The performance of aircraft engines at various altitudes and temperatures are well-understood. Before anything the size of an airliner takes off the crew calculates exactly how much thrust is needed to complete the takeoff safely.
Things considered include: 1. Temperature 2. Altitude 3. Takeoff weight 4. Runway length (from start point to end of runway). 5. Any obstructions beyond the end of the runway. 6. Runway slope 7. Head/tailwind 8. Flap configuration 9. Ground conditions (wet, ice, etc - this matters if the takeoff needs to be aborted)
I might have missed something, but there are charts for every aircraft with any model of engines that allow you to look all this stuff up and determine if the takeoff can be performed safely. A safe takeoff is one where the aircraft can reach a safe speed and clear all obstacles should an engine fail right at the point of no return, and also where the aircraft can lose an engine right before the point of no return and stop before the end of the runway. None of this stuff is left to chance.
Usually there is a considerable margin beyond what is necessary for a safe takeoff, and in this case the pilots instruct the aircraft to use less than full thrust. That saves wear and tear on the engines, reduces noise, and also gets rid of the "Top Gun" effect when a jet powered to haul cargo takes off mostly empty.
If the air is too hot to take off safely on any available runway then the plane doesn't take off. Of course, they know that this will happen before they bother to load the plane - they would take on less cargo/etc if they could, or cancel the flight.
That depends on your provider. In the US with the "big two" you pay the same whether you get the free/cheap phone or not. If you don't get a new phone they just smile since you're paying them huge rates and not even taking the promotional offer.
I know T-Mobile will give you a break for not getting a new phone - it is substantial, especially with a data plan. I'm likely to switch over as the savings are more than the cost of a retail phone, and they will even do interest-free financing if you want. Plus, now when the new Nexus phones come out direct sale only I don't have any qualms about ordering one and forgoing the subsidy.
Well, you already got the knee-jerk Android reaction - just uninstall the app.
If I followed this advice anytime an app annoyed me in some way I wouldn't be running any apps.
You know what the response on Windows 3.1 used to be when an app hung the entire system due to a lack of strong process separation and pre-emptive multitasking? Uninstall it... And yet who considers a lack of those two characteristics to be a "feature" of a modern operating system (even android has those).
I've said it elsewhere. Google has to start with the assumption that the only thing applications do is steal data and destroy the phone experience, but users still like to install them anyway, and manage them accordingly. Don't tell me that the app could steal my data - I knew it would do that before I installed it - KEEP IT FROM STEALING MY DATA. Yes, I know a contact manager needs access to my contacts, but maybe I want to use Facebook but NOT give it access to my contacts. Rather than trusting the checkbox in Facebook to work, why not just let the OS block it?
Well, profit motive IS a control - it tends to drive efficiency. The problem is without adequate oversight it also drives an efficient plundering of consumers.
I think the bottom line is that unless you give voters a fairly granular level of control and they show some interest in it, you're going to have problems either way.
Perhaps, but they still have to read all those documents to ensure that they're:
1. Everything they were ordered by the court to produce. 2. Not more than the court ordered them to produce. 3. Accurate, official versions, etc. 4. Not out-of-context.
It isn't like they're going to just point their search engine at their entire internal network and give Oracle access to it to go fishing.
I'd take issue with the statement that linux vulnerabilities are rare. Most linux distros are issuing several security updates per week. Now, the number that impact software you actually use are likely smaller, since linux distros endeavor to stay on top of everything their users actually use, vs something like Windows where they only worry about the core OS.
The strength of the typical linux distro isn't that it never has vulnerabilities, but that they are fixed in a timely manner and your package manager makes sure you don't miss something important. On Windows I never really know if everything on the system is Ok unless I run some kind of auditing tool against it, and I end up with 47 processes in RAM that do nothing but check for updates to a single program, since there is no unified package manager.
If Linux seems so much more secure, it is because the distros do a good job staying on top of things and concern themselves with your entire user experience.
That's pretty-much how the top ones in the US work as well. You can take the hard courses which will give you a great education. However, if that isn't your thing you can take the "Calculus and Society" courses and get a B/C as long as you show up to the exams.
Getting into an Ivy-league school may be difficult, but graduating from one is not. If you're the son of some VIP they can't very well not give you a way to get a diploma.
Keep in mind that today's products are the result of yesterday's work.
Sure, windows pre-XP was lacking. Since XP MS has stumbled quite a bit on what followed. XP is the result of the work done in the 1990s.
Just because MS has been successful in sales in the last decade doesn't mean that they haven't been sowing the seeds of their destruction all the while...
Then MS came up with "Palladium" ten years ago and it, too, was soundly rejected and MS got yet another black eye.
How do you figure? They never really implemented it, but just about every computer in use today has all the hardware necessary to make it work.
If MS wanted to they could push out an XP update that encrypted the drive on the next boot, and blocked all access to any data stored on it if you mess with any part of the boot chain. That's one of the things I don't get about UEFI/etc - you can already block boot-sector rootkits today but with the caveat that you can't prevent people from just wiping the drive and installing a new OS.
Even Linux supports this today. Linux has support for TPM, and there is a fork of Grub that supports it as well. You could easily configure a linux distro to encrypt your home directory with a key stored in the TPM that is only accessible if the OS booted cleanly without tampering. Stick a rootkit in the MBR and you won't be able to log in. (None of these technologies block denial-of-service - just the much more dangerous hidden software-level tampering.)
Agreed. If you read the GPL v3 the only time you're required to pass along keys is if your software product is designed to be used in conjunction with some consumer product that requires that it be signed. The fact that somebody happened to build a product that requires your signature doesn't mean that you distributed it with the intent that it be used with that product.
If Ubuntu's intent is that their software be used on PCs that allow secure boot to be disabled, I don't see how they could get in trouble. They could point to the MS agreements and such and state that they only used the key because it was clear it would not infringe the GPLv3. If somebody doesn't follow the spec or the spec changes later, then Ubuntu wouldn't be liable for activity in the past that was not at the time infringing.
Intent matters in the eyes of the law.
Oh, and the bit about "well the FSF could change and still sue us" doesn't ring true either. As long as they save that press statement there is almost no chance they could prevail unless they gave advance notice of their policy changing and gave Ubuntu a fair amount of time to change what they're doing. If you promise somebody that you will interpret a legal agreement in a certain way, and they act on that promise in a way that would otherwise be to their detriment, then you can't later go back on your word - that's promissory estoppel. The future leadership of the FSF is still bound by the past actions of the organization in this way.
But what I have read here, it looks like that what she reported was real.
How do you figure. I don't see anything about the use of an MRI machine in this article.
From what I've googled on deep brain stimulation they seem to involve pulses of energy at a frequncy of tens to hundreds of hertz.
The powerful magnet of an MRI is constant - it is not pulsed at all. What is pulsed are radio transmissions tuned to the resonance frequency of hydrogen (most of the time), and some gradient magnetic fields much weaker than the main field. I'm not an expert on MRI, but I'd assume that the gradient pulses are only a few per second, and the high-frequency pulses are also only a few per second for typical uses, and those are tuned way up in the tens to hundreds of MHz range. They also hit the entire brain and not one area specifically.
It is quite possible that something associated with the study caused a change, but that could be anything from the excitement of all the dressing/attention/etc, to fear from sticking your head in an enclosed space, to any number of things. Certainly I can't rule out the MRI itself, but I wouldn't really call the known effects of direct brain stimulation as being equivalent to an MRI.
Again, I'm not an MRI expert, but studied NMR a fair bit in grad school. They are the same basic technology applied in two different ways. NMR experiments tend to be much more complex in terms of pulse sequences, but MRI tends to involve some complex gradients to generate images.
The conflict of interest is that you don't have an independent watchdog any longer - there is no regulation since the organization running the plant also makes the regulations and enforces them.
The counterargument is that with regulatory capture you don't really have an independent watchdog over private industry either, but you do have a profit motive there which is lacking with government.
Bad things really happen either way unless the public gets REALLY enraged (like burning stuff in the streets enraged). There are too many powerful interests involved otherwise.
I don't use iOS, but have they gotten it to the point where you REALLY don't need a desktop to get it set up? I know for the longest time it was pretty dependent on iTunes on a desktop (Apple or MS). If your only computers were made by Apple, would you be self-sufficient? Would your AppleTV/iPhone/iPad work, and would your AirPort be configurable, and all that?
Maybe the answer is yes, but if not it seems a bit premature to kill off OSX.
Well, despite that, the US's financial services sector is probably the largest economy in the world if taken on its own, even if compared to the entire rest of the US economy, or the total economy of any other country. I'm not 100% certain on that - maybe it is a close #2 or something like that.
It is amazing how much we spend on bankers in the US...
It probably also matters whether assembly is a big part of the production cost.
Take a telescope mirror. Ingredients are sand, or maybe a block of glass. Then you sit and polish away at it for months to years constantly analyzing light reflected off of it until the whole thing is uniform to within maybe a few dozen nanometers.
Even if only that step is done in the US it would qualify as being made here as that one step converts the mirror from a few thousand dollars worth of glass into something worth millions of dollars.
Much of the legal world around tarrifs/etc is based on the addition of value - the difference between what you could sell the total of the inputs vs the outputs for.
Interesting. I'm just glad to see a country with decent environmental/labor regs get business, whether that is the US or Europe or Japan (or elsewhere). As much as I see Europeans and Americans squabbling around here, the fact is that these two regions have FAR more in common than what separates them, when compared to places where sludge is literally dumped in creeks and people could get beaten if they don't get enough work done.
You mentioned the bullet cluster. The bullet cluster's shape IS the result of actual physical collisions. As you say the stars pass right past each other interacting only gravitationally, but the image that shows the displacement of dark/visible matter is showing ionized hydrogen. These particles are fairly uniformly dispersed in the cluster (obviously more concentrated near the bulk of the mass), and they do collide.
That hydrogen gas actually makes up a big part of the ordinary mass of a cluster.
Who said the case is the only part made in the USA? I read that the power supply was made here, as were numerous components. Much of the assembly was done in the USA as well, and that is probably a big part of the cost.
When you make a widget there are a bazillion costs that all go into it. As long as the overwhelming majority were spent in the USA I don't have an issue with the device having a Chinese screw or RAM chip in it...
As far as I can tell they did all the assembly in the US, many of the key components were made in the US, and most of the design/etc work as well. It sounds like it has a few chips in it that say made in xyz. Good luck finding anything that doesn't have an asian component in it SOMEWHERE.
in fact it appears to be largely unaffected by the collision at all, which would seem to at odds with many "simple" dark matter theories as well (i.e. it's like normal matter, except light passes right through it).
How is that at odds?
When you grab a door knob, why don't your fingers pass right through it? For that matter, why doesn't your hand just fall apart, or gravitationally collapse into a black hole?
The answer is that the electrons in your hand are repelled by the electrons in the door knob, and that the various atoms in your hand are held together by chemical bonds, but repel each other as well to hold themselves roughly rigidly in place.
Why does that happen? Electrons interact with the electromagnetic force, which means they interact with photons.
Now, suppose you had a type of matter that photos passed right through, like dark matter. That makes it likely that this matter does not interact via electromagnetism either, which means that it is not repelled by other matter and may be able to pass right through it. Or, maybe it interacts in other ways, but those ways have much smaller cross-sections of collision. Remember that almost all of the space in an atom lies between the electrons and the nucleus. If the cross-section of matter were a nuclear radius and not an atomic radius then if you had a gas there would be FAR fewer collisions.
I'm sure a physicist could give a better explanation, but it isn't surprising at all that a dark form of matter that does not interact with photons would also behave VERY differently when it comes to collisions with other forms of matter, or perhaps even with other forms of dark matter.
Reader and iGoogle are really different tools with different functions.
iGoogle is more about seeing what is going on right now. Reader is more about wanting to make sure you don't miss anything good.
Your favorite once-a-day/week blog is a perfect thing to have in Reader - you'll easily keep track of what you've seen, and you can skim if you want to. If you stick CNN in Reader you end up with a feed that always has 5000 unread items in it, unless you spam the mark-all-read button every 15 minutes.
CNN is a great thing to stick in iGoogle - you'll always see the current news. If you stick your favorite blog in there, then you'll miss articles since it won't keep them there until you read them.
Both are useful tools, when used for their intended purpose. I don't really get dropping iGoogle. I don't use it, but I've run into several who do. It can't cost them much to operate - why not give people a reason to not make Bing their homepage?
True, but you still need content. I tend to play single-player games. What makes those interesting are mainly:
1. World content, story, complexity. 2. Half-decent engine including AI. 3. Graphics
If your world is interesting but you're the only thing moving in it, then that isn't useful. If the enemies are interesting but the extent of gameplay is to circle each other in the middle of a desert, that isn't interesting.
I want places to go, people to talk to, things to accomplish. All of that requires artwork, scripting, writing, and so on. Even if the graphics are simple you still need to create all the story and mechanics. That takes time/money.
Look at something like Wesnoth. It has great gameplay and decent graphics. However, it only has two campaigns which makes it of limited value - they aren't playable for that long. You don't need that as much for multiplayer, but I like complex games and complex multiplayer involves way to much commitment for somebody with a family...
If we weren't spending MANY times more money than this on things like sports stadiums I'd buy into this argument. The US is going into debt at a rate of hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Do you think that lack of money is what is stopping people from fixing poverty? If people think something is important, it gets funded.
I use my computer at work for email and documents, and my boss uses a tablet for the same stuff.
Here is the difference. When I send an email it usually has a proposal of some kind in it, usually of moderate length and formatted with sections/etc. When my boss sends an email, it usually contains the words "sounds good - go with it" or "check with Al on that" or "can you set up a meeting to discuss." Nothing wrong with that - our jobs are different.
When I work with a document I'm typing pages of text/numbers/etc. I'm formatting it. When reviewing a document I'm adding comments to it - or typing substantial revisions to the text. When my boss gets one of these documents, they read parts of it, and maybe hit the electronic-sign button. Maybe they send me one of those "can you set up a meeting to discuss" emails.
All of these things involve putting together bytes of data, but there is a VERY big difference in how the computer is being used, and what kinds of interfaces facilitate it.
I shudder to think at how painful typing this comment would be on a tablet, and yet it didn't take me more than 2 mins or so on a PC...
Slashdot Mirror
The performance of aircraft engines at various altitudes and temperatures are well-understood. Before anything the size of an airliner takes off the crew calculates exactly how much thrust is needed to complete the takeoff safely.
Things considered include:
1. Temperature
2. Altitude
3. Takeoff weight
4. Runway length (from start point to end of runway).
5. Any obstructions beyond the end of the runway.
6. Runway slope
7. Head/tailwind
8. Flap configuration
9. Ground conditions (wet, ice, etc - this matters if the takeoff needs to be aborted)
I might have missed something, but there are charts for every aircraft with any model of engines that allow you to look all this stuff up and determine if the takeoff can be performed safely. A safe takeoff is one where the aircraft can reach a safe speed and clear all obstacles should an engine fail right at the point of no return, and also where the aircraft can lose an engine right before the point of no return and stop before the end of the runway. None of this stuff is left to chance.
Usually there is a considerable margin beyond what is necessary for a safe takeoff, and in this case the pilots instruct the aircraft to use less than full thrust. That saves wear and tear on the engines, reduces noise, and also gets rid of the "Top Gun" effect when a jet powered to haul cargo takes off mostly empty.
If the air is too hot to take off safely on any available runway then the plane doesn't take off. Of course, they know that this will happen before they bother to load the plane - they would take on less cargo/etc if they could, or cancel the flight.
I was referring to the other comment.
That depends on your provider. In the US with the "big two" you pay the same whether you get the free/cheap phone or not. If you don't get a new phone they just smile since you're paying them huge rates and not even taking the promotional offer.
I know T-Mobile will give you a break for not getting a new phone - it is substantial, especially with a data plan. I'm likely to switch over as the savings are more than the cost of a retail phone, and they will even do interest-free financing if you want. Plus, now when the new Nexus phones come out direct sale only I don't have any qualms about ordering one and forgoing the subsidy.
Well, you already got the knee-jerk Android reaction - just uninstall the app.
If I followed this advice anytime an app annoyed me in some way I wouldn't be running any apps.
You know what the response on Windows 3.1 used to be when an app hung the entire system due to a lack of strong process separation and pre-emptive multitasking? Uninstall it... And yet who considers a lack of those two characteristics to be a "feature" of a modern operating system (even android has those).
I've said it elsewhere. Google has to start with the assumption that the only thing applications do is steal data and destroy the phone experience, but users still like to install them anyway, and manage them accordingly. Don't tell me that the app could steal my data - I knew it would do that before I installed it - KEEP IT FROM STEALING MY DATA. Yes, I know a contact manager needs access to my contacts, but maybe I want to use Facebook but NOT give it access to my contacts. Rather than trusting the checkbox in Facebook to work, why not just let the OS block it?
Well, profit motive IS a control - it tends to drive efficiency. The problem is without adequate oversight it also drives an efficient plundering of consumers.
I think the bottom line is that unless you give voters a fairly granular level of control and they show some interest in it, you're going to have problems either way.
Perhaps, but they still have to read all those documents to ensure that they're:
1. Everything they were ordered by the court to produce.
2. Not more than the court ordered them to produce.
3. Accurate, official versions, etc.
4. Not out-of-context.
It isn't like they're going to just point their search engine at their entire internal network and give Oracle access to it to go fishing.
I'd take issue with the statement that linux vulnerabilities are rare. Most linux distros are issuing several security updates per week. Now, the number that impact software you actually use are likely smaller, since linux distros endeavor to stay on top of everything their users actually use, vs something like Windows where they only worry about the core OS.
The strength of the typical linux distro isn't that it never has vulnerabilities, but that they are fixed in a timely manner and your package manager makes sure you don't miss something important. On Windows I never really know if everything on the system is Ok unless I run some kind of auditing tool against it, and I end up with 47 processes in RAM that do nothing but check for updates to a single program, since there is no unified package manager.
If Linux seems so much more secure, it is because the distros do a good job staying on top of things and concern themselves with your entire user experience.
That's pretty-much how the top ones in the US work as well. You can take the hard courses which will give you a great education. However, if that isn't your thing you can take the "Calculus and Society" courses and get a B/C as long as you show up to the exams.
Getting into an Ivy-league school may be difficult, but graduating from one is not. If you're the son of some VIP they can't very well not give you a way to get a diploma.
Keep in mind that today's products are the result of yesterday's work.
Sure, windows pre-XP was lacking. Since XP MS has stumbled quite a bit on what followed. XP is the result of the work done in the 1990s.
Just because MS has been successful in sales in the last decade doesn't mean that they haven't been sowing the seeds of their destruction all the while...
Then MS came up with "Palladium" ten years ago and it, too, was soundly rejected and MS got yet another black eye.
How do you figure? They never really implemented it, but just about every computer in use today has all the hardware necessary to make it work.
If MS wanted to they could push out an XP update that encrypted the drive on the next boot, and blocked all access to any data stored on it if you mess with any part of the boot chain. That's one of the things I don't get about UEFI/etc - you can already block boot-sector rootkits today but with the caveat that you can't prevent people from just wiping the drive and installing a new OS.
Even Linux supports this today. Linux has support for TPM, and there is a fork of Grub that supports it as well. You could easily configure a linux distro to encrypt your home directory with a key stored in the TPM that is only accessible if the OS booted cleanly without tampering. Stick a rootkit in the MBR and you won't be able to log in. (None of these technologies block denial-of-service - just the much more dangerous hidden software-level tampering.)
Agreed. If you read the GPL v3 the only time you're required to pass along keys is if your software product is designed to be used in conjunction with some consumer product that requires that it be signed. The fact that somebody happened to build a product that requires your signature doesn't mean that you distributed it with the intent that it be used with that product.
If Ubuntu's intent is that their software be used on PCs that allow secure boot to be disabled, I don't see how they could get in trouble. They could point to the MS agreements and such and state that they only used the key because it was clear it would not infringe the GPLv3. If somebody doesn't follow the spec or the spec changes later, then Ubuntu wouldn't be liable for activity in the past that was not at the time infringing.
Intent matters in the eyes of the law.
Oh, and the bit about "well the FSF could change and still sue us" doesn't ring true either. As long as they save that press statement there is almost no chance they could prevail unless they gave advance notice of their policy changing and gave Ubuntu a fair amount of time to change what they're doing. If you promise somebody that you will interpret a legal agreement in a certain way, and they act on that promise in a way that would otherwise be to their detriment, then you can't later go back on your word - that's promissory estoppel. The future leadership of the FSF is still bound by the past actions of the organization in this way.
But what I have read here, it looks like that what she reported was real.
How do you figure. I don't see anything about the use of an MRI machine in this article.
From what I've googled on deep brain stimulation they seem to involve pulses of energy at a frequncy of tens to hundreds of hertz.
The powerful magnet of an MRI is constant - it is not pulsed at all. What is pulsed are radio transmissions tuned to the resonance frequency of hydrogen (most of the time), and some gradient magnetic fields much weaker than the main field. I'm not an expert on MRI, but I'd assume that the gradient pulses are only a few per second, and the high-frequency pulses are also only a few per second for typical uses, and those are tuned way up in the tens to hundreds of MHz range. They also hit the entire brain and not one area specifically.
It is quite possible that something associated with the study caused a change, but that could be anything from the excitement of all the dressing/attention/etc, to fear from sticking your head in an enclosed space, to any number of things. Certainly I can't rule out the MRI itself, but I wouldn't really call the known effects of direct brain stimulation as being equivalent to an MRI.
Again, I'm not an MRI expert, but studied NMR a fair bit in grad school. They are the same basic technology applied in two different ways. NMR experiments tend to be much more complex in terms of pulse sequences, but MRI tends to involve some complex gradients to generate images.
The conflict of interest is that you don't have an independent watchdog any longer - there is no regulation since the organization running the plant also makes the regulations and enforces them.
The counterargument is that with regulatory capture you don't really have an independent watchdog over private industry either, but you do have a profit motive there which is lacking with government.
Bad things really happen either way unless the public gets REALLY enraged (like burning stuff in the streets enraged). There are too many powerful interests involved otherwise.
I don't use iOS, but have they gotten it to the point where you REALLY don't need a desktop to get it set up? I know for the longest time it was pretty dependent on iTunes on a desktop (Apple or MS). If your only computers were made by Apple, would you be self-sufficient? Would your AppleTV/iPhone/iPad work, and would your AirPort be configurable, and all that?
Maybe the answer is yes, but if not it seems a bit premature to kill off OSX.
Well, despite that, the US's financial services sector is probably the largest economy in the world if taken on its own, even if compared to the entire rest of the US economy, or the total economy of any other country. I'm not 100% certain on that - maybe it is a close #2 or something like that.
It is amazing how much we spend on bankers in the US...
It probably also matters whether assembly is a big part of the production cost.
Take a telescope mirror. Ingredients are sand, or maybe a block of glass. Then you sit and polish away at it for months to years constantly analyzing light reflected off of it until the whole thing is uniform to within maybe a few dozen nanometers.
Even if only that step is done in the US it would qualify as being made here as that one step converts the mirror from a few thousand dollars worth of glass into something worth millions of dollars.
Much of the legal world around tarrifs/etc is based on the addition of value - the difference between what you could sell the total of the inputs vs the outputs for.
Interesting. I'm just glad to see a country with decent environmental/labor regs get business, whether that is the US or Europe or Japan (or elsewhere). As much as I see Europeans and Americans squabbling around here, the fact is that these two regions have FAR more in common than what separates them, when compared to places where sludge is literally dumped in creeks and people could get beaten if they don't get enough work done.
You mentioned the bullet cluster. The bullet cluster's shape IS the result of actual physical collisions. As you say the stars pass right past each other interacting only gravitationally, but the image that shows the displacement of dark/visible matter is showing ionized hydrogen. These particles are fairly uniformly dispersed in the cluster (obviously more concentrated near the bulk of the mass), and they do collide.
That hydrogen gas actually makes up a big part of the ordinary mass of a cluster.
Who said the case is the only part made in the USA? I read that the power supply was made here, as were numerous components. Much of the assembly was done in the USA as well, and that is probably a big part of the cost.
When you make a widget there are a bazillion costs that all go into it. As long as the overwhelming majority were spent in the USA I don't have an issue with the device having a Chinese screw or RAM chip in it...
As far as I can tell they did all the assembly in the US, many of the key components were made in the US, and most of the design/etc work as well. It sounds like it has a few chips in it that say made in xyz. Good luck finding anything that doesn't have an asian component in it SOMEWHERE.
in fact it appears to be largely unaffected by the collision at all, which would seem to at odds with many "simple" dark matter theories as well (i.e. it's like normal matter, except light passes right through it).
How is that at odds?
When you grab a door knob, why don't your fingers pass right through it? For that matter, why doesn't your hand just fall apart, or gravitationally collapse into a black hole?
The answer is that the electrons in your hand are repelled by the electrons in the door knob, and that the various atoms in your hand are held together by chemical bonds, but repel each other as well to hold themselves roughly rigidly in place.
Why does that happen? Electrons interact with the electromagnetic force, which means they interact with photons.
Now, suppose you had a type of matter that photos passed right through, like dark matter. That makes it likely that this matter does not interact via electromagnetism either, which means that it is not repelled by other matter and may be able to pass right through it. Or, maybe it interacts in other ways, but those ways have much smaller cross-sections of collision. Remember that almost all of the space in an atom lies between the electrons and the nucleus. If the cross-section of matter were a nuclear radius and not an atomic radius then if you had a gas there would be FAR fewer collisions.
I'm sure a physicist could give a better explanation, but it isn't surprising at all that a dark form of matter that does not interact with photons would also behave VERY differently when it comes to collisions with other forms of matter, or perhaps even with other forms of dark matter.
Reader and iGoogle are really different tools with different functions.
iGoogle is more about seeing what is going on right now. Reader is more about wanting to make sure you don't miss anything good.
Your favorite once-a-day/week blog is a perfect thing to have in Reader - you'll easily keep track of what you've seen, and you can skim if you want to. If you stick CNN in Reader you end up with a feed that always has 5000 unread items in it, unless you spam the mark-all-read button every 15 minutes.
CNN is a great thing to stick in iGoogle - you'll always see the current news. If you stick your favorite blog in there, then you'll miss articles since it won't keep them there until you read them.
Both are useful tools, when used for their intended purpose. I don't really get dropping iGoogle. I don't use it, but I've run into several who do. It can't cost them much to operate - why not give people a reason to not make Bing their homepage?
True, but you still need content. I tend to play single-player games. What makes those interesting are mainly:
1. World content, story, complexity.
2. Half-decent engine including AI.
3. Graphics
If your world is interesting but you're the only thing moving in it, then that isn't useful. If the enemies are interesting but the extent of gameplay is to circle each other in the middle of a desert, that isn't interesting.
I want places to go, people to talk to, things to accomplish. All of that requires artwork, scripting, writing, and so on. Even if the graphics are simple you still need to create all the story and mechanics. That takes time/money.
Look at something like Wesnoth. It has great gameplay and decent graphics. However, it only has two campaigns which makes it of limited value - they aren't playable for that long. You don't need that as much for multiplayer, but I like complex games and complex multiplayer involves way to much commitment for somebody with a family...
If we weren't spending MANY times more money than this on things like sports stadiums I'd buy into this argument. The US is going into debt at a rate of hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Do you think that lack of money is what is stopping people from fixing poverty? If people think something is important, it gets funded.
I use my computer at work for email and documents, and my boss uses a tablet for the same stuff.
Here is the difference. When I send an email it usually has a proposal of some kind in it, usually of moderate length and formatted with sections/etc. When my boss sends an email, it usually contains the words "sounds good - go with it" or "check with Al on that" or "can you set up a meeting to discuss." Nothing wrong with that - our jobs are different.
When I work with a document I'm typing pages of text/numbers/etc. I'm formatting it. When reviewing a document I'm adding comments to it - or typing substantial revisions to the text. When my boss gets one of these documents, they read parts of it, and maybe hit the electronic-sign button. Maybe they send me one of those "can you set up a meeting to discuss" emails.
All of these things involve putting together bytes of data, but there is a VERY big difference in how the computer is being used, and what kinds of interfaces facilitate it.
I shudder to think at how painful typing this comment would be on a tablet, and yet it didn't take me more than 2 mins or so on a PC...