My father owns over a hundred acres in Maine. Most of that land has been logged at least four times over the past 170 years. The only area that is not forest right now is about four acres of wetland marsh and about one acre of lawn around his house.
One of the poplar groves had been getting fairly dense so he had one of his neighbors, who happens to be a logger, selectively cut about five acres. This man specializes in low impact forestry. He's the only logger I know who still uses draft horses to drag out logs. He cuts the trees very lot to the ground to minimize stumps. Once the trees are down he hitches a few at a time to the horses and just says "Landing." To the horse, "Landing" just means go to where we left the water trough at this job site.
He did the logging in the fall. The next spring you couldn't tell the area had been logged unless you knew the area very well. He got two tractor trailer loads of lumber and pulpwood out of those five acres.
Selective cutting takes a lot more care, training, and labor. But it is most definitely sustainable forestry when it is done right.
In short, VoD must provide the same features as a DVD at a lower cost before most consumers will consider it over actually purchasing a DVD. There are also those who, given both options, would choose the DVD every time.
VOD in combination with a TiVo could work very well, though DRM will probably be set up to block this.
Instant gratification
Apple has made the music-buying experience a whole lot easier. Our agreements with the major record labels make a huge selection of music available to you. You can buy an album or only the songs you want.
I started using GnuCash a couple of weeks ago. I'm running it on a PowerMac G4 350MHz with Mac OS X 10.2.5. I used MoneyDance for about one year in 2001-2002. Then it was discontinued. With some annoying file corruption bugs unfixed and apparently unlikely to be fixed I switched back to Quicken. The current release happened after the original programmer finally got rights to the code he wrote for Appgen.
Now that I have it compiled, I am happier with GnuCash than I was with MoneyDance. One big advantage of GnuCash over MoneyDance for someone leaving Quicken? GnuCash is very good with QIF imports. MoneyDance produces way too many duplicate entries after a QIF import.
On the other hand, the lack of a GnuCash binary distribution for some platforms will push some people to MoneyDance. It took my computer over 12 hours to compile GnuCash and all of its dependencies. Loading MoneyDance took a minute or two.
Delay-line broadcast (reflecting your data with a laser off of a distant object, and rebroadcasting ad infinitum) is fairly reliable until occlusion of the data path occurs, or the transceiver is smashed, unplugged, EMPed.
Or just shoot the laser signal into space and then use your teleporter or warp drive to intercept the signal.:)
Also they need a moderation a long the lines of "stupid shit" or "crap" for all the stupid posts that get modded troll. Half the stuff modded troll is definatly not a troll. Offtopic? sometimes, crap? always, troll? rarely.
Most review sites show all the reviews or the highest and lowest rating reviews. This just shows the general population rating.
The Library of Alexandria website has you rate several books. Then it compares your ratings with all of the other users in its database and finds the users who's ratings are closest to yours, your "neighbors". Then it makes recommendations based on other books your neighbors have rated. It even assigns a confidence level based on how many neighbors have rated a book, what the spread of ratings is, and how close each neighbor is to you.
It started out as a straightforward data gathering and recommendation website. The layout of the website has gotten a little more awkward since they added an online bookstore, but you don't have to order books just to get recommendations. You can sign up for a free membership and then just go to the Departments:Recommender links to get at the rating and recommendation area.
The more you rate, the more accurate Hypatia's recommendations for you and your neighbors will be. I am not an employee of alexlit, but I am an enthusiastic user. I've entered over 2000 ratings over the years.
You know, if we had recuiters for Pharmaceuticals stading outside of colleges offering new graduates 10.2 million over 3 years, then cancer would have been cured 10 years ago. Why do athletes, that contribute NOTHING to society, get paid the most in our society?
How many people watch the broadcast of a professional baseball game? Total population, not just slashdotters.
How much are advertisers willing to pay to put their ads in front of all of those people?
Who gets the money that the advertisers are paying?
The money can trickle down from advertiser to TV Network/Station to League to Team to Players. There is a lot of money involved and relatively few people at the bottom of this chain to divide it up. Granted there is also a lot of money involved in pharmaceuticals, but:
The teams are much larger.
Even if the teams were the same size, how do you pick who the top people are? Grades? Scholastic skill and inventive skill are not the same. Athletic skill is easy to measure. Invention and creativity is much more difficult.
Evolution is not personal survival. It requires you to pass on your genes. Humans are evolving into creatures that can attract mates in crowded cities and suburbs.
Modern medicine keeps people alive when they have problems that might otherwise have killed them, but this does not mean that natural selection is over. It just means that other genes become more important.
mySQL doesn't even have subselects, but it's open source & cheaper so we'll use it instead of Oracle.
Granted the difference in price between Oracle & mySQL is div0 greater than the price difference between Beta & VHS, but some of the same logic applies.
There is a full scale production run for the shuttles. Unfortunately it isn't for making new shuttles. It's for practically rebuilding the shuttles every time they land. The turnaround maintenance for the shuttles is huge.
There is not enough bandwidth, even if you're dealing with low power short distance sets. Assume you're using a transceiver with a nominal 1 mile range. The signal might be good enough for a digital transmission 2 or 3 miles if conditions are good. However, the signal continues on for a long way past that; too low for a readable signal, but a constant contributor to background static. Most of the static you hear on a CB radio are mixed signals from all of the other CB's on the planet. Back when CB's were rare, you could sometimes hear skip transmissions from other continents. Now you are lucky to hear something 5 miles away.
Originally they were going to license Display Postscript, then Adobe killed Display Postscript. Finally, Apple developed Aqua. They probably license a few Adobe Postscript related patents.
If they had a monopoly, they'd simply raise prices until these projects became economical for them so they could recoup their otherwise stranded investment.
Slashdot Mirror
East Coast?
The deadliest single tornado ever was in Worcester, Massachusetts back in 1953.
The stereo microphone I use with my minidisk runs off two AA batteries.
My father owns over a hundred acres in Maine. Most of that land has been logged at least four times over the past 170 years. The only area that is not forest right now is about four acres of wetland marsh and about one acre of lawn around his house.
One of the poplar groves had been getting fairly dense so he had one of his neighbors, who happens to be a logger, selectively cut about five acres. This man specializes in low impact forestry. He's the only logger I know who still uses draft horses to drag out logs. He cuts the trees very lot to the ground to minimize stumps. Once the trees are down he hitches a few at a time to the horses and just says "Landing." To the horse, "Landing" just means go to where we left the water trough at this job site.
He did the logging in the fall. The next spring you couldn't tell the area had been logged unless you knew the area very well. He got two tractor trailer loads of lumber and pulpwood out of those five acres.
Selective cutting takes a lot more care, training, and labor. But it is most definitely sustainable forestry when it is done right.
Unless they charge about 100 small time swappers and publicize it widely to send a chill to everyone else.
I've been happy with Digital Cable phone, and was very glad to tell Verizon goodbye forever.
I started using GnuCash a couple of weeks ago. I'm running it on a PowerMac G4 350MHz with Mac OS X 10.2.5. I used MoneyDance for about one year in 2001-2002. Then it was discontinued. With some annoying file corruption bugs unfixed and apparently unlikely to be fixed I switched back to Quicken. The current release happened after the original programmer finally got rights to the code he wrote for Appgen.
Now that I have it compiled, I am happier with GnuCash than I was with MoneyDance. One big advantage of GnuCash over MoneyDance for someone leaving Quicken? GnuCash is very good with QIF imports. MoneyDance produces way too many duplicate entries after a QIF import.
On the other hand, the lack of a GnuCash binary distribution for some platforms will push some people to MoneyDance. It took my computer over 12 hours to compile GnuCash and all of its dependencies. Loading MoneyDance took a minute or two.
Or just shoot the laser signal into space and then use your teleporter or warp drive to intercept the signal. :)
That's what the "overrated" moderation is for.
Most review sites show all the reviews or the highest and lowest rating reviews. This just shows the general population rating.
The Library of Alexandria website has you rate several books. Then it compares your ratings with all of the other users in its database and finds the users who's ratings are closest to yours, your "neighbors". Then it makes recommendations based on other books your neighbors have rated. It even assigns a confidence level based on how many neighbors have rated a book, what the spread of ratings is, and how close each neighbor is to you.
It started out as a straightforward data gathering and recommendation website. The layout of the website has gotten a little more awkward since they added an online bookstore, but you don't have to order books just to get recommendations. You can sign up for a free membership and then just go to the Departments:Recommender links to get at the rating and recommendation area.
The more you rate, the more accurate Hypatia's recommendations for you and your neighbors will be. I am not an employee of alexlit, but I am an enthusiastic user. I've entered over 2000 ratings over the years.
That's half the reason I switched to Cable Phone last month.
They cost so much because that's what the market will bear.
What bugs me are the millions of dollars of stadium subsidies.
The money can trickle down from advertiser to TV Network/Station to League to Team to Players. There is a lot of money involved and relatively few people at the bottom of this chain to divide it up. Granted there is also a lot of money involved in pharmaceuticals, but:
Evolution is not personal survival. It requires you to pass on your genes. Humans are evolving into creatures that can attract mates in crowded cities and suburbs.
Modern medicine keeps people alive when they have problems that might otherwise have killed them, but this does not mean that natural selection is over. It just means that other genes become more important.
They can always use the Soyuz docked to the station as the emergency lifeboat.
mySQL doesn't even have subselects, but it's open source & cheaper so we'll use it instead of Oracle. Granted the difference in price between Oracle & mySQL is div0 greater than the price difference between Beta & VHS, but some of the same logic applies.
There is a full scale production run for the shuttles. Unfortunately it isn't for making new shuttles. It's for practically rebuilding the shuttles every time they land. The turnaround maintenance for the shuttles is huge.
There is not enough bandwidth, even if you're dealing with low power short distance sets. Assume you're using a transceiver with a nominal 1 mile range. The signal might be good enough for a digital transmission 2 or 3 miles if conditions are good. However, the signal continues on for a long way past that; too low for a readable signal, but a constant contributor to background static. Most of the static you hear on a CB radio are mixed signals from all of the other CB's on the planet. Back when CB's were rare, you could sometimes hear skip transmissions from other continents. Now you are lucky to hear something 5 miles away.
Originally they were going to license Display Postscript, then Adobe killed Display Postscript. Finally, Apple developed Aqua. They probably license a few Adobe Postscript related patents.
Or Mac OS X, with the Save to PDF option right in the print dialog.
Cosmic rays, solar flares, Van Allen Belts...
Do we know that this is a good site, or is this a devious mechanism to collect the email addresses of everyone who forwards them spam?