My first thought was more along the lines of "what kind of idiot thought a laser would make a good flood lamp?"
You don't need a point of light in your car headlights, you need a flood lamp that illuminates a large area.
Or maybe it's not actually a laser, and this is just marketing drivel.
Such marketing drivel does little good when people can't even afford to read TFA.
It will be a blue laser internally. The laser will be converted by a "fluorescent phosphor material into a pure white light".
The phrase "pure white" always stuns me. White is made by a soup of frequencies that trigger the red, green, and blue receptors equally for humans. Any light that is white is clearly not of a pure frequency. This not withstanding, the rest of the explanation makes sense.
I remember in school an important lesson that most people do not get about environmentalism. Everything you do has a trade-off.
Hush. He's supposed to plant anti-capitalistic dreams in these children's heads, not give them actual facts and numbers.
If you show that the most efficient energy source is also the cheapest, then the kids may realize that subsidizing wind farms with tax money depletes our resources more than traditional forms!
The core of the environmental movement today is making Americans to feel guilty for their existence, and then using this guilt to extract money from them. Al Gore has done it by selling carbon credits to guilty feeling Americans. Car manufactures have tricked people to junking cars worth thousands of dollars in order to buy yet another new car that will save them a couple hundred dollars in gas. Farmers have tricked us into burning our food, so that they can sell more of it.
If you really want to do this right, you should sell the kids a book, some carbon credits of your own making, and charge them for your speech. You could also tell them that if they give you enough money, you'll stop flying your plane around, and really save the environment even more. The more ridiculous, the better. If you do it right, these kids will actually learn to evaluate such scams correctly before they get to voting age!
The Americans have put forward a plan to prevent whale extinction caused by the Japanese. The plan involves reseeding the sperm whale population by way of a pair of whales from San Francisco Bay.
The whales will be flown near enough to the sun to reach warp 14, allowing time travel. This will allow whales from 1984 to be brought possibly centuries into the future, if necessary.
The plan isn't just hype. Even new materials necessary for the containment vessels have been engineered for this purpose (transparent aluminium).
The directing scientists responsible for this ambitious plan are from a research institution in California -- Harve Bennett and Leanord Nimoy.
If you're going to cancel the possibility of bringing in a second natural satellite based on safety concerns, then you also have to cancel the space elevator plans.
We are so far from building a space elevator that many plans include "using a geostationary asteroid brought into earth's orbit" as the counterweight, because it is assumed we'll have plenty of them by that time.
All space elevator proposals made so far require a yet-to-be-identified material that is stronger than nanotubes and graphene that can be produced in larger quantities than nanotubes and graphene. No space elevator proposal has yet been able to address concerns of being hit by meteorites, or concerns about destruction by vibrational harmonics. The safety issues alone mean that space elevators will probably never be anything more than science fiction.:(
It would be if poker in WoW was built using stuff you found in the world.
Instead, mods in World of warcraft are written using lua (a programming language, not a world obect). If raid bosses dropped variables, enclosure blocks, and while-loops, and those were needed for building the mod, then that would be closer to what people are doing in minecraft.
If you want to compare modding within the two games, then things are a bit closer. Modding in minecraft gives a lot more open (ie there are no fly mods in WoW, but lots of them in minecraft), but this is only because there is no universal server in minecraft. What would be cheating in WoW is just a "different way to play" in minecraft. So, the result of mods in WoW are cosmetic only. You can't ever write a mod using the published API to kill kobolds, and if you do it on your own, then it breaks the TOS.
Most people would view WoW as the much more immersive game, but the fact that people write mods to play poker while waiting for things to develop makes me wonder if I really understand what it means to be immersive. In Minecraft, people would never bother playing games through the chat system while their characters just stood in one place. If a poker game was made with mods in minecraft, I'm quite sure it would involve actual buttons in the world for "Call", "Raise", etc., and the display of cards to each player would be real world objects, viewable from their vantage point, but not from the other player's vantage points. Returning cards to the discard pile could be done by opening a water valve, letting water wash away the tile-entity cards, and then the valve would close, allowing a dry surface for the next dealt hand. Minecraft may actually be the most immersive game ever.
actually I'm more currious, what enforces the stranger to call you, I know there is a robot for backup to them if they aren't available, but what happens if they let it ring once and hang up imidiately? I mean wouldn't the service be a bit risky to count on.
The robot is involved in every call. First it calls the party that will say "Good Morning". Once they are on the line, then it dials the one who needs to be woken.
If the first party just stays silent, at least the person who scheduled the call will be woken by the ring. At least, that's what I understand from the FAQ.
Alt+` (the key above tab) does that. But one thing that I will say is that I don't understand the idea of grouping windows by parent application. It is an OS X feature I never got on with at all.
I'm also impressed with Gnome 3, and have settled on it. I couldn't stand Gnome 2, and gave it up for fluxbox, but have come back now to Gnome 3.
I posted in the other gnome 3 story what I had to do to eventually accept gnome 3. Some of the default options are really bad (like disabling multiple workspaces on multiple monitors), but I've been able to cope with most, if not change them.
The Alt-` issue is something that I forgot to list. I hated it on mac, but actually think it's good on Gnome3, just because the number of terminal windows I have open is quite large (pretty much one for each workspace).
I'm still wondering how to remove this behavior. I'm sure that it can be tweaked to work like Gnome2, but haven't found the option.
And, as far as I know, Mojang only has 3 employees.
I don't think this is really about winning or losing the trademark battle anyway. It's a publicity stunt. If Bethesda agrees, they'll probably destroy whatever team Mojang assembles, but there will be plenty of good publicity to be shared between the two companies.
Notch just got married this weekend, and is officially away right now, for his honeymoon. This lawsuit came up at a terrible time, and this is the way that Notch handles such stuff.
Notch seems to read and reply most to comments on the minecraft channel at reddit. The thread there would probably be the place to post if you want to volunteer as one of the representatives:)
While this particular use of wealth is quite benign, I can think of many ways that people could spend their wealth to piss me off. For instance, what if Al Gore got all his buddies together and they bought up all the oil companies and shut them down just to prove a point? Would you really think "oh, well, he was fully within his rights to do that, and I don't begrudge his actions one bit" as you starved to death?
It seems you've actually missed the whole point of free enterprise. If someone buys all the companies that do "x", then that opens the market for a lot of NEW companies that do "x".
Also, Al Gore would never do that. You're assuming that his actions so far have something to do with love for the environment, but everything he that he has done (book writing, selling carbon credits) has a lot more to do with his love for money. He would never waste his own money on buying companies and shutting them down.
In the U.S. If your better eye is 20/200 or worse without aid of contact lens, then you are legally blind. I've known several people who are legally blind who can certainly see well enough to watch movies.
The argument these movies had no value because of his bad eyesight is bad is quite silly, in my opinion.
Charities may help the poorest in society in the short term, but a new country with true freedom may do far more in the long term. The average family living below the poverty line in the US has a larger house than the average family (poor and rich together) in the EU. It wouldn't have been possible if not for the financing that Ferdinand and Isabella provided for some crazy explorer.
Personally, I'm not jealous of the wealth that Gates or Thiel have. I don't feel as if they owe me anything. If I disagree with Thiel's plan, and think it isn't worth investing that money that way, then I know the correct response is to earn my own money, and spend it the way that I think it should be spent. Hating this man for the way that he spends his wealth shows that you are the egotistical one, not him.
I don't care about them; I care about how secure my browser is...
Actually, I do care about them, but they aren't really relevant. Someone who doesn't know about extensions is not going to be reading studies about browser safety.
The study should consider the audience. Anyone digging for information about browser security is going to know about noscript.
Even if noscript wasn't one of the most commonly installed browser addon, an article about browser security should certainly discuss it. The.pdf with the results is 21 pages long, and doesn't even mention noscript, yet claims to be a study on browser security. That proves (to me) that there must have been an ulterior motive behind this study.
Wikipedia states that they received settlements on 70 suits filed in their first year (2010). I don't see any reference for that number, though, and nothing is listed for 2011.
According to an unofficial page tracking their lawsuits, they have received an estimated $350,000 from settlements. The page appears to be out of date, and there is no way to really know what they've collected, but I'll bet it's not enough to cover the original costs of the purchased copyrights and cover legal fees for cases that they lose.
Many attempts to make Thorium-based reactors have been tried, but none have been successful enough to make it to production. I could see a Thorium reactor in 10-20 years, but there is no way that it would fit in a car.
The article makes it clear this group is quite convinced that it will work. They say they expect to get a vehicle on the road within 2 years. The whole issue of feasibility comes down to the following line from the article:
A 250 MW unit weighing about 500 lbs. (227 kg) would be small and light enough to drop under the hood of a car, he says.
I can not imagine a 500 lb nuclear reactor. The reactor will need containment vessels for fuel and spent fuel. It will require large amounts of water for cooling. It will require control rods. And, most importantly, it will require a turbine. Each of those components will be close to a ton. The idea that it could all be less than 500 lbs is just silly.
I hope nobody invests any money in this. It isn't real.
It could be too late. The article says they have 40 employees already. I really can't imagine how he has gotten this much grant money or private investors.
Reminds me of an episode of Unsolved mysteries where green goop blanketed a whole town one night. People got sick from it. Tests revealed there was human blood cells in the goop.
Some hacker broke the TOS of online games in South Korea. They made a barrel of money in the process, and are completely untraceable. The coup_d'état is that they managed to build a bread-crumb trail that points to the North Korean government, and South Korea fell for it!
More lies...the debt will INCREASE by almost 8 trillion over the next 10 years. And probably more than that I can guarantee you! The S&P should have downgraded us a loooonnnggggg time ago.
And sorry it is no ones fault but ours.
You are very right on this. If a bloodless coup occurs (as happened recently in Thailand), then the new government could simply announce that it is not honoring previous bonds, or is only giving 50 cents on the dollar. There is no talk of such a thing happening, but if the current spending binge continues (QE4,5,6 and more bailouts), then such a situation could become a real possibility.
The complaint in the article seems to be based on the timing. Right after the debt ceiling fiasco reached resolution, S&P made their announcement, and liberals are calling the move political. Honestly, I think the timing is not political. Until the actual deal occurred, there was a chance that conservatives may impose spending limits with the deal. The final deal was a huge blow to conservatives, and does raise real questions about fiscal policy over the next few years.
I'm using it now. I thought for sure that I would give it a week, and then go back to something that I liked, but it's actually grown on me.
Most of the change of mind was due to me discovering stuff that wasn't completely obvious: 1) Install gconf-editor, and use it to set up hotkeys. See #2 for instructions on how to install it. 2) Fix multiple monitors by changing "workspaces only on primary" to false. 3) use "/usr/bin/terminal" instead of "gnome-terminal". The gnome version has issues. Beware that transparency is buggy unless the terminal is full screen. 4) Use Alt-F2 to open new applications (like Firefox), instead of hitting the super key (windows key) and searching. 5) Use ctrl-alt-up/down to change workspaces. This should be obvious to most people. 6) If you are looking for 'Shutdown', then hold down 'Alt' while you open the start menu. I don't know why it isn't there by default.
It's quite clear to me that gnome3 is in its infancy. It is not nearly as customizable as I would like, and it has bugs. But it's clean, it's fast, and it doesn't get in the way too much, so I'm sticking with it.
I still think fvwm95 is my favorite WM, due to it's 2-dimensional extensible workspace pager. I can't believe nothing like that exists for modern window managers. After that, I'll take gnome3, because it allows me to create workspaces on the fly. After that comes KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, Unity, XFCE, and all other window managers that I've tried.
Slashdot Mirror
My first thought was more along the lines of "what kind of idiot thought a laser would make a good flood lamp?"
You don't need a point of light in your car headlights, you need a flood lamp that illuminates a large area.
Or maybe it's not actually a laser, and this is just marketing drivel.
Such marketing drivel does little good when people can't even afford to read TFA.
It will be a blue laser internally. The laser will be converted by a "fluorescent phosphor material into a pure white light".
The phrase "pure white" always stuns me. White is made by a soup of frequencies that trigger the red, green, and blue receptors equally for humans. Any light that is white is clearly not of a pure frequency. This not withstanding, the rest of the explanation makes sense.
I remember in school an important lesson that most people do not get about environmentalism. Everything you do has a trade-off.
Hush. He's supposed to plant anti-capitalistic dreams in these children's heads, not give them actual facts and numbers.
If you show that the most efficient energy source is also the cheapest, then the kids may realize that subsidizing wind farms with tax money depletes our resources more than traditional forms!
The core of the environmental movement today is making Americans to feel guilty for their existence, and then using this guilt to extract money from them. Al Gore has done it by selling carbon credits to guilty feeling Americans. Car manufactures have tricked people to junking cars worth thousands of dollars in order to buy yet another new car that will save them a couple hundred dollars in gas. Farmers have tricked us into burning our food, so that they can sell more of it.
If you really want to do this right, you should sell the kids a book, some carbon credits of your own making, and charge them for your speech. You could also tell them that if they give you enough money, you'll stop flying your plane around, and really save the environment even more. The more ridiculous, the better. If you do it right, these kids will actually learn to evaluate such scams correctly before they get to voting age!
Meanwhile in China:
The Americans have put forward a plan to prevent whale extinction caused by the Japanese. The plan involves reseeding the sperm whale population by way of a pair of whales from San Francisco Bay.
The whales will be flown near enough to the sun to reach warp 14, allowing time travel. This will allow whales from 1984 to be brought possibly centuries into the future, if necessary.
The plan isn't just hype. Even new materials necessary for the containment vessels have been engineered for this purpose (transparent aluminium).
The directing scientists responsible for this ambitious plan are from a research institution in California -- Harve Bennett and Leanord Nimoy.
If you're going to cancel the possibility of bringing in a second natural satellite based on safety concerns, then you also have to cancel the space elevator plans.
We are so far from building a space elevator that many plans include "using a geostationary asteroid brought into earth's orbit" as the counterweight, because it is assumed we'll have plenty of them by that time.
All space elevator proposals made so far require a yet-to-be-identified material that is stronger than nanotubes and graphene that can be produced in larger quantities than nanotubes and graphene. No space elevator proposal has yet been able to address concerns of being hit by meteorites, or concerns about destruction by vibrational harmonics. The safety issues alone mean that space elevators will probably never be anything more than science fiction. :(
It would be if poker in WoW was built using stuff you found in the world.
Instead, mods in World of warcraft are written using lua (a programming language, not a world obect). If raid bosses dropped variables, enclosure blocks, and while-loops, and those were needed for building the mod, then that would be closer to what people are doing in minecraft.
If you want to compare modding within the two games, then things are a bit closer. Modding in minecraft gives a lot more open (ie there are no fly mods in WoW, but lots of them in minecraft), but this is only because there is no universal server in minecraft. What would be cheating in WoW is just a "different way to play" in minecraft. So, the result of mods in WoW are cosmetic only. You can't ever write a mod using the published API to kill kobolds, and if you do it on your own, then it breaks the TOS.
Most people would view WoW as the much more immersive game, but the fact that people write mods to play poker while waiting for things to develop makes me wonder if I really understand what it means to be immersive. In Minecraft, people would never bother playing games through the chat system while their characters just stood in one place. If a poker game was made with mods in minecraft, I'm quite sure it would involve actual buttons in the world for "Call", "Raise", etc., and the display of cards to each player would be real world objects, viewable from their vantage point, but not from the other player's vantage points. Returning cards to the discard pile could be done by opening a water valve, letting water wash away the tile-entity cards, and then the valve would close, allowing a dry surface for the next dealt hand. Minecraft may actually be the most immersive game ever.
actually I'm more currious, what enforces the stranger to call you, I know there is a robot for backup to them if they aren't available, but what happens if they let it ring once and hang up imidiately? I mean wouldn't the service be a bit risky to count on.
The robot is involved in every call. First it calls the party that will say "Good Morning". Once they are on the line, then it dials the one who needs to be woken.
If the first party just stays silent, at least the person who scheduled the call will be woken by the ring. At least, that's what I understand from the FAQ.
My brother sends more than 1000 texts per month, and he has the $240/yr unlimited plan for his iphone.
I don't like paying much, so I bought a textfree account ($7 up front + ongoing ads), and have unlimited texts for free.
Seems like people fit in one of 2 categories. Either they know about textfree, or they don't. Those that don't pay an extra $240 a year.
If you said "4 colors is not always enough to color a map", but refused to give an example that took more than 4, then I would not be convinced.
If you say that not all software patents are bad, just most, but fail to give an example, then I'm not convinced either.
Alt+` (the key above tab) does that. But one thing that I will say is that I don't understand the idea of grouping windows by parent application. It is an OS X feature I never got on with at all.
I'm also impressed with Gnome 3, and have settled on it. I couldn't stand Gnome 2, and gave it up for fluxbox, but have come back now to Gnome 3.
I posted in the other gnome 3 story what I had to do to eventually accept gnome 3. Some of the default options are really bad (like disabling multiple workspaces on multiple monitors), but I've been able to cope with most, if not change them.
The Alt-` issue is something that I forgot to list. I hated it on mac, but actually think it's good on Gnome3, just because the number of terminal windows I have open is quite large (pretty much one for each workspace).
I'm still wondering how to remove this behavior. I'm sure that it can be tweaked to work like Gnome2, but haven't found the option.
And, as far as I know, Mojang only has 3 employees.
I don't think this is really about winning or losing the trademark battle anyway. It's a publicity stunt. If Bethesda agrees, they'll probably destroy whatever team Mojang assembles, but there will be plenty of good publicity to be shared between the two companies.
I do remember reading that, according to some interpretations, Trial by Combat *may indeed* be legal under the US legal system...
And there is a history of trademark disputes being settled this way.
Notch just got married this weekend, and is officially away right now, for his honeymoon. This lawsuit came up at a terrible time, and this is the way that Notch handles such stuff.
Notch seems to read and reply most to comments on the minecraft channel at reddit. The thread there would probably be the place to post if you want to volunteer as one of the representatives :)
I'll bet that the site remains unhacked for no longer than a week.
While this particular use of wealth is quite benign, I can think of many ways that people could spend their wealth to piss me off. For instance, what if Al Gore got all his buddies together and they bought up all the oil companies and shut them down just to prove a point? Would you really think "oh, well, he was fully within his rights to do that, and I don't begrudge his actions one bit" as you starved to death?
It seems you've actually missed the whole point of free enterprise. If someone buys all the companies that do "x", then that opens the market for a lot of NEW companies that do "x".
Also, Al Gore would never do that. You're assuming that his actions so far have something to do with love for the environment, but everything he that he has done (book writing, selling carbon credits) has a lot more to do with his love for money. He would never waste his own money on buying companies and shutting them down.
In the U.S. If your better eye is 20/200 or worse without aid of contact lens, then you are legally blind. I've known several people who are legally blind who can certainly see well enough to watch movies.
The argument these movies had no value because of his bad eyesight is bad is quite silly, in my opinion.
Charities may help the poorest in society in the short term, but a new country with true freedom may do far more in the long term. The average family living below the poverty line in the US has a larger house than the average family (poor and rich together) in the EU. It wouldn't have been possible if not for the financing that Ferdinand and Isabella provided for some crazy explorer.
Personally, I'm not jealous of the wealth that Gates or Thiel have. I don't feel as if they owe me anything. If I disagree with Thiel's plan, and think it isn't worth investing that money that way, then I know the correct response is to earn my own money, and spend it the way that I think it should be spent. Hating this man for the way that he spends his wealth shows that you are the egotistical one, not him.
I don't care about them; I care about how secure my browser is...
Actually, I do care about them, but they aren't really relevant. Someone who doesn't know about extensions is not going to be reading studies about browser safety.
The study should consider the audience. Anyone digging for information about browser security is going to know about noscript.
Even if noscript wasn't one of the most commonly installed browser addon, an article about browser security should certainly discuss it. The .pdf with the results is 21 pages long, and doesn't even mention noscript, yet claims to be a study on browser security. That proves (to me) that there must have been an ulterior motive behind this study.
Wikipedia states that they received settlements on 70 suits filed in their first year (2010). I don't see any reference for that number, though, and nothing is listed for 2011.
According to an unofficial page tracking their lawsuits, they have received an estimated $350,000 from settlements. The page appears to be out of date, and there is no way to really know what they've collected, but I'll bet it's not enough to cover the original costs of the purchased copyrights and cover legal fees for cases that they lose.
Many attempts to make Thorium-based reactors have been tried, but none have been successful enough to make it to production. I could see a Thorium reactor in 10-20 years, but there is no way that it would fit in a car.
The article makes it clear this group is quite convinced that it will work. They say they expect to get a vehicle on the road within 2 years. The whole issue of feasibility comes down to the following line from the article:
I can not imagine a 500 lb nuclear reactor. The reactor will need containment vessels for fuel and spent fuel. It will require large amounts of water for cooling. It will require control rods. And, most importantly, it will require a turbine. Each of those components will be close to a ton. The idea that it could all be less than 500 lbs is just silly.
I hope nobody invests any money in this. It isn't real.
It could be too late. The article says they have 40 employees already. I really can't imagine how he has gotten this much grant money or private investors.
Reminds me of an episode of Unsolved mysteries where green goop blanketed a whole town one night. People got sick from it. Tests revealed there was human blood cells in the goop.
Can't find any pictures, but here's a collection of news articles about it: http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?read=187500
The real story is....
Some hacker broke the TOS of online games in South Korea. They made a barrel of money in the process, and are completely untraceable. The coup_d'état is that they managed to build a bread-crumb trail that points to the North Korean government, and South Korea fell for it!
More lies...the debt will INCREASE by almost 8 trillion over the next 10 years. And probably more than that I can guarantee you! The S&P should have downgraded us a loooonnnggggg time ago.
And sorry it is no ones fault but ours.
You are very right on this. If a bloodless coup occurs (as happened recently in Thailand), then the new government could simply announce that it is not honoring previous bonds, or is only giving 50 cents on the dollar. There is no talk of such a thing happening, but if the current spending binge continues (QE4,5,6 and more bailouts), then such a situation could become a real possibility.
The complaint in the article seems to be based on the timing. Right after the debt ceiling fiasco reached resolution, S&P made their announcement, and liberals are calling the move political. Honestly, I think the timing is not political. Until the actual deal occurred, there was a chance that conservatives may impose spending limits with the deal. The final deal was a huge blow to conservatives, and does raise real questions about fiscal policy over the next few years.
It's not too far from 2/3. (1.86)/3 is more accurate, if you want to stick with thirds.
5/8 is the fraction I would have used, seeing as anyone who runs track in the U.S. knows that 1600m is about 1 mile.
Look at the graphic again. It clearly lists the Burj Khalifa as 512m.
GameboyRMH's statement is purely accurate. According to the "graphic", it is nearly twice as tall.
Of course, the next next to the graphic lists the Burj Khalifa as 828m, which is the correct value.
The whole article is badly written, IMO.
I'm using it now. I thought for sure that I would give it a week, and then go back to something that I liked, but it's actually grown on me.
Most of the change of mind was due to me discovering stuff that wasn't completely obvious:
1) Install gconf-editor, and use it to set up hotkeys. See #2 for instructions on how to install it.
2) Fix multiple monitors by changing "workspaces only on primary" to false.
3) use "/usr/bin/terminal" instead of "gnome-terminal". The gnome version has issues. Beware that transparency is buggy unless the terminal is full screen.
4) Use Alt-F2 to open new applications (like Firefox), instead of hitting the super key (windows key) and searching.
5) Use ctrl-alt-up/down to change workspaces. This should be obvious to most people.
6) If you are looking for 'Shutdown', then hold down 'Alt' while you open the start menu. I don't know why it isn't there by default.
It's quite clear to me that gnome3 is in its infancy. It is not nearly as customizable as I would like, and it has bugs. But it's clean, it's fast, and it doesn't get in the way too much, so I'm sticking with it.
I still think fvwm95 is my favorite WM, due to it's 2-dimensional extensible workspace pager. I can't believe nothing like that exists for modern window managers. After that, I'll take gnome3, because it allows me to create workspaces on the fly. After that comes KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, Unity, XFCE, and all other window managers that I've tried.