweaver and produced higher quality code than frontpage. I felt like it gave me the flexibility of a notepad-like text editor while leveraging some of the power and ease-of-use of a graphical editor. Unfortunately, the company that made it got bought out and the product got shelved.
I hear that there's a replacement-in-spirit available, though, in the form of XMetaL. It's designed as an XML editor, but if you restricted it to the HTML DTD it may be a useful web editor. I haven't tried it, though, so YMMV.
Good luck with your search!
You wouldn't; the pickups would be inside the sound chamber, not outside. That's the whole point of rejecting outside sound from the space, get a clean recording of what happens inside.
That being said, though, I think the right question for a skeptic would be "wouldn't a completely soundproof room and earphones for the producers/engineers be a better solution than this?", to which the answer is, "yeah, maybe". After all, that's what we're doing now in good studios, and the job's getting done. I'm sure if the unobtanium wallboards hypothesized in this article get made, though, that someone will try them out just for novelty's sake (or to prove how much money they have to spend on bleeding edge tech for their sound rooms). And maybe all the producer needs is a way to tell when the song's over, and the audio diode walls would give some value there.
Unfortunately for the neighbors, the band is more likely to install the walls the other way around. Making a room that can be monitored from the outside (by a sound engineer/producer) while rejecting outside sounds would be ideal for a recording studio.
I'm on Verizon, too, and they have no problem with me daisy-chaining my own router (DD-WRT) onto theirs. I agree that it might be fun to hook straight into their fiber modem with CAT-5 and skip the business of having coax and a second router in the loop, but it's their network and their modem. I'll get more huffy about it if/when I transition to IPv6 and don't want two layers of NAT between me and the network. In the mean time, though, it's trivial to shut off the transmitter for the router they provided and set up one that I can manage competently.
But he was the one to make it work and improve no the design to actual usage and past prototyping
Are we still talking about Captain America's shield? If you've switched to the reactor design, I'll agree with you. Tony was not yet born, though, when WWII was being fought, and Cap. A. already had his shield back then. Don't get me wrong, I'm still giving Tony props for the things he did; I'm also recognizing that he comes from a line of successful engineer/businessmen who had many successes of their own. Whichever Stark is mentioned in the new Captain America trailer is certainly not Tony, and the credit for the shield should go to the correct Stark.
.but when you travel a multitude of different types of creations....of which from what I saw in the movie even included captain americas shield if that was just a preview, although we know stark was not responsible for it in the comics.
I think that was supposed to be Tony's dad or grandfather making the shield. Certainly one of the Starks, but probably not Tony. Just remember the line from the first Iron Man movie: "It's how my dad did it, it's how my grampa did it, and it's worked pretty well so far." He's got quite a legacy to build on, and deep bank accounts to draw from, but he wasn't the one to build all that up.
Here's a late vote for a web-only entry: Kevyn Andreyasn of Schlock Mercenary.
Inventor of the Teraport transportation system, he started a galaxy spanning war, successfully used a wormhole for time travel, and embeds antimatter into his Officer rank epaulets so that he can use them as antitank rounds/13.75 kiloton bombs as necessary.
Perhaps he's not as prolific as Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne, but he thinks big =)
I'm not sure how to respond...
On the one hand I think you're saying that erotica can be successful (your example grossed $25M in the US, $190M worldwide - not quite in the same league as The Godfather , which grossed $135M domestically & $245M worldwide; but still respectable), which kinda supports what I was trying to say . Perhaps the reason Heavy Metal III isn't getting picked up is because it just doesn't compare well against the other animated erotica available out there.
On the other hand, this one outlier, doesn't make a trend like "summer action blockbuster": I've never heard of anyone looking forward to the "winter animated erotica" season. Other posters saying that cultural acceptance of Barbarella was a product of the 60's probably have a point, and I'd guess that your 1972 film was riding at the tail of that cultural wave. As much as horny men across the nation may want it, I don't expect AMC and Cinemark to fill 2000+ American theaters this year with a cartoon about having sex - that's what I meant by "blockbuster-level".
Regardless, for any director to point at a single film (that he didn't make) and say "they made me fail!" is patently ridiculous. I'd sooner believe that his project is weighed down by failures in his own script, previous movies in the same series (IMDB reports the '81 effort as breaking even on video sales, and its fans routinely ridicule the 2000 film), or cultural norms not accepting that kind of work. Bonus points for all three in this case.
Was there fantasy porn anywhere in Heavy Metal? Even "animated erotica" seems like a bit of a stretch. It's been a while, but IIRC you saw a few pairs of titties, and that was it. Lots of violence, some drug use, and crazy action, and a few seconds of boobie shots make a film "porn" in your mind? Man, maybe we're as screwed up as the Europeans say we are.
Well, let's check your memory... Here's IMDB's content advisory for the movie:
Every adult woman featured in film is topless at one point.
Four animated scenes of sex with clear nudity, including exposed female pubic regions. The 1st segment of the film shows a red head woman and taxi driver at his home have sex. It shows full breasts, nipples, a very exposed vagina. They have graphic sex and orgasm.
Male genitalia featured as well throughout the film.
Perhaps my Pornometer's a bit sensitive, but I think that qualifies. I'm not an expert, but I think that list would have trouble passing the MPAA standard for R rating. For what it's worth, on my personal scale "erotic" starts before the clothes come off, and switches to "porn" when sexual acts are shown on-screen (ie. the purpose of the scene is "let's watch them have sex"), YMMV.
Further, IMDB lists Heavy Metal in the following genres: Animation | Action | Adventure | Comedy | Crime | Fantasy | Horror | Sci-Fi
So there's your fantasy, too.
PS - in the four minutes between your posts did you forget that you had already responded to me?