"Look, we can build a VCR *into* the TV, so they're in one unit!"
Yeah, so when either breaks, neither is usable. Putting more points of failure into a device just doesn't sound like a great idea.
In the last 4 computers I've built/had, they've gone through at least 6-7 graphics cards and 5 processors. I can't remember a single one where they both failed simultaneously.
Now, if this tech will reduce the likelihood of CPU/GPU failures (which, IMO, are generally due to heat or less frequently power issues) somehow, then great. But I have a gut reaction against taking two really hot, power-intensive components and jamming them into even closer proximity.
Finally, I'm probably in the minority, but I prefer being able to take my components ala carte. There were many times in the past 25 years that I couldn't afford the best of all components TODAY, so I built a system with a very high-end mobo and CPU, but using my old soundboard, RAM, etc until I could afford individually to replace those components with peer-quality stuff.
OK, then I nominate you for one of the first targets for 'culling'. Have you reproduced? If not, then we can probably just permanently sterilize you. If you have kids, we'll have to eliminate them too.
Oh wait, you have a problem with that? Hm, I wonder why your 'logical' solution isn't pursued?
(Here's a tip: the bulk of population growth and childbearing isn't chasing tax breaks. Hell, even in the US the highest per capita population growth is in population segments that don't even PAY taxes. Sheesh.)
But at the same time, delivering such information with the concurrent subtext "...and you need to believe ME because I'm an 'expert' and you're just a stupid hick. er. 'common folk'..." MATTERS.
You might be an expert, you might also be right. Neither of these disproves you're an asshole, and frankly, whether people listen to you has more to do with the latter than either of the former factors.
I'm curious what the impact of earthquakes in/around the NW would have on the Yellowstone Caldera. Granted, it sounds like the earthquakes in the NW are orders of magnitude more frequent (and less catastrophic) than the eruption of the Yellowstone formation, but it seems likely that one might impact the other, being that they're only what, about 700mi apart?
Pfft. It's almost like you're saying that a lack of IP protection results in a faster pace of development, forcing innovators to move quickly to develop an idea, get it to market, and profit from it (greatly) in the natural lag before someone comes along and copies it cheaply.
Such an idea is, of course, pure craziness. Fashion design must be a marginal business, with very little profit and those poor, poor innovators living in cardboard boxes and eating cat food to stay alive.
Meh. LOST = Gilligan's Island + LSD
on
Lost Ends
·
· Score: 1
I watched the first season, and was absolutely totally hooked by the polar bear. I thought "Wow. Just wow. These guys have the balls to throw COMPLETE curveballs at us and turn the whole story upside down."
Acting was good, ensemble cast was good, setting was of course beautiful, and simply put: I like shows that surprise me. I was all in.
Then...it got LOST. Or I did.
There's a point at which you stop looking for some sort of fantastic storyline that was behind the episodes the whole time, and realize: there isn't one. As Penny Arcade aptly put it (http://www.penny-arcade.com/2006/11/1/): "...he's come to conclusion that there's no story actually being told. He no longer believes that events are happening according to some overarching plan. Watching the show now is apparently awful, because where he once perceived a carefully revealed structure he now just sees a couple guys out back beneath a tarp, flashlights held under the chin."
After season one, they'd run out of stories and were just making shit up, throwing in random disconnected stuff. I believe that they were actually hoping that the internet community might sew it all up with one of their ceaseless speculations.
And that's precisely it. I lost faith that the writers would make sense of it all. There's an investment going on. I give you my time and my attention (after all, it's really just bait to get me to watch the commercials anyway), in exchange for a STORY. It can be happy, or sad, or something in between. But a rather essential part of any story is that it ends. It has some sort of conclusion.* * well, ok unless you're one of those goofy postmodern writers. But that's another rant.
With Lost, it felt like someone just kept slipping pages into the back of the novel, and the plot - such as it was - became more threadbare and tattered as it was stretched to cover more characters, more plot devices, more 'ooh spooky' stuff.
No, I don't watch soap operas for a reason, and by the end of season 2, it was increasingly evident that Lost was merely that.
Only on slashdot would such a screed be rated 'insightful'.
"you were warned back in the 1970s. but you kept funding the saudis, who kept building wahhabi madrassas in pakistan, and you got 9/11. but you still didn't see the writing on the wall. in fact, you thought it was a good excuse to secure some iraqi oil now you're destroying your own shorelines, and still living in denial, still a hopeless rationalizing junkie addict"
So were you one of the ones in the 1970s that warned us about DDT (wrong), Ice Ages (wrong), exhaustion of water resources (wrong), too many people (wrong), widespread famine (wrong), peak oil (wrong)? I think you were the same guys that were meanwhile promoting free love (AIDS), the widespread use of recreational chemicals, and a generally entirely self-centered lifestyle (remember it was YOUR generation that morphed into Gordon Gekko)?
I mean hey, don't let me get in the way of your 20/20 hindsight, but in terms of telling us WHICH sky is falling (today), your predictions have sucked and the things you told us to enjoy have ended up being almost catastrophic.
I don't dispute your comments factually, but "Once the LHC starts producing science data there will be impossible to justify funding for the Tevatron." is just stupid.
By that same logic, we should only have one (the largest, best) astronometric telescope, one (the largest, the best) microscope, etc.
Setting aside, of course, the fact that LHC is, I believe, yet to actually produce science data...the last couple of years have been fairly strong evidence that nobody should assume the LHC is going to run, even if it was firing up TOMORROW.
To me it sounds like the good Dr. has done an admirable job of 'spin control'.
Read her allegations. They are just that, allegations, but dispense with Dr. Evans interpretation of events, and read it for what it is.
Dr. Evans engaged in what most of us would recognize as relatively sophomoric antics and flirtation - repeatedly engaging the complainant in discussions of a sexual nature, about Casanova, and ultimately showing her (I assume with much Junior-high-school snickering) an article on fellatio in Fruit Bats.
It IS possible that all of this was just an unfortunate set of coincidences, showing nothing more than an autistic-level of disconnectedness by Dr. Evans in not understanding the context of the repeated discussions.
Considerably more likely is the Dr. Evans had a serious boner for the alleged victim, and engaged in the sorts of feeble things 7th grade boys would do to try to 'spark' some interest in 'that hot girl' - with arguably similar results...she is shocked, disgusted, and goes running to the teacher crying "GROSS!".
If the subsequent dinner "double date" was accurately represented in the reportage, as well as a YEAR of such antics, she (and the school administration) are entirely vindicated.
I congratulate Dr. Evans on his ability to form a groundswell of public opinion in his behalf by mischaracterizing the event as some sort of Puritanical effort to "stifle academic freedom", a message which rings so readily in the ears of the political leanings of so many here on slashdot that its readily believed contrary to the actual reports. I'm sure he can look forward to many job offers from political parties looking for media consultants.
I'd however recommend to both of them that they perhaps make sure Dr. Evans isn't working with any women.
...actually it's not, it's bullshit, but is anyone surprised?
I'm 43. I grew up through grade school when the Left's dominance in education (in the US) was only really starting to assert itself. This was evident in the rewriting of textbooks, ostensibly to remove gender and ethnic bias, to show that women and blacks contributed in equivalent measure to white males in the founding of the United States.
In high school it became more pronounced, with more and more teachers deliberately pursuing a curriculum of 'alternative' views of history, spending more and more time focussed on the contributions of women and people of color.
Finally in college in the mid-to-late 80's the transformation was, if not complete, advanced to a point of dominance. The entire Liberal Arts (and even, amazingly, the sciences) was dedicated largely to the study of 'little brown babies' more than the widely-disparaged 'dead white males'. Aristotle? Plato? Caesar? Phht..let's spend time dissecting Maya Angelou! Even something as seemingly-neutral as group educational requirements - you need X credits from group A (sciences), Y from B (language), etc. - was PC-biased: the ONLY courses that filled 3+ group requirements (and thus were the most efficient in terms of dollars spent) were, you guessed it, courses like "Native American culture of the 1800's" and "Marxism and Post-Colonial Latin America". One had to look quite hard to even FIND courses that studied the writings of Dead White Males.
As a result, I have two comments about the proposed textbook changes: First - the Left shouldn't be surprised. The Right has started to figure out that conceding education to the Left means children spend much of their school years being indoctrinated, not taught. So the Right is understandably accessing the same tactic. Ironically, where the Left characterizes itself as the populist, revanchist ideology normally, in this case it's the Right that is using populism and appeals to judges to break the lock of the entrenched Left on education.
Secondly - I'd guess that within 5-8 years, the Right will find out this tactic is backfiring. As general education has shifted far more Leftward in the last couple of decades, I sense that (painting with a very broad, generalist brush) that public mood, even among the young and stupid, is shifting reactionarily to the RIGHT. Unsurprising, if one accepts the general view that kids react against the previous generation, and since parents seem to be more often abandoning their responsibilities (forcing teachers to spend more time acting like parents, instead of simply teaching). The Leftward taint of my education contributed significantly to my own strongly Rightist biases, I'd be surprised if a Rightward shift in TX didn't produce a similar Leftward shift in the youth being taught.
"These politicians digging into the judge candidate's background and demanding every brain fart of the candidate's past are all assholes. They are transparent chickenshit party hacks of a corrupt and bankrupt political system. They have some minor importance now, but they won't in future. All they will have then is the eternal hatred and contempt of the people trying to live with the consequences of their stupidity."
Your screed would be more persuasive if we didn't live in a democracy.
If we don't like them, why did we vote in the transparent chickenshit party hacks?
And you can't spell 'appliance' without an a, p, p, l, and e.
Hasn't this just been the whole ethos behind Apple, like, forever?
Simplify, ease the user experience, simultaneously reducing flexibility BUT ALSO making the useful functions that much better/easier/simpler to accomplish?
And I'm sure, as a founding member of the New Energy Congress, it's impossible that he's got some other motivation to criticize Old Energy (ie oil), right?
Here's what concerns me: "...And with iPods and iPads; and Xboxes and PlayStations -- none of which I know how to work..."
Here's a man born 1961 - he's 49 years old.
This is not a senior citizen. He'd have been a senior in high school when home computers just started to appear. He'd have been going to college throughout the heydey of video game arcades, and gone to college and worked on his advanced law school stuff with discussions of the NES amongst his peers.
Yet he could exist through all of this - so focused on his progress, so OCD about whatever he was doing - without noticing videogames?
Moreover, he could be a young adult through this whole period, and reach the highest political office in the land (so clearly no dummy, whether you agree with him or not), and not only be ignorant of really quite common technology completely, but be able to toss out the chuckle-line of 'none of which I know how to work'?
Seriously?
Think about that. I know this is a tech-obsessed audience. But I'm 43, and while I occasionally put on the rose-colored specs of 'ah, the simple life before computers', I don't SERIOUSLY imagine that I could be nearly as productive, entertained, and informed as I am today without these devices.
Honestly, this is the sort of statement that comes out of some ancient Senator that's been holding his seat since Reconstruction.
No kidding that his viewpoint is dismissive; I'm only shocked that so many people are talking here about what he said, and not recognizing how insulated and detached a 49-year-old American man would have to be to make such an absurd assertion.
You're right, that would take some sort of crazy happenstance, like some former has-been politician understanding that his way back into the limelight was to find some fringe ecological theory and spin it up to 'potential catastrophe' proportions.
Of course, he'd need a whole host of political fellow-travelers who would cheerfully manipulate data in all sorts of arcane ways to generate the sort of results he needs. But that's ok, they wouldn't have to be quite as careful as you'd think, since the academics who would be reviewing this arcana are probably going to be sympathetic, and anyone who DOES disagree, well, he could find something to taint them, couldn't he?
He'd probably have to find an institution that would stand behind this data, to give it credibility.
Nah, that's impossible. It would take some sort of collusion of the bulk of the mainstream media to get away with a scam that big; there's no way that journalists would swallow something like that comepletely.......is there?
You're nearly right..."From my perspective as an outsider who does catch a fair bit of America-centric media, the problem the US is having isn't that its citizenry doesn't care. It's that there are several extremely loud contingents of the population that are misinformed, not uninformed. And those groups are also being used by embedded interests."
The problem is that these loud segments are a tiny, tiny proportion of the population, and shout at each other across the vast gulf of the uncaring majority.
Barely half of Americans even BOTHER to vote, and are increasingly turned off by the rhetoric from both sides. I mean look: GW Bush invades another country based on a publicly-stated premise; this premise turns out to be as far as anyone can tell, entirely untrue. The right reflexively defends him while the left castigates him. OTOH, you have examples like ACORN - the organization that was the proud basis of our President's 'community organizer' resume, caught on video repeatedly grossly and obviously helping people to break the law...the left reflexively defends it, the right castigates it.
Truly, there's no thought any more. If it's "My Guy!" he's right, and those other bastards are lying. If it's "Your guy" he's clearly a criminal and you guys are desperately trying to cover it up. We all just jerk our knees in different directions, depending on the stimuli.
What's tangentially interesting is that you've succumbed to it, even from the PoV of an outsider. Notice you talk about "several extremely loud contingents of the population that are misinformed"..what if they aren't misinformed? Is it possible that they are in fact just as well-informed as you, but simply reach DIFFERENT conclusions from that data?
This is the real world. Not every problem has only one answer. Until we recognize that, and see our political opposites as DECENT people who are just as interested in creating a solution as we are (except the the politically exploitative on both sides, of course), and credit them the basic respect they're entitled to as citizens in this country, we simply can't ever get back to reasonable constructive discourse.
Meh, I'd say it's similar generally, but significantly better.
All you do here is dope the wound with some pigment to enhance the excitation of collagen bonding in the wound itself; in a sense you're taking the mechanism of wound-healing, and simply speeding it up.
Quik-clot, a great tool by the way, adds EXTERNAL substance(s) that promote quick clotting. Sure in the former you're adding a pink dye, but the amount of external (ie possibly rejection-inducing and complication-causing) material is substantially less with the new method. That's a great thing, since the main problem is that risk.
It says nothing more or less than that programmers are people growing up with the same entitlement mentality that let's peole think they have a 'right' to a job or a 'right' to broadband.
Why is anyone surprised at this? Feed a kid twinkies all day and he's fat. This is the exact equivalent.
IANARS, but "extract water in an environment lacking gravity" doesn't seem like that hard of a problem.
Water's a fairly easy substance to deal with - nonexplosive, liquid at easily reachable temps, possibly bound in the asteroid in nothing more significantly complex than an ice conglomerate.
Crushing/pulverizing the regolith and then tossing the mess into a gentle screen centrifuge with even moderate heating (ie above 0 deg C) would seem to do the trick - the water would just flow out the centrifuge walls...wouldn't even have to be 'batched' but could run as a constant process. The spin rate wouldn't even have to be significant, just enough to let inertia do its thing and force the water from the slurry.
At least to my ignorance, this seems at least an order of magnitude LESS difficult/dangerous than electrolysis in zero-g, something we've (AFAIK) got a pretty solid grasp of.
A screenshot does not mean the game was being played on the ipad. A screenshot means only that it was running, and in particular that they only showed the login screen was telling.
A few points: - notice that the ipod is running something under 1 frame per second. Perhaps 0.25 fps. That's...suboptimal. I don't care to look up the specs, but I don't know that the ipad has THAT much more of a CPU than the ipod, certainly not if you consider how many more pixels have to be pushed through its system for every frame of action. (And WoW is itself NOT graphically cutting-edge, further it is notoriously processor-hungry meaning even on high-powered machines with cutting-edge graphics its performance is capped more by the cumulative load on the cpu than anything else.) - note that the ipod example is choking on simply load screens and sitting in the most abandoned, empty, low-demand (systemwise) city in the game. - the background music for the video seems to be "I can't escape this hell, I can't escape this nightmare" which might be an apropos if ironic comment on the "ipad is god's gift to computing" that Jobs & Co seem to be promulgating.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like a non-advancement to me.
"Look, we can build a VCR *into* the TV, so they're in one unit!"
Yeah, so when either breaks, neither is usable.
Putting more points of failure into a device just doesn't sound like a great idea.
In the last 4 computers I've built/had, they've gone through at least 6-7 graphics cards and 5 processors. I can't remember a single one where they both failed simultaneously.
Now, if this tech will reduce the likelihood of CPU/GPU failures (which, IMO, are generally due to heat or less frequently power issues) somehow, then great. But I have a gut reaction against taking two really hot, power-intensive components and jamming them into even closer proximity.
Finally, I'm probably in the minority, but I prefer being able to take my components ala carte. There were many times in the past 25 years that I couldn't afford the best of all components TODAY, so I built a system with a very high-end mobo and CPU, but using my old soundboard, RAM, etc until I could afford individually to replace those components with peer-quality stuff.
Considering that they're going to be in there for 500 days, would you bother asking?
OK, then I nominate you for one of the first targets for 'culling'. Have you reproduced? If not, then we can probably just permanently sterilize you. If you have kids, we'll have to eliminate them too.
Oh wait, you have a problem with that? Hm, I wonder why your 'logical' solution isn't pursued?
(Here's a tip: the bulk of population growth and childbearing isn't chasing tax breaks. Hell, even in the US the highest per capita population growth is in population segments that don't even PAY taxes. Sheesh.)
Perhaps.
But at the same time, delivering such information with the concurrent subtext "...and you need to believe ME because I'm an 'expert' and you're just a stupid hick. er. 'common folk'..." MATTERS.
You might be an expert, you might also be right. Neither of these disproves you're an asshole, and frankly, whether people listen to you has more to do with the latter than either of the former factors.
I'm curious what the impact of earthquakes in/around the NW would have on the Yellowstone Caldera.
Granted, it sounds like the earthquakes in the NW are orders of magnitude more frequent (and less catastrophic) than the eruption of the Yellowstone formation, but it seems likely that one might impact the other, being that they're only what, about 700mi apart?
Pfft. It's almost like you're saying that a lack of IP protection results in a faster pace of development, forcing innovators to move quickly to develop an idea, get it to market, and profit from it (greatly) in the natural lag before someone comes along and copies it cheaply.
Such an idea is, of course, pure craziness. Fashion design must be a marginal business, with very little profit and those poor, poor innovators living in cardboard boxes and eating cat food to stay alive.
I watched the first season, and was absolutely totally hooked by the polar bear. I thought "Wow. Just wow. These guys have the balls to throw COMPLETE curveballs at us and turn the whole story upside down."
Acting was good, ensemble cast was good, setting was of course beautiful, and simply put: I like shows that surprise me. I was all in.
Then...it got LOST. Or I did.
There's a point at which you stop looking for some sort of fantastic storyline that was behind the episodes the whole time, and realize: there isn't one. As Penny Arcade aptly put it (http://www.penny-arcade.com/2006/11/1/): "...he's come to conclusion that there's no story actually being told. He no longer believes that events are happening according to some overarching plan. Watching the show now is apparently awful, because where he once perceived a carefully revealed structure he now just sees a couple guys out back beneath a tarp, flashlights held under the chin."
After season one, they'd run out of stories and were just making shit up, throwing in random disconnected stuff. I believe that they were actually hoping that the internet community might sew it all up with one of their ceaseless speculations.
And that's precisely it. I lost faith that the writers would make sense of it all. There's an investment going on. I give you my time and my attention (after all, it's really just bait to get me to watch the commercials anyway), in exchange for a STORY. It can be happy, or sad, or something in between. But a rather essential part of any story is that it ends. It has some sort of conclusion.*
* well, ok unless you're one of those goofy postmodern writers. But that's another rant.
With Lost, it felt like someone just kept slipping pages into the back of the novel, and the plot - such as it was - became more threadbare and tattered as it was stretched to cover more characters, more plot devices, more 'ooh spooky' stuff.
No, I don't watch soap operas for a reason, and by the end of season 2, it was increasingly evident that Lost was merely that.
No, I'm serious.
If nothing else, the frothing nerdrage here on slashdot could now be tapped as a viable alternative energy source.
Only on slashdot would such a screed be rated 'insightful'.
"you were warned back in the 1970s. but you kept funding the saudis, who kept building wahhabi madrassas in pakistan, and you got 9/11. but you still didn't see the writing on the wall. in fact, you thought it was a good excuse to secure some iraqi oil
now you're destroying your own shorelines, and still living in denial, still a hopeless rationalizing junkie addict"
So were you one of the ones in the 1970s that warned us about DDT (wrong), Ice Ages (wrong), exhaustion of water resources (wrong), too many people (wrong), widespread famine (wrong), peak oil (wrong)? I think you were the same guys that were meanwhile promoting free love (AIDS), the widespread use of recreational chemicals, and a generally entirely self-centered lifestyle (remember it was YOUR generation that morphed into Gordon Gekko)?
I mean hey, don't let me get in the way of your 20/20 hindsight, but in terms of telling us WHICH sky is falling (today), your predictions have sucked and the things you told us to enjoy have ended up being almost catastrophic.
Pardon me if nobody's listening to your froth.
LOL, I find it ironic that you also shared "This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed."
I don't dispute your comments factually, but "Once the LHC starts producing science data there will be impossible to justify funding for the Tevatron." is just stupid.
By that same logic, we should only have one (the largest, best) astronometric telescope, one (the largest, the best) microscope, etc.
Setting aside, of course, the fact that LHC is, I believe, yet to actually produce science data...the last couple of years have been fairly strong evidence that nobody should assume the LHC is going to run, even if it was firing up TOMORROW.
To me it sounds like the good Dr. has done an admirable job of 'spin control'.
Read her allegations. They are just that, allegations, but dispense with Dr. Evans interpretation of events, and read it for what it is.
Dr. Evans engaged in what most of us would recognize as relatively sophomoric antics and flirtation - repeatedly engaging the complainant in discussions of a sexual nature, about Casanova, and ultimately showing her (I assume with much Junior-high-school snickering) an article on fellatio in Fruit Bats.
It IS possible that all of this was just an unfortunate set of coincidences, showing nothing more than an autistic-level of disconnectedness by Dr. Evans in not understanding the context of the repeated discussions.
Considerably more likely is the Dr. Evans had a serious boner for the alleged victim, and engaged in the sorts of feeble things 7th grade boys would do to try to 'spark' some interest in 'that hot girl' - with arguably similar results...she is shocked, disgusted, and goes running to the teacher crying "GROSS!".
If the subsequent dinner "double date" was accurately represented in the reportage, as well as a YEAR of such antics, she (and the school administration) are entirely vindicated.
I congratulate Dr. Evans on his ability to form a groundswell of public opinion in his behalf by mischaracterizing the event as some sort of Puritanical effort to "stifle academic freedom", a message which rings so readily in the ears of the political leanings of so many here on slashdot that its readily believed contrary to the actual reports. I'm sure he can look forward to many job offers from political parties looking for media consultants.
I'd however recommend to both of them that they perhaps make sure Dr. Evans isn't working with any women.
...actually it's not, it's bullshit, but is anyone surprised?
I'm 43.
I grew up through grade school when the Left's dominance in education (in the US) was only really starting to assert itself. This was evident in the rewriting of textbooks, ostensibly to remove gender and ethnic bias, to show that women and blacks contributed in equivalent measure to white males in the founding of the United States.
In high school it became more pronounced, with more and more teachers deliberately pursuing a curriculum of 'alternative' views of history, spending more and more time focussed on the contributions of women and people of color.
Finally in college in the mid-to-late 80's the transformation was, if not complete, advanced to a point of dominance. The entire Liberal Arts (and even, amazingly, the sciences) was dedicated largely to the study of 'little brown babies' more than the widely-disparaged 'dead white males'. Aristotle? Plato? Caesar? Phht..let's spend time dissecting Maya Angelou! Even something as seemingly-neutral as group educational requirements - you need X credits from group A (sciences), Y from B (language), etc. - was PC-biased: the ONLY courses that filled 3+ group requirements (and thus were the most efficient in terms of dollars spent) were, you guessed it, courses like "Native American culture of the 1800's" and "Marxism and Post-Colonial Latin America". One had to look quite hard to even FIND courses that studied the writings of Dead White Males.
As a result, I have two comments about the proposed textbook changes:
First - the Left shouldn't be surprised. The Right has started to figure out that conceding education to the Left means children spend much of their school years being indoctrinated, not taught. So the Right is understandably accessing the same tactic. Ironically, where the Left characterizes itself as the populist, revanchist ideology normally, in this case it's the Right that is using populism and appeals to judges to break the lock of the entrenched Left on education.
Secondly - I'd guess that within 5-8 years, the Right will find out this tactic is backfiring. As general education has shifted far more Leftward in the last couple of decades, I sense that (painting with a very broad, generalist brush) that public mood, even among the young and stupid, is shifting reactionarily to the RIGHT. Unsurprising, if one accepts the general view that kids react against the previous generation, and since parents seem to be more often abandoning their responsibilities (forcing teachers to spend more time acting like parents, instead of simply teaching). The Leftward taint of my education contributed significantly to my own strongly Rightist biases, I'd be surprised if a Rightward shift in TX didn't produce a similar Leftward shift in the youth being taught.
"These politicians digging into the judge candidate's background and demanding every brain fart of the candidate's past are all assholes. They are transparent chickenshit party hacks of a corrupt and bankrupt political system. They have some minor importance now, but they won't in future. All they will have then is the eternal hatred and contempt of the people trying to live with the consequences of their stupidity."
Your screed would be more persuasive if we didn't live in a democracy.
If we don't like them, why did we vote in the transparent chickenshit party hacks?
And you can't spell 'appliance' without an a, p, p, l, and e.
Hasn't this just been the whole ethos behind Apple, like, forever?
Simplify, ease the user experience, simultaneously reducing flexibility BUT ALSO making the useful functions that much better/easier/simpler to accomplish?
And I'm sure, as a founding member of the New Energy Congress, it's impossible that he's got some other motivation to criticize Old Energy (ie oil), right?
"It isn't the woman who has to risk the next twenty or more years of their financial lives if a pregnancy takes place."
I know there must have been in the history of slashdot a more staggeringly selfish statement, but I don't think I've ever seen it.
You're right - those silly women are sacrificing their bodies and the next twenty years of their ACTUAL lives (not just financially).
I'm not saying that some women don't play that game to hook a wealthy/powerful male, but still, your comment is stunning.
1) get a man to care about contraception ...
2)
3) (still waiting for #1)
Here's what concerns me: "...And with iPods and iPads; and Xboxes and PlayStations -- none of which I know how to work..."
Here's a man born 1961 - he's 49 years old.
This is not a senior citizen. He'd have been a senior in high school when home computers just started to appear. He'd have been going to college throughout the heydey of video game arcades, and gone to college and worked on his advanced law school stuff with discussions of the NES amongst his peers.
Yet he could exist through all of this - so focused on his progress, so OCD about whatever he was doing - without noticing videogames?
Moreover, he could be a young adult through this whole period, and reach the highest political office in the land (so clearly no dummy, whether you agree with him or not), and not only be ignorant of really quite common technology completely, but be able to toss out the chuckle-line of 'none of which I know how to work'?
Seriously?
Think about that. I know this is a tech-obsessed audience. But I'm 43, and while I occasionally put on the rose-colored specs of 'ah, the simple life before computers', I don't SERIOUSLY imagine that I could be nearly as productive, entertained, and informed as I am today without these devices.
Honestly, this is the sort of statement that comes out of some ancient Senator that's been holding his seat since Reconstruction.
No kidding that his viewpoint is dismissive; I'm only shocked that so many people are talking here about what he said, and not recognizing how insulated and detached a 49-year-old American man would have to be to make such an absurd assertion.
You're right, that would take some sort of crazy happenstance, like some former has-been politician understanding that his way back into the limelight was to find some fringe ecological theory and spin it up to 'potential catastrophe' proportions.
Of course, he'd need a whole host of political fellow-travelers who would cheerfully manipulate data in all sorts of arcane ways to generate the sort of results he needs. But that's ok, they wouldn't have to be quite as careful as you'd think, since the academics who would be reviewing this arcana are probably going to be sympathetic, and anyone who DOES disagree, well, he could find something to taint them, couldn't he?
He'd probably have to find an institution that would stand behind this data, to give it credibility.
Nah, that's impossible. It would take some sort of collusion of the bulk of the mainstream media to get away with a scam that big; there's no way that journalists would swallow something like that comepletely.... ...is there?
You're nearly right..."From my perspective as an outsider who does catch a fair bit of America-centric media, the problem the US is having isn't that its citizenry doesn't care. It's that there are several extremely loud contingents of the population that are misinformed, not uninformed.
And those groups are also being used by embedded interests."
The problem is that these loud segments are a tiny, tiny proportion of the population, and shout at each other across the vast gulf of the uncaring majority.
Barely half of Americans even BOTHER to vote, and are increasingly turned off by the rhetoric from both sides. I mean look: GW Bush invades another country based on a publicly-stated premise; this premise turns out to be as far as anyone can tell, entirely untrue. The right reflexively defends him while the left castigates him. OTOH, you have examples like ACORN - the organization that was the proud basis of our President's 'community organizer' resume, caught on video repeatedly grossly and obviously helping people to break the law...the left reflexively defends it, the right castigates it.
Truly, there's no thought any more. If it's "My Guy!" he's right, and those other bastards are lying. If it's "Your guy" he's clearly a criminal and you guys are desperately trying to cover it up. We all just jerk our knees in different directions, depending on the stimuli.
What's tangentially interesting is that you've succumbed to it, even from the PoV of an outsider. Notice you talk about "several extremely loud contingents of the population that are misinformed"..what if they aren't misinformed? Is it possible that they are in fact just as well-informed as you, but simply reach DIFFERENT conclusions from that data?
This is the real world. Not every problem has only one answer. Until we recognize that, and see our political opposites as DECENT people who are just as interested in creating a solution as we are (except the the politically exploitative on both sides, of course), and credit them the basic respect they're entitled to as citizens in this country, we simply can't ever get back to reasonable constructive discourse.
Meh, I'd say it's similar generally, but significantly better.
All you do here is dope the wound with some pigment to enhance the excitation of collagen bonding in the wound itself; in a sense you're taking the mechanism of wound-healing, and simply speeding it up.
Quik-clot, a great tool by the way, adds EXTERNAL substance(s) that promote quick clotting. Sure in the former you're adding a pink dye, but the amount of external (ie possibly rejection-inducing and complication-causing) material is substantially less with the new method. That's a great thing, since the main problem is that risk.
It says nothing more or less than that programmers are people growing up with the same entitlement mentality that let's peole think they have a 'right' to a job or a 'right' to broadband.
Why is anyone surprised at this? Feed a kid twinkies all day and he's fat. This is the exact equivalent.
IANARS, but "extract water in an environment lacking gravity" doesn't seem like that hard of a problem.
Water's a fairly easy substance to deal with - nonexplosive, liquid at easily reachable temps, possibly bound in the asteroid in nothing more significantly complex than an ice conglomerate.
Crushing/pulverizing the regolith and then tossing the mess into a gentle screen centrifuge with even moderate heating (ie above 0 deg C) would seem to do the trick - the water would just flow out the centrifuge walls...wouldn't even have to be 'batched' but could run as a constant process. The spin rate wouldn't even have to be significant, just enough to let inertia do its thing and force the water from the slurry.
At least to my ignorance, this seems at least an order of magnitude LESS difficult/dangerous than electrolysis in zero-g, something we've (AFAIK) got a pretty solid grasp of.
What am I missing?
A screenshot does not mean the game was being played on the ipad.
A screenshot means only that it was running, and in particular that they only showed the login screen was telling.
Here is WoW running on an ipod: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_PhqNgTKqI, so even the fact it's running under this engine is utterly not "news".
A few points:
- notice that the ipod is running something under 1 frame per second. Perhaps 0.25 fps. That's...suboptimal. I don't care to look up the specs, but I don't know that the ipad has THAT much more of a CPU than the ipod, certainly not if you consider how many more pixels have to be pushed through its system for every frame of action. (And WoW is itself NOT graphically cutting-edge, further it is notoriously processor-hungry meaning even on high-powered machines with cutting-edge graphics its performance is capped more by the cumulative load on the cpu than anything else.)
- note that the ipod example is choking on simply load screens and sitting in the most abandoned, empty, low-demand (systemwise) city in the game.
- the background music for the video seems to be "I can't escape this hell, I can't escape this nightmare" which might be an apropos if ironic comment on the "ipad is god's gift to computing" that Jobs & Co seem to be promulgating.