I believe we're slowly becoming a nation (world?) completely driven by prices at the expense of quality. I continuous hear things like "Why did he buy a Lexus for $50,000 when a new Hyundai is $15,000?" "This CD-R is $.10 each, this one is $.09. Why would anyone buy the $0.10 one?" People don't always get there's more to a product's specs than the price.
1. Huyndai are more reliable than Lexus, in fact Huyndai was the most reliable car in the latest consumer review report.
2. Cars today are significantly more reliable than they were 20 more years ago.
A quote from consumer reviews regarding the latter claim: "One thing that has made used cars more appealing is their improved reliability. In a 20-year reliability trend compiled using 1980 to 2000 Consumer Reports annual subscriber surveys, we have found that the reliability of vehicles has vastly improved. The reported problems per hundred vehicles has declined to a fraction of what it was in 1980. Rust and exhaust-system problems, once common, are now no longer major problems.".
I simply don't understand why people are whining about a cheap-@ss untested chip. If you want reliability buy something else. If I want to save a penny and test my own chip, what gives you the urge to stop me?
If we could get a viable T-Rex zygote, we could almost certainly implant it in the egg of any larger still-living lizard (monitor?) without much difficulty
Good idea, but the closes living relative would be a bird. Ostrich egg, perhaps.
Grand total: 150 babys, 75 boys and 75 girls. More specifically 50 couples with one boy, 25 with a boy and a girl, 25 with two girls. 100 first born, 50 second born.
if you have a boy first time you don't try again, if you have a girl you try again, so there's a 75% chance a child is a boy).
No, 50% of all first born are male. 50% of all second born are also male. So 50% of all born are male. It does not matter that the second born only happen in the case where the first born was female.
Is there a point where graphics cards get so advanced that humans can't even tell the difference anymore? Or is that virtual reality?
As someone else pointed out, the monitors may very well reach the limit that the human eye can resolve.
However, the computational problem of generating those pixels can at least in theory be arbitrarily difficult. If the problem of calculating certain pixels in certain situations is NP-complete then we may never be able to calculate them all in time. It remains to be seen whether this theoretical limitation will apply or if in fact some day all problems encountered in practice will be solved as well as a human eye can appreciate.
So, a great deal of tax financed broadband investment made broadband penetration great. Not surprising.
But this does hardly prove the case for strong government intervention. Is it really true that the investment paid off in economic terms, not only in terms of broadband penetration? Are Korean companies ahead of American ones in terms of using IT profitably?
No doubt many Korean citizens have enjoyed subsidized broadband services but how does that compare to the pleasure they would have gotten from spending the money freely?
" Other than that you can "orbit" at any speed (v) you want as long as your altitude (r) makes the above equations balance."
No. Your equations are correct of course but they assume no air drag. You have to both leave the athmosphere AND reach the appropriate speed for the altitude.
An important border case example of this is the ISS. It is at 300-400 km but because of the (very very thin) athmosphere it slowly slows down and falls towards lower and lower orbits. For that reason the supply ships need to bring fuel so that it can bolster its orbit before it is too late.
I carry a Sony Ericsson P900. It has all the basic PDA functionality, a good phone, and the batteries last for a couple of days. And if fits neatly in my pocket. Perfect!
My only complaint is that the built-in camera is only about a quarter megapixel, so the pictures look crappy. Probably in a couple of years they will ship with cameras comparable to the average dedicated digital camera today.
With the right software you can play DVD audio with your computer. I am considering getting a high end sound card (~$100) and doing this.
Anybody tried this? Did you notice a big difference? I have good speakers and a good receiver, but nothing spetacular. I wonder if you need super high end stuff to even notice a difference...?
There you have it, the entire problem in a nutshell. Too much work, and not enough people.
And I have a solution.
Public review for patents. Open source meets patent reform
Yes, but that is not as far from reality as you might think. After the patent is issued it becomes publicly available. And if you can dig up any prior art that the stressed examiner missed, then the patent (or parts of it) will be rendered invalid.
This happens all the time. In particular when someone gets sued by the patent holder, they often go out on a prior arts search that is much more exhaustive than that of the examiner and the applicant put together.
I've seen several projects where people use their PDA/GPS to map their daily route. Maybe it's time someone organized a collective mapping project, for release cunder the creative commons license
It seems to me that it would take much, much less effort to use satellite pictures with some software that can recognize roads ans streets (and maybe someone manually labeling the streets). Maybe it has been done already.
To kill most large animals, the air doesn't need to be hot enough to bake the whole animal, just ruin its lungs
No. According to this new model, air temperatures only rose by 10 degrees. This is not enough to harm the lungs. The key point of the new paper is the consideration of the very high levels of infrared radiation. Animals heated up not because the air around them was hot but because they were bombarded by heat radiation, rather as one can feel when one sits close to a campfire on a cold night. This is why the authors conclude that animals in "shadow"; underground or under water were able to survive but not those in the open.
Plants are easy. Many (most?) plants have evolved mechanisms to allow them to survive forest fires, brush fires and the like. The root stock would survive, and the seeds are mixed with soil/blown into protected places etc.
This is quite right. And indeed they needed to survive fires as these errupted spontaneously all over the Earth.
According to the article, the dinos were cooked by super-heated air. That would mean they were broiled, not fried:)
From the original paper (I am not making this up): "...global flux of thermal radiation reaching Earth's surface of the order of 10kWm^-2 over periods ranging from one to several hours after the impact. These power levels are comparable to those obtained in a domestic oven set to 'broil'."
Alright, so what do I need to survive the next major asteroid impact of this magnatude? It sounds like most buildings won't be sufficient protection.
Unless you are on the wrong side of the planet (in which case you are f*cked anyway), your building should be the least of your worries.
Global food production will probably take a very deep dive as large areas get drenched/ baked and exposed to a bunch of other nastiness. Maybe the sky will go dark for some days or years also.
We humans being what we are (animals with a strong urge to survive) one can probably expect violence and war for remaining food, and lots of refugees as some parts suck worse than others.
Maybe you should look for a place far inland, a descent house, keep some water and purification equipment, plenty of food, and I'm sad to say, weapons.
We humans are capable of creating a much larger catastrophe than our often theoretical cousins in space; and it's saddening.
This claim simply is not true.
In the following article you can read that 1 mile-asteroid impacts happen about 5 times every million years. Each such impact has the energy of several million megatons. I think that the world's nuclear aresnal sums up to several thousand megatons (most nukes around a megaton or less, times 10,000).
In any case, this is for the "five times per million years" size rock. The rock that hit the dinosaurs was much much bigger (but such big rocks only fall down once per a hundred million years).
Isn't the whole "asteroid impact" scenario a theory? Doesn't that make this new theory a theory based on a theory?
It is widely accepted that an asteroid fell down around 65 million years ago and that this approximately coincided with the end of the dinosaurs (except for birds). You will not find a single serious scientist who disagrees with this.
What is more controversial is how quickly they died off and if it was only because of the asteroid or if other factors were involved as well. This latest claim is that it was quick; we will see how well it will be received in the scientific community.
No, no, no. This is how they did it: the let the beast out carrying some strong drugs in an autoinjector. Then they let him stroll around on the island until he passed the web cam. Then they activated the drugs remotely so that he went into a coma with that big grin on his face.
Clearly if you have the technology and money to Tote along a reactor (nuclear is preferable, but diesel will do), convert sea water to LHOx, and launch your rocket, transporting a truckload of water to wherever you please is a small matter.
Three spheres--Earth, the moon and Mars--are arrayed in sequence, with the streak of a rocket missing all three and flying straight into the sun
One badge team must have been working in metric, the other in imperial.
For Earth, Moon, Mars (in that order) an object behind them cannot be the sun. It has to be another star. It is the "and beyond" part of the new vision, probably.
While I don't necessarily disagree, I have to wonder how people would react if you said "football" or "basketball" instead of gaming. I don't see how, given a suitably strategic and interesting video game, professional gamers would be any different than professional athletes who get paid grotesque sums of money to engage in what is, for most people, a "hobby."
People don't get paid for how well or how hard they work, but for how much other people value their services. It now so happens that a very large number of people very much like to see top athletes perform, hence the gotesques sums of money.
Not that many people are very interested in seing others playing video games. Perhaps not very surprising, considering that the games were never made with spectacors in mind. Who knows about the future though?
Slashdot Mirror
I believe we're slowly becoming a nation (world?) completely driven by prices at the expense of quality. I continuous hear things like "Why did he buy a Lexus for $50,000 when a new Hyundai is $15,000?" "This CD-R is $.10 each, this one is $.09. Why would anyone buy the $0.10 one?" People don't always get there's more to a product's specs than the price.
1. Huyndai are more reliable than Lexus, in fact Huyndai was the most reliable car in the latest consumer review report.
2. Cars today are significantly more reliable than they were 20 more years ago.
A quote from consumer reviews regarding the latter claim: "One thing that has made used cars more appealing is their improved reliability. In a 20-year reliability trend compiled using 1980 to 2000 Consumer Reports annual subscriber surveys, we have found that the reliability of vehicles has vastly improved. The reported problems per hundred vehicles has declined to a fraction of what it was in 1980. Rust and exhaust-system problems, once common, are now no longer major problems.".
I simply don't understand why people are whining about a cheap-@ss untested chip. If you want reliability buy something else. If I want to save a penny and test my own chip, what gives you the urge to stop me?
Tor
Now, China has about 120 men for every 100 women.
There is some imbalance but 120/100??? Do you have a source for this number?
Tor
If we could get a viable T-Rex zygote, we could almost certainly implant it in the egg of any larger still-living lizard (monitor?) without much difficulty
Good idea, but the closes living relative would be a bird. Ostrich egg, perhaps.
Tor
100 couples have babys.
50 boys, 50 girls.
The 50 who got girls have another go.
25 more boys, 25 more girls.
Grand total: 150 babys, 75 boys and 75 girls. More specifically 50 couples with one boy, 25 with a boy and a girl, 25 with two girls. 100 first born, 50 second born.
Tor
if you have a boy first time you don't try again, if you have a girl you try again, so there's a 75% chance a child is a boy).
No, 50% of all first born are male. 50% of all second born are also male. So 50% of all born are male. It does not matter that the second born only happen in the case where the first born was female.
Tor
Is there a point where graphics cards get so advanced that humans can't even tell the difference anymore? Or is that virtual reality?
As someone else pointed out, the monitors may very well reach the limit that the human eye can resolve.
However, the computational problem of generating those pixels can at least in theory be arbitrarily difficult. If the problem of calculating certain pixels in certain situations is NP-complete then we may never be able to calculate them all in time. It remains to be seen whether this theoretical limitation will apply or if in fact some day all problems encountered in practice will be solved as well as a human eye can appreciate.
Tor
So, a great deal of tax financed broadband investment made broadband penetration great. Not surprising.
But this does hardly prove the case for strong government intervention. Is it really true that the investment paid off in economic terms, not only in terms of broadband penetration? Are Korean companies ahead of American ones in terms of using IT profitably?
No doubt many Korean citizens have enjoyed subsidized broadband services but how does that compare to the pleasure they would have gotten from spending the money freely?
Tor
" Other than that you can "orbit" at any speed (v) you want as long as your altitude (r) makes the above equations balance."
No. Your equations are correct of course but they assume no air drag. You have to both leave the athmosphere AND reach the appropriate speed for the altitude.
An important border case example of this is the ISS. It is at 300-400 km but because of the (very very thin) athmosphere it slowly slows down and falls towards lower and lower orbits. For that reason the supply ships need to bring fuel so that it can bolster its orbit before it is too late.
Tor
I carry a Sony Ericsson P900. It has all the basic PDA functionality, a good phone, and the batteries last for a couple of days. And if fits neatly in my pocket. Perfect!
My only complaint is that the built-in camera is only about a quarter megapixel, so the pictures look crappy. Probably in a couple of years they will ship with cameras comparable to the average dedicated digital camera today.
Tor
With the right software you can play DVD audio with your computer. I am considering getting a high end sound card (~$100) and doing this.
Anybody tried this? Did you notice a big difference? I have good speakers and a good receiver, but nothing spetacular. I wonder if you need super high end stuff to even notice a difference...?
Tor
There you have it, the entire problem in a nutshell. Too much work, and not enough people.
And I have a solution.
Public review for patents. Open source meets patent reform
Yes, but that is not as far from reality as you might think. After the patent is issued it becomes publicly available. And if you can dig up any prior art that the stressed examiner missed, then the patent (or parts of it) will be rendered invalid.
This happens all the time. In particular when someone gets sued by the patent holder, they often go out on a prior arts search that is much more exhaustive than that of the examiner and the applicant put together.
Tor
"the Patent Office ultimately greenlights over 95% of all original applications to issue as a patent. This compares with 65% in Europe or Japan."
With statistics like that it's obvious that there is something wrong, just wonder why they've left it so long to fix it...
Not that I like the way the patent system works but I don't think that a high greenlight percentage by itself proves that something is wrong.
Rather, it proves that there is a common understanding between applicants and examiners what will and will not pass.
In an ideal and perfectly transparent system people know beforehand what will pass and don't bother applying if it will not.
Tor
I've seen several projects where people use their PDA/GPS to map their daily route. Maybe it's time someone organized a collective mapping project, for release cunder the creative commons license
It seems to me that it would take much, much less effort to use satellite pictures with some software that can recognize roads ans streets (and maybe someone manually labeling the streets). Maybe it has been done already.
Tor
To kill most large animals, the air doesn't need to be hot enough to bake the whole animal, just ruin its lungs
No. According to this new model, air temperatures only rose by 10 degrees. This is not enough to harm the lungs. The key point of the new paper is the consideration of the very high levels of infrared radiation. Animals heated up not because the air around them was hot but because they were bombarded by heat radiation, rather as one can feel when one sits close to a campfire on a cold night. This is why the authors conclude that animals in "shadow"; underground or under water were able to survive but not those in the open.
Plants are easy. Many (most?) plants have evolved mechanisms to allow them to survive forest fires, brush fires and the like. The root stock would survive, and the seeds are mixed with soil/blown into protected places etc.
This is quite right. And indeed they needed to survive fires as these errupted spontaneously all over the Earth.
Tor
According to the article, the dinos were cooked by super-heated air. That would mean they were broiled, not fried :)
From the original paper (I am not making this up): "...global flux of thermal radiation reaching Earth's surface of the order of 10kWm^-2 over periods ranging from one to several hours after the impact. These power levels are comparable to those obtained in a domestic oven set to 'broil'."
Tor
Life would survive and evolve out of this as it always does, but humans would become extinct along with a large number of other life forms.
But birds and mammals DID survive the last impact. It seems to me that humans (as a species) should be able to, too.
Tor
Alright, so what do I need to survive the next major asteroid impact of this magnatude? It sounds like most buildings won't be sufficient protection.
Unless you are on the wrong side of the planet (in which case you are f*cked anyway), your building should be the least of your worries.
Global food production will probably take a very deep dive as large areas get drenched/ baked and exposed to a bunch of other nastiness. Maybe the sky will go dark for some days or years also.
We humans being what we are (animals with a strong urge to survive) one can probably expect violence and war for remaining food, and lots of refugees as some parts suck worse than others.
Maybe you should look for a place far inland, a descent house, keep some water and purification equipment, plenty of food, and I'm sad to say, weapons.
Tor
We humans are capable of creating a much larger catastrophe than our often theoretical cousins in space; and it's saddening.
This claim simply is not true.
In the following article you can read that 1 mile-asteroid impacts happen about 5 times every million years. Each such impact has the energy of several million megatons. I think that the world's nuclear aresnal sums up to several thousand megatons (most nukes around a megaton or less, times 10,000).
In any case, this is for the "five times per million years" size rock. The rock that hit the dinosaurs was much much bigger (but such big rocks only fall down once per a hundred million years).
Tor
But fairly recently there was another article (...) so what is the consensus *really*, in the scientific community? or is there just none?
The other impact you are talking about was $250 million years ago, during another mass extinction. That is a new claim and still a bit controversial.
The 65 million year ago hit _is_ widely accepted, although it is somewhat controversial exactly what role it played in the mass extinction.
Tor
Isn't the whole "asteroid impact" scenario a theory? Doesn't that make this new theory a theory based on a theory?
It is widely accepted that an asteroid fell down around 65 million years ago and that this approximately coincided with the end of the dinosaurs (except for birds). You will not find a single serious scientist who disagrees with this.
What is more controversial is how quickly they died off and if it was only because of the asteroid or if other factors were involved as well. This latest claim is that it was quick; we will see how well it will be received in the scientific community.
Tor
No, no, no. This is how they did it: the let the beast out carrying some strong drugs in an autoinjector. Then they let him stroll around on the island until he passed the web cam. Then they activated the drugs remotely so that he went into a coma with that big grin on his face.
Tor
Clearly if you have the technology and money to Tote along a reactor (nuclear is preferable, but diesel will do), convert sea water to LHOx, and launch your rocket, transporting a truckload of water to wherever you please is a small matter.
Tor
Your sex toys run PERL???
Tor
Three spheres--Earth, the moon and Mars--are arrayed in sequence, with the streak of a rocket missing all three and flying straight into the sun
One badge team must have been working in metric, the other in imperial.
For Earth, Moon, Mars (in that order) an object behind them cannot be the sun. It has to be another star. It is the "and beyond" part of the new vision, probably.
Tor
While I don't necessarily disagree, I have to wonder how people would react if you said "football" or "basketball" instead of gaming. I don't see how, given a suitably strategic and interesting video game, professional gamers would be any different than professional athletes who get paid grotesque sums of money to engage in what is, for most people, a "hobby."
People don't get paid for how well or how hard they work, but for how much other people value their services. It now so happens that a very large number of people very much like to see top athletes perform, hence the gotesques sums of money.
Not that many people are very interested in seing others playing video games. Perhaps not very surprising, considering that the games were never made with spectacors in mind. Who knows about the future though?
Tor