That would be because they're doing it intentionally as a parody of the "there's an app for that" ads, which would make it tricky for AT&T to sue on those grounds.
And the fact that the only grounds AT&T seem to have for a lawsuit is that the ad doesn't sufficiently explain that just because their 3G network sucks doesn't mean you can't call people while outside it actually makes me take the claims made by the ad more seriously. I always assume that TV ads are misrepresenting something, but in this case apparently what they're misrepresenting is pretty damn trivial.
Don't worry, whatever it is, the genetically engineered super-intelligent rats can remember it for you wholesale, so you should probably welcome them with open arms and offer them your thanks. (And cheese.)
Well my girlfriend is a geek, but not a slashdot reader, and when she saw the article over my shoulder the first thing she asked was "does it have a replaceable battery?" and when i dug up the ad on youtube and they got to the part where it confirms that it does in fact have a replaceable battery she practically cheered, so it seems to me that they're doing something right. Certainly making a stab for the segment of the market that is concerned about practical aspects seems like a good start to me. Trying to steal away marketshare from the iPhone is probably a lot harder than appealing to those people who haven't actually gotten an iPhone yet for some reason.
Well it's impossible to ask for recommendations without those recommendations being influenced by emotions. But one way to at least mitigate that is to structure it around themes, since the description specifically states that the class will involve various social issues. For example:
Read Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers," Joe Haldeman's "The Forever War," and John Scalzi's "Old Man's War." Then discuss what they think each author thought about war and its consequences and how that reflected or disagreed with society's views at the time.
Read James Alan Gardner's "Commitment Hour," Lois McMaster Bujold's "A Civil Campaign," and David Brin's "Glory Season" and discuss gender roles and how science fiction can be used to explore them.
Read Walter M. Miller, Jr's "A Canticle for Leibowitz," Roger Zelazny's "Lord of Light," and Lois McMaster Bujold's "Curse of Chalion" and discuss the role of religion in SF/Fantasy.
Read William Gibson's "Neuromancer," Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash," and Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End" and discuss how our view of the future in general and computers in particular has changed over the past few decades, as well as the differences and similarities between "serious" prediction of the future and satirical commentary on the present.
Alternately one could read early and late books for each of Heinlein, James P. Hogan, Hubbard, Orson Scott Card and Michael Crichton and discuss the varying degrees to which (nominally) decent SF authors go loopy in their later years:)
I'm sure there're lots more ideas along those lines.
Re:I learned about some history today.
on
Elite Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
I like love to read stuff like this, although I have heard of Elite before I did not read up on it much.
Yeah, it inspired me to do a little research into my own favorite space trading game from way back when. It turns out Trade Wars turns 25 this year too! It was a BBS door game so it didn't really have much in the way of graphics (and definitely not 3D like Elite!) but i sure wasted a lot of time on that game in my youth:)
And i guess that both games were at least partly inspired by Star Trader, a game i hadn't actually heard about before now.
See, in 2000, under President Clinton, Federal Tax receipts were $2025.5 billion or 20% of the GDP. In 2008, under President Bush, they were $2524.3 billion, but only 17.7% of the GDP. See, when you cut taxes, the GDP (economy) grows, meaning you are taking a smaller percentage of a larger pie, meaning more $$$ for the government.
Where is the correlationisnotcausation crowd when you need them? You'd need a lot more than comparing two sets of numbers to prove that a decrease in one caused an increase in the other. Just for starters, a significant amount of the difference is probably due to inflation.
And that of course is totally aside form the fact that a lot of people, including apparently you, assume that the Laffer Curve is actually a curve without any proof, and furthermore that we're actually above the global maximum.
I'm unsure if the majority of the people who tag stories just don't know what "correlation does not imply causation" actually means, or if this is just another case of mass not RTFAing.
"Correlation does not imply causation" means that if A correlates to B it does not mean that A causes B. But if it's a statistically strong correlation in a well designed experiment then _something_ is causing the relationship. Perhaps A is causing B, perhaps B is causing A, or perhaps some third factor is causing A and B to show up together.
This study, like many others that have been slandered with the tag, seems to be pretty careful about its terminology. The only reference to a possible causation is actually of the reverse, "One interpretation of the findings, researchers said, is that among women, video-game playing 'may be a form of "digital self-medication."'"
In another place they state "While the study helps 'illuminate the health consequences of video-game playing,' it is not conclusive, its researchers say, but rather serves to 'reveal important patterns in health-related correlates of video-game playing and highlights avenues for future research.'"
So not only do they state that it's a statistical correlation and not conclusive proof of causation, they also give specific examples to show that they're considering other possible relationships besides A causing B. Is the "corellationisnotcausation" crowd just not going to be happy until scientists stop doing research altogether?
"Laurie removed the SD card that stored the data and smashed it. Laurie, who is known as "Major Malfunction" in the hacker community, then briefed some of the Feds on the capabilities of the RFID reader and what it collected."
What is this, education through obfuscation? "This card i just destroyed contained data from reading any RFID chips that were on you. And then we used the webcam to do a retina scan and a palm print scan, it also performed a complimentary palm reading. (Agent Smith, i see a tall dark stranger in your future.) Finally through a careful data analysis we were able to refine an image of your skin cells well enough to perform a full DNA scan. Seriously, it was all there on that card i just smashed."
So in order to maintain the fusion reaction they're going to physically shove the plasma into alignment whenever it develops an instability? Are you saying that Spider-Man 2 was actually correct about its physics? I'm not sure if this means i should be looking forward to flying cars in the near future or watching out for an attack by super villains.
(Just posting in this thread since i'm in California)
I have no problem with people "breaking the rules" and passing on the right when there is less traffic in those lanes. However when people do that they need to realize that they're not following the usual rules of the road and be prepared to handle the consequences. Yesterday there was some guy who decided the rightmost regular lane was the best place to be doing 70 or so, and he got royally pissed and started honking up a storm when he had to slow down because i merged onto the freeway in front of him in order to get out of one of those combined exit only onramps/offramps. And this was after i'd already waited for a couple other fast cars to pass and was starting to run out of room before the exit. Just because the "slow" lanes were clear for awhile doesn't mean the rest of us aren't allowed to use them for their actual intended purpose just so you won't be inconvenienced by having to deal with legitimate traffic again.
"They focused light of equivalent power of a city power plant down to 1/20 the width of a hair in a pulse a femtosecond long and they are surprised the light went through their target. I'd be transparent too at that light level."
"I think what we should be looking for is games that had a great idea but went off in the wrong direction.... Or games where the first installment was awesome but they botched it with the sequels."
Okay, i'll try to run with this, though i think a game only has to be "good" in order to be worth rebooting, not everything can be "great."
ActRaiser - The first game was an interesting combination of decent platformer and simple god-sim. The second game in the series ditched all the sim elements.
Star Control - Already been mentioned elsewhere in the topic, the first one was great (for the time) 2D space combat, the second one took that and added a great story, the third one was done by a different company and went completely off the rails.
Master of Orion - I'm seconding this one, though i'm not sure if they need to do a better job of what they were trying in MoO3, or should just go back to MoO1 or MoO2 and work from there.
Final Fantasy Tactics - The first game, although badly translated, had a deep and interesting story as well as fun (and challenging!) gameplay. The sequels on DS, in the opinion of some people at least, really dumbed down the story. Plus the extra races were unneeded and, again in some opinions, unwanted.
And while we're at it, Final Fantasy - Seriously this time, unlike the joke post someone made above. I think it's time they did another "tribute" game that heralds back the the series origins, like FF9, but this time without the Gainax ending.
Secret of Mana/Seiken Densetsu - The second game (Secret of Mana in the US) was great, and the third game improved on it, but the series got kind of lost after that.
Nobunaga's Ambition/Romance of the Three Kingdoms - The games started with a simple and fun concept, and each sequel added more details and options, to the point where things have really started getting unwieldy. They need to take a step back and streamline things again. (Bonus points if in the process they also update the closely related and now defunct Gemfire "series.")
And in terms of games that had some good ideas but some bad implementation and never took off:
Brigandine - A cool turn based strategy game where you recruit monsters to fight for you and then "evolve" them into different forms. Lots of fun for what it was, but it suffered from early Playstation graphics and limited development time, namely there was just one map and one scenario on that map, with no way to mix things up after going through the game with each of the six playable nations.
I'm not sure if it really counts as a reboot since there's only been one console version so far, but i'd really like to see Kid Icarus! Rumors about it keep popping up from time to time along with vague statements by Nintendo, so hopefully it will actually get done at some point!
Hopefully with such a swath of historical examples the next great "movements" will somehow figure out a way of protecting themselves from the power hungry radicals.
Western democratic political systems seem to have largely got that figured out so a model based on that may work.
That's not especially likely. The problem is that a skilled and benevolent dictator (or _small_ cabal) will always be more efficient than any large committee, bureaucracy or democracy. So groups founded and controlled by a few skilled leaders will be much effective early on. However no matter what safeguards and such group thinks they have in place, eventually someone will be "promoted" above their level of moral or intellectual competence into the leadership position. At that point if the system is based on the leadership of a skilled and benevolent dictator then the entire thing will either fall apart (ex. empire of Alexander) or become corrupt (ex. USSR.)
The purpose of bureaucracies and democracies is not to arrive at the best solution or accomplish things in the most competent manner. The idea/hope is that they will put a brake on all the _worst_ ideas and eventually they reach a solution which is at least marginally acceptable.
That's not exactly a great goal to shoot for, but it's probably the best thing that can reasonably be hoped for in the long term, and to paraphrase Churchill, it's better than all the even worse ideas we've come up with so far.
But that does mean that the groups that are most prone to be taken over by the radicals/crazies within their movement also have the most potential for short term success.
Yes, when i drop this rock it experiences a downward acceleration, but that doesn't mean that it's actually "falling" or that it's due to gravity! Correlation is not causation! Maybe it's just moving downwards because the earth loves it so much!
time to stop using your 105 extensions or figure out which one is causing leaks
I'm using three extensions. Adblock Plus, Microsoft.NET Framework Assistant, and NoScript. I've got 5 plugins, Adobe Acrobat (which i really try to avoid actually having to use, so i don't think that's normally the issue) Java, Microsoft Office 2003, Mozilla Default Plug-in, and Windows Presentation Foundation. I don't have Flash installed for Firefox on this computer. Any site that absolutely requires Flash to work i open up in a different browser.
They fixed most of FF's memory issues with FF3. I've been using 3.5 since beta 1, and I've never had any issues with memory.
As mentioned in a previous comment, i'm currently using 3.0.11, and i haven't seen a noticeable improvement over FF2. If they've fixed everything in 3.5 i'll be very happy. But then everyone told me they'd fixed the memory issued in 3.0 too, and that didn't work so well for me.
Are you including virtual memory in that figure? I can't seem to fun FF without at least 100MB of physical memory, but I never see the sum of physical and virtual go over 600MB (Jesus! I have really lowered my expectations thinking that isn't a lot!) with 15 tabs open for a week.
I'm using version 3.0.11. I currently have three windows open with about 120 tabs between them. Process Explorer reports that the firefox.exe process has 585,384k private bytes and 689,916k virtual bytes. Over the next couple days the amount of memory consumed will continue to grow, probably until it hits around 1.5 gigs of private bytes. I know that i really shouldn't have that many tabs open, but as someone else pointed out it's a convenient bad habit. (Perhaps a quarter of those tabs are sites that i check and refresh fairly often, at least once a day. The rest are sites links that i've checked or the results of google searches that i either haven't finished reading yet or think i'll need to reference back to in the near future. (For example, over 30 of those tabs relate to the myriad of issues i've run into trying to get Oracle working through ADO.Net, and i'll need to keep a lot of them open for reference until this project actually works correctly.)
It's not that i mind Firefox taking up a lot of memory when i have a lot of tabs open (although almost 5 megs a page already seems a little high, though not as bad as your 40 megs per tab!) but i do mind that when i notice my computer slowing down and see that Firefox has consumed somewhere between 1 and 1.5 gigs of physical memory that doing a pruning of the tabs gets me almost no memory back. I have in fact closed everything down except for one google tab left on one window of Firefox and seen it still consuming over a gig of memory.
The main thing i want to know is if they've (finally) fixed the memory issues yet. Namely, if i keep a lot of tabs open for awhile (yes, i know, bad habit) and then close those tabs, will Firefox free up the memory (frequently over a gig of it) without requiring me to shut it down and restart it?
In other news, today scientists announced that sand is wet. Well duh! What are we paying these guys for? I could have told you that... wait, sand? _Sand_ is wet? WTH?
Did they do any polling or anything to figure out why that was? Were people just not able to figure out electronic voting? If so the problem should go away after a couple election cycles. It would be more worrisome if there's some kind of innate apathy to a voting process that doesn't involve getting out of the house and doing something.
Wrong. It is ridiculous to think that "WE" havent' tried. If Ford could come out with a standard 4 door family sedan that got 42mpg AND people would buy it they would in a second.
Did you miss the part where it was pointed out that Europe already has cars like that? Either Ford and co haven't even tried, or they did try and the average American wasn't interested. (I haven't seen any indication that they've tried, but i haven't gone shopping for a car in years.)
If the market can figure out the details, why have the government artificially raise the price of fuel?
Because the market doesn't care about externalities. There are multiple externalities involved with using gasoline, even if you choose not to believe in global climate change, and the auto industry isn't going to care about any of them until it is far too late. By attaching a price to the commodity in the form of taxes it forces the market to respond to the total cost including the externalities (assuming we come up with a reasonably close approximation for the tax,) not just the immediate cost.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be because they're doing it intentionally as a parody of the "there's an app for that" ads, which would make it tricky for AT&T to sue on those grounds.
And the fact that the only grounds AT&T seem to have for a lawsuit is that the ad doesn't sufficiently explain that just because their 3G network sucks doesn't mean you can't call people while outside it actually makes me take the claims made by the ad more seriously. I always assume that TV ads are misrepresenting something, but in this case apparently what they're misrepresenting is pretty damn trivial.
Don't worry, whatever it is, the genetically engineered super-intelligent rats can remember it for you wholesale, so you should probably welcome them with open arms and offer them your thanks. (And cheese.)
Well my girlfriend is a geek, but not a slashdot reader, and when she saw the article over my shoulder the first thing she asked was "does it have a replaceable battery?" and when i dug up the ad on youtube and they got to the part where it confirms that it does in fact have a replaceable battery she practically cheered, so it seems to me that they're doing something right. Certainly making a stab for the segment of the market that is concerned about practical aspects seems like a good start to me. Trying to steal away marketshare from the iPhone is probably a lot harder than appealing to those people who haven't actually gotten an iPhone yet for some reason.
SRSLY?? What a totally radical contradiction!
Well it's impossible to ask for recommendations without those recommendations being influenced by emotions. But one way to at least mitigate that is to structure it around themes, since the description specifically states that the class will involve various social issues. For example:
:)
Read Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers," Joe Haldeman's "The Forever War," and John Scalzi's "Old Man's War." Then discuss what they think each author thought about war and its consequences and how that reflected or disagreed with society's views at the time.
Read James Alan Gardner's "Commitment Hour," Lois McMaster Bujold's "A Civil Campaign," and David Brin's "Glory Season" and discuss gender roles and how science fiction can be used to explore them.
Read Walter M. Miller, Jr's "A Canticle for Leibowitz," Roger Zelazny's "Lord of Light," and Lois McMaster Bujold's "Curse of Chalion" and discuss the role of religion in SF/Fantasy.
Read William Gibson's "Neuromancer," Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash," and Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End" and discuss how our view of the future in general and computers in particular has changed over the past few decades, as well as the differences and similarities between "serious" prediction of the future and satirical commentary on the present.
Alternately one could read early and late books for each of Heinlein, James P. Hogan, Hubbard, Orson Scott Card and Michael Crichton and discuss the varying degrees to which (nominally) decent SF authors go loopy in their later years
I'm sure there're lots more ideas along those lines.
I like love to read stuff like this, although I have heard of Elite before I did not read up on it much.
:)
Yeah, it inspired me to do a little research into my own favorite space trading game from way back when. It turns out Trade Wars turns 25 this year too! It was a BBS door game so it didn't really have much in the way of graphics (and definitely not 3D like Elite!) but i sure wasted a lot of time on that game in my youth
And i guess that both games were at least partly inspired by Star Trader, a game i hadn't actually heard about before now.
See, in 2000, under President Clinton, Federal Tax receipts were $2025.5 billion or 20% of the GDP. In 2008, under President Bush, they were $2524.3 billion, but only 17.7% of the GDP. See, when you cut taxes, the GDP (economy) grows, meaning you are taking a smaller percentage of a larger pie, meaning more $$$ for the government.
Where is the correlationisnotcausation crowd when you need them? You'd need a lot more than comparing two sets of numbers to prove that a decrease in one caused an increase in the other. Just for starters, a significant amount of the difference is probably due to inflation.
And that of course is totally aside form the fact that a lot of people, including apparently you, assume that the Laffer Curve is actually a curve without any proof, and furthermore that we're actually above the global maximum.
I'm unsure if the majority of the people who tag stories just don't know what "correlation does not imply causation" actually means, or if this is just another case of mass not RTFAing.
"Correlation does not imply causation" means that if A correlates to B it does not mean that A causes B. But if it's a statistically strong correlation in a well designed experiment then _something_ is causing the relationship. Perhaps A is causing B, perhaps B is causing A, or perhaps some third factor is causing A and B to show up together.
This study, like many others that have been slandered with the tag, seems to be pretty careful about its terminology. The only reference to a possible causation is actually of the reverse, "One interpretation of the findings, researchers said, is that among women, video-game playing 'may be a form of "digital self-medication."'"
In another place they state "While the study helps 'illuminate the health consequences of video-game playing,' it is not conclusive, its researchers say, but rather serves to 'reveal important patterns in health-related correlates of video-game playing and highlights avenues for future research.'"
So not only do they state that it's a statistical correlation and not conclusive proof of causation, they also give specific examples to show that they're considering other possible relationships besides A causing B. Is the "corellationisnotcausation" crowd just not going to be happy until scientists stop doing research altogether?
"Laurie removed the SD card that stored the data and smashed it. Laurie, who is known as "Major Malfunction" in the hacker community, then briefed some of the Feds on the capabilities of the RFID reader and what it collected."
What is this, education through obfuscation? "This card i just destroyed contained data from reading any RFID chips that were on you. And then we used the webcam to do a retina scan and a palm print scan, it also performed a complimentary palm reading. (Agent Smith, i see a tall dark stranger in your future.) Finally through a careful data analysis we were able to refine an image of your skin cells well enough to perform a full DNA scan. Seriously, it was all there on that card i just smashed."
So in order to maintain the fusion reaction they're going to physically shove the plasma into alignment whenever it develops an instability? Are you saying that Spider-Man 2 was actually correct about its physics? I'm not sure if this means i should be looking forward to flying cars in the near future or watching out for an attack by super villains.
(Just posting in this thread since i'm in California)
I have no problem with people "breaking the rules" and passing on the right when there is less traffic in those lanes. However when people do that they need to realize that they're not following the usual rules of the road and be prepared to handle the consequences. Yesterday there was some guy who decided the rightmost regular lane was the best place to be doing 70 or so, and he got royally pissed and started honking up a storm when he had to slow down because i merged onto the freeway in front of him in order to get out of one of those combined exit only onramps/offramps. And this was after i'd already waited for a couple other fast cars to pass and was starting to run out of room before the exit. Just because the "slow" lanes were clear for awhile doesn't mean the rest of us aren't allowed to use them for their actual intended purpose just so you won't be inconvenienced by having to deal with legitimate traffic again.
"They focused light of equivalent power of a city power plant down to 1/20 the width of a hair in a pulse a femtosecond long and they are surprised the light went through their target. I'd be transparent too at that light level."
Also dead, but yes, probably transparent as well.
"I think what we should be looking for is games that had a great idea but went off in the wrong direction. ... Or games where the first installment was awesome but they botched it with the sequels."
Okay, i'll try to run with this, though i think a game only has to be "good" in order to be worth rebooting, not everything can be "great."
ActRaiser - The first game was an interesting combination of decent platformer and simple god-sim. The second game in the series ditched all the sim elements.
Star Control - Already been mentioned elsewhere in the topic, the first one was great (for the time) 2D space combat, the second one took that and added a great story, the third one was done by a different company and went completely off the rails.
Master of Orion - I'm seconding this one, though i'm not sure if they need to do a better job of what they were trying in MoO3, or should just go back to MoO1 or MoO2 and work from there.
Final Fantasy Tactics - The first game, although badly translated, had a deep and interesting story as well as fun (and challenging!) gameplay. The sequels on DS, in the opinion of some people at least, really dumbed down the story. Plus the extra races were unneeded and, again in some opinions, unwanted.
And while we're at it, Final Fantasy - Seriously this time, unlike the joke post someone made above. I think it's time they did another "tribute" game that heralds back the the series origins, like FF9, but this time without the Gainax ending.
Secret of Mana/Seiken Densetsu - The second game (Secret of Mana in the US) was great, and the third game improved on it, but the series got kind of lost after that.
Nobunaga's Ambition/Romance of the Three Kingdoms - The games started with a simple and fun concept, and each sequel added more details and options, to the point where things have really started getting unwieldy. They need to take a step back and streamline things again. (Bonus points if in the process they also update the closely related and now defunct Gemfire "series.")
And in terms of games that had some good ideas but some bad implementation and never took off:
Brigandine - A cool turn based strategy game where you recruit monsters to fight for you and then "evolve" them into different forms. Lots of fun for what it was, but it suffered from early Playstation graphics and limited development time, namely there was just one map and one scenario on that map, with no way to mix things up after going through the game with each of the six playable nations.
I couldn't remember if there'd been one or two Kid Icarus Game Boy games, which is why i specified that there'd been only one console version :)
I'm not sure if it really counts as a reboot since there's only been one console version so far, but i'd really like to see Kid Icarus! Rumors about it keep popping up from time to time along with vague statements by Nintendo, so hopefully it will actually get done at some point!
Hopefully with such a swath of historical examples the next great "movements" will somehow figure out a way of protecting themselves from the power hungry radicals.
Western democratic political systems seem to have largely got that figured out so a model based on that may work.
That's not especially likely. The problem is that a skilled and benevolent dictator (or _small_ cabal) will always be more efficient than any large committee, bureaucracy or democracy. So groups founded and controlled by a few skilled leaders will be much effective early on. However no matter what safeguards and such group thinks they have in place, eventually someone will be "promoted" above their level of moral or intellectual competence into the leadership position. At that point if the system is based on the leadership of a skilled and benevolent dictator then the entire thing will either fall apart (ex. empire of Alexander) or become corrupt (ex. USSR.)
The purpose of bureaucracies and democracies is not to arrive at the best solution or accomplish things in the most competent manner. The idea/hope is that they will put a brake on all the _worst_ ideas and eventually they reach a solution which is at least marginally acceptable.
That's not exactly a great goal to shoot for, but it's probably the best thing that can reasonably be hoped for in the long term, and to paraphrase Churchill, it's better than all the even worse ideas we've come up with so far.
But that does mean that the groups that are most prone to be taken over by the radicals/crazies within their movement also have the most potential for short term success.
Yes, when i drop this rock it experiences a downward acceleration, but that doesn't mean that it's actually "falling" or that it's due to gravity! Correlation is not causation! Maybe it's just moving downwards because the earth loves it so much!
time to stop using your 105 extensions or figure out which one is causing leaks
.NET Framework Assistant, and NoScript. I've got 5 plugins, Adobe Acrobat (which i really try to avoid actually having to use, so i don't think that's normally the issue) Java, Microsoft Office 2003, Mozilla Default Plug-in, and Windows Presentation Foundation. I don't have Flash installed for Firefox on this computer. Any site that absolutely requires Flash to work i open up in a different browser.
I'm using three extensions. Adblock Plus, Microsoft
They fixed most of FF's memory issues with FF3. I've been using 3.5 since beta 1, and I've never had any issues with memory.
As mentioned in a previous comment, i'm currently using 3.0.11, and i haven't seen a noticeable improvement over FF2. If they've fixed everything in 3.5 i'll be very happy. But then everyone told me they'd fixed the memory issued in 3.0 too, and that didn't work so well for me.
Are you including virtual memory in that figure? I can't seem to fun FF without at least 100MB of physical memory, but I never see the sum of physical and virtual go over 600MB (Jesus! I have really lowered my expectations thinking that isn't a lot!) with 15 tabs open for a week.
I'm using version 3.0.11. I currently have three windows open with about 120 tabs between them. Process Explorer reports that the firefox.exe process has 585,384k private bytes and 689,916k virtual bytes. Over the next couple days the amount of memory consumed will continue to grow, probably until it hits around 1.5 gigs of private bytes. I know that i really shouldn't have that many tabs open, but as someone else pointed out it's a convenient bad habit. (Perhaps a quarter of those tabs are sites that i check and refresh fairly often, at least once a day. The rest are sites links that i've checked or the results of google searches that i either haven't finished reading yet or think i'll need to reference back to in the near future. (For example, over 30 of those tabs relate to the myriad of issues i've run into trying to get Oracle working through ADO.Net, and i'll need to keep a lot of them open for reference until this project actually works correctly.)
It's not that i mind Firefox taking up a lot of memory when i have a lot of tabs open (although almost 5 megs a page already seems a little high, though not as bad as your 40 megs per tab!) but i do mind that when i notice my computer slowing down and see that Firefox has consumed somewhere between 1 and 1.5 gigs of physical memory that doing a pruning of the tabs gets me almost no memory back. I have in fact closed everything down except for one google tab left on one window of Firefox and seen it still consuming over a gig of memory.
The main thing i want to know is if they've (finally) fixed the memory issues yet. Namely, if i keep a lot of tabs open for awhile (yes, i know, bad habit) and then close those tabs, will Firefox free up the memory (frequently over a gig of it) without requiring me to shut it down and restart it?
In other news, today scientists announced that sand is wet. Well duh! What are we paying these guys for? I could have told you that... wait, sand? _Sand_ is wet? WTH?
Did they do any polling or anything to figure out why that was? Were people just not able to figure out electronic voting? If so the problem should go away after a couple election cycles. It would be more worrisome if there's some kind of innate apathy to a voting process that doesn't involve getting out of the house and doing something.
Wrong. It is ridiculous to think that "WE" havent' tried. If Ford could come out with a standard 4 door family sedan that got 42mpg AND people would buy it they would in a second.
Did you miss the part where it was pointed out that Europe already has cars like that? Either Ford and co haven't even tried, or they did try and the average American wasn't interested. (I haven't seen any indication that they've tried, but i haven't gone shopping for a car in years.)
If the market can figure out the details, why have the government artificially raise the price of fuel?
Because the market doesn't care about externalities. There are multiple externalities involved with using gasoline, even if you choose not to believe in global climate change, and the auto industry isn't going to care about any of them until it is far too late. By attaching a price to the commodity in the form of taxes it forces the market to respond to the total cost including the externalities (assuming we come up with a reasonably close approximation for the tax,) not just the immediate cost.