The 3.5 cents/kwh you see for a modern power plant is for the cost at the plant, not to the customer. You have to add in the costs of supporting the network, billing, and transmission losses.
Solar power at your house for 5 cents/kwh is a lot cheaper than 3.5 cents/kwh a hundred miles away (which ends up being about three times that to the customer).
There's a bad habit among some game designers. They use friends and "nice" people to playtest their games.
You have to include idiots and assholes in your test sequence. You need to have That Guy - the rules lawyer, the "I didn't mean to do that" fellow, the "I don't understand this" twit. And you need to build your system to shut them out when it's done. For MMORPGs, you need the sort who will get a medium-powered character and hunt down the newbies. You need a complete lunatic for driving games ("why can't I drive across the river here?"). You need a tactical asshole, who will camp on a resurrection point in a shootemup.
(The idea of "idiot testing" was laid out quite nicely by Steve Jackson about 25 years ago, in "Game Design: Theory and Practice"). It was about board games, but the concept holds even more for online games.
The problem is that too many people who try to design games get really, really serious about "doing it right" while ignoring playability. Having an "accurate" game or a fast-playing one isn't nearly as important as the replay urge. Look at the recent re-release of classic games (fer chrissake, they're putting out Atari 2600 systems again!).
Playtesting is deeply important, and if your testers aren't finishing their sessions with a lot of "that's a lot of fun," you need to start again.
Every game-design disaster I've seen has been easy to predict well in advance.
CBS has since come out with a new justification for the documents, in which they admit that they didn't have any actual experts check them out, but instead asked some anonymous sources if those memos were the sorts of things the guy might have written.
CBS verified the authenticity of the documents by talking to individuals who had seen the documents at the time they were written. These individuals were close associates of Colonel Jerry Killian and confirm that the documents reflect his opinions at the time the documents were written.
In other words, CBS didn't actually check to see if they were forged.
Of course, other documents from the same guy just a little later say that Bush was doing fine and made no mention of the forged memos.
Says someone who used to have to type things on actual old typewriters in those days, including on military machines.
And before you buy into the "it's real" line too much, you need to explain away why the document is *precisely* like a Word document, down to the superscript and the curly apostrophe.
The only machines that could have turned out something like that would have been insanely expensive, and would not have been found in a minor National Guard unit in the early 1970s. Heck, they'd probably only have *manual* machines, much less multi-thousand dollar typesetting equipment.
See the comment you replied to but obviously didn't read.
Multiple generations of copying/faxing would "stagger" the edges of the letters.
On the other hand, which typewriter sold could make a paragraph that looks *precisely* like a document typed up in Word, all the way down to the kerning, the superscript and the curly apostrophe?
When you include noise from multiple generations (used to make it look more "real"), you get uneven baselines with *any* document.
But you can't explain why the document, when compared with a default Word document, has such an extreme similarity in everything from spacking to kerning to superscript letters...
One memo is really, really obviously typed up in MS Word (when you use the default settings, you get a document that looks precisely like the memo in question, all the way down to the default superscript "th").
While some parts of the military might have had really cool equipment, it's safe to say that an early 1970s National Guard unit wouldn't have a copy of Word floating about.
...that were a horrible pain to work with, and nobody in their right mind would ever try to use one to write memos on.
Not to mention, of course, that there weren't any typewriters of this sort that used a superscript small "th" like the example in the one memo.
On the other hand, if you enter the text into Microsoft Word in its default settings, you get a document that looks *exactly* like the memo in question, down to the kerning and superscript.
Ditto for some of the others, with minor exceptions (set the margins different, some extra spaces to make the paragraphs line up).
Consider also that these memos are from a guy who died a while back, who wrote in *other* documents about how great George Bush was as a young officer, and that there were issues with abbreviations and date formats in some of the memos (not standard military usage, which is pretty standard).
The sysadmin from the NYC Indymedia site is the one who's under investigation for hacking the Protest Warrior site and disseminating their full mailing list.
In this case, NYC Indy is neck-deep in it, and it's getting deeper.
One of the major contributors to Indymedia is the Tides Foundation. The Heinz family (yes, Teresa's bunch) has given the Tides folks $4 million over the last few years.
How convenient....calling them "grassroots" when they're being funded by a deep-pockets political machine like the Tides Foundation is, well, wrong.
...but since Indymedia has a habit of deleting messages on a regular basis because they disagree with the content, they had the obligation to delete this info from their boards. Instead, they left it up.
If they were truly uninvolved, the post would have been deleted a few minutes later, and the poster would have been banned. Try posting some illegally-obtained info on Slashdot, and see how long it stays up.
You only get the "anonymity" and "open posting" protections when you don't control the content.
More specifically, since it was posted by a particular user, who had stolen that info, they now have a duty to help the authorities find the felon who did the crime.
Modern video projectors are much, much brighter than 35 mm slide projectors ever were. You can get a couple of thousand lumens out of a box you can fit in your briefcase, and the large venue projectors toss out 17,000 lumens or so. Even a "medium" projector will embarrass any normal slide projector you can name, and gives the monster transparency machines a run for their money (think overhead projector films with a honking big light source and a large lens).
As others have mentioned, the Dataton system makes it reasonably easy to put arbitrarily high resolutions on a screen (I've heard of 8000+ pixel wide setups). The big technical hurdle is now the screens themselves. It's a pain in the ass to make a seamless screen much bigger than 20 feet or so wide (the biggest rear projection screen I've worked on was in the 36 foot range, trust me on this),
By the way - with a projector designed for large venues, aligning two or more projectors to within a pixel or so isn't that hard (almost all LCD and DLP type projectors have worse misalignments between R/G/B in their optical system anyway). At the scales we're discussing, you just have to be able to accurately shift the projector itself by 1/8" or so (a 1920 pixel wide image on a 20 foot wide screen gives pixels about that size). We usually spend more time doing color balance between machines than we do in the geometry tweaks.
Movable Type Free (Unsupported License) Not willing to pay for Movable Type yet? This fully-functional version of the application is available free of charge. Important limitations of this license include: No support from Six Apart No access to paid installation service No access to fee-based services No promotion of your weblogs through the Recently Updated list No commercial usage No more than one author and three weblogs
In other words, pretty much the same "free" usage as before. If you need MT for multiple authors, it's not expensive.
If you need MT for commercial use, it's only a couple of hundred bucks.
...except that pretty much everything you wrote in your post is wrong. You might try and look up *where* Hussein got his chemical weapons, for one thing (not from the US, but from European countries), and among military suppliers, the US comes in way down the list (at about 1/30 of what the Soviet Union sold Iraq in the same time period, for example).
I have one odd little hobby... I collect foreign language dictionaries. One of the funny things you notice when you browse through languages is that the less "sopisticated" ones have fewer color words. Some of the lesser-known tribal languages have one word that stands for both blue and green, because the difference is really not very important to the average guy living way out in the middle of nowhere.
The more urban/technical a culture is, the more words for color the average person knows.
1) Actually, Lomborg's reasoning is quite sound and not hard to follow, and is mostly based on dismantling the assumptions made in the horribly bad "science" of Global Warming.
2) There are thousands of environmental researchers out there in the world right now studying climate change, and many of them would have no jobs in the environmental field if they weren't working on GW. Add in the hundreds to thousands of people who are getting quite healthy paychecks running things like the Kyoto Treaty effort, and you're going to find literally *billions* in paychecks going to "research and fight" Global Warming. This is very different from when I was in environmental science back in the late 1970s, when you had to search long and hard to find any job at all.
3) Lomborg's work was in analyzing the material put forward by environmental researchers to support GW, and he found large, gaping holes in it in many places. It's not the meta-analysis so popular in a lot of fields, it's direct commentary on bad science, very similar to the theoretical physics work done to dismantle cold fusion.
The big problem with Lomborg's "science" is that the work done by the GW researchers that was so flawed. Look at the recent scientific collapse of the "hockey stick" graph in the IPCC report.
It's also very funny that you, as a physicist, complain about an economist working outside of his field when you're also doing the same thing in analyzing his work...
...people have made monster photographs from multiple negatives for a very long time. If you're doing to "many photos equals one" stunt, you're going to have to get into the hundred gigapixel range.
Slashdot Mirror
The 3.5 cents/kwh you see for a modern power plant is for the cost at the plant, not to the customer. You have to add in the costs of supporting the network, billing, and transmission losses.
Solar power at your house for 5 cents/kwh is a lot cheaper than 3.5 cents/kwh a hundred miles away (which ends up being about three times that to the customer).
An absence of input is also input.
There's a bad habit among some game designers. They use friends and "nice" people to playtest their games.
You have to include idiots and assholes in your test sequence. You need to have That Guy - the rules lawyer, the "I didn't mean to do that" fellow, the "I don't understand this" twit. And you need to build your system to shut them out when it's done. For MMORPGs, you need the sort who will get a medium-powered character and hunt down the newbies. You need a complete lunatic for driving games ("why can't I drive across the river here?"). You need a tactical asshole, who will camp on a resurrection point in a shootemup.
(The idea of "idiot testing" was laid out quite nicely by Steve Jackson about 25 years ago, in "Game Design: Theory and Practice"). It was about board games, but the concept holds even more for online games.
The problem is that too many people who try to design games get really, really serious about "doing it right" while ignoring playability. Having an "accurate" game or a fast-playing one isn't nearly as important as the replay urge. Look at the recent re-release of classic games (fer chrissake, they're putting out Atari 2600 systems again!).
Playtesting is deeply important, and if your testers aren't finishing their sessions with a lot of "that's a lot of fun," you need to start again.
Every game-design disaster I've seen has been easy to predict well in advance.
CBS has since come out with a new justification for the documents, in which they admit that they didn't have any actual experts check them out, but instead asked some anonymous sources if those memos were the sorts of things the guy might have written.
CBS verified the authenticity of the documents by talking to individuals who had seen the documents at the time they were written. These individuals were close associates of Colonel Jerry Killian and confirm that the documents reflect his opinions at the time the documents were written.
In other words, CBS didn't actually check to see if they were forged. Of course, other documents from the same guy just a little later say that Bush was doing fine and made no mention of the forged memos.
Says someone who used to have to type things on actual old typewriters in those days, including on military machines.
And before you buy into the "it's real" line too much, you need to explain away why the document is *precisely* like a Word document, down to the superscript and the curly apostrophe.
The only machines that could have turned out something like that would have been insanely expensive, and would not have been found in a minor National Guard unit in the early 1970s. Heck, they'd probably only have *manual* machines, much less multi-thousand dollar typesetting equipment.
See the comment you replied to but obviously didn't read.
Multiple generations of copying/faxing would "stagger" the edges of the letters.
On the other hand, which typewriter sold could make a paragraph that looks *precisely* like a document typed up in Word, all the way down to the kerning, the superscript and the curly apostrophe?
...or photocopying a lot of times.
When you include noise from multiple generations (used to make it look more "real"), you get uneven baselines with *any* document.
But you can't explain why the document, when compared with a default Word document, has such an extreme similarity in everything from spacking to kerning to superscript letters...
One memo is really, really obviously typed up in MS Word (when you use the default settings, you get a document that looks precisely like the memo in question, all the way down to the default superscript "th").
While some parts of the military might have had really cool equipment, it's safe to say that an early 1970s National Guard unit wouldn't have a copy of Word floating about.
...that were a horrible pain to work with, and nobody in their right mind would ever try to use one to write memos on.
Not to mention, of course, that there weren't any typewriters of this sort that used a superscript small "th" like the example in the one memo.
On the other hand, if you enter the text into Microsoft Word in its default settings, you get a document that looks *exactly* like the memo in question, down to the kerning and superscript.
Ditto for some of the others, with minor exceptions (set the margins different, some extra spaces to make the paragraphs line up).
Consider also that these memos are from a guy who died a while back, who wrote in *other* documents about how great George Bush was as a young officer, and that there were issues with abbreviations and date formats in some of the memos (not standard military usage, which is pretty standard).
The sysadmin from the NYC Indymedia site is the one who's under investigation for hacking the Protest Warrior site and disseminating their full mailing list.
In this case, NYC Indy is neck-deep in it, and it's getting deeper.
One of the major contributors to Indymedia is the Tides Foundation. The Heinz family (yes, Teresa's bunch) has given the Tides folks $4 million over the last few years.
...calling them "grassroots" when they're being funded by a deep-pockets political machine like the Tides Foundation is, well, wrong.
How convenient.
...but since Indymedia has a habit of deleting messages on a regular basis because they disagree with the content, they had the obligation to delete this info from their boards. Instead, they left it up.
If they were truly uninvolved, the post would have been deleted a few minutes later, and the poster would have been banned. Try posting some illegally-obtained info on Slashdot, and see how long it stays up.
You only get the "anonymity" and "open posting" protections when you don't control the content.
More specifically, since it was posted by a particular user, who had stolen that info, they now have a duty to help the authorities find the felon who did the crime.
Modern video projectors are much, much brighter than 35 mm slide projectors ever were. You can get a couple of thousand lumens out of a box you can fit in your briefcase, and the large venue projectors toss out 17,000 lumens or so. Even a "medium" projector will embarrass any normal slide projector you can name, and gives the monster transparency machines a run for their money (think overhead projector films with a honking big light source and a large lens).
As others have mentioned, the Dataton system makes it reasonably easy to put arbitrarily high resolutions on a screen (I've heard of 8000+ pixel wide setups). The big technical hurdle is now the screens themselves. It's a pain in the ass to make a seamless screen much bigger than 20 feet or so wide (the biggest rear projection screen I've worked on was in the 36 foot range, trust me on this),
By the way - with a projector designed for large venues, aligning two or more projectors to within a pixel or so isn't that hard (almost all LCD and DLP type projectors have worse misalignments between R/G/B in their optical system anyway). At the scales we're discussing, you just have to be able to accurately shift the projector itself by 1/8" or so (a 1920 pixel wide image on a 20 foot wide screen gives pixels about that size). We usually spend more time doing color balance between machines than we do in the geometry tweaks.
...or he could have just opened iTunes and looked at "Purchased Music."
Movable Type Free
(Unsupported License)
Not willing to pay for Movable Type yet? This fully-functional version of the application is available free of charge. Important limitations of this license include:
No support from Six Apart
No access to paid installation service
No access to fee-based services
No promotion of your weblogs through the Recently Updated list
No commercial usage
No more than one author and three weblogs
In other words, pretty much the same "free" usage as before. If you need MT for multiple authors, it's not expensive.
If you need MT for commercial use, it's only a couple of hundred bucks.
"Ah, the old "other people were worse" argument. "
No, it's the "you were wrong, and now you're trying to pretend you said something else" argument.
...except that pretty much everything you wrote in your post is wrong. You might try and look up *where* Hussein got his chemical weapons, for one thing (not from the US, but from European countries), and among military suppliers, the US comes in way down the list (at about 1/30 of what the Soviet Union sold Iraq in the same time period, for example).
No, really. He is.
So is Aaron Allston.
Horrible people, for decades.
You should ignore them.
The Computer Is Your Friend.
(And Teenagers From Outer Space should be reissued.)
A guy I know does professional aerial photography with a helium-filled blimp. Anything from medium format film on down.
I have one odd little hobby... I collect foreign language dictionaries. One of the funny things you notice when you browse through languages is that the less "sopisticated" ones have fewer color words. Some of the lesser-known tribal languages have one word that stands for both blue and green, because the difference is really not very important to the average guy living way out in the middle of nowhere.
The more urban/technical a culture is, the more words for color the average person knows.
1) Actually, Lomborg's reasoning is quite sound and not hard to follow, and is mostly based on dismantling the assumptions made in the horribly bad "science" of Global Warming.
2) There are thousands of environmental researchers out there in the world right now studying climate change, and many of them would have no jobs in the environmental field if they weren't working on GW. Add in the hundreds to thousands of people who are getting quite healthy paychecks running things like the Kyoto Treaty effort, and you're going to find literally *billions* in paychecks going to "research and fight" Global Warming. This is very different from when I was in environmental science back in the late 1970s, when you had to search long and hard to find any job at all.
3) Lomborg's work was in analyzing the material put forward by environmental researchers to support GW, and he found large, gaping holes in it in many places. It's not the meta-analysis so popular in a lot of fields, it's direct commentary on bad science, very similar to the theoretical physics work done to dismantle cold fusion.
The big problem with Lomborg's "science" is that the work done by the GW researchers that was so flawed. Look at the recent scientific collapse of the "hockey stick" graph in the IPCC report.
It's also very funny that you, as a physicist, complain about an economist working outside of his field when you're also doing the same thing in analyzing his work...
That's the problem with scan backs. Several minutes for one exposure, and if anything moves, it's a wasted shot.
...people have made monster photographs from multiple negatives for a very long time. If you're doing to "many photos equals one" stunt, you're going to have to get into the hundred gigapixel range.
If you're planning on beating 8x10, you're going to need another order of magnitude...
200 to 1000 megapixels for ASA 50 film in that size.