They aren't going to risk being ostracized from the community by disagreeing with the MAN-MADE global warming hysteria. Being a scientific skeptic of MAN-MADE global warming effectively excommunicates them.
If you could show any evidence whatsoever of this supposed "excommunication" actually occurring, you might have a point. But you don't, and you probably can't. If someone came up with sound scientific arguments for why global climate change is not being affected by human activity, or with specific problems or gaps in current understanding, their views would be welcome. Journals love publishing conflicting viewpoints, it tends to bring lots of attention and readers. However, they only like doing it if the conflict is backed by actual scientific evidence, and thus far most of the evidence points to a significant human impact on climate change.
These are the same people who predicted that the 2006 hurricane season would be the worst ever.
No, they aren't. Those would be meteorologists, or other people that study short-term (decadal) weather patterns. They thought they had found a pattern of cyclical changes in storm intensity, and based on that pattern they predicted a very active storm season. They were wrong. This has little or nothing to do with the study of long-term climate change. What you claim is akin to saying that since 2006 was the hottest year on record, it proves that humans are influencing global climate. It does nothing of the sort; it is merely one more data point (well, lots more than that).
This is nothing more than fear mongering and taking advantage of fact that most people can't think of anything that encompasses a time-scale larger than a generation.
It is true, we are coming out of the latest glacial period in a series of glacial-interglacial cycles. Based on records of previous cycles, we would expect the climate to still be warming at this point. There is little or no question about this. Yes, regardless of whether humans were around, we would currently be seeing a long-term trend of global warming. However, when we look at the rate of temperature change, and various factors that impact/are impacted by climate change, it is apparent that our current warming trend is very different from similar periods in the previous several cycles. This isn't an attempt at fear-mongering (though some have certainly tried to hijack it to that cause), it is an attempt to explain why this time the pattern is so different, and the primary answer that comes up is that this time humans are having a significant effect.
What is going on is that a certain group of people have absolutely convinced themselves that scientists are saying humans are the root of all global warming and that the climate would be stable and wonderful if it weren't for us dastardly humans. This isn't at all what the science shows, and this isn't what the scientists have been saying, but it is much easier to argue against this absolutist view than it is to argue against what the climatologists (and scientific evidence) actually show.
"Why, oh why, do drug makers not realize that if you don't TELL PEOPLE WHAT YOUR DRUG IS FOR..."
Those damn spammers are even worse - I've been getting spam for hoodia and cialis for years, and I still have no idea what either one is for. I mean come on, if they're going to bother sending millions of emails you'd think they'd at least try to get me to buy their crap rather than just fill my inbox with cryptic messages about random shit.
It is horrible - but only when the screen is a fairly solid white (or other light color). Fortunately movies generally have a range of lights and darks that makes the flicker much less noticeable (except during rapid panning - god, I hate watching movies in the theater with lots of quick pans). Flicker is especially bad on CRTs because of what you tend to look at - lots of text on solid white backgrounds. Back in the days before CRTs with faster refresh rates (even 75 Hz gives off a noticeable flicker on white backgrounds, really 85 Hz was the minimum for me) I'd set programs like Word to use white or yellow text on a black background, because it was so much easier on my eyes.
Seriously? I never had much of a problem with VCRs breaking, but DVD players seem to all the time. My parents are now on only their second VHS vcr, and they switched to that because their old one didn't even have stereo sound (their first one still works, as does their Betamax set, aside from no longer being able to rewind). They are on their third DVD player, having gotten their first one about five or six years ago.
Similarly, I've only ever owned one VCR (now about 9 years old), and it still works great. In the past five years, I've gone through three DVD players. So while VCRs may have more moving parts, they seem to generally be built to a much higher standard than DVD players (I've only bought relatively inexpensive ones, in the $100-$150 range, but my brother has purchased ones in the > $300 range, with no better luck).
So yes, a large part of switching to DVDs for some people might have had to do with ease of use, but in my experience no one did it because DVD players were sturdier. Personally, I did it for sound and video quality, and so did pretty much everyone else I know. Ease of use wasn't really a factor in the decision, although it was definitely a huge bonus after switching and I wouldn't want to go back.
Tough to beat the $420 price, but if you go against the slightly upgraded $800 mini it isn't too much trouble. Just head over to newegg and throw together a Shuttle - you'll get a core 2 duo instead of a core duo (the core 2 is a little cheaper, but significantly faster), and it's tough to find an 8x DVD writer (I would go with the $30 LG 18x writer), and no OS (that was one of your conditions, right?), but everything else mathces up. All comes out to about $550, before tax and shipping. Or, about 31% less than the upgraded mini. Of course, that's without any kind of software (I guess we're putting linux on, or else being one of the 22%), and it will be a little noisier, and we'll have to put it together ourselves - and it won't look as nice. But it will be a little faster, and heck, sometime down the road we can stick a real video card in if we feel like it.
I'm not sure about "resetting permissions", but we have had some big problems with permissions in the past. OS X seems to occasionally get confused about who has what permissions for which file/folder. Back when we had three or four people using the lab G5, it was a never-ending headache; one guy would modify a file, without changing the permissions, and all of a sudden no one else would be able to touch it. Take a look at the permissions under his account, and it claims everyone can read/write. Try to look at it from anyone else's account, didn't have permission. Hell, more than once the permissions would appear different depending on whether you were looking at them in the console or using the mac explorer (whatever it is called). The only way we found to get around it was to have the person who owned the file or folder we were trying to access sudo from one of the accounts that didn't (but should) have access and change the permissions. For some reason this seemed to work (most of the time). Very strange, and we've never been able to get an answer from Apple about how to avoid it in the future.
That's just one of many problems we've had with it, though most of the rest we've figured out how to avoid over the years. But I'd hazard a guess that most people who don't run into problems somewhat consistently aren't using their Macs in a multi-user environment.
Oh, and talk about FUD - I've never had to reinstall Windows because of a virus or corruption of the registry. I have occasionally reinstalled in the past (before the days of win2k - there are enough registry cleaning tools and tricks around now that it isn't really an issue), but that was more an issue of registry and system bloat and was entirely optional. Of course, the last time I had a virus it was the "Ripper" virus back in the early nineties(?) - you know, back when we were pkzipping Doom and Doom2 across fifteen different floppies, at least one of which was invariably corrupt (turns out the ripper virus spread itself by floppies, and, you guessed it, manifested itself by randomly corrupting the floppy - instead of maybe one in 100 or 1 in 50 being bad, it would give each disk something like a 10% chance of being corrupted every time it was inserted in the drive - at least that's how it seemed, I haven't bothered looking it up).
I have heard that sinking the waste to the bottom of the atlantic right at the fault lines (where it will be sucked into the earth) was a good idea. Why don't we do that?
I think this idea is usually associated with subduction zones where you have oceanic crust being overridden by continental crust, which you will not find anywhere around the Atlantic. The main tectonic activity going on in the Atlantic is the Mid Atlantic Ridge, a spreading center where new oceanic crust is being created. Not too helpful if you are trying to get rid of waste, since this is where you have ~mantle material coming up. It is also a sort of silly idea; the roughly 240,000 years of storage often cited as needed to make the material "safe" really isn't that long in terms of subduction processes (it is extremely short, in fact). Basically, the process happens too slowly to be of any help in storing spent nuclear fuel, never mind that putting nuclear waste in the area with the most tectonic activity is probably not such a good idea - it would just compound the difficulties in constructing a safe storage container. Remember that big earthquake in Indonesia a couple years ago, or the big ones in Alaska or Chile over the past ~50 years? That's what you get around subduction zones.
Another option is to actually read the choices Dell gives you when you are "building" your computer. I recently got a new Inspiron laptop; if you order it with XP Pro there was a checkbox for "windows media cd" or some such. The price? $0. If you ordered the laptop with XP Home, the windows CD costed $10 (no idea why).
That said, I wanted to get one of the Latitude laptops (the Inspiron is butt-ugly, and the Latitudes feel more solidly built), but I was hunting seriously just after the core2duo came out and Dell couldn't tell me when they were going to update the Latitude line with them. That, and I found a coupon for something like $400 off any Inspiron over $1500 which was just too good to pass up (for everyone that says Macs aren't really that much more expensive, it would have cost nearly double what I paid, or ~$1400 more, to get a similarly-configured Macbook Pro).
Best of all, it is easy to find drivers for everything, so a wipe and reinstall to clean out all the crap was very straightforward. Unlike my old Gateway; I still haven't managed to find drivers anywhere (at least, ones that work) for the ATI Rage Mobility M6 that thing has in it.
Hah. The researchers' morals have nothing to do with it. It is most likely the morals of the university administration that will decide how any patents will be used - and in my experience, university administrators are slightly less moral than your average businessman (take it however you want).
On a somewhat related note, my wife (who just finished her PhD in microbiology) is in the process of submitting a patent based on her research. Because she works for the University of California system, she has basically no chance of ever seeing anything from the patent - but, assuming anyone is interested in licensing it (there has been some interest already), it will help to fund additional research at the university in that area. Yes, corporations sometimes make donations to support university research, but in my opinion it is better to try and enter into a business arrangement between the university and the business (for example, licensing a patent) rather than always relying on the goodwill of the businesses to continue supporting research.
It doesn't matter what their market share is... it could be 99.9%, and there still wouldn't necessarily be a problem. It could only be described as a monopoly (really an abusive monopoly) if they then leveraged that market share to artificially raise the barrier to entry into the market for their competitors.
For example, if Google started telling it's advertisers that they can't advertise with anyone else if they want to be able to advertise with Google, that would be an attempt to illegally (or at least abusively) leverage their position in order to harm their competitors. Sort of like Microsoft telling computer manufacturers that if they want to be able to sell computers with Windows installed, they better not be selling computers with any other OS (or with no OS) - at that point, they are abusing their market position to build artificial barriers to entry in the desktop OS market.
There can only be a monopoly if there is a significant barrier to entry in a market. It is only an abusive monopoly if they either use their position to raise artificial barriers, or if significant "natural" barriers exist, when they start abusing their customers.
When you buy a TV, does part of the purchase price go to Paramount just in case someone watches a pirated version of Indiana Jones on it?
Essentially, yes. If you are buying a newer TV (or laptop, or video card, etc.) with HDMI, you are basically paying content companies for extra crap because it is assumed you will watch pirated material otherwise. Not exactly the same, but pretty damn close. You want to be able to watch anything at 1080p? You gotta pay up - even though your DVI connection can technically handle it just fine, you gotta pay the licensing fees to include HDMI - cause, you know, you can't be trusted just playing whatever source you want at full resolution.
Oh, great. Once upon a time it was a keyboard and mouse training kids to shoot guns. Now Nintendo is about to invade our homes with a revolutionary Baseball Bat* Beating Simulator (it's fun, see? Wiiiii!)
Thank god Microsoft and Sony aren't following Nintendo's lead in trying to turn our youth into highly-trained, uh, baseball bat* wielding thugs.
Inflation adjusted, we're not paying nearly as much for oil as during the energy crisis in the 1970s.
According to most of the sources a quick google search picks up, we are paying just about as much for oil now as during the '70s when adjusted for inflation. Maybe a little less, but I suppose it depends on how you define "nearly". For example:
I was confused by this at first as well, but after reading some about HDR photography it makes more sense. Basically, the image sensor in the camera has a finite range of intensities it can capture (just like with film). So, if you have a scene with a wide range of light intensities, the camera can only physically capture a limited portion of those intensities in a given exposure. Yes, you can use photoshop to lighten and darken various parts of the whole image, but if you underexpose a part of the picture, the detail there is lost - no amount of tweaking in photoshop will reveal it, because it wasn't recorded even in the raw sensor data. Same with over-exposed pictures (or portions thereof). Of course, the "multiple exposure" setting (or exposure bracketing) on most cameras doesn't really cover a wide enough range to be useful, but there is a physical limitation that they are attempting to overcome.
Of course, unless you are doing HDR photography, you should be able to just look at the preview and have a pretty good idea of whether you under-exposed or over-exposed the image and take a new one if necessary, so yeah, the setting is sort of redundant - but better to have the option than not, I suppose.
I'm not sure volcanologists really fit in this list. Most of their work these days is done through remote sensing (at least for volcanoes prone to explosive eruptions). Still dangerous to set up and service equipment, but I'm sure there are lots of more dangerous jobs around. And there really isn't that much dirt involved (ash, maybe - but it's good clean ash).
This is all getting further and further off topic, but...
Or.. you didn't define bed. Does a couch count? A futon? A straw matress on the floor? What if I wasn't in bed before the day started?
It doesn't matter how you define bed. Whatever the definition, the answer is still a "yes" or a "no". You can argue about what precisely a bed is, but that still leads to a yes or no answer to the question. If you do not have a bed, and you were not staying in someone else's bed, then no, you did not get out of a bed this morning. If you weren't in bed before the day began, and assuming you haven't gone to bed and gotten out since, then obviously no, you did not get out of bed.
However many complications you go through, you will ultimately arrive at a "yes" or "no" answer to the question.
That's exactly what unbeatable means - cannot be beaten. It does not mean it can beat you.
My pet rock is also unbeatable at Tic-Tac-Toe. She discovered the cunning (hehe, cunning stunt bonus!) strategy of never making a move. I've been forced to concede every game so far as hunger, thirst and a need to urinate ultimately win out over my drive to be the greatest Tic-Tac-Toe player on the block.
Not to rain on everyone's EA hatefest (something generally deserved, but off the mark here), but the disclaimer seems to make it clear that what is being tracked is in-game adserves - that is, how many ads are being served to the player and for how long. It says nothing at all about collecting information on surfing habits. It seems clear that this is just ad-tracking software designed to keep track of ad views for billing purposes, not a super-insidious plot by EA to watch your computer use 24 hours a day.
Still a good reason to avoid buying the game, though - a big first step into advertising-inundated mainstream games (they expect people to PAY for their adware????).
The interesting thing about the DU 'debate' is that most of the people who have done scientific studies on the DU will say 'it's not particularly dangerous, but there are so many factors involved, we can't be 100% sure' while the anti-DU activists always seem to have absolute certainty about their data despite it being based on shoddy papers by undergrads in unralted fields (geology instead of physics, for instance).
While I generally agree with what you are saying, anyone who thinks geology is an unrelated field needs to be hit with a clue-batt. Radioactive isotopes are a widely used tool in several fields of geology, and are not exactly that difficult to understand. What happens to the depleted uranium once it is released in the environment is definitely solidly in the field of geology. That said, most geologists (or physicists, for that matter) would probably not have a good understanding of the effects DU has on humans - that would be more of a biology-related field. The point is, geologists would have at least as much usefull input as a physicist - probably far more. It is simple to say that the low-level radiation present in depleted uranium is not going to be a danger as long as it stays outside the skin, but it may be somewhat dangerous if it is ingested - although at that point, most heavy metals are just as poisonous. The part that would be a more interesting question (as in, harder to answer) is how the DU dust and fragments are transported and where they might end up. That is square in the field of geology.
That said, I agree that DU poses little or no more risk than alternatives (lead?). However, to discount research from a particular field just because you don't know what that field involves seems pretty, well, dumb (of course, it is still possible that there are really bad studies coming out of geologists who don't actually have a clue, but that happens in every field).
The change in gravity going up 14,000 feet or whatever is pretty miniscule. Locating it (or at least the departure point) at a high elevation would help significantly with air resistance, though.
But as the article pointed out, this could also be used to launch intercontinental weapons - so assuming it is the U.S. building it, they probably aren't going to want it located outside the U.S.
Assuming the inside of the ring is kept at near-vacuum (otherwise they'd be losing a hell of a lot of energy to drag, so I assume that's what they plan - I don't think the article actually said) you could probably design the loop on an incline, say up the side of a mountain, but you'd need a pretty gentle slope (otherwise you'd need a huge structure to maintain a constant curvature of the ring as you near the top of the mountain) - something like the Hawaiian shields would probably work pretty well (but I somehow doubt the population of the Big Island, never mind the observatories at the tops of the dormant volcanoes, would be real happy about launching something at 23 times the speed of sound 10 times a day - might be a little noisy).
You ever seen one of those Tivoli things? Some people seem to be into sort-of-but-not-really-retro colors and styling, so maybe the brown one is supposed to appeal to them (personally, I'm waiting for hickory - I'd overclock the sucker, and then even my pockets would taste good!).
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What, he wanted in on the under-the-table-money action?
They aren't going to risk being ostracized from the community by disagreeing with the MAN-MADE global warming hysteria. Being a scientific skeptic of MAN-MADE global warming effectively excommunicates them.
If you could show any evidence whatsoever of this supposed "excommunication" actually occurring, you might have a point. But you don't, and you probably can't. If someone came up with sound scientific arguments for why global climate change is not being affected by human activity, or with specific problems or gaps in current understanding, their views would be welcome. Journals love publishing conflicting viewpoints, it tends to bring lots of attention and readers. However, they only like doing it if the conflict is backed by actual scientific evidence, and thus far most of the evidence points to a significant human impact on climate change.
These are the same people who predicted that the 2006 hurricane season would be the worst ever.
No, they aren't. Those would be meteorologists, or other people that study short-term (decadal) weather patterns. They thought they had found a pattern of cyclical changes in storm intensity, and based on that pattern they predicted a very active storm season. They were wrong. This has little or nothing to do with the study of long-term climate change. What you claim is akin to saying that since 2006 was the hottest year on record, it proves that humans are influencing global climate. It does nothing of the sort; it is merely one more data point (well, lots more than that).
This is nothing more than fear mongering and taking advantage of fact that most people can't think of anything that encompasses a time-scale larger than a generation.
It is true, we are coming out of the latest glacial period in a series of glacial-interglacial cycles. Based on records of previous cycles, we would expect the climate to still be warming at this point. There is little or no question about this. Yes, regardless of whether humans were around, we would currently be seeing a long-term trend of global warming. However, when we look at the rate of temperature change, and various factors that impact/are impacted by climate change, it is apparent that our current warming trend is very different from similar periods in the previous several cycles. This isn't an attempt at fear-mongering (though some have certainly tried to hijack it to that cause), it is an attempt to explain why this time the pattern is so different, and the primary answer that comes up is that this time humans are having a significant effect.
What is going on is that a certain group of people have absolutely convinced themselves that scientists are saying humans are the root of all global warming and that the climate would be stable and wonderful if it weren't for us dastardly humans. This isn't at all what the science shows, and this isn't what the scientists have been saying, but it is much easier to argue against this absolutist view than it is to argue against what the climatologists (and scientific evidence) actually show.
"Why, oh why, do drug makers not realize that if you don't TELL PEOPLE WHAT YOUR DRUG IS FOR..."
Those damn spammers are even worse - I've been getting spam for hoodia and cialis for years, and I still have no idea what either one is for. I mean come on, if they're going to bother sending millions of emails you'd think they'd at least try to get me to buy their crap rather than just fill my inbox with cryptic messages about random shit.
It is horrible - but only when the screen is a fairly solid white (or other light color). Fortunately movies generally have a range of lights and darks that makes the flicker much less noticeable (except during rapid panning - god, I hate watching movies in the theater with lots of quick pans). Flicker is especially bad on CRTs because of what you tend to look at - lots of text on solid white backgrounds. Back in the days before CRTs with faster refresh rates (even 75 Hz gives off a noticeable flicker on white backgrounds, really 85 Hz was the minimum for me) I'd set programs like Word to use white or yellow text on a black background, because it was so much easier on my eyes.
Seriously? I never had much of a problem with VCRs breaking, but DVD players seem to all the time. My parents are now on only their second VHS vcr, and they switched to that because their old one didn't even have stereo sound (their first one still works, as does their Betamax set, aside from no longer being able to rewind). They are on their third DVD player, having gotten their first one about five or six years ago.
Similarly, I've only ever owned one VCR (now about 9 years old), and it still works great. In the past five years, I've gone through three DVD players. So while VCRs may have more moving parts, they seem to generally be built to a much higher standard than DVD players (I've only bought relatively inexpensive ones, in the $100-$150 range, but my brother has purchased ones in the > $300 range, with no better luck).
So yes, a large part of switching to DVDs for some people might have had to do with ease of use, but in my experience no one did it because DVD players were sturdier. Personally, I did it for sound and video quality, and so did pretty much everyone else I know. Ease of use wasn't really a factor in the decision, although it was definitely a huge bonus after switching and I wouldn't want to go back.
I'm not real keen on this; I've already got one, you see.
It's very nice-a.
Tough to beat the $420 price, but if you go against the slightly upgraded $800 mini it isn't too much trouble. Just head over to newegg and throw together a Shuttle - you'll get a core 2 duo instead of a core duo (the core 2 is a little cheaper, but significantly faster), and it's tough to find an 8x DVD writer (I would go with the $30 LG 18x writer), and no OS (that was one of your conditions, right?), but everything else mathces up. All comes out to about $550, before tax and shipping. Or, about 31% less than the upgraded mini. Of course, that's without any kind of software (I guess we're putting linux on, or else being one of the 22%), and it will be a little noisier, and we'll have to put it together ourselves - and it won't look as nice. But it will be a little faster, and heck, sometime down the road we can stick a real video card in if we feel like it.
I'm not sure about "resetting permissions", but we have had some big problems with permissions in the past. OS X seems to occasionally get confused about who has what permissions for which file/folder. Back when we had three or four people using the lab G5, it was a never-ending headache; one guy would modify a file, without changing the permissions, and all of a sudden no one else would be able to touch it. Take a look at the permissions under his account, and it claims everyone can read/write. Try to look at it from anyone else's account, didn't have permission. Hell, more than once the permissions would appear different depending on whether you were looking at them in the console or using the mac explorer (whatever it is called). The only way we found to get around it was to have the person who owned the file or folder we were trying to access sudo from one of the accounts that didn't (but should) have access and change the permissions. For some reason this seemed to work (most of the time). Very strange, and we've never been able to get an answer from Apple about how to avoid it in the future.
That's just one of many problems we've had with it, though most of the rest we've figured out how to avoid over the years. But I'd hazard a guess that most people who don't run into problems somewhat consistently aren't using their Macs in a multi-user environment.
Oh, and talk about FUD - I've never had to reinstall Windows because of a virus or corruption of the registry. I have occasionally reinstalled in the past (before the days of win2k - there are enough registry cleaning tools and tricks around now that it isn't really an issue), but that was more an issue of registry and system bloat and was entirely optional. Of course, the last time I had a virus it was the "Ripper" virus back in the early nineties(?) - you know, back when we were pkzipping Doom and Doom2 across fifteen different floppies, at least one of which was invariably corrupt (turns out the ripper virus spread itself by floppies, and, you guessed it, manifested itself by randomly corrupting the floppy - instead of maybe one in 100 or 1 in 50 being bad, it would give each disk something like a 10% chance of being corrupted every time it was inserted in the drive - at least that's how it seemed, I haven't bothered looking it up).
I think this idea is usually associated with subduction zones where you have oceanic crust being overridden by continental crust, which you will not find anywhere around the Atlantic. The main tectonic activity going on in the Atlantic is the Mid Atlantic Ridge, a spreading center where new oceanic crust is being created. Not too helpful if you are trying to get rid of waste, since this is where you have ~mantle material coming up.
It is also a sort of silly idea; the roughly 240,000 years of storage often cited as needed to make the material "safe" really isn't that long in terms of subduction processes (it is extremely short, in fact). Basically, the process happens too slowly to be of any help in storing spent nuclear fuel, never mind that putting nuclear waste in the area with the most tectonic activity is probably not such a good idea - it would just compound the difficulties in constructing a safe storage container. Remember that big earthquake in Indonesia a couple years ago, or the big ones in Alaska or Chile over the past ~50 years? That's what you get around subduction zones.
Another option is to actually read the choices Dell gives you when you are "building" your computer. I recently got a new Inspiron laptop; if you order it with XP Pro there was a checkbox for "windows media cd" or some such. The price? $0. If you ordered the laptop with XP Home, the windows CD costed $10 (no idea why).
That said, I wanted to get one of the Latitude laptops (the Inspiron is butt-ugly, and the Latitudes feel more solidly built), but I was hunting seriously just after the core2duo came out and Dell couldn't tell me when they were going to update the Latitude line with them. That, and I found a coupon for something like $400 off any Inspiron over $1500 which was just too good to pass up (for everyone that says Macs aren't really that much more expensive, it would have cost nearly double what I paid, or ~$1400 more, to get a similarly-configured Macbook Pro).
Best of all, it is easy to find drivers for everything, so a wipe and reinstall to clean out all the crap was very straightforward. Unlike my old Gateway; I still haven't managed to find drivers anywhere (at least, ones that work) for the ATI Rage Mobility M6 that thing has in it.
Hah. The researchers' morals have nothing to do with it. It is most likely the morals of the university administration that will decide how any patents will be used - and in my experience, university administrators are slightly less moral than your average businessman (take it however you want).
On a somewhat related note, my wife (who just finished her PhD in microbiology) is in the process of submitting a patent based on her research. Because she works for the University of California system, she has basically no chance of ever seeing anything from the patent - but, assuming anyone is interested in licensing it (there has been some interest already), it will help to fund additional research at the university in that area. Yes, corporations sometimes make donations to support university research, but in my opinion it is better to try and enter into a business arrangement between the university and the business (for example, licensing a patent) rather than always relying on the goodwill of the businesses to continue supporting research.
It doesn't matter what their market share is... it could be 99.9%, and there still wouldn't necessarily be a problem. It could only be described as a monopoly (really an abusive monopoly) if they then leveraged that market share to artificially raise the barrier to entry into the market for their competitors.
For example, if Google started telling it's advertisers that they can't advertise with anyone else if they want to be able to advertise with Google, that would be an attempt to illegally (or at least abusively) leverage their position in order to harm their competitors. Sort of like Microsoft telling computer manufacturers that if they want to be able to sell computers with Windows installed, they better not be selling computers with any other OS (or with no OS) - at that point, they are abusing their market position to build artificial barriers to entry in the desktop OS market.
There can only be a monopoly if there is a significant barrier to entry in a market. It is only an abusive monopoly if they either use their position to raise artificial barriers, or if significant "natural" barriers exist, when they start abusing their customers.
Essentially, yes. If you are buying a newer TV (or laptop, or video card, etc.) with HDMI, you are basically paying content companies for extra crap because it is assumed you will watch pirated material otherwise. Not exactly the same, but pretty damn close. You want to be able to watch anything at 1080p? You gotta pay up - even though your DVI connection can technically handle it just fine, you gotta pay the licensing fees to include HDMI - cause, you know, you can't be trusted just playing whatever source you want at full resolution.
Oh, great.
Once upon a time it was a keyboard and mouse training kids to shoot guns.
Now Nintendo is about to invade our homes with a revolutionary Baseball Bat* Beating Simulator (it's fun, see? Wiiiii!)
Thank god Microsoft and Sony aren't following Nintendo's lead in trying to turn our youth into highly-trained, uh, baseball bat* wielding thugs.
* - cricket bats in some markets
According to most of the sources a quick google search picks up, we are paying just about as much for oil now as during the '70s when adjusted for inflation. Maybe a little less, but I suppose it depends on how you define "nearly".
For example:
Oregon State estimate
California gas prices
I was confused by this at first as well, but after reading some about HDR photography it makes more sense. Basically, the image sensor in the camera has a finite range of intensities it can capture (just like with film). So, if you have a scene with a wide range of light intensities, the camera can only physically capture a limited portion of those intensities in a given exposure. Yes, you can use photoshop to lighten and darken various parts of the whole image, but if you underexpose a part of the picture, the detail there is lost - no amount of tweaking in photoshop will reveal it, because it wasn't recorded even in the raw sensor data. Same with over-exposed pictures (or portions thereof). Of course, the "multiple exposure" setting (or exposure bracketing) on most cameras doesn't really cover a wide enough range to be useful, but there is a physical limitation that they are attempting to overcome.
Of course, unless you are doing HDR photography, you should be able to just look at the preview and have a pretty good idea of whether you under-exposed or over-exposed the image and take a new one if necessary, so yeah, the setting is sort of redundant - but better to have the option than not, I suppose.
I'm not sure volcanologists really fit in this list. Most of their work these days is done through remote sensing (at least for volcanoes prone to explosive eruptions). Still dangerous to set up and service equipment, but I'm sure there are lots of more dangerous jobs around. And there really isn't that much dirt involved (ash, maybe - but it's good clean ash).
Or.. you didn't define bed. Does a couch count? A futon? A straw matress on the floor? What if I wasn't in bed before the day started?
It doesn't matter how you define bed. Whatever the definition, the answer is still a "yes" or a "no". You can argue about what precisely a bed is, but that still leads to a yes or no answer to the question. If you do not have a bed, and you were not staying in someone else's bed, then no, you did not get out of a bed this morning. If you weren't in bed before the day began, and assuming you haven't gone to bed and gotten out since, then obviously no, you did not get out of bed.
However many complications you go through, you will ultimately arrive at a "yes" or "no" answer to the question.
IIRC, the Roger Young is the ship in Heinlein's Starship Troopers that the main characters end up on.
Yup, I was right.
My pet rock is also unbeatable at Tic-Tac-Toe. She discovered the cunning (hehe, cunning stunt bonus!) strategy of never making a move. I've been forced to concede every game so far as hunger, thirst and a need to urinate ultimately win out over my drive to be the greatest Tic-Tac-Toe player on the block.
I blame my DNA.
Not to rain on everyone's EA hatefest (something generally deserved, but off the mark here), but the disclaimer seems to make it clear that what is being tracked is in-game adserves - that is, how many ads are being served to the player and for how long. It says nothing at all about collecting information on surfing habits. It seems clear that this is just ad-tracking software designed to keep track of ad views for billing purposes, not a super-insidious plot by EA to watch your computer use 24 hours a day.
Still a good reason to avoid buying the game, though - a big first step into advertising-inundated mainstream games (they expect people to PAY for their adware????).
While I generally agree with what you are saying, anyone who thinks geology is an unrelated field needs to be hit with a clue-batt. Radioactive isotopes are a widely used tool in several fields of geology, and are not exactly that difficult to understand. What happens to the depleted uranium once it is released in the environment is definitely solidly in the field of geology. That said, most geologists (or physicists, for that matter) would probably not have a good understanding of the effects DU has on humans - that would be more of a biology-related field. The point is, geologists would have at least as much usefull input as a physicist - probably far more. It is simple to say that the low-level radiation present in depleted uranium is not going to be a danger as long as it stays outside the skin, but it may be somewhat dangerous if it is ingested - although at that point, most heavy metals are just as poisonous. The part that would be a more interesting question (as in, harder to answer) is how the DU dust and fragments are transported and where they might end up. That is square in the field of geology.
That said, I agree that DU poses little or no more risk than alternatives (lead?). However, to discount research from a particular field just because you don't know what that field involves seems pretty, well, dumb (of course, it is still possible that there are really bad studies coming out of geologists who don't actually have a clue, but that happens in every field).
The change in gravity going up 14,000 feet or whatever is pretty miniscule. Locating it (or at least the departure point) at a high elevation would help significantly with air resistance, though.
But as the article pointed out, this could also be used to launch intercontinental weapons - so assuming it is the U.S. building it, they probably aren't going to want it located outside the U.S.
Assuming the inside of the ring is kept at near-vacuum (otherwise they'd be losing a hell of a lot of energy to drag, so I assume that's what they plan - I don't think the article actually said) you could probably design the loop on an incline, say up the side of a mountain, but you'd need a pretty gentle slope (otherwise you'd need a huge structure to maintain a constant curvature of the ring as you near the top of the mountain) - something like the Hawaiian shields would probably work pretty well (but I somehow doubt the population of the Big Island, never mind the observatories at the tops of the dormant volcanoes, would be real happy about launching something at 23 times the speed of sound 10 times a day - might be a little noisy).
Where I live, that would be counted as a clear vote for the Republican candidate(s).
You ever seen one of those Tivoli things? Some people seem to be into sort-of-but-not-really-retro colors and styling, so maybe the brown one is supposed to appeal to them (personally, I'm waiting for hickory - I'd overclock the sucker, and then even my pockets would taste good!).