The difference is that high-speed trainset will tend to stay upright when derailed, and slowly grind to a stop due to its articulated design. Although the train will "derail" in the sense that the wheels will be touching the ground instead of the track, in order for one car to topple, either an extraordinary amount of force must be applied to that one car, as to cause it to shear away from the rest of the trainset (at both ends!), or the entire trainset would have to topple simultaneously. The amount of energy that would be required for either of those things to happen is considerably more than what you'd get from some nutjob carrying a backpack full of explosives.
The French TGV has had a number of high-speed derailments, and out of the 1.2 billion people that have used the service, there hasn't been a single fatality while the train was running over 100mph (160km/h), with an exceptional low-speed safety record as well. This includes a number of rather severe incidents, including a terrorist bombing, level crossing accidents, and at least two incidents in which the ground beneath the track dropped into a sinkhole.
Compared to virtually any other form of transport on the planet, the TGV's safety record is probably as close to perfect as you're ever going to get.
Unlike a plane, in which a bomb would likely down the craft, killing all on board, an attack upon a train a highs-speed train wouldn't be all that deadly, given that there would hardly be any casualties outside of the blast radius. The train station would be a far greater point of vulnerability than the train itself.
So, no. I don't think we have anything to worry about. If you're concerned about safety and security, articulated high-speed rail is hands-down the safest form of transport known to man.
Except in England, where it's: 0118-999-881-999-119-7253.
You forgot the +44
(But all joking aside, since it hasn't been mentioned here, 112 works in the UK and Ireland, as does 999, which was the UK/Ireland emergency number before the EU standard was adopted.)
There's something very satisfying about handing the money directly to the musician on the CD.
Then there's something pleasantly surprising when said musician says "If you like it, and want to do us a favor, make as many copies as you want, and give them to your friends" after handing you the CD.
And If you legitimately don't have the $10 they're selling the CD for, they'll usually give you the CD for however much money it takes to buy gas to get back home.
However, in this case, their incompetence is borderline criminal. They need to push out a mandatory firmware update that removes this behavior immediately, or issue a recall. This comes to mind as being *extremely* dangerous.
The Walter Reed travesty was indeed one that never should have happened.
HOWEVER, it is a brilliant example in which a public outrage was sparked, and the government was forced to do its job, and did indeed clean things up after the horrible conditions were brought to light.
If it were a private hospital, I fear that things would have been kept hush-hush for far longer through lawsuits and settlements. Even then, the worst that the government could do to the place would be to either impose fines, or shut them down entirely. Neither of these scenarios would benefit the patient.
90% of the time, patients at hospitals don't have an active choice in which hospital they arrive at. If you're severely injured or sick, you're not going to drive 2 extra hours to the "better" hospital. You're going to want to get immediate medical attention. In this regards, hospitals are prime candidates for nationalization, as they are hardly ever in competition with each other, which in turn results in all sorts of nasty side effects like inefficiency, negligence, etc.... It really does make sense to hold every hospital to the same exact standards across the nation.
You're also conveniently ignoring the fact that Walter Reed was a single entity in a very large system. There are always going to be a few outliers. Considering that the VA isn't funded nearly as well as it should be (we cut funding to the VA, and used the cash to fund an illegal war) it's still a pretty darn nice health system. An outrage was sparked because a government-run institution that was part of system in which all of the hospitals should have been more or less equally, had fallen behind. This simply would not have occurred in a private system.
To use these reasons to argue against a nationalized healthcare system in the US is to be completely ignorant. We're one of the only industrialized nations *without* a nationalized healthcare system open to all. The idea works. Reconciling the general incompetence of the US government is another issue entirely.
So your study is done, the results are that cannibis prevents cancer.
Not so fast. Correlation doesn't necessary imply causation.
Even though you've proven that cancer occurrence is lower (and in some cases FAR lower) in pot smokers than those who don't smoke, you can't prove that these people are healthy because they smoke pot.
Perhaps the cancer rates are lower, because pot smokers tend to die of other causes before they're old enough to be prone to it.
Perhaps pot smokers refuse medical attention, don't get diagnosed with the cancer, and let it kill them without a diagnosis being made.
Perhaps the sort of person who smokes pot (upper-middle-class, suburban, generally well-educated) is simply less prone to those cancers to start.
A strong correlation implies that more research should be conducted, not that we should be jumping to any dramatic conclusions.
Anytime something horribly bad is happening, we drag out the most worthless inconsequential legislation we can think of.
Baseball testimony, gay marriage, a woman's right to choose, kiddie porn, and the manner in which ratings systems are controlled/kept in check are all legitimate issues, and probably should be dealt with eventually.
HOWEVER, the significance of any of these issues absolutely pales in comparison to the disaster we have on our hands with the Economy, Iraq, our healthcare system, an executive branch that has no respect for the law, and on and on and on.
I'd even at least partly blame the media for it. The "issues" that receive the most attention during elections are the ones which the candidate is least likely to ever be able to do anything about. Even George Bush, who has managed to pass every piece of illegal legislation imaginable has failed to do anything to promote his conservative social agenda.
And for the record, if the government has a hand in the manner in which ratings systems work, those systems need to be under the full control and oversight of the government. I'm all for small government, but the current system that allows the government to manipulate the ESRB and MPAA without actually having oversight over either organization is absolute bullshit. If you're actually going to endorse/sponsor some sort of censorship, be forward about it, and stop hiding behind these "private" organizations.
If you look at why the iPod succeeded it was because it was an attractive MP3 player with some great software that let you rip and burn music. Oh and the software let you buy tracks conveniently and cheaply.
Although I agree with your point, the iPod was already dominating the market by the time the iTunes Music Store came around.
Why? You can't re-sell an online subscription. And don't think for a second that the online text is any cheaper, particularly well-designed, or viewable in Firefox.
Now the rest of us are going to have to pay the same price that the suckers currently pay for new books.
Personally, I like being able to flip through a book in a manner that no digital device ever will be able to emulate. (And also --- how much has undergraduate mathematics changed over the past 100 years? It's absurd that these companies keep putting out "new editions" every 6 weeks, intentionally obfuscating the material as to make it exceedingly difficult to refer to a previous edition)
The textbook industry is nearly just as evil as the RIAA/MPAA. Nobody's called them out on it yet.
Somewhere there's a quote of approximately 30 cents USD per watt.
I'm not sure if this is solely the manufacutring cost, or what they'll be selling the panels for in bulk.
And my point was that nanoSolar probably won't produce any products that you'll be able to go out any buy yourself. They're not that kind of company, and their product doesn't really lend itself to that sort of distribution channel.
They'll instead cater to other manufacturers to allow them to package the panels into their own products. 3M, DuPont, and other similar companies do this all the time with most of their products.
I'm not going to go out to buy an aluminium fry pan, a jar of teflon, and apply the nonstick coating myself.
I never said that the US didn't create its own problems. The restrictions of the civil liberties of African Americans was very much an aftershock of the civil war that should have never been allowed to occur. The vast majority of the problems we created, however, can be very easily traced back to much more ancient roots.
2. Even if we accept "we're dealing with problems left over from dead empires" as an excuse, then China can use it, too: "We're not racists, we're just trying to correct inequities left over from the Qing Dynasty."
Do you really think that China invaded Tibet out of pure malevolence?
Racism is almost always the result of conflicts from past generations. I'm sure China has any number of ways of justifying it to themselves, just like the US did. So, yes. You are most likely 100% correct in your argument. (However, on the other hand, the US never really made things worse, whereas China appears to have gotten progressively more oppressive toward its own citizens)
To give an idea of how long it takes for that sort of racism to die out, consider that Anti-semitism has existed for about just as long as the Judaism has existed.
Racism is a bad, bad thing, but you've got to realize that it can't be "turned off" overnight. Saying "we're right, and you're wrong" is horribly naive. We need to identify where changes need to be made, and pressure the appropriate authorities to gradually make those changes. US foreign policy really should encourage this sort of thing, especially with our trading partners.
oh please, how can you even compare the US to the Chinese...
Native Americans? African Americans?
I'll play devil's advocate, even though I agree that your point is frequently overlooked by many Americans.
Injustices aimed at Native Americans and African Americans began long before the formation of the independent US state, and you can't expect sweeping change to take place instantly, or for an entire nation to completely abandon a well-established institution such as slavery, especially when it was propping up half the country's economy.
Yes, both situations were handled poorly by the nacent US government, and compromises should have been reached both to make peace with the Native Americans, and to very slowly phase out slavery, whilst making sure that civil rights were preserved for all. Neither of these things happened. In one case, an entire culture was nearly wiped out, and in the other, half of the country seceded, resulting in an long and bloody war.
In reality, however, it's not nearly as black-and-white (no pun intended). The colonists were very much to blame, and the French and Indian War didn't leave a warm fuzzy feeling with the settlers.
So yes. The British and French empires did do some pretty ghastly things to attempt to establish themselves on North America. The new US government was left to deal with the damage that was already done. The fact that things didn't turn around sooner is unfortunate, but you're overlooking a few key facts if you're going to place the blame solely and squarely on the US.
Just because I can't walk into a hardware store and buy a brown paper bag full of carbon nanotubes and a fistful of buckyballs doesn't make them any less relevant or significant.
'Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.' 'All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. '
NO, NO, NO!
Do not start redefining terms and definitions at your own political whims.
Even though I'm sure the majority of us are in agreement that corporations should not have a pervasive influence over a government, although Fascism as it was defined by Mussolini may very well apply to China, you can NOT apply this sort of thinking in reverse.
You could potentially make the argument China controls the media in a manner similar to what was suggested by Benito Mussolini, hence China shows characteristics of Fascism. However, you can't do the opposite: China embraces corporate-controlled capitalism, and since China is Fascist, all Fascists embrace corporate-controlled capitalism.
Although my example is a bit extreme, you're effectively doing the same thing.
And this has happened over and over and over again throughout history. If a political leader can draw a connection between his own personal opponents, and an ideology that is widely feared by the public, he can then contort this fear in a manner as to to defeat his opponent. Such ideologies in recent history would include communism, fascism, and nazism.
Over time, this strategy serves to contort the very meaning of that ideology. When communism emerged, and the Russian revolution occurred, several American leaders took a look, and decided that communism might not be such a fantastic idea. Unfortunately, the layer of FUD they applied was far too thick, and every one of the USSR's missteps got incorporated into the definition of "communism"
By the time Stalin took power, the Soviet Union had strayed completely away from Marx's original set of communist ideals. The fear element was now in place, and McCarthyism was born. (The Soviet leadership did the same exact thing on the opposite end, committing a number of heinous crimes in defense of their beloved "communism")
Whilst attempting to be as "un-communistic" as possible, America shunned some of the more favorable aspects of the ideology for very little reason. Sure, a monolithic communist government will probably never work, but that's not to say that nationalized healthcare, and a properly funded public education system will spell doom and gloom for the nation. Marx got those ideas from the French Revolution, which was also more or less the inspiration for the US Constitution.
This is also the reason why we see Godwin's Law all over the place. There's a BIG difference between exclaiming "He's just bad as the Nazis!" and "He's a Nazi!". Please tread lightly.
If nothing else, it makes history a real pain in the ass to study. (When exactly did the definitions of 'Liberal' and 'Conservative' reverse, whilst both completely separated themselves from the European definitions of the words? Don't you see what problems that could cause?)
I'm pretty skeptical as well, but they seem to have produced working prototypes, and have a good idea of how they're going to be able to produce them efficiently in massive quantities, and have solid investor support. It's definitely not snake oil. It'll be some time before we know if it catches on or not, but despite the cheesy name, they do seem to have their act together.
Well, if nanoSolar doesn't do it, someone else will.
Thin-film deposition is a very promising area of research for a variety of applications, allowing for very advanced surfaces to be "printed" onto ordinary materials. The fact that they've proven that photovoltaics can be produced in such a manner is extremely significant.
nanoSolar seem to have worked the hard bits out, and actually appear to have a working prototype, along with a production strategy that's fast, efficient, and comparatively inexpensive, making it more or less the holy grail of materials engineering. It's no wonder that they don't seem to have any problem raising enormous amounts of venture capital. (I'm frankly surprised that someone like 3M, GE, or DuPont hasn't attempted a buyout, although I'd trust the technology far more in the hands of a small corporation that at least appears to have more than just money in mind)
And, like I said. It won't solve the energy crisis. It will however, (if it's economical) take a bit of the load off of the grid in congested areas, and give a bit more oomph to portable devices. For actually powering the grid, I imagine that Heliostats will be the most likely source of solar power generation on a large scale. Photovoltaics just don't make sense for large-scale applications due to the cost and pollution of producing them. If you want to do renewables (and not nuclear), wind and tidal generation seem a bit more practical. (Although, like solar, tidal isn't terribly practical in many locales)
Although I was pretty skeptical about the buzzword-laden NanoSolar, after reading TFA, I've gotta say that their technology is absolutely incredible, and unlike most of PopSci's outlandish predictions looks like it very well break into the mainstream. Although it's not going to singlehandedly solve the energy crisis, if they can ramp up production quickly enough (and maybe cut costs even further), we'll soon begin to see a more widespread adoption of solar power.
As long as the cells are cheap enough, the applications for it are impressively extensive. The cells themselves are incredibly light and thin, and looks like it can be applied to just about any flat surface. It won't power your car, but it might make your hybrid/electric go a few extra miles before the next charge. Flat-roofed buildings can cover themselves in the stuff, and greatly reduce their energy usage. (Alternatively, a facility such as a warehouse could possibly even break even on its energy usage by keeping itself lit during the day with skylights, and selling the energy from the roof back to the grid. During the night, power for artificial light is taken from the grid)
You might even be able to apply the film directly to the body of a car or to roofing materials, given that the underlying backing doesn't need to be anything terribly special.
The fact that they're doing the majority of their research and production in the US and Germany also suggest that the manufacturing process will be relatively clean, and that their workers will be paid decent wages.
Re:Openness is Fundamental to Mathematics
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I'm not 100% sure, but I'm pretty sure that the source for many of MATLAB's functions (albeit copywrighted) is available for inspection.
I don't know... I think that the segment of the population that got hit the hardest by the credit crunch were already avid Wal-Mart customers. Yeah, there were some who were living WAY above their means, but I think those are more the exception than the rule.
The rich-poor gap is growing alarmingly wide, which is inevitably going to cause a rather severe backlash against the fiscal conservatives not too far down the road.
But back on topic: Wal-Mart's site isn't going to go down. People who got severely hit by the credit crisis aren't going to be the ones buying big-ticket items on sale during Black Friday.
Likewise, Wal-Mart's network infrastructure is supposedly intimidatingly huge. They're notorious data mongerers, recording every single line item from every single retail outlet in a central datacenter, and doing all sorts of wacky correlations and calculations on the data. Not a whole ton is publicly known about their data operations, but there were widespread rumors that their network capacity rivaled that of Google up until a year or two ago.
Considering the absolute gargantuan size of Wal-Mart's retail operation, even if their Online traffic jumps by one or two orders of magnitude, it's just going to be a tiny blip in the graph as long as everything's properly load-balanced and distributed.
No problem! It's shareware, so do give it a try before plunking down $60 for it. It IS of course missing some of the features you'd expect in Photoshop, although it's got more of the 'essentials' than the GIMP presently does. It's also
There seem to be a few inexpensive graphics apps coming onto OS X, rushing to fill in the gap, given that there weren't really many options apart from the GIMP and Photoshop (one's rather undesirable, and the other's rather expensive and outdated).
Pixelmator leads the pack, but there are one or two other raster and vector apps that look promising, and some competition will certainly be welcome.
I can't wait to see similar independent/inexpensive page layout and video-editing tools come forward.
Also, the GIMP team needs to take a long hard look at Pixelmator, consider the fact that it took a very small team about a year to develop, have themselves a good cry, and then bring their darn program up to a usable state.
I mean, the only "innovation" here is that one company is making the CPU, chipset and graphics card. You know, like Intel have been for years. But AMD make one where the graphics card is targeted at gamers. Whoop-de-fucking-do.
Not quite. The role of the GPU is stepping up to be much more important than "just games".
Newer operating systems rely extensively on the GPU to render the desktop, apply various effects to it, etc.... These tasks can be as simple as alpha blending, or as complex as providing a hardware-accelerated version of Photoshop.
It's not quite there yet on Windows (Vista implements it rather poorly), but Linux and OS X have been using OpenGL acceleration on the desktop for quite some time now. In what might be a first for a 'desktop' feature, support for it on Linux is actually quite good, and provides a rather nice UI experience (once you turn all of Compiz's superfluous effects off, that is).
I'm going to jump in here as a part-time Apple fanboy, and also point out that Apple's very heavily pushing its set of accelerated 2D Graphics libraries toward developers to integrate into their applications to provide a more natural and fluid experience. In 10.5, OpenGL rendering is pervasive in almost every part of the user interface. Once you've got that framework in place, it becomes very easy to do all sorts of fun stuff without worrying about bogging down the CPU.
Even fast modern CPUs perform miserably when it comes to graphics operations, as they're not designed to cope with vector and matrix operations. With high-resolution displays becoming prevalent these days, it makes a good deal of sense to offload as much of the processing as possible to the GPU. If you implement this properly in the operating system, it's even transparent to the users AND developers. It's very much a no-brainer.
Many GPUs these days also provide accelerated support for video encoding/decoding, which is also a rather strenuous task for a normal desktop CPU to handle efficiently. Video editing applications can also take advantage by providing realtime previews of HD video rendered with effects applied to it.
Anyone who's done a substantial amount of video editing knows just how welcome this would be. Ironically, it's a shift back to an older paradigm, as the Amiga Video Toasters included an array of specialized graphics hardware to do all of the dirty work, and did it in real-time.
This might also translate into some sort of energy savings, given that modern CPUs consume very little power when idle, although this is pure speculation on my part.
There are all sorts of fun applications for this sort of technology once the frameworks are in place. Read up on Apple's 'Core' set of libraries for a fascinating peek into the future of UI and software design. Pixelmator is one of the first applications to take extensive advantage of these features, and is an absolute joy to work with. Although its featureset isn't as extensive as Photoshop, it's damn impressive for a 1.0 product, and I'd daresay that it's a hell of a lot more useful to mainstream audiences than the GIMP is, and has a sexy UI to boot. Dragging the sliders when tweaking a filter, and watching the ENTIRE image smoothly change as you drag the slider seems like nirvana to photographers and graphic artists (even on somewhat old hardware)
So yes. This is a big deal. Everyday desktop software is transitioning toward relying upon the GPU for basic tasks, and AMD has stepped up to the plate to provide a decent set of entry-level graphics hardware to fill in the gap. Remember the state of video hardware before nVidia came along, and introduced the TNT2 and later the Geforce2-MX? Before them, decent 3d graphics hardware was an extravagant luxury. Afterward, it was easily affordable, and nearly ubiquitous.
I should also point out that Intel's graphics hardware is absolute shit. That comparison's just not fair.
This should give you a pretty good idea of the state of NYC's infrastructure.
It's been pushed to its absolute limits in terms of age and longevity. The subways have served us well, but it's only been in the last few years that we've stopped neglecting them, and replacing outdated/dangerous systems with more efficient modern counterparts. (There was also the issue that the only people who knew how to service some of the archaic equipment that the MTA was running had been dead for at least 20 years)
The pumps used to clear stormwater from the subways today are the same exact ones used to pump out the Panama canal when it was under construction. (Literally --- NYC purchased them as surplus after construction of the canal was complete)
The electrical grid has issues. Remember the Queens blackouts 2 years ago? Con Ed would replace the feeder cables the failed, turn the power back on, and a dozen more cables would fail down the line. I don't even think that they ever determined why the blackout was as bad as it was apart from "aging infrastructure"
Earlier this year, the bowels of hell opened up when an 80 year old high-pressure steam pipe exploded under 42nd street.
I'm a big proponent of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," but it's pretty clear that NYC's infrastructure is in dire need of attention.
Not that we didn't create the situation; If we hadn't started the war, we wouldn't be in this position in the first place. However, suggesting that the Iraq war was originally about profiting off of oil is ludicrous.
No. It was about Halliburton and a thousand other no-bid contractors profiting off of everything else.
I do hope that Bush, Cheney, and their entire administration are put on trial after the next president takes oath.
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The difference is that high-speed trainset will tend to stay upright when derailed, and slowly grind to a stop due to its articulated design. Although the train will "derail" in the sense that the wheels will be touching the ground instead of the track, in order for one car to topple, either an extraordinary amount of force must be applied to that one car, as to cause it to shear away from the rest of the trainset (at both ends!), or the entire trainset would have to topple simultaneously. The amount of energy that would be required for either of those things to happen is considerably more than what you'd get from some nutjob carrying a backpack full of explosives.
The French TGV has had a number of high-speed derailments, and out of the 1.2 billion people that have used the service, there hasn't been a single fatality while the train was running over 100mph (160km/h), with an exceptional low-speed safety record as well. This includes a number of rather severe incidents, including a terrorist bombing, level crossing accidents, and at least two incidents in which the ground beneath the track dropped into a sinkhole.
Compared to virtually any other form of transport on the planet, the TGV's safety record is probably as close to perfect as you're ever going to get.
Unlike a plane, in which a bomb would likely down the craft, killing all on board, an attack upon a train a highs-speed train wouldn't be all that deadly, given that there would hardly be any casualties outside of the blast radius. The train station would be a far greater point of vulnerability than the train itself.
So, no. I don't think we have anything to worry about. If you're concerned about safety and security, articulated high-speed rail is hands-down the safest form of transport known to man.
You forgot the +44
(But all joking aside, since it hasn't been mentioned here, 112 works in the UK and Ireland, as does 999, which was the UK/Ireland emergency number before the EU standard was adopted.)
There's something very satisfying about handing the money directly to the musician on the CD.
Then there's something pleasantly surprising when said musician says "If you like it, and want to do us a favor, make as many copies as you want, and give them to your friends" after handing you the CD.
And If you legitimately don't have the $10 they're selling the CD for, they'll usually give you the CD for however much money it takes to buy gas to get back home.
Well, yes. Verizon is generally crap.
However, in this case, their incompetence is borderline criminal. They need to push out a mandatory firmware update that removes this behavior immediately, or issue a recall. This comes to mind as being *extremely* dangerous.
The Walter Reed travesty was indeed one that never should have happened.
HOWEVER, it is a brilliant example in which a public outrage was sparked, and the government was forced to do its job, and did indeed clean things up after the horrible conditions were brought to light.
If it were a private hospital, I fear that things would have been kept hush-hush for far longer through lawsuits and settlements. Even then, the worst that the government could do to the place would be to either impose fines, or shut them down entirely. Neither of these scenarios would benefit the patient.
90% of the time, patients at hospitals don't have an active choice in which hospital they arrive at. If you're severely injured or sick, you're not going to drive 2 extra hours to the "better" hospital. You're going to want to get immediate medical attention. In this regards, hospitals are prime candidates for nationalization, as they are hardly ever in competition with each other, which in turn results in all sorts of nasty side effects like inefficiency, negligence, etc.... It really does make sense to hold every hospital to the same exact standards across the nation.
You're also conveniently ignoring the fact that Walter Reed was a single entity in a very large system. There are always going to be a few outliers. Considering that the VA isn't funded nearly as well as it should be (we cut funding to the VA, and used the cash to fund an illegal war) it's still a pretty darn nice health system. An outrage was sparked because a government-run institution that was part of system in which all of the hospitals should have been more or less equally, had fallen behind. This simply would not have occurred in a private system.
To use these reasons to argue against a nationalized healthcare system in the US is to be completely ignorant. We're one of the only industrialized nations *without* a nationalized healthcare system open to all. The idea works. Reconciling the general incompetence of the US government is another issue entirely.
Not so fast. Correlation doesn't necessary imply causation.
Even though you've proven that cancer occurrence is lower (and in some cases FAR lower) in pot smokers than those who don't smoke, you can't prove that these people are healthy because they smoke pot.
Perhaps the cancer rates are lower, because pot smokers tend to die of other causes before they're old enough to be prone to it.
Perhaps pot smokers refuse medical attention, don't get diagnosed with the cancer, and let it kill them without a diagnosis being made.
Perhaps the sort of person who smokes pot (upper-middle-class, suburban, generally well-educated) is simply less prone to those cancers to start.
A strong correlation implies that more research should be conducted, not that we should be jumping to any dramatic conclusions.
Does anyone else notice this pattern?
Anytime something horribly bad is happening, we drag out the most worthless inconsequential legislation we can think of.
Baseball testimony, gay marriage, a woman's right to choose, kiddie porn, and the manner in which ratings systems are controlled/kept in check are all legitimate issues, and probably should be dealt with eventually.
HOWEVER, the significance of any of these issues absolutely pales in comparison to the disaster we have on our hands with the Economy, Iraq, our healthcare system, an executive branch that has no respect for the law, and on and on and on.
I'd even at least partly blame the media for it. The "issues" that receive the most attention during elections are the ones which the candidate is least likely to ever be able to do anything about. Even George Bush, who has managed to pass every piece of illegal legislation imaginable has failed to do anything to promote his conservative social agenda.
And for the record, if the government has a hand in the manner in which ratings systems work, those systems need to be under the full control and oversight of the government. I'm all for small government, but the current system that allows the government to manipulate the ESRB and MPAA without actually having oversight over either organization is absolute bullshit. If you're actually going to endorse/sponsor some sort of censorship, be forward about it, and stop hiding behind these "private" organizations.
Although I agree with your point, the iPod was already dominating the market by the time the iTunes Music Store came around.
Several are already doing it.
Why? You can't re-sell an online subscription. And don't think for a second that the online text is any cheaper, particularly well-designed, or viewable in Firefox.
Now the rest of us are going to have to pay the same price that the suckers currently pay for new books.
Personally, I like being able to flip through a book in a manner that no digital device ever will be able to emulate. (And also --- how much has undergraduate mathematics changed over the past 100 years? It's absurd that these companies keep putting out "new editions" every 6 weeks, intentionally obfuscating the material as to make it exceedingly difficult to refer to a previous edition)
The textbook industry is nearly just as evil as the RIAA/MPAA. Nobody's called them out on it yet.
Now I'm curious. What exactly are the other 24 people using?
Somewhere there's a quote of approximately 30 cents USD per watt.
I'm not sure if this is solely the manufacutring cost, or what they'll be selling the panels for in bulk.
And my point was that nanoSolar probably won't produce any products that you'll be able to go out any buy yourself. They're not that kind of company, and their product doesn't really lend itself to that sort of distribution channel.
They'll instead cater to other manufacturers to allow them to package the panels into their own products. 3M, DuPont, and other similar companies do this all the time with most of their products.
I'm not going to go out to buy an aluminium fry pan, a jar of teflon, and apply the nonstick coating myself.
Do you really think that China invaded Tibet out of pure malevolence?
Racism is almost always the result of conflicts from past generations. I'm sure China has any number of ways of justifying it to themselves, just like the US did. So, yes. You are most likely 100% correct in your argument. (However, on the other hand, the US never really made things worse, whereas China appears to have gotten progressively more oppressive toward its own citizens)
To give an idea of how long it takes for that sort of racism to die out, consider that Anti-semitism has existed for about just as long as the Judaism has existed.
Racism is a bad, bad thing, but you've got to realize that it can't be "turned off" overnight. Saying "we're right, and you're wrong" is horribly naive. We need to identify where changes need to be made, and pressure the appropriate authorities to gradually make those changes. US foreign policy really should encourage this sort of thing, especially with our trading partners.
I'll play devil's advocate, even though I agree that your point is frequently overlooked by many Americans.
Injustices aimed at Native Americans and African Americans began long before the formation of the independent US state, and you can't expect sweeping change to take place instantly, or for an entire nation to completely abandon a well-established institution such as slavery, especially when it was propping up half the country's economy.
Yes, both situations were handled poorly by the nacent US government, and compromises should have been reached both to make peace with the Native Americans, and to very slowly phase out slavery, whilst making sure that civil rights were preserved for all. Neither of these things happened. In one case, an entire culture was nearly wiped out, and in the other, half of the country seceded, resulting in an long and bloody war.
In reality, however, it's not nearly as black-and-white (no pun intended). The colonists were very much to blame, and the French and Indian War didn't leave a warm fuzzy feeling with the settlers.
So yes. The British and French empires did do some pretty ghastly things to attempt to establish themselves on North America. The new US government was left to deal with the damage that was already done. The fact that things didn't turn around sooner is unfortunate, but you're overlooking a few key facts if you're going to place the blame solely and squarely on the US.
Just because I can't walk into a hardware store and buy a brown paper bag full of carbon nanotubes and a fistful of buckyballs doesn't make them any less relevant or significant.
NO, NO, NO!
Do not start redefining terms and definitions at your own political whims.
Even though I'm sure the majority of us are in agreement that corporations should not have a pervasive influence over a government, although Fascism as it was defined by Mussolini may very well apply to China, you can NOT apply this sort of thinking in reverse.
You could potentially make the argument China controls the media in a manner similar to what was suggested by Benito Mussolini, hence China shows characteristics of Fascism. However, you can't do the opposite: China embraces corporate-controlled capitalism, and since China is Fascist, all Fascists embrace corporate-controlled capitalism.
Although my example is a bit extreme, you're effectively doing the same thing.
And this has happened over and over and over again throughout history. If a political leader can draw a connection between his own personal opponents, and an ideology that is widely feared by the public, he can then contort this fear in a manner as to to defeat his opponent. Such ideologies in recent history would include communism, fascism, and nazism.
Over time, this strategy serves to contort the very meaning of that ideology. When communism emerged, and the Russian revolution occurred, several American leaders took a look, and decided that communism might not be such a fantastic idea. Unfortunately, the layer of FUD they applied was far too thick, and every one of the USSR's missteps got incorporated into the definition of "communism"
By the time Stalin took power, the Soviet Union had strayed completely away from Marx's original set of communist ideals. The fear element was now in place, and McCarthyism was born. (The Soviet leadership did the same exact thing on the opposite end, committing a number of heinous crimes in defense of their beloved "communism")
Whilst attempting to be as "un-communistic" as possible, America shunned some of the more favorable aspects of the ideology for very little reason. Sure, a monolithic communist government will probably never work, but that's not to say that nationalized healthcare, and a properly funded public education system will spell doom and gloom for the nation. Marx got those ideas from the French Revolution, which was also more or less the inspiration for the US Constitution.
This is also the reason why we see Godwin's Law all over the place. There's a BIG difference between exclaiming "He's just bad as the Nazis!" and "He's a Nazi!". Please tread lightly.
If nothing else, it makes history a real pain in the ass to study. (When exactly did the definitions of 'Liberal' and 'Conservative' reverse, whilst both completely separated themselves from the European definitions of the words? Don't you see what problems that could cause?)
I'm pretty skeptical as well, but they seem to have produced working prototypes, and have a good idea of how they're going to be able to produce them efficiently in massive quantities, and have solid investor support. It's definitely not snake oil. It'll be some time before we know if it catches on or not, but despite the cheesy name, they do seem to have their act together.
Well, if nanoSolar doesn't do it, someone else will.
Thin-film deposition is a very promising area of research for a variety of applications, allowing for very advanced surfaces to be "printed" onto ordinary materials. The fact that they've proven that photovoltaics can be produced in such a manner is extremely significant.
nanoSolar seem to have worked the hard bits out, and actually appear to have a working prototype, along with a production strategy that's fast, efficient, and comparatively inexpensive, making it more or less the holy grail of materials engineering. It's no wonder that they don't seem to have any problem raising enormous amounts of venture capital. (I'm frankly surprised that someone like 3M, GE, or DuPont hasn't attempted a buyout, although I'd trust the technology far more in the hands of a small corporation that at least appears to have more than just money in mind)
And, like I said. It won't solve the energy crisis. It will however, (if it's economical) take a bit of the load off of the grid in congested areas, and give a bit more oomph to portable devices. For actually powering the grid, I imagine that Heliostats will be the most likely source of solar power generation on a large scale. Photovoltaics just don't make sense for large-scale applications due to the cost and pollution of producing them. If you want to do renewables (and not nuclear), wind and tidal generation seem a bit more practical. (Although, like solar, tidal isn't terribly practical in many locales)
Although I was pretty skeptical about the buzzword-laden NanoSolar, after reading TFA, I've gotta say that their technology is absolutely incredible, and unlike most of PopSci's outlandish predictions looks like it very well break into the mainstream. Although it's not going to singlehandedly solve the energy crisis, if they can ramp up production quickly enough (and maybe cut costs even further), we'll soon begin to see a more widespread adoption of solar power.
As long as the cells are cheap enough, the applications for it are impressively extensive. The cells themselves are incredibly light and thin, and looks like it can be applied to just about any flat surface. It won't power your car, but it might make your hybrid/electric go a few extra miles before the next charge. Flat-roofed buildings can cover themselves in the stuff, and greatly reduce their energy usage. (Alternatively, a facility such as a warehouse could possibly even break even on its energy usage by keeping itself lit during the day with skylights, and selling the energy from the roof back to the grid. During the night, power for artificial light is taken from the grid)
You might even be able to apply the film directly to the body of a car or to roofing materials, given that the underlying backing doesn't need to be anything terribly special.
The fact that they're doing the majority of their research and production in the US and Germany also suggest that the manufacturing process will be relatively clean, and that their workers will be paid decent wages.
I'm not 100% sure, but I'm pretty sure that the source for many of MATLAB's functions (albeit copywrighted) is available for inspection.
Do you mean to say that Godzilla does contract work?
I don't know... I think that the segment of the population that got hit the hardest by the credit crunch were already avid Wal-Mart customers. Yeah, there were some who were living WAY above their means, but I think those are more the exception than the rule.
The rich-poor gap is growing alarmingly wide, which is inevitably going to cause a rather severe backlash against the fiscal conservatives not too far down the road.
But back on topic:
Wal-Mart's site isn't going to go down. People who got severely hit by the credit crisis aren't going to be the ones buying big-ticket items on sale during Black Friday.
Likewise, Wal-Mart's network infrastructure is supposedly intimidatingly huge. They're notorious data mongerers, recording every single line item from every single retail outlet in a central datacenter, and doing all sorts of wacky correlations and calculations on the data. Not a whole ton is publicly known about their data operations, but there were widespread rumors that their network capacity rivaled that of Google up until a year or two ago.
Considering the absolute gargantuan size of Wal-Mart's retail operation, even if their Online traffic jumps by one or two orders of magnitude, it's just going to be a tiny blip in the graph as long as everything's properly load-balanced and distributed.
No problem! It's shareware, so do give it a try before plunking down $60 for it. It IS of course missing some of the features you'd expect in Photoshop, although it's got more of the 'essentials' than the GIMP presently does. It's also
There seem to be a few inexpensive graphics apps coming onto OS X, rushing to fill in the gap, given that there weren't really many options apart from the GIMP and Photoshop (one's rather undesirable, and the other's rather expensive and outdated).
Pixelmator leads the pack, but there are one or two other raster and vector apps that look promising, and some competition will certainly be welcome.
I can't wait to see similar independent/inexpensive page layout and video-editing tools come forward.
Also, the GIMP team needs to take a long hard look at Pixelmator, consider the fact that it took a very small team about a year to develop, have themselves a good cry, and then bring their darn program up to a usable state.
Not quite. The role of the GPU is stepping up to be much more important than "just games".
Newer operating systems rely extensively on the GPU to render the desktop, apply various effects to it, etc.... These tasks can be as simple as alpha blending, or as complex as providing a hardware-accelerated version of Photoshop.
It's not quite there yet on Windows (Vista implements it rather poorly), but Linux and OS X have been using OpenGL acceleration on the desktop for quite some time now. In what might be a first for a 'desktop' feature, support for it on Linux is actually quite good, and provides a rather nice UI experience (once you turn all of Compiz's superfluous effects off, that is).
I'm going to jump in here as a part-time Apple fanboy, and also point out that Apple's very heavily pushing its set of accelerated 2D Graphics libraries toward developers to integrate into their applications to provide a more natural and fluid experience. In 10.5, OpenGL rendering is pervasive in almost every part of the user interface. Once you've got that framework in place, it becomes very easy to do all sorts of fun stuff without worrying about bogging down the CPU.
Even fast modern CPUs perform miserably when it comes to graphics operations, as they're not designed to cope with vector and matrix operations. With high-resolution displays becoming prevalent these days, it makes a good deal of sense to offload as much of the processing as possible to the GPU. If you implement this properly in the operating system, it's even transparent to the users AND developers. It's very much a no-brainer.
Many GPUs these days also provide accelerated support for video encoding/decoding, which is also a rather strenuous task for a normal desktop CPU to handle efficiently. Video editing applications can also take advantage by providing realtime previews of HD video rendered with effects applied to it.
Anyone who's done a substantial amount of video editing knows just how welcome this would be. Ironically, it's a shift back to an older paradigm, as the Amiga Video Toasters included an array of specialized graphics hardware to do all of the dirty work, and did it in real-time.
This might also translate into some sort of energy savings, given that modern CPUs consume very little power when idle, although this is pure speculation on my part.
There are all sorts of fun applications for this sort of technology once the frameworks are in place. Read up on Apple's 'Core' set of libraries for a fascinating peek into the future of UI and software design. Pixelmator is one of the first applications to take extensive advantage of these features, and is an absolute joy to work with. Although its featureset isn't as extensive as Photoshop, it's damn impressive for a 1.0 product, and I'd daresay that it's a hell of a lot more useful to mainstream audiences than the GIMP is, and has a sexy UI to boot. Dragging the sliders when tweaking a filter, and watching the ENTIRE image smoothly change as you drag the slider seems like nirvana to photographers and graphic artists (even on somewhat old hardware)
So yes. This is a big deal. Everyday desktop software is transitioning toward relying upon the GPU for basic tasks, and AMD has stepped up to the plate to provide a decent set of entry-level graphics hardware to fill in the gap. Remember the state of video hardware before nVidia came along, and introduced the TNT2 and later the Geforce2-MX? Before them, decent 3d graphics hardware was an extravagant luxury. Afterward, it was easily affordable, and nearly ubiquitous.
I should also point out that Intel's graphics hardware is absolute shit. That comparison's just not fair.
This should give you a pretty good idea of the state of NYC's infrastructure.
It's been pushed to its absolute limits in terms of age and longevity. The subways have served us well, but it's only been in the last few years that we've stopped neglecting them, and replacing outdated/dangerous systems with more efficient modern counterparts. (There was also the issue that the only people who knew how to service some of the archaic equipment that the MTA was running had been dead for at least 20 years)
The pumps used to clear stormwater from the subways today are the same exact ones used to pump out the Panama canal when it was under construction. (Literally --- NYC purchased them as surplus after construction of the canal was complete)
The electrical grid has issues. Remember the Queens blackouts 2 years ago? Con Ed would replace the feeder cables the failed, turn the power back on, and a dozen more cables would fail down the line. I don't even think that they ever determined why the blackout was as bad as it was apart from "aging infrastructure"
Earlier this year, the bowels of hell opened up when an 80 year old high-pressure steam pipe exploded under 42nd street.
I'm a big proponent of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," but it's pretty clear that NYC's infrastructure is in dire need of attention.
No. It was about Halliburton and a thousand other no-bid contractors profiting off of everything else.
I do hope that Bush, Cheney, and their entire administration are put on trial after the next president takes oath.