I gave up partway through thinking I really don't care about these people or their dumb politics.
That's about the way I felt about Red Mars, and I wasn't even reading it but listening to the book on tape while commuting. Actually more the soap operas than the politics. Maybe if I'd been reading it I could have just skipped those bits.
(That's what I did with the Chronicles of Covenant that somebody once gave me. Read the beginning and ending bits where he's in the real world, and skipped over the stupid swords'n'sorcery stuff where his character is so revolting. These days I'm a lot more ready to just toss the whole thing; life's too short.)
I disagree on the fidelity and scratchproofing comments
I suppose fidelity is arguable if you had a high-end system and never played your LPs on anything else. Play one once on a cheapo or portable player (ie, what most teenagers/students had) and the high frequencies start going. (Not to mention wow and rumble from lousy turntables).
As for scratchproofing -- drop the tonearm, or the LP, or just leave it uncovered on the turntable to collect dust and you start getting noise. Spill beer or soda on one (parties!) and even a good cleaning never quite gets it the same. Believe me, CD's were a vast improvement.
I hope you have LCDs and not a high voltage device (part of the electron gun in a CRT) in your wet environment.
I've seen a house with a bathroom where the (CRT type) TV was installed behind the mirror, that section of the mirror being partially silvered. Looks just like normal mirror unless the TV is on. Mind, this was a model "display all the builders' goodies" home (that bathroom also had a urinal as well as a commode), I don't know how many setups like that get installed otherwise. Oh yeah, in addition to the usual TV feeds you could also check the security camera views on it. Handy if the doorbell rings while you're in the bathroom.
I firmly believe that the demise of the Vinyl LP was orchestrated by the recording industry,
No, there were just too many advantages in CDs over vinyl LPs: fidelity, scratchproofing, ease of play, etc for the consumer, and size (equals reduced packaging and shipping costs) for the producer (plus getting to sell the inventory over again to those who wanted to upgrade).
Copying CDs was inconceivable at the time -- first CD-burners weren't available at all, then CD recording gear cost thousands of dollars and the blank media in the range of a hundred bucks a pop (even in the early 90s it was several dollars apiece). Making cassette tape copies of CDs was easy, but we did that from vinyl LPs too.
Dude, that Ars Technica article on "falling DVD sales" is two years old, and referred to "theatrical releases" (movies). IIRC, sales of season sets of TV shows started to ramp about then too, and is still going strong.
They certainly weren't falling in 2005 because of HD competition.
**unless** they had Earth-like conditions at some point in the past, where life originated.
Recall the "programming error" in the survey ramrobots of Niven's Known Space: you only need those Earth-like conditions at one spot, not over the whole planet. Maybe there's the local equivalent of a Mt. Lookitthat.
Run a website of your own, see how many people call or email with problems that are caused by noscript and adblock
I run a bunch, and nobody complains because I don't do client side scripts or run other people's ads.
because it actually enhances the browsing experience.
I go to websites for information, not a "browsing experience". What enhances my browsing experience is delivering the information I'm looking for without a lot of singing and dancing. If I'm looking for entertainment, again it'll be the specific content (eg video clip) I'm looking for, not all singing all dancing all popup crap.
The Apple II didn't have a CGA. Colors were generated by dot-timing the luminance signal into an NTSC composite monitor (read, TV), faking out the color decoding in the monitor. Subpixel rendering was done by reversing that to choose the appropriate color to generate the desired dot timing. On a monochrome monitor these showed up as higher-resolution dots than the nominal pixels in display memory.
Go look at the circuit diagram for an Apple II, for pete's sake. It's not that complicated, maybe a dozen or so 74-series chips plus the memory and CPU.
Clear type uses exactly the same idea -- pick the color to activate the desired combination of R, G and/or B stripes in the LCD pixel -- i.e. activate the desired sequence of horizontal dots by color choice.
Plenty of mechanisms to explain how higher temperatures can increase the CO2 level in the atmosphere -- warm water doesn't dissolve gases as easily, for one example. Correlation != causation.
That said, temperature tracks sunspot count pretty well, when you consider that the temperature starts to climb at the end during a sustained period of high sunspot activity (relative the first half of the graph).
Why don't you quote the rest of that wikipedia article?
Particularly the part that says: Since sunspots are dark it might be expected that more sunspots lead to less solar radiation. However, the surrounding areas are brighter and the overall effect is that more sunspots means a brighter sun. (Emphasis added).
Sunspots are relatively cooler, but the surrounding areas are hotter.
This may not perfectly account for global warming (and we don't have the data or models to do that anyway), but it sure points in that direction.
I dunno, the idea of a missile going "aw fuck, I'm not heading in the right direction, I'll return to base and avoid needless destruction" sounds rather neat.
Maybe so, but then said missile is faced with the question of, to return to base, in just which direction should it go?
Sun spots are *cool* parts of the sun....that means that it is at a 1,000 year *low* for temperature
If you'd actually bothered to read that wiki link you pointed to, you'd have stumbled across this:
Since sunspots are dark it might be expected that more sunspots lead to less solar radiation. However, the surrounding areas are brighter and the overall effect is that more sunspots means a brighter sun.
Sunspots are only relatively cooler, and the rest of the sun is even hotter -- which would explain why we're observing global warming on other planets in the solar system too.
At this point, the question isn't really whether rising CO2 is the cause of global warming or vice versa (and I'm pretty much in the non-anthropogenic global warming camp). While there's still room for discussion about how much global warming is taking place, and how much is really global vs local, I think it's pretty fair to say that there's some global warming going on.
The next question is - wether it's natural climate cycles or not - should we (if we can) do anything about it, and if so, what? Personally I like the idea of a carbon tax because burning carbon is a damn stupid way to produce energy anyway, especially considering where much of the carbon we burn comes from. We do know that warming and greenhouse gas emission can go into a feedback loop (with co2 and methane being released from thawing permafrost, warmer water holding less in solution, etc) so slowing that down may be no bad thing even if the current primary cause of warming is increased solar output.
There are other things that can be done too -- ways of increasing the planet's albedo by a tiny bit, perhaps, to reflect more of the incoming sunshine -- but means, methods, effects and costs need to be evaluted. (Worth checking the opposite, too, in case the warming trend suddenly reverses.)
Oh gods yes. Hercules was absolute whale dreck. H-B's "Ruff & Reddy", etc, was lightyears beyond that. I swear Hercules couldn't have had more than a score of different shots total, they just kept reusing them in different combos. The writing was crap too.
LOX saturating some organic materials can create an explosive.
I haven't tried it, but a couple of folks I know well enough to believe they probably have, report that soaking a charcoal briquette (as for a barbecue) in LOX and then throwing it against something hard can be pretty impressive, in the "stick of dynamite" range. A LOX-soaked charcoal briquette doesn't sound like something I'd want to pick up, myself.
I have seen someone light a cigarette that had been briefly dipped in LOX (it was in a clamp, he wasn't trying to smoke it!). More impressive than a magnesium fire.
fires in spacecraft, because they do have lots of flammable stuff, like wire insulation (which is fire-resistant, not necessarily fire-proof.)
The only spacecraft that used a pure O2 environment were the US Mercury through Apollo-Skylab series. It's worth noting that even the pre-fire Apollo spacecraft materials were fire-resistant in the designed-for pure O2 atmosphere -- because the designed-for atmosphere was 3 PSI, not the 16 PSI (pure O2!) that they were using in the pre-launch plugs out test where the Apollo 1 fire occurred.
There have been minor in-orbit wiring fires aboard Shuttle, which uses standard air.
Yeah, I still have one of the original Apex AD-600A players - that's how I discovered that some discs don't like R0. The drive itself died in it a while back, I just swapped it out for a regular IDE DVD drive (well, the mechanical fit isn't perfect). Works great for watching PAL discs on an NTSC TV.
I've heard that most of the cheap Chinese DVD players are Region 0 anyway, right out of the box.
Certainly not true of the $30 player my wife picked up from Sam's Club as an emergency replacement for the kids' player -- didn't like the Region 2 discs (Star Cops) I just got. My Linux box doesn't care, my (well, my employer's) Windows laptop helpfully asked if I wanted to change the region (but it'll only do it 5 times total). Some (Disney IIRC) discs have control code which queries the region and refuses to play on R0 players.
(I just made a backup copy of the discs and changed the region code -- byte 23 in the video_ts.ifo file.)
California is trying to push the single standard (ODF) as THE standard here,
What's wrong with that? ODF is an ISO standard (ISO 26300). Should California allow non-standard character sets? Or non-standard paper sizes in its documents? (Right, try filing that A4 sheet in a standard US letter-size filing cabinet.)
Microsoft is perfectly free to implement ISO-26300 (ODF) in its products, this isn't about shutting Microsoft out at all. Just their lock-in.
You don't "have" to go back to the application to read the file. If you do not understand the difference between "you can" and "you have to", then I pity your existence.
On the other hand, with closed formats -- and for all practical purposes this includes MS OOXML -- you can't go back to the source, so you do have to use the original app.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Vista articles on Slashdot must come with a Greedy Gorilla icon..
Would you settle for a picture of Steve Ballmer?
Feisty Fawn, Gutsy Gibbon, ... So what are they going to call the one after Zaftig Zebra? (Consider the code bloat by then.)
Perhaps they'll strip it down and go with Anorexic Aardvark.
I gave up partway through thinking I really don't care about these people or their dumb politics.
That's about the way I felt about Red Mars, and I wasn't even reading it but listening to the book on tape while commuting. Actually more the soap operas than the politics. Maybe if I'd been reading it I could have just skipped those bits.
(That's what I did with the Chronicles of Covenant that somebody once gave me. Read the beginning and ending bits where he's in the real world, and skipped over the stupid swords'n'sorcery stuff where his character is so revolting. These days I'm a lot more ready to just toss the whole thing; life's too short.)
I disagree on the fidelity and scratchproofing comments
I suppose fidelity is arguable if you had a high-end system and never played your LPs on anything else. Play one once on a cheapo or portable player (ie, what most teenagers/students had) and the high frequencies start going. (Not to mention wow and rumble from lousy turntables).
As for scratchproofing -- drop the tonearm, or the LP, or just leave it uncovered on the turntable to collect dust and you start getting noise. Spill beer or soda on one (parties!) and even a good cleaning never quite gets it the same. Believe me, CD's were a vast improvement.
I hope you have LCDs and not a high voltage device (part of the electron gun in a CRT) in your wet environment.
I've seen a house with a bathroom where the (CRT type) TV was installed behind the mirror, that section of the mirror being partially silvered. Looks just like normal mirror unless the TV is on. Mind, this was a model "display all the builders' goodies" home (that bathroom also had a urinal as well as a commode), I don't know how many setups like that get installed otherwise. Oh yeah, in addition to the usual TV feeds you could also check the security camera views on it. Handy if the doorbell rings while you're in the bathroom.
I firmly believe that the demise of the Vinyl LP was orchestrated by the recording industry,
No, there were just too many advantages in CDs over vinyl LPs: fidelity, scratchproofing, ease of play, etc for the consumer, and size (equals reduced packaging and shipping costs) for the producer (plus getting to sell the inventory over again to those who wanted to upgrade).
Copying CDs was inconceivable at the time -- first CD-burners weren't available at all, then CD recording gear cost thousands of dollars and the blank media in the range of a hundred bucks a pop (even in the early 90s it was several dollars apiece). Making cassette tape copies of CDs was easy, but we did that from vinyl LPs too.
The AACS (Advanced Access Content System) just happens to be a mechanism to deny access to the content.
I have no doubt that the acronym originally stood for Advanced Access Control System before some PR or marketing types got hold of it.
Dude, that Ars Technica article on "falling DVD sales" is two years old, and referred to "theatrical releases" (movies). IIRC, sales of season sets of TV shows started to ramp about then too, and is still going strong.
They certainly weren't falling in 2005 because of HD competition.
**unless** they had Earth-like conditions at some point in the past, where life originated.
Recall the "programming error" in the survey ramrobots of Niven's Known Space: you only need those Earth-like conditions at one spot, not over the whole planet. Maybe there's the local equivalent of a Mt. Lookitthat.
Run a website of your own, see how many people call or email with problems that are caused by noscript and adblock
I run a bunch, and nobody complains because I don't do client side scripts or run other people's ads.
because it actually enhances the browsing experience.
I go to websites for information, not a "browsing experience". What enhances my browsing experience is delivering the information I'm looking for without a lot of singing and dancing. If I'm looking for entertainment, again it'll be the specific content (eg video clip) I'm looking for, not all singing all dancing all popup crap.
The Apple II didn't have a CGA. Colors were generated by dot-timing the luminance signal into an NTSC composite monitor (read, TV), faking out the color decoding in the monitor. Subpixel rendering was done by reversing that to choose the appropriate color to generate the desired dot timing. On a monochrome monitor these showed up as higher-resolution dots than the nominal pixels in display memory.
Go look at the circuit diagram for an Apple II, for pete's sake. It's not that complicated, maybe a dozen or so 74-series chips plus the memory and CPU.
Clear type uses exactly the same idea -- pick the color to activate the desired combination of R, G and/or B stripes in the LCD pixel -- i.e. activate the desired sequence of horizontal dots by color choice.
Plenty of mechanisms to explain how higher temperatures can increase the CO2 level in the atmosphere -- warm water doesn't dissolve gases as easily, for one example. Correlation != causation.
That said, temperature tracks sunspot count pretty well, when you consider that the temperature starts to climb at the end during a sustained period of high sunspot activity (relative the first half of the graph).
Why don't you quote the rest of that wikipedia article?
Particularly the part that says: Since sunspots are dark it might be expected that more sunspots lead to less solar radiation. However, the surrounding areas are brighter and the overall effect is that more sunspots means a brighter sun. (Emphasis added).
Sunspots are relatively cooler, but the surrounding areas are hotter.
This may not perfectly account for global warming (and we don't have the data or models to do that anyway), but it sure points in that direction.
I dunno, the idea of a missile going "aw fuck, I'm not heading in the right direction, I'll return to base and avoid needless destruction" sounds rather neat.
Maybe so, but then said missile is faced with the question of, to return to base, in just which direction should it go?
If you'd actually bothered to read that wiki link you pointed to, you'd have stumbled across this:
Sunspots are only relatively cooler, and the rest of the sun is even hotter -- which would explain why we're observing global warming on other planets in the solar system too.
At this point, the question isn't really whether rising CO2 is the cause of global warming or vice versa (and I'm pretty much in the non-anthropogenic global warming camp). While there's still room for discussion about how much global warming is taking place, and how much is really global vs local, I think it's pretty fair to say that there's some global warming going on.
The next question is - wether it's natural climate cycles or not - should we (if we can) do anything about it, and if so, what? Personally I like the idea of a carbon tax because burning carbon is a damn stupid way to produce energy anyway, especially considering where much of the carbon we burn comes from. We do know that warming and greenhouse gas emission can go into a feedback loop (with co2 and methane being released from thawing permafrost, warmer water holding less in solution, etc) so slowing that down may be no bad thing even if the current primary cause of warming is increased solar output.
There are other things that can be done too -- ways of increasing the planet's albedo by a tiny bit, perhaps, to reflect more of the incoming sunshine -- but means, methods, effects and costs need to be evaluted. (Worth checking the opposite, too, in case the warming trend suddenly reverses.)
Oh gods yes. Hercules was absolute whale dreck. H-B's "Ruff & Reddy", etc, was lightyears beyond that. I swear Hercules couldn't have had more than a score of different shots total, they just kept reusing them in different combos. The writing was crap too.
LOX saturating some organic materials can create an explosive.
I haven't tried it, but a couple of folks I know well enough to believe they probably have, report that soaking a charcoal briquette (as for a barbecue) in LOX and then throwing it against something hard can be pretty impressive, in the "stick of dynamite" range. A LOX-soaked charcoal briquette doesn't sound like something I'd want to pick up, myself.
I have seen someone light a cigarette that had been briefly dipped in LOX (it was in a clamp, he wasn't trying to smoke it!). More impressive than a magnesium fire.
fires in spacecraft, because they do have lots of flammable stuff, like wire insulation (which is fire-resistant, not necessarily fire-proof.)
The only spacecraft that used a pure O2 environment were the US Mercury through Apollo-Skylab series. It's worth noting that even the pre-fire Apollo spacecraft materials were fire-resistant in the designed-for pure O2 atmosphere -- because the designed-for atmosphere was 3 PSI, not the 16 PSI (pure O2!) that they were using in the pre-launch plugs out test where the Apollo 1 fire occurred.
There have been minor in-orbit wiring fires aboard Shuttle, which uses standard air.
Yeah, I still have one of the original Apex AD-600A players - that's how I discovered that some discs don't like R0. The drive itself died in it a while back, I just swapped it out for a regular IDE DVD drive (well, the mechanical fit isn't perfect). Works great for watching PAL discs on an NTSC TV.
I've heard that most of the cheap Chinese DVD players are Region 0 anyway, right out of the box.
Certainly not true of the $30 player my wife picked up from Sam's Club as an emergency replacement for the kids' player -- didn't like the Region 2 discs (Star Cops) I just got. My Linux box doesn't care, my (well, my employer's) Windows laptop helpfully asked if I wanted to change the region (but it'll only do it 5 times total). Some (Disney IIRC) discs have control code which queries the region and refuses to play on R0 players.
(I just made a backup copy of the discs and changed the region code -- byte 23 in the video_ts.ifo file.)
California is trying to push the single standard (ODF) as THE standard here,
What's wrong with that? ODF is an ISO standard (ISO 26300). Should California allow non-standard character sets? Or non-standard paper sizes in its documents? (Right, try filing that A4 sheet in a standard US letter-size filing cabinet.)
Microsoft is perfectly free to implement ISO-26300 (ODF) in its products, this isn't about shutting Microsoft out at all. Just their lock-in.
Don't be a twit.
You don't "have" to go back to the application to read the file. If you do not understand the difference between "you can" and "you have to", then I pity your existence.
On the other hand, with closed formats -- and for all practical purposes this includes MS OOXML -- you can't go back to the source, so you do have to use the original app.
So tell me, why the hell does a document format that is not a memory dump of .DOC data structures need to support defunct legacy formatting like W95??
For that matter, why the hell does that format specify that 1900 was a leap year? Oh yeah, because that bug is built in to Excel.
Don't be a twit. Nobody's actually advocating using coal as a thorium ore.
It does, however, point out quite nicely the relative impact of chemical (fossil) vs nuclear energy.