I usually prefer Future Shop over Best Buy (I know they're owned by the same company). My in-store experiences are about the same--FS staff are commissioned, but I've never felt harassed by them, and they almost never push the extended warranty after I say no the first time (if they do, I'll take the info home and "think about adding it" during the 30 day window). Actually a few times they were nowhere to be found when I *wanted* help looking for something.
It's partly because I don't like the Best Buy website at all. Compared to the FS website, the BB site is a user interface design disaster.
Mod up. This is an annoyance I have with National Geographic, too.
In any article referencing primary sources, the measurements used in that source should be listed first, with "local" units in brackets afterwards.
E.g. "A huge Brachiosaur, once thought to weigh 80,000 kg (176,370 pounds), is now believed to have weighed 23,000 kg (50,706 pounds)."
Discovery.com could have done worse, by only giving the imperial measurement *and* rounding them to the nearest 1000 pounds without saying "approximately," since that's mis-representing the primary source--doesn't matter if the difference is "only" 0.2 to 1.4%, or that the source is an estimate anyway.
Because the original weights were in kilograms (80,000kg and 23,000kg respectively), and Discovery helpfully converted to the Imperial system for its American audience without properly sourcing the original figures.
Hey Genius. Chinese is a nationality, not an ethnicity, culture, or religion. China has about 20 ethnic groups with populations over 1 million in China.
"Chinese" is not merely a nationality, like American or Canadian. I wasn't born in China, I have cultural but no emotional ties to it. My parents and immediate relatives, being from Hong Kong, were not Chinese nationals either, but are still Chinese, not Hongkongers or Cantonese.
In the biological sciences, it's even easier. I've known a number of profs in bio fields who've commented that a major task in their introductory courses is eliminating the term "purpose" from their students' vocabularies. It's well understood among biologists that use of this word is a very good tipoff that the speaker/writer has little or no understanding of modern biology. Sometimes other phrasing will be used. Thus, a student may explain that giraffes grow long necks "in order to" reach the leaves of trees. This wording also shows that the speaker doesn't understand what's going on. Giraffes don't knowingly grow long necks for any purpose, any more than humans knowingly grow short necks. Neck length is determined by DNA, which is an unknowing, unthinking organic polymer, and can't be modified by intent or purpose.
Although I agree this applies to biology in general, "purpose" is definitely part of genetically engineered organisms, since their DNA has been directly altered by knowing, thinking humans, and not evolution. Monsanto crops did not inherit a natural mutation from their parent plant.
One, she really was hopelessly ignorant and clueless about it. Sadly this isn't rare enough.
The second: she might have been putting the question to you for the benefit of her children, who might wonder the exact same thing at their age (sounds like the older child was 10-ish?), so they could hear the answer from an authority on the matter. Just accepting your word isn't exactly good science, of course, and you could explain the physics behind it if you want, but keep it simple for the pre-teen crowd.
Obviously you're in a better position to say which she was, but assuming this wasn't a school trip, the parent at least had taken them to a museum at all, instead of leaving them in front of a TV.
Yes, it was half of what a full-blown computer could do, but obviously consumers have decreed it the right half.
And while some claim the iPad isn't a "real" productivity environment so it shouldn't be considered in the same league as a desktop/laptop, a TV with PVR, game console, internet box, etc, is almost exclusively a content consumption or gaming device anyway, which iOS excels at. A full-blown Apple TV can't be dismissed as "just a toy" because it doesn't have a full office suite.
A small prediction: If Apple does release a full-blown TV, it will not have HDMI ports, but Thunderbolt ports instead, which at 2x 10 Gbps channels has almost twice the bitrate of HDMI (10.2 Gbps) and might support daisy-chaining better than HDMI. This is additional cost to the end user, but Apple's well known for leaving off ports to save space or costs, and requiring pricey adapters.
While I agree with you in principle, the problem is the copyright special interest groups often uses extremist, raving lunatic language too.
Except they are backed by millions of dollars, have PR agencies, and have the ear of politicians (or are politicians, in the example where a Conservative Canadian MP called backers of fair copyright "radical extremists").
It also implies the possibility that the total number of criminals who decided to conceal carry went up because it was now legal to do so, whereas before they might only feel comfortable doing so with a knife (not quite logical, but they say criminals aren't always the sharpest tool in the shed).
Give it time. The student protests in Montreal, Quebec are continuing, there hasn't been such a prolonged and significant turnout at protests in years. It was originally over rising tuition fees, which most of the rest of Canada roll their eyes at because Quebec has the lowest average tuition of all provinces--in some cases 50% less. OTOH, Quebec taxes are among the highest, so the two kind of balanced out until now.
And so the student protests have morphed to also protest against Law 78, and student groups in other provinces are starting to demonstrate too, but nowhere near the level or intensity of those in Quebec.
I don't support either side in this, but have to hand it to Quebec--the French have a lot more guts than English Canada in standing up for their rights (possibly because they've been standing up to Canada for decades), and aren't as afraid to put themselves on the line to do it.
as per the typical liberal stance there can be no grey areas so you flamed him without thinking.
Although MickeyTheIdiot lives up to his name, "no grey areas" is the domain of extremists of any ideology, and conservatives have no shortage of those either.
In the last two Canadian elections, our national broadcaster, CBC, put up a "political compass" online survey tool that worked with a similar idea to your stemtest. Instead of the flawed, overly-simplistic left-right wing, they use the more modern (and less-flawed) two-axis grid.
Like your friends, a lot people who took it were placed in a different party than they expected. I don't know if your friends did this, but the comments left on the compass tool accused the producers of rigging it so results more often said the more left-centrist party (which the right-wing often accuses CBC of supporting).
Although I wouldn't call this survey scientific nor comprehensive enough (the average user won't sit through 100 questions), I don't know why this was at all a surprise; many people support parts of both left and right wing ideologies, so those people very likely average out with the most moderate of the major parties.
The first thing I thought as soon as I read the first sentence was that the Olympic authorities would be all over them. The second was seeing that the submitter had also thought the same thing.
Just another indication of how badly the Olympics have been corrupted--and how they in turn corrupt the IP laws of host countries like a cancer.
My wife had a Dell. It worked fine until the battery died and needed replacing. Of course it is a proprietary Dell battery and costs $$$$.
I don't like Dells myself, but I don't understand the complaint about them being proprietary Dell and expensive. Don't *all* laptops use proprietary batteries? Or do you mean the battery is specific to this one Dell model?
An Apple-made battery for my 2006 13" Macbook costs $130. Thankfully I got mine replaced free over a year after the 3-year Applecare extended warranty ended, as the old one was bulging badly.
Glad I'm not the only geek guy who discovered dancing as a great social activity. For me it was salsa and more recently blues and swing. All are great for being around and interacting with women, and without a whole lot of talking either (while dancing anyway--I'm still working on follow-up *after* a dance...).
And although I'd have a panic attack doing public speaking and am still anxious talking one-on-one (really great during a date [rolleyes]), I realized recently don't have (much of) a problem partner dancing, by ourselves, in front of dozens of people. Hell, the first warm day this year, we even took it outside onto a downtown sidewalk.
All this in turn is somewhat helping to get over social anxiety and self-confidence issues in general, as it finally starts sinking in that I *am* good at something social, and even *better* than all the poor schmucks sitting at the tables just watching women dance, instead of dancing with them.
We have one chance now, in the 21st century, one window to get to space for real. If we don't do it now it is a downward spiral, and we won't have the resources from this planet to try industrialising again, so we will all hit the wall again, and slowly we'll poison everything, in our millions of warring tribes, and even nature won't really survive.
Either we get off this planet and figure out how to grab our materials from the lifeless solar system, or we slowly perish in a downward spiral of crises, violence, competition, wars, pollution and global extinction, taking this garden of nature down with us.
Totally agree. I've said this from a different perspective: If there were a global war that takes us back to the early industrial age, and before we've learned how to be self-sufficient in space, humans will be doomed to eventual extinction on Earth.
Industrialization occurred and was sustained because we had easy access to fuel, from coal and oil that took many millions of years to create. Most of the easy stuff is gone. Without it we can't realistically push our technology past early 20th-century levels, maybe not even mid-19th.
I wonder then, what is preventing a large EFF-like organization in the UK from doing a private prosecution against a couple of these media giants or their enforcement agencies, and removing every last computer and server as evidence? Other than the media giants having more money and bribed officials, of course.
They could even come up with plausible charges--extortion, corruption, stalking, whatever. After all, the recording industry or its UK lackeys were using bullshit charges to get a warrant against SurfTheChannel.
You'd think the British tabloids would've been nailed to the wall a lot sooner, too, by celebrities who actually have the money to do so. There must be some restriction preventing this from happening more often.
I watched a video on Elon Musk which stated that raw materials come in to the factory in Hawthorne, CA and rocket parts come out the other side. I believe most of their 1500+ employees are in CA (awesome vid of them cheering the launch here). Hawthorne is about a mile from LAX and they can probably just take the parts over to LAX and put them on a big transport and fly them. I'd be willing to bet that transport costs are but a tiny tiny fraction of the human resource cost of the project.
Transportation costs would probably be minor by comparison, true.
And SpaceX won't be dealing with anything the size of the shuttle external tank, which had to be shipped by covered barge from around New Orleans. The Falcon components could also be transported by rail, since no one section of the rocket itself is wider than the old shuttle SRBs (Falcon: 3.2m, SRBs: 3.7m). The fairing, or payload capsule, is 5.2m though, too wide for train tunnels, so those parts probably have to shipped or flown.
There's probably some pages out there saying how the components are transported, but a quick Google didn't turn up anything useful.
We've been spoiled by shuttle launches, where the solid rocket boosters propel the shuttle stack upwards at much greater acceleration. Most liquid-fuel-only rockets, including the Saturn V if you watch old video, will launch much more slowly, especially right after launch.
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I usually prefer Future Shop over Best Buy (I know they're owned by the same company). My in-store experiences are about the same--FS staff are commissioned, but I've never felt harassed by them, and they almost never push the extended warranty after I say no the first time (if they do, I'll take the info home and "think about adding it" during the 30 day window). Actually a few times they were nowhere to be found when I *wanted* help looking for something.
It's partly because I don't like the Best Buy website at all. Compared to the FS website, the BB site is a user interface design disaster.
Mod up. This is an annoyance I have with National Geographic, too.
In any article referencing primary sources, the measurements used in that source should be listed first, with "local" units in brackets afterwards.
E.g. "A huge Brachiosaur, once thought to weigh 80,000 kg (176,370 pounds), is now believed to have weighed 23,000 kg (50,706 pounds)."
Discovery.com could have done worse, by only giving the imperial measurement *and* rounding them to the nearest 1000 pounds without saying "approximately," since that's mis-representing the primary source--doesn't matter if the difference is "only" 0.2 to 1.4%, or that the source is an estimate anyway.
Because the original weights were in kilograms (80,000kg and 23,000kg respectively), and Discovery helpfully converted to the Imperial system for its American audience without properly sourcing the original figures.
Hey Genius. Chinese is a nationality, not an ethnicity, culture, or religion. China has about 20 ethnic groups with populations over 1 million in China.
"Chinese" is not merely a nationality, like American or Canadian. I wasn't born in China, I have cultural but no emotional ties to it. My parents and immediate relatives, being from Hong Kong, were not Chinese nationals either, but are still Chinese, not Hongkongers or Cantonese.
In the biological sciences, it's even easier. I've known a number of profs in bio fields who've commented that a major task in their introductory courses is eliminating the term "purpose" from their students' vocabularies. It's well understood among biologists that use of this word is a very good tipoff that the speaker/writer has little or no understanding of modern biology. Sometimes other phrasing will be used. Thus, a student may explain that giraffes grow long necks "in order to" reach the leaves of trees. This wording also shows that the speaker doesn't understand what's going on. Giraffes don't knowingly grow long necks for any purpose, any more than humans knowingly grow short necks. Neck length is determined by DNA, which is an unknowing, unthinking organic polymer, and can't be modified by intent or purpose.
Although I agree this applies to biology in general, "purpose" is definitely part of genetically engineered organisms, since their DNA has been directly altered by knowing, thinking humans, and not evolution. Monsanto crops did not inherit a natural mutation from their parent plant.
There's two ways to look at that.
One, she really was hopelessly ignorant and clueless about it. Sadly this isn't rare enough.
The second: she might have been putting the question to you for the benefit of her children, who might wonder the exact same thing at their age (sounds like the older child was 10-ish?), so they could hear the answer from an authority on the matter. Just accepting your word isn't exactly good science, of course, and you could explain the physics behind it if you want, but keep it simple for the pre-teen crowd.
Obviously you're in a better position to say which she was, but assuming this wasn't a school trip, the parent at least had taken them to a museum at all, instead of leaving them in front of a TV.
So the Voyager episode "The 37s" didn't/won't really happen?
Now I'm disillusioned.
Voyager itself didn't happen. Neither did Enterprise. So I'm not sure what episode of a non-existent series you could possibly be referring to.
The last major product line Apple introduced was the iPad in 2010, which stunned analysts because it cost half what they confidently priced the rumoured device at.
Yes, it was half of what a full-blown computer could do, but obviously consumers have decreed it the right half.
And while some claim the iPad isn't a "real" productivity environment so it shouldn't be considered in the same league as a desktop/laptop, a TV with PVR, game console, internet box, etc, is almost exclusively a content consumption or gaming device anyway, which iOS excels at. A full-blown Apple TV can't be dismissed as "just a toy" because it doesn't have a full office suite.
A small prediction: If Apple does release a full-blown TV, it will not have HDMI ports, but Thunderbolt ports instead, which at 2x 10 Gbps channels has almost twice the bitrate of HDMI (10.2 Gbps) and might support daisy-chaining better than HDMI. This is additional cost to the end user, but Apple's well known for leaving off ports to save space or costs, and requiring pricey adapters.
Probably the same way wildlife benefit greatly from the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea: No humans (or very few and infrequent), and no development.
While I agree with you in principle, the problem is the copyright special interest groups often uses extremist, raving lunatic language too.
Except they are backed by millions of dollars, have PR agencies, and have the ear of politicians (or are politicians, in the example where a Conservative Canadian MP called backers of fair copyright "radical extremists").
You choose to look south because looking north paints a different picture.
Europe doesn't have a neighbour with an insane War on Drugs that also has companies happily supplying guns to the drug cartels.
It also implies the possibility that the total number of criminals who decided to conceal carry went up because it was now legal to do so, whereas before they might only feel comfortable doing so with a knife (not quite logical, but they say criminals aren't always the sharpest tool in the shed).
Give it time. The student protests in Montreal, Quebec are continuing, there hasn't been such a prolonged and significant turnout at protests in years. It was originally over rising tuition fees, which most of the rest of Canada roll their eyes at because Quebec has the lowest average tuition of all provinces--in some cases 50% less. OTOH, Quebec taxes are among the highest, so the two kind of balanced out until now.
The provincial government's response, Law 78, tramples on fundamental freedoms enough that over 500 lawyers--lawyers!--marched on the streets to protest.
And so the student protests have morphed to also protest against Law 78, and student groups in other provinces are starting to demonstrate too, but nowhere near the level or intensity of those in Quebec.
I don't support either side in this, but have to hand it to Quebec--the French have a lot more guts than English Canada in standing up for their rights (possibly because they've been standing up to Canada for decades), and aren't as afraid to put themselves on the line to do it.
The fees should be at least 47 trillion loonies per event.
Wow, $47 trillion loonies is a LOT. That's like, what, $500 trillion US!
(ah, how we don't miss the days when the joke went the other way...)
as per the typical liberal stance there can be no grey areas so you flamed him without thinking.
Although MickeyTheIdiot lives up to his name, "no grey areas" is the domain of extremists of any ideology, and conservatives have no shortage of those either.
Mod parent way up. Where are mod points when you need them...
In the last two Canadian elections, our national broadcaster, CBC, put up a "political compass" online survey tool that worked with a similar idea to your stemtest. Instead of the flawed, overly-simplistic left-right wing, they use the more modern (and less-flawed) two-axis grid.
Like your friends, a lot people who took it were placed in a different party than they expected. I don't know if your friends did this, but the comments left on the compass tool accused the producers of rigging it so results more often said the more left-centrist party (which the right-wing often accuses CBC of supporting).
Although I wouldn't call this survey scientific nor comprehensive enough (the average user won't sit through 100 questions), I don't know why this was at all a surprise; many people support parts of both left and right wing ideologies, so those people very likely average out with the most moderate of the major parties.
The first thing I thought as soon as I read the first sentence was that the Olympic authorities would be all over them. The second was seeing that the submitter had also thought the same thing.
Just another indication of how badly the Olympics have been corrupted--and how they in turn corrupt the IP laws of host countries like a cancer.
My wife had a Dell. It worked fine until the battery died and needed replacing. Of course it is a proprietary Dell battery and costs $$$$.
I don't like Dells myself, but I don't understand the complaint about them being proprietary Dell and expensive. Don't *all* laptops use proprietary batteries? Or do you mean the battery is specific to this one Dell model?
An Apple-made battery for my 2006 13" Macbook costs $130. Thankfully I got mine replaced free over a year after the 3-year Applecare extended warranty ended, as the old one was bulging badly.
Glad I'm not the only geek guy who discovered dancing as a great social activity. For me it was salsa and more recently blues and swing. All are great for being around and interacting with women, and without a whole lot of talking either (while dancing anyway--I'm still working on follow-up *after* a dance...).
And although I'd have a panic attack doing public speaking and am still anxious talking one-on-one (really great during a date [rolleyes]), I realized recently don't have (much of) a problem partner dancing, by ourselves, in front of dozens of people. Hell, the first warm day this year, we even took it outside onto a downtown sidewalk.
All this in turn is somewhat helping to get over social anxiety and self-confidence issues in general, as it finally starts sinking in that I *am* good at something social, and even *better* than all the poor schmucks sitting at the tables just watching women dance, instead of dancing with them.
We have one chance now, in the 21st century, one window to get to space for real. If we don't do it now it is a downward spiral, and we won't have the resources from this planet to try industrialising again, so we will all hit the wall again, and slowly we'll poison everything, in our millions of warring tribes, and even nature won't really survive.
Either we get off this planet and figure out how to grab our materials from the lifeless solar system, or we slowly perish in a downward spiral of crises, violence, competition, wars, pollution and global extinction, taking this garden of nature down with us.
Totally agree. I've said this from a different perspective: If there were a global war that takes us back to the early industrial age, and before we've learned how to be self-sufficient in space, humans will be doomed to eventual extinction on Earth.
Industrialization occurred and was sustained because we had easy access to fuel, from coal and oil that took many millions of years to create. Most of the easy stuff is gone. Without it we can't realistically push our technology past early 20th-century levels, maybe not even mid-19th.
Add to that list Crimson Tide because it dealt with a mutiny aboard a US submarine.
I wonder then, what is preventing a large EFF-like organization in the UK from doing a private prosecution against a couple of these media giants or their enforcement agencies, and removing every last computer and server as evidence? Other than the media giants having more money and bribed officials, of course.
They could even come up with plausible charges--extortion, corruption, stalking, whatever. After all, the recording industry or its UK lackeys were using bullshit charges to get a warrant against SurfTheChannel.
You'd think the British tabloids would've been nailed to the wall a lot sooner, too, by celebrities who actually have the money to do so. There must be some restriction preventing this from happening more often.
I watched a video on Elon Musk which stated that raw materials come in to the factory in Hawthorne, CA and rocket parts come out the other side. I believe most of their 1500+ employees are in CA (awesome vid of them cheering the launch here). Hawthorne is about a mile from LAX and they can probably just take the parts over to LAX and put them on a big transport and fly them. I'd be willing to bet that transport costs are but a tiny tiny fraction of the human resource cost of the project.
Transportation costs would probably be minor by comparison, true.
And SpaceX won't be dealing with anything the size of the shuttle external tank, which had to be shipped by covered barge from around New Orleans. The Falcon components could also be transported by rail, since no one section of the rocket itself is wider than the old shuttle SRBs (Falcon: 3.2m, SRBs: 3.7m). The fairing, or payload capsule, is 5.2m though, too wide for train tunnels, so those parts probably have to shipped or flown.
There's probably some pages out there saying how the components are transported, but a quick Google didn't turn up anything useful.
We've been spoiled by shuttle launches, where the solid rocket boosters propel the shuttle stack upwards at much greater acceleration. Most liquid-fuel-only rockets, including the Saturn V if you watch old video, will launch much more slowly, especially right after launch.