Improving security is great, but they really need to keep working on usability as well! I just installed Chrome for the first time yesterday and have been playing around with it. It seems pretty speedy but the UI is a bit weird.
The lack of a title bar seems kind of weird. I don't know what they were going for with that, but it's the only window on my entire machine and it stands out, and not in a good way. At one point i tried adding a new tab while waiting for visual studio to start a debug session, and the UI hung up for a little bit, and for a few brief seconds Chrome acquired a title bar. I actually thought it looked better that way. A couple minor aesthetic gripes. I may eventually get used to having the tab bar above the toolbar, though currently it seems pretty funky to me.
I haven't done a side-by-side comparison with Firefox yet, but my initial rough estimates seem to be that Chrome uses at least 75% as much memory as Firefox, possibly more, and at least as much virtual memory. I find the fact that Chrome has about 40 process running right now to be rather awkward, but hopefully it at least means that when i start closing large numbers of tabs that the memory will actually be released (unlike Firefox.)
The biggest problem however is the tab bar. Personally i don't like having new tabs open in the middle of the bar, screwing up the ordering, but it was easy to find an extension to fix that behavior. However if you open up a lot of tabs they just get smaller and smaller until you can't see what each of them is anymore. And to my further frustration there's no way to access a list of the tabs. There are a couple extensions that offer some kind of tab index, but nothing that presents a simple list like in Firefox.
After a little searching i found out the reason for these problems in a Chromium blog post. The designers are approaching the UI design from a heavily aesthetic angle. Which is good in theory, but they're also being fanatical about it. If they don't think a feature is aesthetically correct but can't think of a more aesthetically pleasing way to implement it they just won't implement the feature at all, even though they admit that the lack of that feature causes usability problems!
And to wrap it all up, they say "In all of these areas we've resisted adding options to control behavior. Keeping our set of options minimal is a good forcing function for us as user interface designers to come up with the right approach, since we never rely on the crutch of making the user decide what we were unable to."
Well i hate to tell you guys, but it doesn't seem to be working really well as a "forcing function" given that you've crippled an important part of the UI while dithering about what the "best" way to implement it is. The blog post was made a year ago and they apparently still haven't found a solution! And i find it very aggravating that they feel once they've come up with the "right" approach they don't want to provide options to do it any other way. Clearly if the user has a different aesthetic sense than the designer then the user is wrong! I've dealt with designers like this on projects before, and trying to convince them that the users can legitimately have a different opinion is a very frustrating task.
I remember the painful process of Firefox developers trying to get their tab bar into a useful state under similar circumstances. Perhaps their solution isn't 100% aesthetically appealing to the Chrome designers, but it undeniably _works_, and leaving the users hanging while they try to figure out something more "aesthetically" and "spatially" pleasing seems like pure egotism to me.
"The Apple of today is more 1984-ish than Microsoft ever was at the time of the aforementioned Superbowl ad."
Aside from the IBM/Microsoft thing which others have mentioned, has anyone else noticed the interesting correlation between the Superbowl ad and Apple's logos?
In the 80's Apple was an upstart, fighting against the big "totalitarian establishment," and the commercial showed a dark and grey world before the brightly colored Apple person ran in and smashed it. It then ended with the bright, cheery rainbow apple logo.
Some other company (Google?) could remake the 1984 Superbowl ad with the current Apple logo plastered all over everything (trademark issues aside) and it would still be thematically appropriate color-wise. Obviously the FSF would argue that it would still be thematically appropriate in other senses as well.
"Ahead of: Halo (any of them), Xbox 360 versions of Call of Duty (any of them), Myst, GTA4 (360), Gears of War (any of them), Final Fantasy 7, Gran Turismo 4"
Which means it has now also outsold MW2 on every platform, including the 360, _individually_ (not all combined.) Just like Reggie bet that it would. He originally said it would beat Modern Warfare 2 on one platform by the end of January. (The person he was interviewing then specified the 360 and Reggie didn't seem to object. Which led to a lot of controversy amongst fanboys when it seemed like Mario might beat the PS3 sales but not the 360 sales, but that's all moot now.)
After the response to the initial sales of Modern Warfare 2 in November, a lot of people are going to be eating crow over that one:)
"So how long till it makes its way to Droid - if ever at all?"
I assume you mean aside from playing it through NESoid? I'm currently in the middle of a game of Nobunaga's Ambition on my Nexus One. (I might have started up a game of FF1 instead, except i was already playing that on the Wii Virtual Console =) Even if you want to be entirely ethical (since you apparently don't already have an old copy lying around) i personally wouldn't feel any qualms about buying a copy for some other system (even an old used copy) and then d/ling the rom.
"I personally never played any of the FF series, only because I hadn't heard of it until like 7 or 8 came out, and I thought I'd have a lot of backstory to catch up with (though people have reassured me that I really don't)."
I wouldn't suggest playing FF1 for the first time now unless you're already very familiar with how clunky those old NES games could get. FF1, along with Dragon Quest 1, were both exploring how to do RPGs on the console format, and there's a lot of UI issues that got resolved in later versions. (In particular, having to buy each item one at a time, no descriptions for any items, no way to view stats without equipping an item and switching to the status screen.) And even aside from the difficulties the UI imposes it's probably the most challenging game in the FF series. (It's hard to say if the fact that attacks targeted on enemies that die before that character's turn don't get re-targeted to another enemy is a UI bug or just an unneeded increase to the difficulty, but in either case they got rid of it in later games.)
I still think it's a great game despite all that, but i admit that i come pre-equipped with a pair of rose-tinted glasses which you would be lacking:)
Or the Facebook mentality, re: Zuckerberg's opinion that none of us care about privacy anymore. The fact that at least some people are complaining about this gives me a little hope.
(Of course if one wants to get really depressed there's Brin's opinion that it doesn't matter if we want privacy or not, we ain't getting it anyways.)
I'm still a little peeved that they apparently didn't think to record that concert. The "Dear Friends Concert CD" they ended up selling later was actually just the original tracks of the pieces that were played at the concert. I'm glad that they at least corrected that for the "More Friends" concert the next year. (In a neat bit of synchronicity, i just found the "More Friends" t-shirt i bought at the concert while digging through some old boxes yesterday.)
And here's hoping the Distant Worlds concert makes it to LA later this year!:)
It doesn't look like anyone has recommended BillShrink.com. You tell them what type of plan you want, if you want to get a new phone or not, where you live and where you work, and it will give you a list of possible phones and/or plans from each provider, along with a rating of how strong each carrier is expected to be in the areas where you'd usually want to use your phone.
Of course if you want to be really safe you ought to find some coworkers or neighbors with different kinds of phones and see what kind of coverage they get. Combined with the list from BillShrink, all you have to do is decide how to balance how much you want to pay with what kind of coverage you're willing to deal with. (And maybe you'll even get lucky like me and find that the cheapest company (T-Mobile currently) also has the best coverage in your area =)
Kodak's "preview" patent says that you see all of the digital processing and sensor data? How do they manage that one on a tiny LCD?
I could certainly be mistaken, but i think what they mean is that the picture you see on the LCD screen is the picture that you actually have/would have stored, not what you would see through a viewfinder. I'm confused in fact as to what it is you think it is that they could be showing instead that wouldn't fit on an LCD.
In any case, this makes me unsure about if that means it applies to what you see in the LCD before you take the picture, or to the image of the picture it shows you for a second or two after taking the picture. I've taken a lot of pictures where what i saw through the LCD beforehand was not what came out in the actual picture, most often because of the flash, with some cameras however they did some kind of low-light processing for the LCD viewfinder which wasn't performed on the picture itself, which was really annoying.
Like most recent android phones the hardware supports multi-touch. Also like most recent android phones multi-touch isn't used in the basic interface by Google, supposedly because of legal threats from Apple. (No, i haven't seen anything specific about those supposed threats, though i have seen an analysis claiming that Apple doesn't actually have a patent on "pinch to zoom." So i dunno what's actually up with the supposed legal threats. Anyone have a link they want to share?)
However there's nothing preventing other developers from using multi-touch in their apps. So if someone wants to add multi-touch to a game they're writing for Android app store there's nothing stopping them as far as i know.
Subsistence style living is not an option... large scale commercial style farming is the only way to feed the number of people we have (and it isn't enough, really)
I agree with your basic point, that large scale commercial farming is necessary. But not only is it enough, it is more than enough. The world currently produces enough food to feed everyone in the world more than adequately. And that's with using just a fraction of the available farmland. The reason so many people in the world go hungry are entirely due to economic and political issues.
"There are a lot of disappointed people over @ nexusoneforum.net with regards to the pricing. It sounds to me like Google lost alot of good will with such a high unsubsidized price."
So in the total absence of any confirmation from Google, a bunch of people fantasized that Google would somehow manage to release a brand new high tech phone for a fraction of the price of slightly less advanced phones already out on the market? And when the next rumor seems to indicate the Google won't be doing this it disappointed said people who then blame it all on Google?
I suppose anyone has the right to be disappointed with anything they want, but getting upset that Google didn't follow through on something Google never said and then saying that lost Google a lot of good will seems to indicate being slightly out of touch with reality to me.
Funny though, most of the scientists in the shows admit that the earth's climate is just going through another cycle, one of many. And it will go through this cycle, of cooling and warming, regardless of what we want or do.
Ahhh, the deluded "this is just another cycle" mantra. As usual you're skipping over the fact that previous cycles happened over geologic time, while this is happening over the scale of human history, a much shorter timespan. It also ignores the fact that what life was able to deal with in the past we humans may not want to have to deal with in the present.
Consider this: humans are increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by something in the range of 2.1 to 2.4 ppm per year. I did a back of the envelope calculation based on the amount of oil consumed a year (figures available upon request or easily searchable via Google) and it is matched by the actual observed increase in CO2. Since the atmosphere currently contains 350-400 ppm CO2, that means we're currently increasing the total by a little over half a percent a year.
Let's pretend that this rate of use/production continues, with a starting value of 375 ppm and an increase of 2.2 ppm per year. This ignores the fact that currently usage is increasing every year but also ignores the fact that eventually we will have to find some other source of fuel.
In about 170 years we will have doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. In about 285 years it will reach 1000 ppm and "cause discomfort in more than 20% of occupants." (That would be occupants of the entire planet.) In 740 years we hit 2000 ppm and "the majority of occupants will feel a significant degree of discomfort, and many will develop nausea and headaches." So everyone on the planet uncomfortable all of the time, and many of them nauseous and with a headache, also all the time. We'd hit 1% (10,000 ppm) in a little under 4,400 years. I expect every animal on the planet would be dead by the time we hit 3% in 13,500 years. That level can be tolerated by humans "for at least one month," but we'd be dealing with it for every hour of every day. 4% (at 18,000 years) is survivable "for over a week," but we'd already have had to deal with 54,000 months of it at over 3%, so i doubt anyone would be left to worry about it at that point.
That's a pretty extreme time frame, but you say "Can we all powerful humans do anything about it?? According to these experts, nope." Absent humans can you name any natural cycle or phenomenon that is _likely_ to kill all higher life forms on the planet in the time frame of less than 20,000 years? There's a few things that could theoretically do it, but they don't happen on that time scale, or all life would have been wiped out on this planet long ago. The claim that humans can't significantly affect things on this planet is clearly hogwash.
On the plus side, hopefully we'll run out of things to burn long before the situation gets that extreme. We might even be smart enough to figure out something better to do than burning stuff before we hit that limit. However on the minus side it's very likely that we'll start seeing serious effects well below the 1% mark. 1000 ppm may just make people feel uncomfortable when exposed to it for days or weeks at a time, but what about an exposure period of decades? And of course there's that whole climate thing:)
(And i'm sure someone will bring up the fact that there are natural forces that also take CO2 out of the atmosphere, and they might scale up as the amount of CO2 in the air increases. However in the past such adaptions have happened on geologic scales, tens of thousands of years, i wouldn't want to bet the life of the human race on such things being able to handle the same change over thousands or even just hundreds of years.)
Russia is a nation heavily dependent on fossil fuel exports, in fact, their entire economy depends on it else it would just flat out collapse again as it did at the fall of communism.
And i was just struck with a sudden thought that dovetails with your economic analysis quite well. As you say, Russia benefits immensely from oil exports, but what happens to them if the AGW proponents are right? Well, for starters the Arctic ice cap would diminish or disappear entirely. This would open up new sea lanes, create new locations for possible ports, and uncover many new potentially untapped resources. Who stands to gain from that? Mainly Canada, Greenland and.... Russia! (The US would probably gain a little due to Alaska, but not nearly as much in proportion as the others.) They'd have to deal with higher sea levels as well of course, but i think the benefits would probably outweigh the losses in their case.
The other big concern of course is the actual changes to the climate, particularly in relation to farming. A lot of currently arable land would become either desert or swamp, while other areas that are currently too wet, too dry, or too cold would become capable of supporting crops. Which countries have a lot of tundra that might become new farmland? Once again, mainly Canada, Greenland and Russia. There's no guarantee that their gains would equal their losses (though they've got far better odds of it than most) but even so, if future economic prosperity comes at the cost of a few (or a few million) peasants starving, who cares? As much as i disagree with a certain segment of politicians in America i do feel that most of them want what they honestly feel would be best for America, and that doesn't include mass starvation. But that's practically a tradition in Russia, and whatever they may say in public i'm not convinced the elite there has really changed that much from where they were 50 years ago.
Now on the other hand, who would climate change most likely hurt? Well high on that list would be the US and China. We're temperate countries with more to lose than gain, we have large economies that are heavily dependent on trade and would get foobarred if the world economy took (another) nosedive. (Russia has less than a third of the imports and exports than either the US or China.)
So while Russia is benefiting from AGW their biggest rivals are suffering. From the perspective of a Machiavellian Russian elite, the only possible downside would be if China gets so desperate that it decides to invade and/or start launching nukes. Otherwise, Russia can continue selling oil for extreme profits for as long as everyone is willing to buy it, and then sit back and enjoy the benefits of the changing climate while watching their rivals struggle and possibly descend into chaos. It's win-win both economically and strategically, and as the unwanted in-law of both "western" and "eastern" civilization i'm sure they'd take no small emotional pleasure in that outcome as well.
for anyone who's willing to do some basic math (which may or may not describe the "average" American.) Verizon has a low-talk-minutes, unlimited text and "unlimited" data plan for $100 a month. T-Mobile has the "Even More Plus" plan with low-talk-minutes, unlimited text and "unlimited" data for $60 a month. Over the course of a year you'll have saved $480 with a T-Mobile phone (like the Nexus One, supposedly) vs a Verizon Phone (like the Droid.) I expect that's more than the discount you'd be getting from Verizon in exchange for a _two_ year contract. No ads required.
Is there anywhere enough details available to say if whatever this thing is will be better than the Droid? (At least the impression i've gotten without doing a great deal of research is that the Droid is the best Android phone out so far.)
"Those were SCROLLS. He didn't say anything about scrollburning."
If the nature of the writing is determined by what it is written on, then the things you get on the Kindle and Nook aren't books either. They could have just as easily be called electronic scrolls, electronic tablets, or electronic cave walls. You could be pedantic and argue that is in fact the case (although the dictionary seems to disagree with you somewhat) but nobody else is going to pretend that artificial distinction is relevant to this discussion.
"(Posting anonymously because slashdot's web 2.0 ui is crapping out on me, and not letting me log on.)"
Or perhaps because you realize how silly the distinction you're claiming is?
Entrance into Physics 102 denied. Please go back to physics 101. You failed to pass the final.
Congratulations! You failed to even read the summary! Please go back to... hmm, not really sure what you should go back to in this case. Where do they teach basic reading comprehension?
"At high energies, it actually snips any ties between space and time, yet at low energies devolves to equivalence with the theory of General Relativity, which binds them together."
So _if_ that's correct, then Newtonian physics is a subset of Einsteinian physics which is a subset of this new physics. And this theory was developed for the exact same reason as Einstein's, to explain some "minor" weird behaviour that happened at the borders of the old model. My argument stands.
Assuming of course that Newton's theories are actually incorrect. This particular Einstein theory sets off my bullshit detector because it claims that the nature of reality suddenly(*) changes at high enough speeds - not just some field, but space and time itself.
Frankly, yes; I don't think Newton's theories will ever be proven wrong. They fit too many phenomenon perfectly, predict too much, and when you really come down to it, are too fundamentally simple: it's just taking the notion that gravity affects all objects equally and all objects are subject to the same laws of motion.
The only reason these "Newton was wrong" -theories keep on popping up is because it's difficult to get the math of the laws of motion to apply to light. I suspect that's mainly because of our insufficiently advanced measurements, rather than physics.
(*) I suspect that if one actually examines this new theory the changes happens just as "suddenly" as the change from Newtonian to Einsteinian behaviour.
Not that i'm saying this new theory is necessarily correct, but a lot of the arguments being used against it in the various Slashdot posts seem exactly like the ones that were most likely used against Einstein's theories.
Well clearly the poster meant to indicate that if the GP isn't happy with the security through obscurity used by our current banking and social security system then why hasn't he gone out and created his own banking and social security system? With blackjack! And hookers! In fact, forget the banking and social security system!
Actually this is a system designed to protect us from anyone who shows signs of fear, so the only thing we have to fear is people who aren't afraid. So don't be afraid! Oh wait, that's scary...
Slashdot Mirror
Improving security is great, but they really need to keep working on usability as well! I just installed Chrome for the first time yesterday and have been playing around with it. It seems pretty speedy but the UI is a bit weird.
The lack of a title bar seems kind of weird. I don't know what they were going for with that, but it's the only window on my entire machine and it stands out, and not in a good way. At one point i tried adding a new tab while waiting for visual studio to start a debug session, and the UI hung up for a little bit, and for a few brief seconds Chrome acquired a title bar. I actually thought it looked better that way. A couple minor aesthetic gripes. I may eventually get used to having the tab bar above the toolbar, though currently it seems pretty funky to me.
I haven't done a side-by-side comparison with Firefox yet, but my initial rough estimates seem to be that Chrome uses at least 75% as much memory as Firefox, possibly more, and at least as much virtual memory. I find the fact that Chrome has about 40 process running right now to be rather awkward, but hopefully it at least means that when i start closing large numbers of tabs that the memory will actually be released (unlike Firefox.)
The biggest problem however is the tab bar. Personally i don't like having new tabs open in the middle of the bar, screwing up the ordering, but it was easy to find an extension to fix that behavior. However if you open up a lot of tabs they just get smaller and smaller until you can't see what each of them is anymore. And to my further frustration there's no way to access a list of the tabs. There are a couple extensions that offer some kind of tab index, but nothing that presents a simple list like in Firefox.
After a little searching i found out the reason for these problems in a Chromium blog post. The designers are approaching the UI design from a heavily aesthetic angle. Which is good in theory, but they're also being fanatical about it. If they don't think a feature is aesthetically correct but can't think of a more aesthetically pleasing way to implement it they just won't implement the feature at all, even though they admit that the lack of that feature causes usability problems!
And to wrap it all up, they say "In all of these areas we've resisted adding options to control behavior. Keeping our set of options minimal is a good forcing function for us as user interface designers to come up with the right approach, since we never rely on the crutch of making the user decide what we were unable to."
Well i hate to tell you guys, but it doesn't seem to be working really well as a "forcing function" given that you've crippled an important part of the UI while dithering about what the "best" way to implement it is. The blog post was made a year ago and they apparently still haven't found a solution! And i find it very aggravating that they feel once they've come up with the "right" approach they don't want to provide options to do it any other way. Clearly if the user has a different aesthetic sense than the designer then the user is wrong! I've dealt with designers like this on projects before, and trying to convince them that the users can legitimately have a different opinion is a very frustrating task.
I remember the painful process of Firefox developers trying to get their tab bar into a useful state under similar circumstances. Perhaps their solution isn't 100% aesthetically appealing to the Chrome designers, but it undeniably _works_, and leaving the users hanging while they try to figure out something more "aesthetically" and "spatially" pleasing seems like pure egotism to me.
"The Apple of today is more 1984-ish than Microsoft ever was at the time of the aforementioned Superbowl ad."
Aside from the IBM/Microsoft thing which others have mentioned, has anyone else noticed the interesting correlation between the Superbowl ad and Apple's logos?
In the 80's Apple was an upstart, fighting against the big "totalitarian establishment," and the commercial showed a dark and grey world before the brightly colored Apple person ran in and smashed it. It then ended with the bright, cheery rainbow apple logo.
Then in the late 90s, Apple switched from the bright colorful logo to a series of monochrome logos.
Some other company (Google?) could remake the 1984 Superbowl ad with the current Apple logo plastered all over everything (trademark issues aside) and it would still be thematically appropriate color-wise. Obviously the FSF would argue that it would still be thematically appropriate in other senses as well.
It's immature, i know, but the name keeps making me think that they will announce a stylus for use with the iPad, called the iTampon.
"Ahead of: Halo (any of them), Xbox 360 versions of Call of Duty (any of them), Myst, GTA4 (360), Gears of War (any of them), Final Fantasy 7, Gran Turismo 4"
:)
Which means it has now also outsold MW2 on every platform, including the 360, _individually_ (not all combined.) Just like Reggie bet that it would. He originally said it would beat Modern Warfare 2 on one platform by the end of January. (The person he was interviewing then specified the 360 and Reggie didn't seem to object. Which led to a lot of controversy amongst fanboys when it seemed like Mario might beat the PS3 sales but not the 360 sales, but that's all moot now.)
After the response to the initial sales of Modern Warfare 2 in November, a lot of people are going to be eating crow over that one
"So how long till it makes its way to Droid - if ever at all?"
:)
I assume you mean aside from playing it through NESoid? I'm currently in the middle of a game of Nobunaga's Ambition on my Nexus One. (I might have started up a game of FF1 instead, except i was already playing that on the Wii Virtual Console =) Even if you want to be entirely ethical (since you apparently don't already have an old copy lying around) i personally wouldn't feel any qualms about buying a copy for some other system (even an old used copy) and then d/ling the rom.
"I personally never played any of the FF series, only because I hadn't heard of it until like 7 or 8 came out, and I thought I'd have a lot of backstory to catch up with (though people have reassured me that I really don't)."
I wouldn't suggest playing FF1 for the first time now unless you're already very familiar with how clunky those old NES games could get. FF1, along with Dragon Quest 1, were both exploring how to do RPGs on the console format, and there's a lot of UI issues that got resolved in later versions. (In particular, having to buy each item one at a time, no descriptions for any items, no way to view stats without equipping an item and switching to the status screen.) And even aside from the difficulties the UI imposes it's probably the most challenging game in the FF series. (It's hard to say if the fact that attacks targeted on enemies that die before that character's turn don't get re-targeted to another enemy is a UI bug or just an unneeded increase to the difficulty, but in either case they got rid of it in later games.)
I still think it's a great game despite all that, but i admit that i come pre-equipped with a pair of rose-tinted glasses which you would be lacking
Or the Facebook mentality, re: Zuckerberg's opinion that none of us care about privacy anymore. The fact that at least some people are complaining about this gives me a little hope.
(Of course if one wants to get really depressed there's Brin's opinion that it doesn't matter if we want privacy or not, we ain't getting it anyways.)
I'm still a little peeved that they apparently didn't think to record that concert. The "Dear Friends Concert CD" they ended up selling later was actually just the original tracks of the pieces that were played at the concert. I'm glad that they at least corrected that for the "More Friends" concert the next year. (In a neat bit of synchronicity, i just found the "More Friends" t-shirt i bought at the concert while digging through some old boxes yesterday.)
:)
And here's hoping the Distant Worlds concert makes it to LA later this year!
It doesn't look like anyone has recommended BillShrink.com. You tell them what type of plan you want, if you want to get a new phone or not, where you live and where you work, and it will give you a list of possible phones and/or plans from each provider, along with a rating of how strong each carrier is expected to be in the areas where you'd usually want to use your phone.
Of course if you want to be really safe you ought to find some coworkers or neighbors with different kinds of phones and see what kind of coverage they get. Combined with the list from BillShrink, all you have to do is decide how to balance how much you want to pay with what kind of coverage you're willing to deal with. (And maybe you'll even get lucky like me and find that the cheapest company (T-Mobile currently) also has the best coverage in your area =)
Kodak's "preview" patent says that you see all of the digital processing and sensor data? How do they manage that one on a tiny LCD?
I could certainly be mistaken, but i think what they mean is that the picture you see on the LCD screen is the picture that you actually have/would have stored, not what you would see through a viewfinder. I'm confused in fact as to what it is you think it is that they could be showing instead that wouldn't fit on an LCD.
In any case, this makes me unsure about if that means it applies to what you see in the LCD before you take the picture, or to the image of the picture it shows you for a second or two after taking the picture. I've taken a lot of pictures where what i saw through the LCD beforehand was not what came out in the actual picture, most often because of the flash, with some cameras however they did some kind of low-light processing for the LCD viewfinder which wasn't performed on the picture itself, which was really annoying.
I spent a lot of time playing this on the NES. I don't suppose this version includes the cheesy computer voices though?
Like most recent android phones the hardware supports multi-touch. Also like most recent android phones multi-touch isn't used in the basic interface by Google, supposedly because of legal threats from Apple. (No, i haven't seen anything specific about those supposed threats, though i have seen an analysis claiming that Apple doesn't actually have a patent on "pinch to zoom." So i dunno what's actually up with the supposed legal threats. Anyone have a link they want to share?)
However there's nothing preventing other developers from using multi-touch in their apps. So if someone wants to add multi-touch to a game they're writing for Android app store there's nothing stopping them as far as i know.
Subsistence style living is not an option ... large scale commercial style farming is the only way to feed the number of people we have (and it isn't enough, really)
I agree with your basic point, that large scale commercial farming is necessary. But not only is it enough, it is more than enough. The world currently produces enough food to feed everyone in the world more than adequately. And that's with using just a fraction of the available farmland. The reason so many people in the world go hungry are entirely due to economic and political issues.
"We'll try again later and hope the public doesn't pay attention the next time."
"There are a lot of disappointed people over @ nexusoneforum.net with regards to the pricing. It sounds to me like Google lost alot of good will with such a high unsubsidized price."
So in the total absence of any confirmation from Google, a bunch of people fantasized that Google would somehow manage to release a brand new high tech phone for a fraction of the price of slightly less advanced phones already out on the market? And when the next rumor seems to indicate the Google won't be doing this it disappointed said people who then blame it all on Google?
I suppose anyone has the right to be disappointed with anything they want, but getting upset that Google didn't follow through on something Google never said and then saying that lost Google a lot of good will seems to indicate being slightly out of touch with reality to me.
Funny though, most of the scientists in the shows admit that the earth's climate is just going through another cycle, one of many. And it will go through this cycle, of cooling and warming, regardless of what we want or do.
:)
Ahhh, the deluded "this is just another cycle" mantra. As usual you're skipping over the fact that previous cycles happened over geologic time, while this is happening over the scale of human history, a much shorter timespan. It also ignores the fact that what life was able to deal with in the past we humans may not want to have to deal with in the present.
Consider this: humans are increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by something in the range of 2.1 to 2.4 ppm per year. I did a back of the envelope calculation based on the amount of oil consumed a year (figures available upon request or easily searchable via Google) and it is matched by the actual observed increase in CO2. Since the atmosphere currently contains 350-400 ppm CO2, that means we're currently increasing the total by a little over half a percent a year.
That may not sound like a lot, but now take a look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide#Toxicity
Let's pretend that this rate of use/production continues, with a starting value of 375 ppm and an increase of 2.2 ppm per year. This ignores the fact that currently usage is increasing every year but also ignores the fact that eventually we will have to find some other source of fuel.
In about 170 years we will have doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. In about 285 years it will reach 1000 ppm and "cause discomfort in more than 20% of occupants." (That would be occupants of the entire planet.) In 740 years we hit 2000 ppm and "the majority of occupants will feel a significant degree of discomfort, and many will develop nausea and headaches." So everyone on the planet uncomfortable all of the time, and many of them nauseous and with a headache, also all the time. We'd hit 1% (10,000 ppm) in a little under 4,400 years. I expect every animal on the planet would be dead by the time we hit 3% in 13,500 years. That level can be tolerated by humans "for at least one month," but we'd be dealing with it for every hour of every day. 4% (at 18,000 years) is survivable "for over a week," but we'd already have had to deal with 54,000 months of it at over 3%, so i doubt anyone would be left to worry about it at that point.
That's a pretty extreme time frame, but you say "Can we all powerful humans do anything about it?? According to these experts, nope." Absent humans can you name any natural cycle or phenomenon that is _likely_ to kill all higher life forms on the planet in the time frame of less than 20,000 years? There's a few things that could theoretically do it, but they don't happen on that time scale, or all life would have been wiped out on this planet long ago. The claim that humans can't significantly affect things on this planet is clearly hogwash.
On the plus side, hopefully we'll run out of things to burn long before the situation gets that extreme. We might even be smart enough to figure out something better to do than burning stuff before we hit that limit. However on the minus side it's very likely that we'll start seeing serious effects well below the 1% mark. 1000 ppm may just make people feel uncomfortable when exposed to it for days or weeks at a time, but what about an exposure period of decades? And of course there's that whole climate thing
(And i'm sure someone will bring up the fact that there are natural forces that also take CO2 out of the atmosphere, and they might scale up as the amount of CO2 in the air increases. However in the past such adaptions have happened on geologic scales, tens of thousands of years, i wouldn't want to bet the life of the human race on such things being able to handle the same change over thousands or even just hundreds of years.)
Russia is a nation heavily dependent on fossil fuel exports, in fact, their entire economy depends on it else it would just flat out collapse again as it did at the fall of communism.
And i was just struck with a sudden thought that dovetails with your economic analysis quite well. As you say, Russia benefits immensely from oil exports, but what happens to them if the AGW proponents are right? Well, for starters the Arctic ice cap would diminish or disappear entirely. This would open up new sea lanes, create new locations for possible ports, and uncover many new potentially untapped resources. Who stands to gain from that? Mainly Canada, Greenland and.... Russia! (The US would probably gain a little due to Alaska, but not nearly as much in proportion as the others.) They'd have to deal with higher sea levels as well of course, but i think the benefits would probably outweigh the losses in their case.
The other big concern of course is the actual changes to the climate, particularly in relation to farming. A lot of currently arable land would become either desert or swamp, while other areas that are currently too wet, too dry, or too cold would become capable of supporting crops. Which countries have a lot of tundra that might become new farmland? Once again, mainly Canada, Greenland and Russia. There's no guarantee that their gains would equal their losses (though they've got far better odds of it than most) but even so, if future economic prosperity comes at the cost of a few (or a few million) peasants starving, who cares? As much as i disagree with a certain segment of politicians in America i do feel that most of them want what they honestly feel would be best for America, and that doesn't include mass starvation. But that's practically a tradition in Russia, and whatever they may say in public i'm not convinced the elite there has really changed that much from where they were 50 years ago.
Now on the other hand, who would climate change most likely hurt? Well high on that list would be the US and China. We're temperate countries with more to lose than gain, we have large economies that are heavily dependent on trade and would get foobarred if the world economy took (another) nosedive. (Russia has less than a third of the imports and exports than either the US or China.)
So while Russia is benefiting from AGW their biggest rivals are suffering. From the perspective of a Machiavellian Russian elite, the only possible downside would be if China gets so desperate that it decides to invade and/or start launching nukes. Otherwise, Russia can continue selling oil for extreme profits for as long as everyone is willing to buy it, and then sit back and enjoy the benefits of the changing climate while watching their rivals struggle and possibly descend into chaos. It's win-win both economically and strategically, and as the unwanted in-law of both "western" and "eastern" civilization i'm sure they'd take no small emotional pleasure in that outcome as well.
for anyone who's willing to do some basic math (which may or may not describe the "average" American.) Verizon has a low-talk-minutes, unlimited text and "unlimited" data plan for $100 a month. T-Mobile has the "Even More Plus" plan with low-talk-minutes, unlimited text and "unlimited" data for $60 a month. Over the course of a year you'll have saved $480 with a T-Mobile phone (like the Nexus One, supposedly) vs a Verizon Phone (like the Droid.) I expect that's more than the discount you'd be getting from Verizon in exchange for a _two_ year contract. No ads required.
Is there anywhere enough details available to say if whatever this thing is will be better than the Droid? (At least the impression i've gotten without doing a great deal of research is that the Droid is the best Android phone out so far.)
"Those were SCROLLS. He didn't say anything about scrollburning."
If the nature of the writing is determined by what it is written on, then the things you get on the Kindle and Nook aren't books either. They could have just as easily be called electronic scrolls, electronic tablets, or electronic cave walls. You could be pedantic and argue that is in fact the case (although the dictionary seems to disagree with you somewhat) but nobody else is going to pretend that artificial distinction is relevant to this discussion.
"(Posting anonymously because slashdot's web 2.0 ui is crapping out on me, and not letting me log on.)"
Or perhaps because you realize how silly the distinction you're claiming is?
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
Entrance into Physics 102 denied. Please go back to physics 101. You failed to pass the final.
Congratulations! You failed to even read the summary! Please go back to... hmm, not really sure what you should go back to in this case. Where do they teach basic reading comprehension?
"At high energies, it actually snips any ties between space and time, yet at low energies devolves to equivalence with the theory of General Relativity, which binds them together."
So _if_ that's correct, then Newtonian physics is a subset of Einsteinian physics which is a subset of this new physics. And this theory was developed for the exact same reason as Einstein's, to explain some "minor" weird behaviour that happened at the borders of the old model. My argument stands.
Assuming of course that Newton's theories are actually incorrect. This particular Einstein theory sets off my bullshit detector because it claims that the nature of reality suddenly(*) changes at high enough speeds - not just some field, but space and time itself.
Frankly, yes; I don't think Newton's theories will ever be proven wrong. They fit too many phenomenon perfectly, predict too much, and when you really come down to it, are too fundamentally simple: it's just taking the notion that gravity affects all objects equally and all objects are subject to the same laws of motion.
The only reason these "Newton was wrong" -theories keep on popping up is because it's difficult to get the math of the laws of motion to apply to light. I suspect that's mainly because of our insufficiently advanced measurements, rather than physics.
(*) I suspect that if one actually examines this new theory the changes happens just as "suddenly" as the change from Newtonian to Einsteinian behaviour.
Not that i'm saying this new theory is necessarily correct, but a lot of the arguments being used against it in the various Slashdot posts seem exactly like the ones that were most likely used against Einstein's theories.
Well clearly the poster meant to indicate that if the GP isn't happy with the security through obscurity used by our current banking and social security system then why hasn't he gone out and created his own banking and social security system? With blackjack! And hookers! In fact, forget the banking and social security system!
I am totally unsurprised by this development after reading about the 5 species that seem to be trying to take over the earth article at Cracked.com.
Actually this is a system designed to protect us from anyone who shows signs of fear, so the only thing we have to fear is people who aren't afraid. So don't be afraid! Oh wait, that's scary...