I'm frequently amazed at the quality of microphones in newer phones. Call quality is usually limited by the codec, not the mic.
There are videos on Youtube taken by cellphones of rock concerts where the audio is both clear and doesn't clip. There are videos on Youtube taken by cellphones of speeches where the person filming is far back in the audience and there's no amplification, yet the recording is good enough that you can listen to the speech.
If you had told me ten years ago that it would be possible to do that with a mainstream consumer electronic device weighing in at 100 grams today I would have been very skeptical.
Friendica, Diaspora and others are already up and running and growing exponentially as we speak, which means that technology-wise we're already on the verge of having a federated social web.
The next problem will be to have a federated social web that is profitable for the people who work to create and maintain it. That's a very, very serious problem by the way. Your federated social web is not really resistant if it depends on Google ads, because that would mean that the whole system would have a single point of failure that a government could exploit by putting pressure on Google to ban ad users that don't behave according to the government's liking.
This has little or nothing to do with fear of liability. Note that the video is shocking and may ruin your day if you're not aware that these sorts of things happen.
So why do multiple people in the same part of town run over a little kid as if it was a pile of dead matter? Well, it says in the article that it was a child of a migrant worker. Racism and the dehumanization processes that go along with it, if left unchecked, makes people do things like this.
The real value of silver has undergone drastic changes in the past, sometimes because of enormous new finds, sometimes for other reasons.
It's probably better to use "a nice lunch" (as in a good but unpretentious restaurant meal of tasty, nutritious, healthful food, containing about 500 kcal) as your price reference. A meal at a restaurant is both a product and a service, and it contains a range of raw materials. Since the restaurant needs to pay real estate costs it also reflects the housing market.
Like someone pointed out below they didn't know that certain wind conditions (basically dust devils) would clean the solar panels periodically. Had they know that I think they might have designed the rovers to last 900 days. NASA made a big PR number about how the solar panels would run out in a few months, which they then didn't thanks to the dust devils.
Now, I wonder if it's possible to make the cleaning events more effective, for example by coating the solar panels with a slippery coating, or by tilting them slightly downwards to make them a bigger target for horizontal winds.
3D is all the makers had to get you to upgrade your set. Once you're on 1080P/Blu-Ray it's pretty much good enough for any kind of viewing you want to do.
A 1080p display only has 2 Mpixels, which might possibly be enough for fast moving images, but it's certainly not perfect for slow scenes in movies, or for still images such as the ones that you can take yourself with a simple point and shoot.
I think we'll see TVs with thousands of lines of pixels. An 80" 3000p or 4000p TV would be perfect for a lot of things.
It's either that, or that consumers are more interested in getting a bigger TV than a smaller 3D TV for the same money. We'll see what happens when TVs hit a size wall.
Also, a lot of what people watch is TV series. We'll see what happens when they start making series in 3D.
If 3D doesn't take of when a 80" TV is $1000 and all the most popular series are available in 3D, then it would be time to declare 3D dead. For now we just can't say.
Marriage has nothing to do with religion; marriage is a commercial contract between long-term sexual partners who live together and have chosen to combine their finances because of the financial benefits that come with such an arrangement. Religions have coopted marriage, beginning with Judaism and Christianity - marriage was not seen as a religious commitment in most early religions.
That's certainly part of it, but the central aspect of marriage is that it used to be the thing that regulated inheritance before we had a functioning monetary economy where inheritances could be divided into pieces easily.
The firstborn son within wedlock would inherit the farm. (Tough luck if you're one of the siblings!) As societies progressed and became more advanced the other children tended to get more and more of the inheritance. Today its almost a global standard that the inheritance is shared equally between all children, inside or outside of wedlock.
Nowadays, for all practical intents and purposes your wedding day is the day your first child is born (if you're still a couple), or the day you buy a house together, or the day you start a family business or another large project together.
Phone, skype and email work just fine internationally....?
If you're feeling minimalist you could probably scratch Skype off that list. If you rank electronic communication technologies by number of active users it's something like:
1. Phone/SMS/MMS ~5 billion active SIM-cards 2. Email ~2 billion users 3. Facebook ~800 million users 4. Twitter ~100 million users 4. Skype ~100 million users
Phone and email are the two de facto standard technologies and Facebook is by far the most popular complement to those two. Skype and Twitter are niche phenomenon.
Free software couldn't even stop a government from creating a law that says that free software licenses are null and void.
It's as simple as writing "All software licenses are legal, except those that result in software being free." and translating it into proper legal wording.
I think it's even true in general that there will never be a mainstream technical solution to the problem of bad government.
There has actually been progress in how the protests are carried out. In the 1990's some of the protesters often initiated violence and the majority of protesters did very little to stop it from happening, which gave me the impression that they were basically a bunch of middle-class thrill-seekers, the political equivalent of soccer hooligans.
This year of activism and protest has been something different. These people have, to use Obama's favorite phrase, legitimate grievances. People nice up quickly when they have something to lose. Back in great-grandpa's days in the 1920's and 1930's protesters often made a point of wearing suits and ties to protests.
I'm not saying it will lead to anything, but at least it's legitimate and worth thinking about. Occupy may be gone, but something else will replace it, unless the economy and the job market makes a major recovery in early 2012, which is unlikely.
It's actually a singing, blinking snowman that goes off when you come close. And the LEDs are animated by the sound signal strength, so it's blinking along to whichever tune you have stored on the SD card...
More likely to physically demonstrate the continuity of a powerful government to the people, especially to those who may have been secretly waiting for the transition period to launch a revolt.
Public transit can be great if both your origin and destination is in an urban core of an urban area with enough inhabitants to create a reasonable level of demand. There are plenty of example of good subways, suburban rail, fast conventional rail and HSR around the world.
However, it always be a niche market. At any given point in time only about one fourth to one third of everyone wants to live in the urban core and only about half of the urban core travel is by transit, which means that something like 80-90% of all travel is going to be done by other means, e.g. primarily by car, unless something makes that impossible.
I think the driverless taxi/rental car will eventually kill the private car as a mass market product, but that's my personal speculation.
It's news because it confirmed the rumors that have been floating around the web the last couple of weeks. It looks like there's a decent chance* that the Higgs exists somewhere around 126 GeV.
*Unless you're one of those people who think the chance is either 1 or 0...
I must have misread your post. I thought you meant that the data gathered so far by the LHC can't disprove the existence of the Higgs boson.
So you mean that the LHC is unable to disprove all of the Higgs bosons that have been proposed? That's interesting. Do you have a link to an article about that for the non-physicists among us?
I download tons of completely legal stuff (of course) from various public torrent sites and sometimes share for extended periods of time, so you'd think they would have found my IP.
I don't know, but I think the woman in the clip is referring to the sort of clicking, two-stroke engine like sound that she makes at the end. I don't hear any of that when she speaks normally. Her R:s sound nice and clean.
I occasionally use that sound and I've always assumed that it signals "I'm too lazy/tired/drunk/confused to think properly about what you just said", so you associating it with laziness makes sense, although it could also mean that the person you're speaking with thinks that you're confusing.
A hippie is something else. Cartman in South Park is meant to be a comical character, you know.
why the hell does the top bar only show one thing at a time, its fucking annoying on my 86 mac and its still fucking annoying on my 2011 linux machine. how is me clicking on the taskbar to select a window in "old fashioned" windows style management LESS efficient than clicking on the magic corner and having to squint at reduced windows, and clicking again?
Those reduced windows are enormous compared to any taskbar button or dock icon that I've used. Why should I have to squint at tiny dock icons? Why should I have to limit myself to a tiny fraction of the screen when I'm looking for a window?
mounting filesystems, If I am in the file explorer and click on my windows partition a stupid ass popup comes up and asks me if I want to open it in the file explorer!?! and of course it does not go away unless I click in its general area.
I'll grant you that one. That is annoying.
virtual desktops? as far as I can tell by default they only appear if something is maximized, or you right click on a window and tell it to move, what if I just wanted to click on desktop 2 and open more shit up?
You create virtual desktops in the Activities view by dragging and dropping windows to the dock on the right. The dock behavior is annoying and needs a lot of work, but I like where they're going with it.
adding launchers to the desktop, why for the fucking love of god are modern DE designers opposed to me putting a shortcut to frequently used applications??? again how is it less efficient to double click on a icon vs clicking on the magic G spot bringing up a menu, THEN clicking on it from favorites if its even on your favorites list (which is tiny, and if its not on your favorites list add 2 more clicks and menus)? Hell before I sat down and read how to do this the only way I could get a fucking shortcut on the desktop was to log out of gnome 3 back into gnome 2, put my shit there, log back out then log back in again... fucking fail.
I don't know about you, but I have to click something or hit a keyboard shortcut to get to the desktop (assuming I have at least one window open). How is that more efficient?
Now I know every single bit of this can be customized, which brings me to my final point, why the fuck do I have to install a tweaker tool and mod endless text files to get simple functionality that used to be a GOD DAMED RIGHT CLICK OPTION!
While Gnome3 is not as stupid / broken as KDE4 (which I really hate) its still stupid and broken. A computer interface should be something you really dont have to think about while using it, and ever since installing gnome 3 I have spent more time getting rid of dumb shit poping up out of everywhere impeding what I was doing.
Shit I accidentally bumped that fucking magic spot on the task bar 2 damned times writing this post, shrinking everything down, making me stop everything and select what window I was using. Even the show desktop spot on the windows taskbar goes the fuck away once you move the mouse away.
Oh well guess I will just keep using XFCE.
I haven't had those issues, except for the popups. My main issue with Gnome Shell is that it freezes up on me sometimes, which is why I I'd rather not use it for serious work.
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I'm frequently amazed at the quality of microphones in newer phones. Call quality is usually limited by the codec, not the mic.
There are videos on Youtube taken by cellphones of rock concerts where the audio is both clear and doesn't clip. There are videos on Youtube taken by cellphones of speeches where the person filming is far back in the audience and there's no amplification, yet the recording is good enough that you can listen to the speech.
If you had told me ten years ago that it would be possible to do that with a mainstream consumer electronic device weighing in at 100 grams today I would have been very skeptical.
Friendica, Diaspora and others are already up and running and growing exponentially as we speak, which means that technology-wise we're already on the verge of having a federated social web.
The next problem will be to have a federated social web that is profitable for the people who work to create and maintain it. That's a very, very serious problem by the way. Your federated social web is not really resistant if it depends on Google ads, because that would mean that the whole system would have a single point of failure that a government could exploit by putting pressure on Google to ban ad users that don't behave according to the government's liking.
This has little or nothing to do with fear of liability. Note that the video is shocking and may ruin your day if you're not aware that these sorts of things happen.
So why do multiple people in the same part of town run over a little kid as if it was a pile of dead matter? Well, it says in the article that it was a child of a migrant worker. Racism and the dehumanization processes that go along with it, if left unchecked, makes people do things like this.
Sounds like you need to look up the word 'unpretentious' in a dictionary.
The real value of silver has undergone drastic changes in the past, sometimes because of enormous new finds, sometimes for other reasons.
It's probably better to use "a nice lunch" (as in a good but unpretentious restaurant meal of tasty, nutritious, healthful food, containing about 500 kcal) as your price reference. A meal at a restaurant is both a product and a service, and it contains a range of raw materials. Since the restaurant needs to pay real estate costs it also reflects the housing market.
It's a good idea, but very hard to pull off in practice.
Why? Well, most customers are basically afraid of cables. If you have a technical solution for that you may have a business.
Like someone pointed out below they didn't know that certain wind conditions (basically dust devils) would clean the solar panels periodically. Had they know that I think they might have designed the rovers to last 900 days. NASA made a big PR number about how the solar panels would run out in a few months, which they then didn't thanks to the dust devils.
Now, I wonder if it's possible to make the cleaning events more effective, for example by coating the solar panels with a slippery coating, or by tilting them slightly downwards to make them a bigger target for horizontal winds.
3D is all the makers had to get you to upgrade your set. Once you're on 1080P/Blu-Ray it's pretty much good enough for any kind of viewing you want to do.
I'm looking forward to the new super thin OLED sets: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2012/01/lgs-55-inch-oled-tv-at-ces-to-have-almost-no-bezel.html
A 1080p display only has 2 Mpixels, which might possibly be enough for fast moving images, but it's certainly not perfect for slow scenes in movies, or for still images such as the ones that you can take yourself with a simple point and shoot.
I think we'll see TVs with thousands of lines of pixels. An 80" 3000p or 4000p TV would be perfect for a lot of things.
It's either that, or that consumers are more interested in getting a bigger TV than a smaller 3D TV for the same money. We'll see what happens when TVs hit a size wall.
Also, a lot of what people watch is TV series. We'll see what happens when they start making series in 3D.
If 3D doesn't take of when a 80" TV is $1000 and all the most popular series are available in 3D, then it would be time to declare 3D dead. For now we just can't say.
Marriage has nothing to do with religion; marriage is a commercial contract between long-term sexual partners who live together and have chosen to combine their finances because of the financial benefits that come with such an arrangement. Religions have coopted marriage, beginning with Judaism and Christianity - marriage was not seen as a religious commitment in most early religions.
That's certainly part of it, but the central aspect of marriage is that it used to be the thing that regulated inheritance before we had a functioning monetary economy where inheritances could be divided into pieces easily.
The firstborn son within wedlock would inherit the farm. (Tough luck if you're one of the siblings!) As societies progressed and became more advanced the other children tended to get more and more of the inheritance. Today its almost a global standard that the inheritance is shared equally between all children, inside or outside of wedlock.
Nowadays, for all practical intents and purposes your wedding day is the day your first child is born (if you're still a couple), or the day you buy a house together, or the day you start a family business or another large project together.
Phone, skype and email work just fine internationally....?
If you're feeling minimalist you could probably scratch Skype off that list. If you rank electronic communication technologies by number of active users it's something like:
1. Phone/SMS/MMS ~5 billion active SIM-cards
2. Email ~2 billion users
3. Facebook ~800 million users
4. Twitter ~100 million users
4. Skype ~100 million users
Phone and email are the two de facto standard technologies and Facebook is by far the most popular complement to those two. Skype and Twitter are niche phenomenon.
Free software couldn't even stop a government from creating a law that says that free software licenses are null and void.
It's as simple as writing "All software licenses are legal, except those that result in software being free." and translating it into proper legal wording.
I think it's even true in general that there will never be a mainstream technical solution to the problem of bad government.
The SI unit of mass is actually the kilogram [kg]. If you want to be very anal, a gram is actually a millikilogram and a metric ton is a kilokilogram.
There has actually been progress in how the protests are carried out. In the 1990's some of the protesters often initiated violence and the majority of protesters did very little to stop it from happening, which gave me the impression that they were basically a bunch of middle-class thrill-seekers, the political equivalent of soccer hooligans.
This year of activism and protest has been something different. These people have, to use Obama's favorite phrase, legitimate grievances. People nice up quickly when they have something to lose. Back in great-grandpa's days in the 1920's and 1930's protesters often made a point of wearing suits and ties to protests.
I'm not saying it will lead to anything, but at least it's legitimate and worth thinking about. Occupy may be gone, but something else will replace it, unless the economy and the job market makes a major recovery in early 2012, which is unlikely.
The summary sucks.
It's actually a singing, blinking snowman that goes off when you come close. And the LEDs are animated by the sound signal strength, so it's blinking along to whichever tune you have stored on the SD card...
Looks like a fun project for a beginner.
More likely to physically demonstrate the continuity of a powerful government to the people, especially to those who may have been secretly waiting for the transition period to launch a revolt.
Public transit can be great if both your origin and destination is in an urban core of an urban area with enough inhabitants to create a reasonable level of demand. There are plenty of example of good subways, suburban rail, fast conventional rail and HSR around the world.
However, it always be a niche market. At any given point in time only about one fourth to one third of everyone wants to live in the urban core and only about half of the urban core travel is by transit, which means that something like 80-90% of all travel is going to be done by other means, e.g. primarily by car, unless something makes that impossible.
I think the driverless taxi/rental car will eventually kill the private car as a mass market product, but that's my personal speculation.
One week later: millions resolve to commit Higgs ethnic cleansing.
How's that praying working for you, Mr. God particle?
I agree completely and this feels like a call for personal anecdotes, so here's mine:
When I was 9 my teacher told me to memorize the multiplication tables. *Sigh.*
My mom told me she'd give me a treat for each table I memorized. *Sigh.*
Then my dad showed me some pieces of LEGO and demonstrated to me that a*b = b*a by turning a LEGO brick 90 degrees. *Wow!*
I still don't know my multiplication tables, but I can do a multiplication in my head almost as fast as you can recall the answer.
It's news because it confirmed the rumors that have been floating around the web the last couple of weeks. It looks like there's a decent chance* that the Higgs exists somewhere around 126 GeV.
*Unless you're one of those people who think the chance is either 1 or 0...
I must have misread your post. I thought you meant that the data gathered so far by the LHC can't disprove the existence of the Higgs boson.
So you mean that the LHC is unable to disprove all of the Higgs bosons that have been proposed? That's interesting. Do you have a link to an article about that for the non-physicists among us?
They didn't make any specific claims today, except that there's an energy region that looks quite promising. Read the official press release
Same here. They have nothing on me yet.
I download tons of completely legal stuff (of course) from various public torrent sites and sometimes share for extended periods of time, so you'd think they would have found my IP.
I don't know, but I think the woman in the clip is referring to the sort of clicking, two-stroke engine like sound that she makes at the end. I don't hear any of that when she speaks normally. Her R:s sound nice and clean.
I occasionally use that sound and I've always assumed that it signals "I'm too lazy/tired/drunk/confused to think properly about what you just said", so you associating it with laziness makes sense, although it could also mean that the person you're speaking with thinks that you're confusing.
A hippie is something else. Cartman in South Park is meant to be a comical character, you know.
why the hell does the top bar only show one thing at a time, its fucking annoying on my 86 mac and its still fucking annoying on my 2011 linux machine. how is me clicking on the taskbar to select a window in "old fashioned" windows style management LESS efficient than clicking on the magic corner and having to squint at reduced windows, and clicking again?
Those reduced windows are enormous compared to any taskbar button or dock icon that I've used. Why should I have to squint at tiny dock icons? Why should I have to limit myself to a tiny fraction of the screen when I'm looking for a window?
mounting filesystems, If I am in the file explorer and click on my windows partition a stupid ass popup comes up and asks me if I want to open it in the file explorer!?! and of course it does not go away unless I click in its general area.
I'll grant you that one. That is annoying.
virtual desktops? as far as I can tell by default they only appear if something is maximized, or you right click on a window and tell it to move, what if I just wanted to click on desktop 2 and open more shit up?
You create virtual desktops in the Activities view by dragging and dropping windows to the dock on the right. The dock behavior is annoying and needs a lot of work, but I like where they're going with it.
adding launchers to the desktop, why for the fucking love of god are modern DE designers opposed to me putting a shortcut to frequently used applications??? again how is it less efficient to double click on a icon vs clicking on the magic G spot bringing up a menu, THEN clicking on it from favorites if its even on your favorites list (which is tiny, and if its not on your favorites list add 2 more clicks and menus)? Hell before I sat down and read how to do this the only way I could get a fucking shortcut on the desktop was to log out of gnome 3 back into gnome 2, put my shit there, log back out then log back in again ... fucking fail.
I don't know about you, but I have to click something or hit a keyboard shortcut to get to the desktop (assuming I have at least one window open). How is that more efficient?
Now I know every single bit of this can be customized, which brings me to my final point, why the fuck do I have to install a tweaker tool and mod endless text files to get simple functionality that used to be a GOD DAMED RIGHT CLICK OPTION!
While Gnome3 is not as stupid / broken as KDE4 (which I really hate) its still stupid and broken. A computer interface should be something you really dont have to think about while using it, and ever since installing gnome 3 I have spent more time getting rid of dumb shit poping up out of everywhere impeding what I was doing.
Shit I accidentally bumped that fucking magic spot on the task bar 2 damned times writing this post, shrinking everything down, making me stop everything and select what window I was using. Even the show desktop spot on the windows taskbar goes the fuck away once you move the mouse away.
Oh well guess I will just keep using XFCE.
I haven't had those issues, except for the popups. My main issue with Gnome Shell is that it freezes up on me sometimes, which is why I I'd rather not use it for serious work.