Amazing - that guy was comically clueless (3 years to encode the movies to MPEG-2? Was he under the impression that all of the studios combined had only one computer to do this on?).
The advantages of DVD over VHS were pretty immediately apparent - alternate languages, subtitles, random access, improved picture and (perhaps more importantly) sound quality, etc. BlueRay (or whatever the proper name is) compared to DVD just isn't that big of a change. You get... better picture quality (with investment of $1000+ on a new television), better sound quality (with investment of $1000+ on a new home theater system), and a generally painfully slow interface even compared to the slug that is DVD (based on the few titles I have seen).
It will probably take over (assuming another brand-new format doesn't materialize in the next 5 years), but there just isn't any big push to get people to go from DVD to BlueRay. Not any more convenient (less in fact, with the increased load times and annoying menus they like to use), very expensive to get the full benefits, and more expensive for the media.
I liked the idea of BlueRay a lot more than HD-DVD (it seemed like more of a step forward), there just isn't that much demand for increased quality that the majority of people can't see or hear. DVD gave immediate, noticeable benefits even when using your other existing equipment (TV, stereo, etc.) - BlueRay really doesn't.
I don't think it will "fail" - but it isn't going to take off real soon either. Maybe as people invest in new televisions as HD broadcasting becomes more widely available (DISH has finally started offering an HD-only package, rather than requiring you to pay for 200-odd channels you never watch before allowing you to pay an additional fee for HD - the quality difference hasn't been enough for me to keep paying extra for HD and I was going to drop the HD package, but I may just switch over to the HD-only package) BlueRay will ramp up in popularity.
Personally, I'd rather just see biodegradable "plastic" bags than anything else. My wife and I reuse all shopping bags as trash bags, and although paper is a nice idea and all, it is basically useless for that or any other bag purpose, because it's not waterproof.
We use paper bags to hold our recycling. Especially convenient for paper, since you load it up and then just toss the whole thing in the main paper recycling container. If I used plastic, I'd have to dump it out and then put the plastic bag in the plastic container...
But other than that, yeah, paper bags aren't really all that useful.
There's a "degree of difficulty" baseline in ALL sports.
Hmm, let's see how that statement holds up.
Soccer - a goal is 1 point. Period.
Baseball - a run is one point. Period. (Never thought I'd defend baseball as a sport).
Tennis - while they use a weird-ass way of keeping score, every "point" is essentially worth the same - doesn't matter if you score off the serve, off a volley, from the back, or at the net - each point is the same.
Hockey - a goal is a goal.
Polo - a goal is a goal.
So, yeah - looks like you're wrong. Basketball and (non association) football are pretty much the only mainstream sports where this occurs.
Don't think so. All state employee wages are public information, as shown by the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this year or last year. They published the wages of several high-profile people, and provided a search function on their website so you could look up the base salary for any state worker making $100k+.
Yeah, those damn cops are always going after the gay lefties. It's no wonder we've got such an enormous prison overcrowding problem here in California.
Weird. I had to use LexisNexis in high school; I don't think I ever did in college.
It did make high school (occasionally) more interesting to have access to a world-class university library system (UC). Not that I used it more than a couple of times.
Does seem strange, a couple of possibilities I can think of for it:
1. Clearance - having 1 larger engine on each side might not have given them the ground clearance they wanted?
2. Possible efficiency? - Use all four engines for take-off, climb to altitude, then switch two of them off for the descent. Seems like throttling back two larger engines would work better, though.
3. Save development costs of new engine type - they might not have been able to find an existing engine that would provide the thrust range they needed, and didn't want to spend money developing a new one
Here's an idea - forget dubbing. Even with top voice talent, dubbing tends to ruin movies.
Subtitles are much better - and they have the added benefit of being cheaper and quicker to do!
I can't imagine watching something like Pan's Labyrinth dubbed into English - why would a German or French (etc.) speaker want to see American movies ruined by dubbing them into their own languages?
I always thought this was true as well, but in practice it is not. If I'm out taking photos of landscapes or whatnot, then yes, I get rid of all of the photos except the really good ones. When it comes to photos taken at parties and such, I find I usually hang on to most of them. Not because they are necessarily all that good, but because they capture a moment or an action (or blackmail content...) that I don't want to lose in spite of the imperfections. I find I really only delete the ones that are completely out of focus, blurred, or otherwise trashed beyond use.
I don't take a whole lot of photos, but I do have probably 90-100 gigs of photos from the last two or three years.
He claimed that Apple makes a profit of $70 on a $300 iPod. The Chinese company that built the iPod makes a profit of $4.
And where did the other $226 go? Some to cover product design done in the US (assuming that isn't part of the $70 profit, which it actually probably is), the rest to cover cost of labor and materials, neither of which goes to the US.
So, while Apple may be taking the largest portion of the profit, the majority of the money spent on the devices is not returning to the U.S.
Not saying that is bad per se, but the fact that Apple makes a larger margin on the items than their manufacturers doesn't really affect the point of the parent (though it does show that Apple's margins are not "super low").
Free 911 from a payphone. Though they seem to be killing those off.
I can only think of one or two places in the city I live where there are still pay phones. They have been removing them at a pretty steady pace lately. Used to be that every gas station had one or two, but now almost all of them have been removed. There used to be one in a cool red London phone booth downtown, but that too has been removed (though the phone booth still stands - I think the city owns it). I can't think of a single phone booth in the downtown area at this point, though there may be one at the train station (this in a city of ~65,000).
They aren't saying for sure that this is what gives the Stradivarius's their unique sound but it's the first scientific explanation I've heard for it that seems to have merit.
This idea (and papers supporting it) have been around for years... a quick Google Scholar search turns up papers going back to at least 2003. The only new part was the use of CT imagery, as far as I can tell.
It's amazing how far the technology has advanced over the last couple of years and the new products are exciting (as demonstrated by the frequency of/. posts announcing major advances) - Maybe my comment about panel production was a little hasty. But, even with the increased efficiency, that doesn't eliminate footprint associated with large solar farms. The new panels are great for home use (not affected by this interruption), but in order to put out as much energy as a coal plant (let alone nuclear) you need a huge field of these things. And the plants and critters don't respond well to that (if you're into that kind of thing).
I tend to agree, building giant solar farms out in the middle of nowhere doesn't seem like a very positive step. What would be a positive step is looking at all of the places that we could put it where the land is already in use. For example, I've been flying into Ontario (the California one) airport a lot for work lately. As you come in to land, you see that the airport is surrounded by this vast sea of warehouses. Acre after acre after acre of blank concrete roof, perhaps with a few skylights thrown in. Cover those enormous areas with solar panels, and you'd probably be generating quite a bit of power. Also, you don't need to worry about long transmission distances - your plant is pretty much right smack in the middle of the city.
This kind of thing couldn't be used for all of our power needs, but particularly in southwestern cities we could probably generate all the power we need for AC (at least) just by putting existing structures to better use. Solar farms on parking lots, warehouses, etc.
I disagree. People take whatever they are given, and adapt. That is the nature of evolution. Evolution is not just biological, our collective thoughts and opinions evolve based on stimuli and input...
Stimulus, response. Stimulus, Response. Don't you ever think?
Was there actually a scientific achievement reported in there somewhere? I only saw artist's renderings and a whole lot of BS, plus a $750 million request to make it real. Granted, I didn't manage to watch the whole steaming pile of video, but I sure didn't see anything remotely approaching a newsworthy "scientific achievement".
You forgot tidal energy... a portion of geothermal energy is the result of the slightly elastic behavior of earth materials, the "earth tides" that generate heat through friction as the various solar and lunar gravitational forces act on the planet, stretching and compressing it.
IIRC, the energy released through recrystallization at/in the core is currently the primary component of geothermal energy.
At the surface, of course, something like 99% of the heat in the ground is the result of solar heating rather than geothermal heat (not that that has a whole lot to do with what we're talking about - but at the surface there is a hell of a lot more solar energy available than geothermal).
2. place it into sealed containers and drop it into a tectonic subduction zone so it eventually gets pulled down into the mantle People seem to have become stuck on this for some reason, it just keeps popping up. Drop the waste into a subduction zone, and you are going to be waiting hundreds of thousands to millions of years at least for it to be subducted to any significant depth, and that's even assuming it gets subducted at all. Most of the sediment/upper couple kilometers of a subducting plate have as good a chance of being accreted to the overriding plate as they do of being subducted. Besides, if we could build a container economically that would keep the material safe long enough for it to be subducted, we wouldn't have a problem in the first place.
Establishing the monopoly by selling the product very cheap and then increasing the prices drastically is called dumping. IIRC, it is only dumping if you are selling the product at a loss, leveraging your superior market cap to drive out smaller competitors that cannot afford to sell at a loss for as long a time (then jacking the price back up once they are out of business).
It might be tough to prove that Microsoft engages in dumping, since their software products have no intrinsic value. The price they sell them at is somewhat arbitrary since they just need to find a price that maximizes their income by balancing price point vs. demand at that price. They never really sell software products below cost, because the direct cost going into each copy is negligible. Very different from, say, cars (since we all know so very much about them), where if you are selling the cars for less than the cost of the material and labor going in to them it is clear that you are dumping.
US railroads are not nationalized. UP, BNSF, etc. all own and operate their own trackage (which Amtrak leases, except in the Northeast Corridor, I believe).
Uh, yeah. And "Conservatives" inherently back conservation.
I've got news for you: progressives have only existed for a scant couple of years. Before that, they were self-identified as liberals, socialists, even communists. As those names became tarnished by their activities and policies, they moved onto the next most convenient label. Don't tell that to the Progressive party. Pursuing such image-tarnishing activities as universal suffrage and the breakup of the Southern Pacific Railroad monopoly in California.
But yeah - obviously only a newly-invented label to hide the iniquities of those evil liberals.
I don't get it, why would the government want to shut down a sci-fi/fantasy publisher?
Unless... I knew it! That whole wheel of time thing really WAS a government conspiracy designed to cause me to fail out of junior high/high school/college! I thought it was a little fishy when RJ supposedly passed away just before finishing the final installment.
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Dave Chappelle needs an iPhone.
Amazing - that guy was comically clueless (3 years to encode the movies to MPEG-2? Was he under the impression that all of the studios combined had only one computer to do this on?).
The advantages of DVD over VHS were pretty immediately apparent - alternate languages, subtitles, random access, improved picture and (perhaps more importantly) sound quality, etc.
BlueRay (or whatever the proper name is) compared to DVD just isn't that big of a change. You get... better picture quality (with investment of $1000+ on a new television), better sound quality (with investment of $1000+ on a new home theater system), and a generally painfully slow interface even compared to the slug that is DVD (based on the few titles I have seen).
It will probably take over (assuming another brand-new format doesn't materialize in the next 5 years), but there just isn't any big push to get people to go from DVD to BlueRay. Not any more convenient (less in fact, with the increased load times and annoying menus they like to use), very expensive to get the full benefits, and more expensive for the media.
I liked the idea of BlueRay a lot more than HD-DVD (it seemed like more of a step forward), there just isn't that much demand for increased quality that the majority of people can't see or hear. DVD gave immediate, noticeable benefits even when using your other existing equipment (TV, stereo, etc.) - BlueRay really doesn't.
I don't think it will "fail" - but it isn't going to take off real soon either. Maybe as people invest in new televisions as HD broadcasting becomes more widely available (DISH has finally started offering an HD-only package, rather than requiring you to pay for 200-odd channels you never watch before allowing you to pay an additional fee for HD - the quality difference hasn't been enough for me to keep paying extra for HD and I was going to drop the HD package, but I may just switch over to the HD-only package) BlueRay will ramp up in popularity.
Personally, I'd rather just see biodegradable "plastic" bags than anything else. My wife and I reuse all shopping bags as trash bags, and although paper is a nice idea and all, it is basically useless for that or any other bag purpose, because it's not waterproof.
We use paper bags to hold our recycling. Especially convenient for paper, since you load it up and then just toss the whole thing in the main paper recycling container. If I used plastic, I'd have to dump it out and then put the plastic bag in the plastic container...
But other than that, yeah, paper bags aren't really all that useful.
So you say you know better what longstanding words mean than the chaps that run the Oxford English Dictionary. I do look forward to your newsletter.
blah blah blah... appeal to authority... blah blah blah.
(No, I'm not really serious)
There's a "degree of difficulty" baseline in ALL sports.
Hmm, let's see how that statement holds up.
Soccer - a goal is 1 point. Period.
Baseball - a run is one point. Period. (Never thought I'd defend baseball as a sport).
Tennis - while they use a weird-ass way of keeping score, every "point" is essentially worth the same - doesn't matter if you score off the serve, off a volley, from the back, or at the net - each point is the same.
Hockey - a goal is a goal.
Polo - a goal is a goal.
So, yeah - looks like you're wrong. Basketball and (non association) football are pretty much the only mainstream sports where this occurs.
Don't think so. All state employee wages are public information, as shown by the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this year or last year. They published the wages of several high-profile people, and provided a search function on their website so you could look up the base salary for any state worker making $100k+.
Yeah, those damn cops are always going after the gay lefties. It's no wonder we've got such an enormous prison overcrowding problem here in California.
Weird. I had to use LexisNexis in high school; I don't think I ever did in college.
It did make high school (occasionally) more interesting to have access to a world-class university library system (UC). Not that I used it more than a couple of times.
Does seem strange, a couple of possibilities I can think of for it:
1. Clearance - having 1 larger engine on each side might not have given them the ground clearance they wanted?
2. Possible efficiency? - Use all four engines for take-off, climb to altitude, then switch two of them off for the descent. Seems like throttling back two larger engines would work better, though.
3. Save development costs of new engine type - they might not have been able to find an existing engine that would provide the thrust range they needed, and didn't want to spend money developing a new one
Here's an idea - forget dubbing. Even with top voice talent, dubbing tends to ruin movies.
Subtitles are much better - and they have the added benefit of being cheaper and quicker to do!
I can't imagine watching something like Pan's Labyrinth dubbed into English - why would a German or French (etc.) speaker want to see American movies ruined by dubbing them into their own languages?
And 2!
It's what fish crave.
I always thought this was true as well, but in practice it is not. If I'm out taking photos of landscapes or whatnot, then yes, I get rid of all of the photos except the really good ones. When it comes to photos taken at parties and such, I find I usually hang on to most of them. Not because they are necessarily all that good, but because they capture a moment or an action (or blackmail content...) that I don't want to lose in spite of the imperfections. I find I really only delete the ones that are completely out of focus, blurred, or otherwise trashed beyond use.
I don't take a whole lot of photos, but I do have probably 90-100 gigs of photos from the last two or three years.
He claimed that Apple makes a profit of $70 on a $300 iPod. The Chinese company that built the iPod makes a profit of $4.
And where did the other $226 go? Some to cover product design done in the US (assuming that isn't part of the $70 profit, which it actually probably is), the rest to cover cost of labor and materials, neither of which goes to the US.
So, while Apple may be taking the largest portion of the profit, the majority of the money spent on the devices is not returning to the U.S.
Not saying that is bad per se, but the fact that Apple makes a larger margin on the items than their manufacturers doesn't really affect the point of the parent (though it does show that Apple's margins are not "super low").
Free 911 from a payphone.
Though they seem to be killing those off.
I can only think of one or two places in the city I live where there are still pay phones. They have been removing them at a pretty steady pace lately. Used to be that every gas station had one or two, but now almost all of them have been removed. There used to be one in a cool red London phone booth downtown, but that too has been removed (though the phone booth still stands - I think the city owns it). I can't think of a single phone booth in the downtown area at this point, though there may be one at the train station (this in a city of ~65,000).
They aren't saying for sure that this is what gives the Stradivarius's their unique sound but it's the first scientific explanation I've heard for it that seems to have merit.
This idea (and papers supporting it) have been around for years... a quick Google Scholar search turns up papers going back to at least 2003. The only new part was the use of CT imagery, as far as I can tell.
It's amazing how far the technology has advanced over the last couple of years and the new products are exciting (as demonstrated by the frequency of /. posts announcing major advances) - Maybe my comment about panel production was a little hasty. But, even with the increased efficiency, that doesn't eliminate footprint associated with large solar farms. The new panels are great for home use (not affected by this interruption), but in order to put out as much energy as a coal plant (let alone nuclear) you need a huge field of these things. And the plants and critters don't respond well to that (if you're into that kind of thing).
I tend to agree, building giant solar farms out in the middle of nowhere doesn't seem like a very positive step. What would be a positive step is looking at all of the places that we could put it where the land is already in use.
For example, I've been flying into Ontario (the California one) airport a lot for work lately. As you come in to land, you see that the airport is surrounded by this vast sea of warehouses. Acre after acre after acre of blank concrete roof, perhaps with a few skylights thrown in. Cover those enormous areas with solar panels, and you'd probably be generating quite a bit of power. Also, you don't need to worry about long transmission distances - your plant is pretty much right smack in the middle of the city.
This kind of thing couldn't be used for all of our power needs, but particularly in southwestern cities we could probably generate all the power we need for AC (at least) just by putting existing structures to better use. Solar farms on parking lots, warehouses, etc.
I disagree. People take whatever they are given, and adapt. That is the nature of evolution. Evolution is not just biological, our collective thoughts and opinions evolve based on stimuli and input...
Stimulus, response. Stimulus, Response. Don't you ever think?
Was there actually a scientific achievement reported in there somewhere? I only saw artist's renderings and a whole lot of BS, plus a $750 million request to make it real. Granted, I didn't manage to watch the whole steaming pile of video, but I sure didn't see anything remotely approaching a newsworthy "scientific achievement".
You forgot tidal energy... a portion of geothermal energy is the result of the slightly elastic behavior of earth materials, the "earth tides" that generate heat through friction as the various solar and lunar gravitational forces act on the planet, stretching and compressing it.
IIRC, the energy released through recrystallization at/in the core is currently the primary component of geothermal energy.
At the surface, of course, something like 99% of the heat in the ground is the result of solar heating rather than geothermal heat (not that that has a whole lot to do with what we're talking about - but at the surface there is a hell of a lot more solar energy available than geothermal).
Drop the waste into a subduction zone, and you are going to be waiting hundreds of thousands to millions of years at least for it to be subducted to any significant depth, and that's even assuming it gets subducted at all. Most of the sediment/upper couple kilometers of a subducting plate have as good a chance of being accreted to the overriding plate as they do of being subducted.
Besides, if we could build a container economically that would keep the material safe long enough for it to be subducted, we wouldn't have a problem in the first place.
It might be tough to prove that Microsoft engages in dumping, since their software products have no intrinsic value. The price they sell them at is somewhat arbitrary since they just need to find a price that maximizes their income by balancing price point vs. demand at that price. They never really sell software products below cost, because the direct cost going into each copy is negligible.
Very different from, say, cars (since we all know so very much about them), where if you are selling the cars for less than the cost of the material and labor going in to them it is clear that you are dumping.
US railroads are not nationalized. UP, BNSF, etc. all own and operate their own trackage (which Amtrak leases, except in the Northeast Corridor, I believe).
Uh, yeah. And "Conservatives" inherently back conservation.
I've got news for you: progressives have only existed for a scant couple of years. Before that, they were self-identified as liberals, socialists, even communists. As those names became tarnished by their activities and policies, they moved onto the next most convenient label. Don't tell that to the Progressive party. Pursuing such image-tarnishing activities as universal suffrage and the breakup of the Southern Pacific Railroad monopoly in California.
But yeah - obviously only a newly-invented label to hide the iniquities of those evil liberals.
I don't get it, why would the government want to shut down a sci-fi/fantasy publisher?
Unless... I knew it! That whole wheel of time thing really WAS a government conspiracy designed to cause me to fail out of junior high/high school/college! I thought it was a little fishy when RJ supposedly passed away just before finishing the final installment.