I'd quite like to see a truer adaption of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. While it obviously shares much in common with Blade Runner its story and world have (to me at least) a very different, and just as appealing, flavour to Blade Runner.
No need - first watch the film, then read the book and let your brain insert the visuals. Perfection.
Nooo! That's the whole point of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Actually, unless we read different books, the point of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was "so what? are you sure there's a difference?"
The book is (mainly) about Deckard discovering that many things around him were fake. It is also glaringly obvious in the book that the VK test for replicants was actually a test of belief in the dominant (fake) religion (which was heavy on empathy and being kind to animals - c.f. the questions in the VK test). His wife wakes up in the morning and dials up her mood for the day - and if she doesn't feel like dialing, there;s an app for that! By the end of the book, Deckard has pretty much ceased to care what is what.
Thirded - at least for the regular Kindle (cant speak for the DX). Its great for reading novels in ebook formats where the text can be re-flowed to the screen size, but its poor for reference. There's no problem displaying PDFs but you cant fit a whole page on the screen at a legible size and zooming, scrolling is cumbersome. Unless you really want to read papers on the beach (in which case the DX might be a contender) go for a tablet and spend a buck or so on a souped-up reader app.
but they made a serious attempt to cause other people to do widespread damage.
Its not clear from the news reports that they made any "serious attempts" beyond a stupid facebook page. The news reports are ambiguous on whether or not they even turned up to their own riots (if they were actually arrested at the riot site with a large box of firebombs and a map of all the best shops to loot, glancing impatiently at their watches then I'd happily revise my opinion).
Four years may be excessive, but six months of community service for people with that little disregard for society, who desire to do that much harm to their community seems too light.
Fine - give 'em a bit more, there's no Goldilocks "just right" punishment - but unless you're really convinced that these people are a clear and present danger to society, its better to give them a sustainable sentence from the get-go than something which will probably be overturned. In six months' time, when the appeal goes through, their sentence is reduced to 1 year, and they're released immediately based on time served they're going to act like they've been vindicated.
If your dog craps on the carpet its better to rub its nose in it and say "Bad Boy" immediately than to wait half an hour, beat it savagely, then give it a doggy treat because you feel guilty.
Not just FTL, but order-of-magnitude-faster-than-light with magic deflector shields so you didn't get vaporized if you collided with something big like a hydrogen atom. Or wormholes that can pass more than a squirt of randomized radiation.
Even traveling at ~1c will take a minimum of about 4 years, probably much more, to get to the nearest star (that depends on how your we-haven't-invented-it-yet space drive works - how long will you spend accelerating/decelerating, will you experience time dilation etc). You might need warp drive to get even close to 1c (e.g. in the Steven Baxter book Ark - they had warp drive but it still took decades to get to anywhere likely to have a habitable planet - and because it was a Stephen Baxter book everything went pear-shaped).
And even with a slower-than-light "generation ship" there's some hard questions to ask about the energy budget. I notice that even hard SF authors, when they use sublight travel, have been tending to go for imaginary power sources rather than assuming that good ol' nuclear power will let you get there in any reasonable time. (e.g. Stephen Baxter used grand-unified-theory drives, Alistair Reynolds has magic "conjoiner" drives... Greg Egan uses boring old antimatter, but assumes everybody can upload themselves to a computer and fit on a tiny spaceship).
Maybe the first step should be to work out how to build a self-sustaining colony in space: you'll need the same technology to build a generation ship, even if you build an OMFTL drive into a DeLorian you'll need to build a space motel in any star system that doesn't have a nice habitable planet and, if we never work out how to get out of the solar system, a few space colonies would be awfully useful when it came to exploiting the solar system without continually crawling in and out of gravity wells.
Is a bit more than support for one graduate student for five years. Almost nothing, in other words.
But it should be enough to study the field, review the literature (including all the relevant SF - nerd heaven) and actually work out what the critical questions are (including some energy budget calculations which might put the kaboosh on the whole thing). Which is a pretty good first step.
But speedy arrest and conviction does deter. It's a primate thing: do something socially bad, bad things happen back to you, learn not to do it.
...and handing down over-the-top sentences in this case has ensured that there will be an appeal, which will effectively prolong that process and give the perps a sense of vindication.
Its pretty clear that these people were not the sinister criminal masterminds behind the riots - they're just a couple of irresponsible tw@ts who needed to spend their weekends sorting garbage for the next six months. Now, when the inevitable appeal has reduced their sentence, they'll be folk heroes to their fellow tw@ts and, worse, might have enough Facebook friends to actually cause trouble next time they have a little joke. Nice job.
We seem to have an outbreak of bipolar thinking:
Justice system: "You complain when we let 'em off with a slap on the wrist, then you complain when we lock them up for years for a petty offence. Wah! Not fair!"
Police chiefs: "You complain when we kettle people at legitimate political protests, so the next time there's a riot we play it softly-softly and you still complain! That's SO not fair!"
Guys, you're meant to be able to make appropriate decisions in response to individual cases: that's why we pay you so much more than people who stack shelves.
... as if there were no threat from a comet named "eLenin"!
No, no its ELEnin - as in "Extinction Level Event". Didn't you watch the documentary Deep Impact? (Well, it was virtually a documentary compared to Armageddon!)
...but don't worry, these things only ever fall on New York, Washington and a few non-US cities with distinctive landmarks. As long as you're at least 100 miles from the Taj Mahal, Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty or Big Ben you should be safe.
The problem is, nobody wants to knowingly take any sort of risk. Implementing a Big Idea usually involves going out on a limb to a certain extent. If you take a "brave decision" and it goes pear-shaped you'll have inquiries/reviews/committees/auditors sifting through the wreckage with 20/20 hindsight and the clear knowledge that witch hunters won't get employed again unless they turn up a few pointy hats. Of course, if you're high enough up the greasy pole then all that means is you'll only get a 6-digit bonus this year or, at worst, will have to resign and spend a decent interval pruning your roses until another directorship comes along - but hey, all suffering is relative and they seem to think its a big deal. If you're lower down the pecking order, though, you're scapegoat material, and mistakes are not an option.
And of course, he who makes no mistakes, makes nothing.
However, politics would benefit from a few less Big Ideas (like Capitalism, The Market, Socialism, Libertarianism) - a bit more emphasis on tailoring solutions to problems based on evidence and critical reason and a bit less time thumbing through Karl Marx or Adam Smith in search of a one-size-fits-nobody solution.
XSLT, trivial? Have you ever tried doing anything useful with it?
For simple cases, you can always use CSS to style your XML, which can work rather better than using CSS to make tweaks to an unknown set of default styles that may vary from browser to browser. However, in cases where you need to transform the order/nesting of elements in the source document to display it, CSS is stuffed anyway - most non-trivial CSS-based layouts require the HTML to be formatted just so with all the elements in the right order and correctly nested.
With the increasing use of Content Management Systems it is probably more sensible for the server to pull the content out of a database and mark it up in a page description language (doing things like generating TOCs and cross-references on the fly) based on the clients' stated preferences. That can be done using your server-side language of choice (which might include XML and XSLT tools if they are suitable).
For example, if people use bold text all the time, then why shouldn't we be able to [b]bold-text[/b]?
What you do is choose an XML schema and stylesheet - be it custom or off-the-shelf - that suits your application. The schema you're looking for is XHTML which is just as easy to write as HTML (especially if you have a syntax-aware editor to keep you on the straight and narrow and ignore the purists moaning about tag soup).
Why should we have to [span style="text-weight: bold"]
If that's what you're doing then yes, you might as well use [b] tags. The problem comes when you use bold for more than one purpose and later decide, e.g. that you want "definitions" to be in italics but to keep bold when you want it for emphasis. Then you can write [span style="emphasis"], [span style="definition"], [span style="citation"] and re-map them to different font styles at will. That's overkill if you just want (e.g.) to format individual blog posts, but if you're assembling any substantial volume of documents and want to be remotely consistent about style then this sort of situation will occur.
Or, you can choose/create an XML schema which has [citation] [emphasis] [definition] [keyword].... whatever tags. Of course, HTML5 has added a few of those for you, but with XML schemas you could potentially select an off-the-peg custom schema for playwriting, software documentation, encyclopedias, legal documents, LOLcats etc... rather than hope that W3C will add the tags you need in some future version, and that Microsoft will support them.
Or you would be able to, if browser support for XML+XSLT+FO or XML+CSS had been more forthcoming more quickly.
XML/XHTML was written for the parsers. HTML5 was written for web developers.
Which doesn't make sense when, increasingly, web developers are likely to be using authoring tools which minimise the amount of actual HTML they have to write or using server-side scripts to generate their markup. For these, XML or XHTML make much more sense because (as you said) they're easier to parse.
Tomatoes are fruits. Perceived sweetness has nothing to do with whether something is considered a fruit, neither in the lab nor the kitchen.
...and there's no problem with them being vegetables and fruits because the noun "vegetable" isn't a term used in science (it may be used as an adjective, e.g. "vegetable matter" and a tomato is definitely vegetable matter).
Clue: words can have both technical and colloquial meanings and anybody with half a brain ought to be able to work out when scientific pedantry is, and is not appropriate. In the lab, it can be important. In the kitchen, tomatoes can be vegetables, rhubarb can be a fruit and all sorts of things which aren't technically speaking nuts can be nuts because you're trying to cook the fucking things, not classify them. Next thing, you'll be so busy arguing over whether "mushroom" refers to the whole fungus or just the fruiting body that you'll accidentally add 200 Newtons of the things instead of 200 grams and completely ruin your pizza.
Maybe using Latin for science wasn't such a bad idea: it might stop scientists re-defining commonplace words like "work" and "weight" then coming over all smug when people get confused.
Curiously, Intel will still offer 'sold separately' own-brand cooling solutions for the new chips
So, I'm guessing "yes".
Seriously. Maybe, just maybe they did some checking and found that a large proportion of their bundled coolers were ending up in the spare parts bin. Its not exactly surprising that the same people who buy the "extreme" chips would also go in for high bling-to-noise ratio heatsinks and water cooling systems. Not everything is a money-grabbing conspiracy.
Would it be possibly to build a Dyson Sphere around a single star in a binary system?
Anything is possible with enough unobtanium, artificial gravity (unless you spin it up to ludicrous speed to make gravity - see Ringworld) and matter transmutation (if you believe the words of thousand-year-old ship's prostitutes).
Seriously, come back and ask that question when we know how to build a Dyson sphere around a single sun.
Anyway, I thought the original "Dyson sphere" concept was actually a cloud of satellites dense enough to capture all of the solar energy, rather than the rigid sci-fi version with all its tricky engineering?
Here you go. This is the original negative image of course - they'll produce a reversed, colorized print to keep journalists happy but here on/. we understand that sort of thing.
(Sorry guys, you're just going to have to imagine a big chunk of whitespace here because the Slashdot lameness filter has no fecking sense of humor)
I'm sorry, but if they can make such an obvious biased mistrake, why should anybody give even a moment's thought to the rest of their study?
RTFA: sure, its a blog article, not a Nature paper, but it concludes that bikes have drastically lower carbon emissions than cars, so its hardly biassed. Its clearly implicit in the initial question that the author is considering buying a new bike for the daily commute, but already has a car. The later analysis does include the "carbon cost" of the car - that's why they needed to make an estimate of the car's lifetime.
Oh, yes, TFA does mention that cycling and walking consumes food but goes on to refute the idea that that is significant (unless you're on an "all-beef diet" - presumably all those cows grazing on slashed-and-burnt forests farting their asses off).
Moral of the story: buy a second-hand bike (and don't have it air-freighted).
As for the 286 and 386 machines, they were limited by DOS, not by the hardware.
...but the problem was, lots of people got a PC precisely because they did want to run DOS, so the 640KB limit hung around long after 1MB+ became commonplace.
To us computer geeks, the PC was underpowered and expensive even for the time. And that broken keyboard... Ugh.
It remains a mystery to me how this overpriced, mediocre, me-too CP/M-clone machine with its not-really-16-bit processor attracted such gushing reviews (I remember reading the one in TFA when it came out). All I can assume is that no journalist wanted to "pull a Taco" and bet against the Blue Wardrobe Factory.
When the ARM was launched in the late 80s it was a kick-ass desktop workstation processor that could wipe the floor with a 286. They even made an ARM "accelerator card" for the PC (see here and search for "springboard").
In our IBM PC-free alternate universe, the ARM could have taken off on the desktop, inevitably migrated into servers, and would probably have got some 64-bit love rather earlier. Back in the real world, it survived by carving out a niche in mobile/embedded applications, which don't need 64 bits.
Last I checked, all 3D movies had 2D equivalents playing in the same multiplex. No one is being FORCED to watch a 3D movie.
Yeah, right, because all the multiplexes have magically acquired twice as many screens as they had before, so they can do this without restricting your choice of showtimes or reducing the range of movies they carry. Duh!
Slashdot Mirror
Tron would like a word with you.
Was that a sequel? I thought when you used modern techniques to tell pretty much the same story it was called a "remake"?
I'd quite like to see a truer adaption of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. While it obviously shares much in common with Blade Runner its story and world have (to me at least) a very different, and just as appealing, flavour to Blade Runner.
No need - first watch the film, then read the book and let your brain insert the visuals. Perfection.
Yes, but how many questions would it take?
None - just monitor the viewer's pupil dilation, heart rate, skin resistance during the movie.
If its the typical modern blockbuster with loads of flash effects and action but no soul, it'll be flatline.
Nooo! That's the whole point of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Actually, unless we read different books, the point of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was "so what? are you sure there's a difference?"
The book is (mainly) about Deckard discovering that many things around him were fake. It is also glaringly obvious in the book that the VK test for replicants was actually a test of belief in the dominant (fake) religion (which was heavy on empathy and being kind to animals - c.f. the questions in the VK test). His wife wakes up in the morning and dials up her mood for the day - and if she doesn't feel like dialing, there;s an app for that! By the end of the book, Deckard has pretty much ceased to care what is what.
Thirded - at least for the regular Kindle (cant speak for the DX). Its great for reading novels in ebook formats where the text can be re-flowed to the screen size, but its poor for reference. There's no problem displaying PDFs but you cant fit a whole page on the screen at a legible size and zooming, scrolling is cumbersome. Unless you really want to read papers on the beach (in which case the DX might be a contender) go for a tablet and spend a buck or so on a souped-up reader app.
but they made a serious attempt to cause other people to do widespread damage.
Its not clear from the news reports that they made any "serious attempts" beyond a stupid facebook page. The news reports are ambiguous on whether or not they even turned up to their own riots (if they were actually arrested at the riot site with a large box of firebombs and a map of all the best shops to loot, glancing impatiently at their watches then I'd happily revise my opinion).
Four years may be excessive, but six months of community service for people with that little disregard for society, who desire to do that much harm to their community seems too light.
Fine - give 'em a bit more, there's no Goldilocks "just right" punishment - but unless you're really convinced that these people are a clear and present danger to society, its better to give them a sustainable sentence from the get-go than something which will probably be overturned. In six months' time, when the appeal goes through, their sentence is reduced to 1 year, and they're released immediately based on time served they're going to act like they've been vindicated.
If your dog craps on the carpet its better to rub its nose in it and say "Bad Boy" immediately than to wait half an hour, beat it savagely, then give it a doggy treat because you feel guilty.
Until FTL travel becomes a possibility
Not just FTL, but order-of-magnitude-faster-than-light with magic deflector shields so you didn't get vaporized if you collided with something big like a hydrogen atom. Or wormholes that can pass more than a squirt of randomized radiation.
Even traveling at ~1c will take a minimum of about 4 years, probably much more, to get to the nearest star (that depends on how your we-haven't-invented-it-yet space drive works - how long will you spend accelerating/decelerating, will you experience time dilation etc). You might need warp drive to get even close to 1c (e.g. in the Steven Baxter book Ark - they had warp drive but it still took decades to get to anywhere likely to have a habitable planet - and because it was a Stephen Baxter book everything went pear-shaped).
And even with a slower-than-light "generation ship" there's some hard questions to ask about the energy budget. I notice that even hard SF authors, when they use sublight travel, have been tending to go for imaginary power sources rather than assuming that good ol' nuclear power will let you get there in any reasonable time. (e.g. Stephen Baxter used grand-unified-theory drives, Alistair Reynolds has magic "conjoiner" drives... Greg Egan uses boring old antimatter, but assumes everybody can upload themselves to a computer and fit on a tiny spaceship).
Maybe the first step should be to work out how to build a self-sustaining colony in space: you'll need the same technology to build a generation ship, even if you build an OMFTL drive into a DeLorian you'll need to build a space motel in any star system that doesn't have a nice habitable planet and, if we never work out how to get out of the solar system, a few space colonies would be awfully useful when it came to exploiting the solar system without continually crawling in and out of gravity wells.
Is a bit more than support for one graduate student for five years. Almost nothing, in other words.
But it should be enough to study the field, review the literature (including all the relevant SF - nerd heaven) and actually work out what the critical questions are (including some energy budget calculations which might put the kaboosh on the whole thing). Which is a pretty good first step.
But speedy arrest and conviction does deter. It's a primate thing: do something socially bad, bad things happen back to you, learn not to do it.
...and handing down over-the-top sentences in this case has ensured that there will be an appeal, which will effectively prolong that process and give the perps a sense of vindication.
Its pretty clear that these people were not the sinister criminal masterminds behind the riots - they're just a couple of irresponsible tw@ts who needed to spend their weekends sorting garbage for the next six months. Now, when the inevitable appeal has reduced their sentence, they'll be folk heroes to their fellow tw@ts and, worse, might have enough Facebook friends to actually cause trouble next time they have a little joke. Nice job.
We seem to have an outbreak of bipolar thinking:
Justice system: "You complain when we let 'em off with a slap on the wrist, then you complain when we lock them up for years for a petty offence. Wah! Not fair!"
Police chiefs: "You complain when we kettle people at legitimate political protests, so the next time there's a riot we play it softly-softly and you still complain! That's SO not fair!"
Guys, you're meant to be able to make appropriate decisions in response to individual cases: that's why we pay you so much more than people who stack shelves.
And there is no such thing as a black dwarf
What'choo talkin' about, NASA?
... as if there were no threat from a comet named "eLenin"!
No, no its ELEnin - as in "Extinction Level Event". Didn't you watch the documentary Deep Impact? (Well, it was virtually a documentary compared to Armageddon!)
...but don't worry, these things only ever fall on New York, Washington and a few non-US cities with distinctive landmarks. As long as you're at least 100 miles from the Taj Mahal, Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty or Big Ben you should be safe.
The problem is, nobody wants to knowingly take any sort of risk. Implementing a Big Idea usually involves going out on a limb to a certain extent. If you take a "brave decision" and it goes pear-shaped you'll have inquiries/reviews/committees/auditors sifting through the wreckage with 20/20 hindsight and the clear knowledge that witch hunters won't get employed again unless they turn up a few pointy hats. Of course, if you're high enough up the greasy pole then all that means is you'll only get a 6-digit bonus this year or, at worst, will have to resign and spend a decent interval pruning your roses until another directorship comes along - but hey, all suffering is relative and they seem to think its a big deal. If you're lower down the pecking order, though, you're scapegoat material, and mistakes are not an option.
And of course, he who makes no mistakes, makes nothing.
However, politics would benefit from a few less Big Ideas (like Capitalism, The Market, Socialism, Libertarianism) - a bit more emphasis on tailoring solutions to problems based on evidence and critical reason and a bit less time thumbing through Karl Marx or Adam Smith in search of a one-size-fits-nobody solution.
XSLT, trivial? Have you ever tried doing anything useful with it?
For simple cases, you can always use CSS to style your XML, which can work rather better than using CSS to make tweaks to an unknown set of default styles that may vary from browser to browser. However, in cases where you need to transform the order/nesting of elements in the source document to display it, CSS is stuffed anyway - most non-trivial CSS-based layouts require the HTML to be formatted just so with all the elements in the right order and correctly nested.
With the increasing use of Content Management Systems it is probably more sensible for the server to pull the content out of a database and mark it up in a page description language (doing things like generating TOCs and cross-references on the fly) based on the clients' stated preferences. That can be done using your server-side language of choice (which might include XML and XSLT tools if they are suitable).
For example, if people use bold text all the time, then why shouldn't we be able to [b]bold-text[/b]?
What you do is choose an XML schema and stylesheet - be it custom or off-the-shelf - that suits your application. The schema you're looking for is XHTML which is just as easy to write as HTML (especially if you have a syntax-aware editor to keep you on the straight and narrow and ignore the purists moaning about tag soup).
Why should we have to [span style="text-weight: bold"]
If that's what you're doing then yes, you might as well use [b] tags. The problem comes when you use bold for more than one purpose and later decide, e.g. that you want "definitions" to be in italics but to keep bold when you want it for emphasis. Then you can write [span style="emphasis"], [span style="definition"], [span style="citation"] and re-map them to different font styles at will. That's overkill if you just want (e.g.) to format individual blog posts, but if you're assembling any substantial volume of documents and want to be remotely consistent about style then this sort of situation will occur.
Or, you can choose/create an XML schema which has [citation] [emphasis] [definition] [keyword].... whatever tags. Of course, HTML5 has added a few of those for you, but with XML schemas you could potentially select an off-the-peg custom schema for playwriting, software documentation, encyclopedias, legal documents, LOLcats etc... rather than hope that W3C will add the tags you need in some future version, and that Microsoft will support them.
Or you would be able to, if browser support for XML+XSLT+FO or XML+CSS had been more forthcoming more quickly.
XML/XHTML was written for the parsers. HTML5 was written for web developers.
Which doesn't make sense when, increasingly, web developers are likely to be using authoring tools which minimise the amount of actual HTML they have to write or using server-side scripts to generate their markup. For these, XML or XHTML make much more sense because (as you said) they're easier to parse.
Tomatoes are fruits. Perceived sweetness has nothing to do with whether something is considered a fruit, neither in the lab nor the kitchen.
...and there's no problem with them being vegetables and fruits because the noun "vegetable" isn't a term used in science (it may be used as an adjective, e.g. "vegetable matter" and a tomato is definitely vegetable matter).
Clue: words can have both technical and colloquial meanings and anybody with half a brain ought to be able to work out when scientific pedantry is, and is not appropriate. In the lab, it can be important. In the kitchen, tomatoes can be vegetables, rhubarb can be a fruit and all sorts of things which aren't technically speaking nuts can be nuts because you're trying to cook the fucking things, not classify them. Next thing, you'll be so busy arguing over whether "mushroom" refers to the whole fungus or just the fruiting body that you'll accidentally add 200 Newtons of the things instead of 200 grams and completely ruin your pizza.
Maybe using Latin for science wasn't such a bad idea: it might stop scientists re-defining commonplace words like "work" and "weight" then coming over all smug when people get confused.
Is Intel unable to cool these extreme chips?
Er... let me think...
Curiously, Intel will still offer 'sold separately' own-brand cooling solutions for the new chips
So, I'm guessing "yes".
Seriously. Maybe, just maybe they did some checking and found that a large proportion of their bundled coolers were ending up in the spare parts bin. Its not exactly surprising that the same people who buy the "extreme" chips would also go in for high bling-to-noise ratio heatsinks and water cooling systems. Not everything is a money-grabbing conspiracy.
Sure it's possible, but why the hell would they ever do that?
Pre-Copernican theme park for religious literalists? Just paint stars on the inside.
Would it be possibly to build a Dyson Sphere around a single star in a binary system?
Anything is possible with enough unobtanium, artificial gravity (unless you spin it up to ludicrous speed to make gravity - see Ringworld) and matter transmutation (if you believe the words of thousand-year-old ship's prostitutes).
Seriously, come back and ask that question when we know how to build a Dyson sphere around a single sun.
Anyway, I thought the original "Dyson sphere" concept was actually a cloud of satellites dense enough to capture all of the solar energy, rather than the rigid sci-fi version with all its tricky engineering?
I see a Death star
And I want it painted black....
Palpatine: absolutely not!
Anakin: That's SO not fair!!! You're NOT my father!!!
(Or do rebellious teenage super villains demand to paint their bedroom magnolia?)
Is it darker than #000000?
Yep, its #FFFFFFFF!
Here you go. This is the original negative image of course - they'll produce a reversed, colorized print to keep journalists happy but here on /. we understand that sort of thing.
(Sorry guys, you're just going to have to imagine a big chunk of whitespace here because the Slashdot lameness filter has no fecking sense of humor)
I'm sorry, but if they can make such an obvious biased mistrake, why should anybody give even a moment's thought to the rest of their study?
RTFA: sure, its a blog article, not a Nature paper, but it concludes that bikes have drastically lower carbon emissions than cars, so its hardly biassed. Its clearly implicit in the initial question that the author is considering buying a new bike for the daily commute, but already has a car. The later analysis does include the "carbon cost" of the car - that's why they needed to make an estimate of the car's lifetime.
Oh, yes, TFA does mention that cycling and walking consumes food but goes on to refute the idea that that is significant (unless you're on an "all-beef diet" - presumably all those cows grazing on slashed-and-burnt forests farting their asses off).
Moral of the story: buy a second-hand bike (and don't have it air-freighted).
As for the 286 and 386 machines, they were limited by DOS, not by the hardware.
...but the problem was, lots of people got a PC precisely because they did want to run DOS, so the 640KB limit hung around long after 1MB+ became commonplace.
To us computer geeks, the PC was underpowered and expensive even for the time. And that broken keyboard... Ugh.
It remains a mystery to me how this overpriced, mediocre, me-too CP/M-clone machine with its not-really-16-bit processor attracted such gushing reviews (I remember reading the one in TFA when it came out). All I can assume is that no journalist wanted to "pull a Taco" and bet against the Blue Wardrobe Factory.
The 32-bit descendant of the 6502 is the ARM architecture. But half a year ago, ARM had no plans to expand from 40-bit to 64-bit, at least not until RAM hits half terabyte levels.
When the ARM was launched in the late 80s it was a kick-ass desktop workstation processor that could wipe the floor with a 286. They even made an ARM "accelerator card" for the PC (see here and search for "springboard").
In our IBM PC-free alternate universe, the ARM could have taken off on the desktop, inevitably migrated into servers, and would probably have got some 64-bit love rather earlier. Back in the real world, it survived by carving out a niche in mobile/embedded applications, which don't need 64 bits.
Last I checked, all 3D movies had 2D equivalents playing in the same multiplex. No one is being FORCED to watch a 3D movie.
Yeah, right, because all the multiplexes have magically acquired twice as many screens as they had before, so they can do this without restricting your choice of showtimes or reducing the range of movies they carry. Duh!