only that it's not easily accessible, and there is currently no industry that would *need* to be in space to justify the cost of infrastructure (big buzz word thesedays) in space.
think about it -- what can you do in space that you can't now? in large quantites that you need to have a space station that you can't do in the vomit-comet? mix a homogenous mixture of lead and wax? (actually might be useful for radiation shielding.) -- the ONLY useful application I can think of, off the top of my head, might be aerogels. But even then the application is limited, and frankly, even though you manufacture higher quality aerogels in micro-grav, people can justify going with lower quality ones on earth.
maybe when they found out they can mass-produce CVD'd diamond (for whatever) or found a platinum mine on a asteroid, then, maybe we will go to space.
or a alien trade-route or something -- but alpha-centauri is 3.4 light years! if you need any kind of reasonable trade route -- there will be technology available (hopefull) that you won't even need to goto space (space distortion / teleportation / whatever)
so... don't count on it. voting might work better than hoping for space to just become accessible.
25ms response time and everything (usually you can get one on sale - and they are always on sale of some sort - for about 1200 (that's US DOLLARS) or LESS).
I play UT2k3 on it (considered a much faster paced shooting game than others) -- and no problems.
remember -- your eye can only catch 30 fps of refresh (if it's not strobed), and a little while before, you can't even get 25 out of the video-card for Quake 3 -- and we survived that just fine -- i don't see why everyone is bitching about 60Hz refresh / 40Hz refresh is not good enough.
# Don't put liquid nitrogen or dry ice in your mouth. This can also be done safely if done right, for the same reason
actually... i think not. IIRC even if you make sure your tongue / cheek does not freeze and die off -- your teeth will suffer a great deal from this. and as we all know, dentists are... well... not *always* a pleasure to visit. especially when you have frozen your gums / cracked your molars / whatever (this can happen from when you breath out, actually -- i suppose it can be avoided if you just kept the L.N2 boiling inside your mouth -- but the frosty breath you create is, actually, quite spectacular.
besides; US has already backed out / backstabbed taiwan on the PRC thing.
a few moons back the taiwanese president got carried away when vid-conferencing with some activists in the states and was (caught on tape) saything stuff like "yeah you know taiwan is really its own country from the start"...
china got pissed and issued statements about "taiwan is disrupting the stability of the straits". taiwan't stock market dropped like 20% the following monday, and the taiwan president's office apologized profusely - along the lines of "yeah he didn't know what he was saying at the time / he does not represent our ideals / he was on acid" etc... all the mean while, the US basically said: "hey listen, if you piss off china and they come after you, you (as in taiwan) are on your own, and don't expect jack shit from us."
which is, really, kinda sad. granted US has a good reason for this: china is a BIG market and there are tons of US money poured there(*1). point being: (1) I think after the US realized that the communist(*2) government are not impeding the free-trade capitalism taking root, they stopped being so rough on it; and to sacrifice a 386B "country" to a 4.5T market (with unbelieveable potential to grow)? yeah, of course. (2) it's kinda sad that the US would go and abandon one of its storgest (as in, most faithful) allies / followers / groupies for $$, as I personally believe this is what it boiled down to; but hey... this is capitalism -- and a wise man (don't flame me now;^) -- the guy's name is Lenin) said that (a version of it, anyway) "a capitalist would sell the roap to hang another capitalist if it meant making money..." ha! this should go down in the history books as the perfect example.
note(*1): China is the second most economically powerful country in the world, you know -- no joke -- not japan, not taiwan, not germany; (US GDP: 9.963T; China GDP: 4.5T; Japan (3rd) GDP: 3.15T; taiwan is at a measly 386B -- all figures are 2000 estimates from maps.com atlas
note (*2) communist / communism is a misnomer since they (PRC) don't even call *themselves* communists! the first thing they teach in school's policital science classes is that perfect communism is unachieveable (i went through the class) so the (PRC) settles on socialism instead...
i am not commenting on "what if we had tiny fusion reactors" and was using it as an example because there really isn't any great examples of high density energy storage...
anyway -- it came from when i was hearing stuff like "if batteries followed moore's law we would have AA batteries powering cars for ~100 years or so"...
this is true and good, but heh... if you really had a little device the size of AA battery that holds a couple gigajoules in it... i dunno... seems quite dangerous. and sociologically, this danger would be more difficult to manage than the techonological challenges. methinks, anyway.
and there is a good reason why you can't. i mean, besides the 800 degrees (celcius) thing:
Modern Downs cells operate at 25 to 40 kA and at potentials of 7 to 8 volts.
good grief!! that's 300kW of power dissipated *IN THE DOWN CELL!* remember, this does not count the line loss (on the lines, of course) and power-supply's internal resistance...
all in all, that's a lot of fscking current... granted, it's not on the order of 70-100kA like certain dangerous hobbies people keep -- but this is continuous current.
_sigh_... I am huffing and puffing all over the place trying to get across how utterly impossible (at home) / amazing this is... but I think you really have to be an electrical engineer to appreciate its enormity.
i was thinking a little while back: "man wouldn't it nice if we had atomic power, like minature tokamacks or whatnot for cars, cd players, laptops, etc etc.
and then it hit me -- no way man, it would suck ass. when you can store enough energy to run a car for 50 years in the size of a gas tank, what happens if something goes wrong (as it obviously will) with the storage? if somebody *intentially* sets it off, etc?
there are all these scientists out there who are striving for higher and higher power density in energy storage -- but i think there is an end; not necessarily the "diminishing returns" end, but a "maybe it's not a good idea for a AA battery to have enough juice to power a cadillac" -- because when you get enough power density in everyone's hands, everyone will have the power to blow a whole lotta stuff up.
this will probabbly become the next great hurdle in energy storage -- and ironically it's not even a technical challenge, but rather a socialogical one.
IIRC these new high density cameras are actually CMOS (at least, i am very certain that the Canon is). CMOS used to not have as good range and performed much worse in low-light conditions, but that is slowly changing, i suppose.
And one of the important thing about this new thing (canon / kodak) is that the chips themselves are the same size as 35mm -- which means no focus multipliers, no lens adapters, no nothing). now -- here is the kicker: how many sensors can you fit onto a 200mm wafer? not a whole lot (try it, the sensor size is 36mm x 24mm; add a couple more for the cut-line and the contact patches)... i honestly believe this is what's making these things so expensive, and why their prices won't budge as much as you guys seem to think it will (in the future). sure you will cram more pixels onto this area, but you are still only getting handfuls of sensors per wafer...
I second the previous comments about the need to keep wheel mass low - low sprung weight is a definite goal of performance cars. It's hard to call this thing a car, it's more like a bus, since it seats 8 and weighs 3 tonnes...
Sigh... why in the world would you want to make a bus go 180/190 mph? last i checked there was no "performance bus" category / market, so if they are soooo concerned with the speed, i am assuming they are trying to appeal this to some kind of speed-freaky people... but then again japanese taxi drivers are quite suicidal driving wise (but my god they are polite!), so maybe there are some people who might be interested in this thing.
Power 85.8 kw / 115.1 bhp @ combined rpm
Torque 465.05 nm / 343.0 ft lbs @ combined rpm
heh... that's more torque than most truck engines, actually =).
i guess this really confirms the rumor that the electric motor on the prius is so powerful (torque-wise) that they had to tone it down a bit to get reasonable (as in, slow-ish 8-10s) acceleration times (and reasonable fuel economy -- after all it's supposed to be a gas-sipping car). and remember, that torque is available at any rpm.
I would not be surprised that an eletric-motor assisted car would do better than a straight int.comb. engine car (if you can save the weight on the batteries, say, use ultra-caps or something)... This is true *especially* in acceleration, which in any race that involves actually turning, would be one of the, if not the most important stat (while braking into a turn, your engine is still redlined and charging up the capacitors for that speedy exit)
It's cool that they put everything (motor / reduction / brakes) in the wheel, but i fail to see the point of it... to be honest:
the reason you buy high quality name brand wheels is because (beside the "looks cool" and "got $$ buring holes everywhere") it gives a lower up-sprung weight. which means that the car does much better in the ride quality, easier to tune the shocks / suspensions, etc. by the way, different brake rotors would allow the same thing -- but people usually go for bigger rotors for the stopping power, and try to make sure the wheel themselves are as light as possible.
this is kinda important when you want your car to be performance oriented, as these guys are certainly trying to demonstrate -- but this combination of technology will ultimately yield a car that "can go 180mph but the ride really suck", or "if you want reasonable ride quality, then our entire million(s) dollar technology won't work"... self-defeating by my standards, anyway. =)
gotta say, though... damn... 600kg of batteries; that's over 1300 lb. some small cars (say, lotus elise) weight about that much...
Remember how big a deal it was back in the days when Intel released their microprocessor serial number and everybody hated it (even though it would probabbly have brought more good to the world than palladium EVER would?) and they disabled it *BY*DEFAULT*?
that, my friend, is what i am hoping for with microsoft. we all know that palladium will be released regardless of what happens, but if we make enough impact for it to boot into the "insecure mode" (without too much bitching and whining) by default, we can have a good chance of killing it. all it needs is really some (okay, a lot of) bad publicity. the thing that did the intel trick was the "privacy" deal (even though, actually, it wasn't so much a big deal) -- being that Palladium has the potential to do THAT much harm, it makes you wonder why no newspaper has did any kind of real columns on it...
oh wait... you don't mean the newspaper (media) is ultimately the same group of people as the RIAA / MPAA (content providers)? outlook not so good, eh?
AFAIK, Carly Fiorina makes ~10M / year plus about 40M in stocks / options. the record companies have probabbly the same kind of money to spend as HP (maybe more, since the tech sectors are slumping) -- I honestly would not be surprised if the board members make in the mid-high eight digit range. remember too that board members are often huge stock holders in the company -- so even if they don't "make" that kind of cash per-se salary wise -- a 67 million dollar fine vs half billion profit over the course of 5-10 years would still be looked upon very favorably by the the said individuals.
I know if I were on the board of directors, I'd be asking for the head of the person who cost me this fine, and getting something signed in blood by the people who I can decapitate if it happens again.
get real, man... 67 million dollars? EACH board member probabbly makes about that much in a year. and even if they did inquire: a dozen VPs and senior VPs and maybe even layed-off VPs will start to fight for credit: "Hey we lost 67mil but by doing it we gained almost half a BILLION"...
if you fine them a billion dollars or so; then maybe something will take effect... but heh... knowing this government (the type that fines the tabacco companies, and then uses the money to subsidize tobacco growers (no kidding)), it probabbly won't even be that effective.
do you read the news?
Squaresoft is releasing FF based games for *both* the gamecube AND GB advance. FFXI is going to have a PC version; FFVII, which was the first square "hit" game for playstation, was also released for PC; FFVIII was as well -- and then they spent all the money (and lost it all) on the movie and 9 / 10 was never ported.
hey, seems like a bit better than what Bungie is doing, eh?
what I don't understand is... how does this make XP a better choice?
there ARE known vulnerabilities of XP pre-SP1 you know... and it's not like people who doen't do updates will just all the sudden start to religiously do updates. and if the users arn't setting a admin password on 2K, what, you think they suddenly get enlightened at the campus bookstore and decide to set a password for XP?
FURTHERMORE -- i am figuing that most people will come home and do a UPGRADE from their 2K / NT machines -- which means that all the settings (blank password) will carry over nice and happy... worse yet -- the old "do not automatically update my machine" setting will probabbly carry over too, making the upgrade even less effective.
i mean, in the end you are forcing these poor students (hey, i was a student, i was poor, and everyone i knew was poor (or had better place to spend money, like strip clubs or beer)) pay for the equivalent of two service packs. wtf? later you will force everybody to buy palladium because they didn't patch XP up _just_like_now_?
for that kind of effort (helping everyone upgrade etc), hold a fscking 1 hour session on how to manage your computer... add in some talk about how to hide your pr0n browsing so your gf / room-mate don't dig up your history files etc to spice things up / get good attendance. and have a copy of SP3 somewhere local where everybody can get it without killing the bandwidth will probabbly help. (burn some CDs and give out for free, maybe?)
...many people view Bimmers as yuppie mobiles, when in fact, they are amazing to drive, very technically advanced and probably the best overall vehicles on the road.
sad news bud... people don't view bimmers as yuppie mobiles because of the cars themselves, but rather by the people that buys them... think to yourself for a minute: whenever a shiny new model-year bimmer pulls up and it's a young-ish african american male (dressed *very* casually, let's say) pulls up next to you at a traffic light, do you think that -- oh wait -- it DOESN'T HAPPEN.
It's almost always
7-series: rich lookin people (usually old) (usually white)
5-series: rich looking people (usually not as old) (usually white) (who looks like they probabbly used to be yuppies)
3-series: yuppies (asian, white, you name it)
so yeah... yuppies cling themselves onto bimmers for some reason... and i've got to admit, they are nice cars to cling onto (wouldn't mind a M5 personally) (or the new Z4 looks mighty tempting)
but people are saying bimmers are yuppie mobiles because... well, it's true.
p.s. on the motorcycle side, however... i will take a suzuki any day.(or a ducati / aprilia if there are money to be spent)
i read a sci-fi novel a while back... it said that jupitor would be a great place to live because the axis of the planet (spinning) is parallel to the axis of planetary motion (around sun) hence you can basically pick a *season* to live in... (if in fact you can live there, blah blah)
not so on earth... if there are no (of course, i am seriously speculating) energy re-distribution systems (or dysfunctional ones), even the "ideal band" would probabbly suffer from extreme weather throughout the seasons. I think (with my limited meteorlogical expertise) Chicago serves a fairly good example: horribly hot summers (90 degrees F common) and bitterly cold winters (0 deg F / -30 with windchill)... and that's WITH a reasonable sized body of water as a energy buffer (lake michigan)...
we will see, i guess... only that i am not too excited about the prospects.
probability will indicate this scheme will fail at the rate of about 1.2 times a year on average -- assuming 250 working days and you only authenticate once per day. however -- if this was really implemented, people will probabbly time out after 15 minutes / out to lunch / in meeting / whatever; so it will fsck up probabbly every month or so. i dunno -- just seem like passwords are so much more reliable.
nobody have touched on this: but my understanding is that the extremeties of the earth will cool off big time -- but the Earth is still recieving the same amount of heat every day / month / year -- and considering that there are more and more greenhouse gas accumulating -- the earth as a whole should be getting hotter, not colder. It would simply have much more varied climates between near the equator and the poles.
not that this is a good thing. the northern parts cooling 5-10 degrees means that the heat that would be warming it up is now heating up the equatorial section (mexico, egypt, mid. east, india, indo-china, S. china, and some others, of course) by 5-10 degrees. Africa would be fscked with even WORSE famine, and weather in the aforementioned regions will probabbly become quite unbearable. hence even though right now we are pretty much able to inhabit almost all of the earth -- if the weather changes occur we will only be able to live in some band of reasonable weather maybe between 30-60 degrees from equator...
but if humans actually leave the equator alone, we might get some rainforests back... hmm... and the poll (which city you want to live in) will recieve a TON of (city in) ohio / kansas votes)
i mean -- look at all the charities out there: MS foundation; AIDS societies; make a wish foundation etc etc etc. not saying they are not worth donating to -- but they do operate on a principle of "your money makes things A-OK".
on the other hand -- I bet if i contribute $$ to WHOI -- the money will be comming back to me in a way of "Well we are still fucked, but at least now we know how fucked and what we did to get ourselves there"...
maybe you are right -- but you have to admit there IS such a market out there. they are probabbly trying to compete with the likes of alienware and falconNW -- and last i heard they were still selling systems. but what's questionable is that if their brand rocognition (plus tigerdirect's iffy-ness) will allow them to hit the jackpot to their intended market segment.
Slashdot Mirror
only that it's not easily accessible, and there is currently no industry that would *need* to be in space to justify the cost of infrastructure (big buzz word thesedays) in space.
think about it -- what can you do in space that you can't now? in large quantites that you need to have a space station that you can't do in the vomit-comet? mix a homogenous mixture of lead and wax? (actually might be useful for radiation shielding.) -- the ONLY useful application I can think of, off the top of my head, might be aerogels. But even then the application is limited, and frankly, even though you manufacture higher quality aerogels in micro-grav, people can justify going with lower quality ones on earth.
maybe when they found out they can mass-produce CVD'd diamond (for whatever) or found a platinum mine on a asteroid, then, maybe we will go to space.
or a alien trade-route or something -- but alpha-centauri is 3.4 light years! if you need any kind of reasonable trade route -- there will be technology available (hopefull) that you won't even need to goto space (space distortion / teleportation / whatever)
so... don't count on it. voting might work better than hoping for space to just become accessible.
I use a Dell Ultrasharp 20" LCD:
25ms response time and everything (usually you can get one on sale - and they are always on sale of some sort - for about 1200 (that's US DOLLARS) or LESS).
I play UT2k3 on it (considered a much faster paced shooting game than others) -- and no problems.
remember -- your eye can only catch 30 fps of refresh (if it's not strobed), and a little while before, you can't even get 25 out of the video-card for Quake 3 -- and we survived that just fine -- i don't see why everyone is bitching about 60Hz refresh / 40Hz refresh is not good enough.
actually... i think not. IIRC even if you make sure your tongue / cheek does not freeze and die off -- your teeth will suffer a great deal from this. and as we all know, dentists are... well... not *always* a pleasure to visit. especially when you have frozen your gums / cracked your molars / whatever (this can happen from when you breath out, actually -- i suppose it can be avoided if you just kept the L.N2 boiling inside your mouth -- but the frosty breath you create is, actually, quite spectacular.
It's late on a friday night -- so nothing witty here;
... ...
but seriously though -- what do you think verilog / VHDL will say?
and then we have the lego-mindstorm language (whatever it's called)
and then of course we have the ever-pleasure-to-work-with:
* Malbolge
* INTERCAL
* brainf**k
besides; US has already backed out / backstabbed taiwan on the PRC thing.
;^) -- the guy's name is Lenin) said that (a version of it, anyway) "a capitalist would sell the roap to hang another capitalist if it meant making money..." ha! this should go down in the history books as the perfect example.
a few moons back the taiwanese president got carried away when vid-conferencing with some activists in the states and was (caught on tape) saything stuff like "yeah you know taiwan is really its own country from the start"...
china got pissed and issued statements about "taiwan is disrupting the stability of the straits". taiwan't stock market dropped like 20% the following monday, and the taiwan president's office apologized profusely - along the lines of "yeah he didn't know what he was saying at the time / he does not represent our ideals / he was on acid" etc... all the mean while, the US basically said: "hey listen, if you piss off china and they come after you, you (as in taiwan) are on your own, and don't expect jack shit from us."
which is, really, kinda sad. granted US has a good reason for this: china is a BIG market and there are tons of US money poured there(*1). point being: (1) I think after the US realized that the communist(*2) government are not impeding the free-trade capitalism taking root, they stopped being so rough on it; and to sacrifice a 386B "country" to a 4.5T market (with unbelieveable potential to grow)? yeah, of course. (2) it's kinda sad that the US would go and abandon one of its storgest (as in, most faithful) allies / followers / groupies for $$, as I personally believe this is what it boiled down to; but hey... this is capitalism -- and a wise man (don't flame me now
note(*1): China is the second most economically powerful country in the world, you know -- no joke -- not japan, not taiwan, not germany; (US GDP: 9.963T; China GDP: 4.5T; Japan (3rd) GDP: 3.15T; taiwan is at a measly 386B -- all figures are 2000 estimates from maps.com atlas
note (*2) communist / communism is a misnomer since they (PRC) don't even call *themselves* communists! the first thing they teach in school's policital science classes is that perfect communism is unachieveable (i went through the class) so the (PRC) settles on socialism instead...
Christ man... picking a fight between the two most populated countries in the world? indian /.ers to mod you up and chinese /.ers to mod you down...
this will be an interesting case study of slashdot math indeed.
i am not commenting on "what if we had tiny fusion reactors" and was using it as an example because there really isn't any great examples of high density energy storage...
anyway -- it came from when i was hearing stuff like "if batteries followed moore's law we would have AA batteries powering cars for ~100 years or so"...
this is true and good, but heh... if you really had a little device the size of AA battery that holds a couple gigajoules in it... i dunno... seems quite dangerous. and sociologically, this danger would be more difficult to manage than the techonological challenges. methinks, anyway.
Modern Downs cells operate at 25 to 40 kA and at potentials of 7 to 8 volts.
good grief!! that's 300kW of power dissipated *IN THE DOWN CELL!* remember, this does not count the line loss (on the lines, of course) and power-supply's internal resistance...
all in all, that's a lot of fscking current... granted, it's not on the order of 70-100kA like certain dangerous hobbies people keep -- but this is continuous current.
_sigh_... I am huffing and puffing all over the place trying to get across how utterly impossible (at home) / amazing this is... but I think you really have to be an electrical engineer to appreciate its enormity.
i was thinking a little while back: "man wouldn't it nice if we had atomic power, like minature tokamacks or whatnot for cars, cd players, laptops, etc etc.
and then it hit me -- no way man, it would suck ass. when you can store enough energy to run a car for 50 years in the size of a gas tank, what happens if something goes wrong (as it obviously will) with the storage? if somebody *intentially* sets it off, etc?
there are all these scientists out there who are striving for higher and higher power density in energy storage -- but i think there is an end; not necessarily the "diminishing returns" end, but a "maybe it's not a good idea for a AA battery to have enough juice to power a cadillac" -- because when you get enough power density in everyone's hands, everyone will have the power to blow a whole lotta stuff up.
this will probabbly become the next great hurdle in energy storage -- and ironically it's not even a technical challenge, but rather a socialogical one.
IIRC these new high density cameras are actually CMOS (at least, i am very certain that the Canon is). CMOS used to not have as good range and performed much worse in low-light conditions, but that is slowly changing, i suppose.
And one of the important thing about this new thing (canon / kodak) is that the chips themselves are the same size as 35mm -- which means no focus multipliers, no lens adapters, no nothing). now -- here is the kicker: how many sensors can you fit onto a 200mm wafer? not a whole lot (try it, the sensor size is 36mm x 24mm; add a couple more for the cut-line and the contact patches)... i honestly believe this is what's making these things so expensive, and why their prices won't budge as much as you guys seem to think it will (in the future). sure you will cram more pixels onto this area, but you are still only getting handfuls of sensors per wafer...
Sigh... why in the world would you want to make a bus go 180/190 mph? last i checked there was no "performance bus" category / market, so if they are soooo concerned with the speed, i am assuming they are trying to appeal this to some kind of speed-freaky people... but then again japanese taxi drivers are quite suicidal driving wise (but my god they are polite!), so maybe there are some people who might be interested in this thing.
Torque 465.05 nm / 343.0 ft lbs @ combined rpm
heh... that's more torque than most truck engines, actually =).
i guess this really confirms the rumor that the electric motor on the prius is so powerful (torque-wise) that they had to tone it down a bit to get reasonable (as in, slow-ish 8-10s) acceleration times (and reasonable fuel economy -- after all it's supposed to be a gas-sipping car). and remember, that torque is available at any rpm.
I would not be surprised that an eletric-motor assisted car would do better than a straight int.comb. engine car (if you can save the weight on the batteries, say, use ultra-caps or something)... This is true *especially* in acceleration, which in any race that involves actually turning, would be one of the, if not the most important stat (while braking into a turn, your engine is still redlined and charging up the capacitors for that speedy exit)
It's cool that they put everything (motor / reduction / brakes) in the wheel, but i fail to see the point of it... to be honest:
the reason you buy high quality name brand wheels is because (beside the "looks cool" and "got $$ buring holes everywhere") it gives a lower up-sprung weight. which means that the car does much better in the ride quality, easier to tune the shocks / suspensions, etc. by the way, different brake rotors would allow the same thing -- but people usually go for bigger rotors for the stopping power, and try to make sure the wheel themselves are as light as possible.
this is kinda important when you want your car to be performance oriented, as these guys are certainly trying to demonstrate -- but this combination of technology will ultimately yield a car that "can go 180mph but the ride really suck", or "if you want reasonable ride quality, then our entire million(s) dollar technology won't work"... self-defeating by my standards, anyway. =)
gotta say, though... damn... 600kg of batteries; that's over 1300 lb. some small cars (say, lotus elise) weight about that much...
Remember how big a deal it was back in the days when Intel released their microprocessor serial number and everybody hated it (even though it would probabbly have brought more good to the world than palladium EVER would?) and they disabled it *BY*DEFAULT*?
that, my friend, is what i am hoping for with microsoft. we all know that palladium will be released regardless of what happens, but if we make enough impact for it to boot into the "insecure mode" (without too much bitching and whining) by default, we can have a good chance of killing it. all it needs is really some (okay, a lot of) bad publicity. the thing that did the intel trick was the "privacy" deal (even though, actually, it wasn't so much a big deal) -- being that Palladium has the potential to do THAT much harm, it makes you wonder why no newspaper has did any kind of real columns on it...
oh wait... you don't mean the newspaper (media) is ultimately the same group of people as the RIAA / MPAA (content providers)? outlook not so good, eh?
you got data do back this up?
AFAIK, Carly Fiorina makes ~10M / year plus about 40M in stocks / options. the record companies have probabbly the same kind of money to spend as HP (maybe more, since the tech sectors are slumping) -- I honestly would not be surprised if the board members make in the mid-high eight digit range. remember too that board members are often huge stock holders in the company -- so even if they don't "make" that kind of cash per-se salary wise -- a 67 million dollar fine vs half billion profit over the course of 5-10 years would still be looked upon very favorably by the the said individuals.
get real, man... 67 million dollars? EACH board member probabbly makes about that much in a year. and even if they did inquire: a dozen VPs and senior VPs and maybe even layed-off VPs will start to fight for credit: "Hey we lost 67mil but by doing it we gained almost half a BILLION"...
if you fine them a billion dollars or so; then maybe something will take effect... but heh... knowing this government (the type that fines the tabacco companies, and then uses the money to subsidize tobacco growers (no kidding)), it probabbly won't even be that effective.
do you read the news? Squaresoft is releasing FF based games for *both* the gamecube AND GB advance. FFXI is going to have a PC version; FFVII, which was the first square "hit" game for playstation, was also released for PC; FFVIII was as well -- and then they spent all the money (and lost it all) on the movie and 9 / 10 was never ported. hey, seems like a bit better than what Bungie is doing, eh?
what I don't understand is... how does this make XP a better choice?
there ARE known vulnerabilities of XP pre-SP1 you know... and it's not like people who doen't do updates will just all the sudden start to religiously do updates. and if the users arn't setting a admin password on 2K, what, you think they suddenly get enlightened at the campus bookstore and decide to set a password for XP?
FURTHERMORE -- i am figuing that most people will come home and do a UPGRADE from their 2K / NT machines -- which means that all the settings (blank password) will carry over nice and happy... worse yet -- the old "do not automatically update my machine" setting will probabbly carry over too, making the upgrade even less effective.
i mean, in the end you are forcing these poor students (hey, i was a student, i was poor, and everyone i knew was poor (or had better place to spend money, like strip clubs or beer)) pay for the equivalent of two service packs. wtf? later you will force everybody to buy palladium because they didn't patch XP up _just_like_now_?
for that kind of effort (helping everyone upgrade etc), hold a fscking 1 hour session on how to manage your computer... add in some talk about how to hide your pr0n browsing so your gf / room-mate don't dig up your history files etc to spice things up / get good attendance. and have a copy of SP3 somewhere local where everybody can get it without killing the bandwidth will probabbly help. (burn some CDs and give out for free, maybe?)
sad news bud... people don't view bimmers as yuppie mobiles because of the cars themselves, but rather by the people that buys them... think to yourself for a minute: whenever a shiny new model-year bimmer pulls up and it's a young-ish african american male (dressed *very* casually, let's say) pulls up next to you at a traffic light, do you think that -- oh wait -- it DOESN'T HAPPEN.
so yeah... yuppies cling themselves onto bimmers for some reason... and i've got to admit, they are nice cars to cling onto (wouldn't mind a M5 personally) (or the new Z4 looks mighty tempting) but people are saying bimmers are yuppie mobiles because... well, it's true.
p.s. on the motorcycle side, however... i will take a suzuki any day.(or a ducati / aprilia if there are money to be spent)
hmm are you asking a question? in case you are:
i read a sci-fi novel a while back... it said that jupitor would be a great place to live because the axis of the planet (spinning) is parallel to the axis of planetary motion (around sun) hence you can basically pick a *season* to live in... (if in fact you can live there, blah blah)
not so on earth... if there are no (of course, i am seriously speculating) energy re-distribution systems (or dysfunctional ones), even the "ideal band" would probabbly suffer from extreme weather throughout the seasons. I think (with my limited meteorlogical expertise) Chicago serves a fairly good example: horribly hot summers (90 degrees F common) and bitterly cold winters (0 deg F / -30 with windchill)... and that's WITH a reasonable sized body of water as a energy buffer (lake michigan)...
we will see, i guess... only that i am not too excited about the prospects.
all other numbers are okay
probability will indicate this scheme will fail at the rate of about 1.2 times a year on average -- assuming 250 working days and you only authenticate once per day. however -- if this was really implemented, people will probabbly time out after 15 minutes / out to lunch / in meeting / whatever; so it will fsck up probabbly every month or so. i dunno -- just seem like passwords are so much more reliable.
nobody have touched on this: but my understanding is that the extremeties of the earth will cool off big time -- but the Earth is still recieving the same amount of heat every day / month / year -- and considering that there are more and more greenhouse gas accumulating -- the earth as a whole should be getting hotter, not colder. It would simply have much more varied climates between near the equator and the poles.
not that this is a good thing. the northern parts cooling 5-10 degrees means that the heat that would be warming it up is now heating up the equatorial section (mexico, egypt, mid. east, india, indo-china, S. china, and some others, of course) by 5-10 degrees. Africa would be fscked with even WORSE famine, and weather in the aforementioned regions will probabbly become quite unbearable. hence even though right now we are pretty much able to inhabit almost all of the earth -- if the weather changes occur we will only be able to live in some band of reasonable weather maybe between 30-60 degrees from equator...
but if humans actually leave the equator alone, we might get some rainforests back... hmm... and the poll (which city you want to live in) will recieve a TON of (city in) ohio / kansas votes)
people are willing to pay money so others can write newsletters telling them how smart they are. I would not be surprised if many people pay money to be told that their contributions are making things A-OK...
i mean -- look at all the charities out there: MS foundation; AIDS societies; make a wish foundation etc etc etc. not saying they are not worth donating to -- but they do operate on a principle of "your money makes things A-OK".
on the other hand -- I bet if i contribute $$ to WHOI -- the money will be comming back to me in a way of "Well we are still fucked, but at least now we know how fucked and what we did to get ourselves there"...
maybe you are right -- but you have to admit there IS such a market out there. they are probabbly trying to compete with the likes of alienware and falconNW -- and last i heard they were still selling systems. but what's questionable is that if their brand rocognition (plus tigerdirect's iffy-ness) will allow them to hit the jackpot to their intended market segment.