Every electric engine? Or do you mean this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... Our parent was not talking about that, but about engines that simply don't have an "exhaust" or other means of expelling impulse in one direction. At least that is how I understood his post.
Yes, of course I meant a reactionless means of propulsion, which was *exactly* what meta-monkey's post was talking about (the fuel *is* the reaction mass in a chemical rocket engine), and incidentally it was the very word you used without any inclination about its meaning. He even gave you a hint about Newton's laws, look them up, pay attention to the words "action" and "reaction". The third law has never been proven wrong, any reactionless engine would earn you an extremely easy Nobel price.
"Every electric engine" would not help us doing spacecraft propulsion without reaction mass. I don't suppose you actually read the Wiki page you linked to, as I think your understanding of "reactionless" still is a trainwreck.
You obviously have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, but feel free to mention just one of the plenty "reaction less" engines (or drives, whatever) that we have. Please don't mention "electric engines" again unless they are reactionless.
Normally I would just leave this inane discussion, but I am feeling grumpy today.
OK, hot, yes, but wouldn't they need something combustible to actually erupt into flame? Or what am I missing?
I think this is what's going on: when something is burning, the flame you see is just glowing hot air, heated by the energy from the combustion. The flame is not part of the combustion, just the side effect. In this video you see glowing hot air heated by compression and possibly the shock wave from the projectile. Same result, but the energy source is different.
If you've seen a meteor (streak of light in the sky at night, or a visible fireball with a trail if you're really, really lucky), the principle is the same, nothing is burning. The heat come from compression of the air in front of it, and the light you see is from the superheated air in its wake (and a little from the glowing meteorite).
Current cars can 80% charge in 30 minutes. So I think the question is do we need 5 minute charging instead of 30 minute charging?
If my range was 300 miles, I'd be cool with 30 minute charging. I'd almost never use it.
I bought my car exactly a year ago. I have driven it about 9000 km in that year, but the longest single-stretch trip was about 250 Km. Turns out I could easily have managed the vast majority of my trips without stopping to charge in one of the longer range electrics, and it would be close to free compared with the petrol prices where I live.
I really like the idea of electric cars, sadly they are still expensive to buy where I live. Then again, so is petrol. I'm watching the used market, and it'll also be interesting to see how well the newer battery packs hold up after a few years, but we'll certainly consider an all-electric car as our primary vehicle. A plug-in hybrid is also attractive, but even more expensive to buy, as taxes are based on total engine power (fuel + electric).
I'd bet it against your soul, because I think I'm better than you.
What does that even mean?
It's a reference to a country song, The Devil Went Down to Georgia by Charlie Daniels Band, in which a boy bets his soul against a golden fiddle in a duel with the devil.
I guess the ghost of Newton would be very happy with 'reaction less' engines as you 'christian' them... after all we already have plenty of them, they are just not suitable for space crafts.
I would be be very excited to hear about this plethora of reactionless engines... That is, if you had any idea what this word you are parroting actually means. (Please, do me the favour of looking it up before replying).
To add some details: the Moon's gravity being about 1/6 of Earth's, lifting the 300 Kg object on the Moon would require about as much strength as you would need to lift 50 Kg on Earth. It would take a little bit longer, however, as you would still have to struggle against the full 300 Kg of inertia.
If you're a diver, you might have experienced that lifting rocks underwater is easier than on land. This is because of buoyancy helping you, making the apparent weight of the rock less. It feels strangely "sluggish" because the inertia is the same (and the resistance of water is a lot more than that of air, partly because of the water's inertia). This paragraph might not be very clarifying after all, but I'm leaving it in because I already wrote it:)
Didn't know inertia came into play in the empty vacuum of space.
No need to be a cock about it.
I'm not good at explaining things, but here's a try: many confuse weigth, the effect of a gravitational field on a massy object, with mass, an intrinsic property of massy objects anywhere. The inertia of an object depends only on mass, not gravity. A couple of examples to illustrate: on the moon a healthy person could easily lift a 300 Kg object off the ground, which you probably couldn't do on earth. However, if that object were falling at you from above at 10 m/s it would hurt you exactly as much as it would on Earth. This equals a fall of about one second (five meters) on Earth, but on the moon it would require a fall of about six seconds / 29 meters due to the lower weight/mass ratio. The speed is the same, the crushing inertia which is a property of mass is identical everywhere, only the weight is different. In space, the 300 Kg object coming at you at 10 m/s would *still* do the same damage to you (assuming you were crushed between it and a space station, for instance). This is a real concern when astronauts are handling heavy objects in space.
If you decelerate an object the mechanics are identical to accelerating it, including the effects of acceleration, and this is again no different in space. If you needed one year to accelerate the spaceship without crushing the passengers, you will also need one year to brake. There are a lot of other problems with interstellar travel which we really, really don't have the technology to address, such as for instance reaction mass, energy concerns, and deep space impacts, but that isn't relevant to the above explanation:)
Uh, where do YOU think it came from? If you say "God," then you have to explain why God can pop up from nowhere, or why he can be eternal, but nothing else can. Oh, wait... it's "ineffable," sorry.
Besides, no one has given any reason why existence itself must be subject to cause and effect; only things that already exist can be observed to hold to that law.
They don't want to explain anything, they only want to attack and denigrate the evil, evil science at every crossroad. If there is *anything* that science can't explain, the cause must of course be supernatural (god). Look up the fallacy "god of the gaps". For some, this is not a search for truth.
... but the simple act of consenting to the recording is enough, under the law; a release at that point is just ass-covering.
That might be US law, but it sounds strange to me. In Norway the matter is more complex: you can not publish a photo of somebody without their expressed consent, even if they were aware that the picture was taken. "Publishing" includes posting on a website accessible to the general public, and this makes a lot of sense. I would not stop someone taking my picture in a social setting, but if I don't give my consent for them to post it on Facebook, they are in violation of the law if they do so. If you're part of a crowd and not the primary subject of the image, this law is not applicable.
There is an exception for "public persons" (celebrities), which must expect that images of them are published if available, but for regular guys this law is sensible. In fact there was a case a few years back where a picture of some random dude enjoying a beer alone at a sidewalk café was used as an illustration image in an article about alcoholism. He was not aware that the picture was taken, but when the article was published in one of the largest dailies his friends and relatives started calling him, concerned about his alcohol consumption. The paper ended up paying him a substantial amount of money because he obviously hadn't given consent to publishing, and he pursued the case until conclusion.
"Publishing" stuff on the internet, like on a revenge porn site, would certainly fall under this clause here in Norway. Again, this makes sense.
Most people have little idea of what is about to happen as the pH of the oceans falls another 0.1 to 0.4 in log hydromium ion concentrations. A 0.1-0.2 pH drop is already in the cards as the oceans come into equilibrium with current atmospheric CO2 concentrations over the next 50 to 100 years so the intense selection regime is already baked into our planetary system.
I think the main problem is right here; most people won't be alive in one hundred years. Even if they were sure about the consequences many of those people would still not use an electric car for their 10 km daily commute and rent an F-250 only when they need it (twice a year), since the consequences will not affect them personally. The vehicles are just an example here, the important thing is the mindset.
Incidentally, a bunch of posters will now complain about how a Leaf can not tow their loaded boat trailer, blithely ignoring the fact that they actually only tow their boats twice a year. Point proven.
$2000 + $60/tape isn't what I'd call cheap for home use. Or is that stuff available for a LOT less?
Well, it is available used for somewhat less, but 20TB isn't exactly your average home storage system either. I would ask him *why* he needed to keep all that data online, including backing it up. If the RAID itself contains a copy of his physical media library (or the bay), well, there's your backup already:)
He should balance the need to keep it all instantly available against the cost of doing so. The reason why there are no cheap solutions to backing up 20TB in a home scenario is that very few people do it. If it were me I'd just get a bunch of cheap drives and a hot-swap bay, and just create a script that catalogued the content of each drive. If it was irreplaceable content I created/shot myself I would invest in a tape solution, in that case it isn't *that* expensive. Crashplan works well for me to keep onsite/offsite backups of videos and pictures of my kids, but if I needed so much space that recovery time became a concern I would shell out for some disks or a tape library (it won't, however).
He could be something like a freelance video producer, in which case it might be a legitimate need, but then he would be insane to not already have a backup solution in place. Also, that would remove him from the home user category. For instance, rip-on-demand is likely the cheapest strategy storage-wise for using your library on your media center, and you probably won't end up with 20TB on a RAID:)
Theres no storage system in existence that will store 2TB of data for $5, let alone maintain it.
No, but the average customer stores far less, obviously it all works out because they're still in business:)
I wouldn't find it inappropriate if Crashplan contacted the poster storing 14TB above with a suggestion to get a business plan (if he doesn't already have one), but Crashplan obviously can handle it. I've read articles about people successfully recovering terabytes of data from Crashplan, but that guy had to use the HDD recovery option because it would have taken him weeks or months to download it all.
and because volume of a star is both hard to measure from distance and not really well defined, since stars are made of gas and thus don't have a well-defined surface.
Also, this star (at about 2 197 000 000 times the volume of the sun, but only at most ~39 times the mass) must have an extremely low specific density. AFAICT even the average density is very close to what we would call a vacuum here on Earth at 7.87 × 10^-5 kg / m^3, and the mass is not evenly distributed, making it even more sparse for most of its volume.
This surprises me a little, did I make any mistakes?
It may have been an old version I tried, but I was singularly unimpressed by Calibre.
It silently failed to convert some files, plus it insisted on copying every file I opened with it to its own directory.
For its intended purpose (ebook library management for use with your reading devices), calibre is simply the best software out there IMNSHO, paid or not. There are things for which it is not as good, but for my library of epub/kindle ebooks I haven't found anything that comes close. It might not be for you after all, but I'd advice you to give it another try, keeping the following in mind:
The "copying files" thing can be counterintuitive if you're used to micromanage files and folders yourself, but it can be viewed from another perspective: calibre doesn't manage files, it manages *books*. It keeps them in its internal database, of which the folder structure and data files is essentially just the bulk storage part. The files are a subset of all the information that makes up a book record, and the paths are not even used for metadata storage, although it reflects them. I keep a copy of my original files for backup purposes, but they are effectively obsoleted as soon as I clean up metadata and formatting in calibre. After that calibre is the absolutely best way to manage and access my books, and I'm happy to keep them in the calibre "db". After all, a file path is not a good place to store metadata. A db with proper fields, tags and so on is far better suited. Work with it, not against it:)
If you find that it doesn't suit you after some time, the export functionality is excellent. You also have all metadata stored in a well-structured SQLite db to extract and do with as you please.
The conversion error, BTW, is unfamiliar to me. If it simply omitted converting without throwing an error, that's a strange bug I haven't encountered or even heard of. If the results are not satisfactory: be aware that automatic document conversion between some formats, for instance from PDF to a flowing format, is *hard* to perfect, if not impossible. Most of my conversions are between flowing formats, and calibre does an admirable job with those. It even works around limitations in the different formats (by generating a html TOC for formats that don't support proper metadata TOCs, for instance).
It is extremely flexible and extensible. Incidentally the custom column system has a surprisingly powerful template language written by Charles Haley, one of the original authors of ex (which became vi):)
calibre has a lot of "power user" features built in, a great plugin system with lots of available plugins, and it is very mature at this point. The relevant sub-forum at MobileRead is an excellent resource, any questions you might have are most likely already answered there.
- Age of Empires - Assassins Creed (1,2.3...) - BioShock - BorderLands 1 & 2 - DIshonored - Fallout 3 - Mass Effect 1 - 3 - Metro Last Light - Sleeping Dogs - Syndicate - Elder Scrolls - Tombraider
We have a very similar taste in games, sir:) I've greatly enjoyed most of the games on your list. I got Metro 2033 in a Humble Bundle a while ago, but never checked it out. I suppose it is similar to Last Light, which I see several posters mention here? Would you recommend it (2033 for starters, that is)?
One of our big national newspapers here in Norway recently put up a nagwall at 8 articles/week, though not every article seems to be count but since there's no clear indication this has lead me to only read what I can't get at the other 3-4 sites that usually carry the same mix of news. Even when it's not copy-pasta "breaking events" tend to be exactly the same, the number of unique in-depth articles is very low. Between home and work and smartphone (unique IPs) 24/week is plenty.
A fellow Norwegian here. We'll probably always have nrk.no (the national broadcaster) as a free option:)
I generally agree with you, but many online papers now has only premium content behind paywalls. I don't know many who actually pays for them (most people I know can certainly afford it, they just choose not to), but it'd be interesting to see numbers. I also believe that Norwegian papers should collaborate on an all-you-can-eat scheme, however. I won't pay 200 NOK (about $32) monthly to read any one paper, but I would probably pay that amount (or even a bit more) to access all articles on all Norwegian papers. I believe I' not alone. They could divide that money based on usage.
Even better would be a micropayment solution (something like $1 pr. article), with a reasonably monthly cap, valid across all participating papers. That way you would get the long tail of readers who would pick only a few articles they really want to read, in addition to those who would blow through to the cap in a few days, effectively making the subscribers. Very few would shell out for a subscription just to read that one article, but more would probably enter a micropayment agreement based on usage. This could still be implemented as a collaboration between papers, I guess it would attract subscribers quickly.
The way it's looking right now more large papers will follow Aftenposten. I'm quite sure they're shooting themselves in the foot. People generally read several papers online, but few will be interested in spending something like 5% of their income on it.
Actually, I bypass the middleman and decrypt directly.
I know I'm the odd one out, but I never could get excited about Calibre. I have other tools, and they may not be drag-drop-drool simple, but they're easy enough and allow me to do just about anything I want to any format I want.
Sure, whatever works for you. I inferred from your comment that you deferred decryption to some later date, and that would've been risky. Using calibre and just leave the books unorganised, but searchable, might have been the most efficient way to do it in bulk. I didn't intend to tell you how to do it, only to do it at all:)
Incidentally, I just read that Adobe has dropped the "drop dead" deadline, although they're still pushing the new DRM scheme for the long term.
Yeah, I read that too, and I'm not surprised. As many, many others are saying, breaking the reading habits of millions of customers (both those who remove DRM and those who don't) would have been a PR nightmare. I'm inclined to think that Adobe was just testing the water to see whether this was something they could pull of, I'm only surprised that they thought it would fly at all.
Is there a meaningful number of ebook consumers that don't fall into one of those categories?
I believe you forgot the category "Power users who don't care about DRM as long as they can remove it". The crowd over at MobileRead may not be representative of the majority of customers, but amongst them it is common to deDRM everything as SOP. In the linked thread there are a lot of people who *do* care indeed:)
I remove DRM as well. I have never bought a book with DRM I can't remove, and I never will. I suspect that this new scheme will be broken soon, but if it isn't I will not buy another Adept-encrypted book.
I know that the "correct" thing to do would have been to boycott DRM-infested stuff completely, but that would limit my choice of books severely. I have absolutely no problem paying a fair price for a good product. In fact, the publishers who have abandoned DRM altogether (for instance Tor, O'Reilly) find that only their support requests and negative feedback decline, not their sales, so there must be many like me. Not that DRM will ever stop pirates from providing a superior product.
Ultimately I hope that the publishing industry will realise their insanity and drop DRM. The only ones they're hurting are their legitimate customers, the pirates will not even slow down because of any type of DRM.
...can be decrypted if the provider goes belly-up or does an Amazon-style "1984" on them.
Don't wait, do it now. Download calibre and some plugin tools, and deDRM is just a drag'n'drop operation. There is no need to use it to manage your books if you don't want to, you can just use it as a "storage shed" for your uncrippled books.
Slashdot Mirror
Users might be more inclined to support them if they stopped ignoring what users want.
But... what if all the users are mistaken, and the Gnome designers are right? How can they continue to do the right thing without support or money? :)
Sorry, our parent had no idea what he was talking about.
I have no idea what is upsetting you so much. Had a bad day? Take a beer perhaps and a break.
Good night.
Yup, you're correct, and I went a little overboard. My apologies.
Every electric engine?
Or do you mean this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Our parent was not talking about that, but about engines that simply don't have an "exhaust" or other means of expelling impulse in one direction.
At least that is how I understood his post.
Yes, of course I meant a reactionless means of propulsion, which was *exactly* what meta-monkey's post was talking about (the fuel *is* the reaction mass in a chemical rocket engine), and incidentally it was the very word you used without any inclination about its meaning. He even gave you a hint about Newton's laws, look them up, pay attention to the words "action" and "reaction". The third law has never been proven wrong, any reactionless engine would earn you an extremely easy Nobel price.
"Every electric engine" would not help us doing spacecraft propulsion without reaction mass. I don't suppose you actually read the Wiki page you linked to, as I think your understanding of "reactionless" still is a trainwreck.
You obviously have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, but feel free to mention just one of the plenty "reaction less" engines (or drives, whatever) that we have. Please don't mention "electric engines" again unless they are reactionless.
Normally I would just leave this inane discussion, but I am feeling grumpy today.
OK, hot, yes, but wouldn't they need something combustible to actually erupt into flame? Or what am I missing?
I think this is what's going on: when something is burning, the flame you see is just glowing hot air, heated by the energy from the combustion. The flame is not part of the combustion, just the side effect. In this video you see glowing hot air heated by compression and possibly the shock wave from the projectile. Same result, but the energy source is different.
If you've seen a meteor (streak of light in the sky at night, or a visible fireball with a trail if you're really, really lucky), the principle is the same, nothing is burning. The heat come from compression of the air in front of it, and the light you see is from the superheated air in its wake (and a little from the glowing meteorite).
Current cars can 80% charge in 30 minutes. So I think the question is do we need 5 minute charging instead of 30 minute charging?
If my range was 300 miles, I'd be cool with 30 minute charging. I'd almost never use it.
I bought my car exactly a year ago. I have driven it about 9000 km in that year, but the longest single-stretch trip was about 250 Km. Turns out I could easily have managed the vast majority of my trips without stopping to charge in one of the longer range electrics, and it would be close to free compared with the petrol prices where I live.
I really like the idea of electric cars, sadly they are still expensive to buy where I live. Then again, so is petrol. I'm watching the used market, and it'll also be interesting to see how well the newer battery packs hold up after a few years, but we'll certainly consider an all-electric car as our primary vehicle. A plug-in hybrid is also attractive, but even more expensive to buy, as taxes are based on total engine power (fuel + electric).
I'd bet it against your soul, because I think I'm better than you.
What does that even mean?
It's a reference to a country song, The Devil Went Down to Georgia by Charlie Daniels Band, in which a boy bets his soul against a golden fiddle in a duel with the devil.
I guess the ghost of Newton would be very happy with 'reaction less' engines as you 'christian' them ... after all we already have plenty of them, they are just not suitable for space crafts.
I would be be very excited to hear about this plethora of reactionless engines... That is, if you had any idea what this word you are parroting actually means. (Please, do me the favour of looking it up before replying).
To add some details: the Moon's gravity being about 1/6 of Earth's, lifting the 300 Kg object on the Moon would require about as much strength as you would need to lift 50 Kg on Earth. It would take a little bit longer, however, as you would still have to struggle against the full 300 Kg of inertia.
If you're a diver, you might have experienced that lifting rocks underwater is easier than on land. This is because of buoyancy helping you, making the apparent weight of the rock less. It feels strangely "sluggish" because the inertia is the same (and the resistance of water is a lot more than that of air, partly because of the water's inertia). This paragraph might not be very clarifying after all, but I'm leaving it in because I already wrote it :)
Didn't know inertia came into play in the empty vacuum of space.
No need to be a cock about it.
I'm not good at explaining things, but here's a try: many confuse weigth, the effect of a gravitational field on a massy object, with mass, an intrinsic property of massy objects anywhere. The inertia of an object depends only on mass, not gravity. A couple of examples to illustrate: on the moon a healthy person could easily lift a 300 Kg object off the ground, which you probably couldn't do on earth. However, if that object were falling at you from above at 10 m/s it would hurt you exactly as much as it would on Earth. This equals a fall of about one second (five meters) on Earth, but on the moon it would require a fall of about six seconds / 29 meters due to the lower weight/mass ratio. The speed is the same, the crushing inertia which is a property of mass is identical everywhere, only the weight is different. In space, the 300 Kg object coming at you at 10 m/s would *still* do the same damage to you (assuming you were crushed between it and a space station, for instance). This is a real concern when astronauts are handling heavy objects in space.
If you decelerate an object the mechanics are identical to accelerating it, including the effects of acceleration, and this is again no different in space. If you needed one year to accelerate the spaceship without crushing the passengers, you will also need one year to brake. There are a lot of other problems with interstellar travel which we really, really don't have the technology to address, such as for instance reaction mass, energy concerns, and deep space impacts, but that isn't relevant to the above explanation :)
Uh, where do YOU think it came from? If you say "God," then you have to explain why God can pop up from nowhere, or why he can be eternal, but nothing else can. Oh, wait... it's "ineffable," sorry.
Besides, no one has given any reason why existence itself must be subject to cause and effect; only things that already exist can be observed to hold to that law.
They don't want to explain anything, they only want to attack and denigrate the evil, evil science at every crossroad. If there is *anything* that science can't explain, the cause must of course be supernatural (god). Look up the fallacy "god of the gaps". For some, this is not a search for truth.
... but the simple act of consenting to the recording is enough, under the law; a release at that point is just ass-covering.
That might be US law, but it sounds strange to me. In Norway the matter is more complex: you can not publish a photo of somebody without their expressed consent, even if they were aware that the picture was taken. "Publishing" includes posting on a website accessible to the general public, and this makes a lot of sense. I would not stop someone taking my picture in a social setting, but if I don't give my consent for them to post it on Facebook, they are in violation of the law if they do so. If you're part of a crowd and not the primary subject of the image, this law is not applicable.
There is an exception for "public persons" (celebrities), which must expect that images of them are published if available, but for regular guys this law is sensible. In fact there was a case a few years back where a picture of some random dude enjoying a beer alone at a sidewalk café was used as an illustration image in an article about alcoholism. He was not aware that the picture was taken, but when the article was published in one of the largest dailies his friends and relatives started calling him, concerned about his alcohol consumption. The paper ended up paying him a substantial amount of money because he obviously hadn't given consent to publishing, and he pursued the case until conclusion.
"Publishing" stuff on the internet, like on a revenge porn site, would certainly fall under this clause here in Norway. Again, this makes sense.
Most people have little idea of what is about to happen as the pH of the oceans falls another 0.1 to 0.4 in log hydromium ion concentrations. A 0.1-0.2 pH drop is already in the cards as the oceans come into equilibrium with current atmospheric CO2 concentrations over the next 50 to 100 years so the intense selection regime is already baked into our planetary system.
I think the main problem is right here; most people won't be alive in one hundred years. Even if they were sure about the consequences many of those people would still not use an electric car for their 10 km daily commute and rent an F-250 only when they need it (twice a year), since the consequences will not affect them personally. The vehicles are just an example here, the important thing is the mindset.
Incidentally, a bunch of posters will now complain about how a Leaf can not tow their loaded boat trailer, blithely ignoring the fact that they actually only tow their boats twice a year. Point proven.
$2000 + $60/tape isn't what I'd call cheap for home use. Or is that stuff available for a LOT less?
Well, it is available used for somewhat less, but 20TB isn't exactly your average home storage system either. I would ask him *why* he needed to keep all that data online, including backing it up. If the RAID itself contains a copy of his physical media library (or the bay), well, there's your backup already :)
He should balance the need to keep it all instantly available against the cost of doing so. The reason why there are no cheap solutions to backing up 20TB in a home scenario is that very few people do it. If it were me I'd just get a bunch of cheap drives and a hot-swap bay, and just create a script that catalogued the content of each drive. If it was irreplaceable content I created/shot myself I would invest in a tape solution, in that case it isn't *that* expensive. Crashplan works well for me to keep onsite/offsite backups of videos and pictures of my kids, but if I needed so much space that recovery time became a concern I would shell out for some disks or a tape library (it won't, however).
He could be something like a freelance video producer, in which case it might be a legitimate need, but then he would be insane to not already have a backup solution in place. Also, that would remove him from the home user category. For instance, rip-on-demand is likely the cheapest strategy storage-wise for using your library on your media center, and you probably won't end up with 20TB on a RAID :)
Theres no storage system in existence that will store 2TB of data for $5, let alone maintain it.
No, but the average customer stores far less, obviously it all works out because they're still in business :)
I wouldn't find it inappropriate if Crashplan contacted the poster storing 14TB above with a suggestion to get a business plan (if he doesn't already have one), but Crashplan obviously can handle it. I've read articles about people successfully recovering terabytes of data from Crashplan, but that guy had to use the HDD recovery option because it would have taken him weeks or months to download it all.
and because volume of a star is both hard to measure from distance and not really well defined, since stars are made of gas and thus don't have a well-defined surface.
Also, this star (at about 2 197 000 000 times the volume of the sun, but only at most ~39 times the mass) must have an extremely low specific density. AFAICT even the average density is very close to what we would call a vacuum here on Earth at 7.87 × 10^-5 kg / m^3, and the mass is not evenly distributed, making it even more sparse for most of its volume.
This surprises me a little, did I make any mistakes?
It would be something more like Gesaalt, or Ivani or Kompactor or something.
The strangest name I've seen there is a desk lamp they used to have called "Mörker", which means "darkness" in Swedish.
It may have been an old version I tried, but I was singularly unimpressed by Calibre.
It silently failed to convert some files, plus it insisted on copying every file I opened with it to its own directory.
For its intended purpose (ebook library management for use with your reading devices), calibre is simply the best software out there IMNSHO, paid or not. There are things for which it is not as good, but for my library of epub/kindle ebooks I haven't found anything that comes close. It might not be for you after all, but I'd advice you to give it another try, keeping the following in mind:
The "copying files" thing can be counterintuitive if you're used to micromanage files and folders yourself, but it can be viewed from another perspective: calibre doesn't manage files, it manages *books*. It keeps them in its internal database, of which the folder structure and data files is essentially just the bulk storage part. The files are a subset of all the information that makes up a book record, and the paths are not even used for metadata storage, although it reflects them. I keep a copy of my original files for backup purposes, but they are effectively obsoleted as soon as I clean up metadata and formatting in calibre. After that calibre is the absolutely best way to manage and access my books, and I'm happy to keep them in the calibre "db". After all, a file path is not a good place to store metadata. A db with proper fields, tags and so on is far better suited. Work with it, not against it :)
If you find that it doesn't suit you after some time, the export functionality is excellent. You also have all metadata stored in a well-structured SQLite db to extract and do with as you please.
The conversion error, BTW, is unfamiliar to me. If it simply omitted converting without throwing an error, that's a strange bug I haven't encountered or even heard of. If the results are not satisfactory: be aware that automatic document conversion between some formats, for instance from PDF to a flowing format, is *hard* to perfect, if not impossible. Most of my conversions are between flowing formats, and calibre does an admirable job with those. It even works around limitations in the different formats (by generating a html TOC for formats that don't support proper metadata TOCs, for instance).
It is extremely flexible and extensible. Incidentally the custom column system has a surprisingly powerful template language written by Charles Haley, one of the original authors of ex (which became vi) :)
calibre has a lot of "power user" features built in, a great plugin system with lots of available plugins, and it is very mature at this point. The relevant sub-forum at MobileRead is an excellent resource, any questions you might have are most likely already answered there.
- Age of Empires
- Assassins Creed (1,2.3...)
- BioShock
- BorderLands 1 & 2
- DIshonored
- Fallout 3
- Mass Effect 1 - 3
- Metro Last Light
- Sleeping Dogs
- Syndicate
- Elder Scrolls
- Tombraider
We have a very similar taste in games, sir :)
I've greatly enjoyed most of the games on your list. I got Metro 2033 in a Humble Bundle a while ago, but never checked it out. I suppose it is similar to Last Light, which I see several posters mention here? Would you recommend it (2033 for starters, that is)?
Won't work, you can only build ip address tracking applications in Visual Basic
Yes, you simply create a GUI interface using VB :)
One of our big national newspapers here in Norway recently put up a nagwall at 8 articles/week, though not every article seems to be count but since there's no clear indication this has lead me to only read what I can't get at the other 3-4 sites that usually carry the same mix of news. Even when it's not copy-pasta "breaking events" tend to be exactly the same, the number of unique in-depth articles is very low. Between home and work and smartphone (unique IPs) 24/week is plenty.
A fellow Norwegian here. We'll probably always have nrk.no (the national broadcaster) as a free option :)
I generally agree with you, but many online papers now has only premium content behind paywalls. I don't know many who actually pays for them (most people I know can certainly afford it, they just choose not to), but it'd be interesting to see numbers. I also believe that Norwegian papers should collaborate on an all-you-can-eat scheme, however. I won't pay 200 NOK (about $32) monthly to read any one paper, but I would probably pay that amount (or even a bit more) to access all articles on all Norwegian papers. I believe I' not alone. They could divide that money based on usage.
Even better would be a micropayment solution (something like $1 pr. article), with a reasonably monthly cap, valid across all participating papers. That way you would get the long tail of readers who would pick only a few articles they really want to read, in addition to those who would blow through to the cap in a few days, effectively making the subscribers. Very few would shell out for a subscription just to read that one article, but more would probably enter a micropayment agreement based on usage. This could still be implemented as a collaboration between papers, I guess it would attract subscribers quickly.
The way it's looking right now more large papers will follow Aftenposten. I'm quite sure they're shooting themselves in the foot. People generally read several papers online, but few will be interested in spending something like 5% of their income on it.
I thought people come here for content, not stylesheets?
Yeah, they come for the comments. Comment posting and -reading have many, many problems in the beta, some of them strongly degrading functionality.
Actually, I bypass the middleman and decrypt directly.
I know I'm the odd one out, but I never could get excited about Calibre. I have other tools, and they may not be drag-drop-drool simple, but they're easy enough and allow me to do just about anything I want to any format I want.
Sure, whatever works for you. I inferred from your comment that you deferred decryption to some later date, and that would've been risky. Using calibre and just leave the books unorganised, but searchable, might have been the most efficient way to do it in bulk. I didn't intend to tell you how to do it, only to do it at all :)
Incidentally, I just read that Adobe has dropped the "drop dead" deadline, although they're still pushing the new DRM scheme for the long term.
Yeah, I read that too, and I'm not surprised. As many, many others are saying, breaking the reading habits of millions of customers (both those who remove DRM and those who don't) would have been a PR nightmare. I'm inclined to think that Adobe was just testing the water to see whether this was something they could pull of, I'm only surprised that they thought it would fly at all.
Is there a meaningful number of ebook consumers that don't fall into one of those categories?
I believe you forgot the category "Power users who don't care about DRM as long as they can remove it". The crowd over at MobileRead may not be representative of the majority of customers, but amongst them it is common to deDRM everything as SOP. In the linked thread there are a lot of people who *do* care indeed :)
I remove DRM as well. I have never bought a book with DRM I can't remove, and I never will. I suspect that this new scheme will be broken soon, but if it isn't I will not buy another Adept-encrypted book.
I know that the "correct" thing to do would have been to boycott DRM-infested stuff completely, but that would limit my choice of books severely. I have absolutely no problem paying a fair price for a good product. In fact, the publishers who have abandoned DRM altogether (for instance Tor, O'Reilly) find that only their support requests and negative feedback decline, not their sales, so there must be many like me. Not that DRM will ever stop pirates from providing a superior product.
Ultimately I hope that the publishing industry will realise their insanity and drop DRM. The only ones they're hurting are their legitimate customers, the pirates will not even slow down because of any type of DRM.
...can be decrypted if the provider goes belly-up or does an Amazon-style "1984" on them.
Don't wait, do it now. Download calibre and some plugin tools, and deDRM is just a drag'n'drop operation. There is no need to use it to manage your books if you don't want to, you can just use it as a "storage shed" for your uncrippled books.
I'm still fascinated that the entire big bang theory is based on the color of the stars.
With apologies to Charles Babbage: I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a statement.