At least it's less idiotic than the old "Keyboard not found. Press F1 to continue." boot error when the computer didn't correctly identify the keyboard that was plugged into it.
Even cotton socks will accumulate moisture against your skin and encourage foot rot if you're in extremely high humidity; the ability of Gore-Tex, cotton, and other materials to carry sweat away from your skin depends on the water being able to evaporate, so if it's not evaporating, it just builds up. Some laws of physics you can't get around, even with the scriptwriter on your side...
From the website, it appears as if the first batch of 200 pre-orders has already been taken; they're saying the next batch of pre-orders will be fulfilled in late December.
I encourage people to read Spider Robinson's short story Melancholy Elephants (winner of the Hugo Award for best short story in 1983), where he presents what perpetual copyright would do to human culture. Think for a minute; how many different pleasing combinations of musical notes are there? Not just how many combinations of notes, but how many of them sound musical to the human ear? Imagine what it would be like if every piece of music that someone would want to listen to is already under perpetual copyright, if no new music can appear because all the pleasing combinations of notes are already taken? Legal precedents from copyright suits have already killed the premise that the copyright protects the arrangement of words, not the idea behind them. West Side Story was a well-done remake of Romeo and Juliet, but it was possible only because Romeo and Juliet was in the public domain. A. E. van Vogt sued the producers of the movie Alien for infringing on the copyright on a story he'd written some forty years earlier. The number of good story ideas is limited; once they've all been written and perpetual copyright prevents those themes from ever being used again, what happens?
It's whatever editing or posting software was used eating characters. Manufacturers report a megabyte as 10^6 bytes (1,000,000), while computers report a megabyte as 2^20 bytes (1,048,576).
I've been making toddy coffee for years now, and I still remember the experiment I did shortly after I bought my first toddy maker, when I went to the supermarket and bought the cheapest blue-stripe coffee I could find and brewed that in the toddy maker. What I got was clearly inferior coffee made from cheap beans... but it was perfectly drinkable and not at all acidic or bitter... unlike the one cup of filter-cone drip I brewed as a control, which by comparison was almost undrinkable.
Didn't Diebold already lose a "Waaahhh, you didn't buy our product, so we're gonna sue" lawsuit like this one? If I understand the provisions of the DMCA, it criminalizes the act of bypassing DRM on copyrighted material, but it does not mandate the presence of DRM on copyrighted material (much less a specific company's DRM product), in the same manner that the laws criminalizing the unauthorized entry into someone's home do not require that the resident install locks on their door, much less buy those locks from (say) Schlage.
Ahh... And because one person was able to push power back to Cal Edison and pay off his investment in seven years, this means that everyone who installs solar generation systems will be able to do the same? By the same argument, if I get to pick a single person for a sample of the population, everyone in the US is a multibillionaire, because Bill Gates is a multibillionaire. To be valid, you need to look at all the people who have installed solar generation systems and look at their aggregate performance to determine whether it is, overall, a net benefit. HomePower isn't about to print an article about someone who installed $15,000 of solar-generation hardware and had their power bill go up because they weren't generating enough power to offset Cal Edison's tiered pricing system; that wouldn't support the premise of the publication.
And that's fine if you live alone, so virtually everything the solar generation system produces while you're off at work can be pumped back into the grid (and the energy consumption from always-on appliances like your refrigerator is not 'nearly zero'); a family is going to have higher energy consumption through the day. But the problem is that under the tiered pricing mechanism, energy costs double during the peak period. If you can't afford to put in a solar generation system that will produce at least half your energy consumption during the peak period, then your energy bill will go up as a result of your being forced to the tiered-cost structure when you install a solar generation system. And remember that it is the average energy production that determines whether you break even or come out ahead on the arrangement, and it's dependent on the weather, which you can't control; Cal Edison doesn't care that your solar panels are parked under a cloud all day; you pay the same doubled rate for peak power regardless, and if you're not generating enough power yourself, that's your problem.
Who wants to hold their arm out, hovering over the keyboard,...
A telling observation, since it was gorilla arm that pretty much killed the touchscreen as a primary input device (except for applications where the user only spends a short time using the device, such as ATM screens).
And after they install all the IR motion sensors controlling the lights and other systems, all the programmers and other IT workers have to learn to wave their hands over their heads every few minutes so that sitting in one spot with only their hands moving just above the keyboard and mouse won't let the timers run out and turn off their lights, leaving them sitting in the dark.
Unfortunately, the way it's more likely to work is:
1) Hire another company to invent time machine 2) Send blueprints, code, a completed time machine, and source code for existing project back in time 3) Get all of the above siezed for violating the patent on the time machine (Patent No. 1, issued the day the Patent Office opened -- when else would you be first-to-file with a time machine?) 4) ??? 5) They PROFIT!!!
Unfortunately, from the description, I don't see this as being any kind of a cure; it's described as preventing the HIV-1 virus from infecting cells and multiplying. That doesn't do anything to eradicate the virus in your system; since they've established that viri can remain dormant for long periods of time, as soon as you stopped receiving VRIP, the virus would be able to infect cells and multiply. What it would do is halt progression of an HIV-1 infection, either allowing someone infected with HIV to live a reasonably normal life without having the disease progress or giving time for treatment with antivirals to eradicate the HIV-1 virus from the body.
You're saying you need it extracted and reinjected? Duh, come on.
No, that if they can either synthesize it or develop a biosynthesis process, they can produce it in large quantities and inject that, augmenting the body's natural supply to increase its resistance to infection by the AIDs virus.
And while we're at it, let's require that all identical twins, triplets, etc. be required to wear prominent labels stating "WARNING: THIS ENTITY IS A CLONE" in order to make sure that we don't unknowingly associate with one...
However, I can see that the game companies would want to lobby very heavily for the distinction to be drawn between income from selling virtual property (albeit against the game's EULA, therefore reportable on your return in the box for 'embezzled or other illegal income') and the virtual property itself as a capital gain. If Congress goes for the quick but ill-considered solution, they will pass a law that makes the acquisition of this virtual property taxable on the premise that it is something of value that can be sold for profit. However, by the game's EULA, all of this virtual property belongs to the game company, which means that your acquisition of virtual property would represent a taxable capital gain on the part of the game company, not you. Consider what it would mean for Blizzard to get hit with a capital-gains tax on the grey-market value of every item that all of its subscribers managed to acquire in a year.
Given the extremely rare circumstances when one would be shot at by a random stranger on a college campus?
Well, I'll tell you what. Why don't you go tell these kid's parents and friends that it was ok, because it was rare. Go ahead. I'll wait here for you. With a first aid kit. Hopefully, that'll be sufficient.
I remember the news about the shooting in the Lubey's in Texas, and the pain of the woman who had to watch those people being killed because she obeyed the law. City ordinances prohibited bringing weapons into restaurants, so she had locked her gun in the glove compartment of her car. And she was badly broken up by the realization that, if she'd kept her gun with her, she would have been able to shoot the gunman before he had killed so many people.
The ongoing rationalization I hear from the gun-control lobby is "If it saves even one life..." to justify ever more restrictive gun laws. But the same justification can be turned against gun-control laws: "If it costs even one life..." Sometimes, the steady erosion of personal responsibility is depressing, with ever-more-ridiculous 'justification' for claims of diminished capacity used to avoid facing the consequences of people's actions. If you're an adult, you are responsible for the conduct of your life, and have no grounds for disclaiming responsibility for your actions.
Unless Grant Callin was more prophetic than he would believe and the Hexies of Tharthee (from his novels Saturn Alia and A Lion on Tharthee) really exist... in which case there's a plaque down there with information inscribed on it.
Silverbrook has forecast printing costs for the 60 page per minute desktop printer at below $0.02 for black text, and under $0.06 for color pages (with 20 percent ink coverage), according to Lyra Research, which had early access to prototypes.
The desktop printer's individual color ink cartridges hold 50ml of ink, an almost unprecedented amount in a consumer product, and will sell for less than $20 each, the company predicts. Most existing inkjet printers from companies like Epson use ink cartridges with a capacity of about 10ml, and prices of $15 to $30.
"Silverbrook expect costs of ink and media supplies will be pushing new lows. They're not looking to subsidize their costs with high ink prices, instead they want more of a balance," says Steve Hoffenberg, Lyra's director of consumer imaging research.
You have to admire some of the handwaves that the RealClimate article resorts to in order to preserve the global-warming doctrine. "Temperature leads CO2 by 800 years in the ice cores. Not quite as true as they said, but basically correct; however they misinterpret it. The way they said this you would have thought that T and CO2 are anti-correlated; but if you overlay the full 400/800 kyr of ice core record, you can't even see the lag because its so small." It's either true or it's not. The RealClimate site admits that the "Great Global Warming Swindle" statement is correct, but that when you look at the 800,000 year range of the ice cores, this lag is insignificant. Excuse me, but if you make the claim "X causes Y; just look at these graphs, where you see X and Y moving in similar patterns", then ignoring the fact that X happens afterY makes your entire claim invalid.
If increasing CO2 levels cause increased global temperatures, then the historical record would show that the CO2 levels increased before the temperature rise. But the temperature rises actually occurred prior to the CO2 rise; making the claim that an effect is due to a cause that happened after the effect makes you look like an idiot. If the CO2 level changes mimic the temperature changes from 800 years earlier -- but not the current temperature changes -- over the measurement period, then it doesn't matter that the lag is 0.1% of the measurement range, then the CO2 level changes are not a cause of the temperature changes.
If that were true, it would eliminate the thousands of years of correlation between CO2 level and average temperature that the global-warming proponents use to support the claim that it is the increase in man-made CO2 emissions that is causing the temperature increase. If the historical CO2 variations below a level X have no provable effect on global climate, how do you establish that X plus epsilon does?
Arbitrarily deciding that a position someone present can't be valid solely on the basis of their political beliefs is an inadequate substitute for the scientific method. It does, however, allow you to dismiss outright anything that might challenge your beliefs, protecting you from the risk of having to admit you might be wrong.
Yes, and it's equally true that the temperature changes correlate well with the CO2 levels... It is curious, though, as to the mechanism by which increased CO2 levels drive increased temperature when, historically, the CO2 variations have lagged the temperature changes. If man-made CO2 emissions are driving global warming, then the period from around 1940 to around 1970, when major increases in industrialization drove CO2 production upward, would show a steady increase in temperature... pity that the actual recorded temperatures declined during that period, though; it casts the whole premise into doubt.
Slashdot Mirror
At least it's less idiotic than the old "Keyboard not found. Press F1 to continue." boot error when the computer didn't correctly identify the keyboard that was plugged into it.
Even cotton socks will accumulate moisture against your skin and encourage foot rot if you're in extremely high humidity; the ability of Gore-Tex, cotton, and other materials to carry sweat away from your skin depends on the water being able to evaporate, so if it's not evaporating, it just builds up. Some laws of physics you can't get around, even with the scriptwriter on your side...
From the website, it appears as if the first batch of 200 pre-orders has already been taken; they're saying the next batch of pre-orders will be fulfilled in late December.
I encourage people to read Spider Robinson's short story Melancholy Elephants (winner of the Hugo Award for best short story in 1983), where he presents what perpetual copyright would do to human culture. Think for a minute; how many different pleasing combinations of musical notes are there? Not just how many combinations of notes, but how many of them sound musical to the human ear? Imagine what it would be like if every piece of music that someone would want to listen to is already under perpetual copyright, if no new music can appear because all the pleasing combinations of notes are already taken? Legal precedents from copyright suits have already killed the premise that the copyright protects the arrangement of words, not the idea behind them. West Side Story was a well-done remake of Romeo and Juliet, but it was possible only because Romeo and Juliet was in the public domain. A. E. van Vogt sued the producers of the movie Alien for infringing on the copyright on a story he'd written some forty years earlier. The number of good story ideas is limited; once they've all been written and perpetual copyright prevents those themes from ever being used again, what happens?
It's whatever editing or posting software was used eating characters. Manufacturers report a megabyte as 10^6 bytes (1,000,000), while computers report a megabyte as 2^20 bytes (1,048,576).
I've been making toddy coffee for years now, and I still remember the experiment I did shortly after I bought my first toddy maker, when I went to the supermarket and bought the cheapest blue-stripe coffee I could find and brewed that in the toddy maker. What I got was clearly inferior coffee made from cheap beans... but it was perfectly drinkable and not at all acidic or bitter... unlike the one cup of filter-cone drip I brewed as a control, which by comparison was almost undrinkable.
Didn't Diebold already lose a "Waaahhh, you didn't buy our product, so we're gonna sue" lawsuit like this one? If I understand the provisions of the DMCA, it criminalizes the act of bypassing DRM on copyrighted material, but it does not mandate the presence of DRM on copyrighted material (much less a specific company's DRM product), in the same manner that the laws criminalizing the unauthorized entry into someone's home do not require that the resident install locks on their door, much less buy those locks from (say) Schlage.
I guess the engines really couldn't take it...
Ahh... And because one person was able to push power back to Cal Edison and pay off his investment in seven years, this means that everyone who installs solar generation systems will be able to do the same? By the same argument, if I get to pick a single person for a sample of the population, everyone in the US is a multibillionaire, because Bill Gates is a multibillionaire. To be valid, you need to look at all the people who have installed solar generation systems and look at their aggregate performance to determine whether it is, overall, a net benefit. HomePower isn't about to print an article about someone who installed $15,000 of solar-generation hardware and had their power bill go up because they weren't generating enough power to offset Cal Edison's tiered pricing system; that wouldn't support the premise of the publication.
And that's fine if you live alone, so virtually everything the solar generation system produces while you're off at work can be pumped back into the grid (and the energy consumption from always-on appliances like your refrigerator is not 'nearly zero'); a family is going to have higher energy consumption through the day. But the problem is that under the tiered pricing mechanism, energy costs double during the peak period. If you can't afford to put in a solar generation system that will produce at least half your energy consumption during the peak period, then your energy bill will go up as a result of your being forced to the tiered-cost structure when you install a solar generation system. And remember that it is the average energy production that determines whether you break even or come out ahead on the arrangement, and it's dependent on the weather, which you can't control; Cal Edison doesn't care that your solar panels are parked under a cloud all day; you pay the same doubled rate for peak power regardless, and if you're not generating enough power yourself, that's your problem.
A telling observation, since it was gorilla arm that pretty much killed the touchscreen as a primary input device (except for applications where the user only spends a short time using the device, such as ATM screens).
And after they install all the IR motion sensors controlling the lights and other systems, all the programmers and other IT workers have to learn to wave their hands over their heads every few minutes so that sitting in one spot with only their hands moving just above the keyboard and mouse won't let the timers run out and turn off their lights, leaving them sitting in the dark.
Unfortunately, the way it's more likely to work is:
1) Hire another company to invent time machine
2) Send blueprints, code, a completed time machine, and source code for existing project back in time
3) Get all of the above siezed for violating the patent on the time machine (Patent No. 1, issued the day the Patent Office opened -- when else would you be first-to-file with a time machine?)
4) ???
5) They PROFIT!!!
Unfortunately, from the description, I don't see this as being any kind of a cure; it's described as preventing the HIV-1 virus from infecting cells and multiplying. That doesn't do anything to eradicate the virus in your system; since they've established that viri can remain dormant for long periods of time, as soon as you stopped receiving VRIP, the virus would be able to infect cells and multiply. What it would do is halt progression of an HIV-1 infection, either allowing someone infected with HIV to live a reasonably normal life without having the disease progress or giving time for treatment with antivirals to eradicate the HIV-1 virus from the body.
No, that if they can either synthesize it or develop a biosynthesis process, they can produce it in large quantities and inject that, augmenting the body's natural supply to increase its resistance to infection by the AIDs virus.
And while we're at it, let's require that all identical twins, triplets, etc. be required to wear prominent labels stating "WARNING: THIS ENTITY IS A CLONE" in order to make sure that we don't unknowingly associate with one...
However, I can see that the game companies would want to lobby very heavily for the distinction to be drawn between income from selling virtual property (albeit against the game's EULA, therefore reportable on your return in the box for 'embezzled or other illegal income') and the virtual property itself as a capital gain. If Congress goes for the quick but ill-considered solution, they will pass a law that makes the acquisition of this virtual property taxable on the premise that it is something of value that can be sold for profit. However, by the game's EULA, all of this virtual property belongs to the game company, which means that your acquisition of virtual property would represent a taxable capital gain on the part of the game company, not you. Consider what it would mean for Blizzard to get hit with a capital-gains tax on the grey-market value of every item that all of its subscribers managed to acquire in a year.
I remember the news about the shooting in the Lubey's in Texas, and the pain of the woman who had to watch those people being killed because she obeyed the law. City ordinances prohibited bringing weapons into restaurants, so she had locked her gun in the glove compartment of her car. And she was badly broken up by the realization that, if she'd kept her gun with her, she would have been able to shoot the gunman before he had killed so many people.
The ongoing rationalization I hear from the gun-control lobby is "If it saves even one life..." to justify ever more restrictive gun laws. But the same justification can be turned against gun-control laws: "If it costs even one life..." Sometimes, the steady erosion of personal responsibility is depressing, with ever-more-ridiculous 'justification' for claims of diminished capacity used to avoid facing the consequences of people's actions. If you're an adult, you are responsible for the conduct of your life, and have no grounds for disclaiming responsibility for your actions.
Unless Grant Callin was more prophetic than he would believe and the Hexies of Tharthee (from his novels Saturn Alia and A Lion on Tharthee) really exist... in which case there's a plaque down there with information inscribed on it.
You have to admire some of the handwaves that the RealClimate article resorts to in order to preserve the global-warming doctrine. "Temperature leads CO2 by 800 years in the ice cores. Not quite as true as they said, but basically correct; however they misinterpret it. The way they said this you would have thought that T and CO2 are anti-correlated; but if you overlay the full 400/800 kyr of ice core record, you can't even see the lag because its so small." It's either true or it's not. The RealClimate site admits that the "Great Global Warming Swindle" statement is correct, but that when you look at the 800,000 year range of the ice cores, this lag is insignificant. Excuse me, but if you make the claim "X causes Y; just look at these graphs, where you see X and Y moving in similar patterns", then ignoring the fact that X happens after Y makes your entire claim invalid.
If increasing CO2 levels cause increased global temperatures, then the historical record would show that the CO2 levels increased before the temperature rise. But the temperature rises actually occurred prior to the CO2 rise; making the claim that an effect is due to a cause that happened after the effect makes you look like an idiot. If the CO2 level changes mimic the temperature changes from 800 years earlier -- but not the current temperature changes -- over the measurement period, then it doesn't matter that the lag is 0.1% of the measurement range, then the CO2 level changes are not a cause of the temperature changes.
If that were true, it would eliminate the thousands of years of correlation between CO2 level and average temperature that the global-warming proponents use to support the claim that it is the increase in man-made CO2 emissions that is causing the temperature increase. If the historical CO2 variations below a level X have no provable effect on global climate, how do you establish that X plus epsilon does?
Arbitrarily deciding that a position someone present can't be valid solely on the basis of their political beliefs is an inadequate substitute for the scientific method. It does, however, allow you to dismiss outright anything that might challenge your beliefs, protecting you from the risk of having to admit you might be wrong.
Yes, and it's equally true that the temperature changes correlate well with the CO2 levels... It is curious, though, as to the mechanism by which increased CO2 levels drive increased temperature when, historically, the CO2 variations have lagged the temperature changes. If man-made CO2 emissions are driving global warming, then the period from around 1940 to around 1970, when major increases in industrialization drove CO2 production upward, would show a steady increase in temperature... pity that the actual recorded temperatures declined during that period, though; it casts the whole premise into doubt.
"We had to destroy your freedom in order to save it."