One thing that I have notice when you swap Mac/PC USB keyboards is that the modifier keys get swapped around.
The Apple "Command" Key (The one with the cloverleaf design on it) becomes the Windows "Start" Key and Option becomes Alt. This is reversed from their orientation on a PC keyboard. I suspect you can remap them, but I'm not sure. My only experience is with a PC USB keyboard on a Mac.
I have no idea what Linux would map to the "Command" Key, but a USB keyboard is a USB keyboard, pretty much. --
It says in the article that the farmers planted about 200 acres of cotton and claimed damage on nearly 1000 acres. They may well have shown an adjuster some of the 200 acres that were distroyed, but I doubt that the adjuster (who probably had to confirm a bunch of damages in the area) took the time to confirm that 1000 acres had been planted in the first place. --
In the indoor pot growing case, the Justices rule (5 to 4) that an individual would have a reasonable expectation of privacy against such a device. If IR scanning devices ever become commonplace (everyone gets their own night vision goggles), then it would no longer apply.
However, the Supreme Court has also ruled in the past that an individual does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy against a plane flying overhead and taking pictures of visible things on their property. Sattelite data would fall into this second category. --
Can you prove that your symptoms are due to RSI and could not have been caused by anything else?
Carpel tunnel syndrom makes it more difficult to type, yes, agreed. The article does not dispute that. The question is: "Did typing cause your carpel tunnel syndrom?". How do you know for sure that it was not caused by, say, a virus? a bacterial infection? Something else?
The article says that the rate of carpel tunnel syndrom is constant whether people use a computer or not. Sounds like you can rule out RSI as a cause of CTS. --
It does NOT say that Carpel Tunnel Syndrom does not exist. It says that Carpel Tunnel Syndrom is not caused by RSI.
In fact, it says that on average, 10% of the population has it at any given time, irregardless of whether they use a computer.
Many people seem to be posting "I know someone with RSI and their pain is real". The article agrees that their pain is probably real, but says that RSI is not the cause, and therefore ergonomics may not be the answer.
I get the feeling reading this article that very little scientific study has gone into all this, and now that real results are becoming available, it is starting to look like a bunch of misinformed hype. --
There was a case recently where a guy got convicted of drunken driving and he got turned in by the OnStar(TM) system in his SUV. His airbag deployed and the computer relayed to the satalite his position.
When local emergency crews got there, they only found an injured pedestrian and some paint markings. They then tracked down the SUV and found that the driver was drunk.
I hate to say this, but that french fry oil is probably already getting recycled.
When I was in HS (early 90s), I worked at a small KFC. Whenever we had greese to dispose of, we put it in a bucket (we had another bucket for fat and other chicken parts). At the end of the day, the fry cook had the job of taking the buckets and dumping them in 55 galon drums out back. About once a month or so, someone would come out and haul this stuff off and sell it for use in making makeup and soap and other stuff.
Personally, my bigest question as far as biodiesel is concerned is emmissions. Diesel engines do not have catylitic converters. Even if they were required to have them, the technology is not in place. I know people where I am a grad student (Northwestern University), who are curently actively working on new technologies to go into such a device. The American auto manufacturers are interested in this sort of thing. They all used diesel engines in their
PNGV concept cars.
The EPA actually has
ratings of various cars as far as emissions go and give the cars a score of 1-10. The Bentley Continental rates a 3 (where 10 is the best) and the Volkswagon TDI Golf, Jetta, and Bug are the only cars sold in the US to get a rating of 1, the worst. --
The quoted figure for liquid N2 is about 10c per liter.
This does not mean that liquid nitrogen trucks will have to pull up every couple of days or so. All you really need is a super heavy duty refrigerator to keep the nitrogen cold enough to stay liquid.
There is a company called Illinois Superconductor that makes filters for cell phone base stations. You wouldn't even know there was liquid nitrogen in their products, the filters just have an integrated cooling system that keeps the nitrogen inside (and hence the superconductor) cold.
Obviously the cost of this cooling system has gotten down to the point where it is profitable, otherwise I don't think Detroit Edison would be doing it. --
Except that at the moment, the biggest limitation to burning DVDs is the time required to encode the video in MPEG-2 format. The other problem is that there is currently no ability to burn multilayer DVDs. The video on a DVD-R (like that made sold by Apple) is about an hour compressed.
At the moment, it takes something like 55 minutes to encode and burn a 20 minute movie to DVD (and that is with software that is optimized for the G4's vector processing unit, I have no idea how long the same thing would take on an Intel processor). Speciallized hardware would speed it up somewhat, but we are not yet at the point where it would become practical. --
I'm probably going to get modded down for going this far offtopic, but hey.
You are calling "War of the Worlds" a parody? I would disagree. It was intended to be realistic, but not funny.
It also was not really intended as a hoax. If you had listened to the beginning, you knew that it was a program. There were even commercial breaks that said "This is a Mercury Theater Production" (or something to that effect). Have you ever listened to the broadcast? If you picked up in the middle, it was very realistic. That was the idea, there was no reason to doubt it. They were going for realism. They pretened to interrupt a broadcast of ballroom music. Back then, people did not have as many quick means of information transfer as today. You couldn't go and check nytimes.com. It was radio or newspapers. That was it. If you heard it on the radio, your next best source was the next day's paper.
How do you know that aliens couldn't land on Earth tomorrow and start attacking people? If you were alive at the time, how would you know it wasn't true. This kind of "Ha, Ha, I'm too smart for that" sort of thing is BS. You can't tell me you've NEVER been duped.
Anyway, I believe that they did interrupt the broadcast to tell people that it was a work of fiction. It started becoming a matter of public safety. --
Have you actually tried typing in www.fuckgeneralmotors.com into your browser? You immediately get redirected to www.ford.com. To the casual observer, it looks like Ford has registered the domain. It would be another thing alltogether if a page flashed up saying fuckgeneralmotors.com (brought to you by 2600) came up and then redirected you to Ford's website.
Parody is only protected if it is plainly obvious that it is a joke. This is a case where it it not obvious. Unless you actually look at the redirect header or do a whois on the domain name, you'd think Ford was playing a dirty trick. --
I really don't think that bandwidth is what Ford is sueing over. The real problem here is that the way the redirect is done makes it look like Ford has registered the domain "fuckgeneralmotors.com".
Yes, those of us in the know would immediately do a whois lookup and see who owns the domain name, but if the average person does this, they would think that Ford was playing a dirty trick.
In effect, I think that Ford probably feels that they are getting a bad name (or could get a bad name) for something they didn't do. Sooner or later some idiot will start forwarding an emails that say "HEY, LOOK AT THIS. FORD POINTS FUCKGENERALMOTORS.COM TO THEIR WEBSITE". Then Ford would have to spend money on a PR campain to correct that misconception.
I'll quote:
David H. Bernstein, an intellectual property lawyer in New York, agreed that Ford is holding the high cards in the case. He said Corley might have meant his linking to be a joke, but "one of the things about parody is that it's only effective if it's clear to consumers that it's a joke."
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and Ford would rather sue now then end up with a public relations nightmare on their hands. --
When I graduated from CWRU, the university was guaranteeing that you could keep your email address for life. I actually went to the alumni office right after I graduated and requested that we be able to also use address@alumni.cwru.edu as well, just because it would make things clearer that I'm not a student there anymore. The person I talked to loved the idea (this was in 1998, they had never considered it) and they implemented it within a few months. We have the option of forwarding, or using CWRU's POP server (or web email, now). I personally really like to be able to give people a "permanent" email address. That way I know they can always get in touch with me (and I can always ignore email, if I don't like the person.
Now, I do happen to be one of those people who jealously guards my main email address, and I don't have to use a spam filter, because I only get about 5% spam. My Yahoo account is for spam. --
One old example of this is some Pizza Hut ads in the game "TMNT2:The Arcade Game" for the original NES. (This must date to like '91 or '92) The instruction manual even had a coupon for a free personal pan pizza.
I remember one odd thing in the game. At one point you walk by a big Pizza Hut sign, then some enemies attack you by knocking it off the wall on to you.
I had a professor who told a story that happened to him when he was a graduate student at MIT. He had this old HP occiliscope that he was trying to use for something, but he didn't have a manual. He called HP to see if they could find something and HP called him back to see if they could BUY the scope.
It seems they wanted it for their own company museum. --
It is in fact worth noting that the article you linked to is a little out of date. The Sears tower now leads in the highest antenna category too.
This is because the Sears tower replaced one of the two antennas on top of the building recently. The two antennas used to be the same height, but now the west antenna is taller the east one and it is higer than the one on the World Trade center.
Incidently, here in Chicago, we call the spires on the Petronas towers "cheatsticks".:-) --
This is in fact correct. Arthur C. Clarke has said as much in interviews. He did come up with the idea of putting a
geosynchronous satalite in orbit and using it for communications. He himself points out that he could have pattented it, but Telstar (the first such satalite) was launched about the time the pattent would have expired, so he doesn't feel put out by it. --
OK, that is true, but your home computer does the same thing. You store programs on your hard disk, and when you want to run them, they load into memory. You can't run more than 8MB at a time, but that is more of a limitation with the way Palm designed the hardware in the first place. Try to find a PalmOS machine with 16MB internal. It doesn't exist, even though 8MB has been available forever. In fact, the IIIx had an internal expansion slot that you could put an 8MB expansion card into, but that just disabled the 4MB that was already there.
I believe that the Handspring Visors and the TRG Pro play the exact same trick. There is a fundamental limit in the chipset that Palm uses that caps usable memory at 8MB.
In any case, since you can't multitask in PalmOS, this limits all programs to 8MB minus whatever the system needs and whatever you have stored on the internal memory.
Besides, memory sticks are supposed to be like floppies or a small HD. It is a form of flash memory and is really not suited to use as active memory. --
Let me correct one major misstatement in your post.
You CAN run programs directly off the memory stick. You just need to download the MSAutorun utility from the
Sony Clie website. It was released on Oct 4 (not long after the Clie came out).
My fiancee is a resident physician and she uses her Clie constantly. For someone that wants a small handheld that can store up to 64 MB of medical textbooks on a single memory stick, the Clie is a godsend. Even better now that the 128 MB sticks are coming out. --
Nice article, except that they refer to the material as "magnesium dibromide" which would be MgBr2, a common salt, not a metal.
The material in question is magnesium diboride or MgB2, which would almost have to be a borderline ceramic/intermetallic, which means it won't be much easier to process than a ceramic. --
I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. Should they have done what? Conceeded that the Bible is not a good basis for interpreting scientific data? I think they (the Catholic Church, that is) were perfectly correct in abandoning any role in interpeting measurements from telescopes in light of the Bible. That is not the buisness of the church.
Go read "Galileo's Daughter" by Dava Sobel. The Catholic Church condemned Galileo on the basis that his model of the solar system/universe conflicted with the church backed Aristotilian view of the universe which held that any object that was farther away than the moon was part of the immutable celestial sphere. One of the things that was most considered heresy by the Catholic Church Authorities (many Catholics believed Galileo, BTW)was the mere concept that the planets were farther than the moon. Even if you can develop a model with the earth at the center of the universe (which is possible, if difficult), I doubt that you can come up with a useful model with Mars closer than the moon.
One thing the church can have some say about is the ethical ramifications that those discoveries and models have on our society. In the case of astronomy, it is hard to make an argument that models of the earth's rotation and quasars and black holes have any meaningful effect on how you should live your life. With things like genetic engineering, which does affect human life, the church certainly has a place in saying how the teachings of the bible might tell us about how to apply these technologies.
The simple fact of the matter, though, is that WE CAN NEVER KNOW which is really the case.
That is actually something of a pompus statement. How do you know that we can never know which is really the case? Can you actually prove that? I would say we don't know which is really the case. But I would also say (and this is the key point here) that we also don't know whether we CAN know which is the case. Maybe we can.
Anyway, it is not like the Bible is any more authoritative. It is clear from your.sig that you don't believe evolutionary theory. However, if you believe creationism, I would like you to explain to me why Genesis ch. 1 and Genesis ch. 2 tell the same story, but things happen in a slightly different order. --
This statement does apply to the Catholic Church, which has actually learned its lesson after their dealings with Galileo. The Catholic Church has actually essentially adopted Galileo's position (a few hundred years later) on the use of the Bible for interpreting scientific discoveries (which is to say, the bible is a book that tells you how to get to heaven, and its usefulness outside of that is limited). I give the Catholic Church a lot of credit for this stance. They have a lot of other policies that are stuck in the dark ages, but this one is certainly what it should be.
However, this does not stop other religous sects from condemning evolution of Biblical grounds. You are never going to be able to argue with these people, as someone else pointed out in this discussion, it is always possible that people can just say "God created Man's genetic code that way" and you can't argue with that, because if God exists and God has the powers advertised, then God is certainly capable of doing that. You have to start arguing the existance of God and that is something you can neither prove or disprove.
(And lets not even get into the whole "what does the Bible mean discussion) --
Slashdot Mirror
The Apple "Command" Key (The one with the cloverleaf design on it) becomes the Windows "Start" Key and Option becomes Alt. This is reversed from their orientation on a PC keyboard. I suspect you can remap them, but I'm not sure. My only experience is with a PC USB keyboard on a Mac.
I have no idea what Linux would map to the "Command" Key, but a USB keyboard is a USB keyboard, pretty much.
--
It says in the article that the farmers planted about 200 acres of cotton and claimed damage on nearly 1000 acres. They may well have shown an adjuster some of the 200 acres that were distroyed, but I doubt that the adjuster (who probably had to confirm a bunch of damages in the area) took the time to confirm that 1000 acres had been planted in the first place.
--
In the indoor pot growing case, the Justices rule (5 to 4) that an individual would have a reasonable expectation of privacy against such a device. If IR scanning devices ever become commonplace (everyone gets their own night vision goggles), then it would no longer apply.
However, the Supreme Court has also ruled in the past that an individual does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy against a plane flying overhead and taking pictures of visible things on their property. Sattelite data would fall into this second category.
--
...that you might be able to execute a series of obscure actions and get babelfish integrated into your kernal?
--
Carpel tunnel syndrom makes it more difficult to type, yes, agreed. The article does not dispute that. The question is: "Did typing cause your carpel tunnel syndrom?". How do you know for sure that it was not caused by, say, a virus? a bacterial infection? Something else?
The article says that the rate of carpel tunnel syndrom is constant whether people use a computer or not. Sounds like you can rule out RSI as a cause of CTS.
--
It does NOT say that Carpel Tunnel Syndrom does not exist. It says that Carpel Tunnel Syndrom is not caused by RSI.
In fact, it says that on average, 10% of the population has it at any given time, irregardless of whether they use a computer.
Many people seem to be posting "I know someone with RSI and their pain is real". The article agrees that their pain is probably real, but says that RSI is not the cause, and therefore ergonomics may not be the answer.
I get the feeling reading this article that very little scientific study has gone into all this, and now that real results are becoming available, it is starting to look like a bunch of misinformed hype.
--
When local emergency crews got there, they only found an injured pedestrian and some paint markings. They then tracked down the SUV and found that the driver was drunk.
I can't find a link to the story, but it was on Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me recently.
--
When I was in HS (early 90s), I worked at a small KFC. Whenever we had greese to dispose of, we put it in a bucket (we had another bucket for fat and other chicken parts). At the end of the day, the fry cook had the job of taking the buckets and dumping them in 55 galon drums out back. About once a month or so, someone would come out and haul this stuff off and sell it for use in making makeup and soap and other stuff.
Personally, my bigest question as far as biodiesel is concerned is emmissions. Diesel engines do not have catylitic converters. Even if they were required to have them, the technology is not in place. I know people where I am a grad student (Northwestern University), who are curently actively working on new technologies to go into such a device. The American auto manufacturers are interested in this sort of thing. They all used diesel engines in their PNGV concept cars.
The EPA actually has ratings of various cars as far as emissions go and give the cars a score of 1-10. The Bentley Continental rates a 3 (where 10 is the best) and the Volkswagon TDI Golf, Jetta, and Bug are the only cars sold in the US to get a rating of 1, the worst.
--
This does not mean that liquid nitrogen trucks will have to pull up every couple of days or so. All you really need is a super heavy duty refrigerator to keep the nitrogen cold enough to stay liquid.
There is a company called Illinois Superconductor that makes filters for cell phone base stations. You wouldn't even know there was liquid nitrogen in their products, the filters just have an integrated cooling system that keeps the nitrogen inside (and hence the superconductor) cold.
Obviously the cost of this cooling system has gotten down to the point where it is profitable, otherwise I don't think Detroit Edison would be doing it.
--
At the moment, it takes something like 55 minutes to encode and burn a 20 minute movie to DVD (and that is with software that is optimized for the G4's vector processing unit, I have no idea how long the same thing would take on an Intel processor). Speciallized hardware would speed it up somewhat, but we are not yet at the point where it would become practical.
--
I'm probably going to get modded down for going this far offtopic, but hey.
You are calling "War of the Worlds" a parody? I would disagree. It was intended to be realistic, but not funny.
It also was not really intended as a hoax. If you had listened to the beginning, you knew that it was a program. There were even commercial breaks that said "This is a Mercury Theater Production" (or something to that effect). Have you ever listened to the broadcast? If you picked up in the middle, it was very realistic. That was the idea, there was no reason to doubt it. They were going for realism. They pretened to interrupt a broadcast of ballroom music. Back then, people did not have as many quick means of information transfer as today. You couldn't go and check nytimes.com. It was radio or newspapers. That was it. If you heard it on the radio, your next best source was the next day's paper.
How do you know that aliens couldn't land on Earth tomorrow and start attacking people? If you were alive at the time, how would you know it wasn't true. This kind of "Ha, Ha, I'm too smart for that" sort of thing is BS. You can't tell me you've NEVER been duped.
Anyway, I believe that they did interrupt the broadcast to tell people that it was a work of fiction. It started becoming a matter of public safety.
--
Have you actually tried typing in www.fuckgeneralmotors.com into your browser? You immediately get redirected to www.ford.com. To the casual observer, it looks like Ford has registered the domain. It would be another thing alltogether if a page flashed up saying fuckgeneralmotors.com (brought to you by 2600) came up and then redirected you to Ford's website.
Parody is only protected if it is plainly obvious that it is a joke. This is a case where it it not obvious. Unless you actually look at the redirect header or do a whois on the domain name, you'd think Ford was playing a dirty trick.
--
Yes, those of us in the know would immediately do a whois lookup and see who owns the domain name, but if the average person does this, they would think that Ford was playing a dirty trick.
In effect, I think that Ford probably feels that they are getting a bad name (or could get a bad name) for something they didn't do. Sooner or later some idiot will start forwarding an emails that say "HEY, LOOK AT THIS. FORD POINTS FUCKGENERALMOTORS.COM TO THEIR WEBSITE". Then Ford would have to spend money on a PR campain to correct that misconception.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and Ford would rather sue now then end up with a public relations nightmare on their hands.
--
Now, I do happen to be one of those people who jealously guards my main email address, and I don't have to use a spam filter, because I only get about 5% spam. My Yahoo account is for spam.
--
Why exactly are you apologizing to them? You should be apologizing to the rest of us. :-)
--
I remember one odd thing in the game. At one point you walk by a big Pizza Hut sign, then some enemies attack you by knocking it off the wall on to you.
Not exactly the best product placement...
--
I had a professor who told a story that happened to him when he was a graduate student at MIT. He had this old HP occiliscope that he was trying to use for something, but he didn't have a manual. He called HP to see if they could find something and HP called him back to see if they could BUY the scope.
It seems they wanted it for their own company museum.
--
This is because the Sears tower replaced one of the two antennas on top of the building recently. The two antennas used to be the same height, but now the west antenna is taller the east one and it is higer than the one on the World Trade center.
Incidently, here in Chicago, we call the spires on the Petronas towers "cheatsticks". :-)
--
This is in fact correct. Arthur C. Clarke has said as much in interviews. He did come up with the idea of putting a geosynchronous satalite in orbit and using it for communications. He himself points out that he could have pattented it, but Telstar (the first such satalite) was launched about the time the pattent would have expired, so he doesn't feel put out by it.
--
I believe that the Handspring Visors and the TRG Pro play the exact same trick. There is a fundamental limit in the chipset that Palm uses that caps usable memory at 8MB.
In any case, since you can't multitask in PalmOS, this limits all programs to 8MB minus whatever the system needs and whatever you have stored on the internal memory.
Besides, memory sticks are supposed to be like floppies or a small HD. It is a form of flash memory and is really not suited to use as active memory.
--
You CAN run programs directly off the memory stick. You just need to download the MSAutorun utility from the Sony Clie website. It was released on Oct 4 (not long after the Clie came out).
My fiancee is a resident physician and she uses her Clie constantly. For someone that wants a small handheld that can store up to 64 MB of medical textbooks on a single memory stick, the Clie is a godsend. Even better now that the 128 MB sticks are coming out.
--
This is almost as exciting as mole day, which is celebrated on 10/23 at 6:02 in the morning in honor of Avagadro's number.
--
The material in question is magnesium diboride or MgB2, which would almost have to be a borderline ceramic/intermetallic, which means it won't be much easier to process than a ceramic.
--
I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. Should they have done what? Conceeded that the Bible is not a good basis for interpreting scientific data? I think they (the Catholic Church, that is) were perfectly correct in abandoning any role in interpeting measurements from telescopes in light of the Bible. That is not the buisness of the church.
Go read "Galileo's Daughter" by Dava Sobel. The Catholic Church condemned Galileo on the basis that his model of the solar system/universe conflicted with the church backed Aristotilian view of the universe which held that any object that was farther away than the moon was part of the immutable celestial sphere. One of the things that was most considered heresy by the Catholic Church Authorities (many Catholics believed Galileo, BTW)was the mere concept that the planets were farther than the moon. Even if you can develop a model with the earth at the center of the universe (which is possible, if difficult), I doubt that you can come up with a useful model with Mars closer than the moon.
One thing the church can have some say about is the ethical ramifications that those discoveries and models have on our society. In the case of astronomy, it is hard to make an argument that models of the earth's rotation and quasars and black holes have any meaningful effect on how you should live your life. With things like genetic engineering, which does affect human life, the church certainly has a place in saying how the teachings of the bible might tell us about how to apply these technologies.
The simple fact of the matter, though, is that WE CAN NEVER KNOW which is really the case.
That is actually something of a pompus statement. How do you know that we can never know which is really the case? Can you actually prove that? I would say we don't know which is really the case. But I would also say (and this is the key point here) that we also don't know whether we CAN know which is the case. Maybe we can.
Anyway, it is not like the Bible is any more authoritative. It is clear from your .sig that you don't believe evolutionary theory. However, if you believe creationism, I would like you to explain to me why Genesis ch. 1 and Genesis ch. 2 tell the same story, but things happen in a slightly different order.
--
This statement does apply to the Catholic Church, which has actually learned its lesson after their dealings with Galileo. The Catholic Church has actually essentially adopted Galileo's position (a few hundred years later) on the use of the Bible for interpreting scientific discoveries (which is to say, the bible is a book that tells you how to get to heaven, and its usefulness outside of that is limited). I give the Catholic Church a lot of credit for this stance. They have a lot of other policies that are stuck in the dark ages, but this one is certainly what it should be.
However, this does not stop other religous sects from condemning evolution of Biblical grounds. You are never going to be able to argue with these people, as someone else pointed out in this discussion, it is always possible that people can just say "God created Man's genetic code that way" and you can't argue with that, because if God exists and God has the powers advertised, then God is certainly capable of doing that. You have to start arguing the existance of God and that is something you can neither prove or disprove.
(And lets not even get into the whole "what does the Bible mean discussion)
--