Scientific American might disagree with you... "Although Americans with good health insurance coverage may get the best medical treatment in the world, the health of the average American, as measured by life expectancy and infant mortality, is below the average of other major industrial countries."
some little box that does everything a tivo does and more--save shows as files, move them over a network, let you edit them, burn to CD or DVD, etc.
Doesn't the Tivo let you do that? I can do all those things with my All-in-Wonder 9700 (but only in my Windows partition, unfortunately).
Re:ISA slot adapter card for PCI slot?
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From what I've heard, it's impossible. Which is why I spent days trying to find a motherboard with an ISA slot. Considering these guys sell it for less than $300Can, it's a pretty good deal.
...though I can't understand this obsession with removing everything legacy from PCs - it's not like it would reduce the price much, or increase performance/stability.
Re:I always love that argument...
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and my wheels are still made out of stone, too! It's not like the wheel is free of innovation.
Yeah, now we have Firestone tires. Whee! *crash*
Seriously, though - new tires can still drive on old roads, can't they?
Uh, excuse me, but most people suffer from heart disease after they've reproduced. Though if all potential mates had access to such information before he had kids, then that would work.
A better solution might be to provide him with free health care in exchange for being sterilized (with the option of paying for genetic engineering to produce offspring with the gene fixed, if he can afford it).
In any case, this is yet another reason why I consider a universal health care system like Canada's (despite the folks trying to tear it apart) is superior, besides the fact that Americans end up paying the most per capita yet get worse treatment (if they aren't millionares).
Three Mile Island hasn't "caused human birth deformities for a several hundred mile radius", and while Cherynobyl has definitely had a significant impact, that still sounds like hyperbole.
No one that I know of has even completed a comprehensive study of the effect chernobyl had on wildlife.
How about the effect of industrial pollution, acid rain, etc. on Eastern European forests?
Which power source would you rather live next to when the next accident happens?
Well, that depends on the accident, doesn't it? A wisp of radioactive smoke (insignificant compared to background levels) would be preferable to a dam bursting upstream from my house or a microwave transmitter (beaming power down from a solar satellite) losing its tracking and burning me to a crisp. But any of those risks would be better than the very real long-term effect of breathing coal smoke.
There is very legitimate disagreement as to whether it is possible to engineer such a plant so that no operator incompetence can possibly have catastrophic effects.
1)TMI didn't have catastrophic effects.
2)What? You mean all technology has to be designed so that it is impossible to cause any harm, no matter how hard one tries? Now that's miraculous engineering.
Chernobyl was the a disaster because of a deeply flawed design and extreme incompetence on the part of the operators. Three Mile Island was the result of operator incompetence - but even then, no actual harm was caused.
What about the effects of breathing tons of coal smoke? Science and technology cannot be relied upon to build a safe fossil fuel power plant. Or any entirely safe power plant (or anything) for that matter. What about wind farms killing birds, or hydro plants ruining salmon spawning grounds? In many cases, nuclear isn't the best option, but why is it the only one that needs to prove itself 100% safe and environmentally friendly?
And, y'know, if you do like it and have the money, you could always try buying it. The profit margins for anime are generally a lot less than the typical Hollywood crap, and the more incentive there is to bring good shows over the better.
Personally, I would have been just as happy if Cowboy Bebop had a happy ending, since I enjoyed every episode. If anything, the sad ending was a huge let-down. Then again, the first episode in the series was a pretty tragic, and should have been a clue that they'd go any-which-way.
The thing I didn't like about the ending was that it pretty much came out of nowhere. (Spike just suddenly decides to go after this guy - while the individual episodes were good, there just wasn't much build-up.) If the series had been more "story arc" driven than episodic, the ending would have worked better for me.
I haven't tried either of the above, though... Also, the program Dokusha, while also being a good English-Japanese dictionary, comes with some Japanese fonts.
No, it's RNA. As far as I know, all retroviruses are single (+)stranded RNA that is coverted to DNA by reverse transcriptase. (The "+" means that the strand goes in the proper direction and has the requirements to be translated into protein by ribosomes in the cell. Influenza is a single (-)stranded virus that is copied into (+)stranded mRNA by a protein it brings along with it before it can make proteins.)
Why is it that the ONLY thing you can get standalone is a 15" 1024x768, or a 17" 1280x1024?
...though the reason it annoys me is that it makes it almost impossible to get a 4:3 screen ratio in an LCD bigger than 15". Why can't I find a 17" LCD that is 1280x960 (or 1600x1200 would be okay, too) so fullscreen at other resolutions isn't stretched and crappy like it is on a 1280x1024 LCD. The only thing I've seen is this 18.1" monstrosity which only does 1024x768. I'd still probably buy it if it were available in Canada. I guess I'll just settle on a 15" 1024x768.
...check your links before you post them. Your link to www.sharp.com goes to Sharp Healthcare. (I went to www.sharp-usa.com, but didn't want to wait the hour or two for the manual to download before posting.)
There is no pause on the Zaurus as it converts text.
I wasn't specifically referring to the Zaurus, but "handwriting recognition" systems in general. But if it doesn't pause, how does it know when you're finished writing a word? Or do you push a button to convert a page of writing to text? Or does it recognize one character at a time, which would hardly be "the natural way that people write".
Wrong again. It's actually extremely easy to train it to new methods. Check the PDF manual available at the official site for more information.
I suppose, though it would a little tedious. It just doesn't seem that big of a deal. Personally, I'd choose a machine like this over an m125 because the m125 is a piece of crap...
I find the built in keyboard very usable. In fact, that's what I use the most. There are however external keyboards available including one that uses infrared(!)--no wires/cables.
I just find those thumbpad things annoying. The C700 looks much nicer...pity it isn't available here.
Wrong yet again. The batteries cost $50 retail. They're available even cheaper if you do a bit of searching. And the Zaurus's batteries (it has more than one) are fully replaceable.
Gotcha there! I meant in Canadian pesos.;-) Seriously, though - while that's great, it doesn't help when this unit is discontinued a few years down the road and the batteries are no longer available. Since there are no standard forms of lithium batteries, the inevitable fate of any device powered by them is that they will only be useable by power cord or they'll become paperweights.
I bought a USB link for my PS2 - it lets me copy saved games from the memory cards to my PC's hard drive. Doesn't the X-Box have anything similar?
The hard drive one of the main reasons I didn't buy an X-Box - the "Microsoft is Evil" thing was a relatively minor concern. I just knew it would be a major pain in the ass. My PS2, Gamecube, and PC are enough for me.
Its a theme park, i.e. a zoo. We dont try and reach environmental equilibrium in our zoos: we bring outside food in, and feed the tigers, the wallabies and the zebras. Why wouldn't we just bring in outside food from Jurassic park to feed them?
Heck, why not let visitors pay to hunt them? Of course, even the biggest guns would only work on the smaller ones, but going after a brontosaurus with a missile launcher would be kinda neat...;-)
Perhaps, but I can input graffiti faster than I can write - the one-stroke, simplified characters just take less time to make and there's no pause while waiting for writing to be converted into text. And I'd guess that training the handwriting recognition system on the Zaurus to use graffiti would be an extraordinarily time-consuming task.
I'd like to see a unit with a small but useable keyboard, instead. Something that can run on some sort of standard battery (say, NIMH AAs) rather than proprietary lithium #63416 would also be nice. Why aren't there any standard lithium battery forms (like there are C, D, 9V, etc.), anyway? Oh, right - then companies couldn't sell them for $200, or refuse to let customers replace their batteries and demand they buy a shiny new unit instead.
Yup, it's definitely crap. I believe it does have the ability to log out, though, because I think I can remember "make sure you log out" messages after finishing my CLST301 quizzes before I graduated last year.
Another interesting "feature" of it is that on the messageboard, teachers can delete messages (see issue 16.10 page 5) but students can't.
yes but methanol might well break down the enzymes (or more likely the enzymes will break down the methanol and its byproduct including formaldihyde will poison them). I would guess this is why they didn't just use cheaper methanol to start out.
I doubt it - ethanol is preferred over methanol as a target for alcohol dehydrogenase. So much so that ethanol is a treatment for methanol poisoning (along with sodium bicarbonate for acidosis). Methanol (or other impurities) may very well gum up the works somehow, though.
I suspect that at least part of the reason for this is that ethanol is much less toxic, so there is less concern with getting poisoned. You can also buy denatured 70% or 99% ethanol in any drugstore, so it'd be easy to get - even if this thing were released right now.
That probably depends on how much ethanol you want to carry around with you.;-) A nice thing about these is that they might be more versatile. A big 2L bottle would probably last a good while.
OTOH, if they'd build laptops to be more efficient, rather than making them blazing fast multimedia entertainment centers (insert a few more buzzwords here), they might be useable for more than an hour or two. Even most PDA's last a few hours at best, unless you get a good monochrome one running on AAA's which will last you weeks to months - but they're getting harder to find. The only ones that spring to mind are the PEG-SL10 and Handera 330. It's ironic how many "technical innovations" like colour screens, StrongARM processors, lithium batteries, etc. seem to reduce usefulness.
Just in case anyone actually reads this old thread, I advise strongly against ordering from DirectPC. Also, if you are interested in the Desknote, you should know that the Desknote iBuddie4 928 not only lacks the "Hardware SoundBlaster Pro for real-mode DOS legacy compatible" that is advertised, but it doesn't seem to have any DOS support at all. The sound card it does have is a SiS 7012 PCI, which doesn't seem to have any soundblaster emulation drivers. Nor does it seem very compatible with linux according to http://fdiv.net/desknote/
You see, they had to absorb a few good marketers before they got their introduction right.
Aha! That's why they're interested in Earth. We should cooperate with these proto-Borg, and gather up all the marketers, salesmen, etc. and send them off in a ship. We'll call it the "B" Ark.
Yeah, but it gave the old one had pretty impressive battery life on a pair of AA's. I was in the hospital for a month a while ago after being hit by a truck (while in a crosswalk, #%@! drivers), and after I was off the morphine injections I got (amongst other things) my Gameboy Advance and my NIMH charger from home. I kept expecting to need to change them, but never did. And hospital lighting is ideal for playing the GA.;-)
I think a built-in front light (which it says this thing has) is better, since the back of the screen can probably be a lot more reflective. IMO, the worst thing about the GA was that the glass front of the screen was so shiny, and reflected a lot of light back at you.
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Scientific American might disagree with you... "Although Americans with good health insurance coverage may get the best medical treatment in the world, the health of the average American, as measured by life expectancy and infant mortality, is below the average of other major industrial countries."
Doesn't the Tivo let you do that? I can do all those things with my All-in-Wonder 9700 (but only in my Windows partition, unfortunately).
and my wheels are still made out of stone, too!
It's not like the wheel is free of innovation.
Yeah, now we have Firestone tires. Whee! *crash*
Seriously, though - new tires can still drive on old roads, can't they?
A better solution might be to provide him with free health care in exchange for being sterilized (with the option of paying for genetic engineering to produce offspring with the gene fixed, if he can afford it).
In any case, this is yet another reason why I consider a universal health care system like Canada's (despite the folks trying to tear it apart) is superior, besides the fact that Americans end up paying the most per capita yet get worse treatment (if they aren't millionares).
Three Mile Island hasn't "caused human birth deformities for a several hundred mile radius", and while Cherynobyl has definitely had a significant impact, that still sounds like hyperbole.
No one that I know of has even completed a comprehensive study of the effect chernobyl had on wildlife.
How about the effect of industrial pollution, acid rain, etc. on Eastern European forests?
Which power source would you rather live next to when the next accident happens?
Well, that depends on the accident, doesn't it? A wisp of radioactive smoke (insignificant compared to background levels) would be preferable to a dam bursting upstream from my house or a microwave transmitter (beaming power down from a solar satellite) losing its tracking and burning me to a crisp. But any of those risks would be better than the very real long-term effect of breathing coal smoke.
1)TMI didn't have catastrophic effects.
2)What? You mean all technology has to be designed so that it is impossible to cause any harm, no matter how hard one tries? Now that's miraculous engineering.
Chernobyl was the a disaster because of a deeply flawed design and extreme incompetence on the part of the operators. Three Mile Island was the result of operator incompetence - but even then, no actual harm was caused.
What about the effects of breathing tons of coal smoke? Science and technology cannot be relied upon to build a safe fossil fuel power plant. Or any entirely safe power plant (or anything) for that matter. What about wind farms killing birds, or hydro plants ruining salmon spawning grounds? In many cases, nuclear isn't the best option, but why is it the only one that needs to prove itself 100% safe and environmentally friendly?
Though I can't seem to find the boxed set...
The thing I didn't like about the ending was that it pretty much came out of nowhere. (Spike just suddenly decides to go after this guy - while the individual episodes were good, there just wasn't much build-up.) If the series had been more "story arc" driven than episodic, the ending would have worked better for me.
Neopad Nihongo Input Romazi
I haven't tried either of the above, though...
Also, the program Dokusha, while also being a good English-Japanese dictionary, comes with some Japanese fonts.
No, it's RNA. As far as I know, all retroviruses are single (+)stranded RNA that is coverted to DNA by reverse transcriptase. (The "+" means that the strand goes in the proper direction and has the requirements to be translated into protein by ribosomes in the cell. Influenza is a single (-)stranded virus that is copied into (+)stranded mRNA by a protein it brings along with it before it can make proteins.)
Frankly though, I'm going to stick with my Frytium 4 2.4GSz (Gigasizzles) with built-in grease channels...
I wasn't specifically referring to the Zaurus, but "handwriting recognition" systems in general. But if it doesn't pause, how does it know when you're finished writing a word? Or do you push a button to convert a page of writing to text? Or does it recognize one character at a time, which would hardly be "the natural way that people write".
Wrong again. It's actually extremely easy to train it to new methods. Check the PDF manual available at the official site for more information.
I suppose, though it would a little tedious. It just doesn't seem that big of a deal. Personally, I'd choose a machine like this over an m125 because the m125 is a piece of crap...
I find the built in keyboard very usable. In fact, that's what I use the most. There are however external keyboards available including one that uses infrared(!)--no wires/cables.
I just find those thumbpad things annoying. The C700 looks much nicer...pity it isn't available here.
Wrong yet again. The batteries cost $50 retail. They're available even cheaper if you do a bit of searching. And the Zaurus's batteries (it has more than one) are fully replaceable.
Gotcha there! I meant in Canadian pesos. ;-) Seriously, though - while that's great, it doesn't help when this unit is discontinued a few years down the road and the batteries are no longer available. Since there are no standard forms of lithium batteries, the inevitable fate of any device powered by them is that they will only be useable by power cord or they'll become paperweights.
I bought a USB link for my PS2 - it lets me copy saved games from the memory cards to my PC's hard drive. Doesn't the X-Box have anything similar?
The hard drive one of the main reasons I didn't buy an X-Box - the "Microsoft is Evil" thing was a relatively minor concern. I just knew it would be a major pain in the ass. My PS2, Gamecube, and PC are enough for me.
Heck, why not let visitors pay to hunt them? Of course, even the biggest guns would only work on the smaller ones, but going after a brontosaurus with a missile launcher would be kinda neat... ;-)
Perhaps, but I can input graffiti faster than I can write - the one-stroke, simplified characters just take less time to make and there's no pause while waiting for writing to be converted into text. And I'd guess that training the handwriting recognition system on the Zaurus to use graffiti would be an extraordinarily time-consuming task. I'd like to see a unit with a small but useable keyboard, instead. Something that can run on some sort of standard battery (say, NIMH AAs) rather than proprietary lithium #63416 would also be nice. Why aren't there any standard lithium battery forms (like there are C, D, 9V, etc.), anyway? Oh, right - then companies couldn't sell them for $200, or refuse to let customers replace their batteries and demand they buy a shiny new unit instead.
Another interesting "feature" of it is that on the messageboard, teachers can delete messages (see issue 16.10 page 5) but students can't.
I doubt it - ethanol is preferred over methanol as a target for alcohol dehydrogenase. So much so that ethanol is a treatment for methanol poisoning (along with sodium bicarbonate for acidosis). Methanol (or other impurities) may very well gum up the works somehow, though.
I suspect that at least part of the reason for this is that ethanol is much less toxic, so there is less concern with getting poisoned. You can also buy denatured 70% or 99% ethanol in any drugstore, so it'd be easy to get - even if this thing were released right now.
OTOH, if they'd build laptops to be more efficient, rather than making them blazing fast multimedia entertainment centers (insert a few more buzzwords here), they might be useable for more than an hour or two. Even most PDA's last a few hours at best, unless you get a good monochrome one running on AAA's which will last you weeks to months - but they're getting harder to find. The only ones that spring to mind are the PEG-SL10 and Handera 330. It's ironic how many "technical innovations" like colour screens, StrongARM processors, lithium batteries, etc. seem to reduce usefulness.
Just in case anyone actually reads this old thread, I advise strongly against ordering from DirectPC. Also, if you are interested in the Desknote, you should know that the Desknote iBuddie4 928 not only lacks the "Hardware SoundBlaster Pro for real-mode DOS legacy compatible" that is advertised, but it doesn't seem to have any DOS support at all. The sound card it does have is a SiS 7012 PCI, which doesn't seem to have any soundblaster emulation drivers. Nor does it seem very compatible with linux according to http://fdiv.net/desknote/
Aha! That's why they're interested in Earth. We should cooperate with these proto-Borg, and gather up all the marketers, salesmen, etc. and send them off in a ship. We'll call it the "B" Ark.
I think a built-in front light (which it says this thing has) is better, since the back of the screen can probably be a lot more reflective. IMO, the worst thing about the GA was that the glass front of the screen was so shiny, and reflected a lot of light back at you.