A good chunk of the diamonds out there are harvested with what is effectively slave labor and the money involved in smuggling them fuels brutal civil wars. Things have gotten better over the past few years, but there's still a lot of it. Check to make sure the diamond is from Canada or a synthetic if you're really set on a thermodynamically unstable alletrope of carbon.
Avoid (natural) rubies as well. The vast majority (90+%) come from Burma and enrich a regime that is happy to shoot Buddhist monks to stay in power. Again, synthetics are just fine.
Why is GPS useless in space? It most certainly works in orbit- you just need a few more satellites to get an accurate fix on altitude and you need to get signals from satellites on the other side of the earth, but you can do it. See http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/12714/?a=f
Now around Jupiter you're pretty much out of luck, but there's no way NASA's ever using one of these guys on a deep space probe. Data rates are a bit worse than even a first gen iPhone:^)
Petabytes are actually pretty common in the sciences. I visited NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) in Boulder five years ago and their main database was in the 2PB region even then. I'm sure it's a lot larger today
The LHC will generate several PB of data per year, as will the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. These projects aren't all that uncommon.
Halo has the best FPS story? Absurd- just because you grew up with Doom story doesn't mean Halo's is good. It's not even the first with an epic story- not even the first from *Bungie*
Halo's storyline is on par with Bungie's first FPS, Pathways into Darkness. Bungie's second FPS Marathon (and sequels) blow away Halo in the story department.
System Shock II and Thief both have far better stories, as well as better mechanics. Pure FPS they ain't, but that's what makes them so outstanding
And FPSes have weak storylines compared to good RPGs. Comparing Halo to Fallout or Planetscape Torment points out just how bad the storyline and characters are in virtually every FPS.
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if they *do* do this someday.
WoW is not going to last forever- looking at the player growth curves it's been leveling off for a while. Someday, eventually, it will begin to decline no matter how many expansion packs they manage to make. Lots of MMOs keep running at this point- you can survive with 10k subscibers if you don't bother with new content.
But WoW could be different: Blizz is smart enough that they should have something ready to go when this happens- World of Starcraft, WoW2 in a new area, something. Once that game starts off the ground, announce end of life for vintage WoW in six months time. Script an invasion of horrible baddies and follow through, with various zones falling to them while the horde and alliance frantically try to hold on. Make it so defended areas fall more slowly and let players see how long they can hold out, then burn Ironforge and Org a few days before turning off all the servers.
Follow that up with some free play time on The Next Great MMO for existing WoW players, maybe some sort of character transfer where you can move a "child" of your toon to the new world if it's WoW2.
You would have *legions* of retired players come back for this- most of the folks who have left WoW were just bored with the same old content, and frankly watching the sand castle get kicked down would be great fun. Get them excited again, get a ton of quick cash, give the players a reason to move to TNGMMO and not your competitor's and get rid of all your legacy support issues in one huge ball of fun.
What's the relevance here? LispMs were as fast to boot as you'd expect for a computational appliance. OMFG if I have to boot my current Linux desktop or Windows laptop it takes eons to come up, and that's with hardware that's probably three orders of magnitude faster. Our modern machines should be in a known, operable state in under a second, and the only reason they aren't is poor engineering / pressure from Microsoft.
While it's nice to MS bash, this doesn't explain why a Sparc Sun workstation won't come up in under a second, or a PowerPC Apple laptop, or my wireless router, or my DishTV box, or my freaking cell phone, or any of a thousand other devices that have nothing at all to do with the MS/Intel hegmony. Everything out there seems to take bloody forever to boot, and I don't think you can exactly blame MS here.
Enchanted motorcycle? No way. Ever since the nerfs when Pemptus went live, motorcycles are near useless. Roll a bastard lunatic instead. My Demicanadian bastard lunatic is busy executing 5 sick pit fiends even as I type this- motorcycles can't even manage 3 pulls...
Does your pool explode, blowing up your house and possibly the ones next door if you make a mistake or forget? Given that you seem to have no idea whatsoever of the flammability of ether or any knowledge of peroxide contamination, *I* *don't* *trust* *you*. You flippantly blow off serious risks by comparing them to trivial problems like oily rags and swimming pool pH balancing- you're clueless and you don't even know it.
Ever wonder why you don't want meth labs in your neighborhood?
Spoken like someone who's never dealt with ether. You're the exact reason why I *don't* trust random people to deal with this.
Hint: ether's just a *tiny* touch more flammable than gasoline. It also has vapors that tend to sneak along the ground- take fire training with ether sometime. It's a ton of fun, seriously- there's nothing like watching a couple of feet square suddenly go up in bright flames. (Neat example at http://www.angelo.edu/faculty/kboudrea/demos/ether_trough/ether_trough.htm)
Oh yeah, and it builds up peroxides over time that can cause the entire bottle to detonate when picked up. You know how to check for peroxide contamination every few months? I mean, you do that with your gasoline, right?
And ether is pretty benign when it comes to serious chemistry. I know people who do research into flourine chemistry- now that's *insane*. Gasoline is absurdly easy to handle compared to virtually any organic solvent used in real chemistry- low vapor pressure, low toxicity, chemically stable over long periods and so on.
despite my worries about the restrictions on personal freedom I have to wonder about the advisability of serious home chemistry work. Speaking as a (former) chemist I watched hideous safety violations daily at my previous job, and that was trained people working in a properly equipped lab on commericially zoned land.
Sure, your neighbor *might* know what they are doing. They also might be doing things like
Leaving cans of ether sitting open on a benchtop and smoking a cigarette five feet away.
Leaving cans of ether sitting in a stockroom for *20* years. We had the bomb squad in to dispose of them.
Working with phosgene in a non-functional hood. Hint- if I can smell hay walking by the door of your lab, you might want to fix it
Storing various radioactives in a lab with no functioning controls at all.
Dumping cans of waste benzene and chloroform down the drain into their septic tank. The plant I use to work at is sitting on a lake of chloroform right now, ringed with positive pressure wells to avoid poisoning the water supply for everyone around them.
Remember, these were all trained professionals. I'm not really interested in watching my neighbor's house explode because he didn't understand how to store ether properly, or having my well poisoned because he was too cheap to hire a proper chemical disposal service. Since my neighbor is a complete amateur, I have *no* idea how capable he is in handling this stuff. I've got a freaking PhD in the subject but there's no way I'm going to do anything beyond a chemistry set in my basement- I'm rusty and there's way too much chance of massive fail.
Look at it this way- are you going to let your neighbor build high-power rockets in his basement and launch them from his backyard? (I'm not talking Estees, I'm talking the serious stuff) No? Why not? Because you hate his freedom or because they have a high chance of failure that could injure or kill a lot of people?
Now, I've taken a game back in the past, where the install CD was absolutely blank. No tracks burned on it.. Nada. I took it back to the store, and they simply said "We don't do refunds on games". I had to drag that right back to their head office with a legal threat under the consumer protection legislation before they deigned to offer me a refund.
This is why you always buy stuff with a credit card. "You won't take it back even if it's defective? Here, let me pull out my cell phone and I'll have them reverse the charges." Tell the CC company that they sold you a defective product and that they won't do a refund/exchange. (Preferably, do this loudly while standing in line at the store) The saledroid behind the counter probably won't care, but the manager will since they can get socked with all sorts of badness from the CC company for too many problems.
This month's issue of Sky and Telescope has a nice article on Pan-STARRS and a few other enormous survey telescopes. The linked article missed one of the most interesting bits of the camera- it's using an Orthogonal Transfer Charge Coupled Device.(See http://pan-starrs.ifa.hawaii.edu/public/design-features/cameras.html) An OTCCD can transfer built up charge from one pixel to another, so you can compensate for atmospheric distortion by simply moving stuff on the chip rather than trying to do it with a flexible mirror or some other optical approach. Very sweet trick
The article included a lot of details on the immense Large Synoptic Survey Telescope which will dwarf Pan-STARRS when it's done in ~2016. (LSST is in the south, Pan-STARRS is in the north, so they don't really compete) The specs for the LSST data boggle the mind- the thing will cover the entire southern sky every 3 days down to 24th magnitude, generating 30TB of data a night or ~13petabytes per year and having over 100 TFLOPS of computers devoted to sorting it. Read the specs here: http://www.lsst.org/About/lsst_baseline.shtml
...Looks over at his little 6" and 8" scopes and sighs...
This is a misleading statement by the poster and the article itself. The post-resurrection text in Mark (which is the only text the article seems to mention is in contention) has always been recognized by the modern Christian church as not appearing in the earliest manuscripts. Don't take my word for it; pick up the latest NIV Bible and look at Mark 16:9-20. It most likely mentions this very fact.
While this may be correct for some modern Christians, I suspect you don't hang around with many true Fundementalists. I know quite a few for whom the NIV and other modern translations are regarded as anathema- the King James bible is the *only* correct bible, and all others that differ are incorrect. Since the last 8 verses of Mark are in the KJV, they are canonical, no matter what modern biblical scholarship says. These folks (and there are a *lot* of them out there) ignore all of that fancy-dancy intellectual stuff and focus on what the True Word of God really is.
These are the folks who will have a problem with this Codex. Of course, the vast majority have very little understanding or interest in the roots of the Bible so they probably won't care much anyway.
While not exactly comparable since I work in academia, I went through a period recently where the college I worked at was going through a reorganization. This was telegraphed well in advance, and I instantly put out the resume to as many places as I could find. The problem? I'm specialized (instructional technology) enough that finding a comparable job within geographical constraints (basically, close enough to drive to our families) was tough- there were exactly *2* jobs I actually wanted in the 3 months I looked, and another 4-6 that I would accept. I also have a wife and two kids, so a prolonged period without a job isn't an option.
If you're in my shoes, you have to start looking and start looking early- you just can't afford to wait since the total might well be 0 next week. My job did get canned- they moved me into a vacant programmer position that I didn't want but I took since I needed the health insurance for my kids. Two days later I got the inital interview call from my top choice, and I was out of the old job in a month and a half, but even so it was a really, really stressful time. If you're in a high-demand area or simply have a lot of possible options (and have no family) then sit still and see what happens, although other posters are right- check the new benefits package very carefully. My old job also cut retirement benefits during the reorg.
See the Pipe International blog about the cable they are laying between Australia and Guam. There's tons of detail in here for any sort of geek- stuff on the ships, sonar and mapping of the seabed, how modern cables amplify signals, details on the buildings that house both ends and tons more.
One of the oddest blogs out there, but strangely compelling.
Something like 97% of *all* email received at my college is dumped by Barracuda even before it hits our system. That's an enormous drain on our network for *zero* value to us, not to mention the cost of the email blocker, cost of personnel to maintain it, cost of the time needed to fix false positives and of course the time to deal with the FBI when a child porn spam sneaks through and one of your professors calls them directly. (No, I'm not joking about the latter)
I suspect that you have no real idea of the scale of spam since your ISP is probably blocking the vast majority of it for you. That service isn't free- you're paying for it.
Sadly, the Kindle's a really lousy textbook reader. It doesn't do indexes, doesn't do non-standard formatting well, doesn't handle images well (and obviously can't do any kind of color) and content from Amazon is DRM'd up the yinyang.
Yup- I do this in every chem course I teach. You get a list of suggested problems, and I'm happy to do them as examples in class if you ask for help. The tests are going to be almost the same problems- I'll switch out numbers, elements and the rest, but the basic structure is going to be there for about 80% of the test. I'll toss in 1-2 more advanced/multi-step problems to sort out the folks who deserve A's from the B's and C's. I also let students bring a 3x5 card in with any notes they want for the test. Saves on people trying to smuggle in cheat sheets, and I can tell within 10 points what grade you'll get on the test based on that 3x5 card.
Back to the original article: I hate the idea of just pirating the book since you do end up hurting the author, who doesn't get much for this. Work instead on open texts as a far better alternative.
I am amazed how a closed-source app like Opera can outperform open source browsers that can supposedly integrate into the enviroment much better by such a high margin.
Why should you be surprised that a small, focused team can make sure that outperforms software created by a huge pool? In my experience OS software is rarely if ever faster than commercial stuff.
Linux? RTOSs like QNX blow the doors off of Linux in both speed and size
OpenOffice. Laugh- the slowest office suite out there by a large margin. Even the bloated pig of Office2007 is quicker.
Opera? Certainly much faster than Firefox and uses a lot less memory
GCC? Compile time might be ok, but in terms of output optimized code speed IBM's XLC just utterly destroyed it back when I used both in grad school.
I'm sure there are lots of others out there- OS programmers aren't somehow magically better than folks working in commercial shops. They can turn out some truly great stuff (Apache comes foremost to mind) but OS just isn't a silver bullet.
So in other words you're a bully. You like to sneak up on people working on a task and kick their sand castle over just because you can. Given that you're taking on 9 people at once and are assured of the outcome, I assume they are 20+ levels below you? I bet it's even better when they get a good lag spike and can't fight back at all, right?
That's PvP alright. It's also why I don't play UO or similar games- I have a life, and so can't compete with a bunch of 14-year-old, 12+ hour-a-day playtime gankers and spawn campers who enjoy ruining the experience for others simple to prove how l33t they are. I get it, you're better than me at the game. That's nice, but I'm not going to play a game where I have to be the hardest of hardcore to even be allowed to join.
People like you are *why* WoW has 10 million+ subscribers and none of the MMOs catering to the hardcore PvP crowd have gone anywhere at all. (Ok, EVE seems to be doing fairly well)
Quick follow up- China is mentioned briefly as having created incendiaries, but not explosives, in the same class as greek fire. (Missed it the first time) This is also dead wrong- the Chinese did have explosive formulations. Greek fire, OTOH, was not a nitre+fuel based mixture to the best of our knowledge, although the exact formula has been lost.
The science of gunpowder was well documented in there, but the history is dead wrong. Schwartz and Bacon were in no way the creators of gunpowder- the Chinese developed it centuries before, and there is ample historical documentation for the development of various strains, uses in warfare, etc. China is not mentioned *anywhere* in the article.
I've heard a lot of people talk about how great the 1911 version of EB is- based on this article, I would not trust it for anything remotely historical that involves something outside of Europe. This isn't a minor error- this is a massive ton of ignorance.
Slashdot Mirror
Avoid (natural) rubies as well. The vast majority (90+%) come from Burma and enrich a regime that is happy to shoot Buddhist monks to stay in power. Again, synthetics are just fine.
Now around Jupiter you're pretty much out of luck, but there's no way NASA's ever using one of these guys on a deep space probe. Data rates are a bit worse than even a first gen iPhone :^)
The LHC will generate several PB of data per year, as will the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. These projects aren't all that uncommon.
Halo's storyline is on par with Bungie's first FPS, Pathways into Darkness. Bungie's second FPS Marathon (and sequels) blow away Halo in the story department.
System Shock II and Thief both have far better stories, as well as better mechanics. Pure FPS they ain't, but that's what makes them so outstanding
And FPSes have weak storylines compared to good RPGs. Comparing Halo to Fallout or Planetscape Torment points out just how bad the storyline and characters are in virtually every FPS.
WoW is not going to last forever- looking at the player growth curves it's been leveling off for a while. Someday, eventually, it will begin to decline no matter how many expansion packs they manage to make. Lots of MMOs keep running at this point- you can survive with 10k subscibers if you don't bother with new content.
But WoW could be different: Blizz is smart enough that they should have something ready to go when this happens- World of Starcraft, WoW2 in a new area, something. Once that game starts off the ground, announce end of life for vintage WoW in six months time. Script an invasion of horrible baddies and follow through, with various zones falling to them while the horde and alliance frantically try to hold on. Make it so defended areas fall more slowly and let players see how long they can hold out, then burn Ironforge and Org a few days before turning off all the servers.
Follow that up with some free play time on The Next Great MMO for existing WoW players, maybe some sort of character transfer where you can move a "child" of your toon to the new world if it's WoW2.
You would have *legions* of retired players come back for this- most of the folks who have left WoW were just bored with the same old content, and frankly watching the sand castle get kicked down would be great fun. Get them excited again, get a ton of quick cash, give the players a reason to move to TNGMMO and not your competitor's and get rid of all your legacy support issues in one huge ball of fun.
While it's nice to MS bash, this doesn't explain why a Sparc Sun workstation won't come up in under a second, or a PowerPC Apple laptop, or my wireless router, or my DishTV box, or my freaking cell phone, or any of a thousand other devices that have nothing at all to do with the MS/Intel hegmony. Everything out there seems to take bloody forever to boot, and I don't think you can exactly blame MS here.
Enchanted motorcycle? No way. Ever since the nerfs when Pemptus went live, motorcycles are near useless. Roll a bastard lunatic instead. My Demicanadian bastard lunatic is busy executing 5 sick pit fiends even as I type this- motorcycles can't even manage 3 pulls...
Ever wonder why you don't want meth labs in your neighborhood?
Hint: ether's just a *tiny* touch more flammable than gasoline. It also has vapors that tend to sneak along the ground- take fire training with ether sometime. It's a ton of fun, seriously- there's nothing like watching a couple of feet square suddenly go up in bright flames. (Neat example at http://www.angelo.edu/faculty/kboudrea/demos/ether_trough/ether_trough.htm)
Oh yeah, and it builds up peroxides over time that can cause the entire bottle to detonate when picked up. You know how to check for peroxide contamination every few months? I mean, you do that with your gasoline, right?
And ether is pretty benign when it comes to serious chemistry. I know people who do research into flourine chemistry- now that's *insane*. Gasoline is absurdly easy to handle compared to virtually any organic solvent used in real chemistry- low vapor pressure, low toxicity, chemically stable over long periods and so on.
Sure, your neighbor *might* know what they are doing. They also might be doing things like
Remember, these were all trained professionals. I'm not really interested in watching my neighbor's house explode because he didn't understand how to store ether properly, or having my well poisoned because he was too cheap to hire a proper chemical disposal service. Since my neighbor is a complete amateur, I have *no* idea how capable he is in handling this stuff. I've got a freaking PhD in the subject but there's no way I'm going to do anything beyond a chemistry set in my basement- I'm rusty and there's way too much chance of massive fail.
Look at it this way- are you going to let your neighbor build high-power rockets in his basement and launch them from his backyard? (I'm not talking Estees, I'm talking the serious stuff) No? Why not? Because you hate his freedom or because they have a high chance of failure that could injure or kill a lot of people?
This is why you always buy stuff with a credit card. "You won't take it back even if it's defective? Here, let me pull out my cell phone and I'll have them reverse the charges." Tell the CC company that they sold you a defective product and that they won't do a refund/exchange. (Preferably, do this loudly while standing in line at the store) The saledroid behind the counter probably won't care, but the manager will since they can get socked with all sorts of badness from the CC company for too many problems.
The article included a lot of details on the immense Large Synoptic Survey Telescope which will dwarf Pan-STARRS when it's done in ~2016. (LSST is in the south, Pan-STARRS is in the north, so they don't really compete) The specs for the LSST data boggle the mind- the thing will cover the entire southern sky every 3 days down to 24th magnitude, generating 30TB of data a night or ~13petabytes per year and having over 100 TFLOPS of computers devoted to sorting it. Read the specs here: http://www.lsst.org/About/lsst_baseline.shtml
...Looks over at his little 6" and 8" scopes and sighs...
While this may be correct for some modern Christians, I suspect you don't hang around with many true Fundementalists. I know quite a few for whom the NIV and other modern translations are regarded as anathema- the King James bible is the *only* correct bible, and all others that differ are incorrect. Since the last 8 verses of Mark are in the KJV, they are canonical, no matter what modern biblical scholarship says. These folks (and there are a *lot* of them out there) ignore all of that fancy-dancy intellectual stuff and focus on what the True Word of God really is.
These are the folks who will have a problem with this Codex. Of course, the vast majority have very little understanding or interest in the roots of the Bible so they probably won't care much anyway.
Will he write an ending for it, or will it just sort of stop in mid-page?
Embrace the deathport, the only *real* way to travel in AOC. (43 PoM before realizing the game was only half baked.)
You think it's going to be a week? Try 3 months. This doesn't bode well for Orion...
If you're in my shoes, you have to start looking and start looking early- you just can't afford to wait since the total might well be 0 next week. My job did get canned- they moved me into a vacant programmer position that I didn't want but I took since I needed the health insurance for my kids. Two days later I got the inital interview call from my top choice, and I was out of the old job in a month and a half, but even so it was a really, really stressful time. If you're in a high-demand area or simply have a lot of possible options (and have no family) then sit still and see what happens, although other posters are right- check the new benefits package very carefully. My old job also cut retirement benefits during the reorg.
One of the oddest blogs out there, but strangely compelling.
Something like 97% of *all* email received at my college is dumped by Barracuda even before it hits our system. That's an enormous drain on our network for *zero* value to us, not to mention the cost of the email blocker, cost of personnel to maintain it, cost of the time needed to fix false positives and of course the time to deal with the FBI when a child porn spam sneaks through and one of your professors calls them directly. (No, I'm not joking about the latter)
I suspect that you have no real idea of the scale of spam since your ISP is probably blocking the vast majority of it for you. That service isn't free- you're paying for it.
To Amazon's credit, there seem to be some folks there who understand the limitations and are working to fix them. If they can handle the DRM issue and make some major tech changes I'd love to see this.
Back to the original article: I hate the idea of just pirating the book since you do end up hurting the author, who doesn't get much for this. Work instead on open texts as a far better alternative.
Why should you be surprised that a small, focused team can make sure that outperforms software created by a huge pool? In my experience OS software is rarely if ever faster than commercial stuff.
Linux? RTOSs like QNX blow the doors off of Linux in both speed and size
OpenOffice. Laugh- the slowest office suite out there by a large margin. Even the bloated pig of Office2007 is quicker.
Opera? Certainly much faster than Firefox and uses a lot less memory
GCC? Compile time might be ok, but in terms of output optimized code speed IBM's XLC just utterly destroyed it back when I used both in grad school.
I'm sure there are lots of others out there- OS programmers aren't somehow magically better than folks working in commercial shops. They can turn out some truly great stuff (Apache comes foremost to mind) but OS just isn't a silver bullet.
That's PvP alright. It's also why I don't play UO or similar games- I have a life, and so can't compete with a bunch of 14-year-old, 12+ hour-a-day playtime gankers and spawn campers who enjoy ruining the experience for others simple to prove how l33t they are. I get it, you're better than me at the game. That's nice, but I'm not going to play a game where I have to be the hardest of hardcore to even be allowed to join.
People like you are *why* WoW has 10 million+ subscribers and none of the MMOs catering to the hardcore PvP crowd have gone anywhere at all. (Ok, EVE seems to be doing fairly well)
Quick follow up- China is mentioned briefly as having created incendiaries, but not explosives, in the same class as greek fire. (Missed it the first time) This is also dead wrong- the Chinese did have explosive formulations. Greek fire, OTOH, was not a nitre+fuel based mixture to the best of our knowledge, although the exact formula has been lost.
I've heard a lot of people talk about how great the 1911 version of EB is- based on this article, I would not trust it for anything remotely historical that involves something outside of Europe. This isn't a minor error- this is a massive ton of ignorance.