Depends on what definition of nature you use. If you mean "the meachanical world", then yes, we are part of nature. If by nature you mean things that are naturally occurring without human intervention, then obviously we are not part of nature - at any rate, I've yet to meet the person not resulting from some sort of human endeavor.
No, I really don't have a point. But if I did, it would be that we are not part of nature because we generally define nature to be those things that we are not part of, or that at least exist without us. Humanity would not exist without humans (though I often wonder whether it exists even with humans:).
How can it possibly cost more every year to register a domain name? Everything involved except labour continually becomes cheaper - bandwidth, processing power, storage, everything! The process is basically automated anyway, so how can a steady increase in the cost of registering a domain be justified? The price is already too high, in my opinion - companies like verisign (and other domain name registers) are making money by charging for something that is essentially free to create. For-profit companies should be kept out of domain registration - isn't that part of the point of ICANN in the first place?
The first thing that pops out at me after taking a look at that site is, "Where does the wate vapor come from, and why does it fluctuate? And why is it usually left out of climate models, if it is indeed true that they are (the website doesn't exactly come off as giving a balanced view of the issue)?".
I'd guess that the vast majority of water vapour comes from evaporation of the oceans. The amount probably depends largely on sea surface temperature, and on the temperature of the air. Higher temp = more evaporation = more water vapor. Once this water vapor is in the atmosphere it acts as a greenhouse gas, but it really doesn't drive temperature change - it is a feedback, but it is not a driver (so it seems to me, based on a two-minute evaluation).
So, where might water vapor also come from? I'd guess you get some from volcanic eruptions, but I don't know how much. Geothermal activity, maybe? Unfortunately, the linked article makes no attempt to clear this up - when it talks about "natural water vapor" is it including evaporation, or is it only counting other sources? It seems like this basic piece of information is critical to the question; if it is based on evaporation, then it is merely looking at a feedback that is affected by all other climate (air and sea temperature) drivers, including natural and anthropogenic CO2. If this is the case, then perhaps climate modellers (unfortuantely the website doesn't actually mention any specific models that do or do not include water vapor - did the authors actually do any research, or did they just take what someone told them and run with it?) take it into account, but simply don't consider it as one of the drivers.
Anyway, that was a pretty useless website that pretends to be informative by including all sorts of data lifted from a government report, but it really doesn't give the basic information about those data required to interpret them in an intelligent way. They just shout "Look at the numbers!" without any explanation of where the numbers come from. Unfortunately, this is largely the level of information you get in the media on both sides of the argument.
In general, IT workers are not the ones interacting directly with clients in-person, but instead are mostly interacting with people within their own company. Because of this, first impressions really don't matter that much. And, I'm afraid, first impressions are the only reason to get dressed up for business (that, or lack of imagination and fixation on inconsequential things, which is admittedly somewhat descriptive of middle and upper management).
Of course, dressing nicely does help some people focus, and I think it can be beneficial for many to have "work" clothes and "non-work" clothes in order to better differentiate between work and home, but (in another sweeping generalization) I'd say tech nerds (obviously the whole of the IT industry) feel less of a need to discriminate between home and work than some other groups.
Personally, I prefer the "whirling blades" approach to feline sanitation. I'm not saying microwaves aren't a good backup, but they just don't have the same impact.
Is it just me or is the fact that they waited until four paragraphs from the end of the entire article to actually state what the change proposal was?
It was worse than that - they wait four paragraphs to tell you that they don't know what the proposal is because they couldn't get anyone making the proposal to take the time to explain it. That has to be one of the worst articles I've read in a wile - basically "UK time keepers are upset because some US group is making some proposal to change how time is kept, but we don't know what the actual proposal is so we'll just print some comments saying why things should stay the way they are". I guess they managed the "who" part okay, but they kinda left out the "what", "where", "when", and "why".
It's the foodwrapping/military complex, headed up by GLAD.
You're laughing now, but did you know that the Food Equipment industry has become an integral part of the defense industry? From wikipedia (referring to United Defense):
The company started as a division of the agricultural machine business, Food Machinery Corporation (FMC), when they won a US government contract to build LVTs and became a weapon manufacturer during World War II.
Aaaarrgh, kill me now! Steam is one of the worst ideas ever, from the standpoint of end-user rights. Never mind problems with updates unsynching clients and servers, etc., why in the HELL should I have to be connected to the internet in order to play a single player game???? That is MUCH more annoying than a CD check. With a CD check at least I can play anywhere on my laptop as long as I have the CD with me; if I had to use steam, I would only be able to play in those few places where I have an internet connection. Please, no centralized authentication. I hated it when Half Life had it (it caused nothing but problems), and I hate it now. That's one of the main reasons I haven't gotten Half Life 2 (that and the fact that the bastards refuse to reduce the price even though the game has been out six months or whatever - and their excuses for why it costs the same retail as over the internet; "It's not OUR fault, it's these damn agreements with the publisher that are FORCING us to sell at the same price as retail and SWALLOW all that damned PROFIT!"). Okay, I may have wandered a bit off topic there, but the point is that using something like Steam for authentication is a step in exactly the WRONG direction. Using something like Steam is like saying "okay mr. police officer, you can insert that radio transmitter under my skin so you can keep track of me wherever I go even though I haven't done anything illegal - just as long as it communicates to you by itself, cause I don't want to be inconvenienced!"
Where are all these mysterious games without copy protections they are using for comparison? I don't seem to remember seeing any major releases without copy protection in at least five years.
I'd say the publishing houses claim this on a yearly basis (probably far more often than that), but they probably all refer to one case back in 1997 or 1996 when two games in the same genre were released near the same time, and the one with protection sold better than the other. That's enough proof for the publishers.
Yeah, that pissed me off for a moment. It didn't help that it gave me a slightly different error depending on which drive I put the wrong disc in - if I put it in my DVD writer it would say "Wrong CD in the drive", but if I put it in my DVD-ROM drive, it would say "Wrong DVD in the drive" so I thought it might be a more complicated problem. Weird. It also took me a while to figure out because mis-labelled discs was actually my first guess, but when I tried putting the "Install" disc back in the first time I opened up the wrong drive first, which contained a CD for a different game, closed it (forgetting about fricking autoplay that I finally downloaded tweakui to remove) and put the instal disc in the correct drive, but by that time BF2 had started up and the Civ 4 startup thing gave a series of six different error messages. Aaargh.
But now it works, and it kicks ass (so far - I've only played 2 hours or so). I must admit, though, the very first thing I did when I got a wrong CD error was head over to gamecopyworld to see if there was a no-cd fix out yet. Unfortunately, no such luck:P
I don't understand how they're coming up with that metric, maybe they're actually saying performance/price, but they don't know how ratios work, or am I just missing something important?
No, you're not missing anything. They actually mean performance/price (at least all the metrics they use seem to be benchmark/price), but for some reason they insist on calling it price/performance in the article. Strange.
Not to mention Heretic 1 and Hexen 1 (though they didn't have the '1' after them originally). Sorry, just thought it was sort of funny that you specifically said Heretic 2 and Hexen 2 (actually, wasn't it HeXen or something?) when they were also responsible for the originals.
We know there are ice ages, we know there are not-so-ice ages, but the precise statistics to start drawing causations just isn't there. Geology speaks in time periods of millenia, even thousands of millenia, not years or even centuries.
This has been true, and still largely is, but it is changing. Some of the larger ice cores, for example the GISP2 from Greenland, can give annual precision well beyond the last ice age (GISP2 goes back to at least 110,000 ybp with annual layers). The Vostok core from Antarctica, although not providing annual precision (I believe it is at least decadal, however) goes back several hundred thousand years at least (I think as much as 800 ka, but I don't remember for sure) - that is several glacial/interglacial cycles (not mini-cycles within one glaciation). So yes, in general geology deals with time scales of hundreds of thousands and millions of years, but there are increasing numbers of studies involving high-resolution paleoclimate records of the "recent" past.
It's the placebo effect, I tell you! All that ash falling to the ground looks sort of like snow, so it just makes everyone feel a little colder! Take that!
The Earth's magnetic field is really really weak at the surface - like 30-40000 nano tesla, depending on where you are. We get exposed to many fields that are significantly stronger all the time (I definitley do - but then I work in a lab where we have several 1-2 tesla magnets going fairly often; on the otehr hand, we also have a shielded room, so I don't get exposed to Earth's magnetic field for significant portions of my day).
Most countries, including America, do not see Taiwan as independent.
I'd put it a little differently. Most countries do not officially recognize Taiwan as being independent; however, most people of most countries (that I've talked to, anyway) generally consider Taiwan to be an independent nation.
Re-selling print ad space doesn't seem like the most profitable business. Of course, I have no idea how much advertising space costs in print, or how much of a break Google might get for taking out a full-page ad that it then fills with smaller ads, but it doesn't seem like it would be very efficient. It is an interesting move, though. Anyone have an idea of the size of the ad market in print vs. online (in terms of dollars)?
Just doing a quick search of retail prices, it looks like I could get a 4 GB compact flash card for about $250, while a 4 GB microdrive runs about $200. Anyone know what the price is like on the Samsung NAND flash memory? The article claims Samsung would have to drop prices 50% to match microdrives, but that seems like a little much - how much less power does NAND flash memory use than a microdrive, and how much less battery would a flash-based device need for comparable performance?
Slashdot Mirror
Rumor has it they developed a DVD writer with a window, but nobody has seen it (twice).
Depends on what definition of nature you use. If you mean "the meachanical world", then yes, we are part of nature. If by nature you mean things that are naturally occurring without human intervention, then obviously we are not part of nature - at any rate, I've yet to meet the person not resulting from some sort of human endeavor.
No, I really don't have a point. But if I did, it would be that we are not part of nature because we generally define nature to be those things that we are not part of, or that at least exist without us. Humanity would not exist without humans (though I often wonder whether it exists even with humans
How can it possibly cost more every year to register a domain name? Everything involved except labour continually becomes cheaper - bandwidth, processing power, storage, everything! The process is basically automated anyway, so how can a steady increase in the cost of registering a domain be justified?
The price is already too high, in my opinion - companies like verisign (and other domain name registers) are making money by charging for something that is essentially free to create. For-profit companies should be kept out of domain registration - isn't that part of the point of ICANN in the first place?
Yeah, too bad they went with their own out-of-ASTEC solution on this one, huh.
The first thing that pops out at me after taking a look at that site is, "Where does the wate vapor come from, and why does it fluctuate? And why is it usually left out of climate models, if it is indeed true that they are (the website doesn't exactly come off as giving a balanced view of the issue)?".
I'd guess that the vast majority of water vapour comes from evaporation of the oceans. The amount probably depends largely on sea surface temperature, and on the temperature of the air. Higher temp = more evaporation = more water vapor. Once this water vapor is in the atmosphere it acts as a greenhouse gas, but it really doesn't drive temperature change - it is a feedback, but it is not a driver (so it seems to me, based on a two-minute evaluation).
So, where might water vapor also come from? I'd guess you get some from volcanic eruptions, but I don't know how much. Geothermal activity, maybe? Unfortunately, the linked article makes no attempt to clear this up - when it talks about "natural water vapor" is it including evaporation, or is it only counting other sources? It seems like this basic piece of information is critical to the question; if it is based on evaporation, then it is merely looking at a feedback that is affected by all other climate (air and sea temperature) drivers, including natural and anthropogenic CO2. If this is the case, then perhaps climate modellers (unfortuantely the website doesn't actually mention any specific models that do or do not include water vapor - did the authors actually do any research, or did they just take what someone told them and run with it?) take it into account, but simply don't consider it as one of the drivers.
Anyway, that was a pretty useless website that pretends to be informative by including all sorts of data lifted from a government report, but it really doesn't give the basic information about those data required to interpret them in an intelligent way. They just shout "Look at the numbers!" without any explanation of where the numbers come from. Unfortunately, this is largely the level of information you get in the media on both sides of the argument.
In general, IT workers are not the ones interacting directly with clients in-person, but instead are mostly interacting with people within their own company. Because of this, first impressions really don't matter that much. And, I'm afraid, first impressions are the only reason to get dressed up for business (that, or lack of imagination and fixation on inconsequential things, which is admittedly somewhat descriptive of middle and upper management).
Of course, dressing nicely does help some people focus, and I think it can be beneficial for many to have "work" clothes and "non-work" clothes in order to better differentiate between work and home, but (in another sweeping generalization) I'd say tech nerds (obviously the whole of the IT industry) feel less of a need to discriminate between home and work than some other groups.
Personally, I prefer the "whirling blades" approach to feline sanitation. I'm not saying microwaves aren't a good backup, but they just don't have the same impact.
Yeah, Sony sure has become a bunch of $sys$ies lately.
OMG, this could be better than M$!
$ony, $sys$ony, $sys$ONYou, the variations are nearly endless!
It was worse than that - they wait four paragraphs to tell you that they don't know what the proposal is because they couldn't get anyone making the proposal to take the time to explain it. That has to be one of the worst articles I've read in a wile - basically "UK time keepers are upset because some US group is making some proposal to change how time is kept, but we don't know what the actual proposal is so we'll just print some comments saying why things should stay the way they are". I guess they managed the "who" part okay, but they kinda left out the "what", "where", "when", and "why".
You're laughing now, but did you know that the Food Equipment industry has become an integral part of the defense industry?
From wikipedia (referring to United Defense):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Defense
Obviously this conspiracy goes back at least as far as WWII.
`Such term shall not include communications over the Internet.'.
Hmm, phone banks, internet... unrestricted massive batches of VoIP political party calls avoided?
Aaaarrgh, kill me now! Steam is one of the worst ideas ever, from the standpoint of end-user rights. Never mind problems with updates unsynching clients and servers, etc., why in the HELL should I have to be connected to the internet in order to play a single player game???? That is MUCH more annoying than a CD check. With a CD check at least I can play anywhere on my laptop as long as I have the CD with me; if I had to use steam, I would only be able to play in those few places where I have an internet connection. Please, no centralized authentication. I hated it when Half Life had it (it caused nothing but problems), and I hate it now. That's one of the main reasons I haven't gotten Half Life 2 (that and the fact that the bastards refuse to reduce the price even though the game has been out six months or whatever - and their excuses for why it costs the same retail as over the internet; "It's not OUR fault, it's these damn agreements with the publisher that are FORCING us to sell at the same price as retail and SWALLOW all that damned PROFIT!"). Okay, I may have wandered a bit off topic there, but the point is that using something like Steam for authentication is a step in exactly the WRONG direction. Using something like Steam is like saying "okay mr. police officer, you can insert that radio transmitter under my skin so you can keep track of me wherever I go even though I haven't done anything illegal - just as long as it communicates to you by itself, cause I don't want to be inconvenienced!"
Where are all these mysterious games without copy protections they are using for comparison? I don't seem to remember seeing any major releases without copy protection in at least five years.
I'd say the publishing houses claim this on a yearly basis (probably far more often than that), but they probably all refer to one case back in 1997 or 1996 when two games in the same genre were released near the same time, and the one with protection sold better than the other. That's enough proof for the publishers.
Yeah, that pissed me off for a moment. It didn't help that it gave me a slightly different error depending on which drive I put the wrong disc in - if I put it in my DVD writer it would say "Wrong CD in the drive", but if I put it in my DVD-ROM drive, it would say "Wrong DVD in the drive" so I thought it might be a more complicated problem. Weird.
:P
It also took me a while to figure out because mis-labelled discs was actually my first guess, but when I tried putting the "Install" disc back in the first time I opened up the wrong drive first, which contained a CD for a different game, closed it (forgetting about fricking autoplay that I finally downloaded tweakui to remove) and put the instal disc in the correct drive, but by that time BF2 had started up and the Civ 4 startup thing gave a series of six different error messages. Aaargh.
But now it works, and it kicks ass (so far - I've only played 2 hours or so). I must admit, though, the very first thing I did when I got a wrong CD error was head over to gamecopyworld to see if there was a no-cd fix out yet. Unfortunately, no such luck
No, you're not missing anything. They actually mean performance/price (at least all the metrics they use seem to be benchmark/price), but for some reason they insist on calling it price/performance in the article. Strange.
Not to mention Heretic 1 and Hexen 1 (though they didn't have the '1' after them originally). Sorry, just thought it was sort of funny that you specifically said Heretic 2 and Hexen 2 (actually, wasn't it HeXen or something?) when they were also responsible for the originals.
This has been true, and still largely is, but it is changing. Some of the larger ice cores, for example the GISP2 from Greenland, can give annual precision well beyond the last ice age (GISP2 goes back to at least 110,000 ybp with annual layers). The Vostok core from Antarctica, although not providing annual precision (I believe it is at least decadal, however) goes back several hundred thousand years at least (I think as much as 800 ka, but I don't remember for sure) - that is several glacial/interglacial cycles (not mini-cycles within one glaciation). So yes, in general geology deals with time scales of hundreds of thousands and millions of years, but there are increasing numbers of studies involving high-resolution paleoclimate records of the "recent" past.
It's the placebo effect, I tell you! All that ash falling to the ground looks sort of like snow, so it just makes everyone feel a little colder! Take that!
Just not the part right next to the volcano. That part can get pretty hot.
The Earth's magnetic field is really really weak at the surface - like 30-40000 nano tesla, depending on where you are. We get exposed to many fields that are significantly stronger all the time (I definitley do - but then I work in a lab where we have several 1-2 tesla magnets going fairly often; on the otehr hand, we also have a shielded room, so I don't get exposed to Earth's magnetic field for significant portions of my day).
Score: 2, Interesting
I don't think the moderator(s) get it. Maybe if you shout FIELD louder.
Most countries, including America, do not see Taiwan as independent.
I'd put it a little differently. Most countries do not officially recognize Taiwan as being independent; however, most people of most countries (that I've talked to, anyway) generally consider Taiwan to be an independent nation.
Re-selling print ad space doesn't seem like the most profitable business. Of course, I have no idea how much advertising space costs in print, or how much of a break Google might get for taking out a full-page ad that it then fills with smaller ads, but it doesn't seem like it would be very efficient. It is an interesting move, though. Anyone have an idea of the size of the ad market in print vs. online (in terms of dollars)?
Disney already owns me.
Just doing a quick search of retail prices, it looks like I could get a 4 GB compact flash card for about $250, while a 4 GB microdrive runs about $200. Anyone know what the price is like on the Samsung NAND flash memory? The article claims Samsung would have to drop prices 50% to match microdrives, but that seems like a little much - how much less power does NAND flash memory use than a microdrive, and how much less battery would a flash-based device need for comparable performance?