Android doesn't seem to be "winning" in the only thing that counts for a business -- profits.
Apple also comprehensively won the "profit" war back in the day with Mac computers. Guess which platform 94% of the world isn't using today?
The current trend is looking very much like the 1990s all over again -- Apple with its superior UI getting overrun by a platform which isn't quite as nice, but is distributed amongst many manufacturers and is much cheaper for end users to purchase.
And once again, as a geek, I'm not at all concerned, as it's a lot easier to hack the Android platform than the Apple equivalent. PCs brought us Microsoft supremacy, but they also brought us linux; Android's shaping to be much the same, and as long as Google and manufacturers like Samsung openly encourage users to hack their phones, I'll keep supporting them with my dollar. The fact that I'll be paying less dollars in doing so is just an added bonus:)
(I've never really understood the "more profit" argument from a fanboi perspective -- the fact that Apple is making users pay more for their phones is hardly a reason for the end users to brag. It's a great reason if you're seeking to buy Apple shares, it's not a good reason if you're in the market for a phone...)
Higher performance? By what measure? Last I checked Android's entire UI is predominantly CPU-bound.
There's a lot of GPU-rendering in gingerbread now. Admittedly probably not enough, but enough to give the user a smooth, reponsive experience. Try using a phone with cm7 on it, and experience what gingerbread should be like. I suspect that ICS will be using a UI that's fully GPU-rendered.
One of the early problems was that some hardware makers (HTC, for example) never appreciated this difference, and rendered all of their abominable HTC Sense UI in software, making it painfully choppy. I'm not sure if they've learnt their lesson now (I only bought an HTC phone because it was one of the most popularly hacked phones available) but knowing HTC, I doubt it.
There was also the problem that even a year ago, most Android phones were using pathetically underpowered GPU hardware. That's changed now, but it's taken far too long...
The means of selection is rather self-evident. Death is the primary means. People can understand dying before you have kids.
But if you want to simplify it that much, then you could say that the means of AGW is like being in a greenhouse -- heat comes in, but most of it can't escape. People can understand this concept just as easily.
If you want to go into more detail, for either theory, it becomes progressively harder: for evolution, why should some individuals be fitter than others? How does genomic change occur? How do small changes to the genome make a detectable difference? How do extremely complex, multipart organs like the eye evolve from scratch? Once you get into the technicalities, it becomes harder to explain to the layman.
Anyway, I'm not trying to argue to be contrary; I just think it's an intriguing idea and I've enjoyed exploring it further. Thanks for a very interesting discussion:)
Any questioning of AGW quickly gets into measurement methodology (I note that even mean global surface temperature isn't measured directly), satellite observations, explaining why alternate theories ("the Sun did it") have been ruled out, etc. So your average layman can't demonstrate enough on their own to defend it. You need the scientists to back up the argument. And once again, with the high stakes involved, there's more demand for evidence and empirical proof. My take is that there's a lot more work load per climatologist than there is for the huge group of scientists knowledgeable on evolution.
I agree, but don't you think it's a little strange that a similar discussion of evolution in a bar (if such a thing ever occurs!) doesn't get quickly bogged down in measurement methodology (dating of fossils in the fossil record), explaining why alternate theories ("God did it", Lamarckism) have been ruled out, etc. Why don't the general public question the somewhat infamous industrial melanism experiments that "proved" evolution?
Absolutely there's more at stake with AGW, but nevertheless I find it fascinating that one major theory is accepted by the man on the street on spec, whereas the other is derided. The evidence for both is fairly similar in terms of strength of proof and also the controversial bits on the edge. And it's not like there's any personal profit in either branch of science. So why are one set of scientists inherently trusted and the other set not?
Frankly, if science is as fallacious and duplicitous as the current round of denalists portray it, then the general public should be questioning everything that they currently take for granted. And yet, they don't...
I see you have replied elsewhere indicating that you understand that there is "more at stake" and that AGW hasn't gone through the stages of public study and acceptance that evolution has. So why be puzzled that the general public isn't merely accepting the theory?
Well, I thought you were arguing more along the lines of "accepting evolution is easier because it's easier for the public to comprehend" rather than "accepting evolution is easier because the costs of acceptance are not as great". And I thought that was an interesting argument... it is fascinating that the public think they have a right to question, on little or no evidence, a major, established scientific theory. It suggests a distrust of science that is at odds with a similarly naive acceptance of evolution, is all.
Sure, the evidence collected by a layman with modest resources would be weaker than the vast preponderance of evidence collected by the whole of humanity, but a very convincing case can be made just from a single individual's observations (such as actually happened with Charles Darwin).
I can see your point, although I think you're possibly not giving Darwin (or Wallace) enough credit, and also forgetting that even someone like Darwin didn't have any way of proving the means of selection.
I agree that having access to the fossil record helps, although that record in itself is just a collection of a vast amount of individual paleo research, and Darwin already had the benefit of that. How many fossils has the average layman actually looked at? Have they seen enough to form a clear concept of the gradual changes to species over time? I certainly haven't seen enough fossils to be able to say that without any prior knowledge of the research, and even if I had I'd still be taking some things on spec, such as the dating of the fossils themselves. It just so happens that the fossil record is a set of research that is accepted and trusted, and if you asked most sincere laymen they'd probably tell you that clear evidence for evolution exists in the fossil record, without ever having bothered to look at it themselves.
Perhaps the difference is that evolution has been lucky enough to have already gone through the phases of being ridiculed and violently opposed, and is now being accepted as self-evident, whereas AGW is still in the second phase. But I personally think there's just a lot more at stake with AGW than with evolution, so that the violent opposition has been correspondingly greater.
As I state elsewhere in the thread, a sincere layman of modest resources can demonstrate the basic principles of evolution and show them in action in nature, all without requiring a dip in the scientific literature. Not so with AGW. You don't have to trust scientists on evolution. You do have to trust them on much of the AGW evidence.
Well, I agree that anyone can easily witness genetic traits being segregated without prior scientific knowledge. But for anything else regarding evolution (structure of DNA, details and mechanisms of gene regulation, means and rates of mutation, mathematical demonstrations of selection algorithms, even much of the fossil record) you're going to have to either read the literature or trust the scientists.
Personally, I would argue that the AGW literature is just as accessible as the literature regarding evolution. I'm a molecular biology postdoc, but out of interest I've read the AGW literature extensively and try to keep myself up to date with new developments. I don't think it's any more difficult to grasp than the work being done in my own field.
Ultimately all of science is built on some measure of trust (you simply don't have the time to go back to first principles for everything). Thankfully, that trust is offset by the fact that scientists are by and large a bunch of conservative bastards who take an awful lot of convincing to accept any new idea, and will do their very best to disprove any new assertion before taking it on board. The major tenets of AGW all had to fight their way through this process in the 50s, 60s and 70s. What's really sad is that now, with AGW almost universally accepted amongst the scientific community, the general public has suddenly felt that they can weigh in on the debate without any knowledge of the subject whatsoever.
Not really. If you're using typography software (which is the perspective from which your slate.com article is arguing) then using one space is absolutely correct. However, that's only because tyopgraphy software automatically inserts the correct extra space after a period. Have a play with LaTeX sometime, you might be surprised.
For everything else, it's two spaces if you want your stuff to be fully readable. That's your call, of course, and a slightly subjective argument. But if you're arguing from a typography perspective (as slate.com was) then it's the correct one.
The obvious rebuttal is that even now, we can't directly measure mean global temperature.
We can measure it well enough to see clear, statistically significant evidence of warming. That's the case using either surface land/sea measurements or using satellite measurements of the temperature of atmospheric layers. What more do you want?
If AGW has a similar body of evidence, it would not be hotly contested today.
But it's not being contested in the scientific literature. It's only being contested in the mainstream public echo chamber, where there's just as much opposition to evolution as AGW. In fact, that opposition often comes from the selfsame ignorant loons (as our parent AC was so kind as to demonstrate).
Seriously, we have just as much substantiated evidence for the process and mechanisms of AGW as we do for evolution. We're still discovering new aspects of both theories, but the general principles of both are exceptionally well-established in the literature.
Realclimate has a couple of articles summarising the research on CO2 absorption here and here, with links to more writings on the subject and a bibliography if you're interested. It's fascinating stuff.
It is a shame that people approach climate science trying to cherry pick points to support their preexisting beliefs rather than trying to get informed about the state of the science, and then forming an opinion.
I think the problem is that the consequences of AGW are downright scary, and also quite costly to solve. There's also the problem that global warming is gradual and insidious -- you can see it on a plot of temperatures over a hundred year span, but you can't feel it day-to-day or even year-to-year. Without a sudden catastrophe to make people stop and think, most would rather shove their heads in the sand and pretend it isn't happening. It's a bit like the link between smoking and cancer a few decades ago... or possibly the boiling-frog principle. Thus climate denialism becomes popular -- it's more important to believe in a fallacy that makes everything alright, than to accept the reality and deal with it, regardless of how costly that may be.
Not scientists. Did you even bother to read the wiki article you cited? "Of those scientific papers [in the 1970s] considering climate trends over the 21st century, only 10% inclined towards future cooling, while most papers predicted future warming." Stupid ACs...
and the theory of evolution hasn't done so well either.
That's right, the world was created 6000 years ago and it's not warming either. Boy, denialists are drinking the stupid juice today...
CO2 and other "greenhouse" gases let light in the visible part of the spectrum pass unimpeded, but they don't let IR through as easily. So, energy comes in but it can't get back out again.
That's more or less true, although one of the big arguments in the first half of the 20th century was that water vapour in the atmosphere completely masks the IR absorption spectra of CO2, and thus it doesn't matter how much CO2 you have in the atmosphere. It took until the 50s for scientists to realise that while this is fairly accurate (although not entirely) at sea level, it's most certainly not true in the upper atmosphere where (a) there's not much water vapour and (b) the absorption spectra don't overlap so much.
What really saddens me is that all of the above was done to death in the literature in the 1950s and 60s, yet that invalid water vapour argument still appears on climate denialists' sites....
What makes me sad is that one can ignore that some of the same people who are howling about global warming today were howling about a man-made ice age in the seventies, and expect the rest of us to blindly follow along. It's a bit disingenuous to claim that global warming was predicted 150 years ago, when a mere 40 years ago the alarmists were predicting the opposite.
It also uses its algorithms to know which links you'll most likely click on (based on what others have clicked on) and starts pre-fetching that data so if/when you click on the link it'll take even less time to load.
Unlike other pre-fetching technology that had no intelligence built in this sounds very awesome.
So not only does Amazon see all the data I'm loading, but they keep a record of it too??? What could possibly go wrong here?
seriously were not running 486's here aside from slashdots javabloat every other site does not suck on modern machines, hell if you can stand not pissing you pants even slashdot only takes about a min on a 300mhz PPC
So long?? It takes less than a minute on a Cyrix P-166 running firefox 1.0 and Win95 (yeah, baby!) (don't laugh -- it's the only machine we've got at work that still has ISA slots, which we need for a bit of equipment....)
But I agree wholeheartedly with the point. Why would anyone wish to jeopardise their privacy to save a few seconds (max) of waiting for a webpage to load? The fact that Amazon can use this as a selling point is a sad statement on current attitudes to privacy.
Nice performance bump for users, and an incredible data mining opportunity for Amazon - who wins more?
Is it really a performance bump, though? I mean, when have you ever felt the load time for a page accessed through broadband was too slow?
If the Kindle Fire was running on a 33MHz Dragonball and accessing the net through a 14.4kbps modem, I could understand the need for this. But with a dual-core 1.2GHz processor and high-speed broadband, why do we need this? I'm still slightly confused at Amazon using this as a selling point... (or perhaps it's a case of needing a selling point other than price, and drawing a blank?)
Seriously though, how often do you actually type on the kindle keyboard though? You mostly use the nav and page buttons.
Not all that often, but I do use it for wifi passcodes, searching for books/text. I'd hate to input either of those with a five-way controller, especially when the onscreen keyboard for the 5-way controller kindle isn't qwerty! I rather like having the keyboard there, and it doesn't exactly take up much room.
What I find more concerning is that the new kindle touch has apparently removed the page turn buttons on the sides. Those side buttons are the easiest way to turn pages, whether or not you've got a touch screen, and are one of the things I really love about reading on my kindle. It becomes a lot harder to flip back a page with only a touchscreen (which happens a lot when most people read). Amazon also seems to have gone for a shiny rather than matte finish on the surface of the device, which may not be the best idea for a device designed to be read in sunlight...
I dunno, but from a first glance at the images on the website those new e-ink kindles *look* cheap. The old kindle 3G looked a lot more classy, somehow.
I honestly hadn't thought that video playback would be a concern.
It's not a concern -- there are many apps that can play large numbers of video formats available from the Market; QQplayer is one that works well. There's nothing much wrong with the way the Gallery app handles videos either.
Actually, you can get most, if not all, of the google apps (including maps, gmail, search, voice) via GetJar, which itself is a downloadable apk. The only thing you can't get is the market itself. Somewhat surprising, but there you go...
Well, they're the right books for me...:) I read mostly literature, but also some non-fiction works. What books are you buying that aren't DRM-encrypted?
As I said, I check for DRM before buying now, after someone on an earlier Slashdot thread told me how to spot the DRM-infested books.
I'm genuinely curious here -- are you only reading books that are already available in the public domain, or are Amazon selling currently published, commercial, copyright works out there without DRM encryption? That's amazing if so, and kudos to Amazon for doing this. I'd love it if Amazon moved away from a DRM model, but I can't realistically see this happening (I mean, they presumably need to reassure wary publishers that they're trying to prevent piracy!)
Well, I was talking tablets, not phones, and in Australia we don't have access to the Nook color -- so it's kindles or tablets here, really. I can only comment on what I see, and I've just never seen anyone reading novels on tablets (which are, almost universally, iPads). I keep looking, because I find this completely fascinating and rather unexpected... but that's the way it is, at least on my train line.
I also wish this was being talked about more, I am not interested in 10 hour battery life, I'm interested in a 15 day battery life for a tablet - it doesn't require a back-lit LCD 60Hz screen, but an app store would be nice.
I doubt you'll get that anytime soon. One of the reason why eink devices have such great battery life is that they never power the screen except for when it is refreshed. Reading books, you only refresh the screen when you turn a page, meaning that your battery lasts forever. But if you want to do tablet-y things like surf the web, play games, etc -- things you do with apps, in other words -- you'll be refreshing the screen much more and your battery life will plummet.
An e-ink reader is a one-trick pony; it just happens to do that trick so exceptionally well that it leaves anything else right now for dead. I'd also like to see a new, higher-resolution e-ink kindle come out, preferable with a better contrast screen. But I don't want it running apps or Android or anything else -- I just want it for reading books. Everything else I can do on my phone or my netbook.
This is stupid, and I'm not switching to e-books until a reasonably wide selection of books is available in an open format from diverse vendors, and there is a selection of e-book readers (or tablet PCs or whatever you want to call them) available that will work with this format. The format itself could be something pretty simple: XHTML with user-customizeable styles, and maybe PNG graphics.
Relax. The DRM of most (all?) major ebook publishers is easily breakable, and because of backwards compatibility with older devices they're locked into these breakable DRM models forever, more or less.
I pay for all my ebooks. I also strip the DRM off all of my ebooks (and occasionally correct the terrible formatting that the publisher's used.) And from there, I can convert them into any format I like. (epub is generally accepted as the default open format and essentially what you just described (zipped xhtml with css), although even something like Amazon's.mobi is technically an open format now...)
All books on Smashwords are DRM-free and many books on Amazon are DRM-free. I was actually surprised when I bought a Kindle book recently and discovered it was DRM-infested, so now I do check before buying them.
Huh? Every book I've purchased from Amazon (mostly literature) has been clad in DRM rubbish. I know this, because I strip them of it before putting them on my kindle...
That's going away. Users seem to prefer fast color displays over slow reflective monochrome ones.
I dunno -- I see a lot more kindles on my train commute than tablets. And I am yet to see anyone reading a novel on a tablet. Ever. (I've seen people reading PDFs for work a few times, but that's as good as it gets...)
Slashdot Mirror
Android doesn't seem to be "winning" in the only thing that counts for a business -- profits.
Apple also comprehensively won the "profit" war back in the day with Mac computers. Guess which platform 94% of the world isn't using today?
The current trend is looking very much like the 1990s all over again -- Apple with its superior UI getting overrun by a platform which isn't quite as nice, but is distributed amongst many manufacturers and is much cheaper for end users to purchase.
And once again, as a geek, I'm not at all concerned, as it's a lot easier to hack the Android platform than the Apple equivalent. PCs brought us Microsoft supremacy, but they also brought us linux; Android's shaping to be much the same, and as long as Google and manufacturers like Samsung openly encourage users to hack their phones, I'll keep supporting them with my dollar. The fact that I'll be paying less dollars in doing so is just an added bonus :)
(I've never really understood the "more profit" argument from a fanboi perspective -- the fact that Apple is making users pay more for their phones is hardly a reason for the end users to brag. It's a great reason if you're seeking to buy Apple shares, it's not a good reason if you're in the market for a phone ...)
Higher performance? By what measure? Last I checked Android's entire UI is predominantly CPU-bound.
There's a lot of GPU-rendering in gingerbread now. Admittedly probably not enough, but enough to give the user a smooth, reponsive experience. Try using a phone with cm7 on it, and experience what gingerbread should be like. I suspect that ICS will be using a UI that's fully GPU-rendered.
One of the early problems was that some hardware makers (HTC, for example) never appreciated this difference, and rendered all of their abominable HTC Sense UI in software, making it painfully choppy. I'm not sure if they've learnt their lesson now (I only bought an HTC phone because it was one of the most popularly hacked phones available) but knowing HTC, I doubt it.
There was also the problem that even a year ago, most Android phones were using pathetically underpowered GPU hardware. That's changed now, but it's taken far too long ...
The means of selection is rather self-evident. Death is the primary means. People can understand dying before you have kids.
But if you want to simplify it that much, then you could say that the means of AGW is like being in a greenhouse -- heat comes in, but most of it can't escape. People can understand this concept just as easily.
If you want to go into more detail, for either theory, it becomes progressively harder: for evolution, why should some individuals be fitter than others? How does genomic change occur? How do small changes to the genome make a detectable difference? How do extremely complex, multipart organs like the eye evolve from scratch? Once you get into the technicalities, it becomes harder to explain to the layman.
Anyway, I'm not trying to argue to be contrary; I just think it's an intriguing idea and I've enjoyed exploring it further. Thanks for a very interesting discussion :)
Any questioning of AGW quickly gets into measurement methodology (I note that even mean global surface temperature isn't measured directly), satellite observations, explaining why alternate theories ("the Sun did it") have been ruled out, etc. So your average layman can't demonstrate enough on their own to defend it. You need the scientists to back up the argument. And once again, with the high stakes involved, there's more demand for evidence and empirical proof. My take is that there's a lot more work load per climatologist than there is for the huge group of scientists knowledgeable on evolution.
I agree, but don't you think it's a little strange that a similar discussion of evolution in a bar (if such a thing ever occurs!) doesn't get quickly bogged down in measurement methodology (dating of fossils in the fossil record), explaining why alternate theories ("God did it", Lamarckism) have been ruled out, etc. Why don't the general public question the somewhat infamous industrial melanism experiments that "proved" evolution?
Absolutely there's more at stake with AGW, but nevertheless I find it fascinating that one major theory is accepted by the man on the street on spec, whereas the other is derided. The evidence for both is fairly similar in terms of strength of proof and also the controversial bits on the edge. And it's not like there's any personal profit in either branch of science. So why are one set of scientists inherently trusted and the other set not?
Frankly, if science is as fallacious and duplicitous as the current round of denalists portray it, then the general public should be questioning everything that they currently take for granted. And yet, they don't ...
I see you have replied elsewhere indicating that you understand that there is "more at stake" and that AGW hasn't gone through the stages of public study and acceptance that evolution has. So why be puzzled that the general public isn't merely accepting the theory?
Well, I thought you were arguing more along the lines of "accepting evolution is easier because it's easier for the public to comprehend" rather than "accepting evolution is easier because the costs of acceptance are not as great". And I thought that was an interesting argument ... it is fascinating that the public think they have a right to question, on little or no evidence, a major, established scientific theory. It suggests a distrust of science that is at odds with a similarly naive acceptance of evolution, is all.
Sure, the evidence collected by a layman with modest resources would be weaker than the vast preponderance of evidence collected by the whole of humanity, but a very convincing case can be made just from a single individual's observations (such as actually happened with Charles Darwin).
I can see your point, although I think you're possibly not giving Darwin (or Wallace) enough credit, and also forgetting that even someone like Darwin didn't have any way of proving the means of selection.
I agree that having access to the fossil record helps, although that record in itself is just a collection of a vast amount of individual paleo research, and Darwin already had the benefit of that. How many fossils has the average layman actually looked at? Have they seen enough to form a clear concept of the gradual changes to species over time? I certainly haven't seen enough fossils to be able to say that without any prior knowledge of the research, and even if I had I'd still be taking some things on spec, such as the dating of the fossils themselves. It just so happens that the fossil record is a set of research that is accepted and trusted, and if you asked most sincere laymen they'd probably tell you that clear evidence for evolution exists in the fossil record, without ever having bothered to look at it themselves.
Perhaps the difference is that evolution has been lucky enough to have already gone through the phases of being ridiculed and violently opposed, and is now being accepted as self-evident, whereas AGW is still in the second phase. But I personally think there's just a lot more at stake with AGW than with evolution, so that the violent opposition has been correspondingly greater.
As I state elsewhere in the thread, a sincere layman of modest resources can demonstrate the basic principles of evolution and show them in action in nature, all without requiring a dip in the scientific literature. Not so with AGW. You don't have to trust scientists on evolution. You do have to trust them on much of the AGW evidence.
Well, I agree that anyone can easily witness genetic traits being segregated without prior scientific knowledge. But for anything else regarding evolution (structure of DNA, details and mechanisms of gene regulation, means and rates of mutation, mathematical demonstrations of selection algorithms, even much of the fossil record) you're going to have to either read the literature or trust the scientists.
Personally, I would argue that the AGW literature is just as accessible as the literature regarding evolution. I'm a molecular biology postdoc, but out of interest I've read the AGW literature extensively and try to keep myself up to date with new developments. I don't think it's any more difficult to grasp than the work being done in my own field.
Ultimately all of science is built on some measure of trust (you simply don't have the time to go back to first principles for everything). Thankfully, that trust is offset by the fact that scientists are by and large a bunch of conservative bastards who take an awful lot of convincing to accept any new idea, and will do their very best to disprove any new assertion before taking it on board. The major tenets of AGW all had to fight their way through this process in the 50s, 60s and 70s. What's really sad is that now, with AGW almost universally accepted amongst the scientific community, the general public has suddenly felt that they can weigh in on the debate without any knowledge of the subject whatsoever.
Flat-out wrong. Two spaces after a period only if you're using an actual, physical typewriter or a monospaced font.
Not really. If you're using typography software (which is the perspective from which your slate.com article is arguing) then using one space is absolutely correct. However, that's only because tyopgraphy software automatically inserts the correct extra space after a period. Have a play with LaTeX sometime, you might be surprised.
For everything else, it's two spaces if you want your stuff to be fully readable. That's your call, of course, and a slightly subjective argument. But if you're arguing from a typography perspective (as slate.com was) then it's the correct one.
The obvious rebuttal is that even now, we can't directly measure mean global temperature.
We can measure it well enough to see clear, statistically significant evidence of warming. That's the case using either surface land/sea measurements or using satellite measurements of the temperature of atmospheric layers. What more do you want?
If AGW has a similar body of evidence, it would not be hotly contested today.
But it's not being contested in the scientific literature. It's only being contested in the mainstream public echo chamber, where there's just as much opposition to evolution as AGW. In fact, that opposition often comes from the selfsame ignorant loons (as our parent AC was so kind as to demonstrate).
Seriously, we have just as much substantiated evidence for the process and mechanisms of AGW as we do for evolution. We're still discovering new aspects of both theories, but the general principles of both are exceptionally well-established in the literature.
Realclimate has a couple of articles summarising the research on CO2 absorption here and here, with links to more writings on the subject and a bibliography if you're interested. It's fascinating stuff.
It is a shame that people approach climate science trying to cherry pick points to support their preexisting beliefs rather than trying to get informed about the state of the science, and then forming an opinion.
I think the problem is that the consequences of AGW are downright scary, and also quite costly to solve. There's also the problem that global warming is gradual and insidious -- you can see it on a plot of temperatures over a hundred year span, but you can't feel it day-to-day or even year-to-year. Without a sudden catastrophe to make people stop and think, most would rather shove their heads in the sand and pretend it isn't happening. It's a bit like the link between smoking and cancer a few decades ago ... or possibly the boiling-frog principle. Thus climate denialism becomes popular -- it's more important to believe in a fallacy that makes everything alright, than to accept the reality and deal with it, regardless of how costly that may be.
What are you talking about? Of course they were talking about global cooling in the 1970's. Can't Google?
Wikipedia: Global Cooling.
Not scientists. Did you even bother to read the wiki article you cited? "Of those scientific papers [in the 1970s] considering climate trends over the 21st century, only 10% inclined towards future cooling, while most papers predicted future warming." Stupid ACs ...
and the theory of evolution hasn't done so well either.
That's right, the world was created 6000 years ago and it's not warming either. Boy, denialists are drinking the stupid juice today ...
CO2 and other "greenhouse" gases let light in the visible part of the spectrum pass unimpeded, but they don't let IR through as easily. So, energy comes in but it can't get back out again.
That's more or less true, although one of the big arguments in the first half of the 20th century was that water vapour in the atmosphere completely masks the IR absorption spectra of CO2, and thus it doesn't matter how much CO2 you have in the atmosphere. It took until the 50s for scientists to realise that while this is fairly accurate (although not entirely) at sea level, it's most certainly not true in the upper atmosphere where (a) there's not much water vapour and (b) the absorption spectra don't overlap so much.
What really saddens me is that all of the above was done to death in the literature in the 1950s and 60s, yet that invalid water vapour argument still appears on climate denialists' sites ....
What makes me sad is that one can ignore that some of the same people who are howling about global warming today were howling about a man-made ice age in the seventies, and expect the rest of us to blindly follow along. It's a bit disingenuous to claim that global warming was predicted 150 years ago, when a mere 40 years ago the alarmists were predicting the opposite.
Um, no they weren't.
My money is on "global warming" being listed as "discredited" in a few years as "global cooling" is now.
Then you're likely to lose some money there, I'm afraid.
It also uses its algorithms to know which links you'll most likely click on (based on what others have clicked on) and starts pre-fetching that data so if/when you click on the link it'll take even less time to load.
Unlike other pre-fetching technology that had no intelligence built in this sounds very awesome.
So not only does Amazon see all the data I'm loading, but they keep a record of it too??? What could possibly go wrong here?
That whole fucking 2 seconds was killing me
seriously were not running 486's here aside from slashdots javabloat every other site does not suck on modern machines, hell if you can stand not pissing you pants even slashdot only takes about a min on a 300mhz PPC
So long?? It takes less than a minute on a Cyrix P-166 running firefox 1.0 and Win95 (yeah, baby!) (don't laugh -- it's the only machine we've got at work that still has ISA slots, which we need for a bit of equipment ....)
But I agree wholeheartedly with the point. Why would anyone wish to jeopardise their privacy to save a few seconds (max) of waiting for a webpage to load? The fact that Amazon can use this as a selling point is a sad statement on current attitudes to privacy.
Nice performance bump for users, and an incredible data mining opportunity for Amazon - who wins more?
Is it really a performance bump, though? I mean, when have you ever felt the load time for a page accessed through broadband was too slow?
If the Kindle Fire was running on a 33MHz Dragonball and accessing the net through a 14.4kbps modem, I could understand the need for this. But with a dual-core 1.2GHz processor and high-speed broadband, why do we need this? I'm still slightly confused at Amazon using this as a selling point ... (or perhaps it's a case of needing a selling point other than price, and drawing a blank?)
Seriously though, how often do you actually type on the kindle keyboard though? You mostly use the nav and page buttons.
Not all that often, but I do use it for wifi passcodes, searching for books/text. I'd hate to input either of those with a five-way controller, especially when the onscreen keyboard for the 5-way controller kindle isn't qwerty! I rather like having the keyboard there, and it doesn't exactly take up much room.
What I find more concerning is that the new kindle touch has apparently removed the page turn buttons on the sides. Those side buttons are the easiest way to turn pages, whether or not you've got a touch screen, and are one of the things I really love about reading on my kindle. It becomes a lot harder to flip back a page with only a touchscreen (which happens a lot when most people read). Amazon also seems to have gone for a shiny rather than matte finish on the surface of the device, which may not be the best idea for a device designed to be read in sunlight ...
I dunno, but from a first glance at the images on the website those new e-ink kindles *look* cheap. The old kindle 3G looked a lot more classy, somehow.
I honestly hadn't thought that video playback would be a concern.
It's not a concern -- there are many apps that can play large numbers of video formats available from the Market; QQplayer is one that works well. There's nothing much wrong with the way the Gallery app handles videos either.
That's right. No Google Apps for you! /Soup Nazi
Actually, you can get most, if not all, of the google apps (including maps, gmail, search, voice) via GetJar, which itself is a downloadable apk. The only thing you can't get is the market itself. Somewhat surprising, but there you go ...
You must be reading the wrong books.
Well, they're the right books for me ... :) I read mostly literature, but also some non-fiction works. What books are you buying that aren't DRM-encrypted?
As I said, I check for DRM before buying now, after someone on an earlier Slashdot thread told me how to spot the DRM-infested books.
I'm genuinely curious here -- are you only reading books that are already available in the public domain, or are Amazon selling currently published, commercial, copyright works out there without DRM encryption? That's amazing if so, and kudos to Amazon for doing this. I'd love it if Amazon moved away from a DRM model, but I can't realistically see this happening (I mean, they presumably need to reassure wary publishers that they're trying to prevent piracy!)
Well, I was talking tablets, not phones, and in Australia we don't have access to the Nook color -- so it's kindles or tablets here, really. I can only comment on what I see, and I've just never seen anyone reading novels on tablets (which are, almost universally, iPads). I keep looking, because I find this completely fascinating and rather unexpected ... but that's the way it is, at least on my train line.
I also wish this was being talked about more, I am not interested in 10 hour battery life, I'm interested in a 15 day battery life for a tablet - it doesn't require a back-lit LCD 60Hz screen, but an app store would be nice.
I doubt you'll get that anytime soon. One of the reason why eink devices have such great battery life is that they never power the screen except for when it is refreshed. Reading books, you only refresh the screen when you turn a page, meaning that your battery lasts forever. But if you want to do tablet-y things like surf the web, play games, etc -- things you do with apps, in other words -- you'll be refreshing the screen much more and your battery life will plummet.
An e-ink reader is a one-trick pony; it just happens to do that trick so exceptionally well that it leaves anything else right now for dead. I'd also like to see a new, higher-resolution e-ink kindle come out, preferable with a better contrast screen. But I don't want it running apps or Android or anything else -- I just want it for reading books. Everything else I can do on my phone or my netbook.
This is stupid, and I'm not switching to e-books until a reasonably wide selection of books is available in an open format from diverse vendors, and there is a selection of e-book readers (or tablet PCs or whatever you want to call them) available that will work with this format. The format itself could be something pretty simple: XHTML with user-customizeable styles, and maybe PNG graphics.
Relax. The DRM of most (all?) major ebook publishers is easily breakable, and because of backwards compatibility with older devices they're locked into these breakable DRM models forever, more or less.
I pay for all my ebooks. I also strip the DRM off all of my ebooks (and occasionally correct the terrible formatting that the publisher's used.) And from there, I can convert them into any format I like. (epub is generally accepted as the default open format and essentially what you just described (zipped xhtml with css), although even something like Amazon's .mobi is technically an open format now ...)
All books on Smashwords are DRM-free and many books on Amazon are DRM-free. I was actually surprised when I bought a Kindle book recently and discovered it was DRM-infested, so now I do check before buying them.
Huh? Every book I've purchased from Amazon (mostly literature) has been clad in DRM rubbish. I know this, because I strip them of it before putting them on my kindle ...
That's going away. Users seem to prefer fast color displays over slow reflective monochrome ones.
I dunno -- I see a lot more kindles on my train commute than tablets. And I am yet to see anyone reading a novel on a tablet. Ever. (I've seen people reading PDFs for work a few times, but that's as good as it gets ...)