Although it's got to be difficult to mirror all of the application logic offline, the Gears apps that I've used thus far make a valiant attempt, and seem to preserve the core functionality.
However NYU does do very well with fundraising. It also doesn't hurt that their undergraduate tuition is obscenely expensive (more than double what I pay).
My college, on the other hand, graduates huge numbers of peace corps volunteers, teachers, and professors, and is (barely) funded by the state.
Naturally, we take a big hit on US News' endowment rankings, which allegedly hold an enormous weight on the overall ranking. However, although a few of our buildings could use a fresh coat of paint, we seem to do just fine without a 2.5billion endowment.
(I shouldn't knock NYU too much. Their Law and Business programs are indeed among the top of their fields, as the GP indicated. Their fine/performing arts program is also top-notch, and certainly doesn't produce many (any?) high-earners (although I do suppose such a program might attract a certain kind of high-rolling donor, if we're going to be throwing uninformed accusations around). Arts & Sciences at NYU, however, do tend to be generally unremarkable compared to the "flagship" programs, and certainly not worth $60 Grand a year)
For a variety of reasons, my school tries to shoot for a 55/45 female-to-male split.
However, the applicant pool is split 65/35 (F/M)
In other words, admission for females is considerably more competitive than it is for males.
In my experiences as a student (I recently graduated), I witnessed virtually no anti-female sexism, but plenty of anti-male remarks, many of which were praised and even applauded. (I find it very difficult to take Women's Studies seriously as a field of study, particularly at the undergraduate level. Studying gender would be much more appropriate, and less prone to bias)
Don't get me started on the processes that take place if a male is accused of sexual assault. The male student is given virtually no opportunity to defend himself, even in light of a complete lack of physical evidence (the Duke lacrosse incident is a good example of this). We also received some of the most offensive "sexual assault prevention training" that I could possibly imagine.
At one point, we were asked to respond to a multiple-choice survey asking us if we'd sexually assaulted a woman A) 0-5 times, B)6-10 times, C)10-15 times, or D)15+ times. (Also, according to the survey and training program, rape apparently only occurs within the heteronormative ideal)
But, yes. In Mathematics and Physics (my field), you do have fewer females than males. Although there isolated incidents of legitimate sexism, I believe that the reasons are largely historical, and will disappear with time. As more females trickle into the field, the field becomes increasingly attractive to other females.
I believe much of the gender disparity in these fields stems from the fact that up until the past decade, Physics and Mathematics were dominated by the huge influx of professors who graduated immediately following WWII. Given that there were comparatively few hires in these departments until that generation began to retire, it's no surprise that that generation's cultural standards lingered around for much longer in those departments.
DVB-T wouldn't work properly in the mostly-rural U.S. The standard chosen by the FCC can broadcast 100-150 miles (via VHF) with about half the power requirement of DVB.
Argentina, Uruguay, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Australia, New Zeland, Saudi Arabia, and Namibia all have a lower population density than the continental United States, and have adopted DVB-T for broadcasting.
We can expand this list further if we include areas that have a slightly higher density than the US. We can expand this list way further if we exclude areas that are virtually uninhabited (less than 0.5 people per square mile).
The "most of the US is rural" argument is complete and total bullshit. I can't get good TV reception (NTSC or ATSC) or good cellular service in New Jersey, which is *far* more densely populated than any European nation.* It took an age and a half for us to get decent broadband as well.
*Excluding micronations. In fact, the only nations that are larger than 1,000km^2 (roughly the size of New York City) and more dense than New Jersey are Bangladesh, Taiwan, Mauritius, and South Korea.
IBM's PC division was never the core focus of its business, even though it might have been their most visible sector.
Given that PCs today are basically treated as commodities (and produced in southeast Asia), the sale to Lenovo actually did make a lot of sense. IBM was also increasingly unable to compete on costs with their competitors. It was sad to see an icon vanish, although nostalgia is a dangerous emotion to apply to economic decisions.
IBM's big on R&D, and the PC industry stagnated. It's no surprise that they wanted to focus their efforts on places where they would actually be able to innovate, and create the "next best thing." Although the actual "future" of the PC market remains to be seen, IBM's decision to forecast the future of their industry, and use their capital to explore new venues should be lauded, not criticized. Had GM done the same thing, they should have seen the need to develop fuel-efficient vehicles, and would have improved their manufacturing processes to at least give consumers the illusion of quality. I feel sorry for the workers, but it's frankly surprising that GM even lasted this long, given their inability to adequately design, manufacture, and market their products.
As another interesting statistic, it's important to point out the the US's GNP is still slightly higher than its GDP.
In other words, the value of goods produced in the US is roughly equal to the value of goods produced by US-owned companies and American citizens. For every foreign-owned factory in the US, there's another US-owned factory someplace else in the world.
(Of course, as with any economic statistic, it's not quite that simple. However, the fact that both figures are roughly equivalent is a good sign)
Do you have any suggestions about how the situation could have been handled better? As far as I can tell, the government went far beyond what was necessary or reasonable to try to keep the industry afloat. Even the unions were willing to consider virtually any plan on the table.
Yes, the first stages of the bailout and stimulus were handled extremely poorly, and cut far too much slack for the financial industry. However, the people who orchestrated it are mostly out of office by now, and it's unlikely that anybody will trust the financial services industry for the next several generations. It's water under the bridge.
Also, how is the US some sort of "alternate reality?" As far as I can tell, the only alternate reality took place over the past 4-6 years.
I know you jest, but I have the Win7 beta installed on a 4-year-old laptop (IBM T42). It's actually quite good -- as a faithful user of Apple and Ubuntu, I'm extremely impressed, and regard it as being nearly on par with the others. (Both Ubuntu and Apple's most recent releases have been kind of spotty as well)
I have no complaints about the speed or stability. It's already replaced XP as my day-to-day OS. There are a few rough edges that need to be worked out, although these are small enough that I could easily foresee them being gone in the final release.
I've also got a copy running in a VM on my Mac. It works fine, even with just 512MB of RAM allocated to it (although XP remains faster in this situation).
My 1999-era 450MHz G4 supports up to 2GB of RAM, which is absolutely insane for a machine that old. Apple's top-end stuff might be obscenely expensive, but you definitely get your money's worth.
I still use the machine regularly with 10.3. It works wonderfully as an everyday machine. (10.4 and above ship on DVD, and I haven't bothered installing a DVD drive in the machine, which is still in its stock configuration apart from some extra RAM and a second hard drive.)
On the other hand, 10.5 is pretty bad. My Intel Mac Mini definitely got slower after installing it. I'm also not to keen on the fact that the maximum amounts of RAM capable of being installed in low-end and portable machines tend to be very small. My 1.66GHz Core Duo Mac Mini has the same maximum RAM capacity as my 10-year old G4.
A compass tells you which direction is magnetic north.
Fixed that for you. Apologies for being pedantic, but this is a huge distinction for some of us.
A compass may point up to 40 degrees away from "true north" in parts of Canada. Although this is an extreme example, ignoring a more common 10 degree declination will place you over 0.17 miles away from your intended target for every mile you travel.
UI design is largely a subjective field. However, there is a significant body of research that states that aesthetics do play a key role in usability. Other aspects such as typeface selection play a big role as well.
That said, we can do objective analyses such as counting the number of clicks or keypresses required to complete a certain task, or using a stopwatch to track the amount of time that it takes a novice user to figure out how to use the UI to perform a given task. Apple are notorious for performing formal UI testing and QA on all of their products. Most phone manufacturers are....not.
It's fairly easy to see how moving every aspect of the UI onto the touchscreen would approve Apple's rankings in these objective analyses. Virtually any function of the phone can be accessed with 2-3 "clicks." Apple have also gone through considerable lengths to avoid the use of any sort of "menus" for common tasks in their applications. There are no hidden options or features. Multitouch is also another big plus, and is extremely intuitive.
For starters, the included suite of applications is fairly comprehensive. You could be quite happy without ever visiting the app store. (I know this is subjective, although I do think it's important to mention that Apple *have* covered all the bases here -- things such as the built-in weather and stock quote apps are nice touches, considering that many users will check them frequently. It would reflect poorly upon the UI if users had to resort to the web-browser for the most common tasks)
The maps application is, in all honesty, probably the high point for the iPhone (and yes, it's almost *exactly* like Google Maps, which is widely regarded as a quality application with a good interface). The multitouch interface works particularly well for viewing maps by panning, zooming, etc. There are also a few 3rd-party applications for viewing subway/mass-transit maps in a similar fashion (I'm not sure if Google Transit has been integrated yet). This alone makes the iPhone an invaluable tool to many. I can say from experience that a simple map search (say for the nearest Pizza place) takes me under 30 seconds on an iPhone, as opposed to a little over a minute with a Blackberry.
Visual Voicemail is another feature that showcases the UI. Voicemail is indexed, retrieved, and managed via the UI, rather than by calling in. It boggles my mind why Apple were the first ones to think of this, given how obvious it is.
Most applications work in portrait and landscape mode. The iPhone automatically senses which way you're holding it, and adjusts itself automatically.
The web browser faithfully renders pages according to standards (most phones don't). Once again, the multitouch interface makes it easy to scroll, pan, and zoom, while the orientation sensor allows you to hold the phone in either orientation.
Recognizing the trend that SMS is frequently used for continuous chats, conversations are grouped and threaded (a la GMail)
The music player preserves the essence of the iPod UI. This is familiar to many users, and has been studied and discussed ad nauseum elsewhere. Most people seem to like it.
Music purchased "over the air" is DRM-free, and may be synced back to your computer. I don't know of any other provider that allows this.
On the more mundane side of things, Apple clearly put a lot of effort into their predictive keyboard. Although this is once again subjective, many people (including those with big hands) find that it works much better than the average touchscreen keyboard.
I don't care how "shiny" the UI is. I care about how *functional* it is.
Right now, the iPhone wins both categories hands-down. The G1's UI frankly looks amateur. Blackberry's UI is ok for email, but is cumbersome for anything else.
Palm's webOS looks extremely promising, and that it might be a worthy competitor. Unfortunately, early reports indicate that the Pre's hardware isn't terribly great.
I'll join the crowd. My LG enV2 has a micro-USB port for charging and data. Most recent LG phones are similar.
The only nice part about the iPhone's proprietary connector is that it works with old iPod accessories, and supports a few other functions such as Video Out (which, frankly, is a rather neat thing to have)
Actually, the Diesel regulations seem to have been a result of lobbying by the auto industry, because Detroit couldn't keep up with diesel technology from Europe. Particulate emissions are indeed a legitimate health and environmental concern, although the standards that were imposed were (at the time) unattainably high.
This had the unintended consequence of Volkswagen and Mercedes eventually designing engines that actually could operate at those specifications, while the American manufacturers languished, and didn't improve their diesel engines at all.
AFAIK, there are no hybrid diesels on the market at the moment. A few are scheduled to be introduced in a year or two, although they're mostly attempts to make gas guzzling SUVs appear a bit more eco-friendly. A small diesel car can reach 50-70MPG without any sort of hybridization.
Doubtful. For sales to triple, manufacturing and supply has to triple to meet the demand.
If GE and co. are remotely intelligent, they're beginning to stockpile incandescent bulbs, while slowly winding down production at their plants, and then converting those plants to produce CFLs. By 2013, production will likely have ceased entirely, and manufacturers will be focusing their efforts on selling their remaining stock.
If consumers choose to go crazy, and hoard incandescent bulbs, prices will skyrocket to the point where the product is no longer attractive. There's no way that a manufacturer is going to invest in increased production of a product that has no future.
The UFO sightings in the 1960s were most likely stealth aircraft (such as the Lockheed A-12, the deployment of which matches the dates in the article very conveniently)
No word on why an A-12 would be in Britain, although odds are that any Cold War era UFO sightings were experimental aircraft that the government didn't want anybody (read: the Soviets) to know about.
Here's one problem with the current method of scientific publishing:
If I pull up a journal article, how am I to know if it was later disproved without a lot of additional research? Of course, it's good (and necessary) to treat everything with a grain of skepticism. However, there's nothing quite as frustrating as performing unnecessary work (or finding out several months into the project that one of your core assumptions was disproved in some obscure journal 10 years ago)
We need a better method of cross-referencing scientific articles. It *boggles* my mind that hypertext isn't widely used in scientific literature, given that the WWW was created expressly for that purpose. Why do we present our research as a neat, 2-column LaTeX-generated PDF formatted for printing, when virtually nobody uses printed journals anymore?
Fix these problems, and I'm sure that academic misconduct will slowly fade as well. Perhaps science needs to join the 21st century, and adopt wiki-style collaboration efforts. Although this has its own pitfalls, it's worked quite well in some cases.
What you are describing is a bad academic program that needs to be reformed or terminated. Setting up undergrads in this sort of a bind is simply not good pedagogy.
Yes, but he's described virtually every undergraduate physics program I've ever heard of (including my own)
I wonder if the "lots of tiny indistinguishable blue icons" clause has finally been removed from the KDE HIG?
Seriously. I want to love KDE. However, their blatant disregard for UI design makes it incredibly difficult for me to do so. Less than 1/3 of Amarok's screen space actually relates to the primary functionality of the application, and it looks like most other KDE apps have followed suit
Similarly, we could use some more good open-source typefaces. The fact that KDE 4 decided to set many on-screen textual elements to huge font sizes has underscored this need.
Yes, but my point was that we've blurred the line between general purpose computers and embedded systems. Would you argue that the iPhone isn't a computer of some sort?
My $50 Linksys router can be hacked to do pretty much anything you'd ever want to do with a router (and then some).
Given that my TV *already* runs Linux, and has USB and ethernet ports, it's not hard to imagine that it could be hacked to do pretty much anything you'd want to do on a TV. It's got a CPU, it's got some RAM, and also a bit of persistent storage. Technically speaking, it's got all the requisite parts that a normal general-purpose system would have, albeit in an unusual package.
Why the hell would you give a linux distribution a name that could easily be confused with Windows ME!
Just reading that name gives me horrific flashbacks of the worst operating system ever created.
(Of course, if you hate your friends/relatives, I've just given you a deviously evil plan. Create an elaborate autorun.inf script that replaces their operating system with WinME)
Slashdot Mirror
Google have already started to tackle this one.
Although it's got to be difficult to mirror all of the application logic offline, the Gears apps that I've used thus far make a valiant attempt, and seem to preserve the core functionality.
However NYU does do very well with fundraising. It also doesn't hurt that their undergraduate tuition is obscenely expensive (more than double what I pay).
My college, on the other hand, graduates huge numbers of peace corps volunteers, teachers, and professors, and is (barely) funded by the state.
Naturally, we take a big hit on US News' endowment rankings, which allegedly hold an enormous weight on the overall ranking. However, although a few of our buildings could use a fresh coat of paint, we seem to do just fine without a 2.5billion endowment.
(I shouldn't knock NYU too much. Their Law and Business programs are indeed among the top of their fields, as the GP indicated. Their fine/performing arts program is also top-notch, and certainly doesn't produce many (any?) high-earners (although I do suppose such a program might attract a certain kind of high-rolling donor, if we're going to be throwing uninformed accusations around). Arts & Sciences at NYU, however, do tend to be generally unremarkable compared to the "flagship" programs, and certainly not worth $60 Grand a year)
Well, I like the drinking part.
That was the compromise.
That's all great unless you live in a rural area, in which the nearest ambulance is *further* away than half the distance to the nearest hospital.
I'm sure people have died because people drove instead of calling an ambulance. I'm also sure that people have died while waiting for an ambulance.
Do 911 dispatchers ever instruct callers to drive the victim to the nearest emergency room in these cases (or when no ambulances are available)?
For a variety of reasons, my school tries to shoot for a 55/45 female-to-male split.
However, the applicant pool is split 65/35 (F/M)
In other words, admission for females is considerably more competitive than it is for males.
In my experiences as a student (I recently graduated), I witnessed virtually no anti-female sexism, but plenty of anti-male remarks, many of which were praised and even applauded. (I find it very difficult to take Women's Studies seriously as a field of study, particularly at the undergraduate level. Studying gender would be much more appropriate, and less prone to bias)
Don't get me started on the processes that take place if a male is accused of sexual assault. The male student is given virtually no opportunity to defend himself, even in light of a complete lack of physical evidence (the Duke lacrosse incident is a good example of this). We also received some of the most offensive "sexual assault prevention training" that I could possibly imagine.
At one point, we were asked to respond to a multiple-choice survey asking us if we'd sexually assaulted a woman A) 0-5 times, B)6-10 times, C)10-15 times, or D)15+ times. (Also, according to the survey and training program, rape apparently only occurs within the heteronormative ideal)
But, yes. In Mathematics and Physics (my field), you do have fewer females than males. Although there isolated incidents of legitimate sexism, I believe that the reasons are largely historical, and will disappear with time. As more females trickle into the field, the field becomes increasingly attractive to other females.
I believe much of the gender disparity in these fields stems from the fact that up until the past decade, Physics and Mathematics were dominated by the huge influx of professors who graduated immediately following WWII. Given that there were comparatively few hires in these departments until that generation began to retire, it's no surprise that that generation's cultural standards lingered around for much longer in those departments.
DVB-T wouldn't work properly in the mostly-rural U.S. The standard chosen by the FCC can broadcast 100-150 miles (via VHF) with about half the power requirement of DVB.
Argentina, Uruguay, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Australia, New Zeland, Saudi Arabia, and Namibia all have a lower population density than the continental United States, and have adopted DVB-T for broadcasting.
We can expand this list further if we include areas that have a slightly higher density than the US. We can expand this list way further if we exclude areas that are virtually uninhabited (less than 0.5 people per square mile).
The "most of the US is rural" argument is complete and total bullshit. I can't get good TV reception (NTSC or ATSC) or good cellular service in New Jersey, which is *far* more densely populated than any European nation.* It took an age and a half for us to get decent broadband as well.
*Excluding micronations. In fact, the only nations that are larger than 1,000km^2 (roughly the size of New York City) and more dense than New Jersey are Bangladesh, Taiwan, Mauritius, and South Korea.
IBM's PC division was never the core focus of its business, even though it might have been their most visible sector.
Given that PCs today are basically treated as commodities (and produced in southeast Asia), the sale to Lenovo actually did make a lot of sense. IBM was also increasingly unable to compete on costs with their competitors. It was sad to see an icon vanish, although nostalgia is a dangerous emotion to apply to economic decisions.
IBM's big on R&D, and the PC industry stagnated. It's no surprise that they wanted to focus their efforts on places where they would actually be able to innovate, and create the "next best thing." Although the actual "future" of the PC market remains to be seen, IBM's decision to forecast the future of their industry, and use their capital to explore new venues should be lauded, not criticized. Had GM done the same thing, they should have seen the need to develop fuel-efficient vehicles, and would have improved their manufacturing processes to at least give consumers the illusion of quality. I feel sorry for the workers, but it's frankly surprising that GM even lasted this long, given their inability to adequately design, manufacture, and market their products.
As another interesting statistic, it's important to point out the the US's GNP is still slightly higher than its GDP.
In other words, the value of goods produced in the US is roughly equal to the value of goods produced by US-owned companies and American citizens. For every foreign-owned factory in the US, there's another US-owned factory someplace else in the world.
(Of course, as with any economic statistic, it's not quite that simple. However, the fact that both figures are roughly equivalent is a good sign)
Do you have any suggestions about how the situation could have been handled better? As far as I can tell, the government went far beyond what was necessary or reasonable to try to keep the industry afloat. Even the unions were willing to consider virtually any plan on the table.
Yes, the first stages of the bailout and stimulus were handled extremely poorly, and cut far too much slack for the financial industry. However, the people who orchestrated it are mostly out of office by now, and it's unlikely that anybody will trust the financial services industry for the next several generations. It's water under the bridge.
Also, how is the US some sort of "alternate reality?" As far as I can tell, the only alternate reality took place over the past 4-6 years.
I know you jest, but I have the Win7 beta installed on a 4-year-old laptop (IBM T42). It's actually quite good -- as a faithful user of Apple and Ubuntu, I'm extremely impressed, and regard it as being nearly on par with the others. (Both Ubuntu and Apple's most recent releases have been kind of spotty as well)
I have no complaints about the speed or stability. It's already replaced XP as my day-to-day OS. There are a few rough edges that need to be worked out, although these are small enough that I could easily foresee them being gone in the final release.
I've also got a copy running in a VM on my Mac. It works fine, even with just 512MB of RAM allocated to it (although XP remains faster in this situation).
Install Windows Me! as your operating system.
Nobody will want to be anywhere near the computer.
Or, better yet, dig deep, and find a copy of Microsoft BOB.
My 1999-era 450MHz G4 supports up to 2GB of RAM, which is absolutely insane for a machine that old. Apple's top-end stuff might be obscenely expensive, but you definitely get your money's worth.
I still use the machine regularly with 10.3. It works wonderfully as an everyday machine. (10.4 and above ship on DVD, and I haven't bothered installing a DVD drive in the machine, which is still in its stock configuration apart from some extra RAM and a second hard drive.)
On the other hand, 10.5 is pretty bad. My Intel Mac Mini definitely got slower after installing it. I'm also not to keen on the fact that the maximum amounts of RAM capable of being installed in low-end and portable machines tend to be very small. My 1.66GHz Core Duo Mac Mini has the same maximum RAM capacity as my 10-year old G4.
A compass tells you which direction is magnetic north.
Fixed that for you. Apologies for being pedantic, but this is a huge distinction for some of us.
A compass may point up to 40 degrees away from "true north" in parts of Canada. Although this is an extreme example, ignoring a more common 10 degree declination will place you over 0.17 miles away from your intended target for every mile you travel.
UI design is largely a subjective field. However, there is a significant body of research that states that aesthetics do play a key role in usability. Other aspects such as typeface selection play a big role as well.
That said, we can do objective analyses such as counting the number of clicks or keypresses required to complete a certain task, or using a stopwatch to track the amount of time that it takes a novice user to figure out how to use the UI to perform a given task. Apple are notorious for performing formal UI testing and QA on all of their products. Most phone manufacturers are....not.
It's fairly easy to see how moving every aspect of the UI onto the touchscreen would approve Apple's rankings in these objective analyses. Virtually any function of the phone can be accessed with 2-3 "clicks." Apple have also gone through considerable lengths to avoid the use of any sort of "menus" for common tasks in their applications. There are no hidden options or features. Multitouch is also another big plus, and is extremely intuitive.
For starters, the included suite of applications is fairly comprehensive. You could be quite happy without ever visiting the app store. (I know this is subjective, although I do think it's important to mention that Apple *have* covered all the bases here -- things such as the built-in weather and stock quote apps are nice touches, considering that many users will check them frequently. It would reflect poorly upon the UI if users had to resort to the web-browser for the most common tasks)
The maps application is, in all honesty, probably the high point for the iPhone (and yes, it's almost *exactly* like Google Maps, which is widely regarded as a quality application with a good interface). The multitouch interface works particularly well for viewing maps by panning, zooming, etc. There are also a few 3rd-party applications for viewing subway/mass-transit maps in a similar fashion (I'm not sure if Google Transit has been integrated yet). This alone makes the iPhone an invaluable tool to many. I can say from experience that a simple map search (say for the nearest Pizza place) takes me under 30 seconds on an iPhone, as opposed to a little over a minute with a Blackberry.
Visual Voicemail is another feature that showcases the UI. Voicemail is indexed, retrieved, and managed via the UI, rather than by calling in. It boggles my mind why Apple were the first ones to think of this, given how obvious it is.
Most applications work in portrait and landscape mode. The iPhone automatically senses which way you're holding it, and adjusts itself automatically.
The web browser faithfully renders pages according to standards (most phones don't). Once again, the multitouch interface makes it easy to scroll, pan, and zoom, while the orientation sensor allows you to hold the phone in either orientation.
Recognizing the trend that SMS is frequently used for continuous chats, conversations are grouped and threaded (a la GMail)
The music player preserves the essence of the iPod UI. This is familiar to many users, and has been studied and discussed ad nauseum elsewhere. Most people seem to like it.
Music purchased "over the air" is DRM-free, and may be synced back to your computer. I don't know of any other provider that allows this.
On the more mundane side of things, Apple clearly put a lot of effort into their predictive keyboard. Although this is once again subjective, many people (including those with big hands) find that it works much better than the average touchscreen keyboard.
Is that subjective enough for you?
I don't care how "shiny" the UI is. I care about how *functional* it is.
Right now, the iPhone wins both categories hands-down. The G1's UI frankly looks amateur. Blackberry's UI is ok for email, but is cumbersome for anything else.
Palm's webOS looks extremely promising, and that it might be a worthy competitor. Unfortunately, early reports indicate that the Pre's hardware isn't terribly great.
I'll join the crowd. My LG enV2 has a micro-USB port for charging and data. Most recent LG phones are similar.
The only nice part about the iPhone's proprietary connector is that it works with old iPod accessories, and supports a few other functions such as Video Out (which, frankly, is a rather neat thing to have)
Actually, the Diesel regulations seem to have been a result of lobbying by the auto industry, because Detroit couldn't keep up with diesel technology from Europe. Particulate emissions are indeed a legitimate health and environmental concern, although the standards that were imposed were (at the time) unattainably high.
This had the unintended consequence of Volkswagen and Mercedes eventually designing engines that actually could operate at those specifications, while the American manufacturers languished, and didn't improve their diesel engines at all.
AFAIK, there are no hybrid diesels on the market at the moment. A few are scheduled to be introduced in a year or two, although they're mostly attempts to make gas guzzling SUVs appear a bit more eco-friendly. A small diesel car can reach 50-70MPG without any sort of hybridization.
Doubtful. For sales to triple, manufacturing and supply has to triple to meet the demand.
If GE and co. are remotely intelligent, they're beginning to stockpile incandescent bulbs, while slowly winding down production at their plants, and then converting those plants to produce CFLs. By 2013, production will likely have ceased entirely, and manufacturers will be focusing their efforts on selling their remaining stock.
If consumers choose to go crazy, and hoard incandescent bulbs, prices will skyrocket to the point where the product is no longer attractive. There's no way that a manufacturer is going to invest in increased production of a product that has no future.
We need a sustainable electric grid, and the best way to create one right now is to tax coal and subsidize alternative power sources.
Why do you hate America?
(I jest, but no politician that opposes coal will ever be elected, or continue to hold his office after his term expires. Ditto for corn.)
The UFO sightings in the 1960s were most likely stealth aircraft (such as the Lockheed A-12, the deployment of which matches the dates in the article very conveniently)
No word on why an A-12 would be in Britain, although odds are that any Cold War era UFO sightings were experimental aircraft that the government didn't want anybody (read: the Soviets) to know about.
Here's one problem with the current method of scientific publishing:
If I pull up a journal article, how am I to know if it was later disproved without a lot of additional research? Of course, it's good (and necessary) to treat everything with a grain of skepticism. However, there's nothing quite as frustrating as performing unnecessary work (or finding out several months into the project that one of your core assumptions was disproved in some obscure journal 10 years ago)
We need a better method of cross-referencing scientific articles. It *boggles* my mind that hypertext isn't widely used in scientific literature, given that the WWW was created expressly for that purpose. Why do we present our research as a neat, 2-column LaTeX-generated PDF formatted for printing, when virtually nobody uses printed journals anymore?
Fix these problems, and I'm sure that academic misconduct will slowly fade as well. Perhaps science needs to join the 21st century, and adopt wiki-style collaboration efforts. Although this has its own pitfalls, it's worked quite well in some cases.
What you are describing is a bad academic program that needs to be reformed or terminated. Setting up undergrads in this sort of a bind is simply not good pedagogy.
Yes, but he's described virtually every undergraduate physics program I've ever heard of (including my own)
I wonder if the "lots of tiny indistinguishable blue icons" clause has finally been removed from the KDE HIG?
Seriously. I want to love KDE. However, their blatant disregard for UI design makes it incredibly difficult for me to do so. Less than 1/3 of Amarok's screen space actually relates to the primary functionality of the application, and it looks like most other KDE apps have followed suit
Similarly, we could use some more good open-source typefaces. The fact that KDE 4 decided to set many on-screen textual elements to huge font sizes has underscored this need.
Yes, but my point was that we've blurred the line between general purpose computers and embedded systems. Would you argue that the iPhone isn't a computer of some sort?
My $50 Linksys router can be hacked to do pretty much anything you'd ever want to do with a router (and then some).
Given that my TV *already* runs Linux, and has USB and ethernet ports, it's not hard to imagine that it could be hacked to do pretty much anything you'd want to do on a TV. It's got a CPU, it's got some RAM, and also a bit of persistent storage. Technically speaking, it's got all the requisite parts that a normal general-purpose system would have, albeit in an unusual package.
The OP's prediction is already true.
Puppy? Tinyme would probably be easier..
Why the hell would you give a linux distribution a name that could easily be confused with Windows ME!
Just reading that name gives me horrific flashbacks of the worst operating system ever created.
(Of course, if you hate your friends/relatives, I've just given you a deviously evil plan. Create an elaborate autorun.inf script that replaces their operating system with WinME)