On a microscopic level (one person, one company, one country's economy...) the SNR is pretty bad. But it would be interesting to see whether the data fits patterns long noticed by civilizations. The Chinese "Wealth never survives three generations" and similar have a grain of truth. The causes and effects of prosperity are predictable:
Hard work and careful use of resources leads to wealth in the grandfather's generation
This wealth is handed down to the next generation who enjoy comfort without the hard work.
By the third generation, the wealth is gone. Grandchildren face poverty and war unless they paid more attention to their grandparent's wisdom than their parent's examples.
It may be a coincidence that the excess which led to this Great Recession came only after the memories of the Great Depression faded as those who came of age during that time died or were no longer listened to.
How about a "light bulb moment", there are many parallels between Thomas Edison's 1879 refinement of a carbon filament electric light patented by Canadians Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans in 1874. And this was by no means the first carbon based electric light, Humphrey Davy had produced a working carbon arc light in 1807 and if we talk about electric arc lights, the mercury arc fluorescent light, predecessor to modern compact fluorescent (CF) lights was demonstrated by AE Becquerel in 1867 and so on back to kerosene, whale oil and prehistoric vegetable oil lamps.
"Light bulb" moment is a myth which is marketed in a land that wants us to believe that we are all self-reliant individuals and that we don't need to look to the past or stand on the shoulders of giants. James Burke's Connections presents this more accurate view of technological history that we should be teaching our children.
A type of dung beetle known as the scarab beetle was sacred to the ancient Egyptians. They saw it's path as it rolled a ball of dung across the earth as an earthly manifestation of the Sun god Ra's path across the sky. Now we know there was a grain of truth in this belief.
Captain James T. Kirk quoted English poet Jonathan Masefield, "All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by." Scarab beetle celestial navigation was far beyond this with their, "All I ask is a ball of dung and a galaxy to steer her by."
McDonalds, Starbucks, the local GasNSip and Grandma all have their Wifi secured with a minimum of WPA/WPA2, often with some kind of MAC filtering, encrypted traffic and IP address management. Why did MIT, one of the most prestigious technology campuses in the world, lack even some of the simplest internet security models? Is MIT unable to find qualified technical staff as McDonalds and Starbucks have?
Is it not likely that MIT's students could sue for damage to their computers caused by internal and external abuse of such a tin-can and string network infrastructure?
JSTOR would not exist were it not for tax-funded public research. Neither would many of the other for-profit journals. Public (FBI...) resources are already used to defend the intellectual property of large private corporations. Should MIT also play the role of a tax-funded security force for private corporations? If so, does MIT also spend equivalent resources to protect the intellectual property of students and staff? How does MIT track public money used to support private ventures?
I ordered mine from Farnell in August hoping it would arrive in time for the mid-winter hacking season and it arrived on my doorstep the very next day. This in Ireland, a place most Amazon and UK Ebay sellers won't ship to because of the random and untrackable variations in its postal system, no post codes and addresses such as "O'Leary's Farm, County Donegal."
IMHO the reason many Slashdotters are hostile to the Pi is that many Slashdotters are based in the US, a country that hasn't been high on the Pi's priority list. Keep in mind that while the Raspberry Pi is great for us grown-up hackers, it was intended primarily for school kids in the UK. So get to the back of the queue/line or build your own.
(Looks around the cube farm at all the gray and white hair in one of the largest financial institutions in the U.S.) Wow, looks like we gotta fire a whole bunch of people with 30+ years of experience then.
Clearly, this clown has never had to maintain a complex application with 4 or 5 9s uptime requirements. Nor has this idiot ever had to keep said application in compliance with a dozen different regulatory regimes. Or tried to figure out how he was going to interface his brand new, spiffy mobile Web 3.0 application with other complex applications that may have been written before he was born!
Trust me. There isn't a large bank anywhere in the world that doesn't value its experienced people. When you have to protect your customers' life savings, you absolutely do NOT want a team of nothing but young hard chargers. You need us old timers to look out for the pot-holes we stepped in a long time ago so you don't see your company's name splashed all over the 5:30 national news.
Or as one the youngest (at 55) of the best software guys I ever worked with put it, "Software Engineering is a circus, everyone likes to make a big song and dance show, but in the end someone has to clean up after the elephants." So while that young hotshot may work long hours and implement a hundred different versions of AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean and the like all in one codebase, we'll always need that old FORTRAN-trained duffer to test it, fix it and refactor it so that it's readable. And with retirement less than 15 years away, we don't need to obfuscate our work for additional job security. Hotshots are wonderful for young start-up companies and they're an excellent part of the mix in any good company, but if you want your company to last longer than pets.com and napster, you'd better look at the long term and for that there is nothing better than experience.
You also need us old timers around to teach the youngsters that working 60+ hours a week needs to be the exception, not the rule. It's been shown time and again that at that point, you're beyond the point of diminishing returns. The mistakes made when people are exhausted from overwork will require so much re-work that the pace simply isn't worth it at least 80% of the time.
If Ferose were smart enough to look beyond this week's stock price, he might understand that one of the reasons IT has shifted to his part of the world has to do with the demographics of a high birthrate, there are many many people in that 18-25 age range who will put up with anything, work long hours, have no family obligations, no need for life in the work/life balance. But that all of these countries are going through demographic changes which will make it nearly impossible to continue to take advantage of the "long tail"/ race to the bottom wage that was once made possible by a high birthrate. This change has already happened in China and will soon take place in other parts of the world. Countries and companies with mandatory retirement ages of 70 and lower will be at a significant disadvantage.
After a 38 year gap, parts of the continental US finally experience a total eclipse in 2017. Americans have 5 years to get this right. 5 years to prove we've learned something about eye safety since 1979. Is it so difficult?
- Always use eye protection which was designed and certified to be safe for viewing the sun. Do not use sunglasses, floppy disks, Kodachrome film, CDRoms, DVDs, or Pop Tart foil. If you can't afford the $5-15 eclipse shades, go inside and watch it on cable TV. (keep in mind that your cable bill will amount to over $400,000 between now and the next time a total solar eclipse comes to your neighborhood.*)
- From the article "Even those who wore solar eclipse glasses and stared too closely at the intense rays are at risk." I'm not sure what this statement was based on, but do not look through an unfiltered telescope, binoculars or any other optical device while using eclipse shades which were designed for naked eye viewing.
- If you do look through a filtered telescope, make sure the filter was designed for the telescope and designed for solar viewing and is mounted firmly onto the objective (front) of the telescope.
- If you are in the narrow path of the total eclipse (if you're not sure, you're probably not), you have a precious few seconds to take off your eclipse shades during totality. But then put them on immediately when the diamond ring appears (if you'r not sure, put it on)
* If you live in Carbondale Illinois, you don't have to wait 300 years for your next Total Solar eclipse. Save your eclipse glasses and reuse them in 2021.
"Twitter has now moved its entire search stack from Ruby-on-Rails to Java.
That's a big shift. Twitter moved its back end message queue from Ruby to Scala, a Java platform in the 2008-2009 time frame. The move was attributed to issues with reliability on the back-end.
This latest move makes the shift pretty much complete. At Twitter, Ruby is out of the picture."
Hey if they can make the world's largest social network out of PHP, spit and bailing wire, I don't think technology matters as much as we wish it did. A frighteningly large percentage of business logic still runs on Visual BASIC and Cobol.
I think it is more the lack of skills and that you will probably need some time with your nose in a manual to set up the rails environment to run a node.
Ah yes, just throw more nodes at your unreliable and resource-hungry server code.
Careful, I think there are several patents on that.
The killer app for the iPhone was a decent touch-screen web browser and a very stable OS, neither was available on the S60 devices. It also shifted away the phone app from being the centerpiece to just being another app amongst others...
Wait a minute, the iPhone can be used as a PHONE? Who knew? Someone tell Apple, maybe they can fit a proper antenna into the iPhone so that users can make a call without climbing up the nearest cell phone tower and looping tin foil between their beloved iPhone and the transponder.
Seriously, I've tried to switch to iPhone and Android. Both are pretty neat, have fun applications, great games but when I'm looking for a durable, water-resistant, reliable device to be used as a phone, send text or even write a multi paragraph email or blog entry that dsnt snd lke ths, give me my 2006 E61. S60 runs circles around the iPhone and Android for these applications. It's a pity that Nokia couldn't grow market share into the monopoly-prone U.S. market.
In Lord of the Rings, the core of evil is external. In Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy, the evil dwells within, a far more realistic and disturbing worldview.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro doesn't fit the profile of most science fiction, but it highlights the reality that humans are quick to dismiss the humanity of anyone who is different. This is the core of racism, ageism, sexism which will most certainly be extended to other sentient life.
I think it was the Guardians by John Christopher which stuck with me from childhood, the idea that the protagonist discovers that others are the builders and that they themselves are eaters of the world. It fits well into all dual mode societies where some are the poor producers and others are the wealthy consumers. H.G. Wells "The Time Machine" takes this relationship thousands of years into the future where it reaches its logical conclusion of two species of humans.
Neither of these books has an adequate Hollywood adaptation but our vision of Frankenstein's monster has been distorted through theater and cinema into something which barely resembles Mary Shelly's novel. The lesson that the evil in Frankenstein's creation is our own hatred and predjudices reflected in what began as a restored an innocent life was completely lost.
Someone at Apple noticed that signing on to toothless EPEAT was free greenwashing. The 15" Retina MacBook gets a gold rating and 5/5 points in "Design for Enf of life." Look at the criteria and you'll see how Apple is trying to pull the wool over the eyes of its customers. RAM soldered to the motherboard, hard drive with a proprietary connector, battery and display glued in... yeah MacBooks are designed for end of life alright!
Or are iPhone owners just more prone to hitting their phones with baseball bats, removing internal antenna cables and flushing their phones down the toilet?
Ray Bradbury wrote "All summer in a day", the story of prejudice on Venus where an earthling's Venus-born schoolmates no longer believe in the sun. In a reflection of the rare beauty of a total solar eclipse, or the rarer phenomena of a Venus the sun only appears once every 7 years on Bradbury's Venus. Mr. Bradbury might have appreciated that his last day on earth coincided with a rare alignment between Earth, the Sun and Venus where...
No one in the class could remember a time when there wasn't rain.
“Ready?"
"Ready."
"Now?"
"Soon."
"Do the scientists really know? Will it happen today, will it?"
"Look, look; see for yourself!"
The children pressed to each other like so many roses, so many weeds, intermixed, peering out for a look at the hidden sun.
It rained.
It had been raining for seven years; thousand upon thousands of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands. A thousand forests had been crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again. And this was the way life was forever on the planet Venus, and this was the schoolroom of the children of the rocket men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives.
"It's stopping, it's stopping!"
"Yes, yes!"
Fellow midwesterner Mark Twain famously wrote: "I came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'"
Bradbury wasn't as sardonic as Twain. He preferred walking to driving, but this preference raised suspicions of cops in Waukegan Illinois. He turned his confrontations into Fahrenheit 451. As one of the most prolific writers in the world, he should be remembered for his love of language and life. Ray has inspired millions of writers and scientists with his prolific writing and love for language and life. And if you can read one of his first short stories, "The Lake" without shedding a tear over how short our time is on this planet... I don't know.
"In my later years I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I've worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating." -- Ray Bradbury (1920-2012 R.I.P.)
Of course you need to waterproof the LED leads, but the LEDs themselves should be outside of the vehicle. Much better match between the high refractive index of the water and the high refractive index of the LED means more light gets out into the water. It also allows you to place the LEDs far enough from the camera that you don't get so much "red eye" from your fish, better shadow definition and and less backscatter from suspended particles in the water.
You should also understand that manufacturers *want* to confuse you...
More specifically, they want to force their competitors off the shelf. You ever wonder why (especially in the US) the shelves are full of variations on the same product, coke zero, diet coke, diet cherry coke, cherry coke and coke...; crest, whitening crest, crest for sensitive teeth, kids crest, mint crest... The reality is that as with flavored sugar water, toothpaste, soap, cleaning products and a variety of other "commodotized" consumables, manufacturers are just trying to take up as much shelf space as possible by making a variety of products with insignificant differences.
The difference between a $800 ASUS and a $3000 Macbook is 99% brand, beauty and marketing, 1% everything else. When I found out that my expensive 1999 Powerbook used the same cheap LG DVD drive as the cheapest ACER laptop, I was mildly disappointed. And there is less do differentiate laptops now than there was then. I like ASUS because they underclock some of their processors but this one had a minor touchpad defect. I've seen the exact same defect in IBM, Toshiba and ACER laptops.
I'd steer far away from the hot running "business class" laptops with fast processors and graphics chips, I've seen those overheat... Sony, Apple and ACER seem to be especially prone to overheating.
The U.S. applied these "anti dumping" tariffs on Chinese solar panels on the same day Saudi Arabia announced plans for a massive dump of oil to drive down prices. Isn't it obvious that Mideast oil dumps have done far more harm to U.S. alternative energy industry, including solar, than a handful of fledgling Chinese photovoltaic companies ever did?
With the exception of a few wildcat oil well companies in the late 90s, the U.S. has never complained of mideast oil dumping. And the U.S. actually complains when China stops dumping Rare Earths. Bush era steel tariffs might have saved a handful of remaining domestic steel jobs at the cost of the thousands of jobs lost with the near demise of the domestic auto industry. 1980s and 90s tariffs on Chinese and Japanese chips did nothing but move manufacturing to Philippines and Central America and Solar tariffs will cost thousands of U.S. jobs by denying U.S. consumers and corporations access to inexpensive clean energy the rest of the world will have. Looking at the history of U.S. WTO trade policy, you'd swear that it was being dictated by policies designed to crush our economy and continue our addiction to oil.
I've been paying > $7 for about 10 years but I hardly ever drive. Well-stocked stores and public transport are within walking distance for most Europeans. Has anyone calculated the average distance between an American and a rail line? How about the average distance between an american and their workplace or grocer. Beyond a few exceptions, DC, NYC, SF and a couple of other colonial cities, U.S. cities were laid out when oil was cheap and readily available. Federal policies propped up the price of land while hiding the true cost of oil which caused U.S. cities to sprawl out, especially in the past two decades. Boutique public transport is absolutely right, investment in current modes of public transport will help a few poor people move within wealthy districts, but it will do nothing for the vast majority of Americans. We've moved beyond the 19th century America political environmentalists are designing for. Given the current layout of the U.S. the options should be:
Telecommute, whenever and wherever possible. There should be government subsidies and tax breaks to get it started so that 'factory-whistle' mindset companies will be forced into seeing that this is a no-brainer.
Smart car/pod trains (vehicles which use existing roads, use GPS + radar to maintain an aerodynamically efficient distance from the lead vehicles, detach would be signaled to the lead car so that separation.
Redesign an economic system to price in the cost of oil, its environmental cleanup and related defense. There is absolutely no way a farmer half way around the world should be able to sell a locally produced agricultural product for less than the local farmer, regardless of labor costs and currency fluctuation.
Change zoning laws so that modern relatively clean businesses and workplaces aren't miles away from residential areas.
Move to a decentralized power generation infrastructure, encourage home heat+electric co-generation which can exceed 90% efficiency
When the Chinese are able to sell solar panels for 1/5th the cost of domestic ones or Brazilians are able to sell ethanol for 1/2 the cost of locally produced corn-ethanol, don't tell them to get lost. Don't bow to ADM and local business lobbies, thank them and build new industries based on this.
Repair should have an economic advantage over disposal and reimport. The past 30 years have been an economic hiccup caused by mutually disfunctional codependent relationships between the U.S. and its trading partners. Products and produce should come from as near to the consumer as possible.
Markus Kayser's solar sintering 3D printer shows what is possible when you use ingenuity, technology and two abundant desert resources, sunlight and sand. Mr. Kayser says he is already working with Kohler on the possibility of using solar powered, sand fed replicators like his to make sanitation products such as toilets and plumbing.
Aluminum, plastic and paper pennies might sound like good ideas now, but all are based on resources which are likely to become more valuable in time. What we need is a penny made out of Nuclear waste, specifically the Iodine-131 isotope. Here's why:
It quite literally 'burns a hole in your pocket' and so would stimulate spending.
It would discourage hoarding (you don't want to keep gamma emitters under your mattress)
It would encourage billionaires to quickly spread their wealth amongst the peons.
Since I-131 has an 8 day half-life, the Fed can keep printing it and giving it to banks and billionaires but by time it trickles down to you or me it will have disappeared!
It is the perfect coin for the economy we've been working towards! Come on Obama, make it so!
P.S. The U.S. and E.U. are in a head to head battle for who can print money the fastest, but I predict that China will win this race to the bottom. I have 2 beautifully designed paper Yuan notes, each worth 0.2 cents. Beat that Mr. Bernanke!
Slashdot Mirror
It may be a coincidence that the excess which led to this Great Recession came only after the memories of the Great Depression faded as those who came of age during that time died or were no longer listened to.
How about a "light bulb moment", there are many parallels between Thomas Edison's 1879 refinement of a carbon filament electric light patented by Canadians Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans in 1874. And this was by no means the first carbon based electric light, Humphrey Davy had produced a working carbon arc light in 1807 and if we talk about electric arc lights, the mercury arc fluorescent light, predecessor to modern compact fluorescent (CF) lights was demonstrated by AE Becquerel in 1867 and so on back to kerosene, whale oil and prehistoric vegetable oil lamps.
"Light bulb" moment is a myth which is marketed in a land that wants us to believe that we are all self-reliant individuals and that we don't need to look to the past or stand on the shoulders of giants. James Burke's Connections presents this more accurate view of technological history that we should be teaching our children.
A type of dung beetle known as the scarab beetle was sacred to the ancient Egyptians. They saw it's path as it rolled a ball of dung across the earth as an earthly manifestation of the Sun god Ra's path across the sky. Now we know there was a grain of truth in this belief.
Captain James T. Kirk quoted English poet Jonathan Masefield, "All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by." Scarab beetle celestial navigation was far beyond this with their, "All I ask is a ball of dung and a galaxy to steer her by."
McDonalds, Starbucks, the local GasNSip and Grandma all have their Wifi secured with a minimum of WPA/WPA2, often with some kind of MAC filtering, encrypted traffic and IP address management. Why did MIT, one of the most prestigious technology campuses in the world, lack even some of the simplest internet security models? Is MIT unable to find qualified technical staff as McDonalds and Starbucks have? Is it not likely that MIT's students could sue for damage to their computers caused by internal and external abuse of such a tin-can and string network infrastructure?
JSTOR would not exist were it not for tax-funded public research. Neither would many of the other for-profit journals. Public (FBI...) resources are already used to defend the intellectual property of large private corporations. Should MIT also play the role of a tax-funded security force for private corporations? If so, does MIT also spend equivalent resources to protect the intellectual property of students and staff? How does MIT track public money used to support private ventures?
What dividend should taxpayers expect when publically-funded funded MIT research is handed to private multinational companies?
What steps has MIT taken to assure that publically funded research is published to the taxpaying public?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of Betamax tapes. Analog of course.
Farnell seem perfectly competent to me,
I ordered mine from Farnell in August hoping it would arrive in time for the mid-winter hacking season and it arrived on my doorstep the very next day. This in Ireland, a place most Amazon and UK Ebay sellers won't ship to because of the random and untrackable variations in its postal system, no post codes and addresses such as "O'Leary's Farm, County Donegal."
IMHO the reason many Slashdotters are hostile to the Pi is that many Slashdotters are based in the US, a country that hasn't been high on the Pi's priority list. Keep in mind that while the Raspberry Pi is great for us grown-up hackers, it was intended primarily for school kids in the UK. So get to the back of the queue/line or build your own.
(Looks around the cube farm at all the gray and white hair in one of the largest financial institutions in the U.S.) Wow, looks like we gotta fire a whole bunch of people with 30+ years of experience then.
Clearly, this clown has never had to maintain a complex application with 4 or 5 9s uptime requirements. Nor has this idiot ever had to keep said application in compliance with a dozen different regulatory regimes. Or tried to figure out how he was going to interface his brand new, spiffy mobile Web 3.0 application with other complex applications that may have been written before he was born!
Trust me. There isn't a large bank anywhere in the world that doesn't value its experienced people. When you have to protect your customers' life savings, you absolutely do NOT want a team of nothing but young hard chargers. You need us old timers to look out for the pot-holes we stepped in a long time ago so you don't see your company's name splashed all over the 5:30 national news.
Or as one the youngest (at 55) of the best software guys I ever worked with put it, "Software Engineering is a circus, everyone likes to make a big song and dance show, but in the end someone has to clean up after the elephants." So while that young hotshot may work long hours and implement a hundred different versions of AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean and the like all in one codebase, we'll always need that old FORTRAN-trained duffer to test it, fix it and refactor it so that it's readable. And with retirement less than 15 years away, we don't need to obfuscate our work for additional job security. Hotshots are wonderful for young start-up companies and they're an excellent part of the mix in any good company, but if you want your company to last longer than pets.com and napster, you'd better look at the long term and for that there is nothing better than experience.
You also need us old timers around to teach the youngsters that working 60+ hours a week needs to be the exception, not the rule. It's been shown time and again that at that point, you're beyond the point of diminishing returns. The mistakes made when people are exhausted from overwork will require so much re-work that the pace simply isn't worth it at least 80% of the time.
If Ferose were smart enough to look beyond this week's stock price, he might understand that one of the reasons IT has shifted to his part of the world has to do with the demographics of a high birthrate, there are many many people in that 18-25 age range who will put up with anything, work long hours, have no family obligations, no need for life in the work/life balance. But that all of these countries are going through demographic changes which will make it nearly impossible to continue to take advantage of the "long tail"/ race to the bottom wage that was once made possible by a high birthrate. This change has already happened in China and will soon take place in other parts of the world. Countries and companies with mandatory retirement ages of 70 and lower will be at a significant disadvantage.
* If you live in Carbondale Illinois, you don't have to wait 300 years for your next Total Solar eclipse. Save your eclipse glasses and reuse them in 2021.
Bearing in mind the sites that use Ruby I don't think so.
Since Twitter is the Ruby poster-child, how about Once Again, Twitter Drops Ruby for Java:
"Twitter has now moved its entire search stack from Ruby-on-Rails to Java.
That's a big shift. Twitter moved its back end message queue from Ruby to Scala, a Java platform in the 2008-2009 time frame. The move was attributed to issues with reliability on the back-end.
This latest move makes the shift pretty much complete. At Twitter, Ruby is out of the picture."
Hey if they can make the world's largest social network out of PHP, spit and bailing wire, I don't think technology matters as much as we wish it did. A frighteningly large percentage of business logic still runs on Visual BASIC and Cobol.
I think it is more the lack of skills and that you will probably need some time with your nose in a manual to set up the rails environment to run a node.
Ah yes, just throw more nodes at your unreliable and resource-hungry server code.
Careful, I think there are several patents on that.
The killer app for the iPhone was a decent touch-screen web browser and a very stable OS, neither was available on the S60 devices. It also shifted away the phone app from being the centerpiece to just being another app amongst others...
Wait a minute, the iPhone can be used as a PHONE? Who knew? Someone tell Apple, maybe they can fit a proper antenna into the iPhone so that users can make a call without climbing up the nearest cell phone tower and looping tin foil between their beloved iPhone and the transponder.
Seriously, I've tried to switch to iPhone and Android. Both are pretty neat, have fun applications, great games but when I'm looking for a durable, water-resistant, reliable device to be used as a phone, send text or even write a multi paragraph email or blog entry that dsnt snd lke ths, give me my 2006 E61. S60 runs circles around the iPhone and Android for these applications. It's a pity that Nokia couldn't grow market share into the monopoly-prone U.S. market.
In Lord of the Rings, the core of evil is external. In Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy, the evil dwells within, a far more realistic and disturbing worldview.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro doesn't fit the profile of most science fiction, but it highlights the reality that humans are quick to dismiss the humanity of anyone who is different. This is the core of racism, ageism, sexism which will most certainly be extended to other sentient life. I think it was the Guardians by John Christopher which stuck with me from childhood, the idea that the protagonist discovers that others are the builders and that they themselves are eaters of the world. It fits well into all dual mode societies where some are the poor producers and others are the wealthy consumers. H.G. Wells "The Time Machine" takes this relationship thousands of years into the future where it reaches its logical conclusion of two species of humans. Neither of these books has an adequate Hollywood adaptation but our vision of Frankenstein's monster has been distorted through theater and cinema into something which barely resembles Mary Shelly's novel. The lesson that the evil in Frankenstein's creation is our own hatred and predjudices reflected in what began as a restored an innocent life was completely lost.
Someone at Apple noticed that signing on to toothless EPEAT was free greenwashing. The 15" Retina MacBook gets a gold rating and 5/5 points in "Design for Enf of life." Look at the criteria and you'll see how Apple is trying to pull the wool over the eyes of its customers. RAM soldered to the motherboard, hard drive with a proprietary connector, battery and display glued in... yeah MacBooks are designed for end of life alright!
In my experience Apple gear is no more nor less likely to break than other good-quality stuff.
Are you sure about that?
Or are iPhone owners just more prone to hitting their phones with baseball bats, removing internal antenna cables and flushing their phones down the toilet?
Ray Bradbury wrote "All summer in a day", the story of prejudice on Venus where an earthling's Venus-born schoolmates no longer believe in the sun. In a reflection of the rare beauty of a total solar eclipse, or the rarer phenomena of a Venus the sun only appears once every 7 years on Bradbury's Venus. Mr. Bradbury might have appreciated that his last day on earth coincided with a rare alignment between Earth, the Sun and Venus where...
No one in the class could remember a time when there wasn't rain.
“Ready?"
"Ready."
"Now?"
"Soon."
"Do the scientists really know? Will it happen today, will it?"
"Look, look; see for yourself!"
The children pressed to each other like so many roses, so many weeds, intermixed, peering out for a look at the hidden sun.
It rained.
It had been raining for seven years; thousand upon thousands of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands. A thousand forests had been crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again. And this was the way life was forever on the planet Venus, and this was the schoolroom of the children of the rocket men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives.
"It's stopping, it's stopping!"
"Yes, yes!"
Fellow midwesterner Mark Twain famously wrote: "I came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'"
Bradbury wasn't as sardonic as Twain. He preferred walking to driving, but this preference raised suspicions of cops in Waukegan Illinois. He turned his confrontations into Fahrenheit 451. As one of the most prolific writers in the world, he should be remembered for his love of language and life. Ray has inspired millions of writers and scientists with his prolific writing and love for language and life. And if you can read one of his first short stories, "The Lake" without shedding a tear over how short our time is on this planet... I don't know.
"In my later years I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I've worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating." -- Ray Bradbury (1920-2012 R.I.P.)
Of course you need to waterproof the LED leads, but the LEDs themselves should be outside of the vehicle. Much better match between the high refractive index of the water and the high refractive index of the LED means more light gets out into the water. It also allows you to place the LEDs far enough from the camera that you don't get so much "red eye" from your fish, better shadow definition and and less backscatter from suspended particles in the water.
You should also understand that manufacturers *want* to confuse you...
More specifically, they want to force their competitors off the shelf. You ever wonder why (especially in the US) the shelves are full of variations on the same product, coke zero, diet coke, diet cherry coke, cherry coke and coke...; crest, whitening crest, crest for sensitive teeth, kids crest, mint crest... The reality is that as with flavored sugar water, toothpaste, soap, cleaning products and a variety of other "commodotized" consumables, manufacturers are just trying to take up as much shelf space as possible by making a variety of products with insignificant differences. The difference between a $800 ASUS and a $3000 Macbook is 99% brand, beauty and marketing, 1% everything else. When I found out that my expensive 1999 Powerbook used the same cheap LG DVD drive as the cheapest ACER laptop, I was mildly disappointed. And there is less do differentiate laptops now than there was then. I like ASUS because they underclock some of their processors but this one had a minor touchpad defect. I've seen the exact same defect in IBM, Toshiba and ACER laptops. I'd steer far away from the hot running "business class" laptops with fast processors and graphics chips, I've seen those overheat... Sony, Apple and ACER seem to be especially prone to overheating.
I'd use a Bose-Einstein condensate, with (light) refractive indexes between 1X10^6 and infinity
The U.S. applied these "anti dumping" tariffs on Chinese solar panels on the same day Saudi Arabia announced plans for a massive dump of oil to drive down prices. Isn't it obvious that Mideast oil dumps have done far more harm to U.S. alternative energy industry, including solar, than a handful of fledgling Chinese photovoltaic companies ever did?
With the exception of a few wildcat oil well companies in the late 90s, the U.S. has never complained of mideast oil dumping. And the U.S. actually complains when China stops dumping Rare Earths. Bush era steel tariffs might have saved a handful of remaining domestic steel jobs at the cost of the thousands of jobs lost with the near demise of the domestic auto industry. 1980s and 90s tariffs on Chinese and Japanese chips did nothing but move manufacturing to Philippines and Central America and Solar tariffs will cost thousands of U.S. jobs by denying U.S. consumers and corporations access to inexpensive clean energy the rest of the world will have. Looking at the history of U.S. WTO trade policy, you'd swear that it was being dictated by policies designed to crush our economy and continue our addiction to oil.
Markus Kayser's solar sintering 3D printer shows what is possible when you use ingenuity, technology and two abundant desert resources, sunlight and sand. Mr. Kayser says he is already working with Kohler on the possibility of using solar powered, sand fed replicators like his to make sanitation products such as toilets and plumbing.
It is the perfect coin for the economy we've been working towards! Come on Obama, make it so!
P.S. The U.S. and E.U. are in a head to head battle for who can print money the fastest, but I predict that China will win this race to the bottom. I have 2 beautifully designed paper Yuan notes, each worth 0.2 cents. Beat that Mr. Bernanke!