Say what? Exactly what was totally new about the ipod?
I suppose you could say the design of the case was new, but MP3 players were out before the iPod.
The interface and simplicity were new especially after they launched iTunes, I have a love hate relationship with iTunes. MP3s were really just solid state cassette players. iPods do have a different feel. In truth I never owned one until the Touches came out. 50% for me was being able to play movies. Watching my own choice of movie changed flying for me. The watch is risky. It's a little like when they started seeing how small they could make calculators. They hit insanity with calculator pens that needed a stylus so once you lost the stylus you found yourself hunting for toothpicks. They were a flop. A touch interface watch seems a little insane. They are talking about a wraparound screen so it's a little more the size of the smallest iPods for screen size. I'd have zero interest and tend to think they'll flop. Then again I thought the iPads would flop since all they are is an oversized Touch. Also the Nano watchband did really well on Kickstarter so there is a change they'd be a hit. 6 billion seems like a pipe dream though.
There's no longer such a thing as a childhood. Anything you do or say practically from birth will be recorded and used against you. Have a bad year in grade school and some one will bring it up in your thirties when you apply for a job. A childhood prank and suddenly you are seen as a risky hire. It's already happening with social media as others are pointing out but imagine your whole school record available to employers and credit agencies? Even your criminal record is sealed when you turn 18 for a reason. One childhood mistake shouldn't ruin a life but they seem to have found a way. Perfect people will succeed, the rich as well since money can hide many sins, but the rest of us need to start worrying.
Look at the timeline of domestication. Dogs were one of the first animals domesticated. Horses were only domesticated 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. The point is most of the wolf erradication attempts happened in response to attacks on other domesticated animals like protecting sheep and cattle. By that point dogs had been domesticated for thousands of years. Before hand weapons we competed directly with wolves for food. But once bows and advanced spear points showed up wolves would have avoided direct competition since they'd loose and dying foolishly is a poor survival trait. They found it better to wait for scraps and early humans probably got a thrill watching a former threat beg for scraps. Eventually groups of wolves found it easier to beg for scraps than hunt and thus found humans non threatening. People forget also that wolves/dogs were possibly the first domesticated animal for a second reason. Humans may have enjoyed having them around but when times got hard they were also seen as a food source.
Does the House GOP caucus have a minimum stupidity requirement?
They are trying to construct an Infinity Stupidity Drive. You need to cram 500lbs of bullshit in a 10lb bag then light it on fire while a 100 Congressmen dance on it singing God Bless America. It won't power a starship and is a complete waste of time but it makes as much sense as everything else they are doing lately!
A huge move forward for private space flight. The fact they had a major problem and still achieved the goal was a huge move forward for private space missions. Private companies are becoming a viable alternative to NASA.
It's been known for some time that you can transplant cells for things like limbs on amphibians and they would be functional. Unfortunately it only works because they are very simple organisms. The same things don't apply to reptiles let alone mammals so it's not an advance that will lead to regrowing eyes. It's Frankenstein tinkering that leads to pointless suffering. A different standard needs to be applied to lifeforms than other sciences in that a question of "what if we did this" shouldn't be a enough to rationalize the research. There's plenty of worthy lines of research that don't involve vivisection.
The proposal I heard before was to use a smaller asteroid which could be moved more easily. Shift the smaller asteroid into a moon like orbit of the large mass to shift it's trajectory by less than a degree years before impact. An explosion would take care of a smaller object like the one that exploded over Russia but a KT sized one would need a larger nuke than we can make or numerous smaller explosions just to fragment it. If we were unlucky enough to have an iron asteroid that size headed for us a nuke would be like hitting a cannon ball with a hammer. You'd be lucky to scratch the surface. The point is if you can detect them decades ahead of impact then a smaller asteroid could be used to deflect it. Others have proposed the tugboat approach so there must be something in the math to make it practical. One problem with your math is it's all dependent on the mass of the tug boat rocket so without that number how can you do any calculations? It's why most proposals have talked about using an asteroid for mass. An elliptical orbit would cause pressure on the main asteroid with each orbit. By adjusting the orbit and applying thrust at the right point you should be able to increase the affect.
5400s are 90s technology. Sad that better than a dozen years later they are going to be the only option other than SSDs. Some benchmarks haven't been increasing that much since the late 90s.
That's why I switched to Open Office. I need basic formatting and spell checking, similar for the spread sheets. Microsoft is desperate to stay relevant but 90% of their users have been happy for years so they are running out of reasons to upgrade.
Aquifer. I don't think this is connected to groundwater pumping.
It can be the start of a sink hole. Drawing out too much water can make the aquifer collapse. It can create a void where rain water flows into washing away the collapsed parts of the aquifer creating an actual void. With broken water lines they can form in days or weeks this one could have taken years. What's scary is they used to be rare events but they are getting more common so something has changed. Just building housing developments changes the flow of water with unknown effects. Most seem to happen along coastal areas, say 20 or 30 miles of the ocean so drained aquifers and redirected water would be the likely causes. look at it this way, aquifers have been stable for thousands of years then we remove billions of gallons from them in a few decades and don't expect a problem? Think of them as big water beds. What happens to your water bed when the water drains out? Now picture it with porous rock only you stick a hose in and start intermittently flushing water in and out. When there was water in the rock it would buffer the affect of the new water but now it flushes freely through the voids washing parts away. Parts of Florida are a ticking time bomb. Personally I think the bigger problem is brackish water flooding the aquifers. The aquifers are retreating at several feet a year so eventually the fresh water will all be miles inland. All those private wells will be pumping sea water.
What most don't realize is guns wear out fairly fast with heavy use. Most guns will start showing signs of wear after a few thousand rounds so if they are approaching that with major parts of guns they are becoming serviceable. A.220 Swift rifle needs to be rebarreled after as little as 500 rounds. It can still last many years since it's not seen as something to use every day. Military weapons are designed to last longer which is the main attraction not the clips and pistol grips as anti gun people claim. If you are looking for simple self defense a printed gun may be adequate. I'd be more concerned with accuracy. Years ago they tried to make titanium pistols which I thought was a great idea and there are advantages but they could never get the accuracy up to an acceptable level. The thing that would keep me from trying a printed gun is safety. An error in production could make the pistol fail and you end up with a slide where your teeth used to be. I'm more interested in custom grips and making the stocks and grips custom fitted. Less safety issues and I don't see a legal challenge so long it conformed to legal lengths.
Curious how they are setting memory into plastics as they are formed? They are obviously using hot water baths to allow the materials to reorganize. I can see some uses like folded parts but really it's not self assembly. This is self bending.
Computer controlled metal bending has been around for decades. Over 20 years ago when I was at Disney the contractors were using a computer bender for rebar. The auto industry was the first to use computer bending on a large scale. What's new is using heat from lasers to bend the parts. Yeah the videos have been sped up 3X or 4X but it seemed to work quite well. Heat bending plastic can be a bit of an art form so I would question what the reject rate is like? The biggest downside a lot of these processes have is speed. It's like printing a car body. If you've got to tie up a multi million dollar machine for weeks to print a car it's just a toy and has no commercial value. Until the can produce one in a similar time frame to current production lines it's pointless. The technology won't get a lot faster due to the physics of heating and depositing plastics so going to expensive multihead machines is the only option. Laser cutters and benders have similar issues since above a certain temperature the plastics and metals will distort and burn.
Most seem to consider him a hero but the guy had to know he would likely face life in prison and for what? What injustice did he undo? He embarrassed some powerful people and got his name in the paper. We aren't exactly talking about outing the military over a massacre. He passed on a bunch of files to Wikileaks without knowing the content so he had no idea what damage it would cause so it was irresponsible at best. I think government secrecy is obscene since most of the secrets are already known to foreign powers it's mostly about keeping the information from the American people. I think stealing secrets without a clear purpose is a stupid thing to do. If he was trying to correct a wrong I might agree with his supporters. I think it was more about ego than doing good. He just threw away his best years over this which was a foolish thing to do.
Why buy either plane???? The F-35 is a dog and keeps getting grounded and has yet to see a day a service. We're talking hundreds of billions on a plane there's serious question whether we need it at all! Drones are cheaper and save pilots lives and the biggest claim against them so far is they are doing too good a job at taking out targets.
Five years ago I was researching in game purchases by opening a browser within the game. I saw it as a way to make purchases within a game. Personally I see micro purchases as a major negative if you need those purchases are needed to actually complete a game. If where we are headed is needing to spend even more money to complete the game I just bought I will stop buying games. Enhancements are one thing but I see greed driving the sales and the in game purchases being a part of the game.
From Hell's retirement home I stab at thee!" Why do I get this picture of some hackers with walkers and false teeth striking out with a couple of old 8088s from their group home?
Seems to be a wasteful way to keep something that is in contact with the ground upright.
Less weight, less friction, less fuel used, fewer worn out tires. Once a flywheel is spinning it doesn't take much to keep it going. There are equal downsides like accidents can get iffy and it's more parts to wear out. They really are quite stable. There are major advantages in cornering if it's an active system.
Make no mistake about it, the music industry still DREAMS of going back to the days when they could charge you $15 for a CD that you had to buy just to listen to one lousy song. Turn your back on them, and they WILL try to go back to a similar model.
I hate using facts but the pricing in today's dollars isn't as outrageous as everyone claims. At the turn of the 80s we were paying around $6 for an LP. It had fewer songs and after a few years needed to be replaced from wear and scratches. Let's say inflation has risen prices three fold, I think it's closer to four fold, that's $18 plus CD have more songs. Pricing hasn't changed as much as the buyers themselves. The very fact industry revenues have been cut in half even without adjusting dollars shows how radically things have changed. People aren't using downloading and streaming to preview albums as was the claim. The end result to me is crappy music. I've bought one current album in the last dozen years and only a couple of songs. Everything else is from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. FYI I don't download or stream at all. Over the years I've bought enough music that I can go days without a repeat and the new music sucks. That's the future not a utopia of free music but a lot of crap music not worth listening to.
And how long will it be until extremists design and assemble a lethal and unstoppable virus this way and trigger a global epidemic that wipes out humanity in the name of Allah? Nice work, Omri; you've just handed them the tools.
It may be inevitable. The more accessible the tools the higher the odds of it happening. Then again toxic gases are incredibly easy to make and yet few even attempt it. Terrorists tend not to be the sharpest tools in the shed. If a super virus is engineered the odds are it will be fairly selective about who it can infect. It could wipe out most of the general population but pockets would likely survive. Once most carriers are dead the virus should be wiped out. It's what happened to smallpox except we made the carriers immune so it was left without hosts. Bird flues and swine flues are scary because common animals can carry them. Mutating an avian flu would probably be the scariest scenario but if it's equally lethal to birds then the same limiting factors would come into play. The odds of us being rendered extinct are small but the odds of a significant percentage of the population dying are quite high.
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Say what? Exactly what was totally new about the ipod?
I suppose you could say the design of the case was new, but MP3 players were out before the iPod.
The interface and simplicity were new especially after they launched iTunes, I have a love hate relationship with iTunes. MP3s were really just solid state cassette players. iPods do have a different feel. In truth I never owned one until the Touches came out. 50% for me was being able to play movies. Watching my own choice of movie changed flying for me. The watch is risky. It's a little like when they started seeing how small they could make calculators. They hit insanity with calculator pens that needed a stylus so once you lost the stylus you found yourself hunting for toothpicks. They were a flop. A touch interface watch seems a little insane. They are talking about a wraparound screen so it's a little more the size of the smallest iPods for screen size. I'd have zero interest and tend to think they'll flop. Then again I thought the iPads would flop since all they are is an oversized Touch. Also the Nano watchband did really well on Kickstarter so there is a change they'd be a hit. 6 billion seems like a pipe dream though.
There's no longer such a thing as a childhood. Anything you do or say practically from birth will be recorded and used against you. Have a bad year in grade school and some one will bring it up in your thirties when you apply for a job. A childhood prank and suddenly you are seen as a risky hire. It's already happening with social media as others are pointing out but imagine your whole school record available to employers and credit agencies? Even your criminal record is sealed when you turn 18 for a reason. One childhood mistake shouldn't ruin a life but they seem to have found a way. Perfect people will succeed, the rich as well since money can hide many sins, but the rest of us need to start worrying.
Look at the timeline of domestication. Dogs were one of the first animals domesticated. Horses were only domesticated 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. The point is most of the wolf erradication attempts happened in response to attacks on other domesticated animals like protecting sheep and cattle. By that point dogs had been domesticated for thousands of years. Before hand weapons we competed directly with wolves for food. But once bows and advanced spear points showed up wolves would have avoided direct competition since they'd loose and dying foolishly is a poor survival trait. They found it better to wait for scraps and early humans probably got a thrill watching a former threat beg for scraps. Eventually groups of wolves found it easier to beg for scraps than hunt and thus found humans non threatening. People forget also that wolves/dogs were possibly the first domesticated animal for a second reason. Humans may have enjoyed having them around but when times got hard they were also seen as a food source.
Does the House GOP caucus have a minimum stupidity requirement?
They are trying to construct an Infinity Stupidity Drive. You need to cram 500lbs of bullshit in a 10lb bag then light it on fire while a 100 Congressmen dance on it singing God Bless America. It won't power a starship and is a complete waste of time but it makes as much sense as everything else they are doing lately!
since methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas.
A huge move forward for private space flight. The fact they had a major problem and still achieved the goal was a huge move forward for private space missions. Private companies are becoming a viable alternative to NASA.
It's been known for some time that you can transplant cells for things like limbs on amphibians and they would be functional. Unfortunately it only works because they are very simple organisms. The same things don't apply to reptiles let alone mammals so it's not an advance that will lead to regrowing eyes. It's Frankenstein tinkering that leads to pointless suffering. A different standard needs to be applied to lifeforms than other sciences in that a question of "what if we did this" shouldn't be a enough to rationalize the research. There's plenty of worthy lines of research that don't involve vivisection.
The proposal I heard before was to use a smaller asteroid which could be moved more easily. Shift the smaller asteroid into a moon like orbit of the large mass to shift it's trajectory by less than a degree years before impact. An explosion would take care of a smaller object like the one that exploded over Russia but a KT sized one would need a larger nuke than we can make or numerous smaller explosions just to fragment it. If we were unlucky enough to have an iron asteroid that size headed for us a nuke would be like hitting a cannon ball with a hammer. You'd be lucky to scratch the surface. The point is if you can detect them decades ahead of impact then a smaller asteroid could be used to deflect it. Others have proposed the tugboat approach so there must be something in the math to make it practical. One problem with your math is it's all dependent on the mass of the tug boat rocket so without that number how can you do any calculations? It's why most proposals have talked about using an asteroid for mass. An elliptical orbit would cause pressure on the main asteroid with each orbit. By adjusting the orbit and applying thrust at the right point you should be able to increase the affect.
5400s are 90s technology. Sad that better than a dozen years later they are going to be the only option other than SSDs. Some benchmarks haven't been increasing that much since the late 90s.
That's why I switched to Open Office. I need basic formatting and spell checking, similar for the spread sheets. Microsoft is desperate to stay relevant but 90% of their users have been happy for years so they are running out of reasons to upgrade.
The main advantage I could see is video editing but adding artifacts makes me want to stick to my firewire machine.
Aquifer. I don't think this is connected to groundwater pumping.
It can be the start of a sink hole. Drawing out too much water can make the aquifer collapse. It can create a void where rain water flows into washing away the collapsed parts of the aquifer creating an actual void. With broken water lines they can form in days or weeks this one could have taken years. What's scary is they used to be rare events but they are getting more common so something has changed. Just building housing developments changes the flow of water with unknown effects. Most seem to happen along coastal areas, say 20 or 30 miles of the ocean so drained aquifers and redirected water would be the likely causes. look at it this way, aquifers have been stable for thousands of years then we remove billions of gallons from them in a few decades and don't expect a problem? Think of them as big water beds. What happens to your water bed when the water drains out? Now picture it with porous rock only you stick a hose in and start intermittently flushing water in and out. When there was water in the rock it would buffer the affect of the new water but now it flushes freely through the voids washing parts away. Parts of Florida are a ticking time bomb. Personally I think the bigger problem is brackish water flooding the aquifers. The aquifers are retreating at several feet a year so eventually the fresh water will all be miles inland. All those private wells will be pumping sea water.
What most don't realize is guns wear out fairly fast with heavy use. Most guns will start showing signs of wear after a few thousand rounds so if they are approaching that with major parts of guns they are becoming serviceable. A .220 Swift rifle needs to be rebarreled after as little as 500 rounds. It can still last many years since it's not seen as something to use every day. Military weapons are designed to last longer which is the main attraction not the clips and pistol grips as anti gun people claim. If you are looking for simple self defense a printed gun may be adequate. I'd be more concerned with accuracy. Years ago they tried to make titanium pistols which I thought was a great idea and there are advantages but they could never get the accuracy up to an acceptable level. The thing that would keep me from trying a printed gun is safety. An error in production could make the pistol fail and you end up with a slide where your teeth used to be. I'm more interested in custom grips and making the stocks and grips custom fitted. Less safety issues and I don't see a legal challenge so long it conformed to legal lengths.
Curious how they are setting memory into plastics as they are formed? They are obviously using hot water baths to allow the materials to reorganize. I can see some uses like folded parts but really it's not self assembly. This is self bending.
Computer controlled metal bending has been around for decades. Over 20 years ago when I was at Disney the contractors were using a computer bender for rebar. The auto industry was the first to use computer bending on a large scale. What's new is using heat from lasers to bend the parts. Yeah the videos have been sped up 3X or 4X but it seemed to work quite well. Heat bending plastic can be a bit of an art form so I would question what the reject rate is like? The biggest downside a lot of these processes have is speed. It's like printing a car body. If you've got to tie up a multi million dollar machine for weeks to print a car it's just a toy and has no commercial value. Until the can produce one in a similar time frame to current production lines it's pointless. The technology won't get a lot faster due to the physics of heating and depositing plastics so going to expensive multihead machines is the only option. Laser cutters and benders have similar issues since above a certain temperature the plastics and metals will distort and burn.
Most seem to consider him a hero but the guy had to know he would likely face life in prison and for what? What injustice did he undo? He embarrassed some powerful people and got his name in the paper. We aren't exactly talking about outing the military over a massacre. He passed on a bunch of files to Wikileaks without knowing the content so he had no idea what damage it would cause so it was irresponsible at best. I think government secrecy is obscene since most of the secrets are already known to foreign powers it's mostly about keeping the information from the American people. I think stealing secrets without a clear purpose is a stupid thing to do. If he was trying to correct a wrong I might agree with his supporters. I think it was more about ego than doing good. He just threw away his best years over this which was a foolish thing to do.
It's exactly the same as WoW just with Hobbits added. Just think hairless Pandas that need to be fed constantly.
Why buy either plane???? The F-35 is a dog and keeps getting grounded and has yet to see a day a service. We're talking hundreds of billions on a plane there's serious question whether we need it at all! Drones are cheaper and save pilots lives and the biggest claim against them so far is they are doing too good a job at taking out targets.
They're claiming an original art patent on spying on foreign governments using hackers.
Five years ago I was researching in game purchases by opening a browser within the game. I saw it as a way to make purchases within a game. Personally I see micro purchases as a major negative if you need those purchases are needed to actually complete a game. If where we are headed is needing to spend even more money to complete the game I just bought I will stop buying games. Enhancements are one thing but I see greed driving the sales and the in game purchases being a part of the game.
From Hell's retirement home I stab at thee!" Why do I get this picture of some hackers with walkers and false teeth striking out with a couple of old 8088s from their group home?
Seems to be a wasteful way to keep something that is in contact with the ground upright.
Less weight, less friction, less fuel used, fewer worn out tires. Once a flywheel is spinning it doesn't take much to keep it going. There are equal downsides like accidents can get iffy and it's more parts to wear out. They really are quite stable. There are major advantages in cornering if it's an active system.
Make no mistake about it, the music industry still DREAMS of going back to the days when they could charge you $15 for a CD that you had to buy just to listen to one lousy song. Turn your back on them, and they WILL try to go back to a similar model.
I hate using facts but the pricing in today's dollars isn't as outrageous as everyone claims. At the turn of the 80s we were paying around $6 for an LP. It had fewer songs and after a few years needed to be replaced from wear and scratches. Let's say inflation has risen prices three fold, I think it's closer to four fold, that's $18 plus CD have more songs. Pricing hasn't changed as much as the buyers themselves. The very fact industry revenues have been cut in half even without adjusting dollars shows how radically things have changed. People aren't using downloading and streaming to preview albums as was the claim. The end result to me is crappy music. I've bought one current album in the last dozen years and only a couple of songs. Everything else is from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. FYI I don't download or stream at all. Over the years I've bought enough music that I can go days without a repeat and the new music sucks. That's the future not a utopia of free music but a lot of crap music not worth listening to.
I hate to bring up the inflation rate but odds are they still lost a percent or two when you factor that in.
And how long will it be until extremists design and assemble a lethal and unstoppable virus this way and trigger a global epidemic that wipes out humanity in the name of Allah? Nice work, Omri; you've just handed them the tools.
It may be inevitable. The more accessible the tools the higher the odds of it happening. Then again toxic gases are incredibly easy to make and yet few even attempt it. Terrorists tend not to be the sharpest tools in the shed. If a super virus is engineered the odds are it will be fairly selective about who it can infect. It could wipe out most of the general population but pockets would likely survive. Once most carriers are dead the virus should be wiped out. It's what happened to smallpox except we made the carriers immune so it was left without hosts. Bird flues and swine flues are scary because common animals can carry them. Mutating an avian flu would probably be the scariest scenario but if it's equally lethal to birds then the same limiting factors would come into play. The odds of us being rendered extinct are small but the odds of a significant percentage of the population dying are quite high.