Aluminum is probably the most cost-effective material to recycle. That basically just needs to be melted (impurities removed, etc). Compared to extracting aluminum from its ore, which is an electrolytic process requiring a lot of energy, melting the stuff is easy.
I think you will find most paper pulp comes from native hardwood forests,
Maybe in your part of the world. In North America most paper pulp comes from pulpwood (ie pine) forests that are planted/harvested on about a 10-20 year cycle. Most of the paper that, eg, the New York Times is printed on comes from Quebec. (And the Sunday edition probably consumes a small forest.) Since the pines are native, as is the scrub growth on the cleared land, it doesn't disrupt the local ecology much.
In fact, many (most?) organized religions have no dispute with evolution. The Catholic Church's position is that yes, evolution occurred and occurs, and that humans (as an organism) may well have evolved from simpler organisms, but that's irrelevant to the origin of the human soul, which was created by God. (Or words to that effect, I'm paraphrasing.)
The discovery of extraterrestrial life wouldn't impact that one iota. If intelligent extraterrestrials are discovered (or discover us!), I imagine the Vatican would think about it for a while, and depending on some criteria or other decide that these creatures are also God's children and have souls, or not. The "in God's image" thing is metaphorical anyway -- what does a soul look like?
The Church has learned a little about making pronouncements about this or that independently verifiable observation being heresy since the days of Galileo and Copernicus; they're much better now at rolling that sort of thing into the dogma.
Maybe lizards, snakes, etc are considered more menacing because they're more different. A wolf or large cat isn't much different from a domestic pet.
However, given the growing evidence that many dinosaurs (particularly therapods) were feathered, the absence of feathers on dragon depictions suggests that the latter are indeed just creations of the imagination. (Now somebody's going to go and bring up Quetzalcoatl.)
Mars is small compared to Earth or Venus, only half the diameter. Its gravity will keep heavier molecules escaping, but e.g. a CO2 molecule is nearly twice the weight of an N2 molecule (48 vs 28 AMU), and almost three times the weight of a molecule of water (18), ammonia (17) or methane (16). It also depends on the temperature (hence velocity) of the molecules.
As for our system, it's not a sample size of one, it's a sample size of six planets of Venus size or greater. Yes, there's an exception, but we're reasonably sure we know why -- the same reason that we have a moon (formerly Earth's eighth continent;-). We've got models of solar system formation, of course -- and some of those indicate that late-formation super-impacts may not be that rare -- but they're pretty much all based on our one known solar system and approximations of known physics. (Approximations being necessary to the modelling process.) There are a lot of unanswered questions both in planetary system formation and in planetary geology yet, that's another reason to learn whatever we can about extrasolar planetary systems.
I haven't run any mathematical models, but given that there's a Neptune-mass (15 Earth mass) planet orbiting inside this planet's orbit (5.4 day orbit vs 13 day orbit), I'd guess that that's enough of a disruption to at least prevent a 1:1 tidal lock. There may be some kind of lock at another resonance (eg Mercury's 2:3 lock) but that would allow for rotation relative to the star and thus more-even heating.
2.25 gees is uncomfortable but tolerable (carry someone your own weight piggyback and you're almost there), and largely irrelevant to any water-dwelling critters.
However, the larger problem -- that I didn't see any of the articles explicitly raise -- it that there's likely a Venus-like greenhouse with the temperature much hotter than the 0-40C based on the equilibrium temperature of a rocky body at that distance from the primary. We can hope not, but we'd need a reason why not.
Based on our system, anything Venus-size or larger has a thick atmosphere, except Earth, and Earth is an anomaly because it got whacked by something massive (Mars mass) late in its formation, blowing most of the volatiles -- and the material that makes up the Moon -- off the planet altogether. (However, such late-stage super-impacts may be not all that unusual; it could explain some other oddities of our system, such as Uranus's tilt.)
Heh. Personally I enjoy it. I grew up on Silver Age DC comics, and don't read any of them anymore. Yeah, there's a lot of non-canon stuff, but I find it interesting how they work in elements that I remember in different ways. (Although some of those different ways are lifted from later comics continuity, I believe -- e.g. the Brainiac/Milton Fine connection.)
Certainly better than the old "Superboy" TV series, which is perhaps better forgotten.
And in the Smallville universe (I know, not canon with the comics, but then the comics aren't all canon with each other), green kryptonite (aka "meteor rock") can have all kinds of weird and/or wonderful effects on humans, especially if they were exposed during the initial meteor shower.
Well,.MOV is a wrapper format so it depends on the particular audio and video codecs used.
Testing with a couple of.mov files I have lying around on my drive, it looks like MPlayer is using ffmpeg decoders for the video (SVQ3, rpza, rel , cvid) but (in these particular cases) relying on proprietary codecs for the audio (QDM2). (Although ima4, mp3, etc audio it handles through OSS.)
Not entirely, no. It uses ffmpeg and other OSS libraries where it can, but will fall back to using 3rd-party codecs if necessary (and available). So for formats where only a proprietary codec exists, then you could say it's "just as" proprietary, but for all those other formats it's open source.
While LGPL allows application developers to release closed source apps, if they change any of the LGPL libraries (say, to embrace an extend a protocol or API), they have to release source to the modified library. With public domain, vendors are free to subtly modify the protocol to their own ends without releasing the changes.
Now, if you don't care about that, then public domain or a BSD type license is fine.
I'm inclined to agree. A helpful reminder that your print heads or ink cartridges are getting old and might start failing is one thing, a hard cutoff is another. There ought to be a "ok I've been warned, go ahead and print anyway" option. Like the low-ink option -- I appreciate the heads-up so that I can go buy another cartridge, but I'll keep using the thing until it runs out. Nothing I print is so critical that I can't print a page over again if I have to.
I bought my last HP Multi-function printer specifically because it separated the heads from the ink,
Odd, I thought all HPs combined the heads into the ink cartridge. My all-in-one does. I went that way after an Epson (in which the heads are built into the printer) died because dried ink clogged the heads. Replacing a print cartridge is much cheaper than replacing the whole printer, even for cheap printers. Although that doesn't seem to be a problem with the HP, I'll go for months at a time without printing color (it has separate BW and color cartridges) without the color heads clogging up.
I've also had cheapo Lexmark and Canon color inkjet printers. Disasters, both of them. Tried refilling the cartridges on the Lexmark -- never again.
I think PJ's interpretation is incorrect. Mono, OpenOffice.org, etc are not "Linux-based products", they're open source products that happen to run on Linux -- and on (for OOo anyway, not sure about Mono) BSD and Windows.
To me a "Linux-based product" sounds more like some gizmo with Linux embedded. Given that Samsung is in the business of making gizmos rather than distributing software, this seems the more likely interpretation.
Read Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, it's a reasonably accessible history. Anyway, the point isn't so much about Hitler's rise per se, as it is the change from a reasonably open society to a totalitarian one. That's happened other places and times than just Nazi Germany.
And while perhaps this particular "little flea-bite on the face of the freedom movement" won't lead to that, how are we to tell at the time which ones will and which won't? And which flea might be carrying plague? As Jefferson put it, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
but IE gives a browsing experience that, in general, I prefer
Again with this "browsing experience". I don't want a damn browsing experience, I want the damn information/content that I'm going to a given website for. Anything that gets in the way of that -- especially all-singing all-dancing crap -- may be a "browsing experience" for some (and an image of 60s drug-addled hippies grooving to Jimi Hendrix comes to mind), but it just gets in the way for the rest of us. Gods, it's even worse than blink tags.
Nobody can reasonably argue that Firefox 1.0 was better than IE.
Sure they can, especially if they're arguing that Firefox 1.0 was better than IE 1.0. But I'd go further than that, it's certainly better than IE 5, and in many ways than IE 6. I'm posting this via Firefox 1.0.6. (Yeah, I keep meaning to upgrade. Real Soon Now.) CaptiveX doesn't mean diddly squat to me, I'm running 64-bit Linux.
Just wait until you get a friendly registered letter from the IRS notifying you that, because you missed filing a couple of years ago, they helpfully went ahead and filed a return on your behalf. Oh, and by the way, by their estimate of your income, you owe them $5,432.10 in back taxes and penalties. Due in 30 days.
You don't have to file if you are entitled to a refund.
Yeah, you do. Mind, the IRS probably won't get nasty about it until a few years after the deadline, but then they'll go ahead and file a return for you which, gee whiz, probably shows that you owe them a few thousand dollars based on their "estimates" of your income and what you already paid.
At that point you can -- if you don't delay too much longer -- go ahead and file a correct return, and they might (if it hasn't been too many years) even send you the refund if you're owed one.
(Been there, done that. Company I'd worked for went out of business and never got around to sending out W-2s, so I put off filing the return, and so on.)
If you itemize, all that stuff should be deductable as tax return preparation fees. Not that it makes a lot of difference to the bottom line, but I've always deducted the cost of the tax software.
The State software is a ripoff, for Colorado anyway -- it's basically "what was your Fed taxable income? You owe us X percent." (There's a little more to it than that, but not much.) -- so I try to get the software version without it and do that one by hand.
It's been done -- well, something like that, anyway. Decades ago I once had a (seasonal) job as a keypunch operator for Revenue Canada (Canada's IRS equivalent), encoding tax returns. I opened up one and it's full of papers, receipts and forms with a note on the front "I can't figure this out, you do it." Obviously that one got routed to special processing.
OTOH, you can be sure that "special processing" doesn't go out of their way to make sure you've taken every deduction you've got coming to you. If you're paying a mortgage (in the US, I don't recall the rules in Canada) it's almost certainly worthwhile itemizing the mortgage interest instead of taking the standard deduction. (This is not tax advice, IANAL or tax accountant, your mileage may vary, etc.)
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Aluminum is probably the most cost-effective material to recycle. That basically just needs to be melted (impurities removed, etc). Compared to extracting aluminum from its ore, which is an electrolytic process requiring a lot of energy, melting the stuff is easy.
I think you will find most paper pulp comes from native hardwood forests,
Maybe in your part of the world. In North America most paper pulp comes from pulpwood (ie pine) forests that are planted/harvested on about a 10-20 year cycle. Most of the paper that, eg, the New York Times is printed on comes from Quebec. (And the Sunday edition probably consumes a small forest.) Since the pines are native, as is the scrub growth on the cleared land, it doesn't disrupt the local ecology much.
Unlike Microsoft, which has never engaged in massive layoffs
Sure. When you've hired thousands of "permatemps", you don't lay them off, you just expire their contracts.
In fact, many (most?) organized religions have no dispute with evolution. The Catholic Church's position is that yes, evolution occurred and occurs, and that humans (as an organism) may well have evolved from simpler organisms, but that's irrelevant to the origin of the human soul, which was created by God. (Or words to that effect, I'm paraphrasing.)
The discovery of extraterrestrial life wouldn't impact that one iota. If intelligent extraterrestrials are discovered (or discover us!), I imagine the Vatican would think about it for a while, and depending on some criteria or other decide that these creatures are also God's children and have souls, or not. The "in God's image" thing is metaphorical anyway -- what does a soul look like?
The Church has learned a little about making pronouncements about this or that independently verifiable observation being heresy since the days of Galileo and Copernicus; they're much better now at rolling that sort of thing into the dogma.
Maybe lizards, snakes, etc are considered more menacing because they're more different. A wolf or large cat isn't much different from a domestic pet.
However, given the growing evidence that many dinosaurs (particularly therapods) were feathered, the absence of feathers on dragon depictions suggests that the latter are indeed just creations of the imagination. (Now somebody's going to go and bring up Quetzalcoatl.)
Mars is small compared to Earth or Venus, only half the diameter. Its gravity will keep heavier molecules escaping, but e.g. a CO2 molecule is nearly twice the weight of an N2 molecule (48 vs 28 AMU), and almost three times the weight of a molecule of water (18), ammonia (17) or methane (16). It also depends on the temperature (hence velocity) of the molecules.
;-). We've got models of solar system formation, of course -- and some of those indicate that late-formation super-impacts may not be that rare -- but they're pretty much all based on our one known solar system and approximations of known physics. (Approximations being necessary to the modelling process.) There are a lot of unanswered questions both in planetary system formation and in planetary geology yet, that's another reason to learn whatever we can about extrasolar planetary systems.
As for our system, it's not a sample size of one, it's a sample size of six planets of Venus size or greater. Yes, there's an exception, but we're reasonably sure we know why -- the same reason that we have a moon (formerly Earth's eighth continent
I haven't run any mathematical models, but given that there's a Neptune-mass (15 Earth mass) planet orbiting inside this planet's orbit (5.4 day orbit vs 13 day orbit), I'd guess that that's enough of a disruption to at least prevent a 1:1 tidal lock. There may be some kind of lock at another resonance (eg Mercury's 2:3 lock) but that would allow for rotation relative to the star and thus more-even heating.
2.25 gees is uncomfortable but tolerable (carry someone your own weight piggyback and you're almost there), and largely irrelevant to any water-dwelling critters.
However, the larger problem -- that I didn't see any of the articles explicitly raise -- it that there's likely a Venus-like greenhouse with the temperature much hotter than the 0-40C based on the equilibrium temperature of a rocky body at that distance from the primary. We can hope not, but we'd need a reason why not.
Based on our system, anything Venus-size or larger has a thick atmosphere, except Earth, and Earth is an anomaly because it got whacked by something massive (Mars mass) late in its formation, blowing most of the volatiles -- and the material that makes up the Moon -- off the planet altogether. (However, such late-stage super-impacts may be not all that unusual; it could explain some other oddities of our system, such as Uranus's tilt.)
Heh. Personally I enjoy it. I grew up on Silver Age DC comics, and don't read any of them anymore. Yeah, there's a lot of non-canon stuff, but I find it interesting how they work in elements that I remember in different ways. (Although some of those different ways are lifted from later comics continuity, I believe -- e.g. the Brainiac/Milton Fine connection.)
Certainly better than the old "Superboy" TV series, which is perhaps better forgotten.
And in the Smallville universe (I know, not canon with the comics, but then the comics aren't all canon with each other), green kryptonite (aka "meteor rock") can have all kinds of weird and/or wonderful effects on humans, especially if they were exposed during the initial meteor shower.
Well, .MOV is a wrapper format so it depends on the particular audio and video codecs used.
.mov files I have lying around on my drive, it looks like MPlayer is using ffmpeg decoders for the video (SVQ3, rpza, rel , cvid) but (in these particular cases) relying on proprietary codecs for the audio (QDM2). (Although ima4, mp3, etc audio it handles through OSS.)
Testing with a couple of
Not entirely, no. It uses ffmpeg and other OSS libraries where it can, but will fall back to using 3rd-party codecs if necessary (and available). So for formats where only a proprietary codec exists, then you could say it's "just as" proprietary, but for all those other formats it's open source.
While LGPL allows application developers to release closed source apps, if they change any of the LGPL libraries (say, to embrace an extend a protocol or API), they have to release source to the modified library. With public domain, vendors are free to subtly modify the protocol to their own ends without releasing the changes.
Now, if you don't care about that, then public domain or a BSD type license is fine.
I'm inclined to agree. A helpful reminder that your print heads or ink cartridges are getting old and might start failing is one thing, a hard cutoff is another. There ought to be a "ok I've been warned, go ahead and print anyway" option. Like the low-ink option -- I appreciate the heads-up so that I can go buy another cartridge, but I'll keep using the thing until it runs out. Nothing I print is so critical that I can't print a page over again if I have to.
I bought my last HP Multi-function printer specifically because it separated the heads from the ink,
Odd, I thought all HPs combined the heads into the ink cartridge. My all-in-one does. I went that way after an Epson (in which the heads are built into the printer) died because dried ink clogged the heads. Replacing a print cartridge is much cheaper than replacing the whole printer, even for cheap printers. Although that doesn't seem to be a problem with the HP, I'll go for months at a time without printing color (it has separate BW and color cartridges) without the color heads clogging up.
I've also had cheapo Lexmark and Canon color inkjet printers. Disasters, both of them. Tried refilling the cartridges on the Lexmark -- never again.
I think PJ's interpretation is incorrect. Mono, OpenOffice.org, etc are not "Linux-based products", they're open source products that happen to run on Linux -- and on (for OOo anyway, not sure about Mono) BSD and Windows.
To me a "Linux-based product" sounds more like some gizmo with Linux embedded. Given that Samsung is in the business of making gizmos rather than distributing software, this seems the more likely interpretation.
Read Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, it's a reasonably accessible history. Anyway, the point isn't so much about Hitler's rise per se, as it is the change from a reasonably open society to a totalitarian one. That's happened other places and times than just Nazi Germany.
And while perhaps this particular "little flea-bite on the face of the freedom movement" won't lead to that, how are we to tell at the time which ones will and which won't? And which flea might be carrying plague? As Jefferson put it, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Say it to me again when she actively hunts down and imprisons people for their dissident views
I think most people would prefer to stop the likes of her before it gets to that point. It's a whole lot harder to stop later rather than earlier.
but IE gives a browsing experience that, in general, I prefer
Again with this "browsing experience". I don't want a damn browsing experience, I want the damn information/content that I'm going to a given website for. Anything that gets in the way of that -- especially all-singing all-dancing crap -- may be a "browsing experience" for some (and an image of 60s drug-addled hippies grooving to Jimi Hendrix comes to mind), but it just gets in the way for the rest of us. Gods, it's even worse than blink tags.
Nobody can reasonably argue that Firefox 1.0 was better than IE.
Sure they can, especially if they're arguing that Firefox 1.0 was better than IE 1.0. But I'd go further than that, it's certainly better than IE 5, and in many ways than IE 6. I'm posting this via Firefox 1.0.6. (Yeah, I keep meaning to upgrade. Real Soon Now.) CaptiveX doesn't mean diddly squat to me, I'm running 64-bit Linux.
If you're thinking of The Second Civil War, that was Idaho.
Like I said, it doesn't make much difference to the bottom line.
Just wait until you get a friendly registered letter from the IRS notifying you that, because you missed filing a couple of years ago, they helpfully went ahead and filed a return on your behalf. Oh, and by the way, by their estimate of your income, you owe them $5,432.10 in back taxes and penalties. Due in 30 days.
You don't have to file if you are entitled to a refund.
Yeah, you do. Mind, the IRS probably won't get nasty about it until a few years after the deadline, but then they'll go ahead and file a return for you which, gee whiz, probably shows that you owe them a few thousand dollars based on their "estimates" of your income and what you already paid.
At that point you can -- if you don't delay too much longer -- go ahead and file a correct return, and they might (if it hasn't been too many years) even send you the refund if you're owed one.
(Been there, done that. Company I'd worked for went out of business and never got around to sending out W-2s, so I put off filing the return, and so on.)
If you itemize, all that stuff should be deductable as tax return preparation fees. Not that it makes a lot of difference to the bottom line, but I've always deducted the cost of the tax software.
The State software is a ripoff, for Colorado anyway -- it's basically "what was your Fed taxable income? You owe us X percent." (There's a little more to it than that, but not much.) -- so I try to get the software version without it and do that one by hand.
It's been done -- well, something like that, anyway. Decades ago I once had a (seasonal) job as a keypunch operator for Revenue Canada (Canada's IRS equivalent), encoding tax returns. I opened up one and it's full of papers, receipts and forms with a note on the front "I can't figure this out, you do it." Obviously that one got routed to special processing.
OTOH, you can be sure that "special processing" doesn't go out of their way to make sure you've taken every deduction you've got coming to you. If you're paying a mortgage (in the US, I don't recall the rules in Canada) it's almost certainly worthwhile itemizing the mortgage interest instead of taking the standard deduction. (This is not tax advice, IANAL or tax accountant, your mileage may vary, etc.)