One of the interesting theories I've heard is that Saudi Arabia is scared that electric cars are the future, and when that happens they will be left sitting on a bunch of worthless oil. Therefore they are pumping out the oil as fast as they can to sell it while it's still worth something. Which is also why they are continuing, even now, to ramp up production even though they've already managed to drive the price way down.
The Tea Party was pretty active back in 2008 too. They were the ones all fired up about Sarah Palin.
The thing with them is that while they called themselves a "Party", they were always and are just Republicans. They never split off and become an actual political Party, nor did the actual Republicans (the "Establishment") kick them out. So rather, the Republicans embraced the Tea Party's ignorance and crazy, and Donald Trump (and to a lessor extent Ted Cruz and Ben Carson) are just the chickens coming home to roost.
Admittedly, it's a bit fun watching the Republican party tear itself to pieces, though the scary part about is that we'll probably end up with Hillary Clinton in the White House because of this.
Well, one of Jesse Ventura's big problems is that he managed to piss off the state congress, and once they decided they weren't going to work with him, they turned him into a lame duck pretty quickly. Then Ventura managed to also piss off the media, and they did everything they possibly could to tear him down. At that point his ability to accomplish anything was near zero. Trump has to be careful not to do the same thing, though as a businessman he's likely going to be a bit more savvy than Ventura when it comes to dealing with congress. Trump doesn't really seem to care about what the media thinks, but thanks to things like Twitter, a lot of people also don't care what the media thinks either so Trump might be onto something there.
Though we can thank Ventura for the light rail and no more vehicle emissions checks.
If I had to guess, the single platter drives outnumber all the other configurations. Virtually all the 500GB-1TB drives are single platter drives now, and that's what you'll find in all the low end computers.
Typically the smallest drives are only one platter. The larger drives will have more platters to get the higher capacity. For example, they get 1TB per platter, so the 4TB model will have 4 platters, the 2TB will have 2, and the 1TB model only one. The 500GB model will use one side of one platter. Counting platters is one way to tell how advanced the drive was when it was made (well, other than looking at the date code:). A 4-5 platter drive at a capacity was probably one of the first drives of that size on the market. If there's only one platter, it was probably one of the last drives of that size made.
My first SSD, which I bought in 2009 as an early adopter, started stuttering horribly within a year. I ended up ripping it out and went back to a HDD (at a significant performance increase over the SSD at that point), which I only replaced this year. I ran some secure wipe on the SSD that was supposed to restore performance. I let it sit on a shelf for a year anyway, and when I tried to finally use it for something also it only lasted a few days before corrupting everything on it. I'd secure wipe it, and it would be fine again for a bit, then shit itself all over again. It finally stopped responding. Other SSDs were not nearly as interesting, as they would just suddenly stop responding. These were all reputable brands too (Samsung, Intel, Crucial). The only brand that hasn't given me trouble is Sandisk.
Well, the sun puts out about 3.8 x 10^26 J/s. In 1000 years, that's about 1.1 x 10^37 J. The Earth is moving at about 32 km/s. So with that much energy you can accelerate about 1.1 x 10^28 kg to 32 km/s in 1000 years. That's roughly 2000 Earth masses, which is probably a bit on the low side for your Ringworld, but I guess it depends on how strong scrith really is.
That's why I'm a bit curious about what he considers an "Earth". There's only one Earth in our solar system once you take into account the large moon, magnetic field, liquid water on the surface, plate tectonics, air pressure, and factors like that. But there's several places that could plausibly support life, or once could have. Things mentioned in the article such as being in a larger galaxy, or being bigger than Earth, or older that Earth* don't really seem to preclude a planet from being an "Earth" to me, all other things being equal.
*Well, older than the Earth could be a problem because any Earth-like planet significantly older than ours in a solar system like ours with a Sun-like star has been burned to crisp by now. So does he mean that there may have once been more Earths, but to have an Earth in the Universe now is extremely unlikely event?
The problem I see with Trump is that most of the Republican voters aren't going to support him. He's polling very well, about 30% or so, which is higher than all the other Republican candidates. The other 70% are split up amongst the not-Trump candidates. But as those candidates drop out, most of those voters will shift to the other not-Trump candidates and won't back Trump. So at some point we'll see Trump with the same 30%, and someone other candidate (probably Rubio) with 70%. Trump's base is very loyal, but it's just not going to grow. Probably the best situation for Trump would be for the other candidates to stay in the race as long as possible and split the vote. If the status quo persists for a couple of months, he could enter the convention with the most delegates (though not a majority), at which point the Republican leadership would bury him one way or the other.
If it was me, I would write software in a way that would as platform agnostic as possible. That way you can run your software on Windows, if that's what they want. And at some point, if the software needed to run on something that wasn't Windows, you'd be ready with hopefully very little effort.
Unfortunately, I've seen software like that, and you're usually talking something that's decades old, built with tools and dependencies based upon decisions made in the 90's, which would make moving off of Windows very difficult. And there's no way the company is going to spend the resources to do that.
The sad thing is they made a lot of that stuff better in Windows 8. Going back to Windows 7 in some ways is a bit painful due to it's stupid quirks that will likely never get fixed, or even get worse. Like the massive memory and CPU usage from Windows Update in Windows 7 that Microsoft won't fix either. It's too bad that Microsoft completely dropped the ball on the UI in Windows 8. If it was the under-the-hood improvements with the Vista/7 UI on top, it would have been a real winner.
Actually, that came from from Windows 8. Though Microsoft messing around with Control Panel is nothing new. It seems every release they rename a bunch of the items in there for no reason whatsover.
The secure boot bullshit can make installing Windows 7 (or anything that's not Windows 8 or 10) on some laptops difficult. Drivers can be a bit tricky too, if the hardware is sufficiently different that the standard drivers don't work, then you are dependent on the manufacturer to publish Windows 7 drivers. And Intel has announced that there will be no drivers for older versions of Windows moving forward. Since most laptops now depend on Intel's GPU (amongst other things), the number of new laptops that will be able to run older versions of Windows will start to get pretty limited.
On the other hand, you can still order yourself a brand new Thinkpad with Windows 7 (or Windows 8.1) today if you don't want Windows 10.
The part about lifting the squirrel was towards the beginning. Did you not get to the part about using a Dyson sphere and lasing cavities to blow up planets in neighboring star systems?
Basically Planck units define several physical constants to be 1. Such as the speed of light, so instead of E=mc^2, you now have E=m. Problem is that for everyday use, things like the planck length, time, and to a lessor extent, mass, are absurdly tiny. The planck temperature, on the other hand, is absurdly high, which is the case because any black body at the planck temperature emits radiation with a wavelength of the planck length...
I've never heard of firefighters intentionally not trying to put out a fire like that. If no lives are at risk, they certainly won't put themselves at risk, but they'll still stand back at spray water at the building. The only times I can think of are: 1. They simply don't have enough resources to both fight the fire and protect the surrounding structures/area, so they prioritize the latter. 2. The owner hasn't paid up in the case of rural areas outside of city-based fire coverage. 3. It's an abandoned building and they figure it's better to let it burn completely down than leave a burnt out (and potentially dangerous to explorers) shell of a building standing. Detroit has been doing things like this.
That was the case a year ago. More recently Microsoft has managed to piss away whatever goodwill they might have had with their telemetry bullshit in Windows 10, followed by backporting that bullshit to Windows 7 and 8.1, as well as their persistent nagging, hassling, and all out tricking people to upgrade to Windows 10.
Well, there already is effectively a negative interest rate, as inflation takes about 2-3% (that's *their* inflation numbers too) of your money every year. Any safe investment nowadays pays out basically nothing, so if you don't want to lose money on your savings you are basically forced to put your money in stocks/mutual funds. Which is of course, by design, as that helps keep that bubble propped up, at least for the time being. Negative interest rates would just mean more of the same, so when that bubble finally pops, there goes everyone's retirement. The whole problem is, of course, government policy that keeps the interest rates so low. If the banks can get nearly free money from Uncle Sam, why pay depositors anything?
The real problem is that the government needs the interest rates low, as servicing the debt will get difficult if interest rates actually went up. If they had to pay 5% on all those T-bills, it would be a real strain on the budget and that's just with the existing debt. If they had to pay 10% (as in the early 80's), things would get real interesting real quick.
With these quadcopters there seems to some kind of 2-way communication between the controller and the quadcopter itself. So while you could build a crazy antenna for the controller, your options on the quadcopter itself are a lot more limited. With that said, I'm not sure what information it sends back, once it's done pairing with the controller. If it's just for the mostly-useless LCD screen on the controller, then it probably doesn't matter.
I actually have the quad copter in question. It's not going to be able to carry anything more than a firecracker, and you're not going to be able to fly it further away than you could shoot with a rifle. The camera is pretty crappy too. It's a toy. It's only real potential use would to fly it basically straight up and use the camera to look around and try and scout out areas you couldn't otherwise see. There's no way you're going to be able to weaponize it.
Yahoo has some pretty decent products like Finance, which are almost invisible. I'm sure lots of people type a ticker into a search engine, end up on Yahoo Finance, only vaguely aware that they're actually using Yahoo. I'm surprised Yahoo doesn't pay more attention to stuff like that, though perhaps with the way they've screwed up the things they do tinker around with, maybe it's best that they continue to ignore things like Yahoo Finance.
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A large, luxurious expensive car with a Chevy badge? Surely you just.
The Chevy Metro is a re-badged Suzuki Swift. Happy now?
One of the interesting theories I've heard is that Saudi Arabia is scared that electric cars are the future, and when that happens they will be left sitting on a bunch of worthless oil. Therefore they are pumping out the oil as fast as they can to sell it while it's still worth something. Which is also why they are continuing, even now, to ramp up production even though they've already managed to drive the price way down.
The Tea Party was pretty active back in 2008 too. They were the ones all fired up about Sarah Palin.
The thing with them is that while they called themselves a "Party", they were always and are just Republicans. They never split off and become an actual political Party, nor did the actual Republicans (the "Establishment") kick them out. So rather, the Republicans embraced the Tea Party's ignorance and crazy, and Donald Trump (and to a lessor extent Ted Cruz and Ben Carson) are just the chickens coming home to roost.
Admittedly, it's a bit fun watching the Republican party tear itself to pieces, though the scary part about is that we'll probably end up with Hillary Clinton in the White House because of this.
Well, one of Jesse Ventura's big problems is that he managed to piss off the state congress, and once they decided they weren't going to work with him, they turned him into a lame duck pretty quickly. Then Ventura managed to also piss off the media, and they did everything they possibly could to tear him down. At that point his ability to accomplish anything was near zero. Trump has to be careful not to do the same thing, though as a businessman he's likely going to be a bit more savvy than Ventura when it comes to dealing with congress. Trump doesn't really seem to care about what the media thinks, but thanks to things like Twitter, a lot of people also don't care what the media thinks either so Trump might be onto something there.
Though we can thank Ventura for the light rail and no more vehicle emissions checks.
Because space is really empty? Even in the most dense part of these belts and clouds, objects are still millions of km apart from each other.
If I had to guess, the single platter drives outnumber all the other configurations. Virtually all the 500GB-1TB drives are single platter drives now, and that's what you'll find in all the low end computers.
Typically the smallest drives are only one platter. The larger drives will have more platters to get the higher capacity. For example, they get 1TB per platter, so the 4TB model will have 4 platters, the 2TB will have 2, and the 1TB model only one. The 500GB model will use one side of one platter. Counting platters is one way to tell how advanced the drive was when it was made (well, other than looking at the date code :). A 4-5 platter drive at a capacity was probably one of the first drives of that size on the market. If there's only one platter, it was probably one of the last drives of that size made.
My first SSD, which I bought in 2009 as an early adopter, started stuttering horribly within a year. I ended up ripping it out and went back to a HDD (at a significant performance increase over the SSD at that point), which I only replaced this year. I ran some secure wipe on the SSD that was supposed to restore performance. I let it sit on a shelf for a year anyway, and when I tried to finally use it for something also it only lasted a few days before corrupting everything on it. I'd secure wipe it, and it would be fine again for a bit, then shit itself all over again. It finally stopped responding. Other SSDs were not nearly as interesting, as they would just suddenly stop responding. These were all reputable brands too (Samsung, Intel, Crucial). The only brand that hasn't given me trouble is Sandisk.
Even if you were to limit it to environmental disasters related to fossil fuels, there's still no way this is worse than the BP gulf oil spill.
Well, the sun puts out about 3.8 x 10^26 J/s. In 1000 years, that's about 1.1 x 10^37 J. The Earth is moving at about 32 km/s. So with that much energy you can accelerate about 1.1 x 10^28 kg to 32 km/s in 1000 years. That's roughly 2000 Earth masses, which is probably a bit on the low side for your Ringworld, but I guess it depends on how strong scrith really is.
That's why I'm a bit curious about what he considers an "Earth". There's only one Earth in our solar system once you take into account the large moon, magnetic field, liquid water on the surface, plate tectonics, air pressure, and factors like that. But there's several places that could plausibly support life, or once could have. Things mentioned in the article such as being in a larger galaxy, or being bigger than Earth, or older that Earth* don't really seem to preclude a planet from being an "Earth" to me, all other things being equal.
*Well, older than the Earth could be a problem because any Earth-like planet significantly older than ours in a solar system like ours with a Sun-like star has been burned to crisp by now. So does he mean that there may have once been more Earths, but to have an Earth in the Universe now is extremely unlikely event?
The problem I see with Trump is that most of the Republican voters aren't going to support him. He's polling very well, about 30% or so, which is higher than all the other Republican candidates. The other 70% are split up amongst the not-Trump candidates. But as those candidates drop out, most of those voters will shift to the other not-Trump candidates and won't back Trump. So at some point we'll see Trump with the same 30%, and someone other candidate (probably Rubio) with 70%. Trump's base is very loyal, but it's just not going to grow. Probably the best situation for Trump would be for the other candidates to stay in the race as long as possible and split the vote. If the status quo persists for a couple of months, he could enter the convention with the most delegates (though not a majority), at which point the Republican leadership would bury him one way or the other.
If it was me, I would write software in a way that would as platform agnostic as possible. That way you can run your software on Windows, if that's what they want. And at some point, if the software needed to run on something that wasn't Windows, you'd be ready with hopefully very little effort.
Unfortunately, I've seen software like that, and you're usually talking something that's decades old, built with tools and dependencies based upon decisions made in the 90's, which would make moving off of Windows very difficult. And there's no way the company is going to spend the resources to do that.
The sad thing is they made a lot of that stuff better in Windows 8. Going back to Windows 7 in some ways is a bit painful due to it's stupid quirks that will likely never get fixed, or even get worse. Like the massive memory and CPU usage from Windows Update in Windows 7 that Microsoft won't fix either. It's too bad that Microsoft completely dropped the ball on the UI in Windows 8. If it was the under-the-hood improvements with the Vista/7 UI on top, it would have been a real winner.
Actually, that came from from Windows 8. Though Microsoft messing around with Control Panel is nothing new. It seems every release they rename a bunch of the items in there for no reason whatsover.
The secure boot bullshit can make installing Windows 7 (or anything that's not Windows 8 or 10) on some laptops difficult. Drivers can be a bit tricky too, if the hardware is sufficiently different that the standard drivers don't work, then you are dependent on the manufacturer to publish Windows 7 drivers. And Intel has announced that there will be no drivers for older versions of Windows moving forward. Since most laptops now depend on Intel's GPU (amongst other things), the number of new laptops that will be able to run older versions of Windows will start to get pretty limited.
On the other hand, you can still order yourself a brand new Thinkpad with Windows 7 (or Windows 8.1) today if you don't want Windows 10.
The part about lifting the squirrel was towards the beginning. Did you not get to the part about using a Dyson sphere and lasing cavities to blow up planets in neighboring star systems?
Well, you can always define everything in terms of Planck units:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units
Basically Planck units define several physical constants to be 1. Such as the speed of light, so instead of E=mc^2, you now have E=m. Problem is that for everyday use, things like the planck length, time, and to a lessor extent, mass, are absurdly tiny. The planck temperature, on the other hand, is absurdly high, which is the case because any black body at the planck temperature emits radiation with a wavelength of the planck length...
Maybe he has a dvorak keyboard?
In which case, please give me a hardware dvorak keyboard, please.
I've never heard of firefighters intentionally not trying to put out a fire like that. If no lives are at risk, they certainly won't put themselves at risk, but they'll still stand back at spray water at the building. The only times I can think of are:
1. They simply don't have enough resources to both fight the fire and protect the surrounding structures/area, so they prioritize the latter.
2. The owner hasn't paid up in the case of rural areas outside of city-based fire coverage.
3. It's an abandoned building and they figure it's better to let it burn completely down than leave a burnt out (and potentially dangerous to explorers) shell of a building standing. Detroit has been doing things like this.
That was the case a year ago. More recently Microsoft has managed to piss away whatever goodwill they might have had with their telemetry bullshit in Windows 10, followed by backporting that bullshit to Windows 7 and 8.1, as well as their persistent nagging, hassling, and all out tricking people to upgrade to Windows 10.
Well, there already is effectively a negative interest rate, as inflation takes about 2-3% (that's *their* inflation numbers too) of your money every year. Any safe investment nowadays pays out basically nothing, so if you don't want to lose money on your savings you are basically forced to put your money in stocks/mutual funds. Which is of course, by design, as that helps keep that bubble propped up, at least for the time being. Negative interest rates would just mean more of the same, so when that bubble finally pops, there goes everyone's retirement. The whole problem is, of course, government policy that keeps the interest rates so low. If the banks can get nearly free money from Uncle Sam, why pay depositors anything?
The real problem is that the government needs the interest rates low, as servicing the debt will get difficult if interest rates actually went up. If they had to pay 5% on all those T-bills, it would be a real strain on the budget and that's just with the existing debt. If they had to pay 10% (as in the early 80's), things would get real interesting real quick.
With these quadcopters there seems to some kind of 2-way communication between the controller and the quadcopter itself. So while you could build a crazy antenna for the controller, your options on the quadcopter itself are a lot more limited. With that said, I'm not sure what information it sends back, once it's done pairing with the controller. If it's just for the mostly-useless LCD screen on the controller, then it probably doesn't matter.
I actually have the quad copter in question. It's not going to be able to carry anything more than a firecracker, and you're not going to be able to fly it further away than you could shoot with a rifle. The camera is pretty crappy too. It's a toy. It's only real potential use would to fly it basically straight up and use the camera to look around and try and scout out areas you couldn't otherwise see. There's no way you're going to be able to weaponize it.
Still, for the price it's pretty impressive.
Yahoo has some pretty decent products like Finance, which are almost invisible. I'm sure lots of people type a ticker into a search engine, end up on Yahoo Finance, only vaguely aware that they're actually using Yahoo. I'm surprised Yahoo doesn't pay more attention to stuff like that, though perhaps with the way they've screwed up the things they do tinker around with, maybe it's best that they continue to ignore things like Yahoo Finance.