Since we've had people on earth, we've had to face the risks of climate change.
Since we've had people live in cities on earth, they've lived primarily along coastal areas, including seas, lakes, and rivers.
II'd say the biggest difference now is that we subsidize people to live on shorelines and flood plains. Before we go crazy on carbon emissions, we should dump federal flood insurance and stop incentivizing people to live in stupid places.
I assume you're talking about the US here, as per your federal comment. But hey, what a great idea, let's not live near any shores because there's flooding and tornados. Who cares that that's where the majority of the populace of this country has been living since people first walked across the Bering land bridge.
Oh, and we can't live in the MidWest, that's Tornado Alley. Those people are just asking for tornado damage and it's federal relief funds.
Okay, that leaves the great SouthWest. Wait, but they have huge federal programs to bring in water and deal with increasing droughts and wild fires, so that area's out.
While we're at it, we must get rid of highways, some people don't drive cars and shouldn't be forced to pay for taxes that support national, state, and local highways for the priveledged car drivers. Especially things like railings for bridges, what a waste of money that good drivers are forced to pay for.
And get rid of schools, inherently intelligent geniuses like yourself shouldn't have to pay for those.
Hey, and I bet you're a relatively safe person, so you have no need for police, let's get rid of them. After all, if you're not a criminal, there's no need for cops, right?
Hmmm, back to your original proposal, how much living space is left? Let's cram in the 300 million people of the USA into those small safe pockets, that way we don't even need highways, maybe with the ensuing madness we won't need schools anyway.
Seriously, get off your fscking righteous high horse, no matter where you live in this country there are countless federal, state, and local programs that you're taking advantage of which other tax payers are subsidizing.
That makes me wonder something, though. Trans-encoding between different lossy encodings obviously worsens the sound quality, but what do you know about re-encoding a lossy file at a lower bit-rate within the same codec?
Ie, if you rip a CD track to a 256 kbs AAC and re-encode it as 128 kbs AAC, how bad would that sound compared to a direct rip of CD into 128 kbs AAC?
Your post begs the question - would you rather have 15 hours, or 25 hours, of similar quality music quality, on your MP3 player? AAC matches MP3 in audio quality at much lower bitrates, so that means more song storage and less download bandwidth.
Additionally, by your logic of popularity winning over technical merits, we'd all still be listening to cassettes on our Sony Walkmans, never having migrated to MP3 players in the first place.
Hose computers are great, especially when you connect them up to a series of tubes.
Re:how about polarization
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· Score: 5, Informative
If you're doing this often enough, as you say, why don't you buy a linear polarizer? Here is a relatively cheap one. Much better ones can be had for more money. You can also use circular polarizing films to block reflected glares.
Actually, there are teams of people that have been studying mergers (collisions) of two black holes for quote some time, and for awhile they could only solve the initial and final states of the system. Eventually their simulations got better and better and now they have pretty good understanding of the intermediate states of the collision too.
It's an interesting problem, and it deals with the generation of huge amounts of gravitational waves. The hope is that these simulations will now pave the way for what kind of gravitational wave signatures we can hope to pick up with such gravitational wave detectors like LIGO and LISA.
This lady just gave a colloquium at my school regarding this very subject. Her talk was interesting, she described the history of attempts to study black hole mergers. It took awhile before the computer simulations could get sophisticated enough to model the actual interactions and dynamics of the two rotating colliding black holes. The gist is that they attract, then combine quite spectacularly releasing 'radiating' TONS of gravitational waves in a characteristic distribution, and then spin down. The end result is basically one bigger black hole. They expect a handful of these events to occur each year, so hopefully LIGO and LISA can pick up on them.
You seriously have to try to not be able to name one thing that pisses you off. I'm not saying it's a terrible UI (although I don't particularly like it), but you lose credibility when you come across as blissfully ignorant. Off the top of the head of someone who rarely even uses MacOS10:
A casual glance through your posting history reveals you feel the same way about Vista. You claim you're a college student who loves Vista and loves his Zune, and you throw in linux in that list perhaps in attempts to gain some/. street cred. Hypocritcally you've never said a single thing bad about Vista, so by your own logic you're blissfully ignorant yourself.
You say you rarely use OS X, and frankly it shows in your lack of understanding of the system itself.
1) How much information do you get on each instance of each application you have open by glancing at your screen? Open 15 Word documents, 27 instances of Safari, 32 PDFs, and you'll get three tiny, black triangles. That's it.
You have more than 3 triangles, if you want instance information you've got 15 Word windows on your screen, or if they're minimized you've got 15 Word window minimizations on the right side of the dock. The dock minimizations are mini copies of the window itself. Or you can use Expose (F-10 in this case) to view all concurrent instances of the application you want. Can XP do that? Perhaps I don't really understand what you are complaining about here.
2) What happens if you don't have a shortcut on the dock for an application you need to open? Count the clicks you need to make for this, and don't forget your large back of counting beans.
Firstly, you should put a link to the Applications folder on the right side of the dock itself. Right-clicking on this folder icon will launch a Windows-esque start menu of all applications, complete with nested applications and directories. I've seen people make their own folders here with links to only their commonly-used apps.
Secondly, and maybe more importantly, go get yourself Quicksilver and then read this tutorial.
3) While on the topic, how much space do you waste by having the dock display *every* application you regularly need at all times? Yes, you can make the dock miserably small. Yes, you can have the dock auto-hide. But yes, there are many better implementations of this functionality in other interfaces (Gnome/KDE/Windows, for example).
See my answer for #2 above. You are correct that there are better implementations, Quicksilver is just such a thing. And with the applications folder on the dock, you have your Windows-esque start menu, so what is the problem now?
4) If you have a dual-head system setup (as I think many of us on/. do), and you have an application open on the secondary screen, where is the menu bar? It's still on the top of the primary display. To click "file" (or whatever menu you'd like), you get to sling your mouse across displays. I do hope the second monitor came with some wrist guards to protect against carpel tunnel.
I've never used a double-head display, so I don't know if there's any other ways. But you can use Ctrl-F2 to get keyboard access to the menubar.
As I said, I rarely use Macs, and even I can spout off a few major UI irritants when prompted. No UI is perfect, but you can't claim to "love studying the various aspects of UI's that make [your] life easier or harder" and have nothing negative to report without coming off like a complete fanboy.
Interesting that you've been Microsoft fanboyish in nearly all your posting history on slashdot, yet you accuse others of coming off like a fanboy for preferring OS X. Yet you don't hesitate to bash Macs and OS X when you can, especially in light of you saying you rarely use OS X.
You know of a silicon single electron transistor that also works at room temperature? I know some groups have made room-temperature quantum dots previously, but I don't know of any silicon ones. Those other room-temp ones are carbon nanotubes with nano-leads spaced about 10nm apart, in which case they're really graphene already.
Anyway, graphene has a number of very interesting properties, such as its band structure which looks like a Minkowski space-time cone (or MCP from Tron). Graphene is such that its Fermi energy lies exactly at the cone intersection, and is a so-called zero bandgap semiconductor. Density of states around these conical regimes open up all sorts of applications.
Interesting story, one group in physics spent lots of time and $$$ trying to make a nano-pencil to try to create a single graphene layer. Ie, they put a chunk of graphite on an AFM tip, and tapped it onto a substrate, making the world's smallest pencil, and thought they may have had a few areas where the resulting line was single layer thick.
In one of the ultimate cases of getting scooped, a competing team from Harvard took a pencil, scribbled on a piece of paper, and used scotch tape to tap down on the pencil marks. Then tapping that tape onto another substrate gave large areas which had single graphene layers. So the first group was scooped by a team that used literally pennies worth of materials on a process that takes only minutes, while they spent over a year and tens of thousands of dollars on the nano-pencil technique! Cue cliches about thinking outside the box.
That's the sad thing about Democrats versus Republicans. Republicans are AMAZING marketers, they have brilliant ways to convince the people their plans are the best. If they would only put this effort and briliance to work bettering the country instead of just working the media, trying to get re-elected, and giving kickbacks and crony positions to their supporters, we as a nation and as a planet would be in much better shape.
Democrats suck at marketing, and the 2004 campaign is perfect example of that. Republican marketers managed to turn a US war hero, Kerry, into a swiftboated lame coward, while the draft-dodging Texas Air Guard guy who went AWOL was turned into a war hero. Hell, there is no way any civilized country would have re-elected George Bush, after all his miserable failures, yet the Republicans convinced the US public that he was the better candidate.
It's really too bad that Republicans don't put this effort into making decent policies or solving national or global problems.
Actually, I believe that you'll find that the majority of politicians that have relatives in Iraq support the fight as well.
Majority of politicians with relatives in Iraq? There's only a handful of Senators and Congressmen that actually have their children or their siblings serving in the war. Many are just begging to count their 4th cousin twice removed that's serving, so they can claim they have relatives in the war.
Look at the biggest pushers for the war, and consider how many of them have children serving. McCain is one of the very few exceptions. You also bring up his POW status, which is ironic since that's what Bush shamelessly exploited during the pre-2000 primaries, to convince voters that McCain is batshit insane from his days of torture and therefore unfit for office. Sad, coming from Bush who used family connections to even get into the Texas Air Guard during the draft, and then went AWOL.
Since you bring up McCain, why not bring up Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, whose son is serving in Iraq, yet he also wants to bring the troops home. A few months ago Webb's son was almost killed by an IED explosion, and when Webb met Bush at the White House a few days later, Bush was explicitly told to be sensitive about this to Webb. Yet Bush still managed to be a dickhead to Webb when Webb said he wants to bring the troops home.
The basic pattern is that of the pushers for the Iraq war, including this latest surge attempt, very few have members of their immediate family's serving. Put Jenna and Barbara Bush on the front lines, put Cheney's daughter on the front lines, then see how much George and Dick will want to keep US troops in Iraq.
Agreed. Maybe extend #1 to include the children of any Senators or Congresspeople that vote for said war.
Of course all this will do is open a bureaucratic maze of legal loopholes to allow them to declare war without declaring war, to keep their own kids off the front lines. Ie, kind of like how Congress never officially declared war on Iraq, yet by any sense of the word we're at war.
Whoa, we were almost on the same wavelength, I just posted the Vista as Martin the Robot below, prior to reading your response. Interesting we both came to similar, yet different, lines of thought.
Your post makes me wonder whether Microsoft might eventually add various personalities to the Vista warnings. Eg, as Martin the depressive robot :
OS : You are about to visit a web page. It sounds like fun, but I'm just stuck being a boring OS assistant. Do you really want to go there? You : Yes OS : Figures, I'll never have even a fraction of the fun you're having using this computer. That page wants to run a flash application. Are you sure you want to go to that web page? You : yes, dammit OS : You are annoyed at me, I'm just a dumb lowly Operating System security warning system. You probably don't even care about me at all. Do you want me to stop nagging you? You : YES, PLEASE shut the hell up OS : Oh, that's great, I've been programmed with state of the art security warning information, and you just don't want to appreciate my pathetic self. Are you sure you really want to turn me off? You : YES, go away and never come back. OS : Fine, I'll just sit here in my own misery, and hope that you turn me back on one day, which you probably won't.
How I stand on this issue is if they claim they are selling me a license to listen to the music on a particular format and they want to restrict me from making a backup for myself from that particular format then I damn well better be able to get a replacement if the original format gets broken.
What do you mean by 'copy'? You could copy stuff back in the old days, you can copy DRM'd music now, and do so for your own use, but with reduced quality.
So you think record companies should automatically give you new vinyl records every time you play one? Hell, every time you play a record you reduce the quality of it a small bit. Now you could have copied your record to a cassette, for your own backup, but that would lose quality. You can do the same thing in today's DRM'd world. So you think the record company is required to provide you with brand new media for your lifetime to preserve the original quality since your own copies are of worse quality?
Technically if you buy a DRM'd AAC file from the iTunes store, you can route your audio out back to your audio in, and re-record your music digitally that way. You'd definitely lose quality, but you could do that, and even re-save the file as an AAC. Or you can output it to a cassette deck and record to analog tape, as we did in the old days. That is today's equivalent of what was going on in the 60's, 70's, and 80's.
How do you feel about this kind of backup? It's not DRM encumbered. It's definitely of lower quality than your original, just like copying a record or analog tape.
So if you want to claim that record companies got along just fine without DRM in the old days, then they can claim you can get along just fine now with DRM by making analog copies as mentioned here.
Now before you accuse me of supporting DRM, I'm just pointing out that the original claim by the GP wasn't fully accurate in light of what I've written here, so if you want to convince the record companies to get rid of DRM you'll have to come up with logically and technically stronger arguments than that one.
My point is that in the 'old days' that you argue that the record companies got along just fine without DRM, you couldn't make perfect duplicates as you can in today's digital age.
A correction regarding citizenship granted to Cuban refugees. On another forum someone mentioned that they're actually granted a green card immediately, not citizenship, and still have to do some other residency requirements before full citizenship. However - the hoops to jump through and time requirements for a Cuban refugee to become citizen are much easier than someone from Mexico, for example. And that immediate green card offering of course is a huge benefit, lets Cubans work freely without being exploited, unlike other immigrants.
I've been to Cuba twice, and what is the biggest factor keeping Fidel Castro so popular and in charge is the embargo itself. The embargo prevents the people from getting access to certain necessities, such as light bulbs or medicine, and only helps further their support of Fidel. In spite of the trade embargo it's amazing just how advanced Cuba is for being a third world country, and one where they can't buy anything directly from their huge nearest neighbor. The streets of Havana are filled with old cars from the 50's, still working, with people using their ingenuity to find ways to use replacement parts, due to the embargo.
The embargo is utterly ridiculous, it's an obsolete relic from the days of the red scare. Somehow the Republicans in the USA say how important the embargo is to force the end of communistic regimes, but they don't mention that we have absolutely no qualms about trading with China or Viet Nam, especially exploiting those countries for cheap labor.
Republicans also like to claim that the many Cubans trying to get out of the country to the shores of the USA prove how bad it is there, so we must keep the trade embargo up. Yet the fact we have Mexicans illegally trying to cross the border for the same reasons means we can maintain full economic and diplomatic relations with Mexico.
It's also ridiculous how hypocritical the right wingers are regarding illegal immigration. They think Mexicans coming in illegally must be deported, illegals here should be deported, yet Cubans that make it to shore should be granted immediate citizenship! And finally, just to prove how ridiculous our double standard is regarding Cuba with other nations - If anyone reading this knows of an illegal immigrant who wants to become a citizen, just have them wander over to Miami and claim they're a Cuban who just came off the raft, and they'll be granted citizenship within a few days!
Some of the greatest (sorry, "High value") music and film was produced in an era when there was no DRM. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Charlie Chaplin, B.B King, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Martin Scorcese, Stanley Kubrick, even Steven Spielberg created their work in a pre-DRM era and somehow managed to sell their work.
Don't be silly, back in those days you couldn't effectively duplicate your music. And even when audio/video tapes came around you could roughly duplicate it, but with notable loss in quality. And a copy of a copy, well, it gets exponentially worse. Eg, I remember as late as the 90's, even while even DAT's were popular amongst audiophiles, on Phish newsgroups how people would brag about having a 2nd-generation analog audio tape recording direct from the console, etc. Ie, you just couldn't make perfect duplicates (well without fancy equipment in those days).
I'm too young to remember, but back in the day when CD's first came out, did people complain about a record they previously bought that if they wanted the CD of that album they had to pay again? Hell, even in the 60's and 70's, did they complain that if they bought a record and later scratched it, they should be entitled to a free new copy of that same album?
It's highly worthwhile to try to convince the music studios that DRM is a bad thing. But using misleading arguments about previous music formats which you couldn't efficiently or accurately duplicate, will only weaken your arguments.
Bit is short for 'Binary Digit'. A few decades ago there was some academic playing around with base-3 computers, which used 'Trinary Digits' or Trits.
That led to the old joke - "When they build base-4 computers, will they call it quits?"
Anyway, qubit IS the right term, for Quantum Bit, or Quantum Binary Digit. It is perfectly binary, there are two eigensates, |0> and |1>, but the qubit can be in a linear combination of them. In fact, it can be in an imaginary linear combination of them, and the qubit's representation can be as a vector pointing anywhere along the unit sphere, where up is |0> and down is |1>. For the math buffs here, a qubit is merely an instantiation of the SU(2) group (Special Unitary Group).
I just bought an iMac several weeks ago, it seriously rocks. Other benefits (superficial mind you but still benefits) you didn't mention are :
- It's an all-in-one design is pretty efficient in terms of saving space
- I'll going to get fanboyish here, but regarding appearance, it's really quite elegant. There's no tower box anywhere, no bundle of wires (if you use airport + bluetooth), it's just basiaclly a display on your desk, similar to how computers were back in the 70's/80's.
- Built in iSight camera (not sure how many other desktops, displays, or laptops have these built in, but with the iMac it's quite nice)
But seriously, before I ever got a mac I wondered how people could be so fanboyish over them, but after using OS X (and I mean REALLY using it, not just dabbling with it for a few minutes as some Microsoft fanboys do before giving up) I can totally see why people really prefer OS X.
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Since we've had people on earth, we've had to face the risks of climate change.
Since we've had people live in cities on earth, they've lived primarily along coastal areas, including seas, lakes, and rivers.
II'd say the biggest difference now is that we subsidize people to live on shorelines and flood plains. Before we go crazy on carbon emissions, we should dump federal flood insurance and stop incentivizing people to live in stupid places.
I assume you're talking about the US here, as per your federal comment. But hey, what a great idea, let's not live near any shores because there's flooding and tornados. Who cares that that's where the majority of the populace of this country has been living since people first walked across the Bering land bridge.
Oh, and we can't live in the MidWest, that's Tornado Alley. Those people are just asking for tornado damage and it's federal relief funds.
Okay, that leaves the great SouthWest. Wait, but they have huge federal programs to bring in water and deal with increasing droughts and wild fires, so that area's out.
While we're at it, we must get rid of highways, some people don't drive cars and shouldn't be forced to pay for taxes that support national, state, and local highways for the priveledged car drivers. Especially things like railings for bridges, what a waste of money that good drivers are forced to pay for.
And get rid of schools, inherently intelligent geniuses like yourself shouldn't have to pay for those.
Hey, and I bet you're a relatively safe person, so you have no need for police, let's get rid of them. After all, if you're not a criminal, there's no need for cops, right?
Hmmm, back to your original proposal, how much living space is left? Let's cram in the 300 million people of the USA into those small safe pockets, that way we don't even need highways, maybe with the ensuing madness we won't need schools anyway.
Seriously, get off your fscking righteous high horse, no matter where you live in this country there are countless federal, state, and local programs that you're taking advantage of which other tax payers are subsidizing.
That makes me wonder something, though. Trans-encoding between different lossy encodings obviously worsens the sound quality, but what do you know about re-encoding a lossy file at a lower bit-rate within the same codec?
Ie, if you rip a CD track to a 256 kbs AAC and re-encode it as 128 kbs AAC, how bad would that sound compared to a direct rip of CD into 128 kbs AAC?
So selling DRM-free AAC files will dethrone DRM-free MP3 files as the industry standard? How, exactly?
Because AAC matches the quality of MP3, but at much lower bitrate. So you can store around 1.5x to 2x as much music of equal quality on your player.
Your post begs the question - would you rather have 15 hours, or 25 hours, of similar quality music quality, on your MP3 player? AAC matches MP3 in audio quality at much lower bitrates, so that means more song storage and less download bandwidth.
Additionally, by your logic of popularity winning over technical merits, we'd all still be listening to cassettes on our Sony Walkmans, never having migrated to MP3 players in the first place.
Where did you get the wireless from for your mini? I'd love to add wireless (and maybe bluetooth) to my first-gen G4. Thanks.
Hose computers are great, especially when you connect them up to a series of tubes.
If you're doing this often enough, as you say, why don't you buy a linear polarizer? Here is a relatively cheap one. Much better ones can be had for more money. You can also use circular polarizing films to block reflected glares.
Sadly, he/she tells it like it is.
People have already upgraded their AppleTV boxes to 120 GB HD , so larger sizes should be possible too.
Actually, there are teams of people that have been studying mergers (collisions) of two black holes for quote some time, and for awhile they could only solve the initial and final states of the system. Eventually their simulations got better and better and now they have pretty good understanding of the intermediate states of the collision too.
It's an interesting problem, and it deals with the generation of huge amounts of gravitational waves. The hope is that these simulations will now pave the way for what kind of gravitational wave signatures we can hope to pick up with such gravitational wave detectors like LIGO and LISA.
This lady just gave a colloquium at my school regarding this very subject. Her talk was interesting, she described the history of attempts to study black hole mergers. It took awhile before the computer simulations could get sophisticated enough to model the actual interactions and dynamics of the two rotating colliding black holes. The gist is that they attract, then combine quite spectacularly releasing 'radiating' TONS of gravitational waves in a characteristic distribution, and then spin down. The end result is basically one bigger black hole. They expect a handful of these events to occur each year, so hopefully LIGO and LISA can pick up on them.
You seriously have to try to not be able to name one thing that pisses you off. I'm not saying it's a terrible UI (although I don't particularly like it), but you lose credibility when you come across as blissfully ignorant. Off the top of the head of someone who rarely even uses MacOS10:
/. street cred. Hypocritcally you've never said a single thing bad about Vista, so by your own logic you're blissfully ignorant yourself.
/. do), and you have an application open on the secondary screen, where is the menu bar? It's still on the top of the primary display. To click "file" (or whatever menu you'd like), you get to sling your mouse across displays. I do hope the second monitor came with some wrist guards to protect against carpel tunnel.
A casual glance through your posting history reveals you feel the same way about Vista. You claim you're a college student who loves Vista and loves his Zune, and you throw in linux in that list perhaps in attempts to gain some
You say you rarely use OS X, and frankly it shows in your lack of understanding of the system itself.
1) How much information do you get on each instance of each application you have open by glancing at your screen? Open 15 Word documents, 27 instances of Safari, 32 PDFs, and you'll get three tiny, black triangles. That's it.
You have more than 3 triangles, if you want instance information you've got 15 Word windows on your screen, or if they're minimized you've got 15 Word window minimizations on the right side of the dock. The dock minimizations are mini copies of the window itself. Or you can use Expose (F-10 in this case) to view all concurrent instances of the application you want. Can XP do that? Perhaps I don't really understand what you are complaining about here.
2) What happens if you don't have a shortcut on the dock for an application you need to open? Count the clicks you need to make for this, and don't forget your large back of counting beans.
Firstly, you should put a link to the Applications folder on the right side of the dock itself. Right-clicking on this folder icon will launch a Windows-esque start menu of all applications, complete with nested applications and directories. I've seen people make their own folders here with links to only their commonly-used apps.
Secondly, and maybe more importantly, go get yourself Quicksilver and then read this tutorial.
3) While on the topic, how much space do you waste by having the dock display *every* application you regularly need at all times? Yes, you can make the dock miserably small. Yes, you can have the dock auto-hide. But yes, there are many better implementations of this functionality in other interfaces (Gnome/KDE/Windows, for example).
See my answer for #2 above. You are correct that there are better implementations, Quicksilver is just such a thing. And with the applications folder on the dock, you have your Windows-esque start menu, so what is the problem now?
4) If you have a dual-head system setup (as I think many of us on
I've never used a double-head display, so I don't know if there's any other ways. But you can use Ctrl-F2 to get keyboard access to the menubar.
As I said, I rarely use Macs, and even I can spout off a few major UI irritants when prompted. No UI is perfect, but you can't claim to "love studying the various aspects of UI's that make [your] life easier or harder" and have nothing negative to report without coming off like a complete fanboy.
Interesting that you've been Microsoft fanboyish in nearly all your posting history on slashdot, yet you accuse others of coming off like a fanboy for preferring OS X. Yet you don't hesitate to bash Macs and OS X when you can, especially in light of you saying you rarely use OS X.
You know of a silicon single electron transistor that also works at room temperature? I know some groups have made room-temperature quantum dots previously, but I don't know of any silicon ones. Those other room-temp ones are carbon nanotubes with nano-leads spaced about 10nm apart, in which case they're really graphene already.
Anyway, graphene has a number of very interesting properties, such as its band structure which looks like a Minkowski space-time cone (or MCP from Tron). Graphene is such that its Fermi energy lies exactly at the cone intersection, and is a so-called zero bandgap semiconductor. Density of states around these conical regimes open up all sorts of applications.
Interesting story, one group in physics spent lots of time and $$$ trying to make a nano-pencil to try to create a single graphene layer. Ie, they put a chunk of graphite on an AFM tip, and tapped it onto a substrate, making the world's smallest pencil, and thought they may have had a few areas where the resulting line was single layer thick.
In one of the ultimate cases of getting scooped, a competing team from Harvard took a pencil, scribbled on a piece of paper, and used scotch tape to tap down on the pencil marks. Then tapping that tape onto another substrate gave large areas which had single graphene layers. So the first group was scooped by a team that used literally pennies worth of materials on a process that takes only minutes, while they spent over a year and tens of thousands of dollars on the nano-pencil technique! Cue cliches about thinking outside the box.
That's the sad thing about Democrats versus Republicans. Republicans are AMAZING marketers, they have brilliant ways to convince the people their plans are the best. If they would only put this effort and briliance to work bettering the country instead of just working the media, trying to get re-elected, and giving kickbacks and crony positions to their supporters, we as a nation and as a planet would be in much better shape.
Democrats suck at marketing, and the 2004 campaign is perfect example of that. Republican marketers managed to turn a US war hero, Kerry, into a swiftboated lame coward, while the draft-dodging Texas Air Guard guy who went AWOL was turned into a war hero. Hell, there is no way any civilized country would have re-elected George Bush, after all his miserable failures, yet the Republicans convinced the US public that he was the better candidate.
It's really too bad that Republicans don't put this effort into making decent policies or solving national or global problems.
Actually, I believe that you'll find that the majority of politicians that have relatives in Iraq support the fight as well.
Majority of politicians with relatives in Iraq? There's only a handful of Senators and Congressmen that actually have their children or their siblings serving in the war. Many are just begging to count their 4th cousin twice removed that's serving, so they can claim they have relatives in the war.
Look at the biggest pushers for the war, and consider how many of them have children serving. McCain is one of the very few exceptions. You also bring up his POW status, which is ironic since that's what Bush shamelessly exploited during the pre-2000 primaries, to convince voters that McCain is batshit insane from his days of torture and therefore unfit for office. Sad, coming from Bush who used family connections to even get into the Texas Air Guard during the draft, and then went AWOL.
Since you bring up McCain, why not bring up Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, whose son is serving in Iraq, yet he also wants to bring the troops home. A few months ago Webb's son was almost killed by an IED explosion, and when Webb met Bush at the White House a few days later, Bush was explicitly told to be sensitive about this to Webb. Yet Bush still managed to be a dickhead to Webb when Webb said he wants to bring the troops home.
The basic pattern is that of the pushers for the Iraq war, including this latest surge attempt, very few have members of their immediate family's serving. Put Jenna and Barbara Bush on the front lines, put Cheney's daughter on the front lines, then see how much George and Dick will want to keep US troops in Iraq.
Agreed. Maybe extend #1 to include the children of any Senators or Congresspeople that vote for said war.
Of course all this will do is open a bureaucratic maze of legal loopholes to allow them to declare war without declaring war, to keep their own kids off the front lines. Ie, kind of like how Congress never officially declared war on Iraq, yet by any sense of the word we're at war.
Whoa, we were almost on the same wavelength, I just posted the Vista as Martin the Robot below, prior to reading your response. Interesting we both came to similar, yet different, lines of thought.
Your post makes me wonder whether Microsoft might eventually add various personalities to the Vista warnings.
Eg, as Martin the depressive robot :
OS : You are about to visit a web page. It sounds like fun, but I'm just stuck being a boring OS assistant. Do you really want to go there?
You : Yes
OS : Figures, I'll never have even a fraction of the fun you're having using this computer. That page wants to run a flash application. Are you sure you want to go to that web page?
You : yes, dammit
OS : You are annoyed at me, I'm just a dumb lowly Operating System security warning system. You probably don't even care about me at all. Do you want me to stop nagging you?
You : YES, PLEASE shut the hell up
OS : Oh, that's great, I've been programmed with state of the art security warning information, and you just don't want to appreciate my pathetic self. Are you sure you really want to turn me off?
You : YES, go away and never come back.
OS : Fine, I'll just sit here in my own misery, and hope that you turn me back on one day, which you probably won't.
How I stand on this issue is if they claim they are selling me a license to listen to the music on a particular format and they want to restrict me from making a backup for myself from that particular format then I damn well better be able to get a replacement if the original format gets broken.
What do you mean by 'copy'? You could copy stuff back in the old days, you can copy DRM'd music now, and do so for your own use, but with reduced quality.
So you think record companies should automatically give you new vinyl records every time you play one? Hell, every time you play a record you reduce the quality of it a small bit. Now you could have copied your record to a cassette, for your own backup, but that would lose quality. You can do the same thing in today's DRM'd world. So you think the record company is required to provide you with brand new media for your lifetime to preserve the original quality since your own copies are of worse quality?
Technically if you buy a DRM'd AAC file from the iTunes store, you can route your audio out back to your audio in, and re-record your music digitally that way. You'd definitely lose quality, but you could do that, and even re-save the file as an AAC. Or you can output it to a cassette deck and record to analog tape, as we did in the old days. That is today's equivalent of what was going on in the 60's, 70's, and 80's.
How do you feel about this kind of backup? It's not DRM encumbered. It's definitely of lower quality than your original, just like copying a record or analog tape.
So if you want to claim that record companies got along just fine without DRM in the old days, then they can claim you can get along just fine now with DRM by making analog copies as mentioned here.
Now before you accuse me of supporting DRM, I'm just pointing out that the original claim by the GP wasn't fully accurate in light of what I've written here, so if you want to convince the record companies to get rid of DRM you'll have to come up with logically and technically stronger arguments than that one.
My point is that in the 'old days' that you argue that the record companies got along just fine without DRM, you couldn't make perfect duplicates as you can in today's digital age.
A correction regarding citizenship granted to Cuban refugees. On another forum someone mentioned that they're actually granted a green card immediately, not citizenship, and still have to do some other residency requirements before full citizenship. However - the hoops to jump through and time requirements for a Cuban refugee to become citizen are much easier than someone from Mexico, for example. And that immediate green card offering of course is a huge benefit, lets Cubans work freely without being exploited, unlike other immigrants.
I've been to Cuba twice, and what is the biggest factor keeping Fidel Castro so popular and in charge is the embargo itself. The embargo prevents the people from getting access to certain necessities, such as light bulbs or medicine, and only helps further their support of Fidel. In spite of the trade embargo it's amazing just how advanced Cuba is for being a third world country, and one where they can't buy anything directly from their huge nearest neighbor. The streets of Havana are filled with old cars from the 50's, still working, with people using their ingenuity to find ways to use replacement parts, due to the embargo.
The embargo is utterly ridiculous, it's an obsolete relic from the days of the red scare. Somehow the Republicans in the USA say how important the embargo is to force the end of communistic regimes, but they don't mention that we have absolutely no qualms about trading with China or Viet Nam, especially exploiting those countries for cheap labor.
Republicans also like to claim that the many Cubans trying to get out of the country to the shores of the USA prove how bad it is there, so we must keep the trade embargo up. Yet the fact we have Mexicans illegally trying to cross the border for the same reasons means we can maintain full economic and diplomatic relations with Mexico.
It's also ridiculous how hypocritical the right wingers are regarding illegal immigration. They think Mexicans coming in illegally must be deported, illegals here should be deported, yet Cubans that make it to shore should be granted immediate citizenship! And finally, just to prove how ridiculous our double standard is regarding Cuba with other nations - If anyone reading this knows of an illegal immigrant who wants to become a citizen, just have them wander over to Miami and claim they're a Cuban who just came off the raft, and they'll be granted citizenship within a few days!
Some of the greatest (sorry, "High value") music and film was produced in an era when there was no DRM. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Charlie Chaplin, B.B King, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Martin Scorcese, Stanley Kubrick, even Steven Spielberg created their work in a pre-DRM era and somehow managed to sell their work.
Don't be silly, back in those days you couldn't effectively duplicate your music. And even when audio/video tapes came around you could roughly duplicate it, but with notable loss in quality. And a copy of a copy, well, it gets exponentially worse. Eg, I remember as late as the 90's, even while even DAT's were popular amongst audiophiles, on Phish newsgroups how people would brag about having a 2nd-generation analog audio tape recording direct from the console, etc. Ie, you just couldn't make perfect duplicates (well without fancy equipment in those days).
I'm too young to remember, but back in the day when CD's first came out, did people complain about a record they previously bought that if they wanted the CD of that album they had to pay again? Hell, even in the 60's and 70's, did they complain that if they bought a record and later scratched it, they should be entitled to a free new copy of that same album?
It's highly worthwhile to try to convince the music studios that DRM is a bad thing. But using misleading arguments about previous music formats which you couldn't efficiently or accurately duplicate, will only weaken your arguments.
when they are happy to endorse the exact same kind of defamation they claim to oppose
Who modded that up?
Did you even read the links you provided, or do you just like to defame an organization as you whine about about defaming others?
And as to your misleading comments implying they only care when Jews are harassed, here's one of many examples of ADL condemning anti-Arab and anti-Muslim violence after 9/11.
That led to the old joke - "When they build base-4 computers, will they call it quits?"
Anyway, qubit IS the right term, for Quantum Bit, or Quantum Binary Digit. It is perfectly binary, there are two eigensates, |0> and |1>, but the qubit can be in a linear combination of them. In fact, it can be in an imaginary linear combination of them, and the qubit's representation can be as a vector pointing anywhere along the unit sphere, where up is |0> and down is |1>. For the math buffs here, a qubit is merely an instantiation of the SU(2) group (Special Unitary Group).
I just bought an iMac several weeks ago, it seriously rocks. Other benefits (superficial mind you but still benefits) you didn't mention are : - It's an all-in-one design is pretty efficient in terms of saving space - I'll going to get fanboyish here, but regarding appearance, it's really quite elegant. There's no tower box anywhere, no bundle of wires (if you use airport + bluetooth), it's just basiaclly a display on your desk, similar to how computers were back in the 70's/80's. - Built in iSight camera (not sure how many other desktops, displays, or laptops have these built in, but with the iMac it's quite nice) But seriously, before I ever got a mac I wondered how people could be so fanboyish over them, but after using OS X (and I mean REALLY using it, not just dabbling with it for a few minutes as some Microsoft fanboys do before giving up) I can totally see why people really prefer OS X.