As for infectability, if you want to point fingers, point one at modern factory farming.
Agreed!
Mostly though, I don't like that we should be fucking our own food, we should respect what God / our planet provides us with and do the best with it. If in some season the apples are not perfectly round, so be it. If the cow from the hilly fields gives different meat from the cow that spends its lifetime indoors, so be it. Don't try to optimize or correct this with pesticides, hormones, practices that can be harmful in other ways.... and certainly don't try to do this behind our backs, trying to keep food processing a secret, or objecting to labelling (what is the difficulty of registering the beef and printing some small letters on the sticker? In the E.U. and I hope so in the USA, every piece of meat is already traceable to the farm, so it wouldn't be too hard.)
Furthermore, I believe that we should make a distinction between optimizing & fine tuning a physical, man-made system, and trying to change life itself, and the food that we grow. Living things are of a far higher complexity and far higher dynamics, we can't understand it. If we would just respect that, and learn how to best go about with this, without trying to change life itself, that would be a far wiser thing to do.
The cloning or genetically modifying an animal is a far riskier thing than cloning or GM-ing a plant. In both cases, we don't really know what we're doing, but in the animal case the dangers are closer to ourselves (as we ourselves are animals, look for example at the triggering of the Creutzfeld-Jacobs disease).
Some phones put so much RF into the hands free kit that radiation exposure is worse on hands free. It would be even worse if you leave the earpiece in between calls.
I think if you use a bluetooth headset if your phone supports it, you will have solved that problem. And in the car you can use a proper carkit connected to the stereo instead of wired earphones. My next phone will have to have built-in handsfree calling.
These are simple things that can effectively move the antenna away from your brain so it gets less exposure.
Local climate change, for example in the northern atlantic, is subject of interesting research and interesting scenario's, but a final verdict is stil out.
Global warming is a fact. The debate is about the amount of warming and the rate of change, not the mechanisms itself anymore. The mechanisms are really well understood. (People still denying the well-documented mechanisms are not scientists)
What global warming precisely means for different countries is partly a surprise, but some things that are probably at least partly influenced by global warming * shift of sea currents * shifting patterns of precipitation * possibly local cooling effects, certainly if gulf stream slows
What is certainly a consequence of global warming: * rising sea level * break up of sea ice * shift of climate zones towards the poles
Phasing out of SCSI for the majority of Macs was inevitable... * IDE drives kept getting faster and faster, as well as getting larger than SCSI drives. * ATA started to have reliable Bus Mastering instead of the old PIO modes. These two reasons alone mean that a single user / single disk system didn't benefit as much anymore from SCSI as used to be the case.
As I recall, the beige G3 boxes had ATA disks (and that was prior to the iMac).
The iMac was the first machine that made a big fuzz about USB as a revolutionary new way to connect all your peripherals. USB at the time was not yet very much alive on the PC, reputedly to the frustration of Intel. USB certainly lived up to that promise - almost ten years later it is still the most used connection. And certainly for low bandwidth devices like most scanners and printers, it is a lot easier than thet bulky SCSI that was too complicated for a-technical people anyway.
Whats needed then is some single device, that sits between the power block/lead and the wall socket that can be turned on via an IR signal thus only having one device in the chain using power.
I believe this thing exists already. It is the same type of apparatus you can use for wirelessly controlling the lamps in your home from one place, the wireless switches click between the devices and the power outlet.
At the local discounter they sometimes have a box set of these things for not much, but I havent tried it out yet, I am unsure if it works OK.
and it has a TON of "one person finds this useful" functionality; they missed the boat, and should have made a very thin client with plugins
Don't agree at all with that, Azureus tries to give a lot of control out of the box and it delivers on that.
Azureus is for if you want many options to control the downloads. The elegance of the user interface may be a bit less, but that is intentional. If that's really important for you, there are other programs out there.
I find Azureus really great on my 1.4 GHz Mini (with 1 GB of RAM). On my machine the Java user interface is a lot faster than some OS X applications, for example iTunes. It is only in the startup of Azureus that you notice it's slow. But I can live with that..
It is a bit of a mystery indeed what China can or will do if the Taiwanese strive towards independence. The Chinese military will be in favour of starting offensive actions, this is to be expected from the military of course. But what will the communist party do? Who will be in control? Catastrophe looms, but before this escalates into a Third world war.... Escalation can only occur if western governments decide that Taiwan is worth a good fight, which can debated. The pro's of going to war is that it is a nice thing for the military to show of their muscle, but the drawback is most certainly huge losses of lives (that dwarf Iraq / Afghanistan), cost, economic downturn.
China is changing really rapidly and the Chinese government is on some aspects quite a lot weaker then say 20 years ago. The last 20 years have shown the Chinese continously and aggressively developing their economy, a single war could destroy all that.
About France's international policy: people pay too much attention, really. I find it really strange (ridiculous) that people in the USA, a country multiple times the size and much more powerful than France, are offended when the French don't support their Iraq war plans. I mean come on, the French sometimes appear to be arrogant, but that is nothing. Here in Holland we are used to it, a couple of years ago we had a conflict with the French over our (soft) drugs policy. The French really did their best to end our liberal soft drugs policy... we didn't listen, nothing changed in our policy. The French sometimes appear very arrogant, I don't know why that is, but you can safely ignore it. They seem nationalistic, and tend to rationalize according to their own logic, but that is more of a cultural thing. I don't think they have really that much power on the level of international politics. Traditionally when France and Germany agree then the other European countries will comply and support E.U.'s policy. Now with the larger E.U. and a more involved Britain the Franco-German axis is less powerful.
You describe 3 possible conflicts: China-USA, N.Korea-USA, Iran-USA
Rest assured that Europe will certainly support the USA in the last two possible conflicts, provided it is a clear cut case of some bad, evil country actively striving to create death and destruction in a peace-loving western country.
This is still because of the US being very helpful in kicking out the Nazis some 60 years ago and afterwards holding back communists.
China-USA, I can't see how that will ever be a war, let alone a war that can be supported from Europe. Relations have constantly been improving for decades, economies are intertwined to a very large extent and the China-Taiwan issue can solve itself... for example if the Taiwanese themselves start to work closer together with China.
"the EU buereacracy's implicit assumption that the US is a strategic competitor"
Don't think that's correct in a military sense. This is not about military competition but about freedom as I see it. That's something different.
If you mean strategic competion at the level of economics and economic strategy, it is clear the US and Europe compete on this level, and the read you provide illustrates that Gallileo indeed could be understood in this context. (Military industry).
That is an interesting point: it is indeed my belief that energy does have characteristics of public goods..
For example energy use in its current form has negative external effects, which is the reasoning behind government's attempt at cutting back energy usage.
Another characteristic of public goods is that society is highly dependent on it, but market doesn't guarantee to provide it at the right form in the right quantities at the right time. Security of energy supply does not come about spontaneously... recent disasters: clear lack of sufficient refining capacity and electricity production (Netherlands 2004, California 2001). Saudi's lying about their reserves, Shell did the same, Opec silently cutting back production...
If governments don't at least *try* to regulate this shit, free and abundant access to this "commodity" is far from certain, and it's only getting worse from this respect...;)
The space energy farming thing is a beautiful concept, I will keep reading it.
I just don't know... even engineers are humans and perhaps these people are too optimistic. Then again, a 4 GW reactor at a cost of thousands of billions, we must have hit serieous energy shortage when that is going to happen I think.
Thankfully we don't need it as if population stops growing, we have lots of landmass where we can do energy farming with PV on earth. Total direct solar energy input to earth is quite enough for our purposes for some hundreds of years of growth of our energy demand, so we have time to think about space...
Until people are building it, I do not find this "engineering", it is more like sci-fi. Personally I don't believe that there is a single technological solution that will fix our energy problems, there has never been one and there will never be one.
The human civilization now consumes about as much energy as earth's biosfere absorbes in a year's time, that is of the same order of magnitude.
This means that all photosynthesis in all green of this Earth, the combined surface area of all plants, delivers about the energy we use. (or we are approaching that order, that could also have been, can't check it now). Of course, photosynthesis and the chemical conversion afterwords is nowhere near as efficient as new space grade PV cells, but the comparison is interesting nevertheless, it shows the schale that we use energy.
This is not to be confused with the amount of solar energy the earth receives and re-radiates back to space, which is multiple orders of magnitude more.;)
I don't want less power, I want *more* power. More power to do whatever I please, whenever I please.
Then you have a problem: the difference between what you want to have and going to get, will only increase in the decades to come, as prices will rise and supplies dwindle.
The irony is funny: it is actually the leftish energy-conserving people, hated by you, are actually helping you get your energy because they use less, so more is available for others. Whereas people who think like you, are actually stealing your energy because they consume something that could have gone to you.
BMW's inline 6 and other BMW engines are genuine BMW designs. The engine is the most important thing about a BMW, they design and make them themselves and the engines have decades of BMW engineering in them.
I believe there are GM cars however that use BMW's engines, but it is not the other way round.
Doesn't make much sense as well, because GM engines usually have less manufacturing quality (I own a GM Fiat and have had some experience with the built quality...)
BMW's diesel injection systems come from Bosch, not FIAT. Although Bosch and Fiat may have collaborated on some aspects, that could be the case.
Anyway in Europe BMW actually competes with Alfa Romeo, Alfa Romeo is the manufacturor of the "sports saloon" cars of the FIAT company. So it wouldn't make sense for BMW to buy its diesel injection system from the Italians because it will rob them of their technological advantage.
Furthermore, BMW is far too proud a company to subcontract things out to the Italian automobile industry, I think when possible they prefer German partners...;)
Of course it makes sense to reduce the " on time " of the small energy consuming devices.
If you bother listing all your devices in a spread sheet with their energy usage, you can easily calculate, for your situation, what types of devices are responsible for what share of electricity consumption in your home.
Of course, consumers are only a part of total energy consumption, but you can never say that reducing your own personal consumption doesn't do anything to improve the situation because the large other parties consuming too much energy, like it are only the industrial companies are too blame or that sort of thing.
Large industries typically provide their own power, for example through combined heat/power plants which are really efficient. Furthermore, because of their scale, large industries have really more incentives to reduce their energy consumption, even from a short term business perspective.
However if our consumption is to be more sustainable then we really have to look at ourselves and what we use. It is not business that drive the world's energy consumption, it is *us*, the consumers. The largest part of oil usage is for transportation, of us and our goods and consumables. Asides for the US military, which is (on a global scale) really a large consumer of fossil energy, all energy consumption is driven by you, me, we, consumers. So savings will have to start with ourselvs, not with "someone else"...
Going from where we are now to a more sustainable situation requires that we are all more willing to focus on the long term prospects of our energy usage, that we realize that what we use now is not without consequences for us a couple of years from now. This thinking is difficult for most people, our economy is focussed on the present time, what things are worth to us now. At the moment, energy doesn't cost much, it is almost free, so we don't care.
I find out that around 25% of my personal electricity usage was lighting, 25% computers, 25% "silent energy consumption" (power adapters, little adapters, chargers, equipment on standby), 25% kitchen. Last year I thought a little about that and saw things I could improve. I installed some other types of lamps, cut back on computers and behaved differently myselves.
I just got the electricity bill for last year, I have saved around 20% in total, so I am really pleased that you can do that with small things. I imagine all people of New York could also easily save as much as I did. In that case an extra power plant easily is avoidable.
This is just like voting in a democracy: each individual's vote doesn't matter anything, but all worthless little votes combined, is a really powerful thing, the policies of a nation is decided by it. Each individual energy consumption is nothing, but all those individuals combined, use a not sustainable amount of energy.
Exactly! Apple's succes really is more than the looks of their products.
Some people really want software or appliances with tens of toolbars, hundreds of buttons, thousands of tweakable settings etcetera. Apple doesn't do that, no hundreds of settings here.
But lacking these abundance of options doesn't mean that the functionality is (too) simple! This is the mistake some geeky people make. Sure, sometimes an Apple piece of software clearly lacks some function or option in some aspect. But at other moments it is clear that loads of options and buttons weren't needed in the beginning anyway provided the software had well thought through workings and a sensible user interface..
This is why non-geeky people quite often prefer the Apple way compared to other ways of doing something.
It is much harder to develop software that combines power with a simple user interface, and Apple demonstrates that it continues to excel in this arena. That is what investors see and like.
Clearly you are American, comparing BMW with VW......
VW means 'peoples car', the brand that was started (?) by Hitler to provide the working class with personal transport... much like the T-Ford. Although VW now is owner of Audi and Lamborghini and also has a really expensive/luxurious car (Phaeton), VW by definition remains producer of a 'people's car'. The bulk of their revenue comes from the Golf/Jetta and smaller models, not their larger cars. VW is the HP/Compaq of the automobile market.....
BMW is quite comparable to Mercedes. You may like Mercedes more, but both brands have their merits, and BMW really isn't a lesser car....
For almost all Mercedes models you can find a similar BMW model, that is similar in specs, build quality, luxury, and costs the same. Technology: BMW leads the world with their inline six-cylinder diesel engines. Mercedes diesel traditionally has a very good reputation, but CDI reliability is worse compared to the older Mercedes technology. In this respect, the technical superiority that Mercedes traditionally had is now less than it used to be. A 2006 Mercedes will not last you longer than a 2006 BMW. The best Mercedesses were made and sold in the '80s, not now. Those were the cars that reputedly get millions of kms/miles...
that direct CD / DVD play without OS bootup: Toshiba has had that for at least half a decade...... not really new that Dell has it now. Indeed nothing Dell ever does is "new".
(Dell's innovation lies in cost cutting in the PC assembly. How long does it take Dell to produce a standard desktop PC? Was it 55 seconds now? 45 seconds? That is amazing stuff...)
Yeah, but Windows media player for the Mac really is worse. If you click full screen, it switches to 640x480! WMP is the worst peace of software on my system. Bizarre things: it has a slider so you can skip forward, but that doesn't even work. Another thing is, if you hit "pause" and then "play", the stream starts all over again! This is not quality software.
With streams from our public broadcasting network, from www.uitzendinggemist.nl, I always choose Real streams. They are tons and tons better, although Real gets bashed down continuously, the software actually is mature and offers quite robust streaming with lots of options to tweak it to bypass firewalls etc. When you got it sorted out, it works really good. Then it supports full screen & full screen controls, definitely has the best video quality @ 500 kbit, and is well supported for different websites.
At least on the Mac, QuickTime isn't that buggy, so it is okay as a media player once you have upgraded to the Pro version. But that pay-for-full screen thing is bizarre and now that Apple is making some money they really should make this free.
For most pretty good HiFi systems the CD's quality is really good enough: there are other bottlenecks to the sound quality that are more present in the final result. For MP3 etc this is different: I think most people can hear imperfections in the sound quality. If you tell people what aspects of the sound to focus on (the definition in the high tones) I think most people will succeed (in a blind test) to pick out MP3s from CDs.:-(
It is true that MS does not pro-actively disclose the details of the file formats they introduce, it is also true they modifying standard formats (expand), but to say that they do that with the sole purpose of reducing compatability and maintainging their market share is something that should not be generalized.
As is frequently pointed out, in some cases their software is just overall better than others.
In the wu-ftpd case the actual impact of the vulnaribilities depends on how the *distro* configures the program by default. In slackware's case, wu-ftpd was not configured for anonymous ftp with upload rights, so slackware was unexploitable by itself. I don't know how the other distro's come by default, though.
To my understanding the problem occurs with every PCI device which isn't PCI master when doing I/O. So you I think you are right and we will see problems with these motherboards in a lot of different installations.
The funny part is that if Intel keeps producing all these flawed chipsets, I think in the end P4 computers will only be used to run Windows ME e.a. in simple home installations, and we won't see it in high-performance configurations. So the problem is solved, and Intel is right..
[offtopic]
you seem to be the only/.'r not wanting to go into into lengthy and offtopic discussions on the pros and cons of dualhead, etc..
[/offtopic]
Re:Silly question about vacuums
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 1
No, than you would create an atmosphere on the moon! (And the atmosphere of the earth will be somewhat thinner). But I guess the created moon-atmosphere will eventually dissipate because of lack of gravity and high temperatures.
Agreed. IMO the mailnews code in Netscape 4.7 is pretty good: it's fast, it doesn't crash, it has an operation cache so that you can undo move/delete, and is tested by millions of users every day. So although that code is not part of mozilla I think Netscape could have tied the two together. But the problem is that at primetime mozilla.org had invested much effort in the mailnews thing and Netscape wanted it as well.
As of Composer: I don't understand at all why it should be in Communicator.
Slashdot Mirror
As for infectability, if you want to point fingers, point one at modern factory farming.
Agreed!
Mostly though, I don't like that we should be fucking our own food, we should respect what God / our planet provides us with and do the best with it. If in some season the apples are not perfectly round, so be it. If the cow from the hilly fields gives different meat from the cow that spends its lifetime indoors, so be it. Don't try to optimize or correct this with pesticides, hormones, practices that can be harmful in other ways.... and certainly don't try to do this behind our backs, trying to keep food processing a secret, or objecting to labelling (what is the difficulty of registering the beef and printing some small letters on the sticker? In the E.U. and I hope so in the USA, every piece of meat is already traceable to the farm, so it wouldn't be too hard.)
Furthermore, I believe that we should make a distinction between optimizing & fine tuning a physical, man-made system, and trying to change life itself, and the food that we grow. Living things are of a far higher complexity and far higher dynamics, we can't understand it. If we would just respect that, and learn how to best go about with this, without trying to change life itself, that would be a far wiser thing to do.
The cloning or genetically modifying an animal is a far riskier thing than cloning or GM-ing a plant. In both cases, we don't really know what we're doing, but in the animal case the dangers are closer to ourselves (as we ourselves are animals, look for example at the triggering of the Creutzfeld-Jacobs disease).
Some phones put so much RF into the hands free kit that radiation exposure is worse on hands free. It would be even worse if you leave the earpiece in between calls.
I think if you use a bluetooth headset if your phone supports it, you will have solved that problem. And in the car you can use a proper carkit connected to the stereo instead of wired earphones. My next phone will have to have built-in handsfree calling.
These are simple things that can effectively move the antenna away from your brain so it gets less exposure.
Weather != local climate != global warming!
Weather is something that cannot be predicted.
Local climate change, for example in the northern atlantic, is subject of interesting research and interesting scenario's, but a final verdict is stil out.
Global warming is a fact. The debate is about the amount of warming and the rate of change, not the mechanisms itself anymore. The mechanisms are really well understood. (People still denying the well-documented mechanisms are not scientists)
What global warming precisely means for different countries is partly a surprise, but some things that are probably at least partly influenced by global warming
* shift of sea currents
* shifting patterns of precipitation
* possibly local cooling effects, certainly if gulf stream slows
What is certainly a consequence of global warming:
* rising sea level
* break up of sea ice
* shift of climate zones towards the poles
Phasing out of SCSI for the majority of Macs was inevitable...
* IDE drives kept getting faster and faster, as well as getting larger than SCSI drives.
* ATA started to have reliable Bus Mastering instead of the old PIO modes.
These two reasons alone mean that a single user / single disk system didn't benefit as much anymore from SCSI as used to be the case.
As I recall, the beige G3 boxes had ATA disks (and that was prior to the iMac).
The iMac was the first machine that made a big fuzz about USB as a revolutionary new way to connect all your peripherals. USB at the time was not yet very much alive on the PC, reputedly to the frustration of Intel. USB certainly lived up to that promise - almost ten years later it is still the most used connection. And certainly for low bandwidth devices like most scanners and printers, it is a lot easier than thet bulky SCSI that was too complicated for a-technical people anyway.
Whats needed then is some single device, that sits between the power block/lead and the wall socket that can be turned on via an IR signal thus only having one device in the chain using power.
I believe this thing exists already. It is the same type of apparatus you can use for wirelessly controlling the lamps in your home from one place, the wireless switches click between the devices and the power outlet.
At the local discounter they sometimes have a box set of these things for not much, but I havent tried it out yet, I am unsure if it works OK.
and it has a TON of "one person finds this useful" functionality; they missed the boat, and should have made a very thin client with plugins
Don't agree at all with that, Azureus tries to give a lot of control out of the box and it delivers on that.
Azureus is for if you want many options to control the downloads. The elegance of the user interface may be a bit less, but that is intentional. If that's really important for you, there are other programs out there.
I find Azureus really great on my 1.4 GHz Mini (with 1 GB of RAM).
On my machine the Java user interface is a lot faster than some OS X applications, for example iTunes. It is only in the startup of Azureus that you notice it's slow. But I can live with that..
RTFA: RSS feeds and PDF will be fully supported....
It is a bit of a mystery indeed what China can or will do if the Taiwanese strive towards independence.
The Chinese military will be in favour of starting offensive actions, this is to be expected from the military of course. But what will the communist party do? Who will be in control?
Catastrophe looms, but before this escalates into a Third world war....
Escalation can only occur if western governments decide that Taiwan is worth a good fight, which can debated. The pro's of going to war is that it is a nice thing for the military to show of their muscle, but the drawback is most certainly huge losses of lives (that dwarf Iraq / Afghanistan), cost, economic downturn.
China is changing really rapidly and the Chinese government is on some aspects quite a lot weaker then say 20 years ago.
The last 20 years have shown the Chinese continously and aggressively developing their economy, a single war could destroy all that.
About France's international policy: people pay too much attention, really.
I find it really strange (ridiculous) that people in the USA, a country multiple times the size and much more powerful than France, are offended when the French don't support their Iraq war plans.
I mean come on, the French sometimes appear to be arrogant, but that is nothing.
Here in Holland we are used to it, a couple of years ago we had a conflict with the French over our (soft) drugs policy. The French really did their best to end our liberal soft drugs policy... we didn't listen, nothing changed in our policy.
The French sometimes appear very arrogant, I don't know why that is, but you can safely ignore it. They seem nationalistic, and tend to rationalize according to their own logic, but that is more of a cultural thing. I don't think they have really that much power on the level of international politics.
Traditionally when France and Germany agree then the other European countries will comply and support E.U.'s policy.
Now with the larger E.U. and a more involved Britain the Franco-German axis is less powerful.
You describe 3 possible conflicts: China-USA, N.Korea-USA, Iran-USA
... for example if the Taiwanese themselves start to work closer together with China.
Rest assured that Europe will certainly support the USA in the last two possible conflicts, provided it is a clear cut case of some bad, evil country actively striving to create death and destruction in a peace-loving western country.
This is still because of the US being very helpful in kicking out the Nazis some 60 years ago and afterwards holding back communists.
China-USA, I can't see how that will ever be a war, let alone a war that can be supported from Europe. Relations have constantly been improving for decades, economies are intertwined to a very large extent and the China-Taiwan issue can solve itself
"the EU buereacracy's implicit assumption that the US is a strategic competitor"
Don't think that's correct in a military sense. This is not about military competition but about freedom as I see it. That's something different.
If you mean strategic competion at the level of economics and economic strategy, it is clear the US and Europe compete on this level, and the read you provide illustrates that Gallileo indeed could be understood in this context. (Military industry).
That is an interesting point: it is indeed my belief that energy does have characteristics of public goods..
;)
For example energy use in its current form has negative external effects, which is the reasoning behind government's attempt at cutting back energy usage.
Another characteristic of public goods is that society is highly dependent on it, but market doesn't guarantee to provide it at the right form in the right quantities at the right time. Security of energy supply does not come about spontaneously... recent disasters: clear lack of sufficient refining capacity and electricity production (Netherlands 2004, California 2001). Saudi's lying about their reserves, Shell did the same, Opec silently cutting back production...
If governments don't at least *try* to regulate this shit, free and abundant access to this "commodity" is far from certain, and it's only getting worse from this respect...
The space energy farming thing is a beautiful concept, I will keep reading it.
;)
I just don't know... even engineers are humans and perhaps these people are too optimistic. Then again, a 4 GW reactor at a cost of thousands of billions, we must have hit serieous energy shortage when that is going to happen I think.
Thankfully we don't need it as if population stops growing, we have lots of landmass where we can do energy farming with PV on earth. Total direct solar energy input to earth is quite enough for our purposes for some hundreds of years of growth of our energy demand, so we have time to think about space...
Until people are building it, I do not find this "engineering", it is more like sci-fi. Personally I don't believe that there is a single technological solution that will fix our energy problems, there has never been one and there will never be one.
The human civilization now consumes about as much energy as earth's biosfere absorbes in a year's time, that is of the same order of magnitude.
This means that all photosynthesis in all green of this Earth, the combined surface area of all plants, delivers about the energy we use. (or we are approaching that order, that could also have been, can't check it now).
Of course, photosynthesis and the chemical conversion afterwords is nowhere near as efficient as new space grade PV cells, but the comparison is interesting nevertheless, it shows the schale that we use energy.
This is not to be confused with the amount of solar energy the earth receives and re-radiates back to space, which is multiple orders of magnitude more.
I don't want less power, I want *more* power. More power to do whatever I please, whenever I please.
Then you have a problem: the difference between what you want to have and going to get, will only increase in the decades to come, as prices will rise and supplies dwindle.
The irony is funny: it is actually the leftish energy-conserving people, hated by you, are actually helping you get your energy because they use less, so more is available for others.
Whereas people who think like you, are actually stealing your energy because they consume something that could have gone to you.
I think it is not accurate what you say,
;)
BMW's inline 6 and other BMW engines are genuine BMW designs. The engine is the most important thing about a BMW, they design and make them themselves and the engines have decades of BMW engineering in them.
I believe there are GM cars however that use BMW's engines, but it is not the other way round.
Doesn't make much sense as well, because GM engines usually have less manufacturing quality (I own a GM Fiat and have had some experience with the built quality...)
BMW's diesel injection systems come from Bosch, not FIAT. Although Bosch and Fiat may have collaborated on some aspects, that could be the case.
Anyway in Europe BMW actually competes with Alfa Romeo, Alfa Romeo is the manufacturor of the "sports saloon" cars of the FIAT company. So it wouldn't make sense for BMW to buy its diesel injection system from the Italians because it will rob them of their technological advantage.
Furthermore, BMW is far too proud a company to subcontract things out to the Italian automobile industry, I think when possible they prefer German partners...
On the road, you will see a lot fewer 20 year-old BMWs than you will 20 year-old Mercedes or VWs.
;)
Because the amount of VW's that are sold is a order of manitude greater than the amount BMW sells anually.
And a lots of BMW's end up crashed by jong drivers, overstreching the limits of what they can do with the car....
Of course it makes sense to reduce the " on time " of the small energy consuming devices.
If you bother listing all your devices in a spread sheet with their energy usage, you can easily calculate, for your situation, what types of devices are responsible for what share of electricity consumption in your home.
Of course, consumers are only a part of total energy consumption, but you can never say that reducing your own personal consumption doesn't do anything to improve the situation because the large other parties consuming too much energy, like it are only the industrial companies are too blame or that sort of thing.
Large industries typically provide their own power, for example through combined heat/power plants which are really efficient. Furthermore, because of their scale, large industries have really more incentives to reduce their energy consumption, even from a short term business perspective.
However if our consumption is to be more sustainable then we really have to look at ourselves and what we use. It is not business that drive the world's energy consumption, it is *us*, the consumers. The largest part of oil usage is for transportation, of us and our goods and consumables. Asides for the US military, which is (on a global scale) really a large consumer of fossil energy, all energy consumption is driven by you, me, we, consumers. So savings will have to start with ourselvs, not with "someone else"...
Going from where we are now to a more sustainable situation requires that we are all more willing to focus on the long term prospects of our energy usage, that we realize that what we use now is not without consequences for us a couple of years from now.
This thinking is difficult for most people, our economy is focussed on the present time, what things are worth to us now. At the moment, energy doesn't cost much, it is almost free, so we don't care.
I find out that around 25% of my personal electricity usage was lighting, 25% computers, 25% "silent energy consumption" (power adapters, little adapters, chargers, equipment on standby), 25% kitchen. Last year I thought a little about that and saw things I could improve. I installed some other types of lamps, cut back on computers and behaved differently myselves.
I just got the electricity bill for last year, I have saved around 20% in total, so I am really pleased that you can do that with small things. I imagine all people of New York could also easily save as much as I did. In that case an extra power plant easily is avoidable.
This is just like voting in a democracy: each individual's vote doesn't matter anything, but all worthless little votes combined, is a really powerful thing, the policies of a nation is decided by it.
Each individual energy consumption is nothing, but all those individuals combined, use a not sustainable amount of energy.
Exactly!
Apple's succes really is more than the looks of their products.
Some people really want software or appliances with tens of toolbars, hundreds of buttons, thousands of tweakable settings etcetera. Apple doesn't do that, no hundreds of settings here.
But lacking these abundance of options doesn't mean that the functionality is (too) simple! This is the mistake some geeky people make. Sure, sometimes an Apple piece of software clearly lacks some function or option in some aspect.
But at other moments it is clear that loads of options and buttons weren't needed in the beginning anyway provided the software had well thought through workings and a sensible user interface..
This is why non-geeky people quite often prefer the Apple way compared to other ways of doing something.
It is much harder to develop software that combines power with a simple user interface, and Apple demonstrates that it continues to excel in this arena. That is what investors see and like.
BMWs aren't luxury cars.....
Clearly you are American, comparing BMW with VW......
VW means 'peoples car', the brand that was started (?) by Hitler to provide the working class with personal transport... much like the T-Ford.
Although VW now is owner of Audi and Lamborghini and also has a really expensive/luxurious car (Phaeton), VW by definition remains producer of a 'people's car'. The bulk of their revenue comes from the Golf/Jetta and smaller models, not their larger cars. VW is the HP/Compaq of the automobile market.....
BMW is quite comparable to Mercedes. You may like Mercedes more, but both brands have their merits, and BMW really isn't a lesser car....
For almost all Mercedes models you can find a similar BMW model, that is similar in specs, build quality, luxury, and costs the same.
Technology: BMW leads the world with their inline six-cylinder diesel engines. Mercedes diesel traditionally has a very good reputation, but CDI reliability is worse compared to the older Mercedes technology. In this respect, the technical superiority that Mercedes traditionally had is now less than it used to be. A 2006 Mercedes will not last you longer than a 2006 BMW. The best Mercedesses were made and sold in the '80s, not now. Those were the cars that reputedly get millions of kms/miles...
that direct CD / DVD play without OS bootup: Toshiba has had that for at least half a decade...... not really new that Dell has it now. Indeed nothing Dell ever does is "new".
(Dell's innovation lies in cost cutting in the PC assembly. How long does it take Dell to produce a standard desktop PC? Was it 55 seconds now? 45 seconds? That is amazing stuff...)
Yeah, but Windows media player for the Mac really is worse. If you click full screen, it switches to 640x480! WMP is the worst peace of software on my system. Bizarre things: it has a slider so you can skip forward, but that doesn't even work. Another thing is, if you hit "pause" and then "play", the stream starts all over again! This is not quality software.
With streams from our public broadcasting network, from www.uitzendinggemist.nl, I always choose Real streams. They are tons and tons better, although Real gets bashed down continuously, the software actually is mature and offers quite robust streaming with lots of options to tweak it to bypass firewalls etc.
When you got it sorted out, it works really good. Then it supports full screen & full screen controls, definitely has the best video quality @ 500 kbit, and is well supported for different websites.
At least on the Mac, QuickTime isn't that buggy, so it is okay as a media player once you have upgraded to the Pro version. But that pay-for-full screen thing is bizarre and now that Apple is making some money they really should make this free.
For most pretty good HiFi systems the CD's quality is really good enough: there are other bottlenecks to the sound quality that are more present in the final result. For MP3 etc this is different: I think most people can hear imperfections in the sound quality. If you tell people what aspects of the sound to focus on (the definition in the high tones) I think most people will succeed (in a blind test) to pick out MP3s from CDs. :-(
It is true that MS does not pro-actively disclose the details of the file formats they introduce, it is also true they modifying standard formats (expand), but to say that they do that with the sole purpose of reducing compatability and maintainging their market share is something that should not be generalized.
As is frequently pointed out, in some cases their software is just overall better than others.
In the wu-ftpd case the actual impact of the vulnaribilities depends on how the *distro* configures the program by default. In slackware's case, wu-ftpd was not configured for anonymous ftp with upload rights, so slackware was unexploitable by itself. I don't know how the other distro's come by default, though.
To my understanding the problem occurs with every PCI device which isn't PCI master when doing I/O. So you I think you are right and we will see problems with these motherboards in a lot of different installations.
The funny part is that if Intel keeps producing all these flawed chipsets, I think in the end P4 computers will only be used to run Windows ME e.a. in simple home installations, and we won't see it in high-performance configurations. So the problem is solved, and Intel is right..
[offtopic]
you seem to be the only
[/offtopic]
No, than you would create an atmosphere on the moon! (And the atmosphere of the earth will be somewhat thinner). But I guess the created moon-atmosphere will eventually dissipate because of lack of gravity and high temperatures.
Agreed. IMO the mailnews code in Netscape 4.7 is pretty good: it's fast, it doesn't crash, it has an operation cache so that you can undo move/delete, and is tested by millions of users every day. So although that code is not part of mozilla I think Netscape could have tied the two together. But the problem is that at primetime mozilla.org had invested much effort in the mailnews thing and Netscape wanted it as well.
As of Composer: I don't understand at all why it should be in Communicator.