Yep, to copy-pasta one of the interesting charts from Wikipedia:
Energy balance Country : Type : Energy balance
United States : Corn ethanol : 1.3
Brazil : Sugarcane ethanol : 8
Germany : Biodiesel : 2.5
United States : Cellulosic ethanol* : 2–36**
* experimental, not in commercial production ** depending on production method
Obviously, the "Cellulosic ethanol" is the likely target of this biofuels research. But of course, if all they have to do is beat corn ethanol to declare success, they're not going to have to try very hard:P
With regards to the hypocrisy, the point is that if you had a smaller high-compression ratio engine turbocharged to 150hp, it would be more efficient than a bigger normal engine that was 150hp in the first place.
But since the goal of the research is to develop biofuels for normal engines, you'll just get decreased mileage without really being able to take advantage of any of the, well, advantages to using ethanol.
So far, just throwing extra fuel into engines has been (artificially) cheaper than spending money on the extra technology to make engines more efficient. Plus turbochargers and things like that make engines more complex, put more stress on the components, making things more likely to break and/or need maintenance. So the simple answer to getting more horsepower was just put in a bigger simple engine.
Biofuels like Ethanol have a very high octane rating, so you can increase power output with really high compression ratios with superchargers and turbochargers. Supposedly these turbo gasohol vehicles are popular in Brazil, where they can actually grow and produce their cane sugar ethanol with a net positive energy output (whereas corn-based ethanol in the US costs more energy to make than you get from it in return... so it's really just an agricultural subsidy as well as a way to water down imported petroleum-based fuels and decreasing your gas mileage - FTW!)
That sorta fits with my theory on why traffic is so bad and commutes are so long in most major metropolitan areas, as people commute from the poor neighborhoods to work in the middle-class suburbs and towns, and the middle class commutes from their areas to the rich downtown. It seems rare that employers can really afford (or wants) to hire from the same neighborhood they can afford to set up shop in.
Heh, someone always brings that up whenever I mention videocardbenchmark.net, and I always point out that if they bothered to read the Anandtech in-depth review, it's pretty obvious why:
(5970 is basically two 5870 GPUs in one card, and looks like they had to downclock it slightly to make it stable).
To the driver, two GPUs on one card probably still looks like two separate GPUs, with several different ways to balance the load across them.
Most of those benchmarks are user-submitted... maybe the people with lots of money to throw at SLI rigs simply neglect to turn on the multiGPU option in their driver before running the benchmark? ^_^
I no longer have access to any SLI rigs, maybe you or someone else could download and run the benchmark and see if you can get the multiGPU option in the driver to make a difference.
Yep, pretty much. We've moved from a manufacturing and research economy to a purely intellectual property economy. All our wealth is going to be tied up in imaginary pieces of paper that say that people have to pay us for using computer software, or by building windshield wipers a particular way, making pharmaceuticals with a particular active ingredient, or for listening to music or watching movies (ooh, a toll on "culture"). We even get money if they record and distribute content themselves using patented h.264 video codecs. So all we need to do is just sit back and collect the money, backed by the threat of economic or conventional warfare if they don't pay up. Maybe once in a while we need to renew or trivially update our patents or copyrights to keep anyone from innovating around them, thus maintaining the status quo.
Not much different from the way things were in the colonial era, where we sent a lot of profits back to the empire, and you needed official licenses from the king to operate trade routes or the navy would sink you. Heck, they even still unabashedly call some of these payments "royalties" today. Fortunately, we know how this turned out, so we can probably count on history repeating itself eventually.
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/ (AKA TTAC) is my current favourite auto rag, filled with TheRegister-esque satire dripping with sarcasm and some descriptive analogies worthy of PA's Jerry Holkins.
Maybe I didn't notice it as a kid since I had the propensity to simply ignore all things politick, but C&D and some of the other auto mags seem to have very right-wing editorials these days, that kind of give the thing a different flavour. Anyway, don't really find them as intellectually stimulating anymore, but I guess they're mostly for the pictures.:-P
Meh, I'd always used Facebook Connect to post comments to their sites. Probably the first mildly useful thing Facebook has done for me.
So at worst, I probably have my spam email address out there in that torrent. Big deal. It's posted all over the web already (including my personal contact page).
But really, if anyone was adversely impacted by this, was it Gawker's failure, or their own for trusting some random website with a sensitive password? I don't use my good passwords for any of these "social networking" sites.... I don't care WHAT their reputation or privacy policy says:P
It's not like CmdrTaco isn't free to break into my/. account and start OMG I LIKE TURTLES HAMSTER HAVOC RULEZ!
And since there are many ways to split the workload over multiple GPUs with different impacts on performance depending on your content, it's probably best to just leave it off for their general benchmark.
So you could use their number to quantify the performance of a single core, and then try to figure out what the multiGPU scaling factor is with your particular settings.
Heh, never had an office, but they seem claustrophobia-inducing compared to cube farms.
I'm actually OK with cubes, though have preferred it when the walls were lower so it more resembles the open plan. But then again, I understand why some people wouldn't care to stare at their co-workers all the time. Anyway, I do very little actual work in my cube... most of what I would consider work is accomplished running around the servers or sites or even meeting with other people. It's nice that they've provided a little space that I can settle down and decorate and control, so I think the benefits are mostly psychological. I tend to have my cube set up as additional lab / storage space, since that's what we're usually short on... also I can display bits of "personality" with junk that my wife and I don't care to have cluttering our home!
That said, if there was a little atrium or window lounge or even community garden, I'd prefer to do my coding / email / reports in that kind of environment.
The latest craze is "hoteling space," which tend to fall in size anywhere between a small cubicle or those little rows of laptop kiosks in airports, reminiscent of urinal stalls. Those booths I really don't care for, but if it prevents the company for maintaining empty cubes for people that telecommute almost all of the time, so much the better. I wouldn't mind spending some business tax deductible dough on fitting out a swank "home office" if I somehow fell into that category.
Unless you have some sort of performance chart you can't tell shit.
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/ gives a pretty comprehensive overview of just about every video card out there... this new AMD/ti video card will probably be added within the next few days. It's a great starting point before heading over to http://tomshardware.com/ or http://anandtech.com/ to read about all the details, caveats, and more comprehensive benchmark results.
Also, it tends to be the only good resource out there when trying to make comparisons between different market segments (what notebook GPU could keep up with my desktop GPU?) or completely different generations (would this cheap embedded GPU actually be a decent upgrade from my ancient media player box?)
Yep, that presentation is by far one of my all-time favourites on TED. Also neatly explain why my sister-in-law -- who studies microeconomics for developing countries -- did field work in Uganda and Sierra Leone.
I still find it easier to simply hold down the shift key (which is actually how I did the capitalized section above).
LOL... some other message boards have been littered with I CAN"T LIVE WITHOUT CAPS LOCK comments, where that tell-tale " exposes their LIES.
Anyway, kudos for managing to get the quote key correct... somehow... (we'll just have to assume you weren't cheating and really using the CAPS LOCK;-)
The guy seems to have it working with KCam http://www.kellyware.com/kcam/... which incidentally he'll include on a laptop along with the machine and personally deliver to your door for a donation pledge of $2500 (continental US only)
Almost makes me want to do it if only to kick myself because this was always the sort of thing I envisioned myself doing now when I was back in engineering school:P .
AnthroCart / AnthroBench are certainly the cadillacs of that kind of thing.
Don't bother with the integrated power bars (though the other accessories are quite nice). Just ziptie a cheap TrippLite 12 or 20-port power strip to the back of the thing.
If you want something (much) cheaper, I'd also recommend the "Mayline eLAN" IT workbenches, which don't give you quite as much flexibility, but stack high and are very solid. http://www.google.com/search?q=mayline+eLAN
Whatever you do, put them on casters so it's easy to reposition / clean . Oh, and that they actually fit through your doors / elevators:-P
Meh, start locally. We ran something like that with our college roommates in our rented house. But I've since graduated and got married. Yay for complete tyranny!
One of the things I'd really find neat and useful is if I could compare my okcupid match profile with that of my elected officials. But I suppose none of them want to tie down their belief system that much... it would hamper their ability to weasel out of their supposed convictions to appease whatever base they're speaking to at the moment:P
1) Whatever his background, Assange apparently seems unversed with the social conventions surrounding the one-night stand. But then again, neither is most of slashdot. 2) I, um, heard on slashdot that the particular Swedish law violated is about sex without a condom during their morning intercourse. But reportedly there was a condom that broke. 3) Because Anna Ardin is one hot forskningsassistent (actual job title). If all I have to do to get some attention from the likes of her is to embarrass the US, WHERE DO I SIGN UP?! 4) Anna Ardin wrote some paper on how to enact sexual revenge, so it was probably a good way to exercise her thesis. And that kind of thing probably looks good in a CIA dossier as well. 5) Supposedly she had some twitter tweets that she deleted after the fact. http://www.opednews.com/articles/Dissecting-Anna-Ardin-s-Ca-by-Press-Release-101208-16.html
There was a *lot* more information out about the circumstances the first time this was reported. Now all the articles I find have everything filtered out... down to the names of the victims (Ms. "A" and Ms. "W"). Before there were a lot of details being reported on things like how she paid for Julians train fare to / from her flat, how they made love at night and again the following morning, and then she cooked breakfast for him, etc. etc. that didn't make for a very convincing case. It's almost as if they decided to drop the charges for a few months and wait for the facts to subside and fade from memory before they can bring it up again and hit him with a pretty dull cut & dried "rape" case devoid of any of those sorts of considerations. InfoOps at its finest, I suppose.
Coincidentally rape and sexual crimes are also higher on the Swedish public radar nowadays, thanks to the "Girl with the Dragon Tatoo" book / movie trilogy that got big there (and internationally) over the past few years. Yay, vengeance.
Global warming could be good for plants, leading to more tropical growing conditions at higher latitudes, and opening up vast fields of tundra to more sophisticated plant life.
These plants create matter out of thin air by binding carbon and nitrogen, and emitting oxygen -- an invisible but caustic, corrosive gas, which in high enough concentrations is known to make just about anything burst into flames. And these plants are just spewing it out into the atmosphere!
I think we have it all wrong, instead of carbon sequestration we need to invest in oxygen sequestration devices, and severely limit who has access to this dangerous material. Who is with me on this endeavor?!
Google already bought StumbleUpon a few years ago. It's awesome, use it !
* The data collected by "Like" button helps send you more stuff you'd like based on what other people also liked. * There's a "Dislike" button * Provides reviews / discussion thread for any web URL * Don't need to link it to any of your other "social networks", it stands as its own separate social space pretty well. Never felt the need to share weblinks with friends / acquaintances, anyway, mostly because my IRL friends have vastly different pr0n preferences, and if a link makes me think of someone in particular I'll message it just to them.
Facebook's "like" button has always been utterly useless in comparison, somewhere just above "poke" and below "wink".
Global warming is occurring. But more heat is simply more energy, which manifests itself in more ways than hotter average temperatures.
Heat rises, creating low pressure zones that suck in cold air from other areas. So the additional energy trapped on Earth doesn't all go directly into raising the thermostat, but also into increasing winds and storms and general "mixing" of the atmosphere. So yeah, temperatures in many places will actually drop as cold air is sucked over them... and this will also decrease the "average global warming" observed at the thermostat. A lot of the science has indicated that the temperature of polar regions has raised the most, and melting ice will raise sea levels and decrease reflected solar energy. But no one really lives up there, and slightly raised sea levels just mean more damage to coastal areas during storms, so most blame will go to the hurricanes and typhoons anyway.
So global warming might be the cause, but climate change is the effect that we're really worried about. And anthropogenic global warming is that part of it that is actually our fault. But like most environmental regulation, like the clean air acts in 1956 after a couple extra thousand people died from London smog, I doubt nothing will be done about it until a lot of death / damage is sustained. So the only question we need to pose to the AGW deniers is how much damage / death is enough for them to go along with the emissions controls.
It would be nice if it was handled more proactively, like the ozone hole in the 70s, where we got CFCs regulated before the ozone hole over the antarctic grew over populated areas. But if people want to push their luck, I don't see why we can't just tell them to go ahead and pollute, and hold a section of their profits in escrow to pay for the eventual cleanup.
A 5970 is sorta like 2x 5870 chips SLI'd together on one board, and they had to downclock it slightly to make it stable. Yeah, the benchmark / driver doesn't appear to make use of the additional shader unit... but then that means most games probably don't either. But at least now you know where to go from here.
Hence I look at the videobenchmark.net rank first to get an overview.
I'm actually liking the multiplayer smartphone games...
Sketch Online : pictionary (though occasionally marred by penis)
Zombie, Run! : take your GPS and run away from the random hordes of advancing zombie icons on your map. It will be really neat once someone does a Layar augmented reality version of this... maybe with weapon drops so you can actually shoot back once in a while.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, to copy-pasta one of the interesting charts from Wikipedia:
Energy balance
Country : Type : Energy balance
United States : Corn ethanol : 1.3
Brazil : Sugarcane ethanol : 8
Germany : Biodiesel : 2.5
United States : Cellulosic ethanol* : 2–36**
* experimental, not in commercial production
** depending on production method
Obviously, the "Cellulosic ethanol" is the likely target of this biofuels research. But of course, if all they have to do is beat corn ethanol to declare success, they're not going to have to try very hard :P
Yeah, good points.
With regards to the hypocrisy, the point is that if you had a smaller high-compression ratio engine turbocharged to 150hp, it would be more efficient than a bigger normal engine that was 150hp in the first place.
But since the goal of the research is to develop biofuels for normal engines, you'll just get decreased mileage without really being able to take advantage of any of the, well, advantages to using ethanol.
So far, just throwing extra fuel into engines has been (artificially) cheaper than spending money on the extra technology to make engines more efficient. Plus turbochargers and things like that make engines more complex, put more stress on the components, making things more likely to break and/or need maintenance. So the simple answer to getting more horsepower was just put in a bigger simple engine.
Biofuels like Ethanol have a very high octane rating, so you can increase power output with really high compression ratios with superchargers and turbochargers. Supposedly these turbo gasohol vehicles are popular in Brazil, where they can actually grow and produce their cane sugar ethanol with a net positive energy output (whereas corn-based ethanol in the US costs more energy to make than you get from it in return... so it's really just an agricultural subsidy as well as a way to water down imported petroleum-based fuels and decreasing your gas mileage - FTW!)
Meh, some interesting reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel
Heh, nice!
That sorta fits with my theory on why traffic is so bad and commutes are so long in most major metropolitan areas, as people commute from the poor neighborhoods to work in the middle-class suburbs and towns, and the middle class commutes from their areas to the rich downtown. It seems rare that employers can really afford (or wants) to hire from the same neighborhood they can afford to set up shop in.
Heh, someone always brings that up whenever I mention videocardbenchmark.net, and I always point out that if they bothered to read the Anandtech in-depth review, it's pretty obvious why:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2877
(5970 is basically two 5870 GPUs in one card, and looks like they had to downclock it slightly to make it stable).
To the driver, two GPUs on one card probably still looks like two separate GPUs, with several different ways to balance the load across them.
Most of those benchmarks are user-submitted... maybe the people with lots of money to throw at SLI rigs simply neglect to turn on the multiGPU option in their driver before running the benchmark? ^_^
I no longer have access to any SLI rigs, maybe you or someone else could download and run the benchmark and see if you can get the multiGPU option in the driver to make a difference.
Yep, pretty much. We've moved from a manufacturing and research economy to a purely intellectual property economy. All our wealth is going to be tied up in imaginary pieces of paper that say that people have to pay us for using computer software, or by building windshield wipers a particular way, making pharmaceuticals with a particular active ingredient, or for listening to music or watching movies (ooh, a toll on "culture"). We even get money if they record and distribute content themselves using patented h.264 video codecs. So all we need to do is just sit back and collect the money, backed by the threat of economic or conventional warfare if they don't pay up. Maybe once in a while we need to renew or trivially update our patents or copyrights to keep anyone from innovating around them, thus maintaining the status quo.
Not much different from the way things were in the colonial era, where we sent a lot of profits back to the empire, and you needed official licenses from the king to operate trade routes or the navy would sink you. Heck, they even still unabashedly call some of these payments "royalties" today. Fortunately, we know how this turned out, so we can probably count on history repeating itself eventually.
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/ (AKA TTAC) is my current favourite auto rag, filled with TheRegister-esque satire dripping with sarcasm and some descriptive analogies worthy of PA's Jerry Holkins.
Here's a decent writing sample that sticks in my memory: http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2009/01/comparison-2008-dodge-charger-v6-vs-1993-toyota-camry/
Maybe I didn't notice it as a kid since I had the propensity to simply ignore all things politick, but C&D and some of the other auto mags seem to have very right-wing editorials these days, that kind of give the thing a different flavour. Anyway, don't really find them as intellectually stimulating anymore, but I guess they're mostly for the pictures. :-P
Meh, I'd always used Facebook Connect to post comments to their sites. Probably the first mildly useful thing Facebook has done for me.
So at worst, I probably have my spam email address out there in that torrent. Big deal. It's posted all over the web already (including my personal contact page).
But really, if anyone was adversely impacted by this, was it Gawker's failure, or their own for trusting some random website with a sensitive password? I don't use my good passwords for any of these "social networking" sites.... I don't care WHAT their reputation or privacy policy says :P
It's not like CmdrTaco isn't free to break into my /. account and start OMG I LIKE TURTLES HAMSTER HAVOC RULEZ!
Yeah, the benchmark doesn't seem to use SLI.
And since there are many ways to split the workload over multiple GPUs with different impacts on performance depending on your content, it's probably best to just leave it off for their general benchmark.
So you could use their number to quantify the performance of a single core, and then try to figure out what the multiGPU scaling factor is with your particular settings.
Heh, never had an office, but they seem claustrophobia-inducing compared to cube farms.
I'm actually OK with cubes, though have preferred it when the walls were lower so it more resembles the open plan. But then again, I understand why some people wouldn't care to stare at their co-workers all the time. Anyway, I do very little actual work in my cube... most of what I would consider work is accomplished running around the servers or sites or even meeting with other people. It's nice that they've provided a little space that I can settle down and decorate and control, so I think the benefits are mostly psychological. I tend to have my cube set up as additional lab / storage space, since that's what we're usually short on... also I can display bits of "personality" with junk that my wife and I don't care to have cluttering our home!
That said, if there was a little atrium or window lounge or even community garden, I'd prefer to do my coding / email / reports in that kind of environment.
The latest craze is "hoteling space," which tend to fall in size anywhere between a small cubicle or those little rows of laptop kiosks in airports, reminiscent of urinal stalls. Those booths I really don't care for, but if it prevents the company for maintaining empty cubes for people that telecommute almost all of the time, so much the better. I wouldn't mind spending some business tax deductible dough on fitting out a swank "home office" if I somehow fell into that category.
Unless you have some sort of performance chart you can't tell shit.
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/ gives a pretty comprehensive overview of just about every video card out there... this new AMD/ti video card will probably be added within the next few days. It's a great starting point before heading over to http://tomshardware.com/ or http://anandtech.com/ to read about all the details, caveats, and more comprehensive benchmark results.
Also, it tends to be the only good resource out there when trying to make comparisons between different market segments (what notebook GPU could keep up with my desktop GPU?) or completely different generations (would this cheap embedded GPU actually be a decent upgrade from my ancient media player box?)
Yep, that presentation is by far one of my all-time favourites on TED. Also neatly explain why my sister-in-law -- who studies microeconomics for developing countries -- did field work in Uganda and Sierra Leone.
Uh, use your head? (figuratively speaking)
WHAT'S IT FOR?
I still find it easier to simply hold down the shift key (which is actually how I did the capitalized section above).
LOL... some other message boards have been littered with I CAN"T LIVE WITHOUT CAPS LOCK comments, where that tell-tale " exposes their LIES.
Anyway, kudos for managing to get the quote key correct... somehow... (we'll just have to assume you weren't cheating and really using the CAPS LOCK ;-)
The guy seems to have it working with KCam http://www.kellyware.com/kcam/ ... which incidentally he'll include on a laptop along with the machine and personally deliver to your door for a donation pledge of $2500 (continental US only)
Almost makes me want to do it if only to kick myself because this was always the sort of thing I envisioned myself doing now when I was back in engineering school :P .
+1 Informative, if only because I've never been bothered to make out what Rick Astley was mumbling between choruses.
AnthroCart / AnthroBench are certainly the cadillacs of that kind of thing.
Don't bother with the integrated power bars (though the other accessories are quite nice). Just ziptie a cheap TrippLite 12 or 20-port power strip to the back of the thing.
If you want something (much) cheaper, I'd also recommend the "Mayline eLAN" IT workbenches, which don't give you quite as much flexibility, but stack high and are very solid.
http://www.google.com/search?q=mayline+eLAN
Whatever you do, put them on casters so it's easy to reposition / clean . Oh, and that they actually fit through your doors / elevators :-P
Meh, start locally. We ran something like that with our college roommates in our rented house. But I've since graduated and got married. Yay for complete tyranny!
One of the things I'd really find neat and useful is if I could compare my okcupid match profile with that of my elected officials. But I suppose none of them want to tie down their belief system that much... it would hamper their ability to weasel out of their supposed convictions to appease whatever base they're speaking to at the moment :P
1) Whatever his background, Assange apparently seems unversed with the social conventions surrounding the one-night stand. But then again, neither is most of slashdot.
2) I, um, heard on slashdot that the particular Swedish law violated is about sex without a condom during their morning intercourse. But reportedly there was a condom that broke.
3) Because Anna Ardin is one hot forskningsassistent (actual job title). If all I have to do to get some attention from the likes of her is to embarrass the US, WHERE DO I SIGN UP?!
4) Anna Ardin wrote some paper on how to enact sexual revenge, so it was probably a good way to exercise her thesis. And that kind of thing probably looks good in a CIA dossier as well.
5) Supposedly she had some twitter tweets that she deleted after the fact.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Dissecting-Anna-Ardin-s-Ca-by-Press-Release-101208-16.html
There was a *lot* more information out about the circumstances the first time this was reported. Now all the articles I find have everything filtered out... down to the names of the victims (Ms. "A" and Ms. "W"). Before there were a lot of details being reported on things like how she paid for Julians train fare to / from her flat, how they made love at night and again the following morning, and then she cooked breakfast for him, etc. etc. that didn't make for a very convincing case. It's almost as if they decided to drop the charges for a few months and wait for the facts to subside and fade from memory before they can bring it up again and hit him with a pretty dull cut & dried "rape" case devoid of any of those sorts of considerations. InfoOps at its finest, I suppose.
Coincidentally rape and sexual crimes are also higher on the Swedish public radar nowadays, thanks to the "Girl with the Dragon Tatoo" book / movie trilogy that got big there (and internationally) over the past few years. Yay, vengeance.
Oh, huh, you're right. I wonder where I got that crazy idea from... oh well, I stand corrected (and probably horribly abused in not too long :P )
Global warming could be good for plants, leading to more tropical growing conditions at higher latitudes, and opening up vast fields of tundra to more sophisticated plant life.
These plants create matter out of thin air by binding carbon and nitrogen, and emitting oxygen -- an invisible but caustic, corrosive gas, which in high enough concentrations is known to make just about anything burst into flames. And these plants are just spewing it out into the atmosphere!
I think we have it all wrong, instead of carbon sequestration we need to invest in oxygen sequestration devices, and severely limit who has access to this dangerous material. Who is with me on this endeavor?!
(Hey, it worked in Spaceballs...)
Google already bought StumbleUpon a few years ago. It's awesome, use it !
* The data collected by "Like" button helps send you more stuff you'd like based on what other people also liked.
* There's a "Dislike" button
* Provides reviews / discussion thread for any web URL
* Don't need to link it to any of your other "social networks", it stands as its own separate social space pretty well. Never felt the need to share weblinks with friends / acquaintances, anyway, mostly because my IRL friends have vastly different pr0n preferences, and if a link makes me think of someone in particular I'll message it just to them.
Facebook's "like" button has always been utterly useless in comparison, somewhere just above "poke" and below "wink".
Global warming is occurring. But more heat is simply more energy, which manifests itself in more ways than hotter average temperatures.
Heat rises, creating low pressure zones that suck in cold air from other areas. So the additional energy trapped on Earth doesn't all go directly into raising the thermostat, but also into increasing winds and storms and general "mixing" of the atmosphere. So yeah, temperatures in many places will actually drop as cold air is sucked over them... and this will also decrease the "average global warming" observed at the thermostat. A lot of the science has indicated that the temperature of polar regions has raised the most, and melting ice will raise sea levels and decrease reflected solar energy. But no one really lives up there, and slightly raised sea levels just mean more damage to coastal areas during storms, so most blame will go to the hurricanes and typhoons anyway.
So global warming might be the cause, but climate change is the effect that we're really worried about. And anthropogenic global warming is that part of it that is actually our fault. But like most environmental regulation, like the clean air acts in 1956 after a couple extra thousand people died from London smog, I doubt nothing will be done about it until a lot of death / damage is sustained. So the only question we need to pose to the AGW deniers is how much damage / death is enough for them to go along with the emissions controls.
It would be nice if it was handled more proactively, like the ozone hole in the 70s, where we got CFCs regulated before the ozone hole over the antarctic grew over populated areas. But if people want to push their luck, I don't see why we can't just tell them to go ahead and pollute, and hold a section of their profits in escrow to pay for the eventual cleanup.
It's pretty obvious why from
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-5970,2474-2.html
A 5970 is sorta like 2x 5870 chips SLI'd together on one board, and they had to downclock it slightly to make it stable. Yeah, the benchmark / driver doesn't appear to make use of the additional shader unit... but then that means most games probably don't either. But at least now you know where to go from here.
Hence I look at the videobenchmark.net rank first to get an overview.
I'm actually liking the multiplayer smartphone games...
Sketch Online : pictionary (though occasionally marred by penis)
Zombie, Run! : take your GPS and run away from the random hordes of advancing zombie icons on your map. It will be really neat once someone does a Layar augmented reality version of this... maybe with weapon drops so you can actually shoot back once in a while.
{chess checkers othello etc.} online