Disclaimer: I am a physicist who studies quantum information.
You still make money in the many world interpretation. Though trading on a sport event might not be your best bet, By having a view of the future you can sell or invest in right technologies etc, this is robust enough not to be affected by small changes.
Making money in Many Worlds is easy, even without time travel. Suppose you want to bet on who will win the World Series. Get some quantum bits, and decide beforehand on what (orthogonal) states of those qubits correspond to which teams. Prepare a superposition of all 30 possible teams. Now, measure your state, and bet all your money on whichever team your measurement tells you. Wait for the world series to finish, then either collect all your winnings, or, if you didn't win, kill yourself.
In all worlds where you're still alive, you'll have won a lot of money.
Note to theoretical computer scientists: this is very similar to how someone (who believes in Many Worlds) might try to compute the answer to a problem in the complexity class Post-BQP. Note to everyone else: don't try this at home.
One day, everybody will have a digital ID. You know, the kind used to digitally sign e-mail. If you had to digitally sign your request to create an account with a certificate issued from a trusted CA, then using a bot creates the potential of the user having his digital certificate revoked.
This is way harder than you think. If the certificate is on their PC, then this does nothing to protect against botnets. The certificate would have to be on a closed, highly-secure platform. Perhaps a specialized cell phone would work. Here's how it might go:
1) You try to register on www.cutepuppies.com, and provide your phone number 2) You receive a signed SMS from www.cutepuppies.com asking you to confirm your registration 3) You send a signed response 4) Your phone displays an alphanumeric "token", which you type into your PC 5) Using the token, your PC can sign onto www.cutepuppies.com
This is probably too hard for many people, yet I don't think it can be made simpler without much loss of security (except, perhaps, performing steps 4 and 5 automatically via Bluetooth).
I know what you mean, and I'm not even old and wise. I went to a concert for the first time in a few years, and was reminded of why I stopped. I had to wear ear plugs most of the time, which, since they don't attenuate all frequencies evenly, totally messed up the sound.
Imagine if, when you entered an art gallery, they stabbed out one of your eyes. That's how much sense it makes to destroy people's hearing when they go to concerts.
I forgot to mention the second part of the "general rule". In bad grizzly country, if you have less than six people in your party, don't go hiking at all. That's actually the law in some parts of the Canadian Rockies (the Sentinel Pass trail near Banff, for instance). Apparently, grizzlies generally don't attack large parties. Small parties are just too dangerous, at least if you're not armed.
From what I've heard, the rules are even more strict in polar bear country--being armed is a requirement.
You've obviously never run into a black bear in the woods
I ran into four this weekend, in Yosemite. Three of them ran away outright, and the fourth (the largest of them) walked off once I started yelling at him. I was just about to start trashing his mama, too...
I don't care how big a guy you are, a black bear will kick any human's ass.
Now, I would never seek out a confrontation with a bear, and I take precautions when backpacking, but a human has a chance against a black bear, even without a gun. Some Boy Scouts killed one a while back (accidentally, I think) when they were trying to scare it off by throwing rocks at it. I weigh around the same as a mid-sized female black bear, and imagine that I could get a few good licks in if one attacked. The general rule is that if a black bear attacks your friend, and you have six or more people with you, you should attack the bear. Otherwise, wait, then administer first aid.
Grizzlies are a whole 'nother story. A grizzly can easily kill you in a single blow, and I'm pretty sure that they can also crush your skull with their jaws (black bears can only tear up your scalp--your skull is too big). Even having a gun won't help much unless you're very fast and very accurate.
I wonder what Stephen Colbert would say about robot bears.. Somebody needs to ask him.
You want to hit the insurgency where it hurts... in their religion. Send robot devil in after them.
Absolutely. I bet sectarian violence would end in a heart beat if they were united against a common enemy. Right now, the only candidate is US soldiers, which sucks for us, but wouldn't it be great if they were instead united against our army of robot devils? After all, we are the Great Satan to their neighbors.
For bonus points, make the robots look like the Horde from WoW, and get the Dept. of Defense to release a WoW "expansion" in which the players unwittingly control the robot army, a la Ender's Game. Use the profits to fund the war.
Alternative: make the robots enact Wii tennis, with grenade-balls that explode on the second bounce. Threaten to send them into Sadr City or wherever the latest hotspot is unless the locals work things out for themselves.
One more thing: instead of making robotic kill-bears, why not just breed actual bears for combat? Black bears aren't particularly scary, but grizzlies are terrifying. Put some body armor and a control mechanism on them, and away you go.
If everybody is going to hate us anyway, we might as well do something really cool to deserve their animosity.
As far as I know, there has not been one scrap of evidence showing that past disk writes can be examined through microscopy, or any other kind of direct physical examination.
The most powerful technique I know of would be Magnetic Force Microscopy (MFM), which is essentially a variant of AFM (Atomic Force Microscopy) that uses a magnetized tip. When I was an undergraduate, I used AFM to image surface features as small as 50 nm, which a quick calculation shows to be comparable to the square root of the physical area used to store a bit on a modern hard drive. Presumably, somebody with more experience or better equipment could do better; it's not a difficult technique if you just want to learn the basics. To actually scan a hard drive in a reasonable amount of time would require a very specialized MFM machine, but I see no reason why such things wouldn't be available to various three-letter agencies.
Now, I don't know whether there is any residual information to get from an overwritten bit, but it would surprise me if there wasn't, and if there is, it can probably be gotten with MFM, if not an easier technique.
you're still not focusing on the disease, and that's fundamental inequality and slavery in this world.
That's not the cause of terrorism. Look at the London Tube bombers--fairly well-off and at least superficially assimilated. Osama bin Laden: rich and well-educated. I remember a study (sorry, no link) that found a positive correlation between education and suicide bombing in Palestine (sorry, no link handy); smarter, better-educated terrorists were more likely to carry out more deadly attacks. Furthermore, if it were inequality and slavery that caused terrorism, one would expect Africa and South America to be major exporters of terrorism, which of course they are not.
I have my own theories about what causes terrorism (I think it's ideological in nature), but the point is that if you can't agree on the cause, treating the symptoms is not a bad idea.
Wouldn't it be trivial to write an application to replace your (or other people's) names from these file headers just by replacing the strings with "Benny Beanfart" or similar?
The account names are plaintext, but there may also be a digital signature of the names, which would make it effectively impossible to replace the strings to "frame" someone for copyright violation. You could still delete the watermark, though.
I think you'd find that, if you put ordinary people in positions of power, they will end up no better than the ones who currently do it.
If people are randomly selected for a single fixed term, you eliminate the requirement of fundraising, which is where a lot of the undue influence happens in the present system. Pay them well enough, and you'll eliminate the motivation for taking bribes. This seems like a big step up from the current system.
Put another way, we currently select people for office based on their political campaigning ability. Does anyone really think this is a good test of the qualities we want in leaders or lawmakers?
After reading up on NeoOffice and having installed OpenOffice on my MacBook. I still say they should be using OpenOffice. I've been using that for almost 6 years for everything.
You like running X11 apps on your MacBook? What the hell is wrong with you? Would you put Flintstone-style chiseled-out-of-stone wheels on a Porsche?
The rest of the world is turning against american copyrights+patents. That will cause a big pop.
More like a big bang. Normally, if one country were to devote most of its production resources to intellectual "property", and the rest of the world were to copy that property without paying, that country would be screwed. When that country spends more on its military than most of the rest of the world combined, things are different.
Put another way, if Europe were to impose "environmental impact teriffs" on US goods, the US could counter with "intellectual property use surcharges". The result would be a trade war. If things got really ugly, the US could impose a naval blockade.
Everybody in power already knows this, and knows it would be bad for almost everybody (just as trade is generally good). What will actually happen is each side will give a little, and the result will be a compromise. You can see this in US & Canadian forestry industries--Canadian forestry companies have voluntarily participated in the various environmental certification programs so that they can sell to large European customers that demand those certifications (I think the same is probably true of US forestry companies). Having said that, since even European standards are not tough enough to stop global warming, the compromise standards certainly won't be.
I think there's little hope of us reducing CO2 emissions sufficiently in the short-to-medium term. We're going to have to find alternate methods of controlling global warming, or else we're screwed.
So the message is--aim low? If you plan on renting forever, you'll need to adjust the retirment savings upwards a bit.
nor are they able to pay for their children's education. My parents didn't pay for my education, and I was able to get one.
My wife and I each mostly paid for our own educations, but rising tuitions and increasing competition for college entry and scholarships mean those days are over.
. Also, your calculations are off, because you aren't considering that there's a second person making money in the family.
As soon as the spouse starts working, you need to add in all sorts of extra costs for babysitting, daycare, extra car, more eating out, etc. Also, your marginal tax rate will be a lot higher. I think the NYT did a "sample family budget" analysis a while ago, and found that, all told, a second earner only slightly increases net family income.
Just as a reference point, I'm currently making $45,000 a year...
That's doable if your job allows you to live somewhere with cheap housing (i.e., not half a million for a starter home in the Bay Area), you start working in your early 20s instead of going to grad/professional school, neither of you becomes seriously ill, Social Security and Medicare don't implode, and interest rates don't rise too much.
I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for a nuclear energy source that passes prominent environmentalists' litmus test.
You can gauge how serious and informed an environmentalist is about global warming by their willingness to consider nuclear fission. Nuclear waste disposal is a comparatively minor problem when global warming is the alternative. Unlike solar and wind, fission already supplies a large chunk of the US's total power consumption--it's a proven, understood techology. It's also safe as long as it's not built and run by communists (I'm referring not only to Chernobyl but also the reactor accidents the USSR had with their nuclear subs).
Many environmentalists say we have only ten to twenty years to avert catastrophic global warming. Given that, why would anyone want to waste that time focusing* on experimental technologies when we could be mass-producing pebble bed reactors or some other failsafe fission design now? Make the reactors modular, with the components small enough to be shipped by rail, and mass-produce them. Since construction is a large part of the cost of nuclear power, that will dramatically reduce the cost.
* I'm not saying we shouldn't be researching wind and solar, but rather that we're too far away from having viable large-scale systems for producing solar/wind electricity and storing the energy to be used during dark/calm periods. Solar and wind are useful now as means of producing supplemental power to meet peak demand, but not so good as a source for baseline power needs. Any price comparison you've seen of solar or wind versus nuclear electricity probably hasn't factored in storage costs for the solar or wind power, which makes it inaccurate for the purpose of finding economical non-greenhouse baseline power sources.
Because trading oil dependence for uranium dependence leads nowhere.
Oil comes from politically unstable countries and its combustion leads to global warming. Uranium comes in large part from Australia and Canada (which are very stable politically), and its use does not cause global warming. Sure, you have to be careful in disposing of the waste, but it's not an insurmountable problem.
While I agree digital is digital, and as such analog artifacts are largely ignored, there is a specific issue with HDMI, namely inter-lane skew.
My point was that small amounts of analog noise on a digital signal have no effect. It's of course true that beyond a certain threshold, serious signal degradation occurs. In other words, digital signals are fine until they're not. If it's not immediately obvious that your digital signal is degraded, it's probably fine.
As a physicist, it drives me nuts how much people are willing to pay for Monster cables or other "high-end" stuff. Need speaker wire? Just buy some heavy-gauge electrical wire. Home Depot sells 500 feet (152 m) of stranded 2-conductor 10-gauge (2.588 mm dia.) wire for about $85 USD. A similar length of thinner 12-gauge (2.053 mm dia.) Monster wire would cost a small fortune.
Some of you may note that, at 20 kHz (high end of human hearing range), the skin depth of copper is only about 0.47 mm, and so for high frequency, your conductivity will only scale with wire circumference, not area. That's true for solid-core, but keep in mind the Home Depot cable I mention is stranded, and has a 25% larger circumference than the Monster stuff. That should be more than enough to make up for any slight resistivity advantage the Monster cable might have from using purer copper (assuming they do).
What's really funny is the people who assume all this stuff matters for digital signals (as I saw in a few of the "reviews" on the Monster website). Unless you're stringing really long cables or your no-name stuff is really, really bad, there won't be a difference. Bits are bits, and small amounts of analog noise will be ignored.
We have a Gaggia Carezza at work (I picked it out after research on WholeLatteLove.com). It does make excellent coffee, although the Gaggia pannarello wand is awful for making a decent microfoam for cappuccinos. Apparently, the Saeco Pannarello wand is compatible, and does a better job if you remove the outer sleeve (the Gaggia pannarello's inner nozzle is too short to make this an option). I haven't tried it yet, though.
Also our road capacity is being overwhelmed, many more bikes can fit on roads than cars.
I am a big bike fan and don't own a car, so please don't take this the wrong way, but what you're saying is potentially somewhat misleading (unintentionally, I know). Yes, more bikes can fit on the road than cars, but the capacity of most bikes is 1, versus 5 for most cars. Bikes also have a much lower top speed, so the potential "flux" of bicyclists is lower than that for driver/passengers for the same density of "seats".
Consider a freeway flowing smoothly with moderately heavy traffic. The amount of road space occupied by one car (including the gap behind it) could comfortably hold maybe 12 bikes. If a typical cyclist averages 20 mph, versus 60 mph for cars on this idealized freeway, and each car contains 4 people, then the flux (number passing a given point per unit time) of cyclists is the same as that of car commuters.
I have of course made all sorts of assumptions in favor of the cars here--most commuters don't carpool, freeways often get congested and slow, and there are a lot of places where freeways aren't available. Obviously cycling beats the current reality of single-occupant vehicles stuck in traffic. My point is just that a well-designed carpool/vanpool system can actually be competitive with cycling in terms of road efficiency.
Things, especially small intricate things, will eventually break if you move them around a lot. This particular iBook model is no exception. Could it have been made more durable? Of course, what couldn't?
The mid-to-late model iBook G3s were notoriously unreliable, resulting in Apple eventually issuing a recall. My familiy has personally experienced about ten iBook G3 failures (most with the logic board, but a few with the display cables wearing where they pass through the screen hinge). My mother's iBook G4 is now also starting to die, with symptoms that sound very familiar to those identified by the Danish Consumer Complaint board.
I'm a big Mac fan, but I think the iBooks were among the worst laptops ever made.
You don't know the half of it. Eat any pre-packaged foods? Wanna wager a guess as to how many ingredients in those pre-packaged foods came from China?
So, really, it's two birds with one stone. Impose sanctions on China, and not only do you get to pay them back for downloading those torrent of Britney Spears and Windows Vista, you also get to not die from melamine poisoning!
Do you think $4 is expensive for a box of cereal? Wait 'til you're paying $8-10 a box.
The price increase won't be nearly that large. Yes, labor is cheaper there, but the flip side is higher shipping, crappier manufacturing technology, and so on.
Yeah, that makes sense. The PC people should pick up on these little usability things and put the eject button directly next to the power button, which doesn't require holding the command key to turn the machine off.
Turning the machine off with the power button requires either that you confirm onscreen (Restart/Sleep/Shutdown/Cancel), or hold the power button down for 5 seconds to force a restart. Seems reasonable.
Or they could have you eject by deleting the drive.
That was stupid, but was fixed a while ago. Now you can eject the drive using the Eject command or with the Eject key on the keyboard. Ejecting by dragging to the trash or deleting is kept around as an option so that old-school Mac users don't get upset.
Or, even better, don't put an eject button anywhere and only have an eject button on the keyboard.
Actually, it makes sense. This allows the OS to first check whether you have open files on the CD before it ejects. If there are open files, it notifies you. Putting the button on the drive usually means the OS can't stop you from ejecting with open files and buggering things up. If you really, really want to eject a disc with open files, you can use the emergency eject button with a paperclip.
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Disclaimer: I am a physicist who studies quantum information.
You still make money in the many world interpretation. Though trading on a sport event might not be your best bet, By having a view of the future you can sell or invest in right technologies etc, this is robust enough not to be affected by small changes.
Making money in Many Worlds is easy, even without time travel. Suppose you want to bet on who will win the World Series. Get some quantum bits, and decide beforehand on what (orthogonal) states of those qubits correspond to which teams. Prepare a superposition of all 30 possible teams. Now, measure your state, and bet all your money on whichever team your measurement tells you. Wait for the world series to finish, then either collect all your winnings, or, if you didn't win, kill yourself.
In all worlds where you're still alive, you'll have won a lot of money.
Note to theoretical computer scientists: this is very similar to how someone (who believes in Many Worlds) might try to compute the answer to a problem in the complexity class Post-BQP.
Note to everyone else: don't try this at home.
One day, everybody will have a digital ID. You know, the kind used to digitally sign e-mail. If you had to digitally sign your request to create an account with a certificate issued from a trusted CA, then using a bot creates the potential of the user having his digital certificate revoked.
This is way harder than you think. If the certificate is on their PC, then this does nothing to protect against botnets. The certificate would have to be on a closed, highly-secure platform. Perhaps a specialized cell phone would work. Here's how it might go:
1) You try to register on www.cutepuppies.com, and provide your phone number
2) You receive a signed SMS from www.cutepuppies.com asking you to confirm your registration
3) You send a signed response
4) Your phone displays an alphanumeric "token", which you type into your PC
5) Using the token, your PC can sign onto www.cutepuppies.com
This is probably too hard for many people, yet I don't think it can be made simpler without much loss of security (except, perhaps, performing steps 4 and 5 automatically via Bluetooth).
Mathematica + OCR can solve calculus problems. I shudder at the thought of a mathematical CAPTCHA so hard Mathematica can't solve it.
Thanks, I just looked at the Hearos site, and the listed attenuation data actually looks pretty reasonable.
What I don't get is why it has to be so loud in the first place.
It's tough being able to hear.
I know what you mean, and I'm not even old and wise. I went to a concert for the first time in a few years, and was reminded of why I stopped. I had to wear ear plugs most of the time, which, since they don't attenuate all frequencies evenly, totally messed up the sound.
Imagine if, when you entered an art gallery, they stabbed out one of your eyes. That's how much sense it makes to destroy people's hearing when they go to concerts.
I forgot to mention the second part of the "general rule". In bad grizzly country, if you have less than six people in your party, don't go hiking at all. That's actually the law in some parts of the Canadian Rockies (the Sentinel Pass trail near Banff, for instance). Apparently, grizzlies generally don't attack large parties. Small parties are just too dangerous, at least if you're not armed.
From what I've heard, the rules are even more strict in polar bear country--being armed is a requirement.
You've obviously never run into a black bear in the woods
I ran into four this weekend, in Yosemite. Three of them ran away outright, and the fourth (the largest of them) walked off once I started yelling at him. I was just about to start trashing his mama, too...
I don't care how big a guy you are, a black bear will kick any human's ass.
Now, I would never seek out a confrontation with a bear, and I take precautions when backpacking, but a human has a chance against a black bear, even without a gun. Some Boy Scouts killed one a while back (accidentally, I think) when they were trying to scare it off by throwing rocks at it. I weigh around the same as a mid-sized female black bear, and imagine that I could get a few good licks in if one attacked. The general rule is that if a black bear attacks your friend, and you have six or more people with you, you should attack the bear. Otherwise, wait, then administer first aid.
Grizzlies are a whole 'nother story. A grizzly can easily kill you in a single blow, and I'm pretty sure that they can also crush your skull with their jaws (black bears can only tear up your scalp--your skull is too big). Even having a gun won't help much unless you're very fast and very accurate.
I wonder what Stephen Colbert would say about robot bears.. Somebody needs to ask him.
You want to hit the insurgency where it hurts... in their religion. Send robot devil in after them.
Absolutely. I bet sectarian violence would end in a heart beat if they were united against a common enemy. Right now, the only candidate is US soldiers, which sucks for us, but wouldn't it be great if they were instead united against our army of robot devils? After all, we are the Great Satan to their neighbors.
For bonus points, make the robots look like the Horde from WoW, and get the Dept. of Defense to release a WoW "expansion" in which the players unwittingly control the robot army, a la Ender's Game. Use the profits to fund the war.
Alternative: make the robots enact Wii tennis, with grenade-balls that explode on the second bounce. Threaten to send them into Sadr City or wherever the latest hotspot is unless the locals work things out for themselves.
One more thing: instead of making robotic kill-bears, why not just breed actual bears for combat? Black bears aren't particularly scary, but grizzlies are terrifying. Put some body armor and a control mechanism on them, and away you go.
If everybody is going to hate us anyway, we might as well do something really cool to deserve their animosity.
Disclaimer: I am a physicist.
As far as I know, there has not been one scrap of evidence showing that past disk writes can be examined through microscopy, or any other kind of direct physical examination.
The most powerful technique I know of would be Magnetic Force Microscopy (MFM), which is essentially a variant of AFM (Atomic Force Microscopy) that uses a magnetized tip. When I was an undergraduate, I used AFM to image surface features as small as 50 nm, which a quick calculation shows to be comparable to the square root of the physical area used to store a bit on a modern hard drive. Presumably, somebody with more experience or better equipment could do better; it's not a difficult technique if you just want to learn the basics. To actually scan a hard drive in a reasonable amount of time would require a very specialized MFM machine, but I see no reason why such things wouldn't be available to various three-letter agencies.
Now, I don't know whether there is any residual information to get from an overwritten bit, but it would surprise me if there wasn't, and if there is, it can probably be gotten with MFM, if not an easier technique.
you're still not focusing on the disease, and that's fundamental inequality and slavery in this world.
That's not the cause of terrorism. Look at the London Tube bombers--fairly well-off and at least superficially assimilated. Osama bin Laden: rich and well-educated. I remember a study (sorry, no link) that found a positive correlation between education and suicide bombing in Palestine (sorry, no link handy); smarter, better-educated terrorists were more likely to carry out more deadly attacks. Furthermore, if it were inequality and slavery that caused terrorism, one would expect Africa and South America to be major exporters of terrorism, which of course they are not.
I have my own theories about what causes terrorism (I think it's ideological in nature), but the point is that if you can't agree on the cause, treating the symptoms is not a bad idea.
Wouldn't it be trivial to write an application to replace your (or other people's) names from these file headers just by replacing the strings with "Benny Beanfart" or similar?
The account names are plaintext, but there may also be a digital signature of the names, which would make it effectively impossible to replace the strings to "frame" someone for copyright violation. You could still delete the watermark, though.
I think you'd find that, if you put ordinary people in positions of power, they will end up no better than the ones who currently do it.
If people are randomly selected for a single fixed term, you eliminate the requirement of fundraising, which is where a lot of the undue influence happens in the present system. Pay them well enough, and you'll eliminate the motivation for taking bribes. This seems like a big step up from the current system.
Put another way, we currently select people for office based on their political campaigning ability. Does anyone really think this is a good test of the qualities we want in leaders or lawmakers?
After reading up on NeoOffice and having installed OpenOffice on my MacBook. I still say they should be using OpenOffice. I've been using that for almost 6 years for everything.
You like running X11 apps on your MacBook? What the hell is wrong with you? Would you put Flintstone-style chiseled-out-of-stone wheels on a Porsche?
The rest of the world is turning against american copyrights+patents. That will cause a big pop.
More like a big bang. Normally, if one country were to devote most of its production resources to intellectual "property", and the rest of the world were to copy that property without paying, that country would be screwed. When that country spends more on its military than most of the rest of the world combined, things are different.
Put another way, if Europe were to impose "environmental impact teriffs" on US goods, the US could counter with "intellectual property use surcharges". The result would be a trade war. If things got really ugly, the US could impose a naval blockade.
Everybody in power already knows this, and knows it would be bad for almost everybody (just as trade is generally good). What will actually happen is each side will give a little, and the result will be a compromise. You can see this in US & Canadian forestry industries--Canadian forestry companies have voluntarily participated in the various environmental certification programs so that they can sell to large European customers that demand those certifications (I think the same is probably true of US forestry companies). Having said that, since even European standards are not tough enough to stop global warming, the compromise standards certainly won't be.
I think there's little hope of us reducing CO2 emissions sufficiently in the short-to-medium term. We're going to have to find alternate methods of controlling global warming, or else we're screwed.
Many people are never able to buy a house,
So the message is--aim low? If you plan on renting forever, you'll need to adjust the retirment savings upwards a bit.
nor are they able to pay for their children's education. My parents didn't pay for my education, and I was able to get one.
My wife and I each mostly paid for our own educations, but rising tuitions and increasing competition for college entry and scholarships mean those days are over.
. Also, your calculations are off, because you aren't considering that there's a second person making money in the family.
As soon as the spouse starts working, you need to add in all sorts of extra costs for babysitting, daycare, extra car, more eating out, etc. Also, your marginal tax rate will be a lot higher. I think the NYT did a "sample family budget" analysis a while ago, and found that, all told, a second earner only slightly increases net family income.
Just as a reference point, I'm currently making $45,000 a year...
That's doable if your job allows you to live somewhere with cheap housing (i.e., not half a million for a starter home in the Bay Area), you start working in your early 20s instead of going to grad/professional school, neither of you becomes seriously ill, Social Security and Medicare don't implode, and interest rates don't rise too much.
I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for a nuclear energy source that passes prominent environmentalists' litmus test.
You can gauge how serious and informed an environmentalist is about global warming by their willingness to consider nuclear fission. Nuclear waste disposal is a comparatively minor problem when global warming is the alternative. Unlike solar and wind, fission already supplies a large chunk of the US's total power consumption--it's a proven, understood techology. It's also safe as long as it's not built and run by communists (I'm referring not only to Chernobyl but also the reactor accidents the USSR had with their nuclear subs).
Many environmentalists say we have only ten to twenty years to avert catastrophic global warming. Given that, why would anyone want to waste that time focusing* on experimental technologies when we could be mass-producing pebble bed reactors or some other failsafe fission design now? Make the reactors modular, with the components small enough to be shipped by rail, and mass-produce them. Since construction is a large part of the cost of nuclear power, that will dramatically reduce the cost.
* I'm not saying we shouldn't be researching wind and solar, but rather that we're too far away from having viable large-scale systems for producing solar/wind electricity and storing the energy to be used during dark/calm periods. Solar and wind are useful now as means of producing supplemental power to meet peak demand, but not so good as a source for baseline power needs. Any price comparison you've seen of solar or wind versus nuclear electricity probably hasn't factored in storage costs for the solar or wind power, which makes it inaccurate for the purpose of finding economical non-greenhouse baseline power sources.
Because trading oil dependence for uranium dependence leads nowhere.
Oil comes from politically unstable countries and its combustion leads to global warming. Uranium comes in large part from Australia and Canada (which are very stable politically), and its use does not cause global warming. Sure, you have to be careful in disposing of the waste, but it's not an insurmountable problem.
Seems like a big improvement to me.
While I agree digital is digital, and as such analog artifacts are largely ignored, there is a specific issue with HDMI, namely inter-lane skew.
My point was that small amounts of analog noise on a digital signal have no effect. It's of course true that beyond a certain threshold, serious signal degradation occurs. In other words, digital signals are fine until they're not. If it's not immediately obvious that your digital signal is degraded, it's probably fine.
As a physicist, it drives me nuts how much people are willing to pay for Monster cables or other "high-end" stuff. Need speaker wire? Just buy some heavy-gauge electrical wire. Home Depot sells 500 feet (152 m) of stranded 2-conductor 10-gauge (2.588 mm dia.) wire for about $85 USD. A similar length of thinner 12-gauge (2.053 mm dia.) Monster wire would cost a small fortune.
Some of you may note that, at 20 kHz (high end of human hearing range), the skin depth of copper is only about 0.47 mm, and so for high frequency, your conductivity will only scale with wire circumference, not area. That's true for solid-core, but keep in mind the Home Depot cable I mention is stranded, and has a 25% larger circumference than the Monster stuff. That should be more than enough to make up for any slight resistivity advantage the Monster cable might have from using purer copper (assuming they do).
What's really funny is the people who assume all this stuff matters for digital signals (as I saw in a few of the "reviews" on the Monster website). Unless you're stringing really long cables or your no-name stuff is really, really bad, there won't be a difference. Bits are bits, and small amounts of analog noise will be ignored.
We have a Gaggia Carezza at work (I picked it out after research on WholeLatteLove.com). It does make excellent coffee, although the Gaggia pannarello wand is awful for making a decent microfoam for cappuccinos. Apparently, the Saeco Pannarello wand is compatible, and does a better job if you remove the outer sleeve (the Gaggia pannarello's inner nozzle is too short to make this an option). I haven't tried it yet, though.
Also our road capacity is being overwhelmed, many more bikes can fit on roads than cars.
I am a big bike fan and don't own a car, so please don't take this the wrong way, but what you're saying is potentially somewhat misleading (unintentionally, I know). Yes, more bikes can fit on the road than cars, but the capacity of most bikes is 1, versus 5 for most cars. Bikes also have a much lower top speed, so the potential "flux" of bicyclists is lower than that for driver/passengers for the same density of "seats".
Consider a freeway flowing smoothly with moderately heavy traffic. The amount of road space occupied by one car (including the gap behind it) could comfortably hold maybe 12 bikes. If a typical cyclist averages 20 mph, versus 60 mph for cars on this idealized freeway, and each car contains 4 people, then the flux (number passing a given point per unit time) of cyclists is the same as that of car commuters.
I have of course made all sorts of assumptions in favor of the cars here--most commuters don't carpool, freeways often get congested and slow, and there are a lot of places where freeways aren't available. Obviously cycling beats the current reality of single-occupant vehicles stuck in traffic. My point is just that a well-designed carpool/vanpool system can actually be competitive with cycling in terms of road efficiency.
Things, especially small intricate things, will eventually break if you move them around a lot. This particular iBook model is no exception.
Could it have been made more durable? Of course, what couldn't?
The mid-to-late model iBook G3s were notoriously unreliable, resulting in Apple eventually issuing a recall. My familiy has personally experienced about ten iBook G3 failures (most with the logic board, but a few with the display cables wearing where they pass through the screen hinge). My mother's iBook G4 is now also starting to die, with symptoms that sound very familiar to those identified by the Danish Consumer Complaint board.
I'm a big Mac fan, but I think the iBooks were among the worst laptops ever made.
You don't know the half of it. Eat any pre-packaged foods? Wanna wager a guess as to how many ingredients in those pre-packaged foods came from China?
So, really, it's two birds with one stone. Impose sanctions on China, and not only do you get to pay them back for downloading those torrent of Britney Spears and Windows Vista, you also get to not die from melamine poisoning!
Do you think $4 is expensive for a box of cereal? Wait 'til you're paying $8-10 a box.
The price increase won't be nearly that large. Yes, labor is cheaper there, but the flip side is higher shipping, crappier manufacturing technology, and so on.
Yeah, that makes sense. The PC people should pick up on these little usability things and put the eject button directly next to the power button, which doesn't require holding the command key to turn the machine off.
Turning the machine off with the power button requires either that you confirm onscreen (Restart/Sleep/Shutdown/Cancel), or hold the power button down for 5 seconds to force a restart. Seems reasonable.
Or they could have you eject by deleting the drive.
That was stupid, but was fixed a while ago. Now you can eject the drive using the Eject command or with the Eject key on the keyboard. Ejecting by dragging to the trash or deleting is kept around as an option so that old-school Mac users don't get upset.
Or, even better, don't put an eject button anywhere and only have an eject button on the keyboard.
Actually, it makes sense. This allows the OS to first check whether you have open files on the CD before it ejects. If there are open files, it notifies you. Putting the button on the drive usually means the OS can't stop you from ejecting with open files and buggering things up. If you really, really want to eject a disc with open files, you can use the emergency eject button with a paperclip.
I have no idea why you got modded down. Very weird.
Are you in BC or elsewhere in Canada? If not, your experience may just reflect a different curriculum order.