Well, you could always take the safest way to travel -- the train.
In Europe it's about as fast as flying for moderate distances. Unfortunately in the U.S. it's not competitive except for the DC/NYC/Boston route (Acela).
But here's the cool thing -- even on a slow train you can get work done since you're not busy driving. You can sit at a nice big table or cozy up at the bar and have a cocktail. Try *THAT* driving.
Granted the nice bar is in first class. (Though on Amtrak if you're in first class on a long-distance train, you actually have your own private room. It's like staying in a hotel but you're going somewhere. Or if you're working on the move, you can think of it as your private office on wheels).
Even the coach seats are the size of a first class airline seat, plus you can get up and go hang out in the aforementioned lounge with your laptop and wifi. (Wifi on some trains, on some others you'll need a cellular data connection).
It's honestly the nicest way to travel. =) Try it sometime. And don't be scared off from first class -- even the cheapest room comes with 3 meals a day (steak, duck, etc.) as part of the price, free wine (on some trains), etc. On one trip I took from SF -> LA, I went with someone. Ticket $50 each, and room $50/each (the room costs the same no matter how many people you have in it). Getting the room paid for itself in meals and drinks (meals in the onboard restaurant, and $5 for the wine tasting that got us about 8 glasses of wine each =P )
I want to live in a place where I can walk to the store, where the proprietor knows my name, have my kids be able to walk to school (or take the subway) and actually make friends and interact with other human beings, and not have to cart everyone around cloistered from the world in an otherwise-useless two ton cage burning ancient dead organisms.
The problem is that the U.S. doesn't *build* these places anymore. Instead they build the giant 50's road-utopias that they're used to building, and even worse -- my taxes have to pay for all that extra sewer line, power line, and *ROAD* that goes there! (And don't go on about the gas tax paying for it, it only pays for major highways, and even then not entirely. All the gajillion miles of road that feed your suburban house come out of other taxes).
Because we don't build real walkable non-auto-centric towns anymore, the supply of such places is VERY short, so now I have to pay through the nose for it.
There's crazy unmet demand in this country, and it's caused by the continual senseless sucking of urban tax dollars to exurban projects. I'm sick of paying for your freeway, sewer, etc. and not even having this fact recognized (yet the exurb people howl and scream when we try to get some public transit built here)
I feel like a sardine in a can when I am asked to commute for an hour in a tiny metal cage (called an automobile). Even worse, I'm forced to constantly due an activity that I do not want to do (drive), as if I try to do other things (like work on my computer, cuddle a date, etc.) I am putting my life and the lives of others at risk as well as breaking numerous safety laws.
My apartment may be smaller than your exurb house, but when I think about it I'm only ever in one room at a time anyway. Why do I need lots of rooms when only one is occupied at any given moment? Excluding sanitation reasons (bathroom, kitchen), one or two rooms can easily serve the purpose of any other room. Unless you're talking about very specialized environments, like a home gym, which I don't really need since I live in a dense area and I only have to walk 500 ft to get to the nearest gym.
Yet for some reason to get an apartment in a real city, I have to fight against hundreds of thousands of people who all want this scarce resource, whereas the people who want to live in sprawly exurbs have vast new product being made for them every day, much of it at taxpayer expense -- and the reason for this is because the government subsidizes exurbs and taxes the cities to pay for it.
All roads should be tolled, just like planes and trains. Make the subsidies explicit (all transportation has to be subsidized to some degree, but more some reason we do a much better job of being unaware of the massive automobile subsidies).
With regards to privacy, there should be a way to anonymously pay the toll (anonymous e-cash paid for with real cash, etc.). One-time-use tickets if you want, etc.
What's going to happen to our farms, forests, etc. then?
Who's going to pay for our sewer systems, power systems, etc. that will have to be geometrically larger due to all the extra miles that must be traveled?
Living far apart has large negative impacts by causing massive expansion of the infrastructure that modern life requires.
Someone who is "overly masculine" to the point of bodybuilding, etc., is obviously obsessed with masculinity. They are obsessed with masculinity because they don't value femininity at all -- because they're gay. ESPECIALLY if they are constantly around men who have a similar physique. In Japan nothing is gayer than a bodybuilder's gym.
If you really want to get the girls, you have a boyish charm, and focus on a softer form of male beauty.
Also, if you like to wear pink frilly dresses it's under the assumption that you're a perv, not gay. (Think of Ed Wood and why he crossdressed. He did it because he WAS into women, and styling himself as one made him feel closer to them.)
That said, there is also an effeminate gay stereotype in Japan, but they are treated almost as women rather than gay men....but what's gayer -- an obsession with dresses or an obsession with ripped beefy muscles and oiled glistening skin?
(See other reply to this post for an explanation of "Bara")
Japan was defeated but they refused an unconditional surrender. Everything at the time indicated that they would fight to the last man. What are you supposed to do?
I dunno, maybe something like conditional surrender? You don't need unconditional surrender to win a war. By the end of the conflict the Japanese had few conditions beyond keeping the imperial court in place. This was not very much to ask for, considering we let them keep the monarchy anyway in the end.
Actually I should clarify, because I wasn't being quite honest or accurate in my previous post. The invasive species in the South East U.S. is a different species than the eels in question in the article. The pest fish that escaped the farms is the Asian Swamp Eel. While it is often sold as "unagi" and is somewhat analogous in flavor, the specific eel in question is the Japanese Eel, which does not live in the Western Hemisphere. The Asian Swamp Eel is actually from a different taxonomic order.
The closest analog in the Western Hemisphere is the American Eel, which is also endangered, partly due to the invasion of the Asian Swamp Eel.
That said, the Asian Swamp Eel works perfectly fine in similar roles, and is quite tasty. Unfortunately you can't really call it "unagi" in a respectable Japanese fish market, even if it's called that when sold in many fish markets outside of Japan.
Unagi infestations are actually a HUGE problem along the U.S. gulf coast! A long time ago, some enterprising farmer tried raising unagi for the Japanese-American market, and some managed to escape. They are now a huge problem in places like Florida and Alabama, where they outcompete and kill off native fish species, foul nets, etc. They're considered a massive pest fish and there have long been attempts at finding ways to poison them, etc.
A much better solution would be to just eat the damn things. We can export tons of these wild unagi to the Japanese if we decide to. There is currently NO shortage of them.
(To clarify, superconductors do NOT work at room temperature -- the best ones (and the only ones we can really consider in practical applications) require cooling with something like liquid nitrogen. Moreover, this molecule is designed for size, rather than temperature, so I wonder if they had to compromise on how low you have to cool it. The lower temperature superconductors require liquid helium cooling, which goes into ridiculously cold territory.)
The article does not seem to indicate the temperature that it works at.
Dude, the Dreamcast was released on November 27, 1998.
I know, because I had a friend get me one for a Christmas present. It was one of the ones with Yukawa Senmue on the box. You know, from the commercials.
He was funny and self-deprecating. It was sort of a recognition of how Sony's Playstation had managed to beat out the Saturn over time (The Saturn was the #1 console in Japan, roughly until FF7 came out for the Playstation)
I still thought the Segata Sanshirou ads were better though =) I think the Saturn would've won in the U.S. if Sanshirou had been the mascot here. He kicks your ass if you don't play Sega Saturn. =D
If you can maintain satellites in GEO, you can BUILD satellites in GEO. Hello Space Based Solar/Beamed Microwave, and We Win The Game! Pournelle has written extensively on this, e.g.:
For some reason I read that as "Hello Kitty" satellites.
"Cash only" establishments are just trying to get by.
They're not evading taxes, they're avoiding the service charge that Visa/Mastercard charges them on every transaction. In most businesses profit margins are very small, and the extra 5%-10% that the credit card companies skim off the transaction (particularly on small purchased) can eat up the entire profit.
Many businesses depend on cash customers because they make zero profit on credit card customers -- they just accept credit cards to increase their volume so to bring overall costs down, and hope and pray that they get enough cash customers to make a profit.
You know that "cash back" that credit card companies give you on each purchase? They're just giving you a cut of the money that they're wringing out of the merchant.
Plate tectonics causes quakes! Sometimes, however, drilling *releases* stress, triggering quakes that were already going to happen, the drilling just throws the straw on the camel's back, so to speak.
In fact, technologies like this could be useful in doing controlled release of earthquakes, such that you can pick the time it can occur so people are ready for it.
...well you *ARE* trusting a small, third party entity with your data on the internet. Can you really expect things that are not on storage you monitor yourself to be secure? Furthermore, why can't it just store your clipboard through local storage? Does it really have to put it up online? Do Apple's apps have no way to store and retrieve local data?
Apple really should have this feature built in, but you shouldn't be surprised when your workaround that involves dumping your unencrypted data on a server somewhere has security issues.
Still, they could get around this by defining the "bittorrent chunk" size to be 1.5k (UDP payload size). Everything else would probably work fine.
This is a really dumb idea, considering that the torrent file carries a 160-bit hash for all the chunks. You'd wind up with your torrent file being over 1/10th of the size of the file you're trying to get in the first place.
Then you'd need a torrent for your torrent.
(Although, this itself isn't that bad an idea now that I think about it for an advanced version of the protocol... Have peers share hashing/parity information as well as the file. You'd be protected against bad hashes by the overall torrent file having hashes of the hashes. =D)
This is why you should always buy your phone with the MANUFACTURER'S firmware. I'm sure HTC will sell these without the T-Mobile lockdown stuff.
Pretty much all HTC users know that if you have a device with a U.S. carrier firmware, the first thing you need to do is flash it with something less restrictive. =)
So can't you just install Evolution on it and be able to sync with Exchange (albeit through crappy OWA interface)?
The phone doesn't force you to use the software it ships with. Go ahead and install whatever calendar/address book you want. Stop acting like you're forced to used bundled software on an open platform.
Nope, he distinctly said raptErs, which pretty much refers to a type of console used by the U.S. Army (see post below). =)
If he said raptOrs, he might've been referring to producing his own line of 10,000RPM SATA hard drives -- which would be a good thing, since there's only one manufacturer in the market at the moment, if you don't want to go with them you need to go the SCSI/SAS route.
It would take a lot of time and effort, but you could probably wipe out humanity with them. A glass/ceramic/metal disk spinning at 10,000 RPM can do a lot of damage.
It's not EXACTLY what you had in mind, but the Sakura Taisen social-sim/tactical RPG series is 1920's late-era steampunk. The internal combustion engine is featured but there's still lots of steam-boiler-powered goodness in it. And since it's the 1920's there's giant airships and such too. =3
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you could always take the safest way to travel -- the train.
In Europe it's about as fast as flying for moderate distances. Unfortunately in the U.S. it's not competitive except for the DC/NYC/Boston route (Acela).
But here's the cool thing -- even on a slow train you can get work done since you're not busy driving. You can sit at a nice big table or cozy up at the bar and have a cocktail. Try *THAT* driving.
Granted the nice bar is in first class. (Though on Amtrak if you're in first class on a long-distance train, you actually have your own private room. It's like staying in a hotel but you're going somewhere. Or if you're working on the move, you can think of it as your private office on wheels).
Even the coach seats are the size of a first class airline seat, plus you can get up and go hang out in the aforementioned lounge with your laptop and wifi. (Wifi on some trains, on some others you'll need a cellular data connection).
It's honestly the nicest way to travel. =) Try it sometime. And don't be scared off from first class -- even the cheapest room comes with 3 meals a day (steak, duck, etc.) as part of the price, free wine (on some trains), etc. On one trip I took from SF -> LA, I went with someone. Ticket $50 each, and room $50/each (the room costs the same no matter how many people you have in it). Getting the room paid for itself in meals and drinks (meals in the onboard restaurant, and $5 for the wine tasting that got us about 8 glasses of wine each =P )
I want to live in a place where I can walk to the store, where the proprietor knows my name, have my kids be able to walk to school (or take the subway) and actually make friends and interact with other human beings, and not have to cart everyone around cloistered from the world in an otherwise-useless two ton cage burning ancient dead organisms.
The problem is that the U.S. doesn't *build* these places anymore. Instead they build the giant 50's road-utopias that they're used to building, and even worse -- my taxes have to pay for all that extra sewer line, power line, and *ROAD* that goes there! (And don't go on about the gas tax paying for it, it only pays for major highways, and even then not entirely. All the gajillion miles of road that feed your suburban house come out of other taxes).
Because we don't build real walkable non-auto-centric towns anymore, the supply of such places is VERY short, so now I have to pay through the nose for it.
There's crazy unmet demand in this country, and it's caused by the continual senseless sucking of urban tax dollars to exurban projects. I'm sick of paying for your freeway, sewer, etc. and not even having this fact recognized (yet the exurb people howl and scream when we try to get some public transit built here)
I feel like a sardine in a can when I am asked to commute for an hour in a tiny metal cage (called an automobile). Even worse, I'm forced to constantly due an activity that I do not want to do (drive), as if I try to do other things (like work on my computer, cuddle a date, etc.) I am putting my life and the lives of others at risk as well as breaking numerous safety laws.
My apartment may be smaller than your exurb house, but when I think about it I'm only ever in one room at a time anyway. Why do I need lots of rooms when only one is occupied at any given moment? Excluding sanitation reasons (bathroom, kitchen), one or two rooms can easily serve the purpose of any other room. Unless you're talking about very specialized environments, like a home gym, which I don't really need since I live in a dense area and I only have to walk 500 ft to get to the nearest gym.
Yet for some reason to get an apartment in a real city, I have to fight against hundreds of thousands of people who all want this scarce resource, whereas the people who want to live in sprawly exurbs have vast new product being made for them every day, much of it at taxpayer expense -- and the reason for this is because the government subsidizes exurbs and taxes the cities to pay for it.
All roads should be tolled, just like planes and trains. Make the subsidies explicit (all transportation has to be subsidized to some degree, but more some reason we do a much better job of being unaware of the massive automobile subsidies).
With regards to privacy, there should be a way to anonymously pay the toll (anonymous e-cash paid for with real cash, etc.). One-time-use tickets if you want, etc.
What's going to happen to our farms, forests, etc. then?
Who's going to pay for our sewer systems, power systems, etc. that will have to be geometrically larger due to all the extra miles that must be traveled?
Living far apart has large negative impacts by causing massive expansion of the infrastructure that modern life requires.
Don't worry, they'll get around to it eventually:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megazone_23
Essentially it goes like this:
Someone who is "overly masculine" to the point of bodybuilding, etc., is obviously obsessed with masculinity. They are obsessed with masculinity because they don't value femininity at all -- because they're gay. ESPECIALLY if they are constantly around men who have a similar physique. In Japan nothing is gayer than a bodybuilder's gym.
If you really want to get the girls, you have a boyish charm, and focus on a softer form of male beauty.
Also, if you like to wear pink frilly dresses it's under the assumption that you're a perv, not gay. (Think of Ed Wood and why he crossdressed. He did it because he WAS into women, and styling himself as one made him feel closer to them.)
That said, there is also an effeminate gay stereotype in Japan, but they are treated almost as women rather than gay men. ...but what's gayer -- an obsession with dresses or an obsession with ripped beefy muscles and oiled glistening skin?
(See other reply to this post for an explanation of "Bara")
Japan was defeated but they refused an unconditional surrender. Everything at the time indicated that they would fight to the last man. What are you supposed to do?
I dunno, maybe something like conditional surrender? You don't need unconditional surrender to win a war. By the end of the conflict the Japanese had few conditions beyond keeping the imperial court in place. This was not very much to ask for, considering we let them keep the monarchy anyway in the end.
Uh, they BOUGHT Flight Simulator from Sublogic. FS1/FS2 were Sublogic products before MS got ahold of FS2.
Actually I should clarify, because I wasn't being quite honest or accurate in my previous post. The invasive species in the South East U.S. is a different species than the eels in question in the article. The pest fish that escaped the farms is the Asian Swamp Eel. While it is often sold as "unagi" and is somewhat analogous in flavor, the specific eel in question is the Japanese Eel, which does not live in the Western Hemisphere. The Asian Swamp Eel is actually from a different taxonomic order.
The closest analog in the Western Hemisphere is the American Eel, which is also endangered, partly due to the invasion of the Asian Swamp Eel.
That said, the Asian Swamp Eel works perfectly fine in similar roles, and is quite tasty. Unfortunately you can't really call it "unagi" in a respectable Japanese fish market, even if it's called that when sold in many fish markets outside of Japan.
Unagi infestations are actually a HUGE problem along the U.S. gulf coast! A long time ago, some enterprising farmer tried raising unagi for the Japanese-American market, and some managed to escape. They are now a huge problem in places like Florida and Alabama, where they outcompete and kill off native fish species, foul nets, etc. They're considered a massive pest fish and there have long been attempts at finding ways to poison them, etc.
A much better solution would be to just eat the damn things. We can export tons of these wild unagi to the Japanese if we decide to. There is currently NO shortage of them.
(To clarify, superconductors do NOT work at room temperature -- the best ones (and the only ones we can really consider in practical applications) require cooling with something like liquid nitrogen. Moreover, this molecule is designed for size, rather than temperature, so I wonder if they had to compromise on how low you have to cool it. The lower temperature superconductors require liquid helium cooling, which goes into ridiculously cold territory.)
The article does not seem to indicate the temperature that it works at.
This doesn't do us a lot of good in most applications if we have to cool our processors with liquid nitrogen.
Dude, the Dreamcast was released on November 27, 1998.
I know, because I had a friend get me one for a Christmas present. It was one of the ones with Yukawa Senmue on the box. You know, from the commercials.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jnsg3YLYcDk&fmt=18
He was funny and self-deprecating. It was sort of a recognition of how Sony's Playstation had managed to beat out the Saturn over time (The Saturn was the #1 console in Japan, roughly until FF7 came out for the Playstation)
I still thought the Segata Sanshirou ads were better though =) I think the Saturn would've won in the U.S. if Sanshirou had been the mascot here. He kicks your ass if you don't play Sega Saturn. =D
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joNwYPdEBTc&fmt=18
If you can maintain satellites in GEO, you can BUILD satellites in GEO. Hello Space Based Solar/Beamed Microwave, and We Win The Game! Pournelle has written extensively on this, e.g.:
For some reason I read that as "Hello Kitty" satellites.
That, and you made me lose the game. =(
"Cash only" establishments are just trying to get by.
They're not evading taxes, they're avoiding the service charge that Visa/Mastercard charges them on every transaction. In most businesses profit margins are very small, and the extra 5%-10% that the credit card companies skim off the transaction (particularly on small purchased) can eat up the entire profit.
Many businesses depend on cash customers because they make zero profit on credit card customers -- they just accept credit cards to increase their volume so to bring overall costs down, and hope and pray that they get enough cash customers to make a profit.
You know that "cash back" that credit card companies give you on each purchase? They're just giving you a cut of the money that they're wringing out of the merchant.
NO!!! Then it will turn all the vegetarians into carnivores! T~T See? -> http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3123/2820401196_e75abeec6f.jpg
Plate tectonics causes quakes! Sometimes, however, drilling *releases* stress, triggering quakes that were already going to happen, the drilling just throws the straw on the camel's back, so to speak.
In fact, technologies like this could be useful in doing controlled release of earthquakes, such that you can pick the time it can occur so people are ready for it.
...well you *ARE* trusting a small, third party entity with your data on the internet. Can you really expect things that are not on storage you monitor yourself to be secure? Furthermore, why can't it just store your clipboard through local storage? Does it really have to put it up online? Do Apple's apps have no way to store and retrieve local data?
Apple really should have this feature built in, but you shouldn't be surprised when your workaround that involves dumping your unencrypted data on a server somewhere has security issues.
This is a really dumb idea, considering that the torrent file carries a 160-bit hash for all the chunks. You'd wind up with your torrent file being over 1/10th of the size of the file you're trying to get in the first place.
Then you'd need a torrent for your torrent.
(Although, this itself isn't that bad an idea now that I think about it for an advanced version of the protocol... Have peers share hashing/parity information as well as the file. You'd be protected against bad hashes by the overall torrent file having hashes of the hashes. =D)
This is all you need. Spent countless hours on it. xD
This is why you should always buy your phone with the MANUFACTURER'S firmware. I'm sure HTC will sell these without the T-Mobile lockdown stuff.
Pretty much all HTC users know that if you have a device with a U.S. carrier firmware, the first thing you need to do is flash it with something less restrictive. =)
So can't you just install Evolution on it and be able to sync with Exchange (albeit through crappy OWA interface)?
The phone doesn't force you to use the software it ships with. Go ahead and install whatever calendar/address book you want. Stop acting like you're forced to used bundled software on an open platform.
Nope, he distinctly said raptErs, which pretty much refers to a type of console used by the U.S. Army (see post below). =)
If he said raptOrs, he might've been referring to producing his own line of 10,000RPM SATA hard drives -- which would be a good thing, since there's only one manufacturer in the market at the moment, if you don't want to go with them you need to go the SCSI/SAS route.
It would take a lot of time and effort, but you could probably wipe out humanity with them. A glass/ceramic/metal disk spinning at 10,000 RPM can do a lot of damage.
...you're going to reduce the human population by cloning the U.S. military's Reporting and Planning Terminal?
It's not EXACTLY what you had in mind, but the Sakura Taisen social-sim/tactical RPG series is 1920's late-era steampunk. The internal combustion engine is featured but there's still lots of steam-boiler-powered goodness in it. And since it's the 1920's there's giant airships and such too. =3