Except you can't fill up with hydrogen at home. All this garbage about needing electric charging stations everywhere is moot when you account for everyone with an electric car charging it at night in their garage. We should only need public charging stations for road trips and forgetfulness/emergencies.
Hydrogen is far less convenient than electric and has gotten a slow start. Therefore my bet right now is heavily on electric, especially when you account for battery swap tech that already has been demonstrated. Moving away from battery ownership towards battery-as-a-service is probably the next logical innovation.
I don't see anything hydrogen offers other than appealing to existing consumer habits.
This is the elephant in the room. Not only is charging up at home more convenient than finding a fueling station, but I have zero confidence that compressed hydrogen fuel will be cost competitive with electricity. Will it be worth thousands of dollars per year to reduce your fueling time by 25 minutes, given the average person will only need such a fueling station a handful of times per year? Keep in mind, being able to fuel up at home in an electric car means you'll save significant time not driving out of your way to get to fueling stations.
Actually no. As a repeat backer (~20 projects), I'd really like to know when a project comes along that there is a high likelihood I would back. I've been posting a request for years now that Kickstarter put together an opt-in option that would email me when "backers similar to you are backing a new project". As long as such an email was reasonably accurate about when I'm likely to back, and didn't spam me incessantly with art projects, it would be great. It certainly would be heaps better than the weekly email that Kickstarter sends out right now, which is loaded with stuff that I have no interest in. At this point I just shunt it to trash folder without reading it.
I occasionally miss on good/interesting projects simply because they don't manage to reach me through social media or any other means. Kickstarter at this point has a pretty severe discoverability problem, and I feel anything that helps cut through that issue would be a positive development.
I'm sure it's economically impractical, but it strikes me that filling some of the worlds emptying water basins by towing large antarctic icebergs to a nearby port and then breaking them up for shipment is a win-win scenario.
Obvious downside: fossil fuel use to get water where it is most useful may exacerbate the problem over time.
You make the same assertion that Mill was correcting against in his statement. Probably you meant to do so, but I got a chuckle out of the idea that you might have missed his point entirely despite how clearly he elucidated it.
Whether any of this is true I have no idea, I would suppose it depends mostly upon whether the stance on issues by the UK conservative party or parties appeals to those who are less educated.
"Awful science"? How so? Care to point out the flaws in the study?
Hmmmmmm?
How about the sample size of 43?
I'm not at all impressed with the ability of study that has a statistically insignificant sample size and which also assumes people can accurately label themselves liberal or conservative to impart wide reaching conclusions about people of different political beliefs such as the submitter of the slashdot article suggests.
To me, a test studying whether people tend to press W when M comes up 4 times as often simply tells us that some people tend to press W when it comes up 4 times more often and others do not.
Final Score: Study - Shaky, but ok. Sample size too small, sample is not listed as random, sample depends on self classification. Conclusions - Just plain shaky.
Good universities require that you take a variety of courses that should round you out nicely. You'll have plenty of time to figure out if you hate computers and really want to be a poly sci or english major or some other thing.
If computers are your passion, I would encourage you to pursue a technical degree. Doing so will not make you one dimensional, or close you off from becoming an intelligent, considerate member of society. It will, however, usually crack the job market open for you when you finish. I've known many a liberal arts major that twisted in the wind for a long time before landing a job completely unrelated to their degree.
If you choose to go on and expand your horizons further as the parent post suggests, pursue your graduate degree in something different. This will leave you with the valuable technical undergraduate degree, and will open up all the crazy roads to academia or corporate management that you would care to pursue.
TFA is a classic example of misunderstanding the user base of a product. The article writer assumes that other users are like him/her self - annoyed by Microsofts patent mongering and monopolistic behavior. The writer does not realize that a huge portion of Office users couldn't care less about such behavior. Many aren't even aware its going on at all, in reference to patent mongering at least.
This mistake is VERY common among technical people. Programmers assume users will want to use an application the same way they would want to use it. In many parts of the Open Source community, programmers write open source applications with themselves in mind as the target audience. There are definitely exceptions, of course, but this is true of the majority. Having to jump through a few highly technical hoops to install or configure the software is often considered fine, even in a "release" version. For a regular user this is a disaster, as they are unable to navigate the installation/configuration hurdles and quickly give up.
Microsoft, meanwhile, fundamentally understands users. Look at what they concentrate on: Installation and Look and Feel. Technical users bemoan XP and Vista as lipstick on a pig. They're right. But Microsoft knows that the road to wealth is not paved with hidden efficiencies like optimized TCP/IP stacks and user/process security models. The road to wealth is paved with nearly foolproof installations and preinstalled pretty looking software. Software that caters to the user. (Technical software with a smaller audience, such as the nightmare installation of Team Foundation Server, are not a part of this discussion since the user base of such software is by nature highly technical)
You may say, "But wait, MS products aren't all that pretty, and they don't always install well!" True today. But Office, when it came out, was prettier and easier to install than anything else on the market. Windows 95 even more so. Now that they've gained the upper hand, they've become complacent, living off their inertia. Still, when new products debut (like Vista), the same two focuses emerge: Ease of Installation and Look and Feel. (Note that Pre-Installation of Microsoft OSes and Office is a HUGE factor in Ease of Installation, don't overlook it if you respond - there's no easier install than no install).
Dyed diesel fuel is NOT illegal. Its only illegal if you use it in ROAD vehicles. This means using untaxed dyed diesel fuel to power your tractor, combine, etc is fine and legal. Its even legal to use in your farm truck, as long as you don't drive that truck on public roads.
The reasoning for this is that using your vehicle on public roads causes wear and tear on said roads, and part of the tax on your fuel goes towards paying for the upkeep of those roads.
Much of this depends greatly on the relative size of the lava tube and the thickness of the crust covering the tube.
We're very used to observing lava tubes here on Earth, whereas lava tubes on Mars (very thin atmosphere, much lower gravity, different rock/lava composition) may behave quite differently.
I like the lava tube theory. The Tharsis volcanoes are much larger than earth volcanoes, the idea that these holes are tiny pinpricks into massive lava tubes is certainly intriguing. That they appear on an ancient lava plain lends much credence to the theory. The big question, when assuming these are gargantuan lava tubes, is where the exit is. To form a tube, we can assume one thing: At the exit location must exist a unique condition, such as over a precipice, where the lava was not obstructed by itself - otherwise it would pile up, slow itself down, and have filled or partially filled the tube as the obstructed lava cooled and hardened.
Perhaps on Mars, due to the lack of atmosphere and cold conditions, the surface of lava flows harden quickly even though molten rock continues to flow underneath? The mystery of where the lava went would still be intriguing if this were true. Perhaps the behavior of lava on Mars is so different that a non-constricting endpoint is not required but rather that simply a downhill flow could generate this result due to differences in viscosity, coherence, and adherence as well as the well known atmospheric and gravitational differences.
In the paper http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2007/pdf/1371 .pdf, further reading turns up that illumination from one of the seven cave floors was captured. Current estimate for depth of the Dena cave is approximately 130m. Since the sides of these holes didn't reflect either, its safe to assume the diameter of each of the caves is considerably larger than the skylights that we're seeing. Those are some pretty large holes!
I work in the banking industry. Banks don't like work on the side. I know of several instances that didn't end well with regards to that issue.
Some companies, especially tech companies, are far more lenient about this sort of thing, since they realize that you'll probably gain valuable experience when doing side work. But you'll find in many industries that work on the side is anywhere from frowned upon and discouraged to flat out denied and a offense that will get you terminated.
So a lot depends on your situation, but my point is that the idea that "if you're rich you should always make more money and donate that" may be flat out ridiculous depending your industry.
And, as I mentioned before, I think everyone needs some time where they aren't working under the pressure of working for money. A hobby, if you will. Thats really what volunteer work is - its a hobby that benefits someone else. There's way less pressure, deadlines are far more lax if they exist at all. You can't work volunteers to the bone unless they want to work that hard. Whenever money is involved, people will expect you to meet deadlines and bust your ass. Once the money is gone, so is all that pressure. Both physiologically and psychologically, it is very important for most people to tinker with something in their spare time rather than work another job.
Another important aspect of volunteerism: you can choose who you associate with. For instance, I can spend time with family and/or friends doing volunteer work. But if I get another job, its just me and some people I don't know. I can't fulfill my needs of community and friendship while working a second job, because my friends and/or family do not have the capabilities to help me in that job.
There are many aspects to consider when thinking about this issue, and the psychological needs of the individual have to be among them. We are not creatures that can exist well under the pressure and isolation of constant work.
Perhaps you do not need to be fulfilled psychologically with the respect and admiration of your family, friends, and community. Some people who do choose to do volunteer work as a means to that end.
Must be nice to be a Dutch banker. Here in the USA, professionals who make lots of money are salaried, meaning they could work round the clock until they died and not get paid a penny more than working 40 hours.
Theoretically, you could get an extra job, but since working the same job for someone else would get you fired at BOTH workplaces, its much easier and better to volunteer your time and effort to a deserving organization who needs it.
Couple that with the fact that working hard at the same or similar job all the time leads to declining health and an early demise, and volunteer work that makes you feel good about yourself and gives you a break from the daily grind starts to sound pretty great after all.
The best option? Give some of your money AND some of your time.
Rather than mod troll, perhaps we should consider the level that this persons wife is on the scale of users. My argument would be that she is on the high end. Not nearly as high as our friendly neighborhood linux geek, no. But the following is a clue:
"My wife wanted Inkscape". Interesting statement there. Not "my wife wanted a program that does x and I said use Inkscape", but "my wife wanted Inkscape". I think Joe and Jane User would have one hell of a time telling you what Inkscape was, or what exactly it did. I believe you underestimate your wife, who is well beyond an ordinary user.
See, the other thing here is that your wife has built in linux tech support, for free, from a very qualified linux geek. Thus, brazen installation of the operating system and various drivers is a picnic, because she knows if she F's it up beyond all recognition, that you'll fix it. She knows that if she's considering buying some strange piece of hardware that does something, and its incompatible or a bitch to install on linux, you'll either advise her not to buy it and recommend a similar product that is more compatible or go through the installation for her. Regular Joe just buys Incompatible Product X and gets pissed when it doesn't work after 3 hours of reading man files and running command line arguments.
Until linux programmers understand that the average user fears the computer, and fears most of all making a mistake on a computer, linux will not succeed. The average user is the exact opposite from your average computer geek. Clicking on things to see what they do isn't fun, its a fearful event that it might break something.
So congratulations to recent linux distros, you've made it past the point where people who like tinkering with computers can possibly do most things without tearing their hair out in frustration. Now comes the hard part, getting timid, fearful users to feel comfortable using your OS. Good luck. I suggest soothing error messages.
I can assure you that yes, Microsoft does in fact put much more effort into building operating operating systems than "defeating" open source. Do they have an army of lawyers looking to keep themselves employed? Yes. But they have way more developers than that assigned to building operating systems.
If Microsoft released a product like linux, everyone would deride it as a step backwards. Oh sure, it'd be secure as hell and optimized up the wazoo, but your average consumer would consider it a huge step backwards in usability. And your average user is where MS is making money hand over fist. (Counting business users, of course)
Don't get me wrong, I like linux and I think it has an increasingly important place among operating systems. If a vendor can ever manage to put a beautiful GUI on top that extends 99% of functionality into the GUI space, and fix a few major issues, most of which pertain to drivers; I expect they'll do tremendously well in the more savvy segments of the computing market. You could argue that Apple has already done this, and to a certain degree they have, though I think they're too intent on tying into (and selling) their own proprietary hardware solutions. I believe this is preventing them from capturing all of the market share available out there, because there is a huge subset of users that can't or aren't willing to buy what is essentially a $1,000+ operating system. Honestly its probably much more than that to achieve the current level of performance they already have with their existing tricked out PC. Basically if OS X were sold as a stand alone product and ran on just about anything - now you're talking the language hardcore users want to hear. I believe sooner or later a linux based distro will achieve that miraculous milestone, and when it does I'll certainly be in line to buy it.
Re:I disagree with Smart Appliances being listed
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The Top 21 Tech Flops
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Smart Appliances make some amount of sense, especially, as pointed out above, when RFID hits its stride.
What I don't understand is the TV in the refrigerator. This makes absolutely no sense to me. Do people really want to stand next to their 'fridge and watch TV? Or is it that we can't stand to be away from the TV for 20 seconds while we go to fetch a beer? I find it puzzling that anyone would want this technology, yet I see it frequently in high end refrigerators. This isn't like the ice and water dispensers, those actually make sense. Odds are decent that you were going to the 'fridge to get ice or water, since both of those items are often contained in said appliance.
Of all the places I can think of, the refrigerator door might be the absolute stupidest place you can possibly put a TV. Lets go through the list: No place to comfortably sit and watch? Check. Constant interruptions from other people trying to use the room for something other than watching TV? Check. TV is mounted on a movable object, that is commonly used and moved? Check. Uncomfortable viewing angle whether sitting or standing? Check. TV is small anyway and thus not useful for watching most programs? Check. Lots of other high amperage appliances plugged in on the same circuit to generate interference? Check. TV is in a high traffic area with a good chance of spilling various things on it? Check. TV generates heat, which has to be dissipated by refrigerator to keep stuff inside cold, thus using more power than should be necessary to refrigerate normally? Check.
Wow, an impressive list of idiocy. If "RFID on everything" fails to take off, the refrigerator TV will die a quick death. If RFID does take off, then the refrigerator TV will live on as an optional use of the screen used primarily for telling you what stuff expired and needs to be replaced.
Its interesting. I work in a large organization. My group is an officially sanctioned technical group (an apps development team). However, we're not the IT group that makes all of the decisions about Hardware, OS configuration, and the like.
So I've actually been on both sides of the coin at once. On one hand, I have registry scripts that I've built to eliminate roadblocks that the IT group has put in place to prevent the massive number of regular users from doing dangerous things to their PCs. Every time a new hinderance policy rolls out, I often find that I have to override it to do my job. Though I'd rather not override the policies, but I need to be able to see things like descriptive HTML error messages. You know, because developing web applications is part of my job. Kinda hard to fix anything when all you get is "There was an error. Peace out".
On the other hand, we have a number of Shadow technical groups floating around in other parts of the organization. Some of these Shadow groups have decided to build their own applications. Often these are Frankenstein monstrosities built out of an amalgam of Excel, Access, VB Macros, and other such "user friendly" tools. Often these same "applications" later become the bane of my existence when they attempt to exceed 15 users and they melt down like Velveeta on the planet Mercury. Luckily, when they come begging our group for help, I can rewrite them if its my prerogative, which it always is. Most often we don't even look at the original code and simply start with user requirements, just as we would do with any other project.
So I feel the pain of the IT group. Its hard to support thousands of users that are doing all kinds of crazy stuff that routinely breaks things or exposes the organization to harmful viruses/spyware/etc. At the same time, I feel the pain of the users, who sometimes need to get out from under the draconian thumb just to get stuff done.
Still, I wish there would be a day when all the Frankenstein applications were dead and gone, and only the clean, gleaming ivory tower applications remained. Unfortunately, it'll never happen because with each monster I kill, somewhere else in the labyrinth another aspiring Dr. Frankenstein creates his/her monster of their very own. They feed it data, and users; and it grows larger each day, inexorably marching towards the day when it too will become like as much melted cheese.
I'd argue that perhaps the biggest problem facing games today is the way in which developers implement the loss condition. Namely death.
Sure, death seems like a very big deterrent for the player. It sounds sinister. "You're dead." Scary stuff. But in games its not really like that. You're not dead, you're simply required to start over from some point before. "Respawn", so to speak. Its like a sort of digital "Ground Hog Day" without the laughs. Some games have dealt with the reason for this creatively, and Planescape comes to mind. Not every game can be in a weird and whacky plane of existence like Planescape though. What this tells me is that developers need to get more creative about loss conditions. In some games this will be easier than others.
For instance, in a WWII game, bullets are flying, bombs are going off - its war and people are killing each other. If you're a grunt and you get shot in the head or hit by close quarters grenade shrapnel, you're dead. Hard to get around that. You might have to make the player anonymous and have him keep "spawning" into new characters, or come up with something similarly creative.
Other games, though, might do better by implementing standard loss conditions where players only become disabled, rather than truly die. If you're hit in the leg, you might survive. Perhaps the enemy captures you, perhaps your buddies pull you out and get you to a hospital. Perhaps you're a jungle troll and you eventually heal yourself and wake up hours later when the battle is over.
The point is, not very many games exist who's primary player induced setback is anything other than death. This industry crutch will plague developers until the mold is recast, and that may never happen. As long as that crutch continues, it will be exceedingly difficult to present the player with unavoidable setbacks that don't feel contrived.
Disabling a player allows the developer to implement a different result in an unavoidable setback. For instance, perhaps normally the disabled player is rescued by comrades in the loss condition. But in the unavoidable setback, the player might wake up in an enemy prison. This works because the player was used to becoming disabled, but the true "setback" now sinks in when the player is presented with required escape from an enemy prison rather than the usual friendly hospital.
This sort of "oh crap" moment is only possible if you've trained the player to expect a certain result and then suddenly juxtapose it with a different one. It works in Half Life 2 because the player enters the game with a certain expectation of the way the game works. The "oh crap" effectively comes in when the player realizes the tables have been turned on them and they're out of their element. A word of caution: This Should Not Be Done Randomly. This sort of situation has to be handled carefully, and the situation that resulted in the true setback loss condition has to be clearly different from situations that the player has encountered before. This vital clue tells the player "Its not your fault, this is the way its SUPPOSED to go down". Without this information, players will feel unfairly penalized.
"The earliest, simplest method of creating dramatic setbacks in games would be the cut-scene ex machina. One of my earliest memories of this venerable technique is in short clips between levels in the very first Ninja Gaiden, but the same effective ploy can be found in the likes of Diablo II, not a few Final Fantasies, and to wonderful effect in Grim Fandango. It's safe. You are not likely to think you failed in a scene you had zero control over, especially as they tend to take the form of rewards for completing a section of the game."
The author further argues that with less and less narrative taking place out-of-game (cutscenes), that game developers need to develop better ways of integrating dramatic setbacks directly into gameplay in a way the directly conveys that the setback was unavoidable.
Fairly common also to see PCs running terminal emulators in call centers. It allows the terminal to connect to multiple servers (which are often running completely different incompatible platforms) at the same time, as well as do PC stuff (office, email, web browsing, etc) without loading down a central server with a lot of unnecessary "wasted" cycles. Call centers are generally full of folks who are great at wasting CPU cycles...
And really to me, thats the reason why the dumb terminal idea breaks down a bit in many environments. Scalability is a major issue when you've got big iron. When the big iron isn't big enough, you've got a difficult choice: either buy another huge slice of big iron, or let your users suffer with less CPU cycles than they require. When you're talking about a business, investing millions to add another piece of big iron doesn't look too great when the majority of the CPU cycles you just bought with it will go unused for months or perhaps years.
With PCs, you just throw down workstations on desks and you're good to go. The cost scales directly with the employees, and thats a big reason why its so attractive for many businesses.
Dumb terminals are great for certain situations: when you have a known number of users that use a known set of applications. At least, within a certain tolerance, you obviously don't need to know the exact number of either one, an approximate upper bound will do. Then you can be very comfortable knowing that your users have all they need in terms of functionality and CPU cycles. When both of those are the case, there's no doubt that dumb terminals are a huge cost saver.
PCs, meanwhile, excel in the opposite environment: where your users need a changing range of applications and/or the number of users is a moving target. This is especially true of the case when the user count is a vacillating target whos general trend is upward.
In a modern large corporate PC environment, application installations can be controlled from a central environment, PCs are set up with a standard image, and often users do not have rights to modify a number of settings. This helps keep maintenance down a bit in comparison to previous environments. No doubt that overall though this still does not meet the level of a term service setup.
So, all in all, I think its about the "right tool for the job". Certain environments suit a dumb terminal setup, and for those that do a definite cost savings exists. But for those that don't, dumb terminals can be a bit of hitting a nail with a screwdriver. Sure, it works, but it'll take longer and you might even hurt yourself.
I've had my TI-85 since 1994. I still remember how my parents complained so much that it was so expensive ($150 at the time I think). I remember my mom saying "you'd better use this thing!" at the store when she took me to purchase it. Thanks again, mom.
That calculator is still in use today, mostly for mundane tasks like paying bills, although I do sometimes do unit conversions with it and even play the occasional game of Tetris (zshell uber alles!).
The real story though is that the calculator changed the course of my life. I started writing BASIC programs on it in high school, little games for fun. One of them, a helicopter game loosely based on Armor Alley, consumed almost all the memory. It even had a boss level with an evil enemy helicopter. But I digress.
It prompted me to take a computer programming elective course in my freshman year of college (I was majoring in EE at the time). I quickly changed my major to Computer Science. Years later, I develop software for a living. Who knew that humble calculator would launch a career?
So, to answer the article: Seriously, buy yourself a rugged calculator with strong capabilities. When you need to convert pints to teaspoons 13 years from now, you'll thank me. Oh, and it'll carry the day through college too, when you need to remember the periodic table or graph some crazy ass equation, or maybe just look up some notes that you might have stuffed in there the night before the test. You know, because you can't bring your laptop or your notebooks. But that calculator, it might get you out of a jam when you forget some law or theorem or equation. It might not launch your career, but a rugged capable calculator will always be useful.
You're absolutely correct, people need to donate to Cord Blood Banks, not individual storage.
My son died of leukemia recently, but had acheived a first remission. We were beginning the process of setting up a bone marrow transplant. I learned a lot more about cancer than I ever wanted to know.
We went to the closest transplant center to talk to the doctors there, and they said the majority of transplants that they do are cord blood now, rather than bone marrow. Cord blood transplants are much better in terms of what is know as Graft Versus Host Disease; in this case, the tendancy of the introduced blood cells to attack the vital organs of the new host. With a traditional marrow transplant, symptoms can often last 1-3 years. With cord blood donations, the symptoms usually last about 3 months and are usually not as severe. GVHD is critical because it prevents the new cells from fighting any potential infections, as they are distracted fighting the body they're supposed to be helping. Couple that with the fact that all existing cells are wiped out prior to transplant (to allow new cells to take hold), and the bodys defenses against infections are little to none in the presence of severe GVHD.
So whats the big deal about a cord blood bank instead of individual storage? In the case of leukemia, the childs own cells are almost worthless, because they are susceptible to the same mutation that caused the leukemia in the first place. Since they are the same cells, they will also not provide an effective defense if it should arise. Doctors will refuse to use them for transplant unless its absolutely a last resort (in the case of leukemia at least), because the chances of relapse (recurrence of cancer) are high. Cord blood donation offers cells which are close enough to work in another person, but different enough that once they take hold (known as neutrophil) they will attack and destroy any leukemia cells (or any of the old blood cells at all) that arise in the body. Leukemia cells can hide in certain locations, such as the spine, which are more difficult for chemotherapy treatments to penetrate.
All this means that cord blood donations are critical for treatment of certain types of leukemia, such as AML (Acute Mylocytic Leukemia) where transplants are commonly performed due to the high risk of relapse. If you're a member of certain ethnicities, the importance is even greater, because the availability is lower for those who need it.
Seriously, the only thing I get from this: Apparently its cool to be more immature than a 13 year old.
Whatever.
Glad we have "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." You know, because when a 13 year old gets pnwed, I know thats a really challenging feat and something I'd like to know about.
Can't wait for the next article: "13 year old tries to pull down a guys pants and then gets his own pants pulled down and its funny because I'm a simpleton"
Go ahead and mod me down, I've got the karma to burn.
I'm sure Google will be more diligent about removing copyrighted material than YouTube has been. However, I contend that is the very thing that has made YouTube popular - the fact that one can go to YouTube and almost instantly see any music video or funny commercial or odd internet clip that has ever existed.
Now, the odd internet clips, they'll survive, since generally they're not copyrighted. But short "big media" content such as music videos and commercials are going to have to be removed, and I think that's a major part of the draw.
Slashdot Mirror
Except you can't fill up with hydrogen at home. All this garbage about needing electric charging stations everywhere is moot when you account for everyone with an electric car charging it at night in their garage. We should only need public charging stations for road trips and forgetfulness/emergencies.
Hydrogen is far less convenient than electric and has gotten a slow start. Therefore my bet right now is heavily on electric, especially when you account for battery swap tech that already has been demonstrated. Moving away from battery ownership towards battery-as-a-service is probably the next logical innovation.
I don't see anything hydrogen offers other than appealing to existing consumer habits.
This is the elephant in the room. Not only is charging up at home more convenient than finding a fueling station, but I have zero confidence that compressed hydrogen fuel will be cost competitive with electricity.
Will it be worth thousands of dollars per year to reduce your fueling time by 25 minutes, given the average person will only need such a fueling station a handful of times per year?
Keep in mind, being able to fuel up at home in an electric car means you'll save significant time not driving out of your way to get to fueling stations.
Actually no. As a repeat backer (~20 projects), I'd really like to know when a project comes along that there is a high likelihood I would back. I've been posting a request for years now that Kickstarter put together an opt-in option that would email me when "backers similar to you are backing a new project". As long as such an email was reasonably accurate about when I'm likely to back, and didn't spam me incessantly with art projects, it would be great. It certainly would be heaps better than the weekly email that Kickstarter sends out right now, which is loaded with stuff that I have no interest in. At this point I just shunt it to trash folder without reading it.
I occasionally miss on good/interesting projects simply because they don't manage to reach me through social media or any other means. Kickstarter at this point has a pretty severe discoverability problem, and I feel anything that helps cut through that issue would be a positive development.
I'm sure it's economically impractical, but it strikes me that filling some of the worlds emptying water basins by towing large antarctic icebergs to a nearby port and then breaking them up for shipment is a win-win scenario.
Obvious downside: fossil fuel use to get water where it is most useful may exacerbate the problem over time.
You make the same assertion that Mill was correcting against in his statement. Probably you meant to do so, but I got a chuckle out of the idea that you might have missed his point entirely despite how clearly he elucidated it.
Whether any of this is true I have no idea, I would suppose it depends mostly upon whether the stance on issues by the UK conservative party or parties appeals to those who are less educated.
How about the sample size of 43?
I'm not at all impressed with the ability of study that has a statistically insignificant sample size and which also assumes people can accurately label themselves liberal or conservative to impart wide reaching conclusions about people of different political beliefs such as the submitter of the slashdot article suggests.
The PDF, if you please:
http://www.psych.nyu.edu/amodiolab/Amodio%20et%20al.%20(2007)%20Nature%20Neuro.pdf/
To me, a test studying whether people tend to press W when M comes up 4 times as often simply tells us that some people tend to press W when it comes up 4 times more often and others do not.
Final Score:
Study - Shaky, but ok. Sample size too small, sample is not listed as random, sample depends on self classification.
Conclusions - Just plain shaky.
Good universities require that you take a variety of courses that should round you out nicely. You'll have plenty of time to figure out if you hate computers and really want to be a poly sci or english major or some other thing.
If computers are your passion, I would encourage you to pursue a technical degree. Doing so will not make you one dimensional, or close you off from becoming an intelligent, considerate member of society. It will, however, usually crack the job market open for you when you finish. I've known many a liberal arts major that twisted in the wind for a long time before landing a job completely unrelated to their degree.
If you choose to go on and expand your horizons further as the parent post suggests, pursue your graduate degree in something different. This will leave you with the valuable technical undergraduate degree, and will open up all the crazy roads to academia or corporate management that you would care to pursue.
TFA is a classic example of misunderstanding the user base of a product. The article writer assumes that other users are like him/her self - annoyed by Microsofts patent mongering and monopolistic behavior. The writer does not realize that a huge portion of Office users couldn't care less about such behavior. Many aren't even aware its going on at all, in reference to patent mongering at least.
This mistake is VERY common among technical people. Programmers assume users will want to use an application the same way they would want to use it. In many parts of the Open Source community, programmers write open source applications with themselves in mind as the target audience. There are definitely exceptions, of course, but this is true of the majority. Having to jump through a few highly technical hoops to install or configure the software is often considered fine, even in a "release" version. For a regular user this is a disaster, as they are unable to navigate the installation/configuration hurdles and quickly give up.
Microsoft, meanwhile, fundamentally understands users. Look at what they concentrate on: Installation and Look and Feel. Technical users bemoan XP and Vista as lipstick on a pig. They're right. But Microsoft knows that the road to wealth is not paved with hidden efficiencies like optimized TCP/IP stacks and user/process security models. The road to wealth is paved with nearly foolproof installations and preinstalled pretty looking software. Software that caters to the user. (Technical software with a smaller audience, such as the nightmare installation of Team Foundation Server, are not a part of this discussion since the user base of such software is by nature highly technical)
You may say, "But wait, MS products aren't all that pretty, and they don't always install well!" True today. But Office, when it came out, was prettier and easier to install than anything else on the market. Windows 95 even more so. Now that they've gained the upper hand, they've become complacent, living off their inertia. Still, when new products debut (like Vista), the same two focuses emerge: Ease of Installation and Look and Feel. (Note that Pre-Installation of Microsoft OSes and Office is a HUGE factor in Ease of Installation, don't overlook it if you respond - there's no easier install than no install).
Dyed diesel fuel is NOT illegal. Its only illegal if you use it in ROAD vehicles. This means using untaxed dyed diesel fuel to power your tractor, combine, etc is fine and legal. Its even legal to use in your farm truck, as long as you don't drive that truck on public roads.
The reasoning for this is that using your vehicle on public roads causes wear and tear on said roads, and part of the tax on your fuel goes towards paying for the upkeep of those roads.
Much of this depends greatly on the relative size of the lava tube and the thickness of the crust covering the tube.
1 .pdf, further reading turns up that illumination from one of the seven cave floors was captured. Current estimate for depth of the Dena cave is approximately 130m. Since the sides of these holes didn't reflect either, its safe to assume the diameter of each of the caves is considerably larger than the skylights that we're seeing. Those are some pretty large holes!
We're very used to observing lava tubes here on Earth, whereas lava tubes on Mars (very thin atmosphere, much lower gravity, different rock/lava composition) may behave quite differently.
I like the lava tube theory. The Tharsis volcanoes are much larger than earth volcanoes, the idea that these holes are tiny pinpricks into massive lava tubes is certainly intriguing. That they appear on an ancient lava plain lends much credence to the theory. The big question, when assuming these are gargantuan lava tubes, is where the exit is. To form a tube, we can assume one thing: At the exit location must exist a unique condition, such as over a precipice, where the lava was not obstructed by itself - otherwise it would pile up, slow itself down, and have filled or partially filled the tube as the obstructed lava cooled and hardened.
Perhaps on Mars, due to the lack of atmosphere and cold conditions, the surface of lava flows harden quickly even though molten rock continues to flow underneath? The mystery of where the lava went would still be intriguing if this were true. Perhaps the behavior of lava on Mars is so different that a non-constricting endpoint is not required but rather that simply a downhill flow could generate this result due to differences in viscosity, coherence, and adherence as well as the well known atmospheric and gravitational differences.
In the paper http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2007/pdf/137
I work in the banking industry. Banks don't like work on the side. I know of several instances that didn't end well with regards to that issue.
f _needs
Some companies, especially tech companies, are far more lenient about this sort of thing, since they realize that you'll probably gain valuable experience when doing side work. But you'll find in many industries that work on the side is anywhere from frowned upon and discouraged to flat out denied and a offense that will get you terminated.
So a lot depends on your situation, but my point is that the idea that "if you're rich you should always make more money and donate that" may be flat out ridiculous depending your industry.
Besides all that, giving money does not earn you the direct respect and admiration that you receive when doing the job yourself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_o
And, as I mentioned before, I think everyone needs some time where they aren't working under the pressure of working for money. A hobby, if you will. Thats really what volunteer work is - its a hobby that benefits someone else. There's way less pressure, deadlines are far more lax if they exist at all. You can't work volunteers to the bone unless they want to work that hard. Whenever money is involved, people will expect you to meet deadlines and bust your ass. Once the money is gone, so is all that pressure. Both physiologically and psychologically, it is very important for most people to tinker with something in their spare time rather than work another job.
Another important aspect of volunteerism: you can choose who you associate with. For instance, I can spend time with family and/or friends doing volunteer work. But if I get another job, its just me and some people I don't know. I can't fulfill my needs of community and friendship while working a second job, because my friends and/or family do not have the capabilities to help me in that job.
There are many aspects to consider when thinking about this issue, and the psychological needs of the individual have to be among them. We are not creatures that can exist well under the pressure and isolation of constant work.
Perhaps you do not need to be fulfilled psychologically with the respect and admiration of your family, friends, and community. Some people who do choose to do volunteer work as a means to that end.
Must be nice to be a Dutch banker. Here in the USA, professionals who make lots of money are salaried, meaning they could work round the clock until they died and not get paid a penny more than working 40 hours.
Theoretically, you could get an extra job, but since working the same job for someone else would get you fired at BOTH workplaces, its much easier and better to volunteer your time and effort to a deserving organization who needs it.
Couple that with the fact that working hard at the same or similar job all the time leads to declining health and an early demise, and volunteer work that makes you feel good about yourself and gives you a break from the daily grind starts to sound pretty great after all.
The best option? Give some of your money AND some of your time.
Rather than mod troll, perhaps we should consider the level that this persons wife is on the scale of users. My argument would be that she is on the high end. Not nearly as high as our friendly neighborhood linux geek, no. But the following is a clue:
"My wife wanted Inkscape". Interesting statement there. Not "my wife wanted a program that does x and I said use Inkscape", but "my wife wanted Inkscape". I think Joe and Jane User would have one hell of a time telling you what Inkscape was, or what exactly it did. I believe you underestimate your wife, who is well beyond an ordinary user.
See, the other thing here is that your wife has built in linux tech support, for free, from a very qualified linux geek. Thus, brazen installation of the operating system and various drivers is a picnic, because she knows if she F's it up beyond all recognition, that you'll fix it. She knows that if she's considering buying some strange piece of hardware that does something, and its incompatible or a bitch to install on linux, you'll either advise her not to buy it and recommend a similar product that is more compatible or go through the installation for her. Regular Joe just buys Incompatible Product X and gets pissed when it doesn't work after 3 hours of reading man files and running command line arguments.
Until linux programmers understand that the average user fears the computer, and fears most of all making a mistake on a computer, linux will not succeed. The average user is the exact opposite from your average computer geek. Clicking on things to see what they do isn't fun, its a fearful event that it might break something.
So congratulations to recent linux distros, you've made it past the point where people who like tinkering with computers can possibly do most things without tearing their hair out in frustration. Now comes the hard part, getting timid, fearful users to feel comfortable using your OS. Good luck. I suggest soothing error messages.
Insightful? Ugh.
I can assure you that yes, Microsoft does in fact put much more effort into building operating operating systems than "defeating" open source. Do they have an army of lawyers looking to keep themselves employed? Yes. But they have way more developers than that assigned to building operating systems.
If Microsoft released a product like linux, everyone would deride it as a step backwards. Oh sure, it'd be secure as hell and optimized up the wazoo, but your average consumer would consider it a huge step backwards in usability. And your average user is where MS is making money hand over fist. (Counting business users, of course)
Don't get me wrong, I like linux and I think it has an increasingly important place among operating systems. If a vendor can ever manage to put a beautiful GUI on top that extends 99% of functionality into the GUI space, and fix a few major issues, most of which pertain to drivers; I expect they'll do tremendously well in the more savvy segments of the computing market. You could argue that Apple has already done this, and to a certain degree they have, though I think they're too intent on tying into (and selling) their own proprietary hardware solutions. I believe this is preventing them from capturing all of the market share available out there, because there is a huge subset of users that can't or aren't willing to buy what is essentially a $1,000+ operating system. Honestly its probably much more than that to achieve the current level of performance they already have with their existing tricked out PC. Basically if OS X were sold as a stand alone product and ran on just about anything - now you're talking the language hardcore users want to hear. I believe sooner or later a linux based distro will achieve that miraculous milestone, and when it does I'll certainly be in line to buy it.
Smart Appliances make some amount of sense, especially, as pointed out above, when RFID hits its stride.
What I don't understand is the TV in the refrigerator. This makes absolutely no sense to me. Do people really want to stand next to their 'fridge and watch TV? Or is it that we can't stand to be away from the TV for 20 seconds while we go to fetch a beer? I find it puzzling that anyone would want this technology, yet I see it frequently in high end refrigerators. This isn't like the ice and water dispensers, those actually make sense. Odds are decent that you were going to the 'fridge to get ice or water, since both of those items are often contained in said appliance.
Of all the places I can think of, the refrigerator door might be the absolute stupidest place you can possibly put a TV. Lets go through the list:
No place to comfortably sit and watch? Check.
Constant interruptions from other people trying to use the room for something other than watching TV? Check.
TV is mounted on a movable object, that is commonly used and moved? Check.
Uncomfortable viewing angle whether sitting or standing? Check.
TV is small anyway and thus not useful for watching most programs? Check.
Lots of other high amperage appliances plugged in on the same circuit to generate interference? Check.
TV is in a high traffic area with a good chance of spilling various things on it? Check.
TV generates heat, which has to be dissipated by refrigerator to keep stuff inside cold, thus using more power than should be necessary to refrigerate normally? Check.
Wow, an impressive list of idiocy. If "RFID on everything" fails to take off, the refrigerator TV will die a quick death. If RFID does take off, then the refrigerator TV will live on as an optional use of the screen used primarily for telling you what stuff expired and needs to be replaced.
Congratulations! You write in such a random and confusing a manner as to make me certain you could become a novelist.
to Wit:
William Gibson, is that you?
Its interesting. I work in a large organization. My group is an officially sanctioned technical group (an apps development team). However, we're not the IT group that makes all of the decisions about Hardware, OS configuration, and the like.
So I've actually been on both sides of the coin at once. On one hand, I have registry scripts that I've built to eliminate roadblocks that the IT group has put in place to prevent the massive number of regular users from doing dangerous things to their PCs. Every time a new hinderance policy rolls out, I often find that I have to override it to do my job. Though I'd rather not override the policies, but I need to be able to see things like descriptive HTML error messages. You know, because developing web applications is part of my job. Kinda hard to fix anything when all you get is "There was an error. Peace out".
On the other hand, we have a number of Shadow technical groups floating around in other parts of the organization. Some of these Shadow groups have decided to build their own applications. Often these are Frankenstein monstrosities built out of an amalgam of Excel, Access, VB Macros, and other such "user friendly" tools. Often these same "applications" later become the bane of my existence when they attempt to exceed 15 users and they melt down like Velveeta on the planet Mercury. Luckily, when they come begging our group for help, I can rewrite them if its my prerogative, which it always is. Most often we don't even look at the original code and simply start with user requirements, just as we would do with any other project.
So I feel the pain of the IT group. Its hard to support thousands of users that are doing all kinds of crazy stuff that routinely breaks things or exposes the organization to harmful viruses/spyware/etc. At the same time, I feel the pain of the users, who sometimes need to get out from under the draconian thumb just to get stuff done.
Still, I wish there would be a day when all the Frankenstein applications were dead and gone, and only the clean, gleaming ivory tower applications remained. Unfortunately, it'll never happen because with each monster I kill, somewhere else in the labyrinth another aspiring Dr. Frankenstein creates his/her monster of their very own. They feed it data, and users; and it grows larger each day, inexorably marching towards the day when it too will become like as much melted cheese.
I'd argue that perhaps the biggest problem facing games today is the way in which developers implement the loss condition. Namely death.
Sure, death seems like a very big deterrent for the player. It sounds sinister. "You're dead." Scary stuff. But in games its not really like that. You're not dead, you're simply required to start over from some point before. "Respawn", so to speak. Its like a sort of digital "Ground Hog Day" without the laughs. Some games have dealt with the reason for this creatively, and Planescape comes to mind. Not every game can be in a weird and whacky plane of existence like Planescape though. What this tells me is that developers need to get more creative about loss conditions. In some games this will be easier than others.
For instance, in a WWII game, bullets are flying, bombs are going off - its war and people are killing each other. If you're a grunt and you get shot in the head or hit by close quarters grenade shrapnel, you're dead. Hard to get around that. You might have to make the player anonymous and have him keep "spawning" into new characters, or come up with something similarly creative.
Other games, though, might do better by implementing standard loss conditions where players only become disabled, rather than truly die. If you're hit in the leg, you might survive. Perhaps the enemy captures you, perhaps your buddies pull you out and get you to a hospital. Perhaps you're a jungle troll and you eventually heal yourself and wake up hours later when the battle is over.
The point is, not very many games exist who's primary player induced setback is anything other than death. This industry crutch will plague developers until the mold is recast, and that may never happen. As long as that crutch continues, it will be exceedingly difficult to present the player with unavoidable setbacks that don't feel contrived.
Disabling a player allows the developer to implement a different result in an unavoidable setback. For instance, perhaps normally the disabled player is rescued by comrades in the loss condition. But in the unavoidable setback, the player might wake up in an enemy prison. This works because the player was used to becoming disabled, but the true "setback" now sinks in when the player is presented with required escape from an enemy prison rather than the usual friendly hospital.
This sort of "oh crap" moment is only possible if you've trained the player to expect a certain result and then suddenly juxtapose it with a different one. It works in Half Life 2 because the player enters the game with a certain expectation of the way the game works. The "oh crap" effectively comes in when the player realizes the tables have been turned on them and they're out of their element. A word of caution: This Should Not Be Done Randomly. This sort of situation has to be handled carefully, and the situation that resulted in the true setback loss condition has to be clearly different from situations that the player has encountered before. This vital clue tells the player "Its not your fault, this is the way its SUPPOSED to go down". Without this information, players will feel unfairly penalized.
Exactly. Specifically, its in this passage:
"The earliest, simplest method of creating dramatic setbacks in games would be the cut-scene ex machina. One of my earliest memories of this venerable technique is in short clips between levels in the very first Ninja Gaiden, but the same effective ploy can be found in the likes of Diablo II, not a few Final Fantasies, and to wonderful effect in Grim Fandango. It's safe. You are not likely to think you failed in a scene you had zero control over, especially as they tend to take the form of rewards for completing a section of the game."
The author further argues that with less and less narrative taking place out-of-game (cutscenes), that game developers need to develop better ways of integrating dramatic setbacks directly into gameplay in a way the directly conveys that the setback was unavoidable.
Fairly common also to see PCs running terminal emulators in call centers. It allows the terminal to connect to multiple servers (which are often running completely different incompatible platforms) at the same time, as well as do PC stuff (office, email, web browsing, etc) without loading down a central server with a lot of unnecessary "wasted" cycles. Call centers are generally full of folks who are great at wasting CPU cycles...
And really to me, thats the reason why the dumb terminal idea breaks down a bit in many environments. Scalability is a major issue when you've got big iron. When the big iron isn't big enough, you've got a difficult choice: either buy another huge slice of big iron, or let your users suffer with less CPU cycles than they require. When you're talking about a business, investing millions to add another piece of big iron doesn't look too great when the majority of the CPU cycles you just bought with it will go unused for months or perhaps years.
With PCs, you just throw down workstations on desks and you're good to go. The cost scales directly with the employees, and thats a big reason why its so attractive for many businesses.
Dumb terminals are great for certain situations: when you have a known number of users that use a known set of applications. At least, within a certain tolerance, you obviously don't need to know the exact number of either one, an approximate upper bound will do. Then you can be very comfortable knowing that your users have all they need in terms of functionality and CPU cycles. When both of those are the case, there's no doubt that dumb terminals are a huge cost saver.
PCs, meanwhile, excel in the opposite environment: where your users need a changing range of applications and/or the number of users is a moving target. This is especially true of the case when the user count is a vacillating target whos general trend is upward.
In a modern large corporate PC environment, application installations can be controlled from a central environment, PCs are set up with a standard image, and often users do not have rights to modify a number of settings. This helps keep maintenance down a bit in comparison to previous environments. No doubt that overall though this still does not meet the level of a term service setup.
So, all in all, I think its about the "right tool for the job". Certain environments suit a dumb terminal setup, and for those that do a definite cost savings exists. But for those that don't, dumb terminals can be a bit of hitting a nail with a screwdriver. Sure, it works, but it'll take longer and you might even hurt yourself.
I've had my TI-85 since 1994. I still remember how my parents complained so much that it was so expensive ($150 at the time I think). I remember my mom saying "you'd better use this thing!" at the store when she took me to purchase it. Thanks again, mom.
That calculator is still in use today, mostly for mundane tasks like paying bills, although I do sometimes do unit conversions with it and even play the occasional game of Tetris (zshell uber alles!).
The real story though is that the calculator changed the course of my life. I started writing BASIC programs on it in high school, little games for fun. One of them, a helicopter game loosely based on Armor Alley, consumed almost all the memory. It even had a boss level with an evil enemy helicopter. But I digress.
It prompted me to take a computer programming elective course in my freshman year of college (I was majoring in EE at the time). I quickly changed my major to Computer Science. Years later, I develop software for a living. Who knew that humble calculator would launch a career?
So, to answer the article: Seriously, buy yourself a rugged calculator with strong capabilities. When you need to convert pints to teaspoons 13 years from now, you'll thank me. Oh, and it'll carry the day through college too, when you need to remember the periodic table or graph some crazy ass equation, or maybe just look up some notes that you might have stuffed in there the night before the test. You know, because you can't bring your laptop or your notebooks. But that calculator, it might get you out of a jam when you forget some law or theorem or equation. It might not launch your career, but a rugged capable calculator will always be useful.
You're absolutely correct, people need to donate to Cord Blood Banks, not individual storage.
My son died of leukemia recently, but had acheived a first remission. We were beginning the process of setting up a bone marrow transplant. I learned a lot more about cancer than I ever wanted to know.
We went to the closest transplant center to talk to the doctors there, and they said the majority of transplants that they do are cord blood now, rather than bone marrow. Cord blood transplants are much better in terms of what is know as Graft Versus Host Disease; in this case, the tendancy of the introduced blood cells to attack the vital organs of the new host. With a traditional marrow transplant, symptoms can often last 1-3 years. With cord blood donations, the symptoms usually last about 3 months and are usually not as severe. GVHD is critical because it prevents the new cells from fighting any potential infections, as they are distracted fighting the body they're supposed to be helping. Couple that with the fact that all existing cells are wiped out prior to transplant (to allow new cells to take hold), and the bodys defenses against infections are little to none in the presence of severe GVHD.
So whats the big deal about a cord blood bank instead of individual storage? In the case of leukemia, the childs own cells are almost worthless, because they are susceptible to the same mutation that caused the leukemia in the first place. Since they are the same cells, they will also not provide an effective defense if it should arise. Doctors will refuse to use them for transplant unless its absolutely a last resort (in the case of leukemia at least), because the chances of relapse (recurrence of cancer) are high. Cord blood donation offers cells which are close enough to work in another person, but different enough that once they take hold (known as neutrophil) they will attack and destroy any leukemia cells (or any of the old blood cells at all) that arise in the body. Leukemia cells can hide in certain locations, such as the spine, which are more difficult for chemotherapy treatments to penetrate.
All this means that cord blood donations are critical for treatment of certain types of leukemia, such as AML (Acute Mylocytic Leukemia) where transplants are commonly performed due to the high risk of relapse. If you're a member of certain ethnicities, the importance is even greater, because the availability is lower for those who need it.
childish, lame, immature (tagging beta)
Seriously, the only thing I get from this: Apparently its cool to be more immature than a 13 year old.
Whatever.
Glad we have "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." You know, because when a 13 year old gets pnwed, I know thats a really challenging feat and something I'd like to know about.
Can't wait for the next article: "13 year old tries to pull down a guys pants and then gets his own pants pulled down and its funny because I'm a simpleton"
Go ahead and mod me down, I've got the karma to burn.
I'm sure Google will be more diligent about removing copyrighted material than YouTube has been. However, I contend that is the very thing that has made YouTube popular - the fact that one can go to YouTube and almost instantly see any music video or funny commercial or odd internet clip that has ever existed.
Now, the odd internet clips, they'll survive, since generally they're not copyrighted. But short "big media" content such as music videos and commercials are going to have to be removed, and I think that's a major part of the draw.
Yeah, I believe www.blacknova.net is one of them.