The best April Fool's day joke is the one that turns out to not really be a joke. It leaves you wondering, "ok this looks like a joke but they say it's real, I'm so confused!" Gotta love it!
OmniWeb has had something similar for a long time, it's called shortcuts. You can either type in your searches (such as: imdb Jack Black) or you can use the search shortcut on the toolbar.
I like Firefox a lot because of its support for standards and its expandability but honestly I find myself using OmniWeb a lot more. Sure I can get addons to Firefox that make it as (or perhaps even more) functional as OmniWeb but the Firefox addons can get a bit odd at times, interacting with Firefox in weird ways. It's also annoying to constantly have to update all the Firefox addons I'd need to match OmniWeb. (I'm sure I can turn off updates but see the previous statement about odd bugs.) It's nice to get so much functionality in an easy-to-use browser like OmniWeb.
World of Warcraft is not exactly a 4 year old game. Each major update to the game has increased the capabilities of the client and also has increased the minimum system requirements to run it. Yes, overall it has been around for 4 years but it is hardly the exact same game and client that it was 4 years ago.
Actually, it just did when I just updated iTunes about 15 minutes ago. I do NOT have Safari on this machine and it had ticked Safari as a 23MB (iirc) 'update' that was in the bottom half of the dialog off on its own. Nice of them to check mark that download for my own good, eh?
That's interesting because I have updated to the latest iTunes through Apple's updater and at no time did it offer to update to the Safari 4 beta. I'm currently using Safari 3. Maybe you just have an outdated Safari 3 and it offered to update you to the most recent Safari 3 release, not the Safari 4 beta.
Have you ever been around scientists? There is simply NOTHING in the universe they like more than proving each other wrong. They argue for years over the tiniest details. Entire labs are dedicated to proving other labs wrong.
With that sort of adversarial process, your conspiratorial arrangement wouldn't last long. Look at Korean cloning or cold fusion as examples. Some scientists made claims. Other scientists tried to duplicate the results and failed.
Actually, I am a Chemist. So, yes I've spent a considerable amount of time around scientists.
It's true that scientists all have their own variations on theories and you can see a lot of that in climatology too. The problem is that most of the culture of climatologists is dominated by people who have gotten notoriety, positions, grants, and other perks for being doom-and-gloom about the environment. The media rewards climatologists for reporting what is going wrong with the world, just like the media does with many other professionals. The politicians of the world have gotten fat on scaring people, getting money thrown at them to solve the problems, and then recruiting scientists who mirror the public opinion - thus creating a feedback loop.
There are plenty of dissenting opinions on the causes and solutions of global warming but, for the most part, the climatologists with clout are the ones who say we are all doomed. You have to seriously dig for the moderate climatologists and even then they mostly have positions at small research facilities, little media exposure, poor access to grants and equipment. This is not because they are bad scientists, some are actually highly respected scientists, but they don't "play ball" and so they don't get the perks.
As far as repeatability of experiments, that's great when you can contain your experiment in a lab under tightly controlled conditions. Until the day that we can make a full-scale (or a significant fraction thereof) model of the Earth and have good control of all the variables we won't have anything like cloning or cold fusion. Those were easily testable and verifiable, climate is far from it.
Like it or not, there is a huge bias in climatology. A lot of the methodology doesn't pass muster as true science, something that this article highlights.
You mean besides the overwhelming majority of the world's climate scientists?
You mean the people whose livelihood and considerable private and government grants depend on making waves about the climate and increasing their self-importance?
Not to mention the fact that a lot of them got into climatology because of past climate fear-mongering and "environmental awareness" advocates who beat on the drum that the Earth is doomed. A lot of the current crop of climatologists are the product of the 60's and of the environmental movement spawned back then, a movement which isn't exactly known for its calm, collected analysis and immersion in reality.
This doesn't mean that all climatologists are delusional or that there is no warming occurring. All I'm saying is that there are a whole lot of people, including professionals, that have an overly-emotional connection to the issues. This results in a lot of bad science and bad policy decisions.
Mob not dying after you got him to 0%, Quests completing without granting rewards, Stats setting back to their naked values - I've never had any of these happen to me in 6 months of beta WoW and 3 years of retail WoW, nor have I heard of it. Perhaps you are thinking of a different game
I've never seen or heard of the stat reset bug but the other two were usually related to some sort of lag. My favorite bug was the multiple reward bug where you could turn in a quest, force-quit the game, and then turn in the quest a second time when you logged back in and get double the xp and rewards. It was tough to do but at one point you could do it reliably with a little practice.
There was also the shaman negative agility bug that was fun, over 100% crit and dodge and tons of armor - it made shaman killing machines until it was fixed.
- if you kept beating on an NPC, at some point it said it runs away in fear. Except it didn't, it stood there like an idiot doing nothing. Then if he survived a few seconds in that state (quite easy for major bosses) it would suddenly heal back to full helt. How _that_ got through QA, I can't even imagine.
- enemies stuck in terrain, e.g., in the cave with the squigs in the greenskin starting quests.
- retarded pet AI. In WoW if your pet can't reach an enemy, it stays with you. In WAR it ran in some retarded direction and down some corridor, and only eventually it would figure out to come back to you.
There were similar major bugs in WoW at some point in time also. The difference is that Blizzard mostly fixed these bugs a while ago but then again they've had several years to do so. Even then some of the bugs were long-standing like the evasion bug where if you stood in just the wrong spot and the pathing algorithm had trouble getting a clear path from the enemy to a person who had threat on the enemy then the enemy would heal to full. This happened quite a bit, especially in large raids where there were 40 people with threat on the enemy and all it took was for one person to have this bug happen. Fortunatley it has been (mostly) fixed.
I haven't played Warhammer Online but I've played a ton of World of Warcraft and I think what keeps people in WoW is how easy it is to fiddle around and not realize you've just spent a couple of hours playing. Of course, eventually even doing little quests, farming for stuff, interacting with people starts to wear at you but with WoW the immersion is pretty complete and so it takes a while before most people get bored of the game. Another good thing is that although there have been and still are bugs in the game most of them aren't so serious that the entire game becomes pointless, they are mostly just annoyances that you can mostly work around.
The cheapest Mac in which you can do something as simple as upgrade the video card is $2,499.
Which doesn't say much about anything since that's just a small slice of the computer market and it doesn't consider all the features of that $2,499 Mac. For example, that Mac you are talking about is running on what is essentially server hardware with a quad-core Xeon processor on a 1600MHz frontside bus, ECC memory, supports up to 32 GB of RAM, four hot-swappable SATA drive bays, etc. Once you compare this computer with a similar non-Mac you start to see that the pricing is pretty close between all OEMs.
Most home users don't need this kind of hardware and they will instead go for a less expensive, home-class computer. Unfortunately Apple does not offer a combination of home-class hardware and the ability to swap out a video card. This really is not much of a problem because most home users don't ever swap out video cards. It does limit the semi-pro user a bit, they either have to spend more on the server hardware Mac Pro, get the less upgradable iMac or Mac Mini, or not get a Mac at all. Apple's stance is that the semi-pro market is too small for them to worry about, I don't agree but that's their call.
So to rephrase your analogy as I see the situation, it would be if Nissan built all Maximas with leather seats and Bose stereos, but then at the dealership they stripped off the leather and replaced it with canvas (or whatever), and put in a crappy stereo using the excuse that only audiophiles really need nice stereos.
Although I agree that making 6 versions of Windows is a very bad idea I don't think this captures the problem at all. The problem is that more versions of Windows means more support headaches and confusion about what exactly your version can do. Suppose my aunt gets a computer and I have to walk her through a problem, now I have to identify exactly what version she has, what features are specific to each version, the differences between menu items and other UI elements, and so on. It's a support nightmare and just a bad idea. Honestly I think that two or three versions of any operating system is plenty.
As for your analogy it's more like Nissan building a base Maxima with only the essentials and then adding modules on for customers that want more. Say, a base car that just gets you there, then an optional stereo, an optional leather seat, optional automatic windows, and so on. The same goes for Microsoft Windows, the base versions only have the core system and then they include other modules for the people who want to pay for them. This means that Microsoft can split up its development costs, spending so much on the core system, so much more on an advanced graphics support module, so much more on a network services module, etc. Developing those extra modules does cost them more so it makes sense to charge more for including them but 6 versions is still a bit too much segmentation in my mind.
how do you turn ink into fine mist of few molecules in diameter? by creating massively fluctuating magnetic field to vibrate the ink molecules - thats why you need electricity to print (technically water should work too, since MRI works in similar principle - the water molecules fluctuate according to magnetic field - but you still need some charged, (water is polar) or some other molecule that will respond to magnetic field
Nope.Tryagain. Pretty much all inkjet printers in use today use either a bubble jet (thermal bubble) or a piezoelectric method to produce fine droplets. Bubble jet printers use fine nozzles that have a heater located just inside the nozzle. When the heater turns on it creates a small vapor bubble that shoots ink out the nozzle. Piezoelectric printers use a piezoelectric actuator located just inside the nozzle that shoots ink out the nozzle. There are no commercial inkjet printers that use magnetic fields in the fashion you describe and I'm not certain that what you describe is a practical design for an inkjet printer.
By the way, an MRI does not work the way you are describing. The magnetic field is stationary, not "massively fluctuating". It also does not work on molecules, rather it works directly on the nuclei of atoms. This large, stationary magnetic field causes the magnetic moments of certain nuclei, such as hydrogen nuclei, to line up with the magnetic field. A radio signal of a frequency specific to that nuclei is tightly focused on a small position. This rotates the nuclei that are at that spot and when the radio signal is removed from that position the nuclei snap back, radiating a radio signal of their own which is detected by the instrumentation.
Please, if you don't completely understand something technical then don't spread misinformation or supposition. A few seconds with Google would have shown you how both these things actually work. Better yet, go take a course in physics or chemistry and directly learn this stuff for yourself.
eucalyptus leaves are toxic to other plants, and will kill them off, regardless of shade
Yes, a lot of leaves falling onto grass, piling up, and rotting can also kill grass. This is due to tannins in the leaves and the physical effect of the leaves choking off the grass's light and root systems. That still doesn't have anything to do with wood itself being toxic to plants, trees need to protect their leaves from insects by loading them up with toxins. The trunks of most trees don't contain significant amounts of toxins, with the exception of some trees like cedar.
No matter, all I'm saying is that you can't simply look at the fact that there is less grass under a tree and say, "Oh, wood must be toxic to plants." It's spurious logic.
Maybe not *pure* wood pulp, but after that wood pulp's been processed and bleached, it's not as safe as you initially indicate. See this reference for details...
Yes, the process of turning wood pulp into bleached paper can produce chemicals that have an amount of toxicity. Small amounts of dioxins, for example, are produced when chlorine is used as part of the bleaching process. However, it would take quite a large amount of bleached paper to be of any danger to a person. The real risk to the older bleaching process was to the environment downstream of the paper mill. This is where the dioxins would concentrate and cause harm to plants and animals. The bleached paper itself was usually pretty harmless.
Anyways, most modern paper mills no longer use chlorine in their process. Instead they use oxygen, ozone, and hydrogen peroxide to bleach in a way that produces a much cleaner and environmentally-friendly product. This means that dioxins are no longer being produced in the majority of paper mills.
Wood pulp is toxic to most plants (and us too, which is why wood alcohol will make you blind while grain alcohol makes great mixed drinks), that's why it's hard to get grass to grow under a tree.
What???
Wood pulp is not toxic to plants. It's mostly simple lignin and cellulose which most plants will grow in quite happily. The reason grass doesn't grow under trees is that the shade from the tree is not good for the growth of grass. Even the "shade" varieties of grass can only tolerate partial shade.
"Wood" alcohol is actually methanol and "grain" alcohol is actually ethanol. When you ferment grain you actually get both methanol and ethanol, it's through careful control of the fermentation process that you minimize the methanol and maximize the ethanol. That's why poorly-made beers and wines tend to give you hangovers, they have a lot more methanol and other undesirable byproducts.
The reason methanol is called wood alcohol is because it was primarily produced through the destructive distillation of wood pulp. This doesn't mean that wood pulp is toxic, it just means that when you destroy wood pulp with heat in an anaerobic environment you produce toxic chemicals. If you take grain and treat it the same way then you'll produce methanol and other toxins. This has NOTHING to do with if wood pulp is toxic or not.
Please, don't start spewing nonsensical chemical information unless you know what you are talking about. And, yes, I am a chemist.
As I think about it, the thing can't work like an inkjet, coffee grounds are not AFAIK magnetic. It doesn't seem like it would work like a laser printer either, as it would be difficult to build up enough charge from mere linear motion of the hopper to power a laser. Also, again, coffee grounds are not magnetic.
Why would magnetism even factor into this? The ink in an inket printer is not magnetic, it's a simple dye that is forced under pressure onto a page where it absorbs into the surface. Laser printer toner is also not magnetic, it is usually a fine plastic powder that can be statically charged and attracted to a charged drum. There is no magnetism involved.
Coffee grounds can produce a liquid that stains and that's all you'd need for inkjet ink. I'm sure that the printing wouldn't be as good as commercial ink but it would probably be readable, at least for temporary documents. That being said I don't see this kind of device going anywhere. If you want to be "green" then throw those coffee grounds into your garden, trying to use them as ink is just way too impractical.
Imagine if anyone could do dummy iPhone apps using Flash, put them anywhere on the web, with absolutely no control from Apple. There'd be popups asking you to enter your credit card every 10 seconds, ads left and right, etc. Users would eventually be fed up and find the iPhone ugly. I guess Apple cares too much to let that happen.
Pretty much anything you can do with Flash can also be done with JavaScript, Ajax, etc. The iPhone fully supports these technologies, in fact that WAS originally how Apple wanted people to do apps for the iPhone. You can find out more about creating web apps straight from Apple.
Apple has no problem with web apps because they access your device through a vetted application, Safari. The reason that Apple is being more cautious on native apps is that they don't want to make their device unstable or dangerous to the cell phone network through someone's bad or malicious coding. Yes, maybe they are being overly cautious and restrictive but I'd rather they deny a few extra apps than allow apps that could cause problems.
Overall Apple has approved many thousands of apps and the percentage of apps that have been denied is small compared to that. No matter what a company does there will always be a vocal minority that pisses and moans about something. The fact is that the iPhone is wildly successful and many people are very happy with Apple's app-approval policies. If Apple does go off the deep end then you can bet they'll lose a lot of sales. That's the way the market works. If you don't like Apple's policies then don't buy Apple, eventually they'll get the message and tone things down.
Film resolution is measured by granularity of the crystals used. In other words, MOLECULES. Digital resolution is measured in pixels. Molecules are more granular than pixels.
Actually the grains in film are much larger than individual molecules. Film grains, even in very good films, are around 2 microns in size. This is MUCH larger than the size of the individual molecules that make up the grain. Now the pixels in a good digital camera are around 6 microns, not that much larger than film grains. The big difference is that the digital sensors can detect multiple levels of light whereas a film grain is either exposed or not exposed. It actually takes a bunch of film grains (on the order of a couple of dozen) to accurately represent the levels of light that one digital sensor can represent. This means that digital cameras can actually have higher resolution than film.
The other thing to remember is that digital sensors can also map the intensity of light over time, all that film can do is measure the cumulative amount of light that it is exposed to. This means that with the right software a digital camera can use the minute vibrations of its mounting to produce an interpolated image with far higher resolution than a film image.
Color saturation of prosumer image capture devices are about an order of magnitude worse than good film.
Saturation is a difficulty with both film and digital photography but digital is more sensitive to it. With the proper use of lighting, filters, and decent software you can pretty much eliminate any problems in both film and digital photography. This is especially true of a controlled setting such as a presidential photograph. In that situation you control everything, it's not hard to produce a properly saturated image.
Longevity. What's the longevity of a pixel on digital media? I have lots of negatives and slides, over 100 years old, which still produce very nice prints.
The longevity of digital media is far better than that of film. At its worst you can just reproduce your digital image onto film and store it that way. At its best you can pay to have the digital information engraved on some sort of durable physical media, such as a metal disc. Although you may not notice it, film degrades quite a bit over time. It loses contrast and fine details and it gets brittle. The thing is that you don't have a reference to compare it against so you don't notice the degradation until it's too late. Digital information is protected by the fact that it's easy to make several perfect copies, protect them with checksums and other methods, and compare each against each other for degradation. Yes, eventually all information will degrade but it's much easier to keep a digital photograph pristine than it is to keep a film photograph pristine.
A colleague who recently visited New York came back with some Hershey's chocolate, and very nice it was too. Except for the milk chocolate ones. They were disgusting - stank of vomit and tasted of sour, old milk. I remember on my visit there a few years ago experiencing the same flavour, but I put it down to it being a bad batch, or possible it got heated in transit. But no, it appears that taste is by design.
I might be just another "dumb American" but hey at I know how to use the web to find things out: The Hershey Process
Every culture has things that outsiders consider unappealing. Try visiting Asia and wonder at all the strange tastes that the natives love but outsiders hate. The same goes for Hershey's chocolate. It has a unique flavor that some people prize and others disdain.
Although not very many Americans travel outside the US. That's a fact, not a stereotype.
You're saying that's a fact and not a stereotype but you couldn't be more wrong. I see quite a few USA citizens visiting other countries. Sure, the per capita amount of US citizens visiting other countries might be lower than that of, say Europe but you have to remember a lot of other countries are so small that they are the size of one of the USA's states. Simply traveling across the USA is like traveling across Europe, you can visit many sites and different cultures and not cross a single country border.
I find it amazing that people poke fun at "Americans" for being ignorant but then these same people turn around and exhibit far greater ignorance.
Of course it's possible to accelerate payloads gradually, using a .
Using the numbers given in that article I calculate that in order to reach an escape velocity of 11.2 km/second on a 2 km wide track you would have a centripetal acceleration (a = v^2/r) of around 12,800 g just before you sent your payload off into space. That's a considerable amount of acceleration and even though military hardware is designed to handle similar accelerations for short periods I'm not sure how they would react to sustained high-g forces while the launch platform got up to speed.
Of course larger tracks are an option but those would cost more to build. You also run into wind resistance issues on open-air tracks and so a covered track with a vacuum would be best. Again, this adds to the cost even more for a large track.
No matter what, there would be a large amount of payloads that could not use such a setup. This would, of course, include astronauts but it would also include many delicate instruments such as telescopes. I'm not saying that launch loops shouldn't be used but no matter what we would still need to pursue lower acceleration launch methods to cover the full range of payloads. I agree that airship launches are a great idea that should be investigated.
The space gun concept would really only be good for a very narrow range of payloads that can withstand the extreme g-forces produced by such a device. You can reduce the g-forces by using a longer barrel but it's still a concept that really isn't feasible.
What we should be looking at is a Space Fountain. Yes, it seems like a very odd idea but it's backed by a lot of very good science and a lot of people are saying that it can be done with present materials and technologies. At the very least we should be experimenting with them on a smaller scale, using them to erect temporary masts and towers.
I think we can see their real purpose described in the linked article:
Whitesides holds up his group's latest development: a square slightly thicker than the other samples, covered in a grid of yellow, greed, red, and blue dots.
I think that dual booting is a very bad solution. If I want to play a game or run this application, then I have to shut down all my applications, reboot, then afterwards, reboot again, and reopen all my applications. If I only want to play a game for a few minutes, it's too much hassle. If I'm playing a game for a long time, or running an application, then I want to have email, IM, web browsing and so on accessible in case I want to quickly check something, or someone contacts me, in the meantime. I also don't want to have to interrupt any background tasks (downloading, or whatever else).
Or you can just run Parallels or any one of the several programs that let you run Windows binaries directly under Mac OS X, no need to reboot at all.
I use an OS that serves all of my needs, and doesn't need me to dual boot into another OS because it isn't up to the job
It's unfortunate that there are game programmers out there that only program for Windows. That doesn't mean that Mac OS X "isn't up to the job", it can run games just fine, it means that sometimes programmers only target one platform. There are tons of games out there that are only for the Wii, does that mean that the XBox "isn't up to the job" to run them?
There are things that Mac OS X does better than Windows, just like there are things Windows does better than Mac OS X. Fortunately my Mac OS X box can run both so I get the best of both worlds.
My thoughts exactly. It should be up to everyone else to protect themselves so that I'm protected by virtue of their diligence.
I mean, I don't wear condoms because everyone else has been told to protect themselves with birth control and prophylactics. I have nothing to worry about, right?
Ya know, it's funny how there are all these people who are offended by the notion that I won't waste my money and time on a problem that doesn't affect me one bit. Well here's a clue, I'm not passing on any viruses in the first place.
I'm running Mac OS X and there are no viruses that can infect my system right now which means I can't be a carrier. If that ever changes then I'll re-evaluate the situation.
I don't forward attachments so I'm not passing on viruses that way.
I don't use Microsoft Office so there is no chance of VBScript macro viruses.
Pretty much every service is shut down, I'm behind a firewall, and I don't run as an admin user, plus I regularly monitor my machines for any intrusion so my risk of being part of a botnet is pretty slim.
I don't feel the need to pay blood money to some antivirus company for the privilege of them wasting processing power and memory on my home machines. This is not being irresponsible, this is being smart. To me the real fools are the people who happily waste their money on cleaning up infections after the fact rather than taking sensible steps to prevent infection in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
The best April Fool's day joke is the one that turns out to not really be a joke. It leaves you wondering, "ok this looks like a joke but they say it's real, I'm so confused!" Gotta love it!
OmniWeb has had something similar for a long time, it's called shortcuts. You can either type in your searches (such as: imdb Jack Black) or you can use the search shortcut on the toolbar.
I like Firefox a lot because of its support for standards and its expandability but honestly I find myself using OmniWeb a lot more. Sure I can get addons to Firefox that make it as (or perhaps even more) functional as OmniWeb but the Firefox addons can get a bit odd at times, interacting with Firefox in weird ways. It's also annoying to constantly have to update all the Firefox addons I'd need to match OmniWeb. (I'm sure I can turn off updates but see the previous statement about odd bugs.) It's nice to get so much functionality in an easy-to-use browser like OmniWeb.
You mean it can run a 4 year old game quite well?
World of Warcraft is not exactly a 4 year old game. Each major update to the game has increased the capabilities of the client and also has increased the minimum system requirements to run it. Yes, overall it has been around for 4 years but it is hardly the exact same game and client that it was 4 years ago.
Actually, it just did when I just updated iTunes about 15 minutes ago. I do NOT have Safari on this machine and it had ticked Safari as a 23MB (iirc) 'update' that was in the bottom half of the dialog off on its own. Nice of them to check mark that download for my own good, eh?
That's interesting because I have updated to the latest iTunes through Apple's updater and at no time did it offer to update to the Safari 4 beta. I'm currently using Safari 3. Maybe you just have an outdated Safari 3 and it offered to update you to the most recent Safari 3 release, not the Safari 4 beta.
Have you ever been around scientists? There is simply NOTHING in the universe they like more than proving each other wrong. They argue for years over the tiniest details. Entire labs are dedicated to proving other labs wrong.
With that sort of adversarial process, your conspiratorial arrangement wouldn't last long. Look at Korean cloning or cold fusion as examples. Some scientists made claims. Other scientists tried to duplicate the results and failed.
Actually, I am a Chemist. So, yes I've spent a considerable amount of time around scientists.
It's true that scientists all have their own variations on theories and you can see a lot of that in climatology too. The problem is that most of the culture of climatologists is dominated by people who have gotten notoriety, positions, grants, and other perks for being doom-and-gloom about the environment. The media rewards climatologists for reporting what is going wrong with the world, just like the media does with many other professionals. The politicians of the world have gotten fat on scaring people, getting money thrown at them to solve the problems, and then recruiting scientists who mirror the public opinion - thus creating a feedback loop.
There are plenty of dissenting opinions on the causes and solutions of global warming but, for the most part, the climatologists with clout are the ones who say we are all doomed. You have to seriously dig for the moderate climatologists and even then they mostly have positions at small research facilities, little media exposure, poor access to grants and equipment. This is not because they are bad scientists, some are actually highly respected scientists, but they don't "play ball" and so they don't get the perks.
As far as repeatability of experiments, that's great when you can contain your experiment in a lab under tightly controlled conditions. Until the day that we can make a full-scale (or a significant fraction thereof) model of the Earth and have good control of all the variables we won't have anything like cloning or cold fusion. Those were easily testable and verifiable, climate is far from it.
Like it or not, there is a huge bias in climatology. A lot of the methodology doesn't pass muster as true science, something that this article highlights.
You mean besides the overwhelming majority of the world's climate scientists?
You mean the people whose livelihood and considerable private and government grants depend on making waves about the climate and increasing their self-importance?
Not to mention the fact that a lot of them got into climatology because of past climate fear-mongering and "environmental awareness" advocates who beat on the drum that the Earth is doomed. A lot of the current crop of climatologists are the product of the 60's and of the environmental movement spawned back then, a movement which isn't exactly known for its calm, collected analysis and immersion in reality.
This doesn't mean that all climatologists are delusional or that there is no warming occurring. All I'm saying is that there are a whole lot of people, including professionals, that have an overly-emotional connection to the issues. This results in a lot of bad science and bad policy decisions.
Mob not dying after you got him to 0%, Quests completing without granting rewards, Stats setting back to their naked values - I've never had any of these happen to me in 6 months of beta WoW and 3 years of retail WoW, nor have I heard of it. Perhaps you are thinking of a different game
I've never seen or heard of the stat reset bug but the other two were usually related to some sort of lag. My favorite bug was the multiple reward bug where you could turn in a quest, force-quit the game, and then turn in the quest a second time when you logged back in and get double the xp and rewards. It was tough to do but at one point you could do it reliably with a little practice.
There was also the shaman negative agility bug that was fun, over 100% crit and dodge and tons of armor - it made shaman killing machines until it was fixed.
- if you kept beating on an NPC, at some point it said it runs away in fear. Except it didn't, it stood there like an idiot doing nothing. Then if he survived a few seconds in that state (quite easy for major bosses) it would suddenly heal back to full helt. How _that_ got through QA, I can't even imagine.
- enemies stuck in terrain, e.g., in the cave with the squigs in the greenskin starting quests.
- retarded pet AI. In WoW if your pet can't reach an enemy, it stays with you. In WAR it ran in some retarded direction and down some corridor, and only eventually it would figure out to come back to you.
There were similar major bugs in WoW at some point in time also. The difference is that Blizzard mostly fixed these bugs a while ago but then again they've had several years to do so. Even then some of the bugs were long-standing like the evasion bug where if you stood in just the wrong spot and the pathing algorithm had trouble getting a clear path from the enemy to a person who had threat on the enemy then the enemy would heal to full. This happened quite a bit, especially in large raids where there were 40 people with threat on the enemy and all it took was for one person to have this bug happen. Fortunatley it has been (mostly) fixed.
I haven't played Warhammer Online but I've played a ton of World of Warcraft and I think what keeps people in WoW is how easy it is to fiddle around and not realize you've just spent a couple of hours playing. Of course, eventually even doing little quests, farming for stuff, interacting with people starts to wear at you but with WoW the immersion is pretty complete and so it takes a while before most people get bored of the game. Another good thing is that although there have been and still are bugs in the game most of them aren't so serious that the entire game becomes pointless, they are mostly just annoyances that you can mostly work around.
The cheapest Mac in which you can do something as simple as upgrade the video card is $2,499.
Which doesn't say much about anything since that's just a small slice of the computer market and it doesn't consider all the features of that $2,499 Mac. For example, that Mac you are talking about is running on what is essentially server hardware with a quad-core Xeon processor on a 1600MHz frontside bus, ECC memory, supports up to 32 GB of RAM, four hot-swappable SATA drive bays, etc. Once you compare this computer with a similar non-Mac you start to see that the pricing is pretty close between all OEMs.
Most home users don't need this kind of hardware and they will instead go for a less expensive, home-class computer. Unfortunately Apple does not offer a combination of home-class hardware and the ability to swap out a video card. This really is not much of a problem because most home users don't ever swap out video cards. It does limit the semi-pro user a bit, they either have to spend more on the server hardware Mac Pro, get the less upgradable iMac or Mac Mini, or not get a Mac at all. Apple's stance is that the semi-pro market is too small for them to worry about, I don't agree but that's their call.
So to rephrase your analogy as I see the situation, it would be if Nissan built all Maximas with leather seats and Bose stereos, but then at the dealership they stripped off the leather and replaced it with canvas (or whatever), and put in a crappy stereo using the excuse that only audiophiles really need nice stereos.
Although I agree that making 6 versions of Windows is a very bad idea I don't think this captures the problem at all. The problem is that more versions of Windows means more support headaches and confusion about what exactly your version can do. Suppose my aunt gets a computer and I have to walk her through a problem, now I have to identify exactly what version she has, what features are specific to each version, the differences between menu items and other UI elements, and so on. It's a support nightmare and just a bad idea. Honestly I think that two or three versions of any operating system is plenty.
As for your analogy it's more like Nissan building a base Maxima with only the essentials and then adding modules on for customers that want more. Say, a base car that just gets you there, then an optional stereo, an optional leather seat, optional automatic windows, and so on. The same goes for Microsoft Windows, the base versions only have the core system and then they include other modules for the people who want to pay for them. This means that Microsoft can split up its development costs, spending so much on the core system, so much more on an advanced graphics support module, so much more on a network services module, etc. Developing those extra modules does cost them more so it makes sense to charge more for including them but 6 versions is still a bit too much segmentation in my mind.
how do you turn ink into fine mist of few molecules in diameter? by creating massively fluctuating magnetic field to vibrate the ink molecules - thats why you need electricity to print (technically water should work too, since MRI works in similar principle - the water molecules fluctuate according to magnetic field - but you still need some charged, (water is polar) or some other molecule that will respond to magnetic field
Nope. Try again.
Pretty much all inkjet printers in use today use either a bubble jet (thermal bubble) or a piezoelectric method to produce fine droplets. Bubble jet printers use fine nozzles that have a heater located just inside the nozzle. When the heater turns on it creates a small vapor bubble that shoots ink out the nozzle. Piezoelectric printers use a piezoelectric actuator located just inside the nozzle that shoots ink out the nozzle. There are no commercial inkjet printers that use magnetic fields in the fashion you describe and I'm not certain that what you describe is a practical design for an inkjet printer.
By the way, an MRI does not work the way you are describing. The magnetic field is stationary, not "massively fluctuating". It also does not work on molecules, rather it works directly on the nuclei of atoms. This large, stationary magnetic field causes the magnetic moments of certain nuclei, such as hydrogen nuclei, to line up with the magnetic field. A radio signal of a frequency specific to that nuclei is tightly focused on a small position. This rotates the nuclei that are at that spot and when the radio signal is removed from that position the nuclei snap back, radiating a radio signal of their own which is detected by the instrumentation.
Please, if you don't completely understand something technical then don't spread misinformation or supposition. A few seconds with Google would have shown you how both these things actually work. Better yet, go take a course in physics or chemistry and directly learn this stuff for yourself.
eucalyptus leaves are toxic to other plants, and will kill them off, regardless of shade
Yes, a lot of leaves falling onto grass, piling up, and rotting can also kill grass. This is due to tannins in the leaves and the physical effect of the leaves choking off the grass's light and root systems. That still doesn't have anything to do with wood itself being toxic to plants, trees need to protect their leaves from insects by loading them up with toxins. The trunks of most trees don't contain significant amounts of toxins, with the exception of some trees like cedar.
No matter, all I'm saying is that you can't simply look at the fact that there is less grass under a tree and say, "Oh, wood must be toxic to plants." It's spurious logic.
Maybe not *pure* wood pulp, but after that wood pulp's been processed and bleached, it's not as safe as you initially indicate. See this reference for details...
Yes, the process of turning wood pulp into bleached paper can produce chemicals that have an amount of toxicity. Small amounts of dioxins, for example, are produced when chlorine is used as part of the bleaching process. However, it would take quite a large amount of bleached paper to be of any danger to a person. The real risk to the older bleaching process was to the environment downstream of the paper mill. This is where the dioxins would concentrate and cause harm to plants and animals. The bleached paper itself was usually pretty harmless.
Anyways, most modern paper mills no longer use chlorine in their process. Instead they use oxygen, ozone, and hydrogen peroxide to bleach in a way that produces a much cleaner and environmentally-friendly product. This means that dioxins are no longer being produced in the majority of paper mills.
Wood pulp is toxic to most plants (and us too, which is why wood alcohol will make you blind while grain alcohol makes great mixed drinks), that's why it's hard to get grass to grow under a tree.
What???
Wood pulp is not toxic to plants. It's mostly simple lignin and cellulose which most plants will grow in quite happily. The reason grass doesn't grow under trees is that the shade from the tree is not good for the growth of grass. Even the "shade" varieties of grass can only tolerate partial shade.
"Wood" alcohol is actually methanol and "grain" alcohol is actually ethanol. When you ferment grain you actually get both methanol and ethanol, it's through careful control of the fermentation process that you minimize the methanol and maximize the ethanol. That's why poorly-made beers and wines tend to give you hangovers, they have a lot more methanol and other undesirable byproducts.
The reason methanol is called wood alcohol is because it was primarily produced through the destructive distillation of wood pulp. This doesn't mean that wood pulp is toxic, it just means that when you destroy wood pulp with heat in an anaerobic environment you produce toxic chemicals. If you take grain and treat it the same way then you'll produce methanol and other toxins. This has NOTHING to do with if wood pulp is toxic or not.
Please, don't start spewing nonsensical chemical information unless you know what you are talking about. And, yes, I am a chemist.
As I think about it, the thing can't work like an inkjet, coffee grounds are not AFAIK magnetic. It doesn't seem like it would work like a laser printer either, as it would be difficult to build up enough charge from mere linear motion of the hopper to power a laser. Also, again, coffee grounds are not magnetic.
Why would magnetism even factor into this? The ink in an inket printer is not magnetic, it's a simple dye that is forced under pressure onto a page where it absorbs into the surface. Laser printer toner is also not magnetic, it is usually a fine plastic powder that can be statically charged and attracted to a charged drum. There is no magnetism involved.
Coffee grounds can produce a liquid that stains and that's all you'd need for inkjet ink. I'm sure that the printing wouldn't be as good as commercial ink but it would probably be readable, at least for temporary documents. That being said I don't see this kind of device going anywhere. If you want to be "green" then throw those coffee grounds into your garden, trying to use them as ink is just way too impractical.
Imagine if anyone could do dummy iPhone apps using Flash, put them anywhere on the web, with absolutely no control from Apple. There'd be popups asking you to enter your credit card every 10 seconds, ads left and right, etc. Users would eventually be fed up and find the iPhone ugly. I guess Apple cares too much to let that happen.
Pretty much anything you can do with Flash can also be done with JavaScript, Ajax, etc. The iPhone fully supports these technologies, in fact that WAS originally how Apple wanted people to do apps for the iPhone. You can find out more about creating web apps straight from Apple.
Apple has no problem with web apps because they access your device through a vetted application, Safari. The reason that Apple is being more cautious on native apps is that they don't want to make their device unstable or dangerous to the cell phone network through someone's bad or malicious coding. Yes, maybe they are being overly cautious and restrictive but I'd rather they deny a few extra apps than allow apps that could cause problems.
Overall Apple has approved many thousands of apps and the percentage of apps that have been denied is small compared to that. No matter what a company does there will always be a vocal minority that pisses and moans about something. The fact is that the iPhone is wildly successful and many people are very happy with Apple's app-approval policies. If Apple does go off the deep end then you can bet they'll lose a lot of sales. That's the way the market works. If you don't like Apple's policies then don't buy Apple, eventually they'll get the message and tone things down.
Film resolution is measured by granularity of the crystals used. In other words, MOLECULES. Digital resolution is measured in pixels. Molecules are more granular than pixels.
Actually the grains in film are much larger than individual molecules. Film grains, even in very good films, are around 2 microns in size. This is MUCH larger than the size of the individual molecules that make up the grain. Now the pixels in a good digital camera are around 6 microns, not that much larger than film grains. The big difference is that the digital sensors can detect multiple levels of light whereas a film grain is either exposed or not exposed. It actually takes a bunch of film grains (on the order of a couple of dozen) to accurately represent the levels of light that one digital sensor can represent. This means that digital cameras can actually have higher resolution than film.
The other thing to remember is that digital sensors can also map the intensity of light over time, all that film can do is measure the cumulative amount of light that it is exposed to. This means that with the right software a digital camera can use the minute vibrations of its mounting to produce an interpolated image with far higher resolution than a film image.
Color saturation of prosumer image capture devices are about an order of magnitude worse than good film.
Saturation is a difficulty with both film and digital photography but digital is more sensitive to it. With the proper use of lighting, filters, and decent software you can pretty much eliminate any problems in both film and digital photography. This is especially true of a controlled setting such as a presidential photograph. In that situation you control everything, it's not hard to produce a properly saturated image.
Longevity. What's the longevity of a pixel on digital media? I have lots of negatives and slides, over 100 years old, which still produce very nice prints.
The longevity of digital media is far better than that of film. At its worst you can just reproduce your digital image onto film and store it that way. At its best you can pay to have the digital information engraved on some sort of durable physical media, such as a metal disc. Although you may not notice it, film degrades quite a bit over time. It loses contrast and fine details and it gets brittle. The thing is that you don't have a reference to compare it against so you don't notice the degradation until it's too late. Digital information is protected by the fact that it's easy to make several perfect copies, protect them with checksums and other methods, and compare each against each other for degradation. Yes, eventually all information will degrade but it's much easier to keep a digital photograph pristine than it is to keep a film photograph pristine.
I thought it was "Be Back Quick".
I've heard it both ways. Honestly I think "Better Be Quick" fits better but they both work.
And how does Barbeque fit into OMGWTFBBQ? Maybe none of us understand the true meaning of all these acronyms.
Oh My God, What The Fuck, Better Be Quick
A colleague who recently visited New York came back with some Hershey's chocolate, and very nice it was too. Except for the milk chocolate ones. They were disgusting - stank of vomit and tasted of sour, old milk. I remember on my visit there a few years ago experiencing the same flavour, but I put it down to it being a bad batch, or possible it got heated in transit. But no, it appears that taste is by design.
I might be just another "dumb American" but hey at I know how to use the web to find things out:
The Hershey Process
Every culture has things that outsiders consider unappealing. Try visiting Asia and wonder at all the strange tastes that the natives love but outsiders hate. The same goes for Hershey's chocolate. It has a unique flavor that some people prize and others disdain.
Although not very many Americans travel outside the US. That's a fact, not a stereotype.
You're saying that's a fact and not a stereotype but you couldn't be more wrong. I see quite a few USA citizens visiting other countries. Sure, the per capita amount of US citizens visiting other countries might be lower than that of, say Europe but you have to remember a lot of other countries are so small that they are the size of one of the USA's states. Simply traveling across the USA is like traveling across Europe, you can visit many sites and different cultures and not cross a single country border.
I find it amazing that people poke fun at "Americans" for being ignorant but then these same people turn around and exhibit far greater ignorance.
Of course it's possible to accelerate payloads gradually, using a .
Using the numbers given in that article I calculate that in order to reach an escape velocity of 11.2 km/second on a 2 km wide track you would have a centripetal acceleration (a = v^2/r) of around 12,800 g just before you sent your payload off into space. That's a considerable amount of acceleration and even though military hardware is designed to handle similar accelerations for short periods I'm not sure how they would react to sustained high-g forces while the launch platform got up to speed.
Of course larger tracks are an option but those would cost more to build. You also run into wind resistance issues on open-air tracks and so a covered track with a vacuum would be best. Again, this adds to the cost even more for a large track.
No matter what, there would be a large amount of payloads that could not use such a setup. This would, of course, include astronauts but it would also include many delicate instruments such as telescopes. I'm not saying that launch loops shouldn't be used but no matter what we would still need to pursue lower acceleration launch methods to cover the full range of payloads. I agree that airship launches are a great idea that should be investigated.
The space gun concept would really only be good for a very narrow range of payloads that can withstand the extreme g-forces produced by such a device. You can reduce the g-forces by using a longer barrel but it's still a concept that really isn't feasible.
What we should be looking at is a Space Fountain. Yes, it seems like a very odd idea but it's backed by a lot of very good science and a lot of people are saying that it can be done with present materials and technologies. At the very least we should be experimenting with them on a smaller scale, using them to erect temporary masts and towers.
I think we can see their real purpose described in the linked article:
Whitesides holds up his group's latest development: a square slightly thicker than the other samples, covered in a grid of yellow, greed, red, and blue dots.
I think that dual booting is a very bad solution. If I want to play a game or run this application, then I have to shut down all my applications, reboot, then afterwards, reboot again, and reopen all my applications. If I only want to play a game for a few minutes, it's too much hassle. If I'm playing a game for a long time, or running an application, then I want to have email, IM, web browsing and so on accessible in case I want to quickly check something, or someone contacts me, in the meantime. I also don't want to have to interrupt any background tasks (downloading, or whatever else).
Or you can just run Parallels or any one of the several programs that let you run Windows binaries directly under Mac OS X, no need to reboot at all.
I use an OS that serves all of my needs, and doesn't need me to dual boot into another OS because it isn't up to the job
It's unfortunate that there are game programmers out there that only program for Windows. That doesn't mean that Mac OS X "isn't up to the job", it can run games just fine, it means that sometimes programmers only target one platform. There are tons of games out there that are only for the Wii, does that mean that the XBox "isn't up to the job" to run them?
There are things that Mac OS X does better than Windows, just like there are things Windows does better than Mac OS X. Fortunately my Mac OS X box can run both so I get the best of both worlds.
My thoughts exactly. It should be up to everyone else to protect themselves so that I'm protected by virtue of their diligence.
I mean, I don't wear condoms because everyone else has been told to protect themselves with birth control and prophylactics. I have nothing to worry about, right?
Ya know, it's funny how there are all these people who are offended by the notion that I won't waste my money and time on a problem that doesn't affect me one bit. Well here's a clue, I'm not passing on any viruses in the first place.
I don't feel the need to pay blood money to some antivirus company for the privilege of them wasting processing power and memory on my home machines. This is not being irresponsible, this is being smart. To me the real fools are the people who happily waste their money on cleaning up infections after the fact rather than taking sensible steps to prevent infection in the first place.