To a point. If your handle was SpreadsheetUser4Life, you might disagree.
I think it's possible the Xbox or one of it's competition, could be competitive against PCs, but they'll never do it unless they have a full web 2.0/AJAX/whatever compatible browsers and arbitrary access to necessary OS services like printing.
Interestingly, the low-powered, no hard drive, lower resolution Wii, with it's Opera browser, is one of the best for this purpose. Theoretically you could run a nice variety of web apps with it. I know the PS3 has a lame printing feature. It's lame because it has like one or two printers that are compatible. I don't own, and have never used an xbox, so I don't know how it stands up to the others in these criteria.
BTW, the PS3 can run linux and has full keyboard and mouse support. If any of these consoles could take make the claim of being close to a PC, it wins hands down.
It's also nice for mapping. No, seriously. If you do the map from [my location] then you only have to add the destination address. It saves one entry, which may be a big deal if you don't know your zip code or you can't see an address number (how long is Main St. anyway?).
"Doesn't do much good if your location is a half mile away," you may say. Well it's much easier to move your starting point to your real location than it would have been to find it from scratch. You're already on the screen instead of scroll-scroll-scrolling till you find what you're looking for.
People who say that it's not that accurate are missing the point. It's a significant improvement, and you don't have to buy anything extra to use it. I'm glad they added it.
As far as I know, Microsoft doesn't make a single PC. IBM's monopoly was replaced by a thriving wealth of hardware and software companies plus a monopoly for the OS. I would even add that the OS is only a fraction of the cost of a PC, so it's very arguable that IBM was replaced by what is for the most part a vast open market.
Note, this doesn't mean I think Microsoft's monopoly is good. It's very bad for the industry. Just pointing out that when you break up a monopoly (and I believe market forces broke up IBMs) then you do have a chance for improvement.
I've experienced frame rate issues, then after a reboot they go away. It's not ideal, but it isn't the developer's fault either and it's definately not a persistent problem. I've yet to see an accusation of 5fps or "slide show" frame rates with any kind of widespread reports of the issue or an instructions on how to duplicate it. Yes, there can be frame rate issues due to lazy development or a bogged down system, but no, it really isn't as bad as all that.
My friend has a nice 42" LCD. Movies are great and the clarity, sharpness and color from his Wii are all top notch. But many of his games look as if they took a Hannah-Barbara cartoon and adapted it for the movie theater without redrawing any of the animation. In other words, it looks like crap because the developers were lazy about making a polished product.
You would absolutely not accept this level of animation on an Xbox or PS3 title, not because they're so much more powerful, but because your expectations are much higher. I think a lot of developers, especially of the mini-game variety, saw the Mii and decided, "that's our target. We'll never have to do anything better than that."
Many of the Wii titles look great even though they're cartoony, like Mario Galaxy. But there are a lot of bad apples out there that seem to think the Wii is an N64 with a pointer stick, and that simply doesn't look good in HD.
You were modded funny, but this is also quite insightful.
A)Simple disagreement with an idea that is being widely spread automatically makes it "propaganda" to the one disagreeing.
B)Many of our politicians have argued that some accurate speech should not be spread because it can cause feelings that they disagree with, such as low morale for our soldiers or high morale for our enemies. Unfortunately, they've been very effective at silencing those that disagree (see above) with this line of reasoning.
Some people accuse the Lancet Report of being inaccurate. I don't know if it is or not, but if you think it's inaccurate then say so. As soon as you start arguing that it's hurting morale, then I know you're full of shit. If it was simply wrong, then saying/proving that should really have been enough.
I've been an Exchange admin (among other things) most of my career. Exchange is still going very strong right now. The fact that my most recent job hunt included _a lot_ of questions about Sharepoint attests to this.
However, I also come from an enterprise where most employees used an external, free account, in addition to their corp. account, for business purposes. It was against the rules, but it's pretty hard to stop a salesman in the middle of a pitch when their attachment limit is too small.
The truth is that these people would have preferred to keep just one account, but they didn't feel they were always getting what they needed from their in-house email. The external providers gave it to them. Since the external providers need to keep up with public demand, and not just whatever the CIO thinks they should have, they'll always be at least one step ahead of corporate. The users are attracted to this.
There are several things keeping corporations' mail in-house, including cost, security, and the fact that Gmail, for all it's pleasant qualities, is not Exchange/Outlook. However, those things can, and will, change. If your enterprise can host OWA and RSP over HTTPS securely and for a reasonable cost, there is absolutely no reason why a giant company, utilizing massive economies of scale, cant do the same, but far more cheaply. There's absolutely no reason why a competitor can't improve on these, too.
The question isn't if Microsoft/Yahoo/Google will offer something superior and cheaper than Exchange/Outlook, but when. And the awesome sales of completely hosted payroll systems sugests that corps won't really have a problem the fact that their own IT staff doesn't have their private data completely on the premises. In fact, judging by some of the mistrust of IT I've seen during my career, and the fact that everyone has stars in their eyes about some of these companies, I think they'll actually be thankful they'll be able to "take a load off" of their IT staff.
Internal IT is not completely going away, and it will always be around in some form, even if just to pass out the laptops. But over the next ten years, you're going to see a slide away from in-house deployments of lots of standard apps. It's already underway. Ask yourself, how many hosted solutions does your company use? Then ask yourself how many more is it _possible_ to outsource, even if it doesn't make sense at the moment. Over the next ten years, those possibilities will likely become done-deals, just like they have over the last five. When that happens, what will your IT staff look like?
That's an interesting thing to say. Every industry I know of that's had a load taken off has then seen massive, or even total, job losses.
A) What's good enough for college is often good enough for business. All it takes is a product/service that matches the executives' pinstripes.
B) Do you have an MCSE Messaging cert? How much will it be worth when nobody does their email in-house?
It's not an "if," it's a "when." The load is going to be so successfully taken off that pretty much all internal email admins are going to have to find something else to do with all their free time. You know, like spending some quality time with Dice.com.
The summary is blatantly stupid. It only took the original model -2 more weeks- than this model. Demand has not increased all that much, considering the considerable user base and available games.
Selling a million units two weeks faster than the original launch is pretty good by anyone's accounting.
It was bouncing around in the 27K to 33K range most of the year. Now, after a huge spike at re-launch, they seem to be hanging out in the 60K range. That's about 3/4 of the DSs current 80K rang which is MUCH better than the 3 to 1 or 4 to one ratio they've often had.
I agree with you about the stupid summary, but saying demand hasn't increased is not accurate at all. This is a big deal.
Why? The article is not stating that they should add Plutonium to your Flintstone's Chewables. It's just saying that you should use, you know, actual science instead of imagined numbers based on something your cousin's-friends-dad(who is an X-ray tech, you know) heard from his boss.
Radiation sucks. The article says so. It just says that it doesn't suck as much as advertised. That shouldn't make you sick, it should make you happy.
BTW, these children and the miners got hit much harder than the rest, health-wise. Is it just me, or does it look like ingesting/inhaling radioactive particles is much worse for you than being just being in an area of elevated radiation?
"So a kite that provides most of the ship's power can only afford a 50% reduction in fuel consumption? Hmmm...
I'm no physics guy and I've never worked on a ship, but I'll bet modern ships go faster than wind power alone would allow, and I'll bet a lot of the extra fuel consumption is to maintain that forward speed.
I picture it like a lot of solar electricity generation. You may generate a significant fraction of your energy needs with the solar panels on your roof, but you still need power from the grid to maintain your microwave and plasma TV lifestyle. You probably save a lot of energy with the wind, but you still need a lot of diesel to get you to port on time.
"If your mom gained weight, she was eating too many calories. Period."
Thank god someone said it. I had a coworker explain to me that because her metabolism slowed as she consumed fewer calories, no matter how little she ate she still couldn't lose weight. I tried to reason with her, but she persisted. I wonder if she could export her metabolism to those starving kids in Africa. They could really use the extra body fat.
I've used the ELandE diet for years. Eat Less and Exercise. It's amazing. If you do those things, you will lose weight. The problem is, I kept having life interrupt me and I wasn't able to keep up with the exercise regimen. I always gained the weight back. For the past few months I've modified my plan to just Eat Less. I've lost 40 pounds.
Note that I said "eat less" and not "eat only these specific foods at these specific times in these specific combinations." If you cut in half the food you're eating, then you could be living on Twinkies and gravy and still lose weight. Your doctor will not approve, but you will get slimmer. But If you start eating a little more sensibly at the same time, then your doctor won't feel so bad. What should you eat? That's easy, just eat more of the foods that you instinctively see as healthy and less of the foods that you instinctively see as not healthy. I'll bet that 100% of you think that you should eat more carrots and less donuts for better health. I'll bet there aren't too many of you that think corn dogs and chili fries are really the direction you should be going to make your doctor happy. Your instincts are better than a lot of diet gurus will lead you to believe.
Look, you're not going to do it perfectly. You're not going to understand that such and such food is not really the best, even though your mom always told you it was. Who cares? Most people have enough of a clue to be moving in a better direction than they currently are. You know you're not doing yourself any favors by having a tripple Whopper with large fries and a large Coke for lunch. If you eat a regular cheeseburger and an apple and some water instead, it might not be "optimal" nutrition, but you don't have to be a nutritionist to know that it's better than the Tripple.
Make a personal decision. Yes, sit down with yourself and have a heart to heart. Come to an understanding that it is possible to eat less than you currently do and that you probably already have the knowledge to eat a better balance of foods, even if that balance isn't perfect. Then act. You don't need to make some big production, just eat less food at your next meal. Then throw some kind of vegetable in the meal after that. If you act according to what you already believe is correct, eating less food, and possibly a better mix of food, you will get thin a hell of a lot faster than reading a thick book and fretting over whether you're doing it "right."
You've got me on pins and needles. Better benefit to society? Better than 157,000 with health care for 10 years? Can you spend a minute explaining it to me, because I'm having a hard time understanding this.
Perhaps there is some ratio of human suffering related to dieing during air travel that greatly eclipses, say, cancer or heart disease. Perhaps you just prefer adding overhead to the economy by raising the cost of doing business rather than pay for it out of taxes. Is it possible that you believe there will be a ramp up in missile fire directed at airlines that will justify this and you have some kind of government estimate to back it up?
In any case, please, please enlighten me, because I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out how you could let so many people get substandard care, lose their businesses, file for bankruptcy or choose between dinner and their expensive heart pills in order to pay for a system that protects against a threat that is currently so low it has never been used against us and if it is used against us is likely to kill only a small fraction of those saved by the medical care.
If the program costs $3 billion, that same money could get 157,895 people health care for 10 years each, at Canada's rates.
You can help all those people for just the cost you suggest, and not spend another dime.
Would you rather spend $1 to $2 per person, per flight to put some fish-eyes on the ass-end of a plane that'll probably never do anything but feed the investors of Northrop Grumman, or would you rather give 157 thousand people health care for 10 years? Do you have enough balls to tell those 157 thousand people that they won't get health care because your program will give a greater benefit to society? More to the point, do you really believe it yourself?
So one plane in the history of aviation might have been saved. Maybe
I think this would make good terrorist MasterCard commercial:
A year of nationalized health care in Canada = about $1,900 A year of food in American = about $3,000 A habitat for humanity house = about $35,000
Scaring Americans into spending "billions" to possibly save between zero and a couple of hundred lives instead of spending it where it's guaranteed to make a difference = Priceless
About the DS Version of King Kong: A murky horrible mess, imagine if a 50-foot high monkey sat on you and by some quirk you found yourself up his ass. Yes, you'd be lucky you hadn't be killed. But would you call yourself lucky, really? You're up a monkey's ass, man!>
That's pure magic (sniff).
But about the ratings. They're useless unless you know something about the reviewer. If you don't know I love FPSs, don't like long storylines, and go gaga over anything "clever", you wouldn't know why I rated anything the way I did. Don't put me down in front of a Final Fantasy title. No matter how much I may try to be objective, I'll ferret out every minor issue and play it up like the game was made by Satan himself. Put me in front of an FPS and I'm likely to give it two thumbs up no matter how boring and repetitive everyone else said it was.
Every reviewer is like that. They're people. They have likes and dislikes. Start putting some well known names behind the reviews then get to know the reviewer and all of a sudden you'll find there's not such a big problem. It doesn't matter if you think my game taste is idiotic, all that matters is that you know what kinds of things I'm likely to enjoy or hate. If you love Final Fantasy, you will be wary of my RPG reviews. IF you have only a limited tolerance to FPSs, when I gush about that new one you should take it with a grain of salt. Either way, it's a hell of a lot better than seeing 4 out of 10 when you have no idea if the problem was the game or the reviewer.
The Star Trek theme for a home theater probably wont put off any buyers with even a medium interest in sci-fi. As you said, the theme fits well with showing movies, and since people have been wanting to "escape" to the movies for years, why not do so on a star ship?
But what about the chairs? No, no, they look nice and I bet they're comfortable, but there doesn't appear to be very many of them. I don't keep up with the latest in home theatres, but both the pictures I've seen and the name itself suggests there should be more than two primary seats.
Yep, I see the third portable chair behind them and I assume a fourth would fit, but they're not going to be what sticks out at the open house. The two big, lonely central chairs will. Wouldn't anyone with a family* or, heck, more than one friend* think twice about this?
TW
*Insert joke about geek and human contact here if you really, really must.
You listed "camera work" as one of your marks of quality. How will you know it's good camera work if you don't see it at it's intended quality level?
Cinematographers are skilled craftsmen. They can make or break a movie in many cases. A scene with a grand landscape might not be very grand if you don't watch it fairly close to the intended resolution, brightness, color saturation, etc. If it's not very grand, then the characters inhabiting are less likely to affect you the way they will others who've seen the same movie at the theaters. Even a character driven movie like "Lost in Translation" plays differently to audiences who see it in poor quality on small screens. Simply put, they were less likely to enjoy the movie. Ebert's theory is that there are subtler cues in the face than we normally imagine. I don't know if he's right, but It's worth taking into consideration. Why let all that hard work of the cameraman go to waste?
The possibility of a proportionally spaced typewriter being used is irrelevant. Probability is all that matters. The document should have triggered a high level of scrutiny because of the subject and the content. That reasonable investigation of the document should have found the font, because it sticks out like a sore thumb, and then triggered a much more detailed level of scrutiny to assure it's authenticity.
Should they investigate more because it's impossible to have such a font? No. You don't investigate at all if it's impossible, you just throw it in the trash. But you also don't accept on faith something this improbable. It's a dark day for the news when such a large news organization gets a damning document about the president and doesn't bother sending it by a forgery expert as a matter of routine diligence.
As much as we need these assumptions to be "true," we also need them to be fallible. Our assumptions openly ask to be tested and happily shift when evidence warrants it. This means that they're not actually hard facts, but it doesn't prevent our assumptions from being useful. We can test and learn with the tools we have on hand and then adjust when new tools become available.
Yes, I know an awful lot of scientists who will tell you this or that is a "fact" or "true." Some even mean it. The good ones are simply using "true" as a convenient and extremely useful placeholder.
BTW, your view of a naturalists assumptions is flawed. Although many will have made the assumption you predict, it is not a forgone conclusion. It is no more necessary for an evolution scientist to reject a belief in god than for a religious person to reject math or archeology. The difference is that when we both find something new, a religious persons will mold the evidence to fit within his beliefs, where a scientist will mold his beliefs to fit the new evidence.
All it means to be a moderate is that you don't consistantly vote left or right. It _does not_ mean you consistantly vote down the middle. Many moderates voted conservative in 2004 and many moderates voted liberal in 2006. Some moderates have never given much thought to gun control or abortion, but they have opinions about the war and taxes.
Some moderates are more like you say, but they don't take averages or split things down the middle. These are people who might favor a tax cut, but not a huge one, or they may favor more gun control, but not banning guns entirely.
A lot of moderates are simple pragmatists. They want us going in the generally correct direction, and if a small change will make someone happy and get things moving they're happy to do it, regardless of which side is proposing it. Sometimes they want to go in a middle direction because both sides have taken extreme positions that could never work.
In no case would a moderate pick a position purely in the middle purely to make sure he wasn't leaning left or right.
Science is not a belief. Science is a method for determining how things work. It is firmly based in the idea that any belief can be wrong. Religion is belief. Religious belief often refuses to accept the possibility that it could be wrong.
Science doesn't fight religion, religion fights science. When scientists discover something that disagrees with a religion's belief, religion often chooses to simply say science is wrong, without looking fairly at the evidence. If it does look at the evidence, it often tries to argue based on faith and belief, rather than science.
Science, on the other hand, often looks at religion. It does this completely objectively most of the time. But science doesn't use belief or faith it it's work. It uses evidence. If it doesn't find evidence that supports religion, it says so.
You won't get science to use religion's rules. Science will not use faith or belief. If religion can't used science, then we're at an impass. If religion would like to use science, science will very happily welcome it.
BTW, ID doesn't really use science, even though it says it does. This is not a judgment of right or wrong, just an evaluation of their methodology. That's why science disapproves of ID. If ID actually used science to come to its conclusions, scientists would be very happy to look at the evidence.
The doc had a proportionately spaced font in the days of monospaced typewriters. Even if you couldn't say with 100% certainty that it wasn't a forgery, that style of typing was so easy to spot, and so rare in those times, that it could easily stand out to even average people who've used typewriters. That should have triggered much more scrutiny on the document, and it was a big mistake for the organization to not give it that scrutiny.
I never said I can't tell it's 700mb, I'm saying that if it is 700mb that its quality is inferior. I also said that a lot of people claim something is a particular quality, but due to a lack of understanding of how rip settings, generational loss and compression work, then end up with lower actual quality than they think they have.
The ability to rip and share movies will not turn you into a video expert. But people making HD-DVDs at studios often are video experts. In my experience, I get a lot better quality with a lot less hassle from the latter.
BTW, I don't have to decide that a full size HD movie is better than a 700mb one. The compression algorithm decided for me. When you use lossy compression, well, it loses data. You'd have to be pretty bad at basic logic to think that it was even possible for something that loses that much data to be "just as good."
You're right on both counts. I agree that listening to multiple opinions is a very good idea. But being forced to present multiple opinions is quite another. The opinions of news organizations are far closer to individual speech than corporate speech. Forcing a TV network with a large news presence to air ideas it has already rejected is quite a bit like forcing you, personally to give free time to the opposition. It's like you being forced to explain to your wife about the benefits of an "open" marriage if normally you promote fidelity. On some level she'll see these words as coming from you, even if she knows that you'd normally oppose the idea. This will be especially the case because part of the rules of presentation will be to give the ideas the same fair and even tone you'd show to it's opposition.
I like lots of sources, I just don't like one source being forced to give more of a variety of opinions than it feels is necessary.
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To a point. If your handle was SpreadsheetUser4Life, you might disagree.
I think it's possible the Xbox or one of it's competition, could be competitive against PCs, but they'll never do it unless they have a full web 2.0/AJAX/whatever compatible browsers and arbitrary access to necessary OS services like printing.
Interestingly, the low-powered, no hard drive, lower resolution Wii, with it's Opera browser, is one of the best for this purpose. Theoretically you could run a nice variety of web apps with it. I know the PS3 has a lame printing feature. It's lame because it has like one or two printers that are compatible. I don't own, and have never used an xbox, so I don't know how it stands up to the others in these criteria.
BTW, the PS3 can run linux and has full keyboard and mouse support. If any of these consoles could take make the claim of being close to a PC, it wins hands down.
It's also nice for mapping. No, seriously. If you do the map from [my location] then you only have to add the destination address. It saves one entry, which may be a big deal if you don't know your zip code or you can't see an address number (how long is Main St. anyway?).
"Doesn't do much good if your location is a half mile away," you may say. Well it's much easier to move your starting point to your real location than it would have been to find it from scratch. You're already on the screen instead of scroll-scroll-scrolling till you find what you're looking for.
People who say that it's not that accurate are missing the point. It's a significant improvement, and you don't have to buy anything extra to use it. I'm glad they added it.
TW
As far as I know, Microsoft doesn't make a single PC. IBM's monopoly was replaced by a thriving wealth of hardware and software companies plus a monopoly for the OS. I would even add that the OS is only a fraction of the cost of a PC, so it's very arguable that IBM was replaced by what is for the most part a vast open market.
Note, this doesn't mean I think Microsoft's monopoly is good. It's very bad for the industry. Just pointing out that when you break up a monopoly (and I believe market forces broke up IBMs) then you do have a chance for improvement.
TW
I've experienced frame rate issues, then after a reboot they go away. It's not ideal, but it isn't the developer's fault either and it's definately not a persistent problem. I've yet to see an accusation of 5fps or "slide show" frame rates with any kind of widespread reports of the issue or an instructions on how to duplicate it. Yes, there can be frame rate issues due to lazy development or a bogged down system, but no, it really isn't as bad as all that.
My friend has a nice 42" LCD. Movies are great and the clarity, sharpness and color from his Wii are all top notch. But many of his games look as if they took a Hannah-Barbara cartoon and adapted it for the movie theater without redrawing any of the animation. In other words, it looks like crap because the developers were lazy about making a polished product.
You would absolutely not accept this level of animation on an Xbox or PS3 title, not because they're so much more powerful, but because your expectations are much higher. I think a lot of developers, especially of the mini-game variety, saw the Mii and decided, "that's our target. We'll never have to do anything better than that."
Many of the Wii titles look great even though they're cartoony, like Mario Galaxy. But there are a lot of bad apples out there that seem to think the Wii is an N64 with a pointer stick, and that simply doesn't look good in HD.
You were modded funny, but this is also quite insightful.
A)Simple disagreement with an idea that is being widely spread automatically makes it "propaganda" to the one disagreeing.
B)Many of our politicians have argued that some accurate speech should not be spread because it can cause feelings that they disagree with, such as low morale for our soldiers or high morale for our enemies. Unfortunately, they've been very effective at silencing those that disagree (see above) with this line of reasoning.
Some people accuse the Lancet Report of being inaccurate. I don't know if it is or not, but if you think it's inaccurate then say so. As soon as you start arguing that it's hurting morale, then I know you're full of shit. If it was simply wrong, then saying/proving that should really have been enough.
I've been an Exchange admin (among other things) most of my career. Exchange is still going very strong right now. The fact that my most recent job hunt included _a lot_ of questions about Sharepoint attests to this.
However, I also come from an enterprise where most employees used an external, free account, in addition to their corp. account, for business purposes. It was against the rules, but it's pretty hard to stop a salesman in the middle of a pitch when their attachment limit is too small.
The truth is that these people would have preferred to keep just one account, but they didn't feel they were always getting what they needed from their in-house email. The external providers gave it to them. Since the external providers need to keep up with public demand, and not just whatever the CIO thinks they should have, they'll always be at least one step ahead of corporate. The users are attracted to this.
There are several things keeping corporations' mail in-house, including cost, security, and the fact that Gmail, for all it's pleasant qualities, is not Exchange/Outlook. However, those things can, and will, change. If your enterprise can host OWA and RSP over HTTPS securely and for a reasonable cost, there is absolutely no reason why a giant company, utilizing massive economies of scale, cant do the same, but far more cheaply. There's absolutely no reason why a competitor can't improve on these, too.
The question isn't if Microsoft/Yahoo/Google will offer something superior and cheaper than Exchange/Outlook, but when. And the awesome sales of completely hosted payroll systems sugests that corps won't really have a problem the fact that their own IT staff doesn't have their private data completely on the premises. In fact, judging by some of the mistrust of IT I've seen during my career, and the fact that everyone has stars in their eyes about some of these companies, I think they'll actually be thankful they'll be able to "take a load off" of their IT staff.
Internal IT is not completely going away, and it will always be around in some form, even if just to pass out the laptops. But over the next ten years, you're going to see a slide away from in-house deployments of lots of standard apps. It's already underway. Ask yourself, how many hosted solutions does your company use? Then ask yourself how many more is it _possible_ to outsource, even if it doesn't make sense at the moment. Over the next ten years, those possibilities will likely become done-deals, just like they have over the last five. When that happens, what will your IT staff look like?
"Takes a load off IT"
That's an interesting thing to say. Every industry I know of that's had a load taken off has then seen massive, or even total, job losses.
A) What's good enough for college is often good enough for business. All it takes is a product/service that matches the executives' pinstripes.
B) Do you have an MCSE Messaging cert? How much will it be worth when nobody does their email in-house?
It's not an "if," it's a "when." The load is going to be so successfully taken off that pretty much all internal email admins are going to have to find something else to do with all their free time. You know, like spending some quality time with Dice.com.
Selling a million units two weeks faster than the original launch is pretty good by anyone's accounting.
It was bouncing around in the 27K to 33K range most of the year. Now, after a huge spike at re-launch, they seem to be hanging out in the 60K range. That's about 3/4 of the DSs current 80K rang which is MUCH better than the 3 to 1 or 4 to one ratio they've often had.
I agree with you about the stupid summary, but saying demand hasn't increased is not accurate at all. This is a big deal.
Why? The article is not stating that they should add Plutonium to your Flintstone's Chewables. It's just saying that you should use, you know, actual science instead of imagined numbers based on something your cousin's-friends-dad(who is an X-ray tech, you know) heard from his boss.
Radiation sucks. The article says so. It just says that it doesn't suck as much as advertised. That shouldn't make you sick, it should make you happy.
BTW, these children and the miners got hit much harder than the rest, health-wise. Is it just me, or does it look like ingesting/inhaling radioactive particles is much worse for you than being just being in an area of elevated radiation?
I'm no physics guy and I've never worked on a ship, but I'll bet modern ships go faster than wind power alone would allow, and I'll bet a lot of the extra fuel consumption is to maintain that forward speed.
I picture it like a lot of solar electricity generation. You may generate a significant fraction of your energy needs with the solar panels on your roof, but you still need power from the grid to maintain your microwave and plasma TV lifestyle. You probably save a lot of energy with the wind, but you still need a lot of diesel to get you to port on time.
"If your mom gained weight, she was eating too many calories. Period."
Thank god someone said it. I had a coworker explain to me that because her metabolism slowed as she consumed fewer calories, no matter how little she ate she still couldn't lose weight. I tried to reason with her, but she persisted. I wonder if she could export her metabolism to those starving kids in Africa. They could really use the extra body fat.
I've used the ELandE diet for years. Eat Less and Exercise. It's amazing. If you do those things, you will lose weight. The problem is, I kept having life interrupt me and I wasn't able to keep up with the exercise regimen. I always gained the weight back. For the past few months I've modified my plan to just Eat Less. I've lost 40 pounds.
Note that I said "eat less" and not "eat only these specific foods at these specific times in these specific combinations." If you cut in half the food you're eating, then you could be living on Twinkies and gravy and still lose weight. Your doctor will not approve, but you will get slimmer. But If you start eating a little more sensibly at the same time, then your doctor won't feel so bad. What should you eat? That's easy, just eat more of the foods that you instinctively see as healthy and less of the foods that you instinctively see as not healthy. I'll bet that 100% of you think that you should eat more carrots and less donuts for better health. I'll bet there aren't too many of you that think corn dogs and chili fries are really the direction you should be going to make your doctor happy. Your instincts are better than a lot of diet gurus will lead you to believe.
Look, you're not going to do it perfectly. You're not going to understand that such and such food is not really the best, even though your mom always told you it was. Who cares? Most people have enough of a clue to be moving in a better direction than they currently are. You know you're not doing yourself any favors by having a tripple Whopper with large fries and a large Coke for lunch. If you eat a regular cheeseburger and an apple and some water instead, it might not be "optimal" nutrition, but you don't have to be a nutritionist to know that it's better than the Tripple.
Make a personal decision. Yes, sit down with yourself and have a heart to heart. Come to an understanding that it is possible to eat less than you currently do and that you probably already have the knowledge to eat a better balance of foods, even if that balance isn't perfect. Then act. You don't need to make some big production, just eat less food at your next meal. Then throw some kind of vegetable in the meal after that. If you act according to what you already believe is correct, eating less food, and possibly a better mix of food, you will get thin a hell of a lot faster than reading a thick book and fretting over whether you're doing it "right."
You've got me on pins and needles. Better benefit to society? Better than 157,000 with health care for 10 years? Can you spend a minute explaining it to me, because I'm having a hard time understanding this.
Perhaps there is some ratio of human suffering related to dieing during air travel that greatly eclipses, say, cancer or heart disease. Perhaps you just prefer adding overhead to the economy by raising the cost of doing business rather than pay for it out of taxes. Is it possible that you believe there will be a ramp up in missile fire directed at airlines that will justify this and you have some kind of government estimate to back it up?
In any case, please, please enlighten me, because I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out how you could let so many people get substandard care, lose their businesses, file for bankruptcy or choose between dinner and their expensive heart pills in order to pay for a system that protects against a threat that is currently so low it has never been used against us and if it is used against us is likely to kill only a small fraction of those saved by the medical care.
TW
Ah, comparison time part deux.
If the program costs $3 billion, that same money could get 157,895 people health care for 10 years each, at Canada's rates.
You can help all those people for just the cost you suggest, and not spend another dime.
Would you rather spend $1 to $2 per person, per flight to put some fish-eyes on the ass-end of a plane that'll probably never do anything but feed the investors of Northrop Grumman, or would you rather give 157 thousand people health care for 10 years? Do you have enough balls to tell those 157 thousand people that they won't get health care because your program will give a greater benefit to society? More to the point, do you really believe it yourself?
TW
So one plane in the history of aviation might have been saved. Maybe
I think this would make good terrorist MasterCard commercial:
A year of nationalized health care in Canada = about $1,900
A year of food in American = about $3,000
A habitat for humanity house = about $35,000
Scaring Americans into spending "billions" to possibly save between zero and a couple of hundred lives instead of spending it where it's guaranteed to make a difference = Priceless
TW
Not necessarily. They can be good entertainment.
About the DS Version of King Kong:
A murky horrible mess, imagine if a 50-foot high monkey sat on you and by some quirk you found yourself up his ass. Yes, you'd be lucky you hadn't be killed. But would you call yourself lucky, really? You're up a monkey's ass, man!>
That's pure magic (sniff).
But about the ratings. They're useless unless you know something about the reviewer. If you don't know I love FPSs, don't like long storylines, and go gaga over anything "clever", you wouldn't know why I rated anything the way I did. Don't put me down in front of a Final Fantasy title. No matter how much I may try to be objective, I'll ferret out every minor issue and play it up like the game was made by Satan himself. Put me in front of an FPS and I'm likely to give it two thumbs up no matter how boring and repetitive everyone else said it was.
Every reviewer is like that. They're people. They have likes and dislikes. Start putting some well known names behind the reviews then get to know the reviewer and all of a sudden you'll find there's not such a big problem. It doesn't matter if you think my game taste is idiotic, all that matters is that you know what kinds of things I'm likely to enjoy or hate. If you love Final Fantasy, you will be wary of my RPG reviews. IF you have only a limited tolerance to FPSs, when I gush about that new one you should take it with a grain of salt. Either way, it's a hell of a lot better than seeing 4 out of 10 when you have no idea if the problem was the game or the reviewer.
TW
The Star Trek theme for a home theater probably wont put off any buyers with even a medium interest in sci-fi. As you said, the theme fits well with showing movies, and since people have been wanting to "escape" to the movies for years, why not do so on a star ship?
But what about the chairs? No, no, they look nice and I bet they're comfortable, but there doesn't appear to be very many of them. I don't keep up with the latest in home theatres, but both the pictures I've seen and the name itself suggests there should be more than two primary seats.
Yep, I see the third portable chair behind them and I assume a fourth would fit, but they're not going to be what sticks out at the open house. The two big, lonely central chairs will. Wouldn't anyone with a family* or, heck, more than one friend* think twice about this?
TW
*Insert joke about geek and human contact here if you really, really must.
You listed "camera work" as one of your marks of quality. How will you know it's good camera work if you don't see it at it's intended quality level?
Cinematographers are skilled craftsmen. They can make or break a movie in many cases. A scene with a grand landscape might not be very grand if you don't watch it fairly close to the intended resolution, brightness, color saturation, etc. If it's not very grand, then the characters inhabiting are less likely to affect you the way they will others who've seen the same movie at the theaters. Even a character driven movie like "Lost in Translation" plays differently to audiences who see it in poor quality on small screens. Simply put, they were less likely to enjoy the movie. Ebert's theory is that there are subtler cues in the face than we normally imagine. I don't know if he's right, but It's worth taking into consideration. Why let all that hard work of the cameraman go to waste?
TW
The possibility of a proportionally spaced typewriter being used is irrelevant. Probability is all that matters. The document should have triggered a high level of scrutiny because of the subject and the content. That reasonable investigation of the document should have found the font, because it sticks out like a sore thumb, and then triggered a much more detailed level of scrutiny to assure it's authenticity.
Should they investigate more because it's impossible to have such a font? No. You don't investigate at all if it's impossible, you just throw it in the trash. But you also don't accept on faith something this improbable. It's a dark day for the news when such a large news organization gets a damning document about the president and doesn't bother sending it by a forgery expert as a matter of routine diligence.
TW
As much as we need these assumptions to be "true," we also need them to be fallible. Our assumptions openly ask to be tested and happily shift when evidence warrants it. This means that they're not actually hard facts, but it doesn't prevent our assumptions from being useful. We can test and learn with the tools we have on hand and then adjust when new tools become available.
Yes, I know an awful lot of scientists who will tell you this or that is a "fact" or "true." Some even mean it. The good ones are simply using "true" as a convenient and extremely useful placeholder.
BTW, your view of a naturalists assumptions is flawed. Although many will have made the assumption you predict, it is not a forgone conclusion. It is no more necessary for an evolution scientist to reject a belief in god than for a religious person to reject math or archeology. The difference is that when we both find something new, a religious persons will mold the evidence to fit within his beliefs, where a scientist will mold his beliefs to fit the new evidence.
TW
All it means to be a moderate is that you don't consistantly vote left or right. It _does not_ mean you consistantly vote down the middle. Many moderates voted conservative in 2004 and many moderates voted liberal in 2006. Some moderates have never given much thought to gun control or abortion, but they have opinions about the war and taxes.
Some moderates are more like you say, but they don't take averages or split things down the middle. These are people who might favor a tax cut, but not a huge one, or they may favor more gun control, but not banning guns entirely.
A lot of moderates are simple pragmatists. They want us going in the generally correct direction, and if a small change will make someone happy and get things moving they're happy to do it, regardless of which side is proposing it. Sometimes they want to go in a middle direction because both sides have taken extreme positions that could never work.
In no case would a moderate pick a position purely in the middle purely to make sure he wasn't leaning left or right.
TW
Science is not a belief. Science is a method for determining how things work. It is firmly based in the idea that any belief can be wrong. Religion is belief. Religious belief often refuses to accept the possibility that it could be wrong.
Science doesn't fight religion, religion fights science. When scientists discover something that disagrees with a religion's belief, religion often chooses to simply say science is wrong, without looking fairly at the evidence. If it does look at the evidence, it often tries to argue based on faith and belief, rather than science.
Science, on the other hand, often looks at religion. It does this completely objectively most of the time. But science doesn't use belief or faith it it's work. It uses evidence. If it doesn't find evidence that supports religion, it says so.
You won't get science to use religion's rules. Science will not use faith or belief. If religion can't used science, then we're at an impass. If religion would like to use science, science will very happily welcome it.
BTW, ID doesn't really use science, even though it says it does. This is not a judgment of right or wrong, just an evaluation of their methodology. That's why science disapproves of ID. If ID actually used science to come to its conclusions, scientists would be very happy to look at the evidence.
TW
The doc had a proportionately spaced font in the days of monospaced typewriters. Even if you couldn't say with 100% certainty that it wasn't a forgery, that style of typing was so easy to spot, and so rare in those times, that it could easily stand out to even average people who've used typewriters. That should have triggered much more scrutiny on the document, and it was a big mistake for the organization to not give it that scrutiny.
TW
I never said I can't tell it's 700mb, I'm saying that if it is 700mb that its quality is inferior. I also said that a lot of people claim something is a particular quality, but due to a lack of understanding of how rip settings, generational loss and compression work, then end up with lower actual quality than they think they have.
The ability to rip and share movies will not turn you into a video expert. But people making HD-DVDs at studios often are video experts. In my experience, I get a lot better quality with a lot less hassle from the latter.
BTW, I don't have to decide that a full size HD movie is better than a 700mb one. The compression algorithm decided for me. When you use lossy compression, well, it loses data. You'd have to be pretty bad at basic logic to think that it was even possible for something that loses that much data to be "just as good."
TW
You're right on both counts. I agree that listening to multiple opinions is a very good idea. But being forced to present multiple opinions is quite another. The opinions of news organizations are far closer to individual speech than corporate speech. Forcing a TV network with a large news presence to air ideas it has already rejected is quite a bit like forcing you, personally to give free time to the opposition. It's like you being forced to explain to your wife about the benefits of an "open" marriage if normally you promote fidelity. On some level she'll see these words as coming from you, even if she knows that you'd normally oppose the idea. This will be especially the case because part of the rules of presentation will be to give the ideas the same fair and even tone you'd show to it's opposition.
I like lots of sources, I just don't like one source being forced to give more of a variety of opinions than it feels is necessary.
TW