As the linked article is basically a wall of text, here's the website which has a video of the maiden flight on the front page:
http://pal-v.com/
They might have been able to make it uglier if they tried really, really hard. Looks like an overweight gyrocopter with really basic road-going abilities. Can't wait for Jeremy Clarkson to get hold of one (well, James May would be more likely I guess, what with his pilot's license and all) - looks tippy;)
You can use on of these and spot check in a grid like pattern. When you place it on a particular spot, the reflection will show you trees overlayed with a grid which indicates the times of the year which that tree would shade that location. This can help guide your panel placement trimming of trees, and tell you how much of the year that each spot would be unshaded.
If you went about in a grid like pattern you could enter the results into a spreadsheet and do a weighted average.
Disclaimer: I do not work for nor am affiliated with this company.
Gah, couldn't remember what the damn things are called. Similar devices have been used for years for determining insolation of streams that are pretty simple. Basically a transparent hemisphere with a grid underneath, you look at the reflection of the sky in the hemisphere and record how much and which portions of the sky are covered. Then you can use charts (or I'm sure there are online tools somewhere) to calculate insolation for your location (important in stream ecology because insolation has a major effect on water temperature; in many watersheds there are rules about how much you can alter insolation of streams through removal of trees and other activities; no, I'm not an ecologist, but I took a class once...). A quick search also turned up some results for hemispherical photography with the same goal in mind.
That said, I'm sure most reputable solar installers will do all those measurements and calculations for you in order to determine whether it is cost effective for you to do it. At least, when my parents put solar on their roof a few years back the installers all did this as part of the bidding process - tough to decide how many and what type of panels to put up if you don't know the production potential of the site.
Big surprise that structures in volumetric configurations ended up being more efficient at gathering energy... considering plants have known this since they left the seas hundreds of millions of years ago.
Are you suggesting that lichen is not the evolutionary pinnacle of plant evolution? Oh sure, maybe your fancy trees produce more nutrients per unit land area, but AT WHAT COST?
20x output (compared to a flat panel with the same footprint).
Not really news. This is like excitedly proclaiming that a 20 story building has nearly 20 times the floorspace of a single story building with the same footprint. Uh, no shit? (Or that a 20 story building receives more insolation than a 1-story building; hmm, you think maybe it has a lot more surface area?) I also like that they hand-wave away the fact that it costs significantly more per unit output by saying that cells are getting cheaper. Great.
Not that there aren't uses - it absolutely makes sense to go this route where you have limited footprint space - but it just doesn't seem at all revolutionary. I guess if you tack the letters M-I-T onto a press release it instantly becomes newsworthy.
We also recommend that major corporations, such as Google, take practical steps to limit the potential for breaches of court orders through use of their products and, if they fail to do so, legislation should be introduced to force them to.
Basically, "Major corporations (especially foreign ones) have lots of money, so even though it doesn't make any sense they should undertake law enforcement so we don't have to. If they choose not to enforce our laws for us, we will introduce legislation to force them to do so."
Great that it isn't a law, but it is pretty clear that it is their intent to make it one if Google doesn't agree to self-censor their results.
In the Max Mosley case the pictures were illegally obtained and possibly violated his human rights (in the EU a person has the right to a private life). If that is the case then it would seem that Google has a legal obligation to remove illegal images.
I'm not saying that the law is necessarily right to deem these images illegal, but if they are then Google, like any other company, has to comply with the law.
Google isn't hosting the images. Wouldn't it make more sense to go after the people who are hosting the images and/or put them up in the first place? I realize that Google is a big foreign company, but that doesn't mean they should take over law enforcement responsibility just because the EU/UK can't be arsed to track down the actual offenders. "I saw it in a Google search, so it must be their responsibility." It seems that it is getting to the point where Google needs to put disclaimers on all search results pages for the small minds in the British and EU parliament - something like, "Google is not responsible for the content of outside websites linked in our search results, you twit!"
They're asserting that 40% of the Moon's mass must have come from the impactor, and thus would have a different isotope balance.
That's clear, but why would the impactor necessarily have a significantly different isotopic ratio than the Earth? Yes it theoretically had a significantly different mass, but the distance from the sun was similar. How much understanding do we have of the variation in these isotopes on other planetary bodies? We have samples from what, the Earth, the Moon, and probably asteroids (very small mass so not too surprising if their isotope ratio is very different)? Possibly Mars? That doesn't seem like a whole lot of data to base models of isotope variation on, so it seems like a weak argument to say that Theia should have had a substantially different isotopic ratio for oxygen and titanium than the Earth. It would be nice if this was discussed in the article, but it isn't (and the link to the original journal article is broken so I can't check for myself).
3D wasn't expensive to develop at all, that's the lie.
3D is just a high refresh rate and an IR transmitter sync'd to vsync to flip which image each eye sees.
This isn't high tech, it was done long ago, including in video games in the early 90's.
That's one method, but people keep complaining that they don't want to wear glasses (or additional glasses) to watch TV/movies. R&D has been going into "passive" 3D, where no special glasses are needed. It doesn't work very well, from what I've seen, but so it goes. I still think active shutter gives by far the best effect, costs almost nothing to implement in the TV, and has no negative impact on 2D image quality (unlike some of the passive designs). If I were buying a new TV I'd get one of these (don't recall which brands offer them) - if you don't want 3D it doesn't affect you negatively, if you do you just have to go get some glasses (and then you are rewarded with the best available 3D experience).
The rest of your description is likewise meaningless. At 12 feet from the TV on a 50" screen, you CAN NOT physically tell the difference. It is impossible, your eyes don't have the resolution to handle it, and telling yourself otherwise is like telling yourself you need some $10,000 ethernet cables for your home network too.
This is not true. The acuity numbers you base this on (from the article linked earlier) are related to vision tests like you might undergo at an optometrist, where the measure is the smallest size text you are able to read at a given distance. "Nominal" vision in this case is 20/20, which means that the subject can resolve letters 20mm high at a distance of 20 feet - this is where the 1 arc-minute of visual acuity your linked article mentions appears to come from (and never mind that people have been measured with vision down to 20/8, which would reduce this significantly - about 0.4 arc-minutes).
This is useful information, but it doesn't actually mean what you seem to be claiming - that we can see no difference in features smaller than this, and any greater resolution is wasted. In tests where subjects are assessing whether two lines line up, acuity down to about 8 arc-seconds has been observed, which is actually better resolution than the physical receptors on the retina. Similarly, a single dark line against an evenly illuminated background can be observed down to a limit of about 0.5 arc-seconds, much finer than the physical detectors in the eye.
This isn't to say that we need displays capable of sub-1 arc-second resolution, but human vision is far more complicated than you make it out to be. Saying that there is no difference between a 720p display and a 1080p display at x distance and size because the pixels are too small to be individually resolved (based on results from a test for resolving letters) is simply not true. Most people probably can detect a difference, even if the difference is too small for them to really notice in moving pictures (or are just not bothered by it). Claiming that no one can see any difference and therefore anyone who doesn't follow that simplistic chart is an idiot is, simply, false.
How much stronger would a field have to be to protect a hypothetical ship the size of the space shuttle from solar winds and other non-EM ionizing radiation in interplanetary space?
A hypothetical ship is the easiest kind to protect from all sorts of dangers; the size doesn't even matter!
Or were you asking, hypothetically, what the field strength needed to protect a space-shuttle size ship would be?
(Pedants hide their ignorance and inability to answer the question by making fun of the grammar of the parent)
President Obama flat turned them down. President Medvedev was not happy, and recorded a very stern video explaining why rejecting Russia was bound to escalate tensions along the EU-RF border. (In other words he didn't like hearing "no" to being part of the missile shield.)
I can't figure it out. Why would President Obama say no to a potential partner and ally in this endeavor? It was the kind of thing I would expect from Bush not Obama.
Actually, the U.S. and NATO offered to include Russia in the missile defense shield in the form of sharing early warning data (I don't believe they intended to share the actual missile intercept systems) around Fall 2010. Russia resisted, and came back a year later demanding that NATO legally bind themselves to never aiming the system towards Russia, which the U.S. and other NATO countries rejected. Most recently there has been some noise about sharing technical data with the Russians to assuage their fears, but I haven't seen any concrete information on what exactly was being offered, or even if there if there ever actually was a formal (or informal) offer.
The article doesn't say anything about mathematical proof of whether someone cheated. At the moment he seems to simply be running the decision points (moves) of a game under suspicion against both historic games (to see if the player is playing significantly above their "normal" rating) and against a single computer chess program (to see if the competitor's moves have unusually high correlation with the moves the computer would make). All of this provides evidence of cheating (or lack thereof, as noted in the article where some grandmasters were found to just be playing unusually poorly rather than their competitor cheating), but in no way does it constitute mathematical proof of cheating. Mathematical proof would suggest that there is absolutely no uncertainty, which is clearly not the case.
The (very simple) skill system doesn't require/allow you to make any hard choices The stat system doesn't allow you to make ANY choices The rune system provides the illusion of skill choices in the form of yet another item hunt Gear is the only way to differentiate from one player of the same class to another (since you don't really controll stat or skill.
-Neither did previous games. If you made the "wrong" choice, your character was gimped and you had to delete him and start the game all over. -This was the case with every previous game as well. If you made your stats "wrong", your character was gimped and you had to delete him and start the game all over. The only real differentiation between characters was who had the better items. Nothing has changed. -Runes are not items any more. It is now just a method of selecting different skill abilities.
If you think Diablo 2 (the multiplayer community anyway) was anything more than a perpetual item grind then you are kidding yourself. There was no building or experimenting in D2 because there was no respeccing period.
Not my experience at all, but then I had no interest in playing on battle.net, let alone worrying about maxing a character for PvP. For MP I played LAN games with my brother and a couple of friends (or direct IP; I don't think we were actually all in the same place) and PvP was never really a part of it. The most fun was usually the first trip through the game, when you still had a reasonable chance of finding improved equipment without resorting to doing the same thing over and over and over and over. By the time you beat it on Normal and go to Nightmare, 99% of the stuff that drops is crap you wouldn't have picked up at level 5 and it just became stupid. Way more fun just to start another character and try out a completely different build, not worrying about whether that build is the best possible or most effective. Sounds like they've done their best to remove/limit the parts I enjoyed, and concentrated instead on the parts that I never had any interest in - grinding and PvP (except apparently they've dropped PvP for now, so it is just grinding).
Somewhat wrong. Research and development (R&D) is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies. Only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies, or the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It sounds like you read the conservative cliff notes on the issue.
R&D expenditure varies pretty widely. Bayer appears to be one of the worst in R&D to marketing ratio; according to their 2011 Annual Report they spent about 3 billion Euros on R&D and 8.8 billion Euros on "selling" (excludes manufacturing costs). On the other hand, Roche was pretty evenly split between R&D and marketing, with about 8 billion Swiss francs on each. Bristol-Meyers Squibb put about $4.5 billion into marketing and $3.5 billion into R&D.
So yes, drug prices tend to be inflated and a lot of the expense goes to marketing. However, they are also spending a lot on R&D - generally 10% - 25% of income. I won't argue that drugs shouldn't be cheaper - they absolutely should be - but claiming that the pharmaceutical companies don't spend money on research and have no associated costs to recover above the cost of manufacturing the drugs is just plain ignorance. It is certainly worth discussing how drug research and development should be paid for, but India unilaterally deciding to ignore patents without providing any way of funding new research simply isn't sustainable if everyone does it.
The more I see about Win 8, the more I'm convinced that Microsoft has no plans of marketing it to corporate users (outside of tablets). I guess they've decided that Win 7 is good enough for people to do actual work on, and don't plan on discontinuing it. At least, I hope that's the plan. They've had enough trouble getting people to move off of XP, this is going to be a thousand times worse. I'd be totally fine with that decision, assuming they patch Win 7 with some of the back-end improvements (which by most accounts are generally pretty minor). Even the strongest proponents I've read for Win 8 say that once you get used to it (and learn the new shortcuts) the new UI isn't any worse than the existing one on the desktop. Not exactly a strong recommendation to go out and upgrade.
Better than the space tether crap which requires manufacturing capabilities we don't have.
I like the idea of building it on the ground then mag lev'ing it up. Makes building it a lot easier....
20 years is in my lifetime and 60 billion is less than 4 years of NASA's current budget. So 20 years of NASA's budget should easily be able to pay for this AND still have money for other stuff.
That might be the case if the estimate had any basis in reality whatsoever. Hell, a high-speed rail system of similar length to the launch track using conventional, proven technology is expected to cost around $100 billion; evolutionary development of a new airliner is running about $30 billion; somehow I think it is extremely unlikely they could come anywhere near their cost estimate given the scale and number of unknowns here. It would probably take 50% of the budget just to design and build the launch vehicle, never mind designing and building the enormous launch structure.
The same is true of google maps though. Compare Vladivostok on Google Maps to on OpenStreetMap for example.
You think that's bad, check out North Korea: Google Maps vs. OSM.
Though I'm not sure how well to trust North Korean OSM. I can just picture some guy in a cubicle in NK building phantom roads and towns all over the place just because.
Yeah and the side effect of it blocking the person trying to make a wireless 911 call. Who cares about the innocents caught in this, right?
Not to mention the five people quietly texting away, or browsing the web, emailing, etc. Basically, the idiot vigilante is screwing everyone over because of one loudmouth. And lets not forget the cell-based position reporting of the bus/train/whatever, or the GPS that his $40 jammer is also screwing with, and so on. Yes, the guy talking loudly on his phone is an asshat; the guy jamming everybody is even worse.
Personally I'd complain if it was anything over 50 ms for wireline. Wireless you are going to see higher; for satellite 300 ms is probably good (but I don't think you can get 10 mbps over satellite yet). With DSL I had ~13-20 ms reported to nearby test servers (well, ~70 miles as the car drives). Switched to U-verse recently, now I get about 22-30 ms to the same server on a bonded pair (interleaved). Don't think I've ever gone above 30 ms to test servers, but then I've only ever had DSL or a T1 at college (for broadband; I think back in the modem days latency was generally on the order of 200-300 ms, but I don't remember for sure). The people that made speedtest.net also offer pingtest.net, which gives some decent information on latency.
Slashdot Mirror
As the linked article is basically a wall of text, here's the website which has a video of the maiden flight on the front page:
http://pal-v.com/
They might have been able to make it uglier if they tried really, really hard. Looks like an overweight gyrocopter with really basic road-going abilities. Can't wait for Jeremy Clarkson to get hold of one (well, James May would be more likely I guess, what with his pilot's license and all) - looks tippy ;)
You can use on of these and spot check in a grid like pattern. When you place it on a particular spot, the reflection will show you trees overlayed with a grid which indicates the times of the year which that tree would shade that location. This can help guide your panel placement trimming of trees, and tell you how much of the year that each spot would be unshaded.
If you went about in a grid like pattern you could enter the results into a spreadsheet and do a weighted average.
http://www.solarpathfinder.com/
Disclaimer: I do not work for nor am affiliated with this company.
Gah, couldn't remember what the damn things are called. Similar devices have been used for years for determining insolation of streams that are pretty simple. Basically a transparent hemisphere with a grid underneath, you look at the reflection of the sky in the hemisphere and record how much and which portions of the sky are covered. Then you can use charts (or I'm sure there are online tools somewhere) to calculate insolation for your location (important in stream ecology because insolation has a major effect on water temperature; in many watersheds there are rules about how much you can alter insolation of streams through removal of trees and other activities; no, I'm not an ecologist, but I took a class once...). A quick search also turned up some results for hemispherical photography with the same goal in mind.
That said, I'm sure most reputable solar installers will do all those measurements and calculations for you in order to determine whether it is cost effective for you to do it. At least, when my parents put solar on their roof a few years back the installers all did this as part of the bidding process - tough to decide how many and what type of panels to put up if you don't know the production potential of the site.
Big surprise that structures in volumetric configurations ended up being more efficient at gathering energy... considering plants have known this since they left the seas hundreds of millions of years ago.
Are you suggesting that lichen is not the evolutionary pinnacle of plant evolution? Oh sure, maybe your fancy trees produce more nutrients per unit land area, but AT WHAT COST?
20x output (compared to a flat panel with the same footprint).
Not really news. This is like excitedly proclaiming that a 20 story building has nearly 20 times the floorspace of a single story building with the same footprint. Uh, no shit? (Or that a 20 story building receives more insolation than a 1-story building; hmm, you think maybe it has a lot more surface area?) I also like that they hand-wave away the fact that it costs significantly more per unit output by saying that cells are getting cheaper. Great.
Not that there aren't uses - it absolutely makes sense to go this route where you have limited footprint space - but it just doesn't seem at all revolutionary. I guess if you tack the letters M-I-T onto a press release it instantly becomes newsworthy.
We also recommend that major corporations, such as Google, take practical steps to limit the potential for breaches of court orders through use of their products and, if they fail to do so, legislation should be introduced to force them to.
Basically, "Major corporations (especially foreign ones) have lots of money, so even though it doesn't make any sense they should undertake law enforcement so we don't have to. If they choose not to enforce our laws for us, we will introduce legislation to force them to do so."
Great that it isn't a law, but it is pretty clear that it is their intent to make it one if Google doesn't agree to self-censor their results.
In the Max Mosley case the pictures were illegally obtained and possibly violated his human rights (in the EU a person has the right to a private life). If that is the case then it would seem that Google has a legal obligation to remove illegal images.
I'm not saying that the law is necessarily right to deem these images illegal, but if they are then Google, like any other company, has to comply with the law.
Google isn't hosting the images. Wouldn't it make more sense to go after the people who are hosting the images and/or put them up in the first place? I realize that Google is a big foreign company, but that doesn't mean they should take over law enforcement responsibility just because the EU/UK can't be arsed to track down the actual offenders. "I saw it in a Google search, so it must be their responsibility." It seems that it is getting to the point where Google needs to put disclaimers on all search results pages for the small minds in the British and EU parliament - something like, "Google is not responsible for the content of outside websites linked in our search results, you twit!"
They're asserting that 40% of the Moon's mass must have come from the impactor, and thus would have a different isotope balance.
That's clear, but why would the impactor necessarily have a significantly different isotopic ratio than the Earth? Yes it theoretically had a significantly different mass, but the distance from the sun was similar. How much understanding do we have of the variation in these isotopes on other planetary bodies? We have samples from what, the Earth, the Moon, and probably asteroids (very small mass so not too surprising if their isotope ratio is very different)? Possibly Mars? That doesn't seem like a whole lot of data to base models of isotope variation on, so it seems like a weak argument to say that Theia should have had a substantially different isotopic ratio for oxygen and titanium than the Earth. It would be nice if this was discussed in the article, but it isn't (and the link to the original journal article is broken so I can't check for myself).
3D wasn't expensive to develop at all, that's the lie.
3D is just a high refresh rate and an IR transmitter sync'd to vsync to flip which image each eye sees.
This isn't high tech, it was done long ago, including in video games in the early 90's.
That's one method, but people keep complaining that they don't want to wear glasses (or additional glasses) to watch TV/movies. R&D has been going into "passive" 3D, where no special glasses are needed. It doesn't work very well, from what I've seen, but so it goes. I still think active shutter gives by far the best effect, costs almost nothing to implement in the TV, and has no negative impact on 2D image quality (unlike some of the passive designs). If I were buying a new TV I'd get one of these (don't recall which brands offer them) - if you don't want 3D it doesn't affect you negatively, if you do you just have to go get some glasses (and then you are rewarded with the best available 3D experience).
The rest of your description is likewise meaningless. At 12 feet from the TV on a 50" screen, you CAN NOT physically tell the difference. It is impossible, your eyes don't have the resolution to handle it, and telling yourself otherwise is like telling yourself you need some $10,000 ethernet cables for your home network too.
This is not true. The acuity numbers you base this on (from the article linked earlier) are related to vision tests like you might undergo at an optometrist, where the measure is the smallest size text you are able to read at a given distance. "Nominal" vision in this case is 20/20, which means that the subject can resolve letters 20mm high at a distance of 20 feet - this is where the 1 arc-minute of visual acuity your linked article mentions appears to come from (and never mind that people have been measured with vision down to 20/8, which would reduce this significantly - about 0.4 arc-minutes).
This is useful information, but it doesn't actually mean what you seem to be claiming - that we can see no difference in features smaller than this, and any greater resolution is wasted. In tests where subjects are assessing whether two lines line up, acuity down to about 8 arc-seconds has been observed, which is actually better resolution than the physical receptors on the retina. Similarly, a single dark line against an evenly illuminated background can be observed down to a limit of about 0.5 arc-seconds, much finer than the physical detectors in the eye.
This isn't to say that we need displays capable of sub-1 arc-second resolution, but human vision is far more complicated than you make it out to be. Saying that there is no difference between a 720p display and a 1080p display at x distance and size because the pixels are too small to be individually resolved (based on results from a test for resolving letters) is simply not true. Most people probably can detect a difference, even if the difference is too small for them to really notice in moving pictures (or are just not bothered by it). Claiming that no one can see any difference and therefore anyone who doesn't follow that simplistic chart is an idiot is, simply, false.
In Japan the opposite was happening just as frequently. The endangered accidentally caught fish was being sold as a commonly available fish.
No kidding. Every time I ordered sashimi over there it tasted like humpback whale.
How much stronger would a field have to be to protect a hypothetical ship the size of the space shuttle from solar winds and other non-EM ionizing radiation in interplanetary space?
A hypothetical ship is the easiest kind to protect from all sorts of dangers; the size doesn't even matter!
Or were you asking, hypothetically, what the field strength needed to protect a space-shuttle size ship would be?
(Pedants hide their ignorance and inability to answer the question by making fun of the grammar of the parent)
Of course! It's against the law to lie to Congress, you know!
He had his fingers crossed, so no problem.
As long as there's a process...
President Obama flat turned them down. President Medvedev was not happy, and recorded a very stern video explaining why rejecting Russia was bound to escalate tensions along the EU-RF border. (In other words he didn't like hearing "no" to being part of the missile shield.)
I can't figure it out. Why would President Obama say no to a potential partner and ally in this endeavor? It was the kind of thing I would expect from Bush not Obama.
Actually, the U.S. and NATO offered to include Russia in the missile defense shield in the form of sharing early warning data (I don't believe they intended to share the actual missile intercept systems) around Fall 2010. Russia resisted, and came back a year later demanding that NATO legally bind themselves to never aiming the system towards Russia, which the U.S. and other NATO countries rejected. Most recently there has been some noise about sharing technical data with the Russians to assuage their fears, but I haven't seen any concrete information on what exactly was being offered, or even if there if there ever actually was a formal (or informal) offer.
The article doesn't say anything about mathematical proof of whether someone cheated. At the moment he seems to simply be running the decision points (moves) of a game under suspicion against both historic games (to see if the player is playing significantly above their "normal" rating) and against a single computer chess program (to see if the competitor's moves have unusually high correlation with the moves the computer would make). All of this provides evidence of cheating (or lack thereof, as noted in the article where some grandmasters were found to just be playing unusually poorly rather than their competitor cheating), but in no way does it constitute mathematical proof of cheating. Mathematical proof would suggest that there is absolutely no uncertainty, which is clearly not the case.
I'd just use the CoD system for cheat detection. If they beat me, they cheated. Simple enough.
The (very simple) skill system doesn't require/allow you to make any hard choices
The stat system doesn't allow you to make ANY choices
The rune system provides the illusion of skill choices in the form of yet another item hunt
Gear is the only way to differentiate from one player of the same class to another (since you don't really controll stat or skill.
-Neither did previous games. If you made the "wrong" choice, your character was gimped and you had to delete him and start the game all over.
-This was the case with every previous game as well. If you made your stats "wrong", your character was gimped and you had to delete him and start the game all over. The only real differentiation between characters was who had the better items. Nothing has changed.
-Runes are not items any more. It is now just a method of selecting different skill abilities.
If you think Diablo 2 (the multiplayer community anyway) was anything more than a perpetual item grind then you are kidding yourself. There was no building or experimenting in D2 because there was no respeccing period.
Not my experience at all, but then I had no interest in playing on battle.net, let alone worrying about maxing a character for PvP. For MP I played LAN games with my brother and a couple of friends (or direct IP; I don't think we were actually all in the same place) and PvP was never really a part of it. The most fun was usually the first trip through the game, when you still had a reasonable chance of finding improved equipment without resorting to doing the same thing over and over and over and over. By the time you beat it on Normal and go to Nightmare, 99% of the stuff that drops is crap you wouldn't have picked up at level 5 and it just became stupid. Way more fun just to start another character and try out a completely different build, not worrying about whether that build is the best possible or most effective. Sounds like they've done their best to remove/limit the parts I enjoyed, and concentrated instead on the parts that I never had any interest in - grinding and PvP (except apparently they've dropped PvP for now, so it is just grinding).
What reading are we getting from the Rape-Your-Customers-O-Meter?
It's considered a hack, and will get your account banned even if you only use it in single player.
You can get a Meter-Of-Blizzard's-Godliness for only $19.99 at the auction house, though.
Somewhat wrong. Research and development (R&D) is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies. Only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies, or the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It sounds like you read the conservative cliff notes on the issue.
R&D expenditure varies pretty widely. Bayer appears to be one of the worst in R&D to marketing ratio; according to their 2011 Annual Report they spent about 3 billion Euros on R&D and 8.8 billion Euros on "selling" (excludes manufacturing costs). On the other hand, Roche was pretty evenly split between R&D and marketing, with about 8 billion Swiss francs on each. Bristol-Meyers Squibb put about $4.5 billion into marketing and $3.5 billion into R&D.
So yes, drug prices tend to be inflated and a lot of the expense goes to marketing. However, they are also spending a lot on R&D - generally 10% - 25% of income. I won't argue that drugs shouldn't be cheaper - they absolutely should be - but claiming that the pharmaceutical companies don't spend money on research and have no associated costs to recover above the cost of manufacturing the drugs is just plain ignorance. It is certainly worth discussing how drug research and development should be paid for, but India unilaterally deciding to ignore patents without providing any way of funding new research simply isn't sustainable if everyone does it.
The more I see about Win 8, the more I'm convinced that Microsoft has no plans of marketing it to corporate users (outside of tablets). I guess they've decided that Win 7 is good enough for people to do actual work on, and don't plan on discontinuing it. At least, I hope that's the plan. They've had enough trouble getting people to move off of XP, this is going to be a thousand times worse. I'd be totally fine with that decision, assuming they patch Win 7 with some of the back-end improvements (which by most accounts are generally pretty minor). Even the strongest proponents I've read for Win 8 say that once you get used to it (and learn the new shortcuts) the new UI isn't any worse than the existing one on the desktop. Not exactly a strong recommendation to go out and upgrade.
Separate, boring they are.
Together, one good movie it would be.
Nah, just cut all three movies together as one. I think the best cut would be about 136 minutes long.
Better than the space tether crap which requires manufacturing capabilities we don't have.
I like the idea of building it on the ground then mag lev'ing it up. Makes building it a lot easier....
20 years is in my lifetime and 60 billion is less than 4 years of NASA's current budget. So 20 years of NASA's budget should easily be able to pay for this AND still have money for other stuff.
That might be the case if the estimate had any basis in reality whatsoever.
Hell, a high-speed rail system of similar length to the launch track using conventional, proven technology is expected to cost around $100 billion; evolutionary development of a new airliner is running about $30 billion; somehow I think it is extremely unlikely they could come anywhere near their cost estimate given the scale and number of unknowns here. It would probably take 50% of the budget just to design and build the launch vehicle, never mind designing and building the enormous launch structure.
I don't think so; if you read the first question out loud, he sounds Canadian.
Polite holocausts are the worst sort, eh.
The same is true of google maps though. Compare Vladivostok on Google Maps to on OpenStreetMap for example.
You think that's bad, check out North Korea: Google Maps vs. OSM.
Though I'm not sure how well to trust North Korean OSM. I can just picture some guy in a cubicle in NK building phantom roads and towns all over the place just because.
Yeah and the side effect of it blocking the person trying to make a wireless 911 call. Who cares about the innocents caught in this, right?
Not to mention the five people quietly texting away, or browsing the web, emailing, etc. Basically, the idiot vigilante is screwing everyone over because of one loudmouth. And lets not forget the cell-based position reporting of the bus/train/whatever, or the GPS that his $40 jammer is also screwing with, and so on. Yes, the guy talking loudly on his phone is an asshat; the guy jamming everybody is even worse.
Personally I'd complain if it was anything over 50 ms for wireline. Wireless you are going to see higher; for satellite 300 ms is probably good (but I don't think you can get 10 mbps over satellite yet). With DSL I had ~13-20 ms reported to nearby test servers (well, ~70 miles as the car drives). Switched to U-verse recently, now I get about 22-30 ms to the same server on a bonded pair (interleaved). Don't think I've ever gone above 30 ms to test servers, but then I've only ever had DSL or a T1 at college (for broadband; I think back in the modem days latency was generally on the order of 200-300 ms, but I don't remember for sure).
The people that made speedtest.net also offer pingtest.net, which gives some decent information on latency.