Thanks for the replies so far. As noted, bikes aren't allowed on BART during commute time (it's very crowded then, so it makes sense...unless you're commuting by bike). The Segway, aka 'IT', is right out--I doubt they'd ever let that on BART because of the size and weight. Plus there's the cost for me...
However, folding bikes are allowed, so the Bike Friday looks like an interesting possibility.
The area of SF from BART to my destination isn't too far (unless I run errands, too) or too hilly. The problem comes at the other end. BART is at about 200' above sea level, and home is near one of those 1200' markers and about 3 miles from BART. I can drive and walk, but I'm looking for something to get rid of the driving part. The Bike Friday's seem better designed and geared, so the hills might be doable with them. I haven't ruled out an electric scooter, and have been referred to a scooter dealer in SF to start looking.
There's a detailed description and diagrams here. The process is referred to as the Grotthuss "hop-turn" mechanism.
Kind of like the old-style ski turns, though I think those are called stem-christies. (OK, it makes more sense if you've read the article and looked at their little sidebar image...)
This sort of reminds me of the question that either Adobe or MS raised a few years ago about whether outline fonts were data or programs. The contention was that since Type 1 and TrueType fonts have some logic in them, they are in fact programs. IIRC, this was because programs were clearly protected under copyright laws, but fonts were not clearly defined at the time.
The closest thing I can find is a reference to a court case between Adobe and Southern Software, in which it was ruled that fonts are copyrightable. I can't find references to earlier cases, though I'm sure there were some.
In any event, there probably isn't a clear legal definition of what software is (heck, the dictionary definition isn't very clear) and whether spreadsheets or a particular spreadsheet is included in that definition. Unless you do some legal research or hire a lawyer to back up your claim, you are (as other posters pointed out) stuck with what the Mississippi Gaming Commission decides it is.
If firepower were truly a deterrent, wouldn't the nuclear weapons of the U.S. have been a deterrent against 9/11 ever happening? Or Palestinians attacking Israel? Yet those things happen.
This is getting somewhat off-topic. While I hope that the U.S. will not have to use such weapons, I would prefer to have them as an option. I just wish they'd spend a little more money on social services, protecting the environment or even space exploration.
It might be better to deploy... smoke... mylar 'chaff'
Oh sure...the old smoke and mirrors. That may have worked back in the.com boom, but no longer:-)
Ironically, landmines are no longer very effective other than at maiming and killing civilians. If your goal is to harass the civilian population, they're a great weapon -- cheap, easy to make, hard to detect. If you're fighting a military campaign, they're of limited usefulness. Even Stormin' Norman Schwartzkopf signed an open letter to the president urging the ban of anti-personnel mines, an action "not only humane but militarily responsible".
And it's not just Afghanistan and our current enemies affected, either. Places like Angola, Mozambique, Cambodia, etc. are littered with them.
Learn more about landmines, where they are, military alternatives to them, and more at Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation through their Campaign for a Landmine Free World.
There's no reason why you can't do it either in an app by saving state or in the OS by saving memory to disk as on a laptop.
GEOS had the concept of state-saving in the OS circa 1990, so it's nothing new. The UI saves its state, what apps are running, what windows are open, etc. and restores it exactly as you left it when you restart. If an app has extra data to save, such as where it was in a lengthy computation, it can save it, too.
A slightly different approach than brute-force writing out all of used memory, but both work quite well with the speed of current hard drives.
Comparing those two movies, I would say that there isn't much advantage to using computer animation over plastercine ! (not yet, anyways).
I haven't seen Final Fantasy (just short clips in the previews), but I think a more fair comparison would be comparing plastercine in Wallace & Gromit to the computer work in Shrek. They have different looks, being different media, but both "work". Probably because they have good artwork, good animation, and good stories to go with them.
That said, Nick Park definitely has a gift in story-telling. I think if he were to work with computers, it would be equally compelling as his work in plastercine.
Which suggests to me the problem lies in Final Fantasy, not the medium...
I'd guess you've never driven a hybrid, or even actually been behind one (unless you were that troglodyte on highway 12 in the white pickup with the dual peeing Calvin stickers, on the phone with one hand and scratching his head with the other? But he didn't want to be behind anyone on his way to Taco Bell, so probably not). The hybrid system means I accelerate differently, leave more space between me and the car in front of me to allow coasting more, and apply brakes on down grades over a longer distance (to maximize regenerative braking). Not that I drive slower, or even accelerate slower except in stop and go traffic. The only place it makes me slower than my old VW Golf V6 is coming up the 1200 foot hill to our house.
And thanks to a kindly fellow/.er (thanks MRV!) I've now got more web resources on further techniques to maximize mileage.
The Prius is a great car. My wife and I have had ours for a little over a month. It's quiet, roomy, fun to drive (we fight over who gets to drive it), and totally rocks on mileage and emissions. It's rated at 45mpg/highway and 52mpg/city, and is SULEV (Super Ultra Low Emission Vehicle) -- the only thing cleaner running is a ZEV electric vehicle. The higher rating in city driving is because of lower speeds, and taking advantage of regenerative braking.
It's funny -- the car has a touch-screen display that shows your mileage and generated energy over 5 minute intervals, and besides being fun to play with, it has made us better drivers. We have a graphic indication of when some driving habit uses more or less fuel, and it's become a fun challenge to maximize our mileage. We've wondered if they made these kinds of displays required in cars, if all people might not become more efficient drivers, even in mega-SUVs.
We looked at the Honda Insight as well. It gets better mileage, but is only a two-seater with very limited cargo and carrying capacity. There was a local news story a while back about a couple of guys that bought one for commuting. They are both large-framed guys, and it turns out they were over the safe weight limit. After some prodding by the reporter, the dealer took back the car because the buyers hadn't been told about this problem, even though they'd told the dealer specifically the two of them planned to use it together.
We know the Prius is still burning fossil fuels and polluting, but it's a big step in the right direction. A friend and I took the Prius to Yosemite a couple weeks after we got it, and to point out the difference, we were parked next to a Ford Expedition at a spot along the Merced River. The Prius was off (we were off taking photos), and the driver of the Expedition was sitting in it with the engine running. It wasn't cold, it wasn't raining, so it was boggling to us why he'd be sitting there instead of actually looking at the scenery, and with the engine running.
Back to the topic -- I really hope Chrysler, Millenium, et al, can get this working. As other posts have pointed out, fuel cells aren't a new energy source, but an energy storage mechanism. Whether it's compressed hyrdogen, borax, or whatever, it takes energy to produce and distribute. But it will be another step in the right direction, just a hybrids or other very efficient vehicles are a good first step.
My wife wrote an even more cynical take on your amusing missive:
Onion rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Chocolate shakes for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine million Mortal Men doomed to buy
Food from the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Whoppers, a drink, and fries.
A loud ca-CHING will rule them all, their avarice will bind them,
It's a sting to bring us in and force us all to pay them
In the Land of Whoppers, a drink, and fries.
Halfway Human by Carolyn Ives Gilman. Looks like another trip to the used book store, as Amazon says it's out of print...
Left Hand of Darkness is a great book. I first read it in college some years ago. I suprisingly hadn't ready anything by Ursula K. Leguin yet, but I signed up for a comparative literature course solely because it's reading list included a SF title. Well, that and I needed a writing course to graduate...
One thing I didn't see on the page or any of the follow up comments is about battery life. For such a slow CPU (at least by today's standards), I'd expect a pretty good lifetime. The old Casio Zoomer (c. 1992), a product done with Geoworks and Palm before they started doing their own hardware was slow. Way too slow -- otherwise it probably would have done much better even though it was expensive. But it had a great battery life, something like 100+ hours. Some other products recharge through their sync cradles. What is this one like in that regard?
No, QA doens't take as long as coding. QA takes 50-60% of the time.
That's what I said (50%). Writing it includes designing and documenting it (which done right, can cover a lot of the same ground besides in-code documentation). But my point was that programmers tend not to think about the QA part. Most of the programmers I know like the design stage, but not the QA stage (I don't either) and tend to leave it out in scheduling, or blissfully/hopefully assume it won't take very long. I agree that coding (and design) are 'fun' parts, though.
For reference, I've been a professional software developer for 14 years.
The biggest mistake most people make in scheduling software is forgetting time for QA. They add up the pieces, thinking "OK, this will take this long, this will take..." and completely ignore that it generally takes as long to properly QA a project as it did to write it. A decent QA should be at least an in-house alpha test and multiple rounds of beta test. That's likely why the "take your best estimate and double it" approach arose.
Schedule slippage comes mostly from (1) not understanding the task when you make the schedule (2) not getting the resources you were told when you made the schedule (been there...) (3) people changing the spec along the way. For the last, stick to your guns. Once the schedule has been made and someone wants to change the spec, tell them up front that a change of that type will cost X amount of time in the schedule. They can have the change, but they have to be willing to pay the cost.
I'm surprised there aren't more non-SF authors listed. Well, OK, this is/. -- maybe I'm not so surprised:-) My partial list of living authors off the top of my head:
Science Fiction and Fantasy
Neal Stephenson - good cyberpunk and other works, very readable
However, don't everyone rejoice, because in a few years your favorite network shows will be interlaced with so many ads that it will make you sick.
Leo: Mr. President, your wife called, and she wants you to pick up some ICE COLD COCA COLA (beat) on the way home from the 'house.
President: Thanks, Leo. Please tell Charlie not to forget to put WORLD-CLASS MONTE BLANC PENS in my jacket pocket, like my dead secretary used to do!
Cool! Just like The Truman Show:-)
Well, OK, not so cool. But it's not actually that different now, it's just not quite so blatant. Companies pay a lot to get their cars (vehicles provided by Ford Motor Company), beer (mmmm...tasty Budweiser in the distinctive and patriotic red, white and blue can!) and other products into television shows and movies already. It's called product placement, and it's been going on for a long time. Of course, there's that nifty real-time video replacement where ads in stadiums get replaced with ads from television sponsors, so maybe it is already that blantant...
The problem is not the photo process, it's the human process. It is surmountable.
I think this is largely true, though there are issues about the longetivy of the data storage format (CD-Rs in 50 years? I doubt it). But the problem in the human process has to be surmounted, regardless.
One example, as related to me by John Shaw, a well known nature photographer.
The well-known shot of Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton hugging at some convention? I think it was captured on video as well. But the one (out of dozens) of still photographers that caught it, and the one that had their picture published all over the world? It was shot on film. All the other press photographers in attendance at that event were shooting digital cameras (digital is now quite prevelant in photojournalism, in large part because of the short turn around time for processing and transmission, but also because quality doesn't matter nearly as much as timeliness). At the time, Monica Lewinsky was a nobody, one of dozens of White House interns.
All the photographers shooting with digital thought: "ah, a nothing shot" and deleted it. When the story broke and the shit hit the fan, who was the one still photographer who had a shot of this? The one shooting on film.
As a nature photographer, digital isn't there yet. Never mind the resolution, etc., but if you're in the jungles of Borneo, or amongst the penguins in Antarctica, or wherever for an extended period, it's still a heck of a lot easier to schlep a bunch of film than a bunch of memory cards, and to know that it will more or less stand up to the conditions.
Many professional photographers have more than one camera body, sometimes for different films, but mostly for backup. If you're on an important shoot, you need backup. If you're shooting with a film camera, that's easy. If you're shooting with digital, that means some way of backing up your memory cards. Which generally means a laptop. Which if you're serious and/or off the beaten path, means you take a backup for it, too. Starting to get the picture?
I'm not saying that digital photography is the problem behind of all this. But the number of photographs that on film that are viewable now from 100 years ago, vs. the number that are shot on digital and will be viewable 100 years from now is probably not comparable. If you find a trunk of old photos from 100 years ago, you'll probably at least go through it once. If you find an old CD 100 years from now, you might think "huh! How quaint! It's like one of those old 45s my grandpa talked about". And those photos will probably never be seen again.
One thing the article didn't really go into that I found interesting is how carbon 14 dating was found to be inaccurate. It had been assumed that C-14 decayed at a constant rate. However, a guy named Schulman studying the Bristlecone Pine trees in the White Mountains of California discovered that C-14 dates didn't match the tree ring dates. Subsequently, tree rings between living and dead bristlecones have been used to construct accurate dating back 9000 years, and it has been determined that C-14 rates do change. Read more about it on the Inyo National Forest page.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, that's for wimps. What you want is something like these :-)
Thanks for the replies so far. As noted, bikes aren't allowed on BART during commute time (it's very crowded then, so it makes sense...unless you're commuting by bike). The Segway, aka 'IT', is right out--I doubt they'd ever let that on BART because of the size and weight. Plus there's the cost for me...
However, folding bikes are allowed, so the Bike Friday looks like an interesting possibility.
The area of SF from BART to my destination isn't too far (unless I run errands, too) or too hilly. The problem comes at the other end. BART is at about 200' above sea level, and home is near one of those 1200' markers and about 3 miles from BART. I can drive and walk, but I'm looking for something to get rid of the driving part. The Bike Friday's seem better designed and geared, so the hills might be doable with them. I haven't ruled out an electric scooter, and have been referred to a scooter dealer in SF to start looking.
There's a detailed description and diagrams here. The process is referred to as the Grotthuss "hop-turn" mechanism.
Kind of like the old-style ski turns, though I think those are called stem-christies. (OK, it makes more sense if you've read the article and looked at their little sidebar image...)
This sort of reminds me of the question that either Adobe or MS raised a few years ago about whether outline fonts were data or programs. The contention was that since Type 1 and TrueType fonts have some logic in them, they are in fact programs. IIRC, this was because programs were clearly protected under copyright laws, but fonts were not clearly defined at the time.
The closest thing I can find is a reference to a court case between Adobe and Southern Software, in which it was ruled that fonts are copyrightable. I can't find references to earlier cases, though I'm sure there were some.
In any event, there probably isn't a clear legal definition of what software is (heck, the dictionary definition isn't very clear) and whether spreadsheets or a particular spreadsheet is included in that definition. Unless you do some legal research or hire a lawyer to back up your claim, you are (as other posters pointed out) stuck with what the Mississippi Gaming Commission decides it is.
- photo at the European Museum on CS and Technology
-
article (including bibliography) at the Virtual Computer Museum
- discussion of ternary computing at American Scientist
One of those indicated it was circa 1958.Firepower happens to be a pretty decent deterrent. I've never heard of a mass shooting in, say, a police station...
Ironic timing, that comment:
120 police and soldiers have been killed in a battle with Nepalese rebels (from CNN).
If firepower were truly a deterrent, wouldn't the nuclear weapons of the U.S. have been a deterrent against 9/11 ever happening? Or Palestinians attacking Israel? Yet those things happen.
This is getting somewhat off-topic. While I hope that the U.S. will not have to use such weapons, I would prefer to have them as an option. I just wish they'd spend a little more money on social services, protecting the environment or even space exploration.
It might be better to deploy ... smoke ... mylar 'chaff' .com boom, but no longer :-)
Oh sure...the old smoke and mirrors. That may have worked back in the
Ironically, landmines are no longer very effective other than at maiming and killing civilians. If your goal is to harass the civilian population, they're a great weapon -- cheap, easy to make, hard to detect. If you're fighting a military campaign, they're of limited usefulness. Even Stormin' Norman Schwartzkopf signed an open letter to the president urging the ban of anti-personnel mines, an action "not only humane but militarily responsible".
And it's not just Afghanistan and our current enemies affected, either. Places like Angola, Mozambique, Cambodia, etc. are littered with them.
Learn more about landmines, where they are, military alternatives to them, and more at Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation through their Campaign for a Landmine Free World.
Eye do! :-)
There's no reason why you can't do it either in an app by saving state or in the OS by saving memory to disk as on a laptop.
GEOS had the concept of state-saving in the OS circa 1990, so it's nothing new. The UI saves its state, what apps are running, what windows are open, etc. and restores it exactly as you left it when you restart. If an app has extra data to save, such as where it was in a lengthy computation, it can save it, too.
A slightly different approach than brute-force writing out all of used memory, but both work quite well with the speed of current hard drives.
Comparing those two movies, I would say that there isn't much advantage to using computer animation over plastercine ! (not yet, anyways).
I haven't seen Final Fantasy (just short clips in the previews), but I think a more fair comparison would be comparing plastercine in Wallace & Gromit to the computer work in Shrek. They have different looks, being different media, but both "work". Probably because they have good artwork, good animation, and good stories to go with them.
That said, Nick Park definitely has a gift in story-telling. I think if he were to work with computers, it would be equally compelling as his work in plastercine.
Which suggests to me the problem lies in Final Fantasy, not the medium...
I'd guess you've never driven a hybrid, or even actually been behind one (unless you were that troglodyte on highway 12 in the white pickup with the dual peeing Calvin stickers, on the phone with one hand and scratching his head with the other? But he didn't want to be behind anyone on his way to Taco Bell, so probably not). The hybrid system means I accelerate differently, leave more space between me and the car in front of me to allow coasting more, and apply brakes on down grades over a longer distance (to maximize regenerative braking). Not that I drive slower, or even accelerate slower except in stop and go traffic. The only place it makes me slower than my old VW Golf V6 is coming up the 1200 foot hill to our house.
And thanks to a kindly fellow /.er (thanks MRV!) I've now got more web resources on further techniques to maximize mileage.
The Prius is a great car. My wife and I have had ours for a little over a month. It's quiet, roomy, fun to drive (we fight over who gets to drive it), and totally rocks on mileage and emissions. It's rated at 45mpg/highway and 52mpg/city, and is SULEV (Super Ultra Low Emission Vehicle) -- the only thing cleaner running is a ZEV electric vehicle. The higher rating in city driving is because of lower speeds, and taking advantage of regenerative braking.
It's funny -- the car has a touch-screen display that shows your mileage and generated energy over 5 minute intervals, and besides being fun to play with, it has made us better drivers. We have a graphic indication of when some driving habit uses more or less fuel, and it's become a fun challenge to maximize our mileage. We've wondered if they made these kinds of displays required in cars, if all people might not become more efficient drivers, even in mega-SUVs.
We looked at the Honda Insight as well. It gets better mileage, but is only a two-seater with very limited cargo and carrying capacity. There was a local news story a while back about a couple of guys that bought one for commuting. They are both large-framed guys, and it turns out they were over the safe weight limit. After some prodding by the reporter, the dealer took back the car because the buyers hadn't been told about this problem, even though they'd told the dealer specifically the two of them planned to use it together.
We know the Prius is still burning fossil fuels and polluting, but it's a big step in the right direction. A friend and I took the Prius to Yosemite a couple weeks after we got it, and to point out the difference, we were parked next to a Ford Expedition at a spot along the Merced River. The Prius was off (we were off taking photos), and the driver of the Expedition was sitting in it with the engine running. It wasn't cold, it wasn't raining, so it was boggling to us why he'd be sitting there instead of actually looking at the scenery, and with the engine running.
Back to the topic -- I really hope Chrysler, Millenium, et al, can get this working. As other posts have pointed out, fuel cells aren't a new energy source, but an energy storage mechanism. Whether it's compressed hyrdogen, borax, or whatever, it takes energy to produce and distribute. But it will be another step in the right direction, just a hybrids or other very efficient vehicles are a good first step.
Halfway Human by Carolyn Ives Gilman. Looks like another trip to the used book store, as Amazon says it's out of print...
Left Hand of Darkness is a great book. I first read it in college some years ago. I suprisingly hadn't ready anything by Ursula K. Leguin yet, but I signed up for a comparative literature course solely because it's reading list included a SF title. Well, that and I needed a writing course to graduate...
One thing I didn't see on the page or any of the follow up comments is about battery life. For such a slow CPU (at least by today's standards), I'd expect a pretty good lifetime. The old Casio Zoomer (c. 1992), a product done with Geoworks and Palm before they started doing their own hardware was slow. Way too slow -- otherwise it probably would have done much better even though it was expensive. But it had a great battery life, something like 100+ hours. Some other products recharge through their sync cradles. What is this one like in that regard?
No, QA doens't take as long as coding. QA takes 50-60% of the time.
That's what I said (50%). Writing it includes designing and documenting it (which done right, can cover a lot of the same ground besides in-code documentation). But my point was that programmers tend not to think about the QA part. Most of the programmers I know like the design stage, but not the QA stage (I don't either) and tend to leave it out in scheduling, or blissfully/hopefully assume it won't take very long. I agree that coding (and design) are 'fun' parts, though.
For reference, I've been a professional software developer for 14 years.
The biggest mistake most people make in scheduling software is forgetting time for QA. They add up the pieces, thinking "OK, this will take this long, this will take..." and completely ignore that it generally takes as long to properly QA a project as it did to write it. A decent QA should be at least an in-house alpha test and multiple rounds of beta test. That's likely why the "take your best estimate and double it" approach arose.
Schedule slippage comes mostly from (1) not understanding the task when you make the schedule (2) not getting the resources you were told when you made the schedule (been there...) (3) people changing the spec along the way. For the last, stick to your guns. Once the schedule has been made and someone wants to change the spec, tell them up front that a change of that type will cost X amount of time in the schedule. They can have the change, but they have to be willing to pay the cost.
I'm surprised there aren't more non-SF authors listed. Well, OK, this is /. -- maybe I'm not so surprised :-) My partial list of living authors off the top of my head:
Science Fiction and Fantasy- Neal Stephenson - good cyberpunk and other works, very readable
- Ursula K. Leguin - The Left Hand of Darkness and other classics
- C.J. Cherryh - she's very prolific, and writes both science fiction and fantasy
- Orson Scott Card - the already classic Ender's Game
OtherHowever, don't everyone rejoice, because in a few years your favorite network shows will be interlaced with so many ads that it will make you sick.
Leo: Mr. President, your wife called, and she wants you to pick up some ICE COLD COCA COLA (beat) on the way home from the 'house.
President: Thanks, Leo. Please tell Charlie not to forget to put WORLD-CLASS MONTE BLANC PENS in my jacket pocket, like my dead secretary used to do!
Cool! Just like The Truman Show :-)
Well, OK, not so cool. But it's not actually that different now, it's just not quite so blatant. Companies pay a lot to get their cars (vehicles provided by Ford Motor Company), beer (mmmm...tasty Budweiser in the distinctive and patriotic red, white and blue can!) and other products into television shows and movies already. It's called product placement, and it's been going on for a long time. Of course, there's that nifty real-time video replacement where ads in stadiums get replaced with ads from television sponsors, so maybe it is already that blantant...
I think this is largely true, though there are issues about the longetivy of the data storage format (CD-Rs in 50 years? I doubt it). But the problem in the human process has to be surmounted, regardless.
One example, as related to me by John Shaw, a well known nature photographer.
The well-known shot of Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton hugging at some convention? I think it was captured on video as well. But the one (out of dozens) of still photographers that caught it, and the one that had their picture published all over the world? It was shot on film. All the other press photographers in attendance at that event were shooting digital cameras (digital is now quite prevelant in photojournalism, in large part because of the short turn around time for processing and transmission, but also because quality doesn't matter nearly as much as timeliness). At the time, Monica Lewinsky was a nobody, one of dozens of White House interns.
All the photographers shooting with digital thought: "ah, a nothing shot" and deleted it. When the story broke and the shit hit the fan, who was the one still photographer who had a shot of this? The one shooting on film.
As a nature photographer, digital isn't there yet. Never mind the resolution, etc., but if you're in the jungles of Borneo, or amongst the penguins in Antarctica, or wherever for an extended period, it's still a heck of a lot easier to schlep a bunch of film than a bunch of memory cards, and to know that it will more or less stand up to the conditions.
Many professional photographers have more than one camera body, sometimes for different films, but mostly for backup. If you're on an important shoot, you need backup. If you're shooting with a film camera, that's easy. If you're shooting with digital, that means some way of backing up your memory cards. Which generally means a laptop. Which if you're serious and/or off the beaten path, means you take a backup for it, too. Starting to get the picture?
I'm not saying that digital photography is the problem behind of all this. But the number of photographs that on film that are viewable now from 100 years ago, vs. the number that are shot on digital and will be viewable 100 years from now is probably not comparable. If you find a trunk of old photos from 100 years ago, you'll probably at least go through it once. If you find an old CD 100 years from now, you might think "huh! How quaint! It's like one of those old 45s my grandpa talked about". And those photos will probably never be seen again.
It's apparently still being considered, as it's on the upcoming ballot as Measure B in San Francisco.
Thanks for the clarification. I knew it had something to do with some rate changing :-)
One thing the article didn't really go into that I found interesting is how carbon 14 dating was found to be inaccurate. It had been assumed that C-14 decayed at a constant rate. However, a guy named Schulman studying the Bristlecone Pine trees in the White Mountains of California discovered that C-14 dates didn't match the tree ring dates. Subsequently, tree rings between living and dead bristlecones have been used to construct accurate dating back 9000 years, and it has been determined that C-14 rates do change. Read more about it on the Inyo National Forest page.