Sounds like marketing got thru to you, in a big way...
Heres what really happened. Cell phones used to be a cutting edge high tech space age product with the related profit margins. But, the cutting edge advances pretty quick. So, the fat profits from a new high tech device start to disappear. The cell phone companies managers think to themselves, well, we can close and quit, or try to compete with Chinese factories as a commodity, or try to "innovate" ourselves back to high profits... Pretty obvious what most of them decided.
Since there is really no useful way to innovate a cell phone, we get, basically, a lot of foolishness that marketing tries to convince us we need. Its coming to a pretty desperate peak effort when they are combining tv remote controls with the phones.
You'll know it's all downhill when you see late night TV ads like cell phone combined with collapsible fishing pole (take cell pics of the one that didn't get away), or cell phone built into the stock of a deer rifle (for the avid hunter or poacher), combination toilet paper holder and cell phone (hey everyone needs a phone, and everyone uses the toilet, so could there be a better match made in heaven?), cell phone built into kitchen microwave oven (already got a touchpad...), cellphone combined with talking Mr Bass mechanical fish (imagine the ringtones!), etc. In fact right now some LG/Motorola/Apple/Nokia executive whom just read this paragraph is raging that I've now publicly described their top secret new killer product. Seriously!
This also adresses the problem of finding the Goddamn remote. It's always on you.
Cultural difference. If its cold out, my cellphone is in my jacket pocket unless it's held up to my ear. If its warm, its next to my car keys on the dresser or is in my pocket opposite my car keys (and I only carry my cell and keys when I'm out of the house).
Also my cell needs charging on a random and inconvenient basis for hours every couple days. For a mobile device it probably spends over 10% of it's life attached to a charger in my office. My MX-500 universal remote conveniently only needs new batteries every couple months and I can insert new AAA batteries in about 20 seconds vs hours and hours of recharging...
If my cellphone battery dies, oh well, those things happen, enjoy the socially acceptable quiet time till it charges. If my remote control battery dies, for most americans, that is a sign of the apocalypse, and a trip will be made to walmart come hell or high water.
However I distinctly remember using my brand new HP48 as a remote control back when I bought it in 1992. I guess that brackets HP48 remote control programs between 1990 (1st year of HP48 production) and 1995. http://www.hpcalc.org/ probably has some original versions.
hokey spiritualism is now a prerequisite for most televised SF (cf. Lost, Heroes). The networks seem to think the masses need a healthy serving of God with their spaceships and time travel or else they might change the channel.
"is now"? What about all the star trek series and movies, all star wars movies... Has there ever been any filmed or televised SF that doesn't contain the hokey spiritualism? It's like theres a censorship committee that requires all SF TV and movies must contain at least one of the following before it will be permitted to be distributed:
telepathy precognition (demonic) Possession god granted miracle telekinesis someone on the ship is a genuine priest/wizard capable of DnD style fighting Each ship must contain at least one prophet or otherwise new religious leader greek gods come to life vampricism or lycanthropy A theme of science and technology are evil, but we must tolerate or join fringe religions Earth/Gaia worship Witchcraft
At least it's possible to publish SF books with minimal interference from the committee or censorship board or whatever it is.
IMNSHO, science fiction is not about spaceships, space battles, people killing each other in spaces, monsters killing people, and most variations thereof. Science fiction is about exploring possible technical advances and their implications, as well as human nature in extreme situations and the like.
Yeah, but a 40 minute BSG episode = 10 minutes of special effects as mentioned + 30 minutes of teen soap opera, leaving no time for any of that interesting stuff.
It also followed the incredibly worn and tired old "sci-fi" formula of any story containing high tech must contain a corresponding quantity of ultra low end mythology and miracles and similar such foolishness. Please. Is there any "sci-fi" out there that avoids that tired old cliche?
I wonder how long he held on? Unless he was sheltered from the airflow I find it hard to believe that he could have held on once the shuttle reached any real speed. It's hard enough to hang on in a wind tunnel at subsonic speeds
Probably frozen in place. They try not to have ice on the tank because it keeps breaking off and smashing tiles... that was the end of Columbia. Still some builds up.
Is a technical article "A millimeter wave technique for measuring ice thickness on the Space Shuttle's external tank" from 1991 where they basically built a radio telescope to measure the temperature of the ice/insulation etc. They don't directly discuss ice thickness, but all their calibration curves ran from 0 to 15 mm thickness. So unless they totally screwed up, they don't expect more than 15 mm of ice.
Most bats are somewhat thicker than 15 mm (err, are they? thats about half an inch). That is probably enough to freeze it onto the tank though.
Since the ice likes to shake loose and crash into the shuttle as it falls, likely the bat didn't make it to space. I don't think the ice would sublimate fast enough in space that if it made it, it would "stage separate" from the tank. So, if it made it up there, it rode the tank back down.
Personally, I'd worry alot more about bats nesting in the engine turbopumps than "chilling out" on the cryogenic fuel tank.
"Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten."
The theoildrum.com scientists seem to think ten is much more correct, a blathering mainstream media claims its 1:1, so it's probably somewhere in between, probably much closer to the scientists on theoildrum than to some magazine journalist. So, you can turn (the equivalent of) ten barrels of crude into (the equivalent of) one barrel of human food.
As a side issue, that is why it is not efficient to bicycle... if it takes ten gallons of gas to make the food equivalent of one gallon equivalent of bicycling. Just think about it. My car gets about 30 MPG and after a half hour 30 mile drive is thirsty for a gallon of gas. After a multi-hour 30 mile bike ride I am very hungry and can easily eat two pounds of food (and still lose weight, if it's salad and not eight quarter pounders with cheese and bacon). Anyway, that two pounds of food obviously takes twenty pounds of gasoline to grow and process and ship and cook. Now at 6 pounds of aviation gas per gallon (note I am not a pilot, but that is my fuzzy memory from wanting to be a pilot decades ago) that would make a bit over 3 gallons of gas to grow the food to bicycle 30 miles. Lets be very pessimistic and round my car down and bicycling up. I'm sure I can do better than 20 MPG for a car and I'm sure I'd do worse than 15 MPG for a bicycle. It's even worse if you have four people in the car vs four bike riders. Now bicycling is fun and good exercise, the fact that I'm wasting fossil fuel by bike riding instead of driving does not stop me from having a little fun, but I don't operate under some delusion that bicycling saves the planet compared to car driving.
Now if you're not going to bother making the food safe for humans to eat (like ethanol, or food that is imported from China) you can get that ratio down to maybe two barrels of crude makes one barrel of inedible fuel. Use far more toxic insecticides, process the inedible parts of the plant, a little rot at harvest time is OK as long as the overall total yield increases, bugs will ferment into fuel just as well as food ferments into fuel, etc. Some marketing people claim that under ideal perfect never attained conditions in the perfect climate ignoring some minor details like maintenance or personnel costs it is possible to turn one barrel of crude into slightly more than one barrel of ethanol, but no one believes that unless they are getting a marketing salary, or live in Brazil where they have a uniquely perfect climate.
I have also pondered the idea of building a low tech computer just to see how much could be done on something that would bring the term 'low power' back down to Model 100 levels and perhaps even finally surpass 1980's tech.
Check out TI's MSP430 series... About a quarter milliamp per MIP... the fastest one they sell should then draw about 6 mA, probably less than the power indicator will draw.
One of the disadvantages of the world moving to a more urban lifestyle is a lack of knowledge about animal breeding. Several generations have been raised to believe buffalo wings are descended from buffalo and chicken, leading to even stranger ideas.
Consider that horses and donkeys are almost infinitely closer related than those two bacteria, yet their offspring, although useful, is not as cool as a unicorn nor can it reproduce.
I don't normally advocate genocide (after the first cup of coffee), but when it comes to mosquitos I find it hard to come up with compelling arguments against.
How bout the genocide of the cute and cuddly smallpox virus? Poor defenseless mother earth once again at the mercy of evil scientists, especially those horrible exploiting capitalists.
I'm sure we can keep some mosquitoes in a liquid nitrogen freezer just in case... until they escape, anyway...
I'm a little concerned that we'll reach a point where we tell a third world country, where significant numbers of people are dying of malaria, "We have this technology that will make a profound difference in the mosquito vector, but we're not going to allow you to use it because we're concerned about potential, but as-yet unspecified damage to your environment. Hope the fever gets better"
For a good time, search and replace cute and cuddly mosquitoes with civilian nuclear power.
How about a built in digital compass that records the direction as part or the filename to help panoramic stitching software, or just because it sounds cool?
How about filenames other than peculiar serial numbers like dsc-12345.jpg? How about an option to use the timestamp as a filename? How about a datestamp and serial number?
How about a shutter response faster than 500 ms? My dads spotmatic and my old K1000 back in the 80s had a shutter response time somewhere around zero (or at least no longer than typical human or video game player reflexes) but my wife's couple year old nikon takes almost a second to take a picture after the button is pressed, almost useless for action shots.
How about a camera that stops shutting off constantly every 30 seconds? Some people take pictures of events that last longer than that, so its just wasting batteries turning on and off over and over. At least put in a menu to shut off the "battery saver" (battery waster, more likely)
How about a tripod mount that isn't made of plastic? Yeah I know the whole cam is plastic, not like the old days, but still, at least some metal threads that won't strip. And make the tripod mount screw deeper than like 3 thread pitch.
What I don't want is cutesy bloatware software for legacy windows boxes... just gimme a SD or CF that plugs into any desktop or wii or laptop anywhere in the world with no weird software install needed.
Also I don't want an irreplaceable and/or unremovable and/or rechargeable battery. I can buy AA batteries anywhere in the world and carry a ridiculous number of spares in my backpack. A rechargeable bettery thats usually discharged or runs out at a bad time or can never be replaced or can't be charged in less than 15 minutes is useless for me. And that applies 10x for mp3 players too. Its not like the "expense" of batteries will bankrupt me compared to the staggering expense of good equipment. And make the camera compatible with 1.2 volt rechargeables not just 1.5 volt alkalines.
I also don't want effort put into stupid sounds that make it sound like an old polaroid when you press the button. I want it silent for wedding/baptism photos or photos of pets/animals/hunting. Or at least a mostly inoffensive beep. Or at worst, an easily found speaker I can tape over. Please god no "ringtones" for the camera shutter sound.
Who knows what kinds of messages are sitting in that never-opened inbox; maybe even a subpoena, but I'd never know.
I can top that, I subscribed to a local ISP before getting broadband, after the broadband install I was using fetchmail to fetch email from the old ISP while I was getting everything set up on the new ISP. Then I canceled my old ISP but forgot to remove my old email account from my fetchmail config, and apparently they never removed my old account, which was receiving a continuous stream of spam months later. I only noticed when months later my old provider took down their pop server for scheduled maintenance and I got fetchmail errors all night.
So, should I continue to illegally access my no longer paid for account that has not been removed by my former provider in order to please the court by receiving legal papers, or should I stop illegally accessing my email account thus being in contempt of court by intentionally avoiding reception of legal papers... Hmmmmmm. Luckily was never an issue for me.
Even stranger is I have heard some companies forward former employee email accounts to their former boss, much as they do with phone calls or mail etc.
Quirky = rare habits and/or rare hobbies and/or rare background/culture that bring a smile to co workers faces or make them interesting to talk to, at least compared to an average drone.
vs
guy in the article = a-hole that everyone hates but has the redeeming characteristic of being somewhat productive (at the cost of ruining everyone elses productivity)
Or are the other people I'm being judged against too fucking retarded to teach themselves?
They're too busy watching American Idol. Look on the bright side, it makes folks like us, stacks of money, at least in comparison to them. Besides, we know its more fun than what they do.
Women do not enter science because they don't like to focus for long periods on one objective at the expense of all others
.... while working immense overtime and hearing constantly about how the entire field is being offshored to India/China and getting paid less (on an hourly basis) than the non-math fields (well, in between downsizings of course).
I'm hoping my daughter (and son!) won't be stupid enough to enter a math intensive field, or if she does, she finds a way to escape to a better line of work. If she can't escape, I will certainly try my best to financially support her family, and I can help raise the grandkids for her while she's at her 80 to 120 hour work weeks, but it would be nice if she's smart enough to avoid putting dear old dad thru that by not getting in that situation.
There is a tradition of enforced medical malpractice, at least in the US, of requiring residents to work 36 plus hour shifts. Kills thousands to millions of patients due to malpractice directly resulting from sleep deprivation. Anything that interferes with the sleep deprivation and its related malpractice is a "reduction in the quality of care". It's 1984 new-speak not the truth, which is why you don't get it. Most licensed day cares are not legally allowed to hold kids for 36+ hour shifts so something has to give, and oddly enough some moms prioritize their kids above their job.
Truth be told people have kids for companionship/economic reasons and (the hope) of old age security I think, that has always been the 'traditional' view imho.
I'm guessing you don't have kids? Truth is, despite all the complaining about diapers and sleepless nights and moody teenagers, its overall on average fun, both the initial procreation for a couple minutes (obviously) and the next couple decades of playing and reminiscing about your own youth, etc. Most adults are really just big kids inside and find the kids are an excellent excuse for their own goals of running around in the park and building legos and building tree houses and digging in sandboxes and riding bikes and playing aports and computer and video games. Yeah the wii is for the kids. Sure I'm only pretending to enjoy an afternoon at the waterpark or chuck e cheese, it's all about the kids. Whatever.
Add to it a society where its widely believed that only a creepy pedo molester kidnapper gang member homeless terrorist adult could possibly want to go to a playground UNLESS THEY HAVE KIDS WITH THEM, that turns the kids into a fashion accessory for the parents to have fun.
You forgot the other often repeated/never researched traditional slashdot claims seen in every mysql comment section, such as mysql doesn't do transactions and doesn't do replication, both of which are necessary for each and every database install ever done past present or future... (Of course it has those features for about half a decade, maybe more, certainly since around the 4.0 range, but that never slows down the folks that repeat those claims)
Then there are the re-occurring claims that mysql is useless because it doesn't have some bizarre feature that you might personally think is useful, therefore any database without it is useless for everyone doing anything, like perhaps direct file importation of COBOL ISAM punch cards, or an internal database representation for complex four dimensional vectors. You know, the stuff everyone uses.
Then there are the posts explaining how a failing hard drive on an old gateway 2000 vaporized the filesystem and/or bad ram caused endless kernel lockups, and the mysql software was running on that bad hardware, and correlation always implies causation, so mysql must be bad too.
Finally I expect several posts about how they found an obscure bug in the beta 3.23 version back around eight years therefore they'll never use it again because that is the only software that has ever had a bug.
I've had success selling 40GB drives on my local Craigslist for $10 a pop. I sold eight drives and had to turn people away, so there's definitely demand.
More people than you would expect understand the fun and profit that comes from digging thru other peoples old drives. Strange warez, stranger pr0n, saved music and videos, financial details, etc. All the fun of a stolen laptop data breach except its totally legal and only cost $10.
Some of the devices really aren't that old, like the Motorola Q cellphone, which some US carriers just started carrying late 2007 (original Q, not Q9).
How bout an off the shelf brand new Leapster2 kids toy, that advises in the instructions that it wont work with SD cards larger than 256 megs? Actually according to the amazon reviews, and my experience, it doesn't work at all. The smallest card I could even find at best buy was one gig.
that size could be a good emergency backup to keep in the camera bag if you fill up your big cards
For years journalists in third world countries (Africa, USA, etc) have known that jack booted thugs don't necessarily check the memory card that they confiscate. So, if they want to confiscate your picture of a choo choo, or of a copyrighted statue in a park, or a video you made of a police beating, you can cheerfully hand over a special card containing innocent pictures or maybe a pic of the declaration of independence or maybe a pic of mr goatsea.
Also it can be pleasant to take pictures etc and then share the card. Instead of one huge expensive card, have a couple small ones and if auntie wants to copy the kids birthday, just "loan" her the card...
Finally in my experience camera cards fail suddenly and totally. Its nice to have a spare, even if its a tiny one.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever happened to "Do one job and do it well".
People's needs and wants, that's what happened.
Sounds like marketing got thru to you, in a big way...
Heres what really happened. Cell phones used to be a cutting edge high tech space age product with the related profit margins. But, the cutting edge advances pretty quick. So, the fat profits from a new high tech device start to disappear. The cell phone companies managers think to themselves, well, we can close and quit, or try to compete with Chinese factories as a commodity, or try to "innovate" ourselves back to high profits... Pretty obvious what most of them decided.
Since there is really no useful way to innovate a cell phone, we get, basically, a lot of foolishness that marketing tries to convince us we need. Its coming to a pretty desperate peak effort when they are combining tv remote controls with the phones.
You'll know it's all downhill when you see late night TV ads like cell phone combined with collapsible fishing pole (take cell pics of the one that didn't get away), or cell phone built into the stock of a deer rifle (for the avid hunter or poacher), combination toilet paper holder and cell phone (hey everyone needs a phone, and everyone uses the toilet, so could there be a better match made in heaven?), cell phone built into kitchen microwave oven (already got a touchpad...), cellphone combined with talking Mr Bass mechanical fish (imagine the ringtones!), etc. In fact right now some LG/Motorola/Apple/Nokia executive whom just read this paragraph is raging that I've now publicly described their top secret new killer product. Seriously!
This also adresses the problem of finding the Goddamn remote. It's always on you.
Cultural difference. If its cold out, my cellphone is in my jacket pocket unless it's held up to my ear. If its warm, its next to my car keys on the dresser or is in my pocket opposite my car keys (and I only carry my cell and keys when I'm out of the house).
Also my cell needs charging on a random and inconvenient basis for hours every couple days. For a mobile device it probably spends over 10% of it's life attached to a charger in my office. My MX-500 universal remote conveniently only needs new batteries every couple months and I can insert new AAA batteries in about 20 seconds vs hours and hours of recharging...
If my cellphone battery dies, oh well, those things happen, enjoy the socially acceptable quiet time till it charges. If my remote control battery dies, for most americans, that is a sign of the apocalypse, and a trip will be made to walmart come hell or high water.
I don't see how this terribly revolutionary in a phone either. You could do this with a Palm III(1998)
Well, I can crush that.
The most RECENT release of ONE HP48 calculator remote control program was in very early 1995.
http://www.rhoads.nu/bjorn/hp48/remote/remote.html
However I distinctly remember using my brand new HP48 as a remote control back when I bought it in 1992. I guess that brackets HP48 remote control programs between 1990 (1st year of HP48 production) and 1995. http://www.hpcalc.org/ probably has some original versions.
hokey spiritualism is now a prerequisite for most televised SF (cf. Lost, Heroes). The networks seem to think the masses need a healthy serving of God with their spaceships and time travel or else they might change the channel.
"is now"? What about all the star trek series and movies, all star wars movies... Has there ever been any filmed or televised SF that doesn't contain the hokey spiritualism? It's like theres a censorship committee that requires all SF TV and movies must contain at least one of the following before it will be permitted to be distributed:
telepathy
precognition
(demonic) Possession
god granted miracle
telekinesis
someone on the ship is a genuine priest/wizard capable of DnD style fighting
Each ship must contain at least one prophet or otherwise new religious leader
greek gods come to life
vampricism or lycanthropy
A theme of science and technology are evil, but we must tolerate or join fringe religions
Earth/Gaia worship
Witchcraft
At least it's possible to publish SF books with minimal interference from the committee or censorship board or whatever it is.
IMNSHO, science fiction is not about spaceships, space battles, people killing each other in spaces, monsters killing people, and most variations thereof. Science fiction is about exploring possible technical advances and their implications, as well as human nature in extreme situations and the like.
Yeah, but a 40 minute BSG episode = 10 minutes of special effects as mentioned + 30 minutes of teen soap opera, leaving no time for any of that interesting stuff.
It also followed the incredibly worn and tired old "sci-fi" formula of any story containing high tech must contain a corresponding quantity of ultra low end mythology and miracles and similar such foolishness. Please. Is there any "sci-fi" out there that avoids that tired old cliche?
I wonder how long he held on? Unless he was sheltered from the airflow I find it hard to believe that he could have held on once the shuttle reached any real speed. It's hard enough to hang on in a wind tunnel at subsonic speeds
Probably frozen in place. They try not to have ice on the tank because it keeps breaking off and smashing tiles... that was the end of Columbia. Still some builds up.
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/44545
Is a technical article "A millimeter wave technique for measuring ice thickness on the Space Shuttle's external tank" from 1991 where they basically built a radio telescope to measure the temperature of the ice/insulation etc. They don't directly discuss ice thickness, but all their calibration curves ran from 0 to 15 mm thickness. So unless they totally screwed up, they don't expect more than 15 mm of ice.
Most bats are somewhat thicker than 15 mm (err, are they? thats about half an inch). That is probably enough to freeze it onto the tank though.
Since the ice likes to shake loose and crash into the shuttle as it falls, likely the bat didn't make it to space. I don't think the ice would sublimate fast enough in space that if it made it, it would "stage separate" from the tank. So, if it made it up there, it rode the tank back down.
Personally, I'd worry alot more about bats nesting in the engine turbopumps than "chilling out" on the cryogenic fuel tank.
This is because we basically eat natural gas, NG being the main feedstock for ammonia, which of course becomes fertilizer.
Its far worse than that because of diesel used for transportation and tractors and insecticides and, well, everything else.
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/02/0079915
"Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten."
The theoildrum.com scientists seem to think ten is much more correct, a blathering mainstream media claims its 1:1, so it's probably somewhere in between, probably much closer to the scientists on theoildrum than to some magazine journalist. So, you can turn (the equivalent of) ten barrels of crude into (the equivalent of) one barrel of human food.
As a side issue, that is why it is not efficient to bicycle... if it takes ten gallons of gas to make the food equivalent of one gallon equivalent of bicycling. Just think about it. My car gets about 30 MPG and after a half hour 30 mile drive is thirsty for a gallon of gas. After a multi-hour 30 mile bike ride I am very hungry and can easily eat two pounds of food (and still lose weight, if it's salad and not eight quarter pounders with cheese and bacon). Anyway, that two pounds of food obviously takes twenty pounds of gasoline to grow and process and ship and cook. Now at 6 pounds of aviation gas per gallon (note I am not a pilot, but that is my fuzzy memory from wanting to be a pilot decades ago) that would make a bit over 3 gallons of gas to grow the food to bicycle 30 miles. Lets be very pessimistic and round my car down and bicycling up. I'm sure I can do better than 20 MPG for a car and I'm sure I'd do worse than 15 MPG for a bicycle. It's even worse if you have four people in the car vs four bike riders. Now bicycling is fun and good exercise, the fact that I'm wasting fossil fuel by bike riding instead of driving does not stop me from having a little fun, but I don't operate under some delusion that bicycling saves the planet compared to car driving.
Now if you're not going to bother making the food safe for humans to eat (like ethanol, or food that is imported from China) you can get that ratio down to maybe two barrels of crude makes one barrel of inedible fuel. Use far more toxic insecticides, process the inedible parts of the plant, a little rot at harvest time is OK as long as the overall total yield increases, bugs will ferment into fuel just as well as food ferments into fuel, etc. Some marketing people claim that under ideal perfect never attained conditions in the perfect climate ignoring some minor details like maintenance or personnel costs it is possible to turn one barrel of crude into slightly more than one barrel of ethanol, but no one believes that unless they are getting a marketing salary, or live in Brazil where they have a uniquely perfect climate.
I have also pondered the idea of building a low tech computer just to see how much could be done on something that would bring the term 'low power' back down to Model 100 levels and perhaps even finally surpass 1980's tech.
Check out TI's MSP430 series... About a quarter milliamp per MIP... the fastest one they sell should then draw about 6 mA, probably less than the power indicator will draw.
http://focus.ti.com/mcu/docs/mcuprodoverview.tsp?sectionId=95&tabId=140&familyId=342
There are PICs and others that are about as good.
Cross these UV-resistant bacteria with these http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans> radioactive-resistant bacteria
One of the disadvantages of the world moving to a more urban lifestyle is a lack of knowledge about animal breeding. Several generations have been raised to believe buffalo wings are descended from buffalo and chicken, leading to even stranger ideas.
Consider that horses and donkeys are almost infinitely closer related than those two bacteria, yet their offspring, although useful, is not as cool as a unicorn nor can it reproduce.
If we could get rid of them, would they be the first species humanity exterminated AND made the world a better place by doing so?
Clearly, you did not google or wikipedia "smallpox virus" before your post.
I don't normally advocate genocide (after the first cup of coffee), but when it comes to mosquitos I find it hard to come up with compelling arguments against.
How bout the genocide of the cute and cuddly smallpox virus? Poor defenseless mother earth once again at the mercy of evil scientists, especially those horrible exploiting capitalists.
I'm sure we can keep some mosquitoes in a liquid nitrogen freezer just in case... until they escape, anyway...
I'm a little concerned that we'll reach a point where we tell a third world country, where significant numbers of people are dying of malaria, "We have this technology that will make a profound difference in the mosquito vector, but we're not going to allow you to use it because we're concerned about potential, but as-yet unspecified damage to your environment. Hope the fever gets better"
For a good time, search and replace cute and cuddly mosquitoes with civilian nuclear power.
integrated GPS for geocoding would be darn handy
How about a built in digital compass that records the direction as part or the filename to help panoramic stitching software, or just because it sounds cool?
How about filenames other than peculiar serial numbers like dsc-12345.jpg? How about an option to use the timestamp as a filename? How about a datestamp and serial number?
How about a shutter response faster than 500 ms? My dads spotmatic and my old K1000 back in the 80s had a shutter response time somewhere around zero (or at least no longer than typical human or video game player reflexes) but my wife's couple year old nikon takes almost a second to take a picture after the button is pressed, almost useless for action shots.
How about a camera that stops shutting off constantly every 30 seconds? Some people take pictures of events that last longer than that, so its just wasting batteries turning on and off over and over. At least put in a menu to shut off the "battery saver" (battery waster, more likely)
How about a tripod mount that isn't made of plastic? Yeah I know the whole cam is plastic, not like the old days, but still, at least some metal threads that won't strip. And make the tripod mount screw deeper than like 3 thread pitch.
What I don't want is cutesy bloatware software for legacy windows boxes... just gimme a SD or CF that plugs into any desktop or wii or laptop anywhere in the world with no weird software install needed.
Also I don't want an irreplaceable and/or unremovable and/or rechargeable battery. I can buy AA batteries anywhere in the world and carry a ridiculous number of spares in my backpack. A rechargeable bettery thats usually discharged or runs out at a bad time or can never be replaced or can't be charged in less than 15 minutes is useless for me. And that applies 10x for mp3 players too. Its not like the "expense" of batteries will bankrupt me compared to the staggering expense of good equipment. And make the camera compatible with 1.2 volt rechargeables not just 1.5 volt alkalines.
I also don't want effort put into stupid sounds that make it sound like an old polaroid when you press the button. I want it silent for wedding/baptism photos or photos of pets/animals/hunting. Or at least a mostly inoffensive beep. Or at worst, an easily found speaker I can tape over. Please god no "ringtones" for the camera shutter sound.
Who knows what kinds of messages are sitting in that never-opened inbox; maybe even a subpoena, but I'd never know.
I can top that, I subscribed to a local ISP before getting broadband, after the broadband install I was using fetchmail to fetch email from the old ISP while I was getting everything set up on the new ISP. Then I canceled my old ISP but forgot to remove my old email account from my fetchmail config, and apparently they never removed my old account, which was receiving a continuous stream of spam months later. I only noticed when months later my old provider took down their pop server for scheduled maintenance and I got fetchmail errors all night.
So, should I continue to illegally access my no longer paid for account that has not been removed by my former provider in order to please the court by receiving legal papers, or should I stop illegally accessing my email account thus being in contempt of court by intentionally avoiding reception of legal papers... Hmmmmmm. Luckily was never an issue for me.
Even stranger is I have heard some companies forward former employee email accounts to their former boss, much as they do with phone calls or mail etc.
What a piece of journalism.
Quirky = rare habits and/or rare hobbies and/or rare background/culture that bring a smile to co workers faces or make them interesting to talk to, at least compared to an average drone.
vs
guy in the article = a-hole that everyone hates but has the redeeming characteristic of being somewhat productive (at the cost of ruining everyone elses productivity)
Or are the other people I'm being judged against too fucking retarded to teach themselves?
They're too busy watching American Idol. Look on the bright side, it makes folks like us, stacks of money, at least in comparison to them. Besides, we know its more fun than what they do.
Women do not enter science because they don't like to focus for long periods on one objective at the expense of all others
.... while working immense overtime and hearing constantly about how the entire field is being offshored to India/China and getting paid less (on an hourly basis) than the non-math fields (well, in between downsizings of course).
I'm hoping my daughter (and son!) won't be stupid enough to enter a math intensive field, or if she does, she finds a way to escape to a better line of work. If she can't escape, I will certainly try my best to financially support her family, and I can help raise the grandkids for her while she's at her 80 to 120 hour work weeks, but it would be nice if she's smart enough to avoid putting dear old dad thru that by not getting in that situation.
I don't get how it reduces the quality of care.
There is a tradition of enforced medical malpractice, at least in the US, of requiring residents to work 36 plus hour shifts. Kills thousands to millions of patients due to malpractice directly resulting from sleep deprivation. Anything that interferes with the sleep deprivation and its related malpractice is a "reduction in the quality of care". It's 1984 new-speak not the truth, which is why you don't get it. Most licensed day cares are not legally allowed to hold kids for 36+ hour shifts so something has to give, and oddly enough some moms prioritize their kids above their job.
Truth be told people have kids for companionship/economic reasons and (the hope) of old age security I think, that has always been the 'traditional' view imho.
I'm guessing you don't have kids? Truth is, despite all the complaining about diapers and sleepless nights and moody teenagers, its overall on average fun, both the initial procreation for a couple minutes (obviously) and the next couple decades of playing and reminiscing about your own youth, etc. Most adults are really just big kids inside and find the kids are an excellent excuse for their own goals of running around in the park and building legos and building tree houses and digging in sandboxes and riding bikes and playing aports and computer and video games. Yeah the wii is for the kids. Sure I'm only pretending to enjoy an afternoon at the waterpark or chuck e cheese, it's all about the kids. Whatever.
Add to it a society where its widely believed that only a creepy pedo molester kidnapper gang member homeless terrorist adult could possibly want to go to a playground UNLESS THEY HAVE KIDS WITH THEM, that turns the kids into a fashion accessory for the parents to have fun.
I was thinking February 7th.
Now a real tough one would be the fine structure constant 1/137
You forgot the other often repeated/never researched traditional slashdot claims seen in every mysql comment section, such as mysql doesn't do transactions and doesn't do replication, both of which are necessary for each and every database install ever done past present or future... (Of course it has those features for about half a decade, maybe more, certainly since around the 4.0 range, but that never slows down the folks that repeat those claims)
Then there are the re-occurring claims that mysql is useless because it doesn't have some bizarre feature that you might personally think is useful, therefore any database without it is useless for everyone doing anything, like perhaps direct file importation of COBOL ISAM punch cards, or an internal database representation for complex four dimensional vectors. You know, the stuff everyone uses.
Then there are the posts explaining how a failing hard drive on an old gateway 2000 vaporized the filesystem and/or bad ram caused endless kernel lockups, and the mysql software was running on that bad hardware, and correlation always implies causation, so mysql must be bad too.
Finally I expect several posts about how they found an obscure bug in the beta 3.23 version back around eight years therefore they'll never use it again because that is the only software that has ever had a bug.
They call the tech support number on the box.
Not really any comparable options when a package manager spits an error back at you.
Some script reader in India is unlikely to be of any help.
On the other hand:
http://www.us.debian.org/consultants/
Lists a mere 759 consultants worldwide whom would love to trade their real expertise for your money.
I've had success selling 40GB drives on my local Craigslist for $10 a pop. I sold eight drives and had to turn people away, so there's definitely demand.
More people than you would expect understand the fun and profit that comes from digging thru other peoples old drives. Strange warez, stranger pr0n, saved music and videos, financial details, etc. All the fun of a stolen laptop data breach except its totally legal and only cost $10.
Some of the devices really aren't that old, like the Motorola Q cellphone, which some US carriers just started carrying late 2007 (original Q, not Q9).
How bout an off the shelf brand new Leapster2 kids toy, that advises in the instructions that it wont work with SD cards larger than 256 megs? Actually according to the amazon reviews, and my experience, it doesn't work at all. The smallest card I could even find at best buy was one gig.
that size could be a good emergency backup to keep in the camera bag if you fill up your big cards
For years journalists in third world countries (Africa, USA, etc) have known that jack booted thugs don't necessarily check the memory card that they confiscate. So, if they want to confiscate your picture of a choo choo, or of a copyrighted statue in a park, or a video you made of a police beating, you can cheerfully hand over a special card containing innocent pictures or maybe a pic of the declaration of independence or maybe a pic of mr goatsea.
Also it can be pleasant to take pictures etc and then share the card. Instead of one huge expensive card, have a couple small ones and if auntie wants to copy the kids birthday, just "loan" her the card...
Finally in my experience camera cards fail suddenly and totally. Its nice to have a spare, even if its a tiny one.