Take your Video-out iPod to Blockbuster, drop it in a kiosk dock then download from the local xServe your choice of 50,000 movies. [...] For Apple the point here is to sell iPods to people who might not otherwise every buy one (my Mom, for example), to bring digital downloads to people who don't have broadband or even a computer, and to make it all incredibly easy.
But borrowing a DVD is already incredibly easy. About the only way this is easier is that you don't have to return the DVD and I don't think that's enough. Apple would be asking its customers to spend hundreds of dollars (?) on a piece of hardware that would be doing more or less the same job as the DVD player they already own.
It's probably a reasonable why-not idea, for those who already have an iPod. But I can't see it attracting a lot of new customers.
That's not surprising: plenty of people make careers out of fields that size. What's amazing is that he did that with the theory of evolution worked out and sitting in his top drawer.
In fact, he seems to have wanted to do some good, if not earth-shattering, biology that nobody could argue with before he published evolution. He actually did show what barnacles were (until then, IIRC, nobody had even realised they were animals) which is important work though obviously not in the theory of evolution class. He thought if he had no reputation in biology then evolution would get dismissed out of hand.
Which is not to say he wasn't already well-known. He was well-known as a geologist, though, having shown where coral reefs came from. Which would be an achievement justifying respect even if it was all he ever did, though again overshadowed. He was afraid biologists would look at his theory as a geologist muscling in on their territory.
He was neither an exceptional genius
I disagree. One great achievement might be luck. One great achievement, one good, and one very good, all by the same person, sounds more like genius.
nor was he arrogant, careless about jumping to conclusions, or an atheist
I've never encountered these attributes as part of the Darwin myth.
I never knew, until recently, that the Darwin family of scientists continued after Charles. Erasumus (Charles' grandfather) is well-known, but he also had several sons. George Darwin did important work on understanding the moon, for instance.
But which gives more redundancy: forty satellites in one system, or forty satellites in two systems? The only sort of extra robustness the second gives us, as far as I can see, is against political decisions.
Hopefully receivers will have the ability to integrate Galileo and GPS signals without troubling us about the details unless the answers they give are widely divergent. I use GPS in forests and built-up areas and I'm often short of satellites.
Well, yeah, but so is a glass of water. It's extremely large compared to the wavelength of visible light
Right, which is why you can see it, and why you can use it as a mirror (a bit).
yet the light passes right through (after a bit of refraction).
Because once you get inside the water there's no structure at the scale of the wavelength or longer. A glass of water is more uniform, at the relevant scale, than is a fog.
The light sees the boundary between the water and the air. But it can't see the boundary between two molecules of water: they're too close together. So water has a reflective edge but a transparent middle.
So the summary is:
Air: all air, hence no structure, transparent.
Water: all water, hence no structure, transparent.
Humid air: mix of water and air, very evenly distributed, hence no structure, transparent.
Fog: mix of water and air, unevenly distributed, hence structure, opaque.
You're actually on the right track, you just have things reversed. Think: why do microscopic water droplets (fog, clouds) reflect light while an entire glass, very dense and really one huge droplet, doesn't?
If you think my explanation's faulty, by all means give the right one. But I'm not sure this is the right forum for Socratic pedagogy. It's probably better just to say what you think.
Another way of looking at this is that opacity is a consequence of the non-uniformity of water density. Water vapour is evenly spread through the air, or at least its unevenness only happens at distance scales much shorter than the wavelength of light. So there's no discontinuities to break up the light's wavefront. Fog is in droplets, which are large compared with light, so the light can "see" its non-uniformity and get reflected.
100,000 pages of paper (a pallet) weighs roughly a ton
Almost exactly half a (metric) ton. A4 paper has an area of one-sixteenth of a square metre. (AN paper, where N is an integer, has an area of two raised to the power of minus N square metres.) At 80 grams per square metre, that's 5 grams per sheet.
It is so funny to me to listen to the Democratic Party's newly found fondness of federalism, where for 40 years prior they treated support of states' rights and federalism as mere code words for supporting racism and segregation, and out of touch with core American values. Now that they're outnumbered at the federal level, they have all kinds of respect for checks and balances and fiscal responsibility.
Pretty much the same thing is happening in Australia. Traditionally the "liberal" (i.e. conservative) party has been federalist, and the labor (sort of post-socialist; US spelling sic) has been centralist.
But today the liberals control both the federal houses of parliament (and hence also the executive), while the labor party has a clean sweep at the state level. Quite extraordinary political situation, and the effect on politicians' psychology, on both sides of politics, has been equally remarkable.
When asked about the possible ecological effects on marine life the military had no comment.
They got asked this because of the concern with low frequency sonar. But the comparison is probably not all that relevant. Low frequency goes for ever, hence the humpback whale's use of it for communication. So a low frequency sonar can hurt a whale that's quite some way away.
The anti-torpedo weapon, on the other hand, uses shock waves. Shock waves are mostly made of high frequency components which die out quickly. So probably only those whales in the immediate vicinity are in trouble. Just do all the testing in a "desert" part of the ocean, where there's no life.
That first paragraph was a quotation from the great-grand parent
Sorry. I wasn't trying to imply all those things in italics were said by the same other person, just that they were said by people other than me.
The Diprotodon, Thylacoleo and the Magalania are all very large pleistocene critters.
I don't know that the thylacoleo would normally be considered megafauna, I'd guess it
massed about the same as a human.
A great many megafaune species became extince during that period due to a rather noticable cold spell.
It was a nastier than average cold spell. But all those species had lived through many other cold spells, some of them worse than the one in which they died out. The only thing that was different this time was that humans had arrived. I've never seen any of the climatic extinction arguments really answer this point. Combined with the extinction of many New Zealand species on arrival of the maori, the extinction of many American species on arrival of the Clovis people, and extinctions on islands in Polynesia and elsewhere, the pattern seems to me irresistibly clear. A lot of species just disappear on contact with humans anywhere: some kinds of giant tortoises and turtles, for instance.
Still, expert people disagree. I don't understand why, but they do.
large, sudden, and drastic changes a certain group of humans made to the local biosphere
You say this meaning Europeans. But the aborigines brought fire, which had every bit as large an impact. In fact, one of the largest impacts the Europeans had was to stop the aborigines setting fires, causing a lot of what had been grassland to become "scrub".
The ancestors of the aborigines arrived from circa fifty thousand years ago. An interesting question is whether they found the continent inhabited. We now know that homo erectus got to Flores, and it's not much harder to get to Australia.
But seeing as about 2/3rds of all native australian fauna have been wiped out since the arrival of the environmental disaster known as homo sapiens, it's certainly possible that there were some cats in there somewhere.
There was a sort-of-leopardlike predator called a marsupial lion (aka thylacoleo, the first "o" is kind of silent).
But there weren't real cats, in the sense of members of the cat family. A thylacoleo or thylacine is more closely related to a koala, and a real cat is more closely related to a human, than the either is to the other.
Well, actually, it's only since the arrival of Europeans. There were homo sapiens living in Australia for quite a while before this.
Some people do indeed argue the aborigines didn't play a large part in wiping out the diprotodon, megalania, thylacoleo, mainland thylacine, etc., etc.. Their arguments never made any sense to me, but YMMV.
the majority of extinctions since European settlement came about through ignorance, carelessness or accidents in introducing foreign species
Like cats! And thus the circle of conversation closes itself.
Glass lenses are ground to specific shapes. When this is done wrong (e.g. Hubble) you get a bad lens.
The fluid lens only seems to have one axis of control: you can make it more convex or more concave, but that's all you can do. It doesn't seem like there's enough control to let you shape the lens so there aren't Hubble-like problems.
Does this mean it will have low image quality?
Is that why they are only looking at mobile phone cameras, and not the higher end?
Once upon a time a lot of scientific breakthroughs were made by lone geniuses. Now a lot are made by teams. It takes time to rise to leadership of a team, so these people will tend to be older.
I could easily imagine this effect alone would explain a change of six years in the age of people credited for breakthroughs. Unfortunately we can't tell for sure unless we pay for the article to see their methodology, and I for one am too cheap.
Therefore, power is proportional to the cube of speed.
Power is what determines fuel consumption, not force. So the original poster was more or less correct.
The complicated version, as others have observed, involves a lot more detail of the implementation of the car's engine, transmission, aerodynamics, etc.. You can do worse than the simple version, but not better.
Do the countries that H1-B's come from have similarly generous guest worker programs?
India (for instance) is much poorer than the US. If you're a US worker who wants to move to India and get a job at Indian wages then I doubt anyone's going to stop you.
In economic terms, the capital and the labour are more productive together than apart. One mechanism to bring them together (not the only one, obviously) is to move the labour to where the capital is, and that's what H-1B and its ilk try to do. There's no corresponding flow of labour from the US to India because the capital imbalance is pulling the other direction.
Caveat: my spelling of "labour" probably gives away that I am (in some sense) a foreigner myself.
Seems like they only put any particular paper into a single category. A paper supports anthropogenic climate change, or opposes it, or is about something else.
But what if the paper says that climate change is due to a combination of factors: partially anthropogenic and partially natural? IIUC that's what most people believe, with argument about how much of each. But the article doesn't indicate how such papers are counted.
It seems like this should have been the first thing they thought of when they wrote the methodology. That it gets no mention is IMO suspicious.
I'm trying to believe that this idea might be workable but I haven't managed it yet. For starters, it requires us to assemble a fleet of MADMEN as a precaution, which is a far more expensive solution than anything reactive and therefore less likely to be approved.
The obvious mechanism seems to be a hail of thermonuclear-tipped missiles, each exploding alongside the target to vaporise a chunk of rock and drive it aside.
Yes, this may make the asteroid break up, but I don't see that as a big problem. Partly because with multiple missiles, two little asteroids aren't much more of a problem than one big one. Partly because Earth's atmosphere makes us immune to really small missiles.
The only major drawback I can see with this method is the risk of generating a cloud of debris that acts to destroy the followup rounds before they can detonate. Anyone know about this?
The MADMEN approach is going to be so many orders of magnitude more expensive it just doesn't seem to make sense. The problem just isn't hard enough to deserve Rube Goldberg solutions of this kind.
Spider silk is strong, but it's not the strongest fibre we have. Ballistic polyethylene (ultra-high-density and molecular weight shopping bag material) is stronger and is already being used in bullet-proof vests. IIRC either is stronger than ballistic nylon (aka kevlar).
Diamond prices are artificially inflated by a diamond equivalent of OPEC.
So neither development is probably all that revolutionary.
Slashdot Mirror
But borrowing a DVD is already incredibly easy. About the only way this is easier is that you don't have to return the DVD and I don't think that's enough. Apple would be asking its customers to spend hundreds of dollars (?) on a piece of hardware that would be doing more or less the same job as the DVD player they already own.
It's probably a reasonable why-not idea, for those who already have an iPod. But I can't see it attracting a lot of new customers.
That's not surprising: plenty of people make careers out of fields that size. What's amazing is that he did that with the theory of evolution worked out and sitting in his top drawer.
In fact, he seems to have wanted to do some good, if not earth-shattering, biology that nobody could argue with before he published evolution. He actually did show what barnacles were (until then, IIRC, nobody had even realised they were animals) which is important work though obviously not in the theory of evolution class. He thought if he had no reputation in biology then evolution would get dismissed out of hand.
Which is not to say he wasn't already well-known. He was well-known as a geologist, though, having shown where coral reefs came from. Which would be an achievement justifying respect even if it was all he ever did, though again overshadowed. He was afraid biologists would look at his theory as a geologist muscling in on their territory.
I disagree. One great achievement might be luck. One great achievement, one good, and one very good, all by the same person, sounds more like genius.
I've never encountered these attributes as part of the Darwin myth.
I never knew, until recently, that the Darwin family of scientists continued after Charles. Erasumus (Charles' grandfather) is well-known, but he also had several sons. George Darwin did important work on understanding the moon, for instance.
By that definition the F-16 isn't operational.
But which gives more redundancy: forty satellites in one system, or forty satellites in two systems? The only sort of extra robustness the second gives us, as far as I can see, is against political decisions.
Hopefully receivers will have the ability to integrate Galileo and GPS signals without troubling us about the details unless the answers they give are widely divergent. I use GPS in forests and built-up areas and I'm often short of satellites.
Right, which is why you can see it, and why you can use it as a mirror (a bit).
Because once you get inside the water there's no structure at the scale of the wavelength or longer. A glass of water is more uniform, at the relevant scale, than is a fog.
The light sees the boundary between the water and the air. But it can't see the boundary between two molecules of water: they're too close together. So water has a reflective edge but a transparent middle.
So the summary is:
If you think my explanation's faulty, by all means give the right one. But I'm not sure this is the right forum for Socratic pedagogy. It's probably better just to say what you think.
Another way of looking at this is that opacity is a consequence of the non-uniformity of water density. Water vapour is evenly spread through the air, or at least its unevenness only happens at distance scales much shorter than the wavelength of light. So there's no discontinuities to break up the light's wavefront. Fog is in droplets, which are large compared with light, so the light can "see" its non-uniformity and get reflected.
Almost exactly half a (metric) ton. A4 paper has an area of one-sixteenth of a square metre. (AN paper, where N is an integer, has an area of two raised to the power of minus N square metres.) At 80 grams per square metre, that's 5 grams per sheet.
Hard drive capacity is doubling every, what, thirteen months? But the improvement in access speed is much slower.
How do the rates of improvement for solid state memory compare with this? Is solid state "catching up" to hard drives? Or just tagging along behind?
If they're watching us, we need to watch them back. So isn't that an argument in favour of buying telescopes?
It is so funny to me to listen to the Democratic Party's newly found fondness of federalism, where for 40 years prior they treated support of states' rights and federalism as mere code words for supporting racism and segregation, and out of touch with core American values. Now that they're outnumbered at the federal level, they have all kinds of respect for checks and balances and fiscal responsibility.
Pretty much the same thing is happening in Australia. Traditionally the "liberal" (i.e. conservative) party has been federalist, and the labor (sort of post-socialist; US spelling sic) has been centralist.
But today the liberals control both the federal houses of parliament (and hence also the executive), while the labor party has a clean sweep at the state level. Quite extraordinary political situation, and the effect on politicians' psychology, on both sides of politics, has been equally remarkable.
I for one welcome the resistance of our human underlings.
The DECT wireless radio
Is there such a thing as non-wireless radio?
When asked about the possible ecological effects on marine life the military had no comment.
They got asked this because of the concern with low frequency sonar. But the comparison is probably not all that relevant. Low frequency goes for ever, hence the humpback whale's use of it for communication. So a low frequency sonar can hurt a whale that's quite some way away.
The anti-torpedo weapon, on the other hand, uses shock waves. Shock waves are mostly made of high frequency components which die out quickly. So probably only those whales in the immediate vicinity are in trouble. Just do all the testing in a "desert" part of the ocean, where there's no life.
That first paragraph was a quotation from the great-grand parent
Sorry. I wasn't trying to imply all those things in italics were said by the same other person, just that they were said by people other than me.
The Diprotodon, Thylacoleo and the Magalania are all very large pleistocene critters.
I don't know that the thylacoleo would normally be considered megafauna, I'd guess it massed about the same as a human.
A great many megafaune species became extince during that period due to a rather noticable cold spell.
It was a nastier than average cold spell. But all those species had lived through many other cold spells, some of them worse than the one in which they died out. The only thing that was different this time was that humans had arrived. I've never seen any of the climatic extinction arguments really answer this point. Combined with the extinction of many New Zealand species on arrival of the maori, the extinction of many American species on arrival of the Clovis people, and extinctions on islands in Polynesia and elsewhere, the pattern seems to me irresistibly clear. A lot of species just disappear on contact with humans anywhere: some kinds of giant tortoises and turtles, for instance.
Still, expert people disagree. I don't understand why, but they do.
large, sudden, and drastic changes a certain group of humans made to the local biosphere
You say this meaning Europeans. But the aborigines brought fire, which had every bit as large an impact. In fact, one of the largest impacts the Europeans had was to stop the aborigines setting fires, causing a lot of what had been grassland to become "scrub".
The ancestors of the aborigines arrived from circa fifty thousand years ago. An interesting question is whether they found the continent inhabited. We now know that homo erectus got to Flores, and it's not much harder to get to Australia.
But seeing as about 2/3rds of all native australian fauna have been wiped out since the arrival of the environmental disaster known as homo sapiens, it's certainly possible that there were some cats in there somewhere.
There was a sort-of-leopardlike predator called a marsupial lion (aka thylacoleo, the first "o" is kind of silent).
But there weren't real cats, in the sense of members of the cat family. A thylacoleo or thylacine is more closely related to a koala, and a real cat is more closely related to a human, than the either is to the other.
Well, actually, it's only since the arrival of Europeans. There were homo sapiens living in Australia for quite a while before this.
Some people do indeed argue the aborigines didn't play a large part in wiping out the diprotodon, megalania, thylacoleo, mainland thylacine, etc., etc.. Their arguments never made any sense to me, but YMMV.
the majority of extinctions since European settlement came about through ignorance, carelessness or accidents in introducing foreign species
Like cats! And thus the circle of conversation closes itself.
Glass lenses are ground to specific shapes. When this is done wrong (e.g. Hubble) you get a bad lens.
The fluid lens only seems to have one axis of control: you can make it more convex or more concave, but that's all you can do. It doesn't seem like there's enough control to let you shape the lens so there aren't Hubble-like problems.
Does this mean it will have low image quality? Is that why they are only looking at mobile phone cameras, and not the higher end?
The prize should be absinthe, in a plastic bottle labeled "lime cordial".
Once upon a time a lot of scientific breakthroughs were made by lone geniuses. Now a lot are made by teams. It takes time to rise to leadership of a team, so these people will tend to be older.
I could easily imagine this effect alone would explain a change of six years in the age of people credited for breakthroughs. Unfortunately we can't tell for sure unless we pay for the article to see their methodology, and I for one am too cheap.
The simple version is:
Power is what determines fuel consumption, not force. So the original poster was more or less correct.
The complicated version, as others have observed, involves a lot more detail of the implementation of the car's engine, transmission, aerodynamics, etc.. You can do worse than the simple version, but not better.
Whyaduck writes:
Do the countries that H1-B's come from have similarly generous guest worker programs?
India (for instance) is much poorer than the US. If you're a US worker who wants to move to India and get a job at Indian wages then I doubt anyone's going to stop you.
In economic terms, the capital and the labour are more productive together than apart. One mechanism to bring them together (not the only one, obviously) is to move the labour to where the capital is, and that's what H-1B and its ilk try to do. There's no corresponding flow of labour from the US to India because the capital imbalance is pulling the other direction.
Caveat: my spelling of "labour" probably gives away that I am (in some sense) a foreigner myself.
Seems like they only put any particular paper into a single category. A paper supports anthropogenic climate change, or opposes it, or is about something else. But what if the paper says that climate change is due to a combination of factors: partially anthropogenic and partially natural? IIUC that's what most people believe, with argument about how much of each. But the article doesn't indicate how such papers are counted. It seems like this should have been the first thing they thought of when they wrote the methodology. That it gets no mention is IMO suspicious.
I'm trying to believe that this idea might be workable but I haven't managed it yet. For starters, it requires us to assemble a fleet of MADMEN as a precaution, which is a far more expensive solution than anything reactive and therefore less likely to be approved. The obvious mechanism seems to be a hail of thermonuclear-tipped missiles, each exploding alongside the target to vaporise a chunk of rock and drive it aside. Yes, this may make the asteroid break up, but I don't see that as a big problem. Partly because with multiple missiles, two little asteroids aren't much more of a problem than one big one. Partly because Earth's atmosphere makes us immune to really small missiles. The only major drawback I can see with this method is the risk of generating a cloud of debris that acts to destroy the followup rounds before they can detonate. Anyone know about this? The MADMEN approach is going to be so many orders of magnitude more expensive it just doesn't seem to make sense. The problem just isn't hard enough to deserve Rube Goldberg solutions of this kind.
Spider silk is strong, but it's not the strongest fibre we have. Ballistic polyethylene (ultra-high-density and molecular weight shopping bag material) is stronger and is already being used in bullet-proof vests. IIRC either is stronger than ballistic nylon (aka kevlar). Diamond prices are artificially inflated by a diamond equivalent of OPEC. So neither development is probably all that revolutionary.