If its true to form, it might not work precisely correctly out of the box, but you will be able to enter the initial conditions for the Universe. For example, you could interchange the masses of the up and down quark, or alter the U(1) gauge coupling parameter from 0.357 to 0.5. Once you have managed to get the laws of physics as we know them to emerge, you will be able to play a game with correct physics for our Universe.
Or maybe it would be more fun to play the game with physics that is correct for a universe in which Planck's Constant is 1.0 m^2 kg / s.
Yes, and if there's a problem getting the sound card configured or with the wifi drivers, he's got Dad for tech support.
I've been using Unix since v7. The first Linux I ever used was Debian 0.93, downloaded over a 28.8KBaud modem to run on on a 386 box. I even got freakin' X running on the thing, which in those days was about as easy and fun as memorizing patterns of monkey shit thrown against the cage wall. Things are a hell of a lot easier these days, but I wouldn't say that getting things running is always easy. I just bought a laptop with the PM45 chipset and Radeon HD 3650 GPU, and the Debian 8.10 64 bit installer barfed on the video card, even with the vga=771 kernel arguments. I even freakin' know what "vga=771" means, which I'm reasnonably sure represents the fruit of time wasted.
In any case Debian 8.10 is reported to work less than perfectly on my hardware, but OpenSUSE 11.1 does. Except that the OpenSUSE 11.1 installer hangs on grub. Fortunately, it's a regular X11 session, so I could Alt-F1 and complete the installation by hand using the command line. After booting, no sound in KDE, but the kernel's fine; I can tell because the 64 bit flash plugin (installed by hand) plays sound fine, but KDE can't. Well, it turns out that OpenSUSE has just migragred to pulseaudio, and they've got integration problems between KDE4 and pulse. You know, that old story.
It's OK, I can handle it. I couldn't fix these kinds of thigns with with Windows, because the simplicity of Windows is a kind of brittle facade; the complexity is papered over, and if you the facade doesn't work, you're on your own because the party line is that the facade is all you'll ever need.
On the other hand, if I were using Windows, I wouldn't have to fix most of these really basic problems. Which is not to say that Windows is better. Support for Windows is a vast and shallow lake. You can get help with easy things anywhere. Support for Linux is like the same area as a dry plain dotted with very deep wells. You have to do some trudging over hot sand, but when you find what you need it is in abundance.
Now of course, we're talking preinstallation here, but the same dichotomy applies to all facets of using the operating system. If you need help with easy things, it's easy to find just about anyplace you look, but it can't help you much. With Linux, unless you happen to live next to a well of technical support, you have to trudge quite a bit before you can get help, but when you do that help will be much more versatile.
This person just wants to do, simple, simple things. Connect to the school network. Write papers that the professors can read. The problem is for a lot of adults going back to school is that they don't have the financial backing of parents; they've got to swing school and work at the same time, and it's not easy. So telling her she's got to put some sweat equity into figuring things out on her own is bullshit. It's not that it wouldn't be a good thing for her to do this, but there are such things as opportunity costs.
What she needs is ubiquitous, but shallow help.
Or she needs somebody to step up to the plate and help her.
Actually, insect protein is about as close to eating vegetarian, environmentally, as you can get without being a vegetarian.
Of course, you can survive on a vegetarian diet, but it's not always the easiest or lowest impact way of eating. For example, you can buy a goat for a third world family from a non-profit development agency. They graze on things humans (and indeed most animals) can't eat, but they produce milk, wool and eventually meat at very little cost. I've bought some of these. For $175, you can change a family's life.
Pigs used to graze this way too, before the advent of factory farming. Here in New England, we have a kind geological feature called a drumlin; it's basically a low, rounded hill of glacial debris. Where a chain of drumlins reaches into the ocean, you get modest sized islands of a few acres, sometimes separated from the mainland by a narrow strip of water and connected at high tide. A number of these islands used to bear the name "Hog Island" (until the developers get their hands on them, after which they get names like "Spinnaker Island"). The reason is that in colonial times people drove their pigs on the island and let them run free until it was time to slaughter.
But insects are by far the most efficient animal when it comes to food conversion, and the quality of that food is, from a nutritional standpoint, outstanding. Unfortunately, insect consumption is fading away in many cultures, as they turn to a more western diet.
He does fly by regular carrier. He does not own a private jet.
That's not to say that he never, under any circumstances, flies in a private plane. When he does he buys carbon offsets -- not ideal of course, but the best you can do under the circumstances.
One of the Achilles' heels of conservative ideology is the inability to distinguish between practicality and expediency. It's always more expedient to travel by private plane. It's sometimes practical.
Cindy McCain got a lot of heat by saying that private plane was the only way to get around Arizona. The liberal reaction was the same kind of BS you're spouting here. Of course, she didn't literally mean you couldn't get from Phoenix to Flagstaff without flying, but as public figures the McCains do have to do a great deal of travel over a rather large state. As a Senator, John McCain spends most of his time in Washington, and if flying in a private plane means he gets to see more constituents, it's a sensible and pragmatic choice because it maximizes his productivity.
It's like the difference between driving a one ton pickup truck because you're a rancher and need to get feed out to your cattle through the snow, and driving the same kind of truck as a commuter vehicle. Environmentalists don't think it is morally wrong for a rancher to drive an F320. They don't think it's morally wrong for a cement truck to have a 400 horsepower engine and get 6MPG. Individuals commuting in a vehicle that got 6MPG would be a different thing.
As an environmentalist, I'm not even against sports cars. I'm just against sports cars as commuter vehicles. If you enjoy driving your Ferrari Enzo on the track at 8MPG, that's fine by me. But maybe you might want to look at an Audi A5 as your regular commuting vehicle.
Yep, that's what I meant by a satellite terminal. It's actually not very expensive.
The thing is to rent the terminal, not buy it. I just looked it up, and you can rent a for two months for about $900, plus $6.40 per megabyte transmitted. That's not pocket change, but it's damned cheap considering what you get; you just plug it in and go. It's something a student could swing financially, especially if he gets his parents to pony up some of the base cost on the promise that he'll phone home every day.
Otherwise you are talking about trying various clever solutions that aren't likely to be much less expensive, but likely to be MUCH more time consuming and considerably less satisfactory.
I think you can find a satellite terminal for about $10/day and $7 or so per MB. So let's say you are at sea for eight weeks, or 56 days. Assuming about $20/day (a bit more than 1MB per day), it's going to cost about $1,120, which isn't bad at all if it really is important to you. I imagine business is bad so you might be able to talk them down for publicity purposes.
Other solutions probably take more time than you want to spend. The obvious one would be to get your Ham license. It'd take time, cost about the same, but then you'd have your license and the related equipment. Alternatively, I've looked at self-contained container tracking units that have a limited telemetry transmission capability. Imagine sending your data as a series of SMS messages spaced apart every ten minutes or so. That's enough to update your blog, but you aren't going to be able send anything but the lowest res pictures in less than a day.
You could probably find a satphone rental for less money, which is intermediate in cost and capacity. You can send data at something like 2KBaud, but you'll have to work the details to see whether you come out ahead for your planned transmissions.
The problem is a phenomenon I call the "competence delta function".
A tool can make many things simple, but sooner or later you run into diminishing returns. As returns diminish, you eventually find yourself at a point where the next thing you want to do takes a step up in competence from what you have right now.
Imagine that you plot effort (on the y axis) and reward (on the x axis). If you are looking for a certain level of reward, you can read how much effort it takes off the X axis. Things like a command line interfaces have a big up front investment to learn, represented by a step function at 0 reward. However the power of command line interfaces (at least good ones), is that the benefits and effort needed thereafter are reasonably proportional over a very large range of tasks.
GUIs, on the other hand, have a low initial step, but eventually you want to do something that has to be expressed conceptually, and there you've got to eat that command line step function and then some. A sysadmin with strong shell scripting and Perl abilities will be able to achieve more than a sysadmin who can only work a GUI.
So the question for an "easy" tool is this: where does the delta function come? Really easy to use tools can be a trap if you don't see this coming. A word processor is highly useful, but at some point you may ask it to do something that would be better done in LaTex.
Spreadsheets are very easy, very useful things. Two dimensional organization of facts may be uniquely useful, giving more flexibility than one dimensional organization, but having none of the capacity for things to hide behind others that three dimensions gives. In fact, the word "plan" comes from the same root as the word "plane".
There are limitations on what spreadsheets can do of course (aside from things like: they are not databases). But I think most people run to the end of their practical, factual, mathematical or business knowledge first. For example, I can say, "prepare a budget for next year," and give you a bunch of spreadsheet templates. If you don't know what you are doing, you'll produce a really bad budget, but it will look great, just as good as a good budget in fact. The reason is, "produce a budget presentation that looks great" is on the left hand side of the spreadsheet delta, but "produce a budget that is financially sound" is well beyond what a spreadsheet application can make easy for you.
I think the same thing goes for the other bete noire of thinking managers everywhere: the PowerPoint presentation.
It's not that PowerPoint isn't a wonderful tool. It's just that it is not a replacement for communication skills. Sometime watch An Inconvenient Truth. You might disagree with Al Gore, but he worked for years on that Keynote presentation until he could really communicate with it. You could take the same presentation, and unless you were an unusually gifted commnicator, you would not achieve anything near an Oscar caliber performance.
As much as PowerPoint is not a replacement for communication skills, it is even less a replacement for critical thinking skills. During the dot com boom, I remember reading how the phrase "send me the stack" was gaining popularity in business circles, "the stack" meaning the PowerPoint slides. Some VCs were so hot to get in on the gold rush the were making investment decisions based on PowerPoint presentations rather than business plans.
A tool that makes certain things easy is always a good thing in itself. The danger is in the illusion that by relying upon it, everything will be easier. Software tools are particularly insidious, because they have the ability to make incompetent efforts look really good.
Everybody has a natural tendency to prefer to do what interests them. There are two things that make it a disorder: (1) you can't control it, and (2) it has a significant, negative impact on your life.
ADHD isn't a new diagnosis, it's just a new name and conceptualization for informal diagnoses people have been making for years. You're doing it here: just not interested. Other diagnoses include "lazy", "unmotivated", and "absent minded". The problem with these informal diagnoses is that they're too simplistic. They're internally consistent if you want to cherry pick certain facts but give you an accurate picture of the individual's life. It's not that students aren't interested in getting along in school, it's that they can't even if they want to. If they don't want to, it's not a disorder.
Likewise, a diagnosis like "lazy" doesn't work either, because people with ADHD have the capacity to work harder than their "normal" counterparts. "Absent minded" or "wooly headed" doesn't cover everything either, because in emergency, high stress situations, people with ADHD may feel, calm, focused, and normal, and show unusual presence of mind. In fact part of the pathology of the disease is that it keeps people's lives on the edge of chaos, and they perform better there.
Brain studies support a biological basis for ADHD. For example when people with ADHD are given a task that normal people perform well on, brain scan suggested that increasing conscious effort actually makes their brains less coordinated. It is literally the case that the harder they try, the worse they do. It's like throwing the throttle all the way forward on an outboard motor: it creates a lot of noise but the props aren't driving the boat forward; their just cavitating.
This may be why games are promising, because the same is true in games. You don't want to try hard, you want to achieve flow state. Think about that for a moment: the problem with labeling ADHD people as lazy and unmotivated is that it leads to exactly the opposite actions than they need. They don't need to try harder, they need to relax. It's like ADHD brains work in a different stimulation band than average brains; the effect of stimulant medications is to shift the band towards the normal spectrum.
Or course ADHD has its problems too. It's a very bad name for a complex of several phenomena: a higher need for stimulation to achieve optimal performance, poor performance at conscious direction of attention, and poor impulse control, each of which is distinct but related to other facets and may manifest itself differently in different people. What is clear though is that there is ample evidence that people who should receive this diagnosis are biologically different. For example a dose of amphetamines that might undermine impulse control in a normal person could improve it in somebody with ADHD.
I believe your point is that ADHD is part of natural human population variation; if so, you'd be right. The exact line between a character quirk and a psychiatric disorder is not clear, nor is is fixed. It may be that in preindustrial societies people who now receive a diagnosis might have provided societies with the benefits of restless, stimulation deprived individuals: as big game hunters, explorers, warriors, craftsmen, or shamans. The problem is that in a society where it is mandatory to regulate your life by the clock and calendar, even moderate ADHD traits are highly mal-adaptive. I've heard it said that the primary symptom of adult ADHD is chronic underachievement.
Of course, one alternative would be to reorganize all of society to make use of each individual's unique characteristics. Unfortunately, that's just not realistic. We can wish society was different than it is, we can work towards that end, but in the meantime you have nothing to offer people who drop through the cracks. It's more pr
I have a Versizon HTC 5800 Windows Mobile Smartphone. It's completely locked down, which was a surprise since I'd used Palm based smartphones before and they were pretty much what you'd expect: a PDA phone.
You have to enter a few registry entries, and voila, the PDA part of the phone is open and you can install your own apps. Google is your friend.
Lack of access to the GPS seems to be a pretty common theme in most phone platforms. I believe the way the phones are architected deliberately assumes that the GPS is there for the network provider, not for you.
In the real world, local effects are just as bad as global effects
Perhaps, but it depends on the pollutants. Lead emissions are a local problem (although there is archaeological evidence of airborne lead pollution in Northern Europe from Roman industry, hundreds of miles away). CO2 is a pollutant that has little local impact, even in comparison to the water emissions from combustion. Except in special circumstances, it has no local significance whatsoever. CO2 is a global pollutant. It makes perfect sense to sequester carbon in a Canadian oil field to offset emissions from a natural gas power plant in the US, because what we are concerned with are long term changes in average CO2 concentration across the globe. In that case, the swimming pool is the entire atmosphere, which would not be the case for things like CO or particulates.
Well, even if you don't spill, the problem with this is that in a carefully used laptop, one of the first things to fail is the keyboard. I used Thinkpads for years... amazing build quality. Worth every penny. I used to wear through the palm plastic and wear off all the letters on the keys. The first two things to go on them were keys on the keyboard, and the inverter board for the LCD.
I think keyboards are probably one of the hardest things to make cheap and good. As Moore's law gives us tiny computers with vast amounts of processing power and memory, those computers have keyboards which are mechanically far inferior to the old PC XT keyboards, which had rows of discrete and individually replaceable mechanical switches.
Well, I have a few laptops like that where I've removed the LCD. Bingo: keyboard computer. I mainly use them as printer servers and the like; you just lug a small LCD panel over when you need a screen, or use VNC.
In any case, if it's the backlight gone, chances are its the inverter board. This provides voltage to the LCD panel, but usually sits at the top edge of the keyboard part. Its usually integrated on a small board about the size of an old fashioned memory SIMM that usually has a few model specific LEDs or maybe switches. It's fairly easy to replace; you can get a new part for around $70, used parts taken from junker computers go from $5 to $10. If you've done it before for a certain model, the repair takes less than ten minutes; it might take several times that if you have to Google a guide for taking apart your laptop. It's pretty much the easiest repair there is, that users are not expected to be able to do.
Except you have to look at the business she is in. Her career is using her life as a kind of laboratory for generating experiences that are novel, but rooted n approachable sentiments and ideas.
In a nutshell, Oprah is a professional middle-brow bohemian.
Doing something that is not entirely sensible because it appeals to a personal sense of what is right is different for her than it would be for you or me. If this makes her mad enough, it's her business to explore her feelings through trying things ordinary people wouldn't.
I think, though, you are dealing with sampling error here... or rather an error in your mental denominator. Yes, in NYC you witness more unpleasant interactions per day, but you have to take into account how many more interactions per day you are witnessing.
Don't get me wrong, I love Toronto... the restaurants, the theater, the museums. But Manhattan has three times the population density of Toronto. You have to allow for that when counting incidents.
On the other hand, the region south of Central park was a lot more bucolic in 1860, when the park was created. When the park land was taken, it was home to 1600 inhabitants, or around 1200 people per square mile. This was urban by the standards of the day, but comparable to the development density of a high income suburb by todays standards.
I find that people who have this view of Manhattan only know it from movies and TV shows. Generally, I have found people in Manhattan to be pleasant and helpful... although one must make allowances for their adaptations to living in large crowds. The first time I went into Grand Central Station, I got swept along by a crowd that had just been disgorged by a subway entrance. My experience of Manhattan crowds is different from the GP's; generally I find the bulk of them very focused on going about whatever their business is. The sheer size of the crowds means that you can probably find any kind of behavior you're looking for. I find I can observe more people walking down a Manhattan block than I normally do in the course of a month.
Generally speaking, Manhattan feels as safe as any other city, especially if we are talking from Central Park south during the day time. There are a lot of human friendly aspects to Manhattan's urban landscape. First and foremost are the very very wide sidewalks, which other cities would do well to emulate. This gives plenty of space to large volumes of pedestrian traffic, fed by a dense public transit network. This creates a vibrant street level commercial economy, which may seem overwhelming at first, until you realize that a Manhattan block is like a city in miniature. You don't have to walk a mile to find something you want; as often as not it's no more than a block away; further and you take transit.
Overall, I find Manhattan to be very comfortable and convenient, once you've adapted a bit to the rhythm and pace. I wonder if the study was perhaps confounded by several things. First, are the subjects accustomed to walking in an urban landscape? If you repeated the experiment a dozen times, would the score for city walkers change? Secondly, are the routes chosen pedestrian friendly? If not the results may simply reflect the results of stress.
I don't deny that nature is important, and don't doubt that experiencing natural settings regularly is a contributor to mental health. But in many ways, dense urban landscapes are both good for people and the environment, when compared to sprawl.
Re:Nah, everybody knows how this one goes.
on
Ubuntu Kung Fu
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
HAHAHA! Your regular expressions are very good. But can you handle my LALR(1) grammar!
I once heard a lecture by a researcher in the field of computer supported cooperative work. He mentioned that one of his largest consulting clients was an insurance company where new management noticed a layer of bureaucracy with no identifiable output. So rather than figure out that output might be, they simply fired them all.
It turned out that what the people in that layer did was to coordinate the flow of information through the company. They didn't approve a policy or claim, or study some aspect of those things. Their job was to know the state of these things, and what needed to be done next under various special circumstances.
Re:Nah, everybody knows how this one goes.
on
Ubuntu Kung Fu
·
· Score: 1
I forgot to add: in a bamboo grove.
Nah, everybody knows how this one goes.
on
Ubuntu Kung Fu
·
· Score: 5, Funny
First you get your cocky ass kicked by some Windows fanboi.
Then you go up onto the mountain to train with a bearded Unix guru. He forces you through a brutal training regimen with obscure CLI utilities, each with its own brain-flayingly inconsistent command line switches.
When you can debug, at a glance, Perl scripts that look like core dumps, you come down from the mountain and beat the crap out of the Windows guy with your esoteric skilz.
Why should you lose volume control? Presumably there is some clockwork mechanism to regulate speed, so if air pressure is used to control volume why not put a speed control on the motor, like a triac light dimmer?
Depends on what you mean by "best series". It had some of the best and some of the worst episodes. If you liked the kind of story arc format TNG moved into, it had much to offer.
The problem with DS9 is that Paramount had decided to structure the ST franchise as a cash cow, running two series at a time on overlapping lifetimes. This wasn't a problem in that DS9's different format provided more leeway for different kinds of stories, but once Voyager was in full swing, both series began to suffer from script problems. Both series continued to produce enough good shows for one series, and in some cases each series produced outstanding stories. But as time wore on the frequency of truly awful scripts began to increase; I don't think there was enough creative energy for two simultaneous shows.
People still do ride horses, so it is possible to by riding crops which presumably are manufactured. A smaller group of people drive horse drawn wagons, carriages and, yes, buggies, and therefore it is possible to buy buggy whips, so somebody is manufacturing them. In about 30 seconds of Googling, it is even possible to locate places to buy them on line. Granted, the $6.95 buggy whip appears to be just a fiberglass driveway marker with a bit of cord on the end, but it exists.
Player pianos, on the other hand, have always been a curiosity. Therefore the market started at the size of the current market for buggy whips. The move to digital just sucked the profit out of making them, even if you have a monopoly.
On the other hand, I think that enthusiasts will probably take up the slack, even if they have to devise tools to do it by hand.
Hmmm. It seems to me, though, that a gizmo for recording rolls is well within the ability of a competent machinist to build. Possibly the kind mechanical enthusiast who goes in for old time player pianos could do it. The main difficulty for a clever mechanic would be getting rolls of paper of a suitable dimension and quality; that's a place where eccentricity provoked sweat equity wouldn't get you far, unless you got lucky. Maybe mylar would work and there are companies producing film rolls that could be cut down or something.
Beyond that, I have yet to see any conclusive benchmarks posted by the defenders of Vista on this thread showing any proof that Vista is faster than XP
Or... why it should be faster.
I wouldn't expect either operating system to be significantly different than the other at walking or chewing gum. If there is there's something wrong. No, it's walking while chewing gum and juggling running chainsaws you have to look at.
Under benign circumstances -- doing simple tasks on an unloaded system with plenty of resources -- I'd be surprised to see much difference, especially if you are doing things like file system copies using more or less the same file system. If there is a difference, something is wrong. It's under demanding circumstances -- multiple complex tasks eating up much of the available resources -- that I'd expect to see differences. That's a case where there are no easy choices to be made, so the differential quality of choices is more visible.
In any case fast is a bad way of thinking about things. Good management is better. An OS may take care of streaming a stretch of multimedia data faster than another one does, but at the expense of dropping an occasional stretch of data. The "efficiency" of the operating system in this case is meaningless; it would be better off doing net less work but getting the time sensitive work done on schedule.
No, the best way to think about this is this: for a given workload, does the OS manage the workload appropriately. Efficiency, as measured by total work done in a unit of time, is much simpler; you could let every process run until it needs I/O. It just wouldn't be very usable. It's usability that matters.
Slashdot Mirror
Meh. I'll wait for the open source knock-off.
If its true to form, it might not work precisely correctly out of the box, but you will be able to enter the initial conditions for the Universe. For example, you could interchange the masses of the up and down quark, or alter the U(1) gauge coupling parameter from 0.357 to 0.5. Once you have managed to get the laws of physics as we know them to emerge, you will be able to play a game with correct physics for our Universe.
Or maybe it would be more fun to play the game with physics that is correct for a universe in which Planck's Constant is 1.0 m^2 kg / s.
Yes, and if there's a problem getting the sound card configured or with the wifi drivers, he's got Dad for tech support.
I've been using Unix since v7. The first Linux I ever used was Debian 0.93, downloaded over a 28.8KBaud modem to run on on a 386 box. I even got freakin' X running on the thing, which in those days was about as easy and fun as memorizing patterns of monkey shit thrown against the cage wall. Things are a hell of a lot easier these days, but I wouldn't say that getting things running is always easy. I just bought a laptop with the PM45 chipset and Radeon HD 3650 GPU, and the Debian 8.10 64 bit installer barfed on the video card, even with the vga=771 kernel arguments. I even freakin' know what "vga=771" means, which I'm reasnonably sure represents the fruit of time wasted.
In any case Debian 8.10 is reported to work less than perfectly on my hardware, but OpenSUSE 11.1 does. Except that the OpenSUSE 11.1 installer hangs on grub. Fortunately, it's a regular X11 session, so I could Alt-F1 and complete the installation by hand using the command line. After booting, no sound in KDE, but the kernel's fine; I can tell because the 64 bit flash plugin (installed by hand) plays sound fine, but KDE can't. Well, it turns out that OpenSUSE has just migragred to pulseaudio, and they've got integration problems between KDE4 and pulse. You know, that old story.
It's OK, I can handle it. I couldn't fix these kinds of thigns with with Windows, because the simplicity of Windows is a kind of brittle facade; the complexity is papered over, and if you the facade doesn't work, you're on your own because the party line is that the facade is all you'll ever need.
On the other hand, if I were using Windows, I wouldn't have to fix most of these really basic problems. Which is not to say that Windows is better. Support for Windows is a vast and shallow lake. You can get help with easy things anywhere. Support for Linux is like the same area as a dry plain dotted with very deep wells. You have to do some trudging over hot sand, but when you find what you need it is in abundance.
Now of course, we're talking preinstallation here, but the same dichotomy applies to all facets of using the operating system. If you need help with easy things, it's easy to find just about anyplace you look, but it can't help you much. With Linux, unless you happen to live next to a well of technical support, you have to trudge quite a bit before you can get help, but when you do that help will be much more versatile.
This person just wants to do, simple, simple things. Connect to the school network. Write papers that the professors can read. The problem is for a lot of adults going back to school is that they don't have the financial backing of parents; they've got to swing school and work at the same time, and it's not easy. So telling her she's got to put some sweat equity into figuring things out on her own is bullshit. It's not that it wouldn't be a good thing for her to do this, but there are such things as opportunity costs.
What she needs is ubiquitous, but shallow help.
Or she needs somebody to step up to the plate and help her.
Actually, insect protein is about as close to eating vegetarian, environmentally, as you can get without being a vegetarian.
Of course, you can survive on a vegetarian diet, but it's not always the easiest or lowest impact way of eating. For example, you can buy a goat for a third world family from a non-profit development agency. They graze on things humans (and indeed most animals) can't eat, but they produce milk, wool and eventually meat at very little cost. I've bought some of these. For $175, you can change a family's life.
Pigs used to graze this way too, before the advent of factory farming. Here in New England, we have a kind geological feature called a drumlin; it's basically a low, rounded hill of glacial debris. Where a chain of drumlins reaches into the ocean, you get modest sized islands of a few acres, sometimes separated from the mainland by a narrow strip of water and connected at high tide. A number of these islands used to bear the name "Hog Island" (until the developers get their hands on them, after which they get names like "Spinnaker Island"). The reason is that in colonial times people drove their pigs on the island and let them run free until it was time to slaughter.
But insects are by far the most efficient animal when it comes to food conversion, and the quality of that food is, from a nutritional standpoint, outstanding. Unfortunately, insect consumption is fading away in many cultures, as they turn to a more western diet.
He does fly by regular carrier. He does not own a private jet.
That's not to say that he never, under any circumstances, flies in a private plane. When he does he buys carbon offsets -- not ideal of course, but the best you can do under the circumstances.
One of the Achilles' heels of conservative ideology is the inability to distinguish between practicality and expediency. It's always more expedient to travel by private plane. It's sometimes practical.
Cindy McCain got a lot of heat by saying that private plane was the only way to get around Arizona. The liberal reaction was the same kind of BS you're spouting here. Of course, she didn't literally mean you couldn't get from Phoenix to Flagstaff without flying, but as public figures the McCains do have to do a great deal of travel over a rather large state. As a Senator, John McCain spends most of his time in Washington, and if flying in a private plane means he gets to see more constituents, it's a sensible and pragmatic choice because it maximizes his productivity.
It's like the difference between driving a one ton pickup truck because you're a rancher and need to get feed out to your cattle through the snow, and driving the same kind of truck as a commuter vehicle. Environmentalists don't think it is morally wrong for a rancher to drive an F320. They don't think it's morally wrong for a cement truck to have a 400 horsepower engine and get 6MPG. Individuals commuting in a vehicle that got 6MPG would be a different thing.
As an environmentalist, I'm not even against sports cars. I'm just against sports cars as commuter vehicles. If you enjoy driving your Ferrari Enzo on the track at 8MPG, that's fine by me. But maybe you might want to look at an Audi A5 as your regular commuting vehicle.
Yep, that's what I meant by a satellite terminal. It's actually not very expensive.
The thing is to rent the terminal, not buy it. I just looked it up, and you can rent a for two months for about $900, plus $6.40 per megabyte transmitted. That's not pocket change, but it's damned cheap considering what you get; you just plug it in and go. It's something a student could swing financially, especially if he gets his parents to pony up some of the base cost on the promise that he'll phone home every day.
Otherwise you are talking about trying various clever solutions that aren't likely to be much less expensive, but likely to be MUCH more time consuming and considerably less satisfactory.
rental a satellite phone or satellite terminal.
I think you can find a satellite terminal for about $10/day and $7 or so per MB. So let's say you are at sea for eight weeks, or 56 days. Assuming about $20/day (a bit more than 1MB per day), it's going to cost about $1,120, which isn't bad at all if it really is important to you. I imagine business is bad so you might be able to talk them down for publicity purposes.
Other solutions probably take more time than you want to spend. The obvious one would be to get your Ham license. It'd take time, cost about the same, but then you'd have your license and the related equipment. Alternatively, I've looked at self-contained container tracking units that have a limited telemetry transmission capability. Imagine sending your data as a series of SMS messages spaced apart every ten minutes or so. That's enough to update your blog, but you aren't going to be able send anything but the lowest res pictures in less than a day.
You could probably find a satphone rental for less money, which is intermediate in cost and capacity. You can send data at something like 2KBaud, but you'll have to work the details to see whether you come out ahead for your planned transmissions.
The problem is a phenomenon I call the "competence delta function".
A tool can make many things simple, but sooner or later you run into diminishing returns. As returns diminish, you eventually find yourself at a point where the next thing you want to do takes a step up in competence from what you have right now.
Imagine that you plot effort (on the y axis) and reward (on the x axis). If you are looking for a certain level of reward, you can read how much effort it takes off the X axis. Things like a command line interfaces have a big up front investment to learn, represented by a step function at 0 reward. However the power of command line interfaces (at least good ones), is that the benefits and effort needed thereafter are reasonably proportional over a very large range of tasks.
GUIs, on the other hand, have a low initial step, but eventually you want to do something that has to be expressed conceptually, and there you've got to eat that command line step function and then some. A sysadmin with strong shell scripting and Perl abilities will be able to achieve more than a sysadmin who can only work a GUI.
So the question for an "easy" tool is this: where does the delta function come? Really easy to use tools can be a trap if you don't see this coming. A word processor is highly useful, but at some point you may ask it to do something that would be better done in LaTex.
Spreadsheets are very easy, very useful things. Two dimensional organization of facts may be uniquely useful, giving more flexibility than one dimensional organization, but having none of the capacity for things to hide behind others that three dimensions gives. In fact, the word "plan" comes from the same root as the word "plane".
There are limitations on what spreadsheets can do of course (aside from things like: they are not databases). But I think most people run to the end of their practical, factual, mathematical or business knowledge first. For example, I can say, "prepare a budget for next year," and give you a bunch of spreadsheet templates. If you don't know what you are doing, you'll produce a really bad budget, but it will look great, just as good as a good budget in fact. The reason is, "produce a budget presentation that looks great" is on the left hand side of the spreadsheet delta, but "produce a budget that is financially sound" is well beyond what a spreadsheet application can make easy for you.
I think the same thing goes for the other bete noire of thinking managers everywhere: the PowerPoint presentation.
It's not that PowerPoint isn't a wonderful tool. It's just that it is not a replacement for communication skills. Sometime watch An Inconvenient Truth. You might disagree with Al Gore, but he worked for years on that Keynote presentation until he could really communicate with it. You could take the same presentation, and unless you were an unusually gifted commnicator, you would not achieve anything near an Oscar caliber performance.
As much as PowerPoint is not a replacement for communication skills, it is even less a replacement for critical thinking skills. During the dot com boom, I remember reading how the phrase "send me the stack" was gaining popularity in business circles, "the stack" meaning the PowerPoint slides. Some VCs were so hot to get in on the gold rush the were making investment decisions based on PowerPoint presentations rather than business plans.
A tool that makes certain things easy is always a good thing in itself. The danger is in the illusion that by relying upon it, everything will be easier. Software tools are particularly insidious, because they have the ability to make incompetent efforts look really good.
Everybody has a natural tendency to prefer to do what interests them. There are two things that make it a disorder: (1) you can't control it, and (2) it has a significant, negative impact on your life.
ADHD isn't a new diagnosis, it's just a new name and conceptualization for informal diagnoses people have been making for years. You're doing it here: just not interested. Other diagnoses include "lazy", "unmotivated", and "absent minded". The problem with these informal diagnoses is that they're too simplistic. They're internally consistent if you want to cherry pick certain facts but give you an accurate picture of the individual's life. It's not that students aren't interested in getting along in school, it's that they can't even if they want to. If they don't want to, it's not a disorder.
Likewise, a diagnosis like "lazy" doesn't work either, because people with ADHD have the capacity to work harder than their "normal" counterparts. "Absent minded" or "wooly headed" doesn't cover everything either, because in emergency, high stress situations, people with ADHD may feel, calm, focused, and normal, and show unusual presence of mind. In fact part of the pathology of the disease is that it keeps people's lives on the edge of chaos, and they perform better there.
Brain studies support a biological basis for ADHD. For example when people with ADHD are given a task that normal people perform well on, brain scan suggested that increasing conscious effort actually makes their brains less coordinated. It is literally the case that the harder they try, the worse they do. It's like throwing the throttle all the way forward on an outboard motor: it creates a lot of noise but the props aren't driving the boat forward; their just cavitating.
This may be why games are promising, because the same is true in games. You don't want to try hard, you want to achieve flow state. Think about that for a moment: the problem with labeling ADHD people as lazy and unmotivated is that it leads to exactly the opposite actions than they need. They don't need to try harder, they need to relax. It's like ADHD brains work in a different stimulation band than average brains; the effect of stimulant medications is to shift the band towards the normal spectrum.
Or course ADHD has its problems too. It's a very bad name for a complex of several phenomena: a higher need for stimulation to achieve optimal performance, poor performance at conscious direction of attention, and poor impulse control, each of which is distinct but related to other facets and may manifest itself differently in different people. What is clear though is that there is ample evidence that people who should receive this diagnosis are biologically different. For example a dose of amphetamines that might undermine impulse control in a normal person could improve it in somebody with ADHD.
I believe your point is that ADHD is part of natural human population variation; if so, you'd be right. The exact line between a character quirk and a psychiatric disorder is not clear, nor is is fixed. It may be that in preindustrial societies people who now receive a diagnosis might have provided societies with the benefits of restless, stimulation deprived individuals: as big game hunters, explorers, warriors, craftsmen, or shamans. The problem is that in a society where it is mandatory to regulate your life by the clock and calendar, even moderate ADHD traits are highly mal-adaptive. I've heard it said that the primary symptom of adult ADHD is chronic underachievement.
Of course, one alternative would be to reorganize all of society to make use of each individual's unique characteristics. Unfortunately, that's just not realistic. We can wish society was different than it is, we can work towards that end, but in the meantime you have nothing to offer people who drop through the cracks. It's more pr
I have a Versizon HTC 5800 Windows Mobile Smartphone. It's completely locked down, which was a surprise since I'd used Palm based smartphones before and they were pretty much what you'd expect: a PDA phone.
You have to enter a few registry entries, and voila, the PDA part of the phone is open and you can install your own apps. Google is your friend.
Lack of access to the GPS seems to be a pretty common theme in most phone platforms. I believe the way the phones are architected deliberately assumes that the GPS is there for the network provider, not for you.
Perhaps, but it depends on the pollutants. Lead emissions are a local problem (although there is archaeological evidence of airborne lead pollution in Northern Europe from Roman industry, hundreds of miles away). CO2 is a pollutant that has little local impact, even in comparison to the water emissions from combustion. Except in special circumstances, it has no local significance whatsoever. CO2 is a global pollutant. It makes perfect sense to sequester carbon in a Canadian oil field to offset emissions from a natural gas power plant in the US, because what we are concerned with are long term changes in average CO2 concentration across the globe. In that case, the swimming pool is the entire atmosphere, which would not be the case for things like CO or particulates.
Well, even if you don't spill, the problem with this is that in a carefully used laptop, one of the first things to fail is the keyboard. I used Thinkpads for years ... amazing build quality. Worth every penny. I used to wear through the palm plastic and wear off all the letters on the keys. The first two things to go on them were keys on the keyboard, and the inverter board for the LCD.
I think keyboards are probably one of the hardest things to make cheap and good. As Moore's law gives us tiny computers with vast amounts of processing power and memory, those computers have keyboards which are mechanically far inferior to the old PC XT keyboards, which had rows of discrete and individually replaceable mechanical switches.
Well, I have a few laptops like that where I've removed the LCD. Bingo: keyboard computer. I mainly use them as printer servers and the like; you just lug a small LCD panel over when you need a screen, or use VNC.
In any case, if it's the backlight gone, chances are its the inverter board. This provides voltage to the LCD panel, but usually sits at the top edge of the keyboard part. Its usually integrated on a small board about the size of an old fashioned memory SIMM that usually has a few model specific LEDs or maybe switches. It's fairly easy to replace; you can get a new part for around $70, used parts taken from junker computers go from $5 to $10. If you've done it before for a certain model, the repair takes less than ten minutes; it might take several times that if you have to Google a guide for taking apart your laptop. It's pretty much the easiest repair there is, that users are not expected to be able to do.
Except you have to look at the business she is in. Her career is using her life as a kind of laboratory for generating experiences that are novel, but rooted n approachable sentiments and ideas.
In a nutshell, Oprah is a professional middle-brow bohemian.
Doing something that is not entirely sensible because it appeals to a personal sense of what is right is different for her than it would be for you or me. If this makes her mad enough, it's her business to explore her feelings through trying things ordinary people wouldn't.
I think, though, you are dealing with sampling error here ... or rather an error in your mental denominator. Yes, in NYC you witness more unpleasant interactions per day, but you have to take into account how many more interactions per day you are witnessing.
Don't get me wrong, I love Toronto ... the restaurants, the theater, the museums. But Manhattan has three times the population density of Toronto. You have to allow for that when counting incidents.
On the other hand, the region south of Central park was a lot more bucolic in 1860, when the park was created. When the park land was taken, it was home to 1600 inhabitants, or around 1200 people per square mile. This was urban by the standards of the day, but comparable to the development density of a high income suburb by todays standards.
I find that people who have this view of Manhattan only know it from movies and TV shows. Generally, I have found people in Manhattan to be pleasant and helpful ... although one must make allowances for their adaptations to living in large crowds. The first time I went into Grand Central Station, I got swept along by a crowd that had just been disgorged by a subway entrance. My experience of Manhattan crowds is different from the GP's; generally I find the bulk of them very focused on going about whatever their business is. The sheer size of the crowds means that you can probably find any kind of behavior you're looking for. I find I can observe more people walking down a Manhattan block than I normally do in the course of a month.
Generally speaking, Manhattan feels as safe as any other city, especially if we are talking from Central Park south during the day time. There are a lot of human friendly aspects to Manhattan's urban landscape. First and foremost are the very very wide sidewalks, which other cities would do well to emulate. This gives plenty of space to large volumes of pedestrian traffic, fed by a dense public transit network. This creates a vibrant street level commercial economy, which may seem overwhelming at first, until you realize that a Manhattan block is like a city in miniature. You don't have to walk a mile to find something you want; as often as not it's no more than a block away; further and you take transit.
Overall, I find Manhattan to be very comfortable and convenient, once you've adapted a bit to the rhythm and pace. I wonder if the study was perhaps confounded by several things. First, are the subjects accustomed to walking in an urban landscape? If you repeated the experiment a dozen times, would the score for city walkers change? Secondly, are the routes chosen pedestrian friendly? If not the results may simply reflect the results of stress.
I don't deny that nature is important, and don't doubt that experiencing natural settings regularly is a contributor to mental health. But in many ways, dense urban landscapes are both good for people and the environment, when compared to sprawl.
HAHAHA! Your regular expressions are very good. But can you handle my LALR(1) grammar!
I once heard a lecture by a researcher in the field of computer supported cooperative work. He mentioned that one of his largest consulting clients was an insurance company where new management noticed a layer of bureaucracy with no identifiable output. So rather than figure out that output might be, they simply fired them all.
It turned out that what the people in that layer did was to coordinate the flow of information through the company. They didn't approve a policy or claim, or study some aspect of those things. Their job was to know the state of these things, and what needed to be done next under various special circumstances.
I forgot to add: in a bamboo grove.
First you get your cocky ass kicked by some Windows fanboi.
Then you go up onto the mountain to train with a bearded Unix guru. He forces you through a brutal training regimen with obscure CLI utilities, each with its own brain-flayingly inconsistent command line switches.
When you can debug, at a glance, Perl scripts that look like core dumps, you come down from the mountain and beat the crap out of the Windows guy with your esoteric skilz.
Why should you lose volume control? Presumably there is some clockwork mechanism to regulate speed, so if air pressure is used to control volume why not put a speed control on the motor, like a triac light dimmer?
Depends on what you mean by "best series". It had some of the best and some of the worst episodes. If you liked the kind of story arc format TNG moved into, it had much to offer.
The problem with DS9 is that Paramount had decided to structure the ST franchise as a cash cow, running two series at a time on overlapping lifetimes. This wasn't a problem in that DS9's different format provided more leeway for different kinds of stories, but once Voyager was in full swing, both series began to suffer from script problems. Both series continued to produce enough good shows for one series, and in some cases each series produced outstanding stories. But as time wore on the frequency of truly awful scripts began to increase; I don't think there was enough creative energy for two simultaneous shows.
People still do ride horses, so it is possible to by riding crops which presumably are manufactured. A smaller group of people drive horse drawn wagons, carriages and, yes, buggies, and therefore it is possible to buy buggy whips, so somebody is manufacturing them. In about 30 seconds of Googling, it is even possible to locate places to buy them on line. Granted, the $6.95 buggy whip appears to be just a fiberglass driveway marker with a bit of cord on the end, but it exists.
Player pianos, on the other hand, have always been a curiosity. Therefore the market started at the size of the current market for buggy whips. The move to digital just sucked the profit out of making them, even if you have a monopoly.
On the other hand, I think that enthusiasts will probably take up the slack, even if they have to devise tools to do it by hand.
Hmmm. It seems to me, though, that a gizmo for recording rolls is well within the ability of a competent machinist to build. Possibly the kind mechanical enthusiast who goes in for old time player pianos could do it. The main difficulty for a clever mechanic would be getting rolls of paper of a suitable dimension and quality; that's a place where eccentricity provoked sweat equity wouldn't get you far, unless you got lucky. Maybe mylar would work and there are companies producing film rolls that could be cut down or something.
Beyond that, I have yet to see any conclusive benchmarks posted by the defenders of Vista on this thread showing any proof that Vista is faster than XP
Or ... why it should be faster.
I wouldn't expect either operating system to be significantly different than the other at walking or chewing gum. If there is there's something wrong. No, it's walking while chewing gum and juggling running chainsaws you have to look at.
Under benign circumstances -- doing simple tasks on an unloaded system with plenty of resources -- I'd be surprised to see much difference, especially if you are doing things like file system copies using more or less the same file system. If there is a difference, something is wrong. It's under demanding circumstances -- multiple complex tasks eating up much of the available resources -- that I'd expect to see differences. That's a case where there are no easy choices to be made, so the differential quality of choices is more visible.
In any case fast is a bad way of thinking about things. Good management is better. An OS may take care of streaming a stretch of multimedia data faster than another one does, but at the expense of dropping an occasional stretch of data. The "efficiency" of the operating system in this case is meaningless; it would be better off doing net less work but getting the time sensitive work done on schedule.
No, the best way to think about this is this: for a given workload, does the OS manage the workload appropriately. Efficiency, as measured by total work done in a unit of time, is much simpler; you could let every process run until it needs I/O. It just wouldn't be very usable. It's usability that matters.