I figured it out for another story a few months ago. Terrorists would have to detonate a nuclear weapon in a Hiroshima scale attack about every four years to bring the terrorism risk up to the fatal car accident risk.
Fat has an energy density of at least 38 MJ / kg (I'm not sure if that's how much energy your body can extract from it, or if that's the actual energy content).
The battery in my Macbook Pro is 60 Wh, which is 216 KJ. So if the person sitting in the seat next to you has even 1 kg of fat on him (not even considering the rest of what he's made of), and the person sitting next to me on the plane always has WAY more than 1 kg of fat, that's 176 times as much energy.
Your seat mate has about as much chance of exploding and bringing down the plane too.
"But thanks for your suggestion!!! I hope you feel smug now for calling us cheap, asshole."
Did you miss the question mark? Do you feel smug now?
Anyway, I'm not sure I believe your story as written. If a company contracts with you to write some code for them, I don't see how Apple would even know, much less care, that you wrote the code and not the original company. It would be to Apple's advantage to keep your special purpose app out of the app store.
Perhaps there's more to the story that you neglected to include?
When someone can't even get their metaphor right it makes one wonder if what they say about the actual subject is any more likely to be meaningful.
It's like with a car - if you just put diesel in your tank instead of unleaded your car will go further so your argument can be made better just by adding a metaphor based on something you made up.
It's more than that. Apple doesn't market to people who want to buy the cheapest possible computer at Wal-mart either. Both their products and marketing are squarely aimed at people who are willing to spend a bit more to get something that works a bit better. If you're an individual to whom price is the primary criterion, you're not really a potential Apple customer. If you're a business that's big enough to have an IT department to set everything up, maintain everything, and train the users, you're probably not going to care much about Apple's value adds and you're going to go for the cheap commodity computers. If you're a small business without an IT department, you're likely more interested in what Apple brings to the table.
Your point is interesting - the major market might be shifting more towards people who need systems that are easier to set up, use and maintain. Microsoft seems to be putting more effort into that market segment, but Apple has a head start on targeting those people.
You can't see out of a lighted room at night because the glass reflects the light from inside, not because the information from inside is more "effective."
As other posters have mentioned, the moon is definitely something you should go for - it's big, bright, easy to find and quite impressive through a small telescope. Plus it's got historical significance for the role it played in Galileo's observations. Jupiter is another obvious target (also with historical significance). If you have enough time between your observing opportunities you can get the kids to draw the positions of the Galilean moons at the first session and then see that they've moved at the second. Venus and Mars are also good. You should be able to make out the phase of Venus (if it's not full or new) and might be able to see some detail on Mars (if you hurry), depending on the seeing. Some bright galaxies (Andromeda) can be interesting. The great nebula in Orion is also good because, under dark skies, you can just make it out with the naked eye but a telescope can reveal some detail. The Pleiades and other clusters are also good. You could also try splitting some binaries, such as Alcor and Mizar in the Big Dipper.
Whatever you do, if it's visible, don't miss Saturn. Even in the smallest telescopes Saturn is visible as something that is clearly not the round star that it looks like to the naked eye. It's the first sky object I remember seeing through a telescope or binoculars and being able to see that there is structure in something that appears to the naked eye as a featureless point made an impact.
So when you buy a book you want to do more than read it once or twice? Perhaps you want to keep it for a long time? Maybe you want to have it on your shelf, as part of your permanent... collection?
The words are free. The book is not. If you want to go find it, scan it, OCR it and format it, good on you. Great if you can find someone who's willing to do all that for you. But it's not free.
It's not unreasonable to pay a small fee for someone to put together an e-book, catalog it, put together a web page so you can choose which ones you want, and, in Amazon's case, pay for the cell bandwidth to send it to you. If you want to make some beer money in the public domain publishing business I'd pay you a buck for a good, easy to acquire and use electronic version of a PD book I was interested in.
Amazon's pricing is kind of weird. If I were the kind of person that HAD to have books when they first came out I might be tempted to buy a $9.99-$14.99 ebook rather than a $25.00-$30.00 hardcover. On the other hand, I'm quite likely to pick up the hardcover anyway - those things only sell because they're basically collectors editions.
The older books priced at around $2.50 look great. Those seem to be priced just right, although the public domain classics really should be $0.99.
Then there's the weird class of Kindle books that Amazon seems to be pricing around $8.39 (CAN). In most cases they seemed to be more expensive than the equivalent paperback, as Amazon's helpful price comparison pointed out.
There's no way I'm paying more than 50% of the price of a paperback for an e-book, and that fraction goes down the older that book gets.
True, but it was the closest thing I could find on short notice. The point is that Pluto isn't very many pixels across. Also, I think when they said "best" they were actually talking about the new images, even though they didn't show a picture.
It's not quite as simple as "the image is over-exposed." Pluto is dim and small enough to be right at the edge of telescopes' resolving power. Intensity variations across its face are even harder to detect, so it usually looks like either a fuzzy white ball or a fuzzy grey ball.
The Mythbusters rarely do any repeating, and when they do they do their best to gloss over it. It's too bad - they've had a few myths that would have been perfect for doing a few trials and then some very basic stats.
The typical Mythbusters "experiment" usually goes more along the lines of discuss, design, test, fail, blow something up.
It depends on the concentration of the bleach, and the concentration (and type) of the antibiotics.
Bleach has the advantage that it's very, very unlikely any bacteria will develop a serous resistance to it. It's kind of like how you might be more resistant to a particular virus than someone else but everyone is pretty much equally vulnerable to being shot.
Somehow I doubt spraying a glass coating on your glass touch screen is going to do you much good. Probably the opposite since glass touch screens are supposed to have oil repellant coatings.
Re:bleach is great but focus on antibiotics
on
Spray-On Liquid Glass
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Bleach is the nuke that people who are serious about killing bacteria use to clean their counters with. Antibacterial cleaners are the things the amateurs at home use.
If you can satisfy the pros that they don't need to use bleach on their counters then the only remaining reason for anyone to use an antibacterial cleaner on his counter at home is superstition.
If you're a "serious gamer" are you going to be happy being locked into your device for two years? No? Are you going to be happy paying a 100%+ premium for a contract free device to cover the cell phone company tax?
Apple COULD set things up so you could do a MobileMe type sync (Address Book, Calendar) to your computer instead of having to go through MobileMe as an intermediary. That would be very nice. I have to say, since I got MobileMe I really don't sync my iPhone as much as I should, for backups, so the over the air sync actually fulfills a lot of the needs.
I can certainly understand why they don't support Bluetooth sync for anything else though.
Slashdot Mirror
Darn, there goes that excuse to the boss for ending up in Cuba.
I figured it out for another story a few months ago. Terrorists would have to detonate a nuclear weapon in a Hiroshima scale attack about every four years to bring the terrorism risk up to the fatal car accident risk.
Fat has an energy density of at least 38 MJ / kg (I'm not sure if that's how much energy your body can extract from it, or if that's the actual energy content).
The battery in my Macbook Pro is 60 Wh, which is 216 KJ. So if the person sitting in the seat next to you has even 1 kg of fat on him (not even considering the rest of what he's made of), and the person sitting next to me on the plane always has WAY more than 1 kg of fat, that's 176 times as much energy.
Your seat mate has about as much chance of exploding and bringing down the plane too.
Whoopsie. As the AC points out, there were no PPC laptops in 1992.
Besides owning a mythical laptop, your experiences (or rather your personal opinion/sketchy report of your experiences are not typical).
"But thanks for your suggestion!!! I hope you feel smug now for calling us cheap, asshole."
Did you miss the question mark? Do you feel smug now?
Anyway, I'm not sure I believe your story as written. If a company contracts with you to write some code for them, I don't see how Apple would even know, much less care, that you wrote the code and not the original company. It would be to Apple's advantage to keep your special purpose app out of the app store.
Perhaps there's more to the story that you neglected to include?
When someone can't even get their metaphor right it makes one wonder if what they say about the actual subject is any more likely to be meaningful.
It's like with a car - if you just put diesel in your tank instead of unleaded your car will go further so your argument can be made better just by adding a metaphor based on something you made up.
Right?
You're too cheap to pay the extra $100 for an enterprise development account?
Screen sharing is also included so you don't even need a third party VNC client.
It's more than that. Apple doesn't market to people who want to buy the cheapest possible computer at Wal-mart either. Both their products and marketing are squarely aimed at people who are willing to spend a bit more to get something that works a bit better. If you're an individual to whom price is the primary criterion, you're not really a potential Apple customer. If you're a business that's big enough to have an IT department to set everything up, maintain everything, and train the users, you're probably not going to care much about Apple's value adds and you're going to go for the cheap commodity computers. If you're a small business without an IT department, you're likely more interested in what Apple brings to the table.
Your point is interesting - the major market might be shifting more towards people who need systems that are easier to set up, use and maintain. Microsoft seems to be putting more effort into that market segment, but Apple has a head start on targeting those people.
You can't see out of a lighted room at night because the glass reflects the light from inside, not because the information from inside is more "effective."
As other posters have mentioned, the moon is definitely something you should go for - it's big, bright, easy to find and quite impressive through a small telescope. Plus it's got historical significance for the role it played in Galileo's observations. Jupiter is another obvious target (also with historical significance). If you have enough time between your observing opportunities you can get the kids to draw the positions of the Galilean moons at the first session and then see that they've moved at the second. Venus and Mars are also good. You should be able to make out the phase of Venus (if it's not full or new) and might be able to see some detail on Mars (if you hurry), depending on the seeing. Some bright galaxies (Andromeda) can be interesting. The great nebula in Orion is also good because, under dark skies, you can just make it out with the naked eye but a telescope can reveal some detail. The Pleiades and other clusters are also good. You could also try splitting some binaries, such as Alcor and Mizar in the Big Dipper.
This page gives some suggestions: http://irwincur.tripod.com/ten_best_obj_-_small_telescope.htm
Whatever you do, if it's visible, don't miss Saturn. Even in the smallest telescopes Saturn is visible as something that is clearly not the round star that it looks like to the naked eye. It's the first sky object I remember seeing through a telescope or binoculars and being able to see that there is structure in something that appears to the naked eye as a featureless point made an impact.
So when you buy a book you want to do more than read it once or twice? Perhaps you want to keep it for a long time? Maybe you want to have it on your shelf, as part of your permanent... collection?
The words are free. The book is not. If you want to go find it, scan it, OCR it and format it, good on you. Great if you can find someone who's willing to do all that for you. But it's not free.
It's not unreasonable to pay a small fee for someone to put together an e-book, catalog it, put together a web page so you can choose which ones you want, and, in Amazon's case, pay for the cell bandwidth to send it to you. If you want to make some beer money in the public domain publishing business I'd pay you a buck for a good, easy to acquire and use electronic version of a PD book I was interested in.
Amazon's pricing is kind of weird. If I were the kind of person that HAD to have books when they first came out I might be tempted to buy a $9.99-$14.99 ebook rather than a $25.00-$30.00 hardcover. On the other hand, I'm quite likely to pick up the hardcover anyway - those things only sell because they're basically collectors editions.
The older books priced at around $2.50 look great. Those seem to be priced just right, although the public domain classics really should be $0.99.
Then there's the weird class of Kindle books that Amazon seems to be pricing around $8.39 (CAN). In most cases they seemed to be more expensive than the equivalent paperback, as Amazon's helpful price comparison pointed out.
There's no way I'm paying more than 50% of the price of a paperback for an e-book, and that fraction goes down the older that book gets.
True, but it was the closest thing I could find on short notice. The point is that Pluto isn't very many pixels across. Also, I think when they said "best" they were actually talking about the new images, even though they didn't show a picture.
There are a few more pictures here, both from Hubble and ground telescopes: http://www.solarviews.com/eng/pluto.htm
It's not quite as simple as "the image is over-exposed." Pluto is dim and small enough to be right at the edge of telescopes' resolving power. Intensity variations across its face are even harder to detect, so it usually looks like either a fuzzy white ball or a fuzzy grey ball.
The images are quite impressive.
Considering it normally looks like this: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/02/100204-pluto-hubble-best-pictures/, those blobs of yellow and grays are pretty impressive.
Since you wasted a portion of your life with that silly, pedantic nitpick, the least I can do is correct myself.
Not just laptops but all high end personal computers. Now, do you feel better?
http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Apple-has-91-of-market-for-1000-PCs-says-NPD/1248313624
Not just laptops but all high end computers. Sure, some of the blame lies with the hardware manufacturers too but a lot of it is Microsoft.
The Mythbusters rarely do any repeating, and when they do they do their best to gloss over it. It's too bad - they've had a few myths that would have been perfect for doing a few trials and then some very basic stats.
The typical Mythbusters "experiment" usually goes more along the lines of discuss, design, test, fail, blow something up.
It depends on the concentration of the bleach, and the concentration (and type) of the antibiotics.
Bleach has the advantage that it's very, very unlikely any bacteria will develop a serous resistance to it. It's kind of like how you might be more resistant to a particular virus than someone else but everyone is pretty much equally vulnerable to being shot.
Somehow I doubt spraying a glass coating on your glass touch screen is going to do you much good. Probably the opposite since glass touch screens are supposed to have oil repellant coatings.
Bleach is the nuke that people who are serious about killing bacteria use to clean their counters with. Antibacterial cleaners are the things the amateurs at home use.
If you can satisfy the pros that they don't need to use bleach on their counters then the only remaining reason for anyone to use an antibacterial cleaner on his counter at home is superstition.
There's also the issue of contracts.
If you're a "serious gamer" are you going to be happy being locked into your device for two years? No? Are you going to be happy paying a 100%+ premium for a contract free device to cover the cell phone company tax?
The same reason you're going to be able to buy an iPad for 30% less than an iPhone costs, and you can buy an iPod Touch for less than half the price.
As soon as you involve a telecom company things suddenly get really expensive.
Apple COULD set things up so you could do a MobileMe type sync (Address Book, Calendar) to your computer instead of having to go through MobileMe as an intermediary. That would be very nice. I have to say, since I got MobileMe I really don't sync my iPhone as much as I should, for backups, so the over the air sync actually fulfills a lot of the needs.
I can certainly understand why they don't support Bluetooth sync for anything else though.