It's a play on words around the whole "flash vs silverlight" thing, but apparently the mods here just figured someone was making a Microsoft joke or something.
We're past the spring equinox so to test this, zoom out far enough that you can see the entire globe. Put the north pole roughly centered on your screen. Now run the 24 hour slider back and forth - you can quite clearly see daylight never leaving some areas of the far north. By June this area will be much-enlarged.
As the actual "viewing the sun from ground level" part of GE seems to correspond to the sun's terminator everywhere else I've tried it, I see no reason why the same wouldn't work from the land of the midnight sun.
It's actually kind of fun to look at the entire globe at once - it really brings home why northern latitudes get longer daylight this time of year. The terminator is clearly angled during both sunrise and sunset to demonstrate the earlier sunrises and later sunsets the further north you go. The closest I've seen until this is the usual flat projection of the Earth with a distorted day/night overlay.
Another cool thing is to use GE to show how the sun does in fact set further north than straight west (in the northern hemisphere) during summer. A surprising number of people refuse to believe that this is the case.
Ok, instead of stupid and/or lying, I'll add a third option: only able to see the world from their viewpoint. And I mean this in good humour, not to be an asshole. I'm certainly no different when I get caught doing what I shouldn't while driving - until the police explain it to me. And yes, I've asked.
To the cop, you were speeding through a yellow light. Period. Whether you sped up just before it or not, that's likely how it looked. Where I grew up we had a ton of those lights, where you have to slow down for them on a major highway, and the cops pretty much don't give a flying rat's ass how fast you were going beforehand. From their perspective you were 1) speeding because 2) you were trying to beat a yellow.
What you did is really no different (again, from an enforcement perspective) than if you were speeding the entire time on a road with no required slowdown. Maybe we can modify the word "gun" in my original comment to "race through", if that makes it easier. Slashdot is a forum that is often difficult to cover every possible circumstance (and you can't go back and correct, no editing!), but what I was trying to say is that for every single person who's told me "I've been ticketed for going through a yellow", there has ALWAYS been something else going on. I've never once heard of a true "going through a yellow" ticket on its own. Because at least where I've checked**, it's always legal, assuming you were following the rules of the road to begin with.
**Of course, and this relates back to my comment about Slashdot being a pain - one of the places I visit frequently, Missouri - turns out they actually are one of the jurisdictions that ticket you if any part of your car is in the intersection when the light turns red. So I've got egg on my face as I await a MO resident to come on here blasting me for not checking every single state's traffic laws.
Or, we could all understand that in the spirit of a forum like this, we don't have to get defensive and jump on people for a slight misunderstanding of wording. Or just stop being pedantic about every last little nuance of life. Including me.
You're OK in every state and provincial jurisdiction in North America where I've bothered to look up the laws (most of Canada, chunks of the US). People who say they are getting pulled over for "running a yellow" are either a) actually running a red and are either stupid or lying, or b) gunning it when they clearly have time to stop.
Properly installed red light cameras will account for this. They should only trigger on a car that has entered the intersection AFTER the light has turned red. If you're stuck turning left on a red, so long as you entered on the yellow, you're legally in the clear.
That doesn't account for improperly installed cameras, of course. How you prove that a week later when you see the ticket in the mail is beyond me. This plays out in experience, too - I'm a habitual yellow light runner who's lived in two cities infested with red light cameras, and I've never once gotten a ticket for running a red.
Actually, what's really interesting is that in the past week or so, we've seen the following stories on Slashdot:
Full-on public surveillance, and should the resulting "footage" be available to everyone in the public (to be fair, this is a weekly discussion here).
Man-made black holes, and the consequences thereof.
And now, Swiss banking and investigating into what TRULY is going on.
Basically, the 3 major plot points or predictions in the novel. Now, Brin didn't write this in 1950 or anything (I believe 1990 or thereabouts), but still - the core topics in that book are coming together just nicely here in 2008. A lot sooner than his book predicted.
It's a book I re-read at least every 3-4 years, because with every read I notice something ELSE that's "come true". But it's just now that the real meat of the book is taking shape.
Would the whales then go on to try cross-breeding experiements between cows and the few remaining humans, to prop up their frowned-upon habit of eating the few of us remaining?
Most zoos have some perimeter displays you can see from the street or a sidewalk. For free. I've often walked by my local zoo and stopped for a minute or two to watch the animals. I inevitably say the following Simpson's quote:
"Hey! They're learning for free! Get them!"
If you didn't find that joke funny when the Simpsons did it, you likely consider what I do stealing.
That only works if you manage to cure 100% of the 0.6%. Considering the incubation times of HIV, I'll go with the vaccine as the more effective method, thanks.
An evil santa clause, a jewish lobster that everyone hates, constant 21st century references via heads in jars.
Holy christ, I think you've seen all of 3 episodes.
Humour's a subjective thing, I'll give you that. I didn't even really like Futurama when it was fist aired. But trying to claim that it's PREDICTABLE?? Dear sweet jesus, what the hell do you watch that's less predictable than Futurama? Random snow on untuned channels??
I had 28.8k dialup in 1998. I can download at 6mb steady from home now. I can't see it being 10 years before I reach the numbers you are saying will take "decades"
In 1998 I nearly had what you have TODAY. And it's barely doubled since then. What I'm saying is you're highly unlikely to see the same increase you saw going from 28.8 to high-speed service, because so far, that's been the last big increase. Everything has been tiny since then. There's been no real indication of massive technology increases since ditching dial-up. At least none that are available to the masses in any real form.
Hell, based on what you're saying, you're likely to be years behind me in terms of reaching 25mbit. Again, I'm nearly a decade ahead of you already in terms of speed.
And I challenge you to find any more than a handful of places out there that will sustain 6mbit upload for several hours. Let alone several times that. For potentially several million customers at a time.
*You* may buy movies online and enjoy waiting a few days for them, but millions of people out there own hundreds of millions of physical discs at this point. It takes me roughly 10 seconds from deciding what I want to watch to actually watching it. People in general aren't going to just give that up lightly.
Besides the fact that if 6mbps is enough, we'll just stick to DVDs anyway. Might be a different codec, but that's just a firmware upgrade away.
Mostly though, I'm baffled that on a tech website people are arguing against the demand for higher-capacity storage. Did we all decide 640k is going to be enough forever, too?:P
Let me know how many decades you figure it'll be before I can download 25GB reliably.
By conservative estimates, that's a solid 25mbit+ feed over 2 hours, with zero hiccups. Or faster allowing for some buffering time. At the rates my Internet speeds have increased (I had 4mbit cable in 1998, 10 years later it's barely pushing 10mbit), it'll be 20+ years before I get that. And I have pretty fast Internet compared to most of North America, if Slashdot posters are any decent sample group. Never mind the fact that in order to saturate my bandwidth, I'm pulling from 10+ sites at a time.
Blu-ray is a lot more than just a stopgap, unless the Internet drastically speeds up, AND video distribution goes P2P. Unless you really think content providers are going to have multi-PB bandwidth ready for their upload requirements (imagine how many homes watch a Disney movie on an average night around the world - now multiply that by all the other studios, add television...).
If 10-15-20 years of viable product life is a "stopgap", well then, you may just be correct.
Get this straight, "You DON'T hold hot coffee between your legs to add sugar while driving a car."
Sigh.
I can't believe people cannot read. SHE WAS NOT DRIVING A CAR.
The court case came down to one thing: is it reasonable to expect people to spill coffee on themselves? If you truly think that no one, ever, under any circumstances will spill coffee on their skin without being completely and totally stupid, then yes - let's put the blame on her.
The decision acknowledged the fact that even the most careful and resonable among us can spill things. Sometimes onto our skin. The judgement was awarded because if you allow people to spill things, THEY SHOULDN'T CAUSE 3RD DEGREE BURNS.
Try reading about the case instead of sounding like a jackass.
It may seem like a semantic difference but it is in fact like saying North American law rather than Canadian and US.
Actually, it sounds more to me like saying Canadian law rather than Ontario and Quebec.
The difference between Canada/US and England/Scotland is the very act of union you mention. Canada and the US are completely sovereign nations. No acts of union between the two. No common anything beyond trade agreements and language.
Hell, the Irish had to fight how many wars to gain independence from the UK? Canada doesn't need that - because it's a completely separate country from the US. You can't really say the same about the UK.
In the Transformers, when the Autobots explain that they learned human language from the World Wide Web, I rather expected Optimus Prime to shout out "r u teh sma witwicky?"
Yeah, as further indication of his paranoia... when I had commented about knowing him in a previous Slashdot story a few years back, he got, shall we say, VERY interested in finding out who I was. To the level of hounding me about it. I think he suspected me of being a CIA plant or something. It REALLY bothered him to not be able to connect some random Slashdot UID to an IRL name.:P
Couldn't have said it better myself. I knew Chris for a few years back in the day (even stayed at his house on Maryland a few times), and you nailed it. He was a drug abusing paranoid kook who videotaped CNN 24 hours a day and watched it on fast-forward to see if anything the US government was doing might be affecting him. He was your stereotypical geek who never got past his teenage pathos of "the MAN is trying to get me" - and as such, pretty much refused to get any real sort of work after a while. He just moved on to scamming people. Leaving behind debt is an understatement.
He did have access to some pretty potent LSD, though. Before knowing him, I always thought LSD was pretty harmless, but with the quantities that man could ingest, I now wonder if permanent brain damage kicks in. And he loved to combine it with a little coke - or whatever other easily accessible drug was around.
Funny, the last I had heard about him was his mindpixel scam. Which made me chuckle a lot, because very few people seemed to catch on that the entire project was just the ravings of a drug-addled lunatic.
I didn't realize he finally offed himself. I say finally because everyone who knew him expected it "any day now" - since at least the early 90s. I'm rather astounded he held on so long.
Slashdot Mirror
Not horribly enough for Hans.
No wireless. Less space than an iPod. Lame.
Flamebait?
Yeesh. And here I thought Slashdot had at least SOME comic book fans.
Flash
Quicksilver
It's a play on words around the whole "flash vs silverlight" thing, but apparently the mods here just figured someone was making a Microsoft joke or something.
We're past the spring equinox so to test this, zoom out far enough that you can see the entire globe. Put the north pole roughly centered on your screen. Now run the 24 hour slider back and forth - you can quite clearly see daylight never leaving some areas of the far north. By June this area will be much-enlarged.
As the actual "viewing the sun from ground level" part of GE seems to correspond to the sun's terminator everywhere else I've tried it, I see no reason why the same wouldn't work from the land of the midnight sun.
It's actually kind of fun to look at the entire globe at once - it really brings home why northern latitudes get longer daylight this time of year. The terminator is clearly angled during both sunrise and sunset to demonstrate the earlier sunrises and later sunsets the further north you go. The closest I've seen until this is the usual flat projection of the Earth with a distorted day/night overlay.
Another cool thing is to use GE to show how the sun does in fact set further north than straight west (in the northern hemisphere) during summer. A surprising number of people refuse to believe that this is the case.
... it's a greenhouse.
Ok, instead of stupid and/or lying, I'll add a third option: only able to see the world from their viewpoint. And I mean this in good humour, not to be an asshole. I'm certainly no different when I get caught doing what I shouldn't while driving - until the police explain it to me. And yes, I've asked.
To the cop, you were speeding through a yellow light. Period. Whether you sped up just before it or not, that's likely how it looked. Where I grew up we had a ton of those lights, where you have to slow down for them on a major highway, and the cops pretty much don't give a flying rat's ass how fast you were going beforehand. From their perspective you were 1) speeding because 2) you were trying to beat a yellow.
What you did is really no different (again, from an enforcement perspective) than if you were speeding the entire time on a road with no required slowdown. Maybe we can modify the word "gun" in my original comment to "race through", if that makes it easier. Slashdot is a forum that is often difficult to cover every possible circumstance (and you can't go back and correct, no editing!), but what I was trying to say is that for every single person who's told me "I've been ticketed for going through a yellow", there has ALWAYS been something else going on. I've never once heard of a true "going through a yellow" ticket on its own. Because at least where I've checked**, it's always legal, assuming you were following the rules of the road to begin with.
**Of course, and this relates back to my comment about Slashdot being a pain - one of the places I visit frequently, Missouri - turns out they actually are one of the jurisdictions that ticket you if any part of your car is in the intersection when the light turns red. So I've got egg on my face as I await a MO resident to come on here blasting me for not checking every single state's traffic laws.
Or, we could all understand that in the spirit of a forum like this, we don't have to get defensive and jump on people for a slight misunderstanding of wording. Or just stop being pedantic about every last little nuance of life. Including me.
You're OK in every state and provincial jurisdiction in North America where I've bothered to look up the laws (most of Canada, chunks of the US). People who say they are getting pulled over for "running a yellow" are either a) actually running a red and are either stupid or lying, or b) gunning it when they clearly have time to stop.
Properly installed red light cameras will account for this. They should only trigger on a car that has entered the intersection AFTER the light has turned red. If you're stuck turning left on a red, so long as you entered on the yellow, you're legally in the clear.
That doesn't account for improperly installed cameras, of course. How you prove that a week later when you see the ticket in the mail is beyond me. This plays out in experience, too - I'm a habitual yellow light runner who's lived in two cities infested with red light cameras, and I've never once gotten a ticket for running a red.
It's almost as if the Slashdot community has more than a single member.
Crazy talk, I know.
Actually, what's really interesting is that in the past week or so, we've seen the following stories on Slashdot:
Full-on public surveillance, and should the resulting "footage" be available to everyone in the public (to be fair, this is a weekly discussion here).
Man-made black holes, and the consequences thereof.
And now, Swiss banking and investigating into what TRULY is going on.
Basically, the 3 major plot points or predictions in the novel. Now, Brin didn't write this in 1950 or anything (I believe 1990 or thereabouts), but still - the core topics in that book are coming together just nicely here in 2008. A lot sooner than his book predicted.
It's a book I re-read at least every 3-4 years, because with every read I notice something ELSE that's "come true". But it's just now that the real meat of the book is taking shape.
Spooky.
Ran Out Of My Bandwidth, Assholes?
Would the whales then go on to try cross-breeding experiements between cows and the few remaining humans, to prop up their frowned-upon habit of eating the few of us remaining?
(and then write songs about it)
Basically deletionists view with bad eyes everything that is fiction related, and dismiss it.
Which is really a very silly position to take.
*troll mode on* What's next, are they going to delete all pages on the Christian Bible? *troll mode off*
Less trolly, I know for a fact that Britannica has entries on Greek Mythology, and Shakespearian characters.
Is fiction only acceptable after a certain period of time?
Most zoos have some perimeter displays you can see from the street or a sidewalk. For free. I've often walked by my local zoo and stopped for a minute or two to watch the animals. I inevitably say the following Simpson's quote:
"Hey! They're learning for free! Get them!"
If you didn't find that joke funny when the Simpsons did it, you likely consider what I do stealing.
That only works if you manage to cure 100% of the 0.6%. Considering the incubation times of HIV, I'll go with the vaccine as the more effective method, thanks.
An evil santa clause, a jewish lobster that everyone hates, constant 21st century references via heads in jars.
Holy christ, I think you've seen all of 3 episodes.
Humour's a subjective thing, I'll give you that. I didn't even really like Futurama when it was fist aired. But trying to claim that it's PREDICTABLE?? Dear sweet jesus, what the hell do you watch that's less predictable than Futurama? Random snow on untuned channels??
I had 28.8k dialup in 1998. I can download at 6mb steady from home now. I can't see it being 10 years before I reach the numbers you are saying will take "decades"
:P
In 1998 I nearly had what you have TODAY. And it's barely doubled since then. What I'm saying is you're highly unlikely to see the same increase you saw going from 28.8 to high-speed service, because so far, that's been the last big increase. Everything has been tiny since then. There's been no real indication of massive technology increases since ditching dial-up. At least none that are available to the masses in any real form.
Hell, based on what you're saying, you're likely to be years behind me in terms of reaching 25mbit. Again, I'm nearly a decade ahead of you already in terms of speed.
And I challenge you to find any more than a handful of places out there that will sustain 6mbit upload for several hours. Let alone several times that. For potentially several million customers at a time.
*You* may buy movies online and enjoy waiting a few days for them, but millions of people out there own hundreds of millions of physical discs at this point. It takes me roughly 10 seconds from deciding what I want to watch to actually watching it. People in general aren't going to just give that up lightly.
Besides the fact that if 6mbps is enough, we'll just stick to DVDs anyway. Might be a different codec, but that's just a firmware upgrade away.
Mostly though, I'm baffled that on a tech website people are arguing against the demand for higher-capacity storage. Did we all decide 640k is going to be enough forever, too?
Let me know how many decades you figure it'll be before I can download 25GB reliably.
By conservative estimates, that's a solid 25mbit+ feed over 2 hours, with zero hiccups. Or faster allowing for some buffering time. At the rates my Internet speeds have increased (I had 4mbit cable in 1998, 10 years later it's barely pushing 10mbit), it'll be 20+ years before I get that. And I have pretty fast Internet compared to most of North America, if Slashdot posters are any decent sample group. Never mind the fact that in order to saturate my bandwidth, I'm pulling from 10+ sites at a time.
Blu-ray is a lot more than just a stopgap, unless the Internet drastically speeds up, AND video distribution goes P2P. Unless you really think content providers are going to have multi-PB bandwidth ready for their upload requirements (imagine how many homes watch a Disney movie on an average night around the world - now multiply that by all the other studios, add television...).
If 10-15-20 years of viable product life is a "stopgap", well then, you may just be correct.
Get this straight, "You DON'T hold hot coffee between your legs to add sugar while driving a car."
Sigh.
I can't believe people cannot read. SHE WAS NOT DRIVING A CAR.
The court case came down to one thing: is it reasonable to expect people to spill coffee on themselves? If you truly think that no one, ever, under any circumstances will spill coffee on their skin without being completely and totally stupid, then yes - let's put the blame on her.
The decision acknowledged the fact that even the most careful and resonable among us can spill things. Sometimes onto our skin. The judgement was awarded because if you allow people to spill things, THEY SHOULDN'T CAUSE 3RD DEGREE BURNS.
Try reading about the case instead of sounding like a jackass.
But if a hardware vendor doesn't make vista drivers, it's their problem not microsoft's.
;)
Sometimes it's nice to see that it's not just us Linux users that have this issue.
It may seem like a semantic difference but it is in fact like saying North American law rather than Canadian and US.
Actually, it sounds more to me like saying Canadian law rather than Ontario and Quebec.
The difference between Canada/US and England/Scotland is the very act of union you mention. Canada and the US are completely sovereign nations. No acts of union between the two. No common anything beyond trade agreements and language.
Hell, the Irish had to fight how many wars to gain independence from the UK? Canada doesn't need that - because it's a completely separate country from the US. You can't really say the same about the UK.
Actually, until he mentioned sshd, I thought he was talking about Vista.
Offtopic, but...
In the Transformers, when the Autobots explain that they learned human language from the World Wide Web, I rather expected Optimus Prime to shout out "r u teh sma witwicky?"
Yes, I have no shame.
Yeah, as further indication of his paranoia... when I had commented about knowing him in a previous Slashdot story a few years back, he got, shall we say, VERY interested in finding out who I was. To the level of hounding me about it. I think he suspected me of being a CIA plant or something. It REALLY bothered him to not be able to connect some random Slashdot UID to an IRL name. :P
Couldn't have said it better myself. I knew Chris for a few years back in the day (even stayed at his house on Maryland a few times), and you nailed it. He was a drug abusing paranoid kook who videotaped CNN 24 hours a day and watched it on fast-forward to see if anything the US government was doing might be affecting him. He was your stereotypical geek who never got past his teenage pathos of "the MAN is trying to get me" - and as such, pretty much refused to get any real sort of work after a while. He just moved on to scamming people. Leaving behind debt is an understatement.
He did have access to some pretty potent LSD, though. Before knowing him, I always thought LSD was pretty harmless, but with the quantities that man could ingest, I now wonder if permanent brain damage kicks in. And he loved to combine it with a little coke - or whatever other easily accessible drug was around.
Funny, the last I had heard about him was his mindpixel scam. Which made me chuckle a lot, because very few people seemed to catch on that the entire project was just the ravings of a drug-addled lunatic.
I didn't realize he finally offed himself. I say finally because everyone who knew him expected it "any day now" - since at least the early 90s. I'm rather astounded he held on so long.
The Odyssey came out in 1972, well before you were born.
:)
Magnavox Odyssey.
You might be thinking of the Odyssey 2 however