If you subscribe to digital cable, the cable company has better data on your TV habits than Neilsen will ever have. Same goes for TiVo. Neilsen's days are numbered, unless they can move into a new market, which is where the gaming thing comes from.
Unfortunately, there are already services out there that allow gamers to "share" what games they are playing in real time (i.e. "User Satanicpuppy is currently playing: Galactic Civilizations II"), so their online gamer friends can keep up with what they're doing...It's almost trivial in implementation...Just run a small client to occasionally check running applications for known games. Such a service could easily grab usage information from their user base to generate stats.
Neilsen is just a fossil at this point; their information gathering is second rate compared to what's publicly available now. They would say that their demographic information is better and that they have the ability to generate a more representative sample set, but this could be overcome through the use of a much wider sample set, something these other services are more capable of getting.
Who the hell knows where life started (besides the ID crowd, haha)? In terms of evolution, however, there is no real need to have multiple origins; starting with a simple enough organism, they can split and diverge countless times to provide the sort of diversity we see today, and that common starting point would provide you your chemical homogeneity.
On the other hand, conditions on the pre-life earth were wildly different from the ones we have now. There could have been a number of different species, and only ones that could adapt to the emerging environment could have survived...They would all have been extremely simple, so that's not impossible.
Or, considering that most things here consume other things from here, a chemical similarity could be absolutely required for existence in the current environment, in order to survive the conditions, and to be able to eat anything.
Or, it could just be that our chemical composition is the most efficient, and natural selection drives species inevitably toward it.
It's unquestionable that all life here is from a common pool. The difference between a human and everything else on the planet isn't all that large in terms of DNA.
I would like to summarize all the following concise and logical refuations from the Intelligent Design Proponents:
"NUH-UH!"
They're clearly right. This proof of human evolutionary origins only has 6,000 empty skulls worth of evidence; Intelligent Design has many many more empty skulls than that.
Uh huh. I'm curious as to why you felt the fact that Gore served a particular fish at his daughters wedding to be at all relevant to an article about airplane biofuel, if you were not specifically pushing an anti-environment agenda through an offtopic attack on a popular environmentalist? It's a classic propaganda technique.
But no no, I'm being hugely irrational because I don't associate an unrelated person's private life with the benefits of biofuels.
The thing that bothers me isn't the attack on Gore; I could care less. The thing that bothers me is the fact that this isn't about Gore, and but you're trying to make it about him because you hate his politics and you want to keep this a politically polarized issue. And I think that fucking sucks. If you can't come up with anything better to say about this issue than to whine about Gore's diet, you've got no fucking place here.
Well, no, there are other options. You could increase the surface area of whatever part is in contact with the water, or you could increase the speed at which it makes contact.
At a sufficiently high speed water is about as solid as cement, so there is no limit to weight as long as you can make it hit the water fast/hard enough.
Did you read the article in Wired about the guy who wore that thing for a year? That's what I was thinking of with the north thing.
Lot of enhancements don't really interest me, but that one did. If they find a way to condense something like that to an implant, I'd be willing to try it out.
It's surprising how your brain adapts to process different types of nerve input. Like, if your prosthetic hand always gave you the sensation of cold when you pointed it in a northern direction, or the sensation of heat whenever you passed it near a "live" electrical source, or a strong magnetic field. They've got a device that allows you to "see" with your tongue, and brain scans of the people using the device show that the visual cortext is active and processing...even in people who are blind from birth.
So a limited signal palette is not necessarily a handicap, though the bandwidth obviously depends on nerve density, etc.
That seems counterintuitive. If your brain states remain the same, whats the issue?
There are a lot of philosophers who argue about this exact topic...Swampman, Twin Earth, etc. Basically it boils down to "Where does the stuff that makes up you live?"
If its external, e.g. you are you based on external referents, then there would be significant issues with you being you after you passed through a disjunct (i.e. death, cloning, etc). The thing that would come out the other side couldn't be assured to be contextually identical to the you that went in in the first place.
If its internal, however, it would seem like you would carry it with you regardless. You couldn't lose your context without losing yourself entirely.
Frankly, I think its much more likely the latter than the former. For there to be something to lose at all, you're pretty much dependent on there being a non-physical aspect (a soul) for you to lose, and that's just adding a lot of unnecessary complication to the situation.
Meat is a high protein, high fat, chemically efficient food that we are hardwired as a species to enjoy. Some people believe that this is ethically unsound, which they are perfectly free to do.
Other people disagree, and it is hard to really gainsay them in this because we are pretty much dependent on the consumption of living things--not like we can just go hang out in the sun and recharge our chloroplasts--and at a certain point it becomes arbitrary to decide which living things are acceptable to eat, and which ones are murder.
Like most evolved predators (sharp teeth, eyes on the front of our skulls, forward pointing ears, etc) we tend to eat meat. Unlike most predators, however, we've moved to the point where we keep meat in handy enclosures for when we need it. This starts a whole new ethical argument between the purists, who believe that meat should have an opportunity to run free and live a natural life before becoming dinner for us or some other predator, and the capitalists, who are more concerned with maximizing money for meat.
In short, the second debate is a meat eater's debate and completely beyond the scope of the vegetarian's "meat is murder" argument. Why does it matter to them that some meat-killers prefer to kill their own meat? Is a hunter bagging a wild hog (an ecologically destructive invasive species that is nonetheless quite tasty) ethically different from a soccer mom buying a pound of bacon at the local megamart? Is it murder-lite, or something?
I'm not going to point out the hypocrisy of a first worlder arguing on the ethics of food and animal killing; Scentcone already did that quite well. I will say, however, that a vegetarian arguing about the ethics of hunting vs farming is like an omnivore arguing about vegetarianism vs veganism...You have nothing to add. We know what you think. Thank you, move along.
Cisco has it's moments, but IMHO they're not remotely worth the premium you pay. Go with HP; they sell the same level of hardware and offer the same level of support, but it costs a hell of a lot less, and since it costs so much less you can get the hardware you actually need rather than just what you have to settle for because your budget doesn't swing more than one 10,000 dollar PIX.
Add to that the byzantine configurations, and it's easy for a non-gifted engineer to make pretty big mistakes.
No, no they're not. CZ is almost twice as heavy by volume. CZ has a substantially different refractive index...Set C and CZ next to each other and examine, and the difference should be clear to even a half-trained eye. CZ doesn't conduct heat well and C does very well. And finally, C will scratch CZ, but CZ will not scratch C.
They may have been hard to tell apart 200 years ago (doubtful), but there is no way a competent gemologist could make that mistake today.
For electricity, not for heat. Electrical and thermal conduction do not always go hand in hand...Actually, when heat increases, electrical conductivity tends to decrease.
CZ is an insulator, so the reaction may not be any less wasteful; the CZ could just be keeping the temperatures down.
The real benefits here seem to be durability, and safety. At 1/10th the heat, your components will take substantially less wear. And safety? Far far better to be hit with a jet of 50-100C gas from a ruptured cell, than to be hit with a 1,000C jet of gas from a ruptured fuel cell...1000c is about where silicon melts, so I'd rather be hit with something the temp of boiling water than to be a pile of ash standing in a little circle of black glass.
It's the other way around actually...CZs are thermal insulators, so they reduce the rate of heat transfer...That's probably one of the key reasons they're being used in this application.
Diamonds, on the other hand, are extremely efficient thermal conductors, so they are quite efficient at heat transfer, making them terribly unsuitable to this sort of application where heat is already the major problem.
So CZ is cheaper, easier to obtain, and (for once) actually has the chemical advantage over the diamond. Cool indeed.
Basically, in addition to being softer than pure C, CZ is also 1.75 times heavier. Even chemically it's a rip off of diamond; more weight, less strength.
As apparently no one bothered to read even the summary, let me be the first to say there is NO DIAMOND in this solution, real or artificial...It's cubic zirconium, which is a sparkly gem that is often used to simulate diamond, but has neither diamond's chemical makeup, nor its hardness.
But it doesn't come with RAID! If you buy a decent RAID controller, it'll have the ports on it for the drives, so what's the point of having 10 slots on the mobo, and no RAID controller? I guess you could buy a 20 dollar pseudo-raid card, but that would be screwing yourself if you're going to be buying 6+ HDDs.
Agreed on the ethernet, though looking around it's hard to find multi-port gigabit cards that are anything except PCI-X, so it'd be hard to get a lot of extra ports. Still, for my money, what the hell do you need that many ports for? Some kind of multi-tiered firewall where you want physical separation of subnets?
You can do liquid cooled that's pretty quiet, but otherwise, yea. If you get a good quiet air cooler (they are often huge chunks of Cu with a big slow fan;) then the biggest source of noise (assuming a decent power supply) is the video card.
That wasn't what leapt out at me...What leapt out at me was "All those SATA ports, and NO RAID"
Unless you're going to be buying a craptacular "fake raid" card, you're going to be paying hundreds of dollars for a card that can handle these drives, so it's a good thing the damn board comes with extra PCI express slots, especially since you're more likely to find a PCI-X raid card, and there are no PCI-X slots on this board (and good luck trying to fit it into a PCI slot, with all that extra crap on the board).
All that SATA with no RAID suggests that all the extra SATA slots are just epeen. All the board real estate used on things that you don't need multiples of, just so you're forced to blow a card slot to make up for it.
Eh. We "allow" it, but it seldom works; if you can argue that they didn't uphold their end of the bargain, then the court can allow the suit to progress...This is how people sue when they sign a waiver of their legal right to sue.
The right to sue anyone for anything is practically enshrined in the Constitution, and considering the number of lawyers in the government, it's no surprise.
Because source code falls under copyright law, and they want things like the original windows code released to the public domain. If the source is never released it never falls into the public domain: you can copy the program forever, but you'll never really be able to look at it.
They're also into music and movies, and file trading, and all these things are impacted by long copyrights. Things like Google's "Scan every library in existence" scheme could be infinitely cooler if your search would bring you the full text of the actual book, and it could do that for a vast number of books if the copyrights were relaxed.
Your faith is based on the assumption that the majority of people are intellectually honest enough to change their opinion in the face of new evidence.
The bulk of those who are still solid bushies are living in a persistent fantasy world. They think the war in Iraq will be "won"...whatever the hell that means, since we still don't seem to have a defined goal other than it going away. They think we went there in the first place for the "right reasons." They think the reason the terrists haven't blown up the Sears tower is because we're "fighting them over there" and not just because terrorists as a whole tend not to be all that successful.
I don't think anything would convince them they're wrong. I mean literally anything; if he was caught on tape having sex with an underage boy, they'd say it was a liberal framejob. There is practically nothing they won't believe is someone else's fault. They're emotionally wedded to their position. If things were reversed, we'd see a similar number of liberal weenies blaming it all on the conservatives.
It's sad to say, but there just aren't a lot of free-thinkers in the world. It just shows up more here because things have gotten so polarized.
>Has the equipment to copy dvds >Has the technical knowledge to copy dvds >Has the bandwidth to download a dvd.
But I still don't copy dvds. Maybe one day I'll finish ripping all my cds on to my computer, but I doubt it. It's just a whole lot of time spent making a copy of something that I don't care enough to actually purchase.
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If you subscribe to digital cable, the cable company has better data on your TV habits than Neilsen will ever have. Same goes for TiVo. Neilsen's days are numbered, unless they can move into a new market, which is where the gaming thing comes from.
Unfortunately, there are already services out there that allow gamers to "share" what games they are playing in real time (i.e. "User Satanicpuppy is currently playing: Galactic Civilizations II"), so their online gamer friends can keep up with what they're doing...It's almost trivial in implementation...Just run a small client to occasionally check running applications for known games. Such a service could easily grab usage information from their user base to generate stats.
Neilsen is just a fossil at this point; their information gathering is second rate compared to what's publicly available now. They would say that their demographic information is better and that they have the ability to generate a more representative sample set, but this could be overcome through the use of a much wider sample set, something these other services are more capable of getting.
Who the hell knows where life started (besides the ID crowd, haha)? In terms of evolution, however, there is no real need to have multiple origins; starting with a simple enough organism, they can split and diverge countless times to provide the sort of diversity we see today, and that common starting point would provide you your chemical homogeneity.
On the other hand, conditions on the pre-life earth were wildly different from the ones we have now. There could have been a number of different species, and only ones that could adapt to the emerging environment could have survived...They would all have been extremely simple, so that's not impossible.
Or, considering that most things here consume other things from here, a chemical similarity could be absolutely required for existence in the current environment, in order to survive the conditions, and to be able to eat anything.
Or, it could just be that our chemical composition is the most efficient, and natural selection drives species inevitably toward it.
It's unquestionable that all life here is from a common pool. The difference between a human and everything else on the planet isn't all that large in terms of DNA.
I would like to summarize all the following concise and logical refuations from the Intelligent Design Proponents:
"NUH-UH!"
They're clearly right. This proof of human evolutionary origins only has 6,000 empty skulls worth of evidence; Intelligent Design has many many more empty skulls than that.
Best on-topic, factually accurate, one-word post...ever.
Uh huh. I'm curious as to why you felt the fact that Gore served a particular fish at his daughters wedding to be at all relevant to an article about airplane biofuel, if you were not specifically pushing an anti-environment agenda through an offtopic attack on a popular environmentalist? It's a classic propaganda technique.
But no no, I'm being hugely irrational because I don't associate an unrelated person's private life with the benefits of biofuels.
The thing that bothers me isn't the attack on Gore; I could care less. The thing that bothers me is the fact that this isn't about Gore, and but you're trying to make it about him because you hate his politics and you want to keep this a politically polarized issue. And I think that fucking sucks. If you can't come up with anything better to say about this issue than to whine about Gore's diet, you've got no fucking place here.
Blah blah bla-fricking blah. Let's rape the planet because Al Gore ate a sea bass.
How the HELL can you be anti-environment? Do you live on the same planet with the rest of us?
Well, no, there are other options. You could increase the surface area of whatever part is in contact with the water, or you could increase the speed at which it makes contact.
At a sufficiently high speed water is about as solid as cement, so there is no limit to weight as long as you can make it hit the water fast/hard enough.
Did you read the article in Wired about the guy who wore that thing for a year? That's what I was thinking of with the north thing.
Lot of enhancements don't really interest me, but that one did. If they find a way to condense something like that to an implant, I'd be willing to try it out.
It's surprising how your brain adapts to process different types of nerve input. Like, if your prosthetic hand always gave you the sensation of cold when you pointed it in a northern direction, or the sensation of heat whenever you passed it near a "live" electrical source, or a strong magnetic field. They've got a device that allows you to "see" with your tongue, and brain scans of the people using the device show that the visual cortext is active and processing...even in people who are blind from birth.
So a limited signal palette is not necessarily a handicap, though the bandwidth obviously depends on nerve density, etc.
That seems counterintuitive. If your brain states remain the same, whats the issue?
There are a lot of philosophers who argue about this exact topic...Swampman, Twin Earth, etc. Basically it boils down to "Where does the stuff that makes up you live?"
If its external, e.g. you are you based on external referents, then there would be significant issues with you being you after you passed through a disjunct (i.e. death, cloning, etc). The thing that would come out the other side couldn't be assured to be contextually identical to the you that went in in the first place.
If its internal, however, it would seem like you would carry it with you regardless. You couldn't lose your context without losing yourself entirely.
Frankly, I think its much more likely the latter than the former. For there to be something to lose at all, you're pretty much dependent on there being a non-physical aspect (a soul) for you to lose, and that's just adding a lot of unnecessary complication to the situation.
Blah blah blah.
Meat is a high protein, high fat, chemically efficient food that we are hardwired as a species to enjoy. Some people believe that this is ethically unsound, which they are perfectly free to do.
Other people disagree, and it is hard to really gainsay them in this because we are pretty much dependent on the consumption of living things--not like we can just go hang out in the sun and recharge our chloroplasts--and at a certain point it becomes arbitrary to decide which living things are acceptable to eat, and which ones are murder.
Like most evolved predators (sharp teeth, eyes on the front of our skulls, forward pointing ears, etc) we tend to eat meat. Unlike most predators, however, we've moved to the point where we keep meat in handy enclosures for when we need it. This starts a whole new ethical argument between the purists, who believe that meat should have an opportunity to run free and live a natural life before becoming dinner for us or some other predator, and the capitalists, who are more concerned with maximizing money for meat.
In short, the second debate is a meat eater's debate and completely beyond the scope of the vegetarian's "meat is murder" argument. Why does it matter to them that some meat-killers prefer to kill their own meat? Is a hunter bagging a wild hog (an ecologically destructive invasive species that is nonetheless quite tasty) ethically different from a soccer mom buying a pound of bacon at the local megamart? Is it murder-lite, or something?
I'm not going to point out the hypocrisy of a first worlder arguing on the ethics of food and animal killing; Scentcone already did that quite well. I will say, however, that a vegetarian arguing about the ethics of hunting vs farming is like an omnivore arguing about vegetarianism vs veganism...You have nothing to add. We know what you think. Thank you, move along.
Answer: Yes
Cisco has it's moments, but IMHO they're not remotely worth the premium you pay. Go with HP; they sell the same level of hardware and offer the same level of support, but it costs a hell of a lot less, and since it costs so much less you can get the hardware you actually need rather than just what you have to settle for because your budget doesn't swing more than one 10,000 dollar PIX.
Add to that the byzantine configurations, and it's easy for a non-gifted engineer to make pretty big mistakes.
No, no they're not. CZ is almost twice as heavy by volume. CZ has a substantially different refractive index...Set C and CZ next to each other and examine, and the difference should be clear to even a half-trained eye. CZ doesn't conduct heat well and C does very well. And finally, C will scratch CZ, but CZ will not scratch C.
They may have been hard to tell apart 200 years ago (doubtful), but there is no way a competent gemologist could make that mistake today.
For electricity, not for heat. Electrical and thermal conduction do not always go hand in hand...Actually, when heat increases, electrical conductivity tends to decrease.
CZ is an insulator, so the reaction may not be any less wasteful; the CZ could just be keeping the temperatures down.
The real benefits here seem to be durability, and safety. At 1/10th the heat, your components will take substantially less wear. And safety? Far far better to be hit with a jet of 50-100C gas from a ruptured cell, than to be hit with a 1,000C jet of gas from a ruptured fuel cell...1000c is about where silicon melts, so I'd rather be hit with something the temp of boiling water than to be a pile of ash standing in a little circle of black glass.
It's the other way around actually...CZs are thermal insulators, so they reduce the rate of heat transfer...That's probably one of the key reasons they're being used in this application.
Diamonds, on the other hand, are extremely efficient thermal conductors, so they are quite efficient at heat transfer, making them terribly unsuitable to this sort of application where heat is already the major problem.
So CZ is cheaper, easier to obtain, and (for once) actually has the chemical advantage over the diamond. Cool indeed.
My gem knowledge is getting rusty: CZ = C * 1.75.
Basically, in addition to being softer than pure C, CZ is also 1.75 times heavier. Even chemically it's a rip off of diamond; more weight, less strength.
As apparently no one bothered to read even the summary, let me be the first to say there is NO DIAMOND in this solution, real or artificial...It's cubic zirconium, which is a sparkly gem that is often used to simulate diamond, but has neither diamond's chemical makeup, nor its hardness.
But it doesn't come with RAID! If you buy a decent RAID controller, it'll have the ports on it for the drives, so what's the point of having 10 slots on the mobo, and no RAID controller? I guess you could buy a 20 dollar pseudo-raid card, but that would be screwing yourself if you're going to be buying 6+ HDDs.
Agreed on the ethernet, though looking around it's hard to find multi-port gigabit cards that are anything except PCI-X, so it'd be hard to get a lot of extra ports. Still, for my money, what the hell do you need that many ports for? Some kind of multi-tiered firewall where you want physical separation of subnets?
You can do liquid cooled that's pretty quiet, but otherwise, yea. If you get a good quiet air cooler (they are often huge chunks of Cu with a big slow fan ;) then the biggest source of noise (assuming a decent power supply) is the video card.
That wasn't what leapt out at me...What leapt out at me was "All those SATA ports, and NO RAID"
Unless you're going to be buying a craptacular "fake raid" card, you're going to be paying hundreds of dollars for a card that can handle these drives, so it's a good thing the damn board comes with extra PCI express slots, especially since you're more likely to find a PCI-X raid card, and there are no PCI-X slots on this board (and good luck trying to fit it into a PCI slot, with all that extra crap on the board).
All that SATA with no RAID suggests that all the extra SATA slots are just epeen. All the board real estate used on things that you don't need multiples of, just so you're forced to blow a card slot to make up for it.
Eh. We "allow" it, but it seldom works; if you can argue that they didn't uphold their end of the bargain, then the court can allow the suit to progress...This is how people sue when they sign a waiver of their legal right to sue.
The right to sue anyone for anything is practically enshrined in the Constitution, and considering the number of lawyers in the government, it's no surprise.
Because source code falls under copyright law, and they want things like the original windows code released to the public domain. If the source is never released it never falls into the public domain: you can copy the program forever, but you'll never really be able to look at it.
They're also into music and movies, and file trading, and all these things are impacted by long copyrights. Things like Google's "Scan every library in existence" scheme could be infinitely cooler if your search would bring you the full text of the actual book, and it could do that for a vast number of books if the copyrights were relaxed.
Your faith is based on the assumption that the majority of people are intellectually honest enough to change their opinion in the face of new evidence.
The bulk of those who are still solid bushies are living in a persistent fantasy world. They think the war in Iraq will be "won"...whatever the hell that means, since we still don't seem to have a defined goal other than it going away. They think we went there in the first place for the "right reasons." They think the reason the terrists haven't blown up the Sears tower is because we're "fighting them over there" and not just because terrorists as a whole tend not to be all that successful.
I don't think anything would convince them they're wrong. I mean literally anything; if he was caught on tape having sex with an underage boy, they'd say it was a liberal framejob. There is practically nothing they won't believe is someone else's fault. They're emotionally wedded to their position. If things were reversed, we'd see a similar number of liberal weenies blaming it all on the conservatives.
It's sad to say, but there just aren't a lot of free-thinkers in the world. It just shows up more here because things have gotten so polarized.
Eh. I'm in the group of people who:
>Has the equipment to copy dvds
>Has the technical knowledge to copy dvds
>Has the bandwidth to download a dvd.
But I still don't copy dvds. Maybe one day I'll finish ripping all my cds on to my computer, but I doubt it. It's just a whole lot of time spent making a copy of something that I don't care enough to actually purchase.