...and the consumer loses all their rights for the "quid pro quo" of a bonus track."
Sounds about as enticing as losing a dental plan for a keg of beer.
Dental plan.
Lisa needs braces.
Dental plan.
Lisa needs braces.
Dental plan.
Lisa needs braces.
Bonus track.
Lisa need fair use.
Bonus track.
Lisa need fair use.
Bonus track.
Lisa need fair use.
...is an appalling infringement of their civil liberties
Nope. In this case it appears to be voluntary. The problem people have is when you unknowingly can be tracked through RFID tags. There may be an issue with stalkers or pedophiles also being able to track people in this park, but I imagine that's not an easy task.
Funny, when I was a kid parents thought nothing about letting their 8-year-old kids wander off to play in the woods or go down to the swimming hole themselves.
Absolutely. I even used to walk 30 minutes to and from school alone every day when I was 8. No wonder kids get no exercise these days, they're not allowed more than 6 feet from their parents. We used to call that overprotective, now it seems to be the norm. (I can say this now because I am a parent myself.)
Mozilla should be the one being used by web developers.
Wouldn't web developers be most likely to use IE. After all, if it is the most used browser (perhaps still >90%) then it is in a company's best interest to make sure their website works properly in IE and not spend time making things working Mozilla if it works find in IE. There was much discussion on this regarding the lack of IE PNG alpha blending support.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, I'm just saying it seems to be the business attitude. There isn't much financial benefit in spending time to make their website compliant with a browser that has 5% market share if the site is fine in the browser with 95% market share. I do find this shortsighted though, since Mozilla/Firefox could be the dominant browser in, say, 6 months for example. Then all these companies would need to re-do their websites at extra cost so it would have been cheaper to make it compliant in the first place.
Who cares if we lose some energy in the process of storing it
We all should. If we didn't, the estimates of requiring 3% of U.S. farm land to produce 95% of its energy needs could easily become 10% of it's farmland to meet 50% of its needs, which would probably make it economically unviable and the environmental damage from all of those wind farms could be significant. You have to take the overall efficiency into account.
After reading a few other comments, it appear that the idea is about using hydrogen as a storage medium (which has nothing directly to do with fuel cells, which is why it is a confusing comment). That's certainly feasible, but I'm not sure if it would be the best approach. There are tons of ways to store energy in general and they all have inefficiencies and logistical problems. If it's been demonstrated that hydrogen is the best approach, great.
I think the main point was that wind turbines produce electricity and it is electricity that we want in the homes. Any energy tranformation steps in the middle, to and from another medium, will produce significant losses of energy. It's better (in terms of efficiency) just to dump it into the grid and reduce energy production from other sources to compensate.
Since electricity can't be stored in large amounts
Could hydrogen fuel cells potentially change this?
Um, no. I must be missing what you're getting at. Fuel cells don't store electricity, they produce it. The electricity we're talking about storing here is produces by wind turbines. How would you get this electricity into a fuel cell? It's not like you can just run a fuel cell backwards --> apply electricity to it and get hydrogen out and store the energy chemcially until needed.
Unless you're just talking about the general concept of storing energy, in which any fuel is "storing" it (uranium, fossil fuels, etc.). But we can't generally run that equation backwards to get a fuel from electricity. (There are exceptions, of course, such as rechargeable batteries and mechanical dynamos.)
Although I also believe the "no performance hit" seems impossible, your example doesn't quite fit. You describe different processors. The apparent claim is that on the exact same hardware, you could run an application under Windows or under Linux and get the same performance. I'm not sure you could ever prove this capability is impossible, but it seems to be. Somehow the OS instructions need to be translated which must take some additional clock cycles. But it is at least theoretically possible for some other aspect to be sped up (e.g., Linux does something faster than Windows would) so the net speed is roughly the same. Having that work both ways (Linux app on Windows vs Windows app on Linux) seems a little bit of a stretch though.
Damn HTML formatting and optional preview button. There used to be breaks in that.
Am I the only one who almost fell on the floor laughing at this? A diatribe about children not being programmed to learn that was screwed up because the authour hadn't learned to do HTML formatting and use the preview button. That's almost as funny as when my boss sent out an email with a misspelled word and followed it up with another email saying it was a "type". (And then followed it up again restating it as a "typo".)
BTW, it was a good diatribe about learning. It was just executed such that hilarity ensued.
Censorship, I believe by definition, is something that has to be done by a government or a large organization
Nope. Those are just the ones people are most pissed about. From Merriam-Webster:
censor: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable
Censoring is not inherently bad. For instance, when parents don't let their children watch certain shows or movies they are censoring. What annoys people most is when adults are censored from things that they have a right to hear or see, which generally can only be done by government or large corporations. Making something unavailable or unobtainable is effectively equivalent to the removal of the right to obtain it. The flip-side to censorship is a boycott where people refuse to obtain something that is available because of some offense to the product or company.
If nobody buys your crappy book about aliens killing Kennedy, it's not being censored, just unappreciated.
That's different than what happened to the Dixie Chicks. Radio stations stopped playing their material because of their beliefs, not because they didn't like the music.
...there are always going to be errors... Some of it is correct some of the time.
The ironic thing is that the wikipedia might actually be more correct more often than normal encyclopedias. Wikipedia entries are often entered by experts in that field who have the best understanding of the subject. "Real" encyclopedia enties are written (as I understand it) by information researchers who are experts at researching information, not in the subjects of the fields they're writing about. The tradeoff is, of course, that there is no verification of expertise of the wiki writers so it's more or less a "use at your own risk".
Well, yes, in the "end" there is no net creation of cash once everybody has re-paid. I use quotes on "end" because this assumes that the total amount of debt is constant -- as much money is created as destroyed. If the total amount of debt increases then the total amount of money existing at that time has increased.
However, even outside the balance of loans, banks create net money when they exchange reserves (non-interest bearing) for government securities (interest bearing), which is where I suppose the increase in actual cash comes from. Of course the central banks control the amount of reserve exchange and therefore the net created money. The simplest explanation for this I could find was here.
Still, it sounds like you have more education on this subject, so you can correct me if I'm wrong in this. But this is my understanding of where net currency increase comes from.
...but the government does this all the time whenever they fire up the printing presses
Hold on, that's not the same thing. It's not like the government prints the money and just "drops" it into circulation such as giving it to someone. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong regarding the U.S., but all actual new money is created as debt by banks, not by the government. If you borrow money from the bank, they just "make up" the money, i.e., they increase the number in your account but you then owe it to them as real money (cash). The bank doesn't actually have to have that money somewhere that they take and give to you. Yes, they do have to have a certain percentage of all "created" money in reserve.
Actual printed money gets into circulation by being exchanged for old bills. Of course, if this was the only way then the total amount of cash in circulation would never change. I've been trying to find out how any other new bills actually get into circulation other than in exchange, but so far I can't find that information. But as far as I'm aware, a government can't just print money and spend it. I'm obviously no expert on it, but this question on how additional new cash (bills) get into circulation has been bugging me for awhile. In order for it to get into circulation, it can't just be given out without exchanging it for something of value. I'm just not sure what that is or where it is done. (Gold reserve perhaps?)
What?!?! What are you trying to insuate with that garbage? A "good point"? What's that supposed to mean? Is that some attack against "intellectually challenged" people? Some day the intellectually challenged people will rise up and conquer the smart people, if they can at least figure out how to get out of the room first. Damn you for baiting me. Damn you all to hell!
That's more or less already underway. The "new" NASA is being built in Washington under Sean O'Keefe. He's basically replacing the Dan Golding version of NASA (shuttle, space station, bloated beurocracy) with his version (space exploration, lean administration modeled on military). Now there are shuttle and ISS commitments to take care of first, but it will be replaced.
That does not mean just robotic missions though. The new NASA is being built on the vision of the moon and Mars. (And no, that's not Bush's vision, he just bought into it and was willing to commit to it. It's been the vision of many people in and around NASA for a long time.) But it will mean an end to the bloated, and almost purposeless, "compromise" programs of the shuttle and ISS.
What prevents someone from hacking into a Seti network packet and make it seem like the signal meant something?!
Well, if you read the article, you'll see they discuss that. It was seen twice by independent users (one in Germany and one in U.S.) and then seen a third time by a Seti researcher directly. So, it's possible, but very hard to fake. It'd almost have to be a Seti insider who did the faking.
So if you look at a given photon traveling through space its "signal" will not weaken with the square of the distance
This is probably the key point. Yes, the energy density decreases with square of distance, but that just means you have to stare longer to see the signal. This is how telescopes can measure faint stars. If they look longer, more photons arrive. So if we sent a modulated signal (e.g., amplitude, frequency, phase) it would still reach other planets in a readible form. The modulation would just have to be very slow so they don't integrate the whole modulation over the "staring" period.
Lasers aren't actually parallel. They are diffraction limited. The smaller the collimation the more quickly they diverge. A big diameter laser can have a lower divergence, but then the energy density is also lower. And still, over the distances we're talking about it would still be a huge spot size.
...but it's lack of the magical iPod Click Wheel will be the singular feature that kills this product
Yes, but on the other hand it is actually an attractive digital music player. I really can't understand why people think the iPod and iPod mini are attractive. They are basically plain white (or some other mono-colour) rectangles. They are to MP3 players what the standard white/tan mini-tower case is to personal computers -- boring. This Rio looks much nicer and organic. It's got style. I suppose it doesn't have the "hip" commercials though.
I've also always been curious about the patent on the iPod Click Wheel. We hear tons of complaints about obvious and prior art software patents, but this seems to be such as case for physical patents. It seems like an obvious interface to me and I'm sure I've seen a similar click-wheel in the 1980's. (I just can't remember the product.)
Sure, this is a business model that has worked well for drug dealers; hook 'em when they are young/naive with freebies and then once they're locked in you force them to pay through the teeth. Works for the tabacco industry as well, though it tends to be through "coolness" advertising rather than freebies. Similar principle though.
People on/. have been saying for years that Microsoft should change its business model which was to force people to use Microsoft by having it pre-installed on every PC at purchase. Perhaps following the drug dealer approach is a step towards a new model. (Nobody said the business model should be moral -- that wouldn't be consistent with Microsoft's history.)
Me-thinks you misunderstood the previous post. Jupiter sweeps up the "dirt" in the solar system so that Earth gets hit less, thus life has a better chance of forming and growing. Unless you are joking in which I case... I don't get it.
That is somewhat true, but that's indirect sponsorship by advertisers. NBC is not going to make the IOC put Coke signs up everywhere or mske athletes pull labels off products they are using. Its the direct product "censorship" we're talking about here, i.e., not showing competing products.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds about as enticing as losing a dental plan for a keg of beer.
Dental plan.
Lisa needs braces.
Dental plan.
Lisa needs braces.
Dental plan.
Lisa needs braces.
Bonus track.
Lisa need fair use.
Bonus track.
Lisa need fair use.
Bonus track.
Lisa need fair use.
Nope. In this case it appears to be voluntary. The problem people have is when you unknowingly can be tracked through RFID tags. There may be an issue with stalkers or pedophiles also being able to track people in this park, but I imagine that's not an easy task.
Absolutely. I even used to walk 30 minutes to and from school alone every day when I was 8. No wonder kids get no exercise these days, they're not allowed more than 6 feet from their parents. We used to call that overprotective, now it seems to be the norm. (I can say this now because I am a parent myself.)
Welcome to our IT dept. For awhile we couldn't even change our timezone without them doing it for us. We can't install jack on our machines.
Wouldn't web developers be most likely to use IE. After all, if it is the most used browser (perhaps still >90%) then it is in a company's best interest to make sure their website works properly in IE and not spend time making things working Mozilla if it works find in IE. There was much discussion on this regarding the lack of IE PNG alpha blending support.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, I'm just saying it seems to be the business attitude. There isn't much financial benefit in spending time to make their website compliant with a browser that has 5% market share if the site is fine in the browser with 95% market share. I do find this shortsighted though, since Mozilla/Firefox could be the dominant browser in, say, 6 months for example. Then all these companies would need to re-do their websites at extra cost so it would have been cheaper to make it compliant in the first place.
We all should. If we didn't, the estimates of requiring 3% of U.S. farm land to produce 95% of its energy needs could easily become 10% of it's farmland to meet 50% of its needs, which would probably make it economically unviable and the environmental damage from all of those wind farms could be significant. You have to take the overall efficiency into account.
I think the main point was that wind turbines produce electricity and it is electricity that we want in the homes. Any energy tranformation steps in the middle, to and from another medium, will produce significant losses of energy. It's better (in terms of efficiency) just to dump it into the grid and reduce energy production from other sources to compensate.
Um, no. I must be missing what you're getting at. Fuel cells don't store electricity, they produce it. The electricity we're talking about storing here is produces by wind turbines. How would you get this electricity into a fuel cell? It's not like you can just run a fuel cell backwards --> apply electricity to it and get hydrogen out and store the energy chemcially until needed.
Unless you're just talking about the general concept of storing energy, in which any fuel is "storing" it (uranium, fossil fuels, etc.). But we can't generally run that equation backwards to get a fuel from electricity. (There are exceptions, of course, such as rechargeable batteries and mechanical dynamos.)
Although I also believe the "no performance hit" seems impossible, your example doesn't quite fit. You describe different processors. The apparent claim is that on the exact same hardware, you could run an application under Windows or under Linux and get the same performance. I'm not sure you could ever prove this capability is impossible, but it seems to be. Somehow the OS instructions need to be translated which must take some additional clock cycles. But it is at least theoretically possible for some other aspect to be sped up (e.g., Linux does something faster than Windows would) so the net speed is roughly the same. Having that work both ways (Linux app on Windows vs Windows app on Linux) seems a little bit of a stretch though.
At least it isn't in Polish Mathematics. Not only would it be difficult to decipher, you'd also have to read it backwards.
Am I the only one who almost fell on the floor laughing at this? A diatribe about children not being programmed to learn that was screwed up because the authour hadn't learned to do HTML formatting and use the preview button. That's almost as funny as when my boss sent out an email with a misspelled word and followed it up with another email saying it was a "type". (And then followed it up again restating it as a "typo".)
BTW, it was a good diatribe about learning. It was just executed such that hilarity ensued.
Nope. Those are just the ones people are most pissed about. From Merriam-Webster:
Censoring is not inherently bad. For instance, when parents don't let their children watch certain shows or movies they are censoring. What annoys people most is when adults are censored from things that they have a right to hear or see, which generally can only be done by government or large corporations. Making something unavailable or unobtainable is effectively equivalent to the removal of the right to obtain it. The flip-side to censorship is a boycott where people refuse to obtain something that is available because of some offense to the product or company.
If nobody buys your crappy book about aliens killing Kennedy, it's not being censored, just unappreciated.
That's different than what happened to the Dixie Chicks. Radio stations stopped playing their material because of their beliefs, not because they didn't like the music.
The ironic thing is that the wikipedia might actually be more correct more often than normal encyclopedias. Wikipedia entries are often entered by experts in that field who have the best understanding of the subject. "Real" encyclopedia enties are written (as I understand it) by information researchers who are experts at researching information, not in the subjects of the fields they're writing about. The tradeoff is, of course, that there is no verification of expertise of the wiki writers so it's more or less a "use at your own risk".
However, even outside the balance of loans, banks create net money when they exchange reserves (non-interest bearing) for government securities (interest bearing), which is where I suppose the increase in actual cash comes from. Of course the central banks control the amount of reserve exchange and therefore the net created money. The simplest explanation for this I could find was here.
Still, it sounds like you have more education on this subject, so you can correct me if I'm wrong in this. But this is my understanding of where net currency increase comes from.
Hold on, that's not the same thing. It's not like the government prints the money and just "drops" it into circulation such as giving it to someone. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong regarding the U.S., but all actual new money is created as debt by banks, not by the government. If you borrow money from the bank, they just "make up" the money, i.e., they increase the number in your account but you then owe it to them as real money (cash). The bank doesn't actually have to have that money somewhere that they take and give to you. Yes, they do have to have a certain percentage of all "created" money in reserve.
Actual printed money gets into circulation by being exchanged for old bills. Of course, if this was the only way then the total amount of cash in circulation would never change. I've been trying to find out how any other new bills actually get into circulation other than in exchange, but so far I can't find that information. But as far as I'm aware, a government can't just print money and spend it. I'm obviously no expert on it, but this question on how additional new cash (bills) get into circulation has been bugging me for awhile. In order for it to get into circulation, it can't just be given out without exchanging it for something of value. I'm just not sure what that is or where it is done. (Gold reserve perhaps?)
What?!?! What are you trying to insuate with that garbage? A "good point"? What's that supposed to mean? Is that some attack against "intellectually challenged" people? Some day the intellectually challenged people will rise up and conquer the smart people, if they can at least figure out how to get out of the room first. Damn you for baiting me. Damn you all to hell!
That's more or less already underway. The "new" NASA is being built in Washington under Sean O'Keefe. He's basically replacing the Dan Golding version of NASA (shuttle, space station, bloated beurocracy) with his version (space exploration, lean administration modeled on military). Now there are shuttle and ISS commitments to take care of first, but it will be replaced.
That does not mean just robotic missions though. The new NASA is being built on the vision of the moon and Mars. (And no, that's not Bush's vision, he just bought into it and was willing to commit to it. It's been the vision of many people in and around NASA for a long time.) But it will mean an end to the bloated, and almost purposeless, "compromise" programs of the shuttle and ISS.
Excellent point as well. Yes, there are "smarter" ways. Mind you the aliens would have to smart enough to do that, but I think it's a fair assumption.
Well, if you read the article, you'll see they discuss that. It was seen twice by independent users (one in Germany and one in U.S.) and then seen a third time by a Seti researcher directly. So, it's possible, but very hard to fake. It'd almost have to be a Seti insider who did the faking.
This is probably the key point. Yes, the energy density decreases with square of distance, but that just means you have to stare longer to see the signal. This is how telescopes can measure faint stars. If they look longer, more photons arrive. So if we sent a modulated signal (e.g., amplitude, frequency, phase) it would still reach other planets in a readible form. The modulation would just have to be very slow so they don't integrate the whole modulation over the "staring" period.
Lasers aren't actually parallel. They are diffraction limited. The smaller the collimation the more quickly they diverge. A big diameter laser can have a lower divergence, but then the energy density is also lower. And still, over the distances we're talking about it would still be a huge spot size.
Yes, but on the other hand it is actually an attractive digital music player. I really can't understand why people think the iPod and iPod mini are attractive. They are basically plain white (or some other mono-colour) rectangles. They are to MP3 players what the standard white/tan mini-tower case is to personal computers -- boring. This Rio looks much nicer and organic. It's got style. I suppose it doesn't have the "hip" commercials though.
I've also always been curious about the patent on the iPod Click Wheel. We hear tons of complaints about obvious and prior art software patents, but this seems to be such as case for physical patents. It seems like an obvious interface to me and I'm sure I've seen a similar click-wheel in the 1980's. (I just can't remember the product.)
People on /. have been saying for years that Microsoft should change its business model which was to force people to use Microsoft by having it pre-installed on every PC at purchase. Perhaps following the drug dealer approach is a step towards a new model. (Nobody said the business model should be moral -- that wouldn't be consistent with Microsoft's history.)
Me-thinks you misunderstood the previous post. Jupiter sweeps up the "dirt" in the solar system so that Earth gets hit less, thus life has a better chance of forming and growing. Unless you are joking in which I case ... I don't get it.
That is somewhat true, but that's indirect sponsorship by advertisers. NBC is not going to make the IOC put Coke signs up everywhere or mske athletes pull labels off products they are using. Its the direct product "censorship" we're talking about here, i.e., not showing competing products.