They will gladly point you to a posting on CoastToCoastAM.com or WhatReallyHappened.org as proof.
Or point to their holy book of choice. "It's written in the Bible" counts as "proof" to a disturbingly large number of people, particularly in the USA.
Speaking of Apple and Android, I wish I could find out if it will be possible to sync calendars/contacts etc. with a Mac. I haven't been able to find info on this yet.
I am just about to abandon my old, busted Treo for a new smartphone, and I need to decide between iPhone and the HTC. Successfully syncing with my mac is a priority... it's a royal PITA with the Treo, when it's even possible.
There will always be a shortfall because non-discretionary spending is set (by law) at something like 103% of the state budget.
It's not quite 103% -- more like 80% -- but it's actually worse than "by law". All these fixtures to state funding were set by ballot propositions, not by laws. That means they are constitutional amendments. The state assembly does not have the power to change them.
When people complain that the state assembly can't balance the budget, the blame falls squarely on the voters and a 50-year tradition of using ballot propositions as if they were laws.
I can't wait for a browser that renders genuine 3d solid objects, so I can code all my sites to literally slap everyone still using IE.
I absolutely agree with you about slapping IE users. The problem is that after the W3 standardizes SolidML 1.0, only Firefox, Safari, and Chrome will support much of it for the next ten years.
So you'll have full capability to script your website to give handjobs to FireFox & Safari users, but the best you'll be able to accomplish in IE is the rendering of a limp wrist that won't obey positioning rules and that inexplicably jumps three pixels to the right every time you float a rectangle near it.
And Microsoft will refuse to fix it, too, because that would break the three trillion pages that will depend on the behavior of pixel-jogged limp wrists.
I have to say, it drives me crazy when I understand the chemistry of a drug my doctor is prescribing... but he doesn't. This happens pretty frequently, actually. And I am not a chemistry major or chemist; just a bioengineering/cs guy who happened to take o-chem on the way up.
Even so, first-term o-chem was really quite easy, even at a #1 school: much easier than, say E&M or differential equations, which I took the same year, and dramatically easier than biochemistry, which requires an understanding of o-chem and is certainly important for medicine. If the people who are going on to become our nation's doctors find first-year o-chem to be a struggle, then they really shouldn't be doctors.
Am I the only one who is surprised to learn that the GAO still retains sufficient autonomy to conduct studies like this and issue reports critical of government policy?
Given the way the Bush administration has ruthlessly turned all the other agencies into organizations of yes-men who exist only to support Bush policies, this is pretty surprising.
Of course, the Right's response to this report will be outrage - not at the environmental travesty, but at the GAO's audacity - followed by a demand that the GAO be shut down. Hear no evil, see no evil; criticism of the government must not be allowed.
(Also, though it's great that the GAO still has some power, it's rather tragic that the GAO has to call out the EPA on environmental abuses.)
Your first problem is expecting rated performance from a component well past its lifespan.
despite only holding 12 volts at the time
... and there's your second problem. Capacitors have a breakdown voltage rating. I don't know what the rating was for your 50-year-old beast, but there's a reason most ultracaps are rated no higher than 2.5V or 2.7V; because it's known they'll exhibit the behavior you saw if they're charged higher than that. The field arcs through the insulating dielectric, all the electrical energy is converted to heat at once, and you get an earth-shattering kaboom.
Play within the well-documented performance characteristics of components and you will (most of the time) be just fine. There will be a few occasional exceptions, but this happens with all energy storage devices, as laptop fires and gasoline fires have taught us. Caps are no different.
Consider this research, which I saw yesterday - possibly the most depressing thing I have read in terms of seeing rational politics and governance in my lifetime. Conservatives are more likely to believe something that supports their belief system after it has been refuted by experts.
For example, when shown a clip of George Bush in 2003 claiming Iraq had WMD's, 35% of conservatives agree. When shown the same clip plus the 2004 Duelfer report (compiled by a Bush appointee) which demonstrated that Iraq did not have WMD's, suddenly 64% of conservatives believe the weapons were there.
The same effect was seen with statements about tax revenue. In general, when shown expert testimony that contradicts preestablished beliefs, conservatives' beliefs go the other way: experts in general have negative credibility with half the country.
This was not true of liberals: they tended to be unswayed or slightly convinced by expert testimony.
IANAP, but my understanding is that the spectra emitted by matter/antimatter annihilation is fairly well-understood, and that most of the energy is carried in very high frequencies, like gamma rays.
Meanwhile, if you scan through the paper itself (arXiv link is downthread), they discuss spectra and absorption bands that are roughly similar to other stellar events in overall energy profile; a lot of it was in the visible spectrum.
My admittedly very poor understanding is that an M/AM event would look roughly like a gamma-ray burst, whereas this looked a lot more like a nova, albeit a very unusual one that didn't match any known profile.
The authors' best suggestion was a stellar merger event of unknown type.
Corrections from people who know astrophysics better than I would be quite appreciated...
Actually, a friend and I have recently come up with two ideas for fun phone apps, and have been waffling between doing them for iPhone or for Android.
The coolness and market base of iPhone combine to create a strong draw towards iPhone. But at the same time, I'm already a seasoned Java developer and learning Objective-C and Cocoa is a pretty hefty hurdle to overcome when I'd like to get things rolling quickly.
Additional crap like this is making me lean more and more away from iPhone and increasingly towards Android/HTC. This may well be the tipping point.
The one last thing that may seal the deal for me, once HTC comes out, is whether or not it will easily sync contacts and calendars with my mac. If it does, HTC may well end up being my personal phone, which would definitely push me away from developing for iPhone.
Asinine, but then again Apple doesn't follow Windows UI guidelines either.
There are Windows UI guidelines? From the truly bizarre menagerie of inconsistent UIs I see in the 3rd-party windows software world, it wasn't clear to me that any guidelines even existed.
Your post is a perfect example of why designers constantly need to be kept in check.
....
Sorry if designing for the web is a hard job, but the notion that the web should get harder for everyone to use so it's easier for a few wannabe-artists to design for is only appealing to wannabe-artists.
Designers -and their designs- are, in my experience, more beholden to the clients than to the designers, and the desire for pixel-perfect control generally comes from that.
I know and care a great deal about making my pages flexible and accessible, and making them work beatifully on a variety of platforms. Where the rubber hits the road is when I meet clients who make hundreds of requests like "Please make the text wrap after the word *foo* instead of the word *bar*" (this is actually a pretty common request). Clients look at the site on one monitor on one browser on one OS and demand (their vision of) perfection on that combination. I do my best to educate them, but sometimes they won't listen.
I was befuddled as well. Trying to find out what the connection was, I googled "hockey slash". Oops.... page after page of hockey player slash fiction.
I agree totally, the problem isn't the scary browser notices. It's websites and their poor security practices
Self-signed certs are not always "poor security practices". Consider, for example, devices like the ubiquitous Linksys broadband routers. They support ssl connections for administration, which is probably a good idea (tm).
But signed certs require a domain name, and cost real money (typically $100/year), which is probably a little much for a home user who just wants the extra security on their LAN. So self-signed certs are perfectly reasonable for uses like that.
That's actually not the worst idea I've ever heard.
Some of the better reviews of the recent schlock pointed out that Indy movies do best when the object he's searching for is one everyone already understands: the ark of the covenant, or the holy grail. When it's something the audience has never heard of (Ankara stones? "Magnetic" crystal skulls?), the movie has to waste most of its time explaining why the quest is interesting, instead of just showing us the action.
Everyone knows why the fountain of youth is interesting.
Is there any serious doubt that Scrabulous infringes on Hasbro's intellectual property?
Hell yes there's doubt. Scrabble was designed and first marketed in 1938. By any reasonable definition of the "protected for a limited time" aspect of intellectual property principle, Scrabble should be in the public domain by now.
Inventing or creating something should not give you, your heirs, and the people who bought it from you, and the people who bought it from them the right to make exclusive profit off it for the rest of time.
The dude who invented Scrabble is long dead. Time to let others play.
Can you imagine if we we still had to pay royalties to whatever company bought the rights to Shakespeare's estate every time a school drama club wanted to put on Hamlet?
Internet Explorer is the only major browser to NOT implement <insert ANY interesting/useful non-proprietary feature or open standard here>
There, fixed that for you. The only thing MS is ever first on are the things that can't be implemented in any other browser because MS owns the technology.
I have participated in many auctions on eBay, and the only ones I have ever "lost" were due to the simple fact that someone else was willing to pay more than I was for the item in question. Sometimes they do it in the last 4 seconds of the auction (which is admittedly annoying), but they still have to be willing to pay more than I am.
The problem with this approach is that the psychology of valuation depends very much on seeing what others value for the same widget.
If someone thinks it's worth $40, but then sees that someone else values it more (because his bid of $40 was 'instantly' outbid by the other person's higher limit), then he is very likely to increase his estimate of this widget's value.
I use sniping tools for two primary reasons: 1) to give my competitors less opportunity to change their mind about what something is worth and 2) to give MYSELF less opportunity to change my mind about what I'm willing to spend.
It's actually very satisfying to find 8 equivalent auctions and use a queue on JBidWatcher to say "this thing is worth $60 to me... keep sniping $60 until I win one". Then I can put it out of my mind and get automatically notified of a win by email. No temptation to overspend!
One feature alone would instantly pull me from eBay to whatever competitor there is: search and filter by "used item" vs "new item" and also "individual seller" vs. "large retail outlet".
When I go to online auctions, I'm looking for a deal on something used. I'm tired of living in a society where paying full priced new is the only option: it means individuals who'd be happy with a used widget have to spend more and our landfills fill up with still-useful widgets.
When I search eBay now for (tools/computers/whatever), I get 90% listings from large businesses selling new, usually crappy knock-off, items. I don't want a cheap chinese $20 wood router that barely functions. I want a used porter-cable router from some hobbyist who is downsizing his garage or upgrading to a newer tool. But the floods of cheap chinese crap are all I can find on eBay!
Have you or anybody in your field considered that humans living that long would grossly exacerbate the current crisis concerning population and resources?
This would be a waste of ask slashdot time, because this question is already dealt with repeatedly on his many FAQs on the website. There are plenty of answers, for example this one. (And of course they've thought of this one, silly)
My favorite answer is not in that current video FAQ item, so I'll explain it here. Basically, if you think death by aging is a major contributor to the population question, you don't understand the math.
The key point is that if there are more than 2 children born per person, births dominate the population equation because they are exponential. If you have 2 children per adult (= 4 per couple) and a 20-year generation time, then when you are 80 you are responsible for adding 14 people to the population via your descendents. (2 kids, 4 grandkids, 8 great-grandkids). If you die, you've only removed 6.7% of the population you're responsible for.
Keeping people alive from age 80 to age 100 only therefore increases this population by 6.7%, where births are responsible for the other 93.3%. Keeping them alive from 100 to 120 only increases the population by 3.3%, and keeping them alive from 120 to 140 only increases it by 1.6%. By the time you're extending someone's life to age 1000, he or she is only a miniscule slice of the population wedge that includes her and her descendants.
Reducing the birth rate from 2 per person to 1.5 per person, OTOH, really dramatically reduces the population. So it's much easier and more important to control the population that way, instead of by insisting people continue to get old and die, which is kind of cruel to the people who are already alive who would prefer to keep living, you know.
That's because by 2015 Microsoft still won't have an operating system better than Windows XP.
You know, this got modded funny but that's only 7 years away. If Windows 7 sucks like Vista and is delayed like vista (both of which seem not entirely unreasonable hypotheses), it could very well be that in 2015 they still haven't improved over windows.
Actually, first hand experience of making calls over 3G (HSDPA) packet data connections using Fring on Three [three.co.uk] shows that call quality is terrible
Wow. Given how atrocious GSM (and CDMA) phone quality is relative to good old POTS (or even analog cell technology), 3G VoiP must be really unconscionably awful.
I am frankly stunned at how many people are switching to mobiles as their only phone. When I'm talking to someone who's on a mobile phone - particularly if I'm on one as well - I am constantly having to ask them to repeat themselves because I can't understand what they're saying. Between the filtering out of the high frequencies (which saves on bandwidth at the cost of intelligibility - consonants are all distinguished in the high frequencies) and occasional little quarter-second-long dropouts, digital mobile technology still seems just barely this side of unusable to me.
Making it worse via VOIP doesn't seem like the greatest idea to me.
Slashdot Mirror
This story has potential!
They will gladly point you to a posting on CoastToCoastAM.com or WhatReallyHappened.org as proof.
Or point to their holy book of choice. "It's written in the Bible" counts as "proof" to a disturbingly large number of people, particularly in the USA.
Speaking of Apple and Android, I wish I could find out if it will be possible to sync calendars/contacts etc. with a Mac. I haven't been able to find info on this yet.
I am just about to abandon my old, busted Treo for a new smartphone, and I need to decide between iPhone and the HTC. Successfully syncing with my mac is a priority ... it's a royal PITA with the Treo, when it's even possible.
Personally I liked ... Spiderman trilogy,
You include the third one? I stopped reading your post at that point; I can't take you seriously anymore.
There will always be a shortfall because non-discretionary spending is set (by law) at something like 103% of the state budget.
It's not quite 103% -- more like 80% -- but it's actually worse than "by law". All these fixtures to state funding were set by ballot propositions, not by laws. That means they are constitutional amendments. The state assembly does not have the power to change them.
When people complain that the state assembly can't balance the budget, the blame falls squarely on the voters and a 50-year tradition of using ballot propositions as if they were laws.
I can't wait for a browser that renders genuine 3d solid objects, so I can code all my sites to literally slap everyone still using IE.
I absolutely agree with you about slapping IE users. The problem is that after the W3 standardizes SolidML 1.0, only Firefox, Safari, and Chrome will support much of it for the next ten years.
So you'll have full capability to script your website to give handjobs to FireFox & Safari users, but the best you'll be able to accomplish in IE is the rendering of a limp wrist that won't obey positioning rules and that inexplicably jumps three pixels to the right every time you float a rectangle near it.
And Microsoft will refuse to fix it, too, because that would break the three trillion pages that will depend on the behavior of pixel-jogged limp wrists.
I have to say, it drives me crazy when I understand the chemistry of a drug my doctor is prescribing ... but he doesn't. This happens pretty frequently, actually. And I am not a chemistry major or chemist; just a bioengineering/cs guy who happened to take o-chem on the way up.
Even so, first-term o-chem was really quite easy, even at a #1 school: much easier than, say E&M or differential equations, which I took the same year, and dramatically easier than biochemistry, which requires an understanding of o-chem and is certainly important for medicine. If the people who are going on to become our nation's doctors find first-year o-chem to be a struggle, then they really shouldn't be doctors.
Am I the only one who is surprised to learn that the GAO still retains sufficient autonomy to conduct studies like this and issue reports critical of government policy?
Given the way the Bush administration has ruthlessly turned all the other agencies into organizations of yes-men who exist only to support Bush policies, this is pretty surprising.
Of course, the Right's response to this report will be outrage - not at the environmental travesty, but at the GAO's audacity - followed by a demand that the GAO be shut down. Hear no evil, see no evil; criticism of the government must not be allowed.
(Also, though it's great that the GAO still has some power, it's rather tragic that the GAO has to call out the EPA on environmental abuses.)
Your first problem is expecting rated performance from a component well past its lifespan.
Play within the well-documented performance characteristics of components and you will (most of the time) be just fine. There will be a few occasional exceptions, but this happens with all energy storage devices, as laptop fires and gasoline fires have taught us. Caps are no different.
... for conservatives, at least.
Consider this research, which I saw yesterday - possibly the most depressing thing I have read in terms of seeing rational politics and governance in my lifetime. Conservatives are more likely to believe something that supports their belief system after it has been refuted by experts.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/14/AR2008091402375_pf.html
For example, when shown a clip of George Bush in 2003 claiming Iraq had WMD's, 35% of conservatives agree. When shown the same clip plus the 2004 Duelfer report (compiled by a Bush appointee) which demonstrated that Iraq did not have WMD's, suddenly 64% of conservatives believe the weapons were there.
The same effect was seen with statements about tax revenue. In general, when shown expert testimony that contradicts preestablished beliefs, conservatives' beliefs go the other way: experts in general have negative credibility with half the country.
This was not true of liberals: they tended to be unswayed or slightly convinced by expert testimony.
IANAP, but my understanding is that the spectra emitted by matter/antimatter annihilation is fairly well-understood, and that most of the energy is carried in very high frequencies, like gamma rays.
Meanwhile, if you scan through the paper itself (arXiv link is downthread), they discuss spectra and absorption bands that are roughly similar to other stellar events in overall energy profile; a lot of it was in the visible spectrum.
My admittedly very poor understanding is that an M/AM event would look roughly like a gamma-ray burst, whereas this looked a lot more like a nova, albeit a very unusual one that didn't match any known profile.
The authors' best suggestion was a stellar merger event of unknown type.
Corrections from people who know astrophysics better than I would be quite appreciated...
Actually, a friend and I have recently come up with two ideas for fun phone apps, and have been waffling between doing them for iPhone or for Android.
The coolness and market base of iPhone combine to create a strong draw towards iPhone. But at the same time, I'm already a seasoned Java developer and learning Objective-C and Cocoa is a pretty hefty hurdle to overcome when I'd like to get things rolling quickly.
Additional crap like this is making me lean more and more away from iPhone and increasingly towards Android/HTC. This may well be the tipping point.
The one last thing that may seal the deal for me, once HTC comes out, is whether or not it will easily sync contacts and calendars with my mac. If it does, HTC may well end up being my personal phone, which would definitely push me away from developing for iPhone.
Asinine, but then again Apple doesn't follow Windows UI guidelines either.
There are Windows UI guidelines? From the truly bizarre menagerie of inconsistent UIs I see in the 3rd-party windows software world, it wasn't clear to me that any guidelines even existed.
Certainly very few people follow them.
Your post is a perfect example of why designers constantly need to be kept in check.
....
Sorry if designing for the web is a hard job, but the notion that the web should get harder for everyone to use so it's easier for a few wannabe-artists to design for is only appealing to wannabe-artists.
Designers -and their designs- are, in my experience, more beholden to the clients than to the designers, and the desire for pixel-perfect control generally comes from that.
I know and care a great deal about making my pages flexible and accessible, and making them work beatifully on a variety of platforms. Where the rubber hits the road is when I meet clients who make hundreds of requests like "Please make the text wrap after the word *foo* instead of the word *bar*" (this is actually a pretty common request). Clients look at the site on one monitor on one browser on one OS and demand (their vision of) perfection on that combination. I do my best to educate them, but sometimes they won't listen.
I was befuddled as well. Trying to find out what the connection was, I googled "hockey slash". Oops. ... page after page of hockey player slash fiction.
Self-signed certs are not always "poor security practices". Consider, for example, devices like the ubiquitous Linksys broadband routers. They support ssl connections for administration, which is probably a good idea (tm).
But signed certs require a domain name, and cost real money (typically $100/year), which is probably a little much for a home user who just wants the extra security on their LAN. So self-signed certs are perfectly reasonable for uses like that.
That's actually not the worst idea I've ever heard.
Some of the better reviews of the recent schlock pointed out that Indy movies do best when the object he's searching for is one everyone already understands: the ark of the covenant, or the holy grail. When it's something the audience has never heard of (Ankara stones? "Magnetic" crystal skulls?), the movie has to waste most of its time explaining why the quest is interesting, instead of just showing us the action.
Everyone knows why the fountain of youth is interesting.
Hell yes there's doubt. Scrabble was designed and first marketed in 1938. By any reasonable definition of the "protected for a limited time" aspect of intellectual property principle, Scrabble should be in the public domain by now.
Inventing or creating something should not give you, your heirs, and the people who bought it from you, and the people who bought it from them the right to make exclusive profit off it for the rest of time.
The dude who invented Scrabble is long dead. Time to let others play.
Can you imagine if we we still had to pay royalties to whatever company bought the rights to Shakespeare's estate every time a school drama club wanted to put on Hamlet?
There, fixed that for you. The only thing MS is ever first on are the things that can't be implemented in any other browser because MS owns the technology.
Hmm, throwing the word "elitist" in every attack, even when it has no relevance to the issue... ...definitely a Republican. ;)
The problem with this approach is that the psychology of valuation depends very much on seeing what others value for the same widget.
If someone thinks it's worth $40, but then sees that someone else values it more (because his bid of $40 was 'instantly' outbid by the other person's higher limit), then he is very likely to increase his estimate of this widget's value.
I use sniping tools for two primary reasons: 1) to give my competitors less opportunity to change their mind about what something is worth and 2) to give MYSELF less opportunity to change my mind about what I'm willing to spend.
It's actually very satisfying to find 8 equivalent auctions and use a queue on JBidWatcher to say "this thing is worth $60 to me ... keep sniping $60 until I win one". Then I can put it out of my mind and get automatically notified of a win by email. No temptation to overspend!
One feature alone would instantly pull me from eBay to whatever competitor there is: search and filter by "used item" vs "new item" and also "individual seller" vs. "large retail outlet".
When I go to online auctions, I'm looking for a deal on something used. I'm tired of living in a society where paying full priced new is the only option: it means individuals who'd be happy with a used widget have to spend more and our landfills fill up with still-useful widgets.
When I search eBay now for (tools/computers/whatever), I get 90% listings from large businesses selling new, usually crappy knock-off, items. I don't want a cheap chinese $20 wood router that barely functions. I want a used porter-cable router from some hobbyist who is downsizing his garage or upgrading to a newer tool. But the floods of cheap chinese crap are all I can find on eBay!
This would be a waste of ask slashdot time, because this question is already dealt with repeatedly on his many FAQs on the website. There are plenty of answers, for example this one. (And of course they've thought of this one, silly)
My favorite answer is not in that current video FAQ item, so I'll explain it here. Basically, if you think death by aging is a major contributor to the population question, you don't understand the math.
The key point is that if there are more than 2 children born per person, births dominate the population equation because they are exponential. If you have 2 children per adult (= 4 per couple) and a 20-year generation time, then when you are 80 you are responsible for adding 14 people to the population via your descendents. (2 kids, 4 grandkids, 8 great-grandkids). If you die, you've only removed 6.7% of the population you're responsible for.
Keeping people alive from age 80 to age 100 only therefore increases this population by 6.7%, where births are responsible for the other 93.3%. Keeping them alive from 100 to 120 only increases the population by 3.3%, and keeping them alive from 120 to 140 only increases it by 1.6%. By the time you're extending someone's life to age 1000, he or she is only a miniscule slice of the population wedge that includes her and her descendants.
Reducing the birth rate from 2 per person to 1.5 per person, OTOH, really dramatically reduces the population. So it's much easier and more important to control the population that way, instead of by insisting people continue to get old and die, which is kind of cruel to the people who are already alive who would prefer to keep living, you know.
You know, this got modded funny but that's only 7 years away. If Windows 7 sucks like Vista and is delayed like vista (both of which seem not entirely unreasonable hypotheses), it could very well be that in 2015 they still haven't improved over windows.
Wow. Given how atrocious GSM (and CDMA) phone quality is relative to good old POTS (or even analog cell technology), 3G VoiP must be really unconscionably awful.
I am frankly stunned at how many people are switching to mobiles as their only phone. When I'm talking to someone who's on a mobile phone - particularly if I'm on one as well - I am constantly having to ask them to repeat themselves because I can't understand what they're saying. Between the filtering out of the high frequencies (which saves on bandwidth at the cost of intelligibility - consonants are all distinguished in the high frequencies) and occasional little quarter-second-long dropouts, digital mobile technology still seems just barely this side of unusable to me.
Making it worse via VOIP doesn't seem like the greatest idea to me.