It's not really the amount in earth crust that matters, it's the concentration.
Why silver, about as abundant as gold, but significantly less expensive and in much wider supply? Take metal A, which appears in content of 1 gram per ton of rock spread regularly over a million tons of rock. You get a ton of it from processing the million tons. And take another, metal, "B" that appears as veins - only about a hundred tons of rock in a million contain it at all, and then they contain only like 100 gram per ton. By processing a million tons of rock you gain only 10kg of it.
The abundance of the first metal is 1E-6. The abundance of the other is mere 1E-8. Still, production of metal B is vastly cheaper and more cost-efficient than metal A, and as such, metal B is much cheaper.
So the argument whether there's enough tellurium on Earth is moot. It's all about its concentration and possibility to mine it.
Gosh, I remember one guy identifying as "GayPinkDwagon" or something like that. He was a very successful player. Not only he was just plain _good_, anyone fragged by him would enter a blind rage to avenge the shame and became an easy target. The person wasn't even gay, that nick was just to infuriate people.
On a related note, there's a whole clan on Nexuiz, with [BOT] at the beginning of their nicknames. Similar reason, just somewhat more subtle approach. "Bot? Not a threat."
In Poland, 30 years if it was acquired in good faith (say, you forgot to take it in a restaurant and I took it for safekeeping, and left an ad "laptop found"), 40 years if it was acquired in bad faith (stolen).
After that period, the ownership of the property passes onto the person who keeps it, unless contested in court before the period expires.
Look, if you try to compare a wooden club, an iron mace and a black powder rifle, you know which is the winner. Let's not talk about submachine guns here.
Also, sapphire is quite expensive, even artificial one.
But from the description it looks like it's only needed as a tool to mass-produce these, reusable. Meaning you make such one sapphire matrix and then use it to produce bulk amounts of media which may be a simple plastic coated with these polymers.
Well, say what you want, right here with me, in my wallet, I have a horse. Smaller than a quarter. Precisely, the complete genome sequenced and sorted. On a 2GB MicroSD card.
"A lot of books" is an odd abstract that doesn't really impress me. But the idea of a full, unabridged, complete set of information which describes a real lifeform in full, contains the program of all the life functions, all the complexity of neural system, all the mysteries of instincts and social behaviors, the complexity of senses, the strength, immunity, lifeforce of a powerful creature - all this potential, described as a bunch of files consisting of rows upon rows of letters AGCT (gzipped).
Sure we have no technology to reproduce a living creature from this data alone. But that looks like a really small problem compared to all the incredible knowledge achieved through billions of years of evolution, to solve all these problems of creating a standalone, self-repairing, self-replicating, self-defending, and quite pretty to that, piece of "biotechnology" - actually, the solution to re-creating it from that data (only on different media) is right in that data. We just can't really use it.
250 high quality movies, in some future? blah. A horse in my wallet, now and today, that is what impresses me, really.
Back in my day, when I had Atari 65XE, original games cost - I don't remember how much, but about twice as much as pirate tapes in Poland (with the difference that a pirate tape was 4-6, and in case of Turbo, 20 or so games). And as much as 3-4 ice cream cones.
I was a kid and I still had some 50% of originals - when piracy was still legal, and getting a pirated game was twice as easy as finding an original! And it even wasn't very heavy on my pocket money, and that is in a country freshly out of martial law, with rampart crisis and people (including my parents) struggling in the new economy. I would buy one-two tapes a week, could skip poor games without regret - except THESE games, then and there - were usually GOOD.
Former scene coders would start computer firms and release games that pushed the possibilities of the computers beyond new thresholds. 256 colors on 8-bit Atari? Why not? Colors in a hi-res B&W mode, by abusing pixel alignment with color patterns on the TV display? Yes, please. 8-channel sound from the 4-channel generator? Why not?
Due to the games being very affordable, and bought often and many, the firms were wildly successful. Until the legislation. With rise of anti-piracy legislation, and death of bulk pirates, the prices went up, the production went down, the sales went down, and suddenly there was no domestic game producers any more, the shops filled with games from the West, at western prices, and... right now I'm back to 5% originals. Because the price is 12x what the pirate is asking and 3x as much as I'm willing to pay, despite a decent salary vs kid's pocket money.
Is there a practical difference between the two examples?
I mean, if I seal the envelopes and promptly kill myself, there is nothing and no one who knows the state of the coins. As much as you know their state is fixed and determines, there is no practical way of determining it without actually examining these coins. It's entirely random. So, is there a practical difference between 'fundamentally unknown' and just unknown?
I know it's a question of the kind 'does a falling tree make a noise if there's nobody to hear it', except -for practical reasons- it doesn't matter if it makes noise or not - the difference has zero influence on the rest of the world.
The odds are quite good, because the subs don't cruise the ocean at random.
Even the best stealth technology won't help much in clear, open, stagnant sea. It's the background noise you hide in. The borders of oceanic currents of various temperature and salination water create zones that neatly reflect noises, create quite a bit of background noise themselves, and in short, for a submarine, are what a bunch of seaweed is to a fish - a great place to hide in. Plus they often run for many, many miles along the currents, providing safe, invisible paths for the submarines to travel - sometimes quite narrow though.
So while collision right in the middle of nowhere would be against cosmic odds, a chance of collision on such a path is quite high - both subs are there because this is a good hiding spot, they are -very- invisible to each other, and both stay in the same relatively narrow zone. They may even travel in opposite directions.
Remember the story of the kid arrested for "terrorism" for making a game of his school for Counter-Strike? I bet porting these maps to CS-Source would be trivial... INSTA-TERRORISM!!!
I don't use NoScript. Too many sites depend on Javascript.
I use Adblock and Flashblock and they do the job adequately enough - blocking off almost all the ad content, except of some most cleverly placed. Flash content is in 90% ads, and in the remaining 10% I don't want it to load without my consent in background (say, I open 10 diferent flash movies, I don't want them to start playing all at once), so it's a feature, not a problem for me.
I also use TabMixPlus, set to open ALL new windows in tabs. So, from time to time, a site manages to trick me into opening their popup, but I close it without ever looking - I just see a redundant tab appear on my tab bar and middle-click it = close.
So: AJAX/JS: yes. There are no real pure JS ads worth speaking of. At least nothing Adblock can't handle. Flash: on request. Way too high noise:content ratio, also autostarting flash is annoying. Sites that intercept your clicks / bypass adblocking - tab mix plus, they manage to open their popup, but they never get me to see it.
There's one ugly problem with this solution: The website places a huge bigass DIV with the flash inside. If the article below has any links, you can't click them unless you close the DIV first. And the close button is embedded in the flash you blocked.
Don't name your servers after food items. If it's 2AM and you're running an all-nighter and there's nothing and nowhere to get food from, and you just managed to distract yourself from food enough, the last thing you want is ssh pizza.
The 51" TV contains costs of manufacture of 3 51" LCD panels, from which 2 were discarded due to presence of dead pixels. The 100 5" displays contain costs of manufacture of 10 5" displays that didn't pass QA. Same number of dead pixels per square inch, but much smaller unit size disqualified by their presence.
It applies to non-"0 dead pixels" products to a degree too. Yield of a modern assembly line for highest performance chips (1GB RAM dice, quad core CPUs, fastest GPUs etc) is like 20%. Meaning you buy one CPU, you pay for 5 - your own and 4 failed ones. Cut your requirements by 10 and you have a 100% yield, on an assembly line that has already paid for itself, in a tech that paid back its development costs already. And you can still do wonders on a 400MHZ CPU.
I have a friend working at a small computer store. I know his cut is about what you said, and I know the wholesale prices. Then I know the prices of a "prestige" computer shop (+20 - +40%), a hypermarket (+50 - +200%), a big electronics stores network ( 0 - +200%, insane promotions and ridiculous standard prices), and second-hand - ( -80 - +50% )
Other middle-men: transport, storage, logistics, wholesale (often 2-3 levels).
Another 10-15% missing in other taxes (than VAT), manufacturer's profit (the cut above costs), insurances, interest on credits and so on.
Maybe EEE doesn't cost 17 dollars each. But I assure you a $50 gamer's mouse costs below $5 in manufacture costs. A $15 SD Card reader is $0.50. An overclockable $300 memory is just the same as $30 one (meaning maybe $3 in manufacture), except past some more QA. Besides, EEE was especially aimed at low price, low price IS the selling point, so the margins had to be cut down. Take your average $1000 laptop instead, and analyze its cost as a sum of components plus assembly.
Oh, nope. They are the Chineese originals. Exactly the same "knock-offs" as your $10 ones. Same device, same design, same PCB, maybe no package at some times. And of course no brand, but they are manufactured by the very same factories, on the very same assembly lines.
Slashdot Mirror
...my teacher complained when on my astronomy essay I wrote "Saturn has countless moons, from which we have discovered about fifteen so far".
It's not really the amount in earth crust that matters, it's the concentration.
Why silver, about as abundant as gold, but significantly less expensive and in much wider supply?
Take metal A, which appears in content of 1 gram per ton of rock spread regularly over a million tons of rock. You get a ton of it from processing the million tons. And take another, metal, "B" that appears as veins - only about a hundred tons of rock in a million contain it at all, and then they contain only like 100 gram per ton. By processing a million tons of rock you gain only 10kg of it.
The abundance of the first metal is 1E-6. The abundance of the other is mere 1E-8. Still, production of metal B is vastly cheaper and more cost-efficient than metal A, and as such, metal B is much cheaper.
So the argument whether there's enough tellurium on Earth is moot. It's all about its concentration and possibility to mine it.
Gosh, I remember one guy identifying as "GayPinkDwagon" or something like that. He was a very successful player. Not only he was just plain _good_, anyone fragged by him would enter a blind rage to avenge the shame and became an easy target. The person wasn't even gay, that nick was just to infuriate people.
On a related note, there's a whole clan on Nexuiz, with [BOT] at the beginning of their nicknames. Similar reason, just somewhat more subtle approach. "Bot? Not a threat."
A submachine gun in firm hands will do the job nicely too.
Actually, I suggest the more practical Australian "crocodile bag" approach instead:
Feed them to the crocodiles!
In Poland, 30 years if it was acquired in good faith (say, you forgot to take it in a restaurant and I took it for safekeeping, and left an ad "laptop found"), 40 years if it was acquired in bad faith (stolen).
After that period, the ownership of the property passes onto the person who keeps it, unless contested in court before the period expires.
Look, if you try to compare a wooden club, an iron mace and a black powder rifle, you know which is the winner. Let's not talk about submachine guns here.
You could argue a game on a CD is not a game, until you install and run it.
mitochondrial RNA file is included in the set :)
As for prions, [citation needed] please?
What do you mean by 'orientation'?
Seems like its data density is 200 miliOlympicPools per kiloLibraryOfCongress.
Also, sapphire is quite expensive, even artificial one.
But from the description it looks like it's only needed as a tool to mass-produce these, reusable. Meaning you make such one sapphire matrix and then use it to produce bulk amounts of media which may be a simple plastic coated with these polymers.
Well, say what you want, right here with me, in my wallet, I have a horse. Smaller than a quarter.
Precisely, the complete genome sequenced and sorted. On a 2GB MicroSD card.
"A lot of books" is an odd abstract that doesn't really impress me. But the idea of a full, unabridged, complete set of information which describes a real lifeform in full, contains the program of all the life functions, all the complexity of neural system, all the mysteries of instincts and social behaviors, the complexity of senses, the strength, immunity, lifeforce of a powerful creature - all this potential, described as a bunch of files consisting of rows upon rows of letters AGCT (gzipped).
Sure we have no technology to reproduce a living creature from this data alone. But that looks like a really small problem compared to all the incredible knowledge achieved through billions of years of evolution, to solve all these problems of creating a standalone, self-repairing, self-replicating, self-defending, and quite pretty to that, piece of "biotechnology" - actually, the solution to re-creating it from that data (only on different media) is right in that data. We just can't really use it.
250 high quality movies, in some future? blah.
A horse in my wallet, now and today, that is what impresses me, really.
Back in my day, when I had Atari 65XE, original games cost - I don't remember how much, but about twice as much as pirate tapes in Poland (with the difference that a pirate tape was 4-6, and in case of Turbo, 20 or so games). And as much as 3-4 ice cream cones.
I was a kid and I still had some 50% of originals - when piracy was still legal, and getting a pirated game was twice as easy as finding an original! And it even wasn't very heavy on my pocket money, and that is in a country freshly out of martial law, with rampart crisis and people (including my parents) struggling in the new economy. I would buy one-two tapes a week, could skip poor games without regret - except THESE games, then and there - were usually GOOD.
Former scene coders would start computer firms and release games that pushed the possibilities of the computers beyond new thresholds. 256 colors on 8-bit Atari? Why not? Colors in a hi-res B&W mode, by abusing pixel alignment with color patterns on the TV display? Yes, please. 8-channel sound from the 4-channel generator? Why not?
Due to the games being very affordable, and bought often and many, the firms were wildly successful. Until the legislation. With rise of anti-piracy legislation, and death of bulk pirates, the prices went up, the production went down, the sales went down, and suddenly there was no domestic game producers any more, the shops filled with games from the West, at western prices, and... right now I'm back to 5% originals. Because the price is 12x what the pirate is asking and 3x as much as I'm willing to pay, despite a decent salary vs kid's pocket money.
Is there a practical difference between the two examples?
I mean, if I seal the envelopes and promptly kill myself, there is nothing and no one who knows the state of the coins. As much as you know their state is fixed and determines, there is no practical way of determining it without actually examining these coins. It's entirely random. So, is there a practical difference between 'fundamentally unknown' and just unknown?
I know it's a question of the kind 'does a falling tree make a noise if there's nobody to hear it', except -for practical reasons- it doesn't matter if it makes noise or not - the difference has zero influence on the rest of the world.
The odds are quite good, because the subs don't cruise the ocean at random.
Even the best stealth technology won't help much in clear, open, stagnant sea. It's the background noise you hide in.
The borders of oceanic currents of various temperature and salination water create zones that neatly reflect noises, create quite a bit of background noise themselves, and in short, for a submarine, are what a bunch of seaweed is to a fish - a great place to hide in. Plus they often run for many, many miles along the currents, providing safe, invisible paths for the submarines to travel - sometimes quite narrow though.
So while collision right in the middle of nowhere would be against cosmic odds, a chance of collision on such a path is quite high - both subs are there because this is a good hiding spot, they are -very- invisible to each other, and both stay in the same relatively narrow zone. They may even travel in opposite directions.
Remember the story of the kid arrested for "terrorism" for making a game of his school for Counter-Strike?
I bet porting these maps to CS-Source would be trivial...
INSTA-TERRORISM!!!
I don't use NoScript. Too many sites depend on Javascript.
I use Adblock and Flashblock and they do the job adequately enough - blocking off almost all the ad content, except of some most cleverly placed. Flash content is in 90% ads, and in the remaining 10% I don't want it to load without my consent in background (say, I open 10 diferent flash movies, I don't want them to start playing all at once), so it's a feature, not a problem for me.
I also use TabMixPlus, set to open ALL new windows in tabs. So, from time to time, a site manages to trick me into opening their popup, but I close it without ever looking - I just see a redundant tab appear on my tab bar and middle-click it = close.
So:
AJAX/JS: yes. There are no real pure JS ads worth speaking of. At least nothing Adblock can't handle.
Flash: on request. Way too high noise:content ratio, also autostarting flash is annoying.
Sites that intercept your clicks / bypass adblocking - tab mix plus, they manage to open their popup, but they never get me to see it.
Other than the triangle by article tags broken, no effect.
There's one ugly problem with this solution:
The website places a huge bigass DIV with the flash inside. If the article below has any links, you can't click them unless you close the DIV first. And the close button is embedded in the flash you blocked.
Don't name your servers after food items. If it's 2AM and you're running an all-nighter and there's nothing and nowhere to get food from, and you just managed to distract yourself from food enough, the last thing you want is ssh pizza.
Especially if you have a "0 dead pixels" policy.
The 51" TV contains costs of manufacture of 3 51" LCD panels, from which 2 were discarded due to presence of dead pixels.
The 100 5" displays contain costs of manufacture of 10 5" displays that didn't pass QA. Same number of dead pixels per square inch, but much smaller unit size disqualified by their presence.
It applies to non-"0 dead pixels" products to a degree too. Yield of a modern assembly line for highest performance chips (1GB RAM dice, quad core CPUs, fastest GPUs etc) is like 20%. Meaning you buy one CPU, you pay for 5 - your own and 4 failed ones. Cut your requirements by 10 and you have a 100% yield, on an assembly line that has already paid for itself, in a tech that paid back its development costs already. And you can still do wonders on a 400MHZ CPU.
I have a friend working at a small computer store. I know his cut is about what you said, and I know the wholesale prices. Then I know the prices of a "prestige" computer shop (+20 - +40%), a hypermarket (+50 - +200%), a big electronics stores network ( 0 - +200%, insane promotions and ridiculous standard prices), and second-hand - ( -80 - +50% )
Other middle-men: transport, storage, logistics, wholesale (often 2-3 levels).
Another 10-15% missing in other taxes (than VAT), manufacturer's profit (the cut above costs), insurances, interest on credits and so on.
Maybe EEE doesn't cost 17 dollars each. But I assure you a $50 gamer's mouse costs below $5 in manufacture costs. A $15 SD Card reader is $0.50. An overclockable $300 memory is just the same as $30 one (meaning maybe $3 in manufacture), except past some more QA. Besides, EEE was especially aimed at low price, low price IS the selling point, so the margins had to be cut down. Take your average $1000 laptop instead, and analyze its cost as a sum of components plus assembly.
Oh, nope. They are the Chineese originals. Exactly the same "knock-offs" as your $10 ones. Same device, same design, same PCB, maybe no package at some times. And of course no brand, but they are manufactured by the very same factories, on the very same assembly lines.