$20M is still substantially less than it costs to send a person to space and get them back alive. A space shuttle launch costs over $1B (and has 7 seats) and the ISS has an amortized cost of over $10B a year.
What is needed is basic research into propulsion systems - something that can get us into low earth orbit for less than $1,000/kg and with fuel consumption more in line with a jumbo jet.
If private enterprise wants to offer space trips, that's fine with me (my belief is that it's still too early for it to be profitable, but I'm waiting to be proved wrong), but I hate seeing valuable government assets that could be used for research being sold (or rented) for pennies on the dollar.
Xvid/divx @ 640x480, 1024 kbps works pretty much perfectly on any NTSC set so long as there aren't any major mastering/encoding blunders and the source is clean (a well made DVD is usually a clean enough source) - there just isn't enough detail in NTSC to discriminate. DVD gives even better quality than that, but I doubt many will notice, no less care.
Maybe if HDTV sets were more popular things would be different.
Oddly enough, the Bush administration has been doing the opposite - passing 'temporary' tax cuts to make the ten year projections look nicer, with no intention of ever letting it expire (they're generally set up to cause maximum political pain to any politician who dares let it expire).
I actually considered the no-rewinding to be a PITA. Sure, rewinding takes time, but at least the tape remembers where you left off. With DVDs, you have to seek back to where you were, if you're lucky enough to remember where you were.
Still, with DVD-Rs costing under $.40 for over 10 hours of capacity (xvid format) and with them much easier to copy (which makes up for them being more fragile), I'll take them any day over tape.
I bred myself a gold Chocobo without a guide. There's plenty of in-game info about breeding, and it was fairly obvious that well fed chocobos do better. As far as racing them goes, I just happened to like the racing game, and bred new chocobos when my old ones just wouldn't get any better with more feeding.
Vincent though is very tough. I didn't even get that character without a guide.
And Final Fantasy can be beaten without a guide quite easily, and even more of the side stuff is easily solvable. A game that really pissed me off was Star Tropics, where you have to take the map that comes bundled with the game and put in water to get the code (which is 747 btw). Since I knew that getting paper wet is a bad idea, I figured it must be referring to something in-game.
I feel it's a bit of both. TV has gotten a little more dumbed down, but looking back, it was pretty lousy to begin with. Sitcoms (quite popular a decade ago) aren't exactly beacons of intellectual enlightenment but reality TV makes even them look good. The advertising has also gotten broader (even PBS now dishes out junk food commercials on its kids shows) and deeper (product placement has become ubiquitous on most genres of shows). Media companies are very reactionary today, but they were much the same a decade ago too. Hanna Barbera cartoons were cheaply made, had awful stories, and taught you nothing, but at least they don't give me headaches the way many Cartoon Network cartoons do.
Pretty much all I watch is kids' educational programming and kids' comedy (and only a small subset of that). Shows like Barney & Friends or Caillou (excluding the latest season, which should be considered a completely different show) or Arthur actually can be quite informative for me as my social skills are quite lousy (perhaps the flip-side of having a genius-level IQ?). It probably has helped quite a bit too, considering I don't offend people very much these days, and I'm much more aware of other people's mental states. In a roundabout way, the same lack of social skills probably explains why I don't like adult comedy.
But if I intend to actually learn something (besides social skills), it's usually Internet all the way. If not that, then its books, or deduction (figuring it out yourself from other things you do know or can find out).
It's the classic first-mover problem. Building an auction site is relatively easy. A few web forms, a little server-side scripting, and a simple database and you have a bare-bones auction site. The problem is getting enough items listed to attract buyers and enough buyers attracted to get listings.
Because of this, Ebay can charge extremely high fees and push through draconian (compared to the cost of running the service) AND still get plenty of customers.
Other examples include privatized and unregulated utilities (usually found in the third world following IMF/World Bank meddling or in very corrupt countries), real estate listings, and operating systems. All these markets are skewed heavily in favor of the monopolist. Some have high startup costs (utilities), some don't (real estate listings).
There were ice ages before the time of the dinosaurs when CO2 levels were much higher (several parts per thousand instead of the current 380 parts per million or so), but there is a major catch: The sun was much dimmer (most stars, including ours, get brighter, larger, cooler, and more red as they age). The CO2 concentrations during those ice ages were lower than the CO2 concentrations of the periods immediately preceding and following them though.
Over hundreds of millions of years, CO2 levels have slowly dropped because of natural feedback loops that sequester CO2 in hot periods and while accumulating it in the atmosphere during cold periods, so our climate has been kept remarkably constant compared to planets without life and plate tectonics on them. If CO2 levels return to where they were in those ice ages past, then the planet is going to be plenty warmer (10-20 degrees C) than what it is now because our sun is giving off that much more heat.
Makes sense to me. It's obviously been hashed over time and time again, and making a law out of it will help contain the industry shills that flood Slashdot whenever downloading comes up.
The damage is contained within its own borders. Since when has loss of access to economic rents been 'damage?' I consider that a solution, not a problem.
I certainly didn't personally agree to such a deal. If it is my right to do what I want with my data, then why can it be taken away from me, without my permission or approval no less. (and I would definitely prefer not to have copyright, despite having written quite a few computer programs, some in actual widespread consumer use - copyright costs me a lot of freedoms and money, while getting me nothing than a few clauses in the GPL that public domain works don't have attached to them)
The government should get the lion's share of the blame for putting out such outrageous press releases. Obviously they hadn't put it through quality control if it didn't even exist.
PS: How does China even acknowledge foreign patents, no less patent things themselves, considering they're communist? Patents fly right in the face of giving according to ability and getting according to need, or are the Chinese just pretending to be communist to get sympathies from the world?
You're right, but it's just an internet post. I try not to make too many errors, but one here or there is nothing to be embarrassed about. What gets me upset is doing them purposefully, which marketers make an art out of.
No empire has ever had lasting freedoms in the homeland/fatherland/motherland. Rome didn't. Napoleonic France didn't. Nazi Germany didn't, and the United States doesn't. And in all cases there were fewer and fewer freedoms as time progressed. Nero was worse than Caesar who was worse than the Roman Senate. Germany 1939 was worse than 1932.
To claim that there is now an empire that has freedoms is a enormous claim, and one that requires enormous proof. You gave not a shred of evidence.
PS: Don't lie about the US not being an empire - The US has hundreds of bases and scores of puppet governments the world over. Rome at its height was puny compared what we've stolen from the former imperial powers after WWII.
News flash: Over two million people are in jail in the US. The last two presidential elections (2000 and 2004) were decided by far fewer votes than that.
Also, Democrats are far more likely to end up in jail because blacks are more likely to be Democrat, and blacks make up a hugely disproportionate share of prisoners (especially felons). Not that they commit any more crimes than whites and Republicans (marijuana use, the largest source of prisoners, is around 30% across all income levels and races).
If I was an editor I would throw out LexisNexis (error intentional) as no letter in proper English can be capitalized save for the first letter. I would replace it with the closest valid spelling, in this case Lexis Nexis. I also correct misspellings (especially when the misspellings are just so that they can get a trademark on a generic word, like with Blue Ray).
I can understand ordinary people being sloppy with their spelling, but when marketers do it on purpose, it drives me crazy. Just one more reason they should be rounded up and thrown into the sea next to their lawyer friends.
Two wrongs don't make a right. I find that denying felons the right to vote to be horrible. It's an awfully strong incentive to jail people whose beliefs are different from your own or oppose your party.
Referencing the UK is like a burglar asking a pickpocket for moral support. Neither are bastions of freedom and civil liberties. After all, the UK invaded Iraq quite willingly in 2003 and is still occupying the south of the country.
Why don't more people get this? And the pretense it's done under is so utterly stupid too. Terrorism is down there with lightning strikes as an unlikely way to die, but people are so easily cowed into accepting anything with that bogeyman.
"3) Quality is dropping, yet for some reason demand is still high. I don't know if this is just a normal perception as one gets in his mid 30s or if this is a real trend or not, but it seems to be a common consensus that quality is not there as it once was. To me, rock music peaked in the 70s and the 60s-70s era bands were still strong in the 80s with a more polished and professional approach. There was a slight resurgence in the early 90s, but things are tapering off from there. Personally, I've been disappointed in most movies all of my life. There are anomalies, but for 1.5 to 3 hours of one piece of material, you have to keep people interested with solid character development and character constancy and, duh, the thing needs a plot too."
Lower quality can be expected to lead to more sales for the industry, because people are contented for less time. It's like selling smaller sized packages of food.
As far as quality changing with time, I think it's remained about the same. Each year has about half a good movie on average, with "The Incredibles", preceded by "Lilo and Stitch" being the two most recent ones I liked.
8Mbps!!! I only get 384kbps (I live in NYC) for cable internet (downspeed is much faster, but that's not the bottleneck). It costs $42/month (tax is extra). No phone service or cable TV included. If you do get the phone service, it has major quality issues and the voice often breaks up - similar overall quality to a US cell phone. You can't even [legally] set up any sort of server - not even remote login software. Recently downtime and overall service quality has been deteriorating too.
Oh how I wish I had the European package. No more wasting electricity (and no more complaints of me being an electricity hog) to get my share ratio above 1:1, I'd save about $40/month in phone and internet bills, and I'd have cable TV thrown in for free to boot.
Pretty stupid assumption. Any country can fall any day, with absolutely no warning. The US in particular seems to be going down the path of Imperial Rome and Nazi Germany, and if that is the case, there is a good chance of a collapse in the coming decade or so.
The big issue is the amount of waste generated. The self-heating coffee is about 50% packaging. A normal cup is maybe 5% packaging (which is already very wasteful). CaO is non-toxic, but it is packaged in plenty of plastic and it still has to be mined and then landfilled.
And an alternative already exists... Dewar flasks. Coffee put into one of those will stay hot all day and it's perfectly reusable.
Slashdot Mirror
$20M is still substantially less than it costs to send a person to space and get them back alive. A space shuttle launch costs over $1B (and has 7 seats) and the ISS has an amortized cost of over $10B a year.
What is needed is basic research into propulsion systems - something that can get us into low earth orbit for less than $1,000/kg and with fuel consumption more in line with a jumbo jet.
If private enterprise wants to offer space trips, that's fine with me (my belief is that it's still too early for it to be profitable, but I'm waiting to be proved wrong), but I hate seeing valuable government assets that could be used for research being sold (or rented) for pennies on the dollar.
Xvid/divx @ 640x480, 1024 kbps works pretty much perfectly on any NTSC set so long as there aren't any major mastering/encoding blunders and the source is clean (a well made DVD is usually a clean enough source) - there just isn't enough detail in NTSC to discriminate. DVD gives even better quality than that, but I doubt many will notice, no less care.
Maybe if HDTV sets were more popular things would be different.
The 3 that I've seen (PS2 and 2 low-end DVD players) don't, or at least it's too well hidden a feature or requires that the machine be kept on.
Oddly enough, the Bush administration has been doing the opposite - passing 'temporary' tax cuts to make the ten year projections look nicer, with no intention of ever letting it expire (they're generally set up to cause maximum political pain to any politician who dares let it expire).
I actually considered the no-rewinding to be a PITA. Sure, rewinding takes time, but at least the tape remembers where you left off. With DVDs, you have to seek back to where you were, if you're lucky enough to remember where you were.
Still, with DVD-Rs costing under $.40 for over 10 hours of capacity (xvid format) and with them much easier to copy (which makes up for them being more fragile), I'll take them any day over tape.
I bred myself a gold Chocobo without a guide. There's plenty of in-game info about breeding, and it was fairly obvious that well fed chocobos do better. As far as racing them goes, I just happened to like the racing game, and bred new chocobos when my old ones just wouldn't get any better with more feeding.
Vincent though is very tough. I didn't even get that character without a guide.
And Final Fantasy can be beaten without a guide quite easily, and even more of the side stuff is easily solvable. A game that really pissed me off was Star Tropics, where you have to take the map that comes bundled with the game and put in water to get the code (which is 747 btw). Since I knew that getting paper wet is a bad idea, I figured it must be referring to something in-game.
I feel it's a bit of both. TV has gotten a little more dumbed down, but looking back, it was pretty lousy to begin with. Sitcoms (quite popular a decade ago) aren't exactly beacons of intellectual enlightenment but reality TV makes even them look good. The advertising has also gotten broader (even PBS now dishes out junk food commercials on its kids shows) and deeper (product placement has become ubiquitous on most genres of shows). Media companies are very reactionary today, but they were much the same a decade ago too. Hanna Barbera cartoons were cheaply made, had awful stories, and taught you nothing, but at least they don't give me headaches the way many Cartoon Network cartoons do.
Pretty much all I watch is kids' educational programming and kids' comedy (and only a small subset of that). Shows like Barney & Friends or Caillou (excluding the latest season, which should be considered a completely different show) or Arthur actually can be quite informative for me as my social skills are quite lousy (perhaps the flip-side of having a genius-level IQ?). It probably has helped quite a bit too, considering I don't offend people very much these days, and I'm much more aware of other people's mental states. In a roundabout way, the same lack of social skills probably explains why I don't like adult comedy.
But if I intend to actually learn something (besides social skills), it's usually Internet all the way. If not that, then its books, or deduction (figuring it out yourself from other things you do know or can find out).
It's the classic first-mover problem. Building an auction site is relatively easy. A few web forms, a little server-side scripting, and a simple database and you have a bare-bones auction site. The problem is getting enough items listed to attract buyers and enough buyers attracted to get listings.
Because of this, Ebay can charge extremely high fees and push through draconian (compared to the cost of running the service) AND still get plenty of customers.
Other examples include privatized and unregulated utilities (usually found in the third world following IMF/World Bank meddling or in very corrupt countries), real estate listings, and operating systems. All these markets are skewed heavily in favor of the monopolist. Some have high startup costs (utilities), some don't (real estate listings).
There were ice ages before the time of the dinosaurs when CO2 levels were much higher (several parts per thousand instead of the current 380 parts per million or so), but there is a major catch: The sun was much dimmer (most stars, including ours, get brighter, larger, cooler, and more red as they age). The CO2 concentrations during those ice ages were lower than the CO2 concentrations of the periods immediately preceding and following them though.
Over hundreds of millions of years, CO2 levels have slowly dropped because of natural feedback loops that sequester CO2 in hot periods and while accumulating it in the atmosphere during cold periods, so our climate has been kept remarkably constant compared to planets without life and plate tectonics on them. If CO2 levels return to where they were in those ice ages past, then the planet is going to be plenty warmer (10-20 degrees C) than what it is now because our sun is giving off that much more heat.
Makes sense to me. It's obviously been hashed over time and time again, and making a law out of it will help contain the industry shills that flood Slashdot whenever downloading comes up.
The damage is contained within its own borders. Since when has loss of access to economic rents been 'damage?' I consider that a solution, not a problem.
I certainly didn't personally agree to such a deal. If it is my right to do what I want with my data, then why can it be taken away from me, without my permission or approval no less. (and I would definitely prefer not to have copyright, despite having written quite a few computer programs, some in actual widespread consumer use - copyright costs me a lot of freedoms and money, while getting me nothing than a few clauses in the GPL that public domain works don't have attached to them)
The government should get the lion's share of the blame for putting out such outrageous press releases. Obviously they hadn't put it through quality control if it didn't even exist.
PS: How does China even acknowledge foreign patents, no less patent things themselves, considering they're communist? Patents fly right in the face of giving according to ability and getting according to need, or are the Chinese just pretending to be communist to get sympathies from the world?
You're right, but it's just an internet post. I try not to make too many errors, but one here or there is nothing to be embarrassed about. What gets me upset is doing them purposefully, which marketers make an art out of.
No empire has ever had lasting freedoms in the homeland/fatherland/motherland. Rome didn't. Napoleonic France didn't. Nazi Germany didn't, and the United States doesn't. And in all cases there were fewer and fewer freedoms as time progressed. Nero was worse than Caesar who was worse than the Roman Senate. Germany 1939 was worse than 1932.
To claim that there is now an empire that has freedoms is a enormous claim, and one that requires enormous proof. You gave not a shred of evidence.
PS: Don't lie about the US not being an empire - The US has hundreds of bases and scores of puppet governments the world over. Rome at its height was puny compared what we've stolen from the former imperial powers after WWII.
News flash: Over two million people are in jail in the US. The last two presidential elections (2000 and 2004) were decided by far fewer votes than that.
Also, Democrats are far more likely to end up in jail because blacks are more likely to be Democrat, and blacks make up a hugely disproportionate share of prisoners (especially felons). Not that they commit any more crimes than whites and Republicans (marijuana use, the largest source of prisoners, is around 30% across all income levels and races).
If I was an editor I would throw out LexisNexis (error intentional) as no letter in proper English can be capitalized save for the first letter. I would replace it with the closest valid spelling, in this case Lexis Nexis. I also correct misspellings (especially when the misspellings are just so that they can get a trademark on a generic word, like with Blue Ray).
I can understand ordinary people being sloppy with their spelling, but when marketers do it on purpose, it drives me crazy. Just one more reason they should be rounded up and thrown into the sea next to their lawyer friends.
Two wrongs don't make a right. I find that denying felons the right to vote to be horrible. It's an awfully strong incentive to jail people whose beliefs are different from your own or oppose your party.
Referencing the UK is like a burglar asking a pickpocket for moral support. Neither are bastions of freedom and civil liberties. After all, the UK invaded Iraq quite willingly in 2003 and is still occupying the south of the country.
Why don't more people get this? And the pretense it's done under is so utterly stupid too. Terrorism is down there with lightning strikes as an unlikely way to die, but people are so easily cowed into accepting anything with that bogeyman.
I value the package at about $1,200/year. I doubt France spends that much per subscriber, so it's tax money well spent.
"3) Quality is dropping, yet for some reason demand is still high. I don't know if this is just a normal perception as one gets in his mid 30s or if this is a real trend or not, but it seems to be a common consensus that quality is not there as it once was. To me, rock music peaked in the 70s and the 60s-70s era bands were still strong in the 80s with a more polished and professional approach. There was a slight resurgence in the early 90s, but things are tapering off from there. Personally, I've been disappointed in most movies all of my life. There are anomalies, but for 1.5 to 3 hours of one piece of material, you have to keep people interested with solid character development and character constancy and, duh, the thing needs a plot too."
Lower quality can be expected to lead to more sales for the industry, because people are contented for less time. It's like selling smaller sized packages of food.
As far as quality changing with time, I think it's remained about the same. Each year has about half a good movie on average, with "The Incredibles", preceded by "Lilo and Stitch" being the two most recent ones I liked.
8Mbps!!! I only get 384kbps (I live in NYC) for cable internet (downspeed is much faster, but that's not the bottleneck). It costs $42/month (tax is extra). No phone service or cable TV included. If you do get the phone service, it has major quality issues and the voice often breaks up - similar overall quality to a US cell phone. You can't even [legally] set up any sort of server - not even remote login software. Recently downtime and overall service quality has been deteriorating too.
Oh how I wish I had the European package. No more wasting electricity (and no more complaints of me being an electricity hog) to get my share ratio above 1:1, I'd save about $40/month in phone and internet bills, and I'd have cable TV thrown in for free to boot.
Pretty stupid assumption. Any country can fall any day, with absolutely no warning. The US in particular seems to be going down the path of Imperial Rome and Nazi Germany, and if that is the case, there is a good chance of a collapse in the coming decade or so.
The big issue is the amount of waste generated. The self-heating coffee is about 50% packaging. A normal cup is maybe 5% packaging (which is already very wasteful). CaO is non-toxic, but it is packaged in plenty of plastic and it still has to be mined and then landfilled.
... Dewar flasks. Coffee put into one of those will stay hot all day and it's perfectly reusable.
And an alternative already exists