What has to be remembered is that Google is a business, Red Hat is a business, News Corp is a business too, and yet none of them actively tried to sabotage the OLPC foundation they had contracted to be a part of.
You don't think that they're in it just for the karma do you?
None of them stands to lose out if an AMD-powered machine becomes the de-facto standard in the developing world. Intel does - bigtime.
Google and Red Hat are arch-rivals of Microsoft and stand to benefit if Linux becomes the de-facto standard in the developing world. Intel owes a lot of its success to Windows' dependence on x86 processors, but Linux is pathologically multi-platform and opens the door to competition from ARM, PowerPC et. al.
Now, I'm not condoning what Intel has (allegedly) done - but it beggars belief that the OLPC people expected Intel to behave like boy scouts in the face of such a conflict of interests.
The OLPC project is a massive threat to the Intel/Microsoft near-monopoly, and like it or not OLPC are going to have to raise their hardball game to make it work.
I was in the airport this last weekend to pick someone up. As I sat and waited, I heard the 'if you see anything or anyone suspicious, dial 911' announcement a few dozen times.
Brilliant that, isn't it - lets repeat the same inane security announcements every 30 seconds so that everybody is conditioned to ignore the tannoy should we have anything important to announce.
Has anyone got a news report they can cite to show we -have- found terrorists this way? Or are the airport security concerns just harrassing law-abiding citizens?
No - its all a conspiracy by the manufacturers of bottled water and 1l zip-lock plastic bags.
If the media was where it should have been then the coverage would be on the OLPC XO and their "Give 1 Get 1" initiative.
Why are people even making this comparison?
If you want to improve education and computer literacy in your developing country , have your education ministry order a million OLPCs which have been purpose designed with lots of innovative features for that role.
If you want a cheap kids computer, or an internet terminal for the spare room, something a bit bigger than a PDA to take to meetings, or something to mess around with Linux on - buy an eee PC. You'll need to recharge it frequently, you'll need a wired or wi-fi internet connection handy, and you won't be able to read the screen in the sub-Saharan sun, but, unlike the OLPC, you can actually buy one! (OK, theres the the G1G1 scheme - its a grand idea but only a limited-time offer and not available outside North America so its not a valid comparison),
He was told to use IE, didn't, teacher noticed, told him to use firefox, he mouthed off back to the teacher.
Except that the letter in TFA completely fails to mention whether the student was told to use (specifically) IE or if he "mouthed off". Since this letter was apparently written by the teacher in order to record and justify the punishment, I think we the Jury are justified in assuming that if the student had been foul-mouthed or abusive then this would have been mentioned.
The letter also fails to mention whether the teacher gave any sort of civil reply to the student's explanation or even looked to see whether the student actually was working on the assignment. If you treat kids with contempt then you will reap what you sow. Enforcing stupid, unjustifiable rules on people doesn't teach respect for authority, it teaches contempt and shows them how to behave should they find themselves in a position of authority.
Getting the name of the offending program wrong on the formal punishment letter is a pretty poor show, too. You don't expect a 100-page legal document, but its reasonable that all the salient points should be present and correct.
UNLESS of course the program really was something called "foxfire.exe" (sic - see TFA) - probably malware or a "stealthed" game - in which case the teacher is totally exonerated and the little brat should get a damned good flog^H^H^H^H counselling - if only to make sure that next time he uses "iexplode.exe" or "msorifice.exe".
The idea of what CSS created for, style sheets, is great & is a step forward, but the way we have to use style sheets with CSS sometimes makes me wonder what an abortion feels like.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. CSS is OK as a replacement for the FONT tag, but beyond that it is a complete mess that fails to do what it says on the tin - since the HTML inevitably has to be modified to achieve any significant layout change (pick up a CSS cookbook and look at the examples - they're as much about where you put the div/class/id tags in the HTML as writing the CSS). In non-trivial cases all it really does is keep the layout and content in separate files - which is not the same as making them independent. You get the impression that the whole thing was invented in the abstract and cast in stone by a committee before anyone actually tried to use it to lay out a website.
Its too easy to blame the whole thing on Microsoft - the browser differences are a big part of the problem but they're not the whole of it. The MS interpretation of the box model was probably more sensible than the standard...
These devices aren't going to directly hit MS's products - what they could do is cost them mindshare and threaten the future of their monopoly.
Products like the eeePC occupy a precarious niche just below cheap "regular" laptops - put a bigger screen and a CD drive on them and there'll be a cheaper Dell laptop - so while they may be successful for their manufacturers they're not going to make a big dent in PC sales. People will buy them as "extra" machines for kids or as spare "take anywhere" machines (don't buy a £2000 ultra-portable - buy a £1000 desktop or large screen laptop plus an eeePC for when you don't need the power or don't want to risk carrying your main machine). But if they find that, out-of-the-box, they can connect to web and EMAIL and open most of their documents with these things called "Firefox", "Thunderbird" and "Open Office" then they might have their eyes opened to other possibilities.
Remember, MS's real monopoly is Office, not Windows. How many lUsers have you met who, when asked what version of windows they are running, respond with their Office version? However, I was in a school (in England) recently and saw a big (homemade) poster on the wall saying "Haven't got MS Office at home? Have you tried the free alternative from www.OpenOffice.org?" - so there is hope for the world.
If I were MS right now I'd be busily developing something like "Vista Lite Edition" that could be sold on a memory stick alongside eeePCs and the like for about $25, probably including a stripped down office. ISTR they did do something similar in some countries but it was perceived as "Windows - crippled edition". It might be an easier sell if it was linked to built-to-a-price "appropriate technology" hardware.
a written offer is kind of pointless, when you can download busybox source code off the net free of charge
Someone pays to maintain whatever website you download the source from - why should they be obliged to provide a service to "your" paying customers?
Plus, you're missing a major strategic aim of the GPL - it guarantees that the source code of useful products is always available from a multitude of sources and can't easily be "lost".
Get real - we're talking about Verizon sticking a.zip file on a website and adding a sentence to the inevitable legal bumf that comes with the product saying "under the terms of the GPL source is available from our website or we'll send you a CD on request for $x" (where $x can be a "reasonable amount" to cover the costs of writing a CD-R and sticking it in the post). In return they get to distribute a valuable bit of software without paying license fees and access to the source code without NDA or other rubbish.
Compared to the other silly, onerous and expensive hoops businesses have to jump through these days, that sounds like a good deal.
sending them the source code seems like a pointless formality
(a) They don't actually have to include the source code with every router - just a written offer to supply the source code on demand. (I assume that the references to "including the source code" are journalistic imprecision or its gonna be a very short lawsuit).
(b) Users may also be developers who wish study the source code or to use or modify the software in other systems - as is their right under the GPL.
Anyway, most such products ship with a CD for plug-n-drool installation so how hard can it be to include a few source files?
If the BBC shows a rerun of Sesame Street that claims that 1 + 1 = 2, do they have to give equal time to mathematicians who claim that it isn't? (Where would they find them?)
Well, as the slashdot sig goes, There are 10 types of mathematician - those that understand binary and those that don't.
Meanwhile, you're not really suggesting that the media can't make any sort of judgement distinguish between genuine areas of scientific disagreement and fringe quackery, are you? Gosh, that's almost like suggesting that managers and politicians with an Arts/Classics/Legal/Business background who know squat about science can't make informed decisions about scientific and technical issues... and that can't be true!
Anyway, the BBC have a remit to cater for a diverse audience, and portraying people who actually know what they are talking about and can back it up with evidence amounts to unfair discrimination against stupid people - and where would TV be if it alienated stupid people?
And if people have scripting turned off for security
...then they will be quite used to many current sites not working properly! I think we already established that these hypothetical people are using Internet Explorer anyway. If the server detects that the browser supports XML+Stylesheet then it sends XML+Stylesheet.
Most modern browsers support CSS-styled XML anyway - the problem is that CSS is so tricky to use (properly), relies on lots of work arounds and can't re-order or re-nest elements very well.
That's what I'd really ideally like to see. Problem is IE... (7 as well as 6) -- they are not going to support this
But, on past performance, IE will then implement a broken version of HTML 5 and the problem will just get worse.
So, instead of producing yet another standard that browser producers will screw up, produce an XML+Stylesheet rendering web app in one or more of AJAX/Java/Flash/ActiveX that runs in the browser and renders pages properly...
Without breaking Slashdot tradition and reading TFA, why not:
Freeze HTML at V4 and regard as a can of worms to be used for legacy purposes only;
freeze XHTML as a handy kludge that is parseable by XML tools while still rendering as HTML4 (and learn to love "tag soup" as long as it parses);
For new projects, dump the poorly-implemented legacy crap and use "pure" XML + a suitable stylesheet/formatting system.
Develop a diverse, extensible range of DTD/Schema + stylesheet "templates" tailored for various purposes (eBooks; blogs; news; reports etc..) but ensure that new browsers can work with any valid Schema/Stylesheet.
Sorry, I did mean to put quotes around "most scientists" in each of those sentences - sadly, these hypothetical "most scientists" are heavily discredited in the public eye and I did go on to point out that the real problem was politicians "cherry picking" the uncertainties.
Have a look at the global warming debate for a plethora of examples.
That's also a good example of my point about scientific proof vs. risk analysis - there's more than enough evidence to justify "doing something" about it on a risk analysis basis, but until the complete theory of Global Warming (not just the basic greenhouse theory) has all the 'i's dotted and the 't's crossed and is ready to take its place alongside F=ma and E=mc^2 the skeptics will always be able to cry "this has not been proven".
Rightly or wrongly, you won't convince the public and politicians with a "scientific consesnsus" argument any more. Unfortunately, the media is full of feuding "scientists" and very few people are saying "Look - if the worst predictions are correct and we do nothing, we all die. If we do something and the predictions are wrong then OPEC loses some money, we end up with cleaner cities, and our grandchildren get left with some coal and oil to make useful stuff from. Which would you rather?"
Why is this a sad thing? Because it is animated instead of with real characters? Because it makes people laugh? Because it has an extremely talented and capable production team? Because it speaks to current events with amusing analogies instead of directly?
No, its not Futurama that's sad. Futurama deserves to be very happy. Its all those other shows (and that includes the CSI genre as well as SF) with less intelligent references to science (and more glaring scientific errors) in an entire season than Futurama has in 25 minutes that are sad. SF shows like BSG, Heroes and Firefly have succeeded (OK so one of those only "succeeded" on DVD) by upping the drama and characterization ante, but in the process have dumped all of the science (turning the sound off in space only gets you so much credit)....and the least said about Trek "science" the better.
Ok, so Futurama has the advantage that when they want to violate the laws of nature to advance the plot they can make a joke out of it...
Speaking of Futurama, a week or two back, the BBC's intellectual quiz show "University Challenge" had a whole round (3 questions) on "Science References in Futurama"!
If I remember the questions were along the lines of:
Which quantum physicist was referred to via a parody of Schroedinger's Cat
What is Bender's serial number, also the smallest number that can be written as the sum of two cubes in two different ways?
What was the symbol, representing the the cardinality of the set of all natural numbers, used in the name of the local cinema?
(I.e. the contestants could conceivably have got the answers without knowing the show - more detail was given for q1 than I can remember - although they didn't do too well and Paxo looked a bit bemused).
I think that this confirms the sad truth that "Futurama" must be the most intellectual TV show of recent years (excluding University Challenge).
Most scientists working in this area see no harmful effects from GM food, yet many in the general public think GM food is going to kill them, cause cancer, or other such nonsense.
Problem is, most members of the general public (at least here in the UK) remember the little debacle a few years back when
most scientists working in the area saw no danger in feeding animals on the bovine equivalent of Soylent Green
Whups, the cows are getting BSE, but most scientists saw no danger of it passing to humans
Ah, perhaps there was some danger of it passing to humans after all, but despite CJD having a long, indeterminate incubation period and there not being any test for it, most scientists see no danger of a mass epidemic of horrible lingering deaths (fingers crossed...)
Consequently, the general public can be forgiven for suspecting that "most scientists" get altogether too much funding from Big Agrobusiness to have an impartial view on the matter. This is rather unfair to "most scientists" and probably more due to politicians not understanding the difference between conclusive scientific proof and risk/benefit analysis (when the only benefit is to the coffers of Big Agrobusiness; the starving third world can't afford GM seed and the overfed first world has no particular need for more efficient agriculture).
How can the moon have only about 1/80 of earth's mass, but have almost 1/6 the gravity? I would think gravity would be linearly proportional to mass.
You're quite right : If you compared the force of the Earth's and Moon's gravity from (say) a million miles away, the earth's would be 80x that of the moon.
but you mean the gravity at the planet's surface and although gravity goes up linearly with mass, it goes down with the square of your distance from the centre of mass. So, the earth has 80 times the mass of the moon but you're about 4 times further away from the centre - so you multiply by 80 and divide by 4x4 => 5 times the gravity (or 6 if you use more accurate figures).
Think about this the next time you watch a Sci-Fi movie in which an interstellar starship gets dragged off course by a black hole: from several A.U. away the gravity will be no different than a large star - all that jazz about wobbly visual effects, sphaghettification, theramin music, mystical visions of hell and time slowing down (or, in a more pedestrian universe, getting torn apart and turned into a brief x-ray fart) only happens when you get much closer to the centre than the surface of any reasonable star would be.
Eliminating the need to print, Kindle makes it easy to take your personal documents with you. (...snip...)
Kindle supports wireless delivery of unprotected Microsoft Word, HTML, TXT, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, PRC and MOBI files.
So its a bit like the iPod situation (speaking as a happy iPod owner who has never spent a penny on iTunes) - the "lock in" is an artifact of DRM - if you can get unprotected content you can use it on the hardware. Now, if I can just find the "Book drive" in my computer so I can rip my book collection... Ah. Problem:-)
Its just a shame that the Kindle looks so fugly - and, unless the guy holding it has very small hands, exactly the wrong size (screen still a bit small for tech/illustrated books but the whole thing looks too big to slip in a pocket c.f. a paperback- if they could make the whole unit about the size of the display).
Correct me if I am wrong, but can't USAians avoid tax by buying from out-of-state?
Anyway, although you may need to ignore the tax to get the full £1=$1 ripoff story, the price differences in question are often far more than the tax.
E.g. Adobe CS 3 Design Standard Full from the Adobe online store: UK Price £895 *excluding* tax, US price $1,199 (About £600)...
Anyway, in the past (certainly in the era of that HD drive I quoted) the "VAT inclusive" rule only applied to "retail" shops and consumer goods Anything vaguely resembling business equipment or commercial supplies was advertised without tax, with maybe a little "*excluding VAT" in the small print. The rationale for this is that most businesses can reclaim any VAT that they pay on materials or equipment.
When the price of solid state drives is competitive with hard disks, I'll pay attention.
Hah. When I were a lad you could get a 7 MEGABYTE Winchester Hard Disk for a mere £3500 (what, about $5000?). (Source, 1981 copy of Personal Computer World).
That's about £10k in modern money (according to this calculator - a.k.a. $20k dollars (or $10k at Microsoft/Adobe screw-the-Brits rates).
Now, if you think that 1981 was, like, ancient history then GET OFF MY LAWN! If the usual growth rate applies, 1TB solid state drives will be cheap and plentiful by the time you get round to repainting your house.
I'm sure that this has probably shown up in other OLPC arguments, but is this project really what the Third World needs? I would imagine that it is far more important to get essentials such as medicine, clean water, food, and adequate shelter before we start worrying about something like this.
As an old and wise person once said:
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish, and he can starve because while he's been overfishing the lake to exhaustion to supply Kwik-E-Mart, nobody has planted any rice.
(Or something like that)
Perhaps if he'd had a better education he'd have set up a local fisherman's co-operative, negotiated a better deal with Kwik-E-Mart and ensured that the profits from fishing were re-invested in local infrastructure. Maybe playing some well-designed ecological simulation games on his OLPC or download some good books on sustainable economics via the clever peer-to-peer mesh network would do this trick. On the other hand, maybe building a proper school with a roof to keep the books dry would also work.
There was a comment on the OLPC site at one stage about the back-lit display possibly being the first electric light some of the customers had seen. I'm afraid I had an instant image of an OLPC hanging from the roof of a tent casting a wam glow over a family reading books...
Electric engine: (locate) -> (extract) -> (transport to refinery) -> (refine) -> (transport to power station) -> Chemical energy-> heat -> mechanical energy -> electrical energy -> (step up transformer) -> (power line) -> (step down transformer) -> (charger) -> chemical energy (in the battery) -> electrical energy -> mechanical energy.
OK if we're talking about coal "refine" may just be "grid off the dirt and smash into pieces of the appropriate size" but it still has to be done, and coal doesn't run along pipelines nicely so it has to be carted around in ships, trains and trucks - especially if you want the nice low-sulphur coal that doesn't occur locally.
The whole point is that oil, coal, nuclear, solar etc. are energy sources (i.e. the energy comes from outside of the thin layer of air and dirt that comprises our ecosystem) whereas electricity is just a way of moving around energy from other sources.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not banging the drum for oil here. I'm not even saying (without doing a lot of research) that "indirectly coal fired" electric cars won't be a few percent more energy efficient than gas engines - but the sort of massive, order-of-magnitude savings needed to actually stay ahead of growth seem implausible.
The meme that electric cars somehow get their energy from "electricity" is a dangerous one, and the G.P. question is very, very important. If you're worried about global warming then the only way electric cars will make a significant difference is in conjunction with nuclear power generation (discuss!)
Slashdot Mirror
You don't think that they're in it just for the karma do you?
None of them stands to lose out if an AMD-powered machine becomes the de-facto standard in the developing world. Intel does - bigtime.
Google and Red Hat are arch-rivals of Microsoft and stand to benefit if Linux becomes the de-facto standard in the developing world. Intel owes a lot of its success to Windows' dependence on x86 processors, but Linux is pathologically multi-platform and opens the door to competition from ARM, PowerPC et. al.
Now, I'm not condoning what Intel has (allegedly) done - but it beggars belief that the OLPC people expected Intel to behave like boy scouts in the face of such a conflict of interests.
The OLPC project is a massive threat to the Intel/Microsoft near-monopoly, and like it or not OLPC are going to have to raise their hardball game to make it work.
Brilliant that, isn't it - lets repeat the same inane security announcements every 30 seconds so that everybody is conditioned to ignore the tannoy should we have anything important to announce.
No - its all a conspiracy by the manufacturers of bottled water and 1l zip-lock plastic bags.
Why are people even making this comparison?
If you want to improve education and computer literacy in your developing country , have your education ministry order a million OLPCs which have been purpose designed with lots of innovative features for that role.
If you want a cheap kids computer, or an internet terminal for the spare room, something a bit bigger than a PDA to take to meetings, or something to mess around with Linux on - buy an eee PC. You'll need to recharge it frequently, you'll need a wired or wi-fi internet connection handy, and you won't be able to read the screen in the sub-Saharan sun, but, unlike the OLPC, you can actually buy one! (OK, theres the the G1G1 scheme - its a grand idea but only a limited-time offer and not available outside North America so its not a valid comparison),
Except that the letter in TFA completely fails to mention whether the student was told to use (specifically) IE or if he "mouthed off". Since this letter was apparently written by the teacher in order to record and justify the punishment, I think we the Jury are justified in assuming that if the student had been foul-mouthed or abusive then this would have been mentioned.
The letter also fails to mention whether the teacher gave any sort of civil reply to the student's explanation or even looked to see whether the student actually was working on the assignment. If you treat kids with contempt then you will reap what you sow. Enforcing stupid, unjustifiable rules on people doesn't teach respect for authority, it teaches contempt and shows them how to behave should they find themselves in a position of authority.
Getting the name of the offending program wrong on the formal punishment letter is a pretty poor show, too. You don't expect a 100-page legal document, but its reasonable that all the salient points should be present and correct.
UNLESS of course the program really was something called "foxfire.exe" (sic - see TFA) - probably malware or a "stealthed" game - in which case the teacher is totally exonerated and the little brat should get a damned good flog^H^H^H^H counselling - if only to make sure that next time he uses "iexplode.exe" or "msorifice.exe".
I'm glad I'm not the only one. CSS is OK as a replacement for the FONT tag, but beyond that it is a complete mess that fails to do what it says on the tin - since the HTML inevitably has to be modified to achieve any significant layout change (pick up a CSS cookbook and look at the examples - they're as much about where you put the div/class/id tags in the HTML as writing the CSS). In non-trivial cases all it really does is keep the layout and content in separate files - which is not the same as making them independent. You get the impression that the whole thing was invented in the abstract and cast in stone by a committee before anyone actually tried to use it to lay out a website.
Its too easy to blame the whole thing on Microsoft - the browser differences are a big part of the problem but they're not the whole of it. The MS interpretation of the box model was probably more sensible than the standard...
First Global Warming...
Then NASA finding mysterious glowing lights over the North pole...
Now the BBC reports finding an ancient polar bear's jawbone on Svalbard...
Is there a very subtle marketing campaign going on, or should God not be starting any long books?
These devices aren't going to directly hit MS's products - what they could do is cost them mindshare and threaten the future of their monopoly.
Products like the eeePC occupy a precarious niche just below cheap "regular" laptops - put a bigger screen and a CD drive on them and there'll be a cheaper Dell laptop - so while they may be successful for their manufacturers they're not going to make a big dent in PC sales. People will buy them as "extra" machines for kids or as spare "take anywhere" machines (don't buy a £2000 ultra-portable - buy a £1000 desktop or large screen laptop plus an eeePC for when you don't need the power or don't want to risk carrying your main machine). But if they find that, out-of-the-box, they can connect to web and EMAIL and open most of their documents with these things called "Firefox", "Thunderbird" and "Open Office" then they might have their eyes opened to other possibilities.
Remember, MS's real monopoly is Office, not Windows. How many lUsers have you met who, when asked what version of windows they are running, respond with their Office version? However, I was in a school (in England) recently and saw a big (homemade) poster on the wall saying "Haven't got MS Office at home? Have you tried the free alternative from www.OpenOffice.org?" - so there is hope for the world.
If I were MS right now I'd be busily developing something like "Vista Lite Edition" that could be sold on a memory stick alongside eeePCs and the like for about $25, probably including a stripped down office. ISTR they did do something similar in some countries but it was perceived as "Windows - crippled edition". It might be an easier sell if it was linked to built-to-a-price "appropriate technology" hardware.
Someone pays to maintain whatever website you download the source from - why should they be obliged to provide a service to "your" paying customers?
Plus, you're missing a major strategic aim of the GPL - it guarantees that the source code of useful products is always available from a multitude of sources and can't easily be "lost".
Get real - we're talking about Verizon sticking a .zip file on a website and adding a sentence to the inevitable legal bumf that comes with the product saying "under the terms of the GPL source is available from our website or we'll send you a CD on request for $x" (where $x can be a "reasonable amount" to cover the costs of writing a CD-R and sticking it in the post). In return they get to distribute a valuable bit of software without paying license fees and access to the source code without NDA or other rubbish.
Compared to the other silly, onerous and expensive hoops businesses have to jump through these days, that sounds like a good deal.
(a) They don't actually have to include the source code with every router - just a written offer to supply the source code on demand. (I assume that the references to "including the source code" are journalistic imprecision or its gonna be a very short lawsuit).
(b) Users may also be developers who wish study the source code or to use or modify the software in other systems - as is their right under the GPL.
Anyway, most such products ship with a CD for plug-n-drool installation so how hard can it be to include a few source files?
Well, as the slashdot sig goes, There are 10 types of mathematician - those that understand binary and those that don't.
Meanwhile, you're not really suggesting that the media can't make any sort of judgement distinguish between genuine areas of scientific disagreement and fringe quackery, are you? Gosh, that's almost like suggesting that managers and politicians with an Arts/Classics/Legal/Business background who know squat about science can't make informed decisions about scientific and technical issues... and that can't be true!
Anyway, the BBC have a remit to cater for a diverse audience, and portraying people who actually know what they are talking about and can back it up with evidence amounts to unfair discrimination against stupid people - and where would TV be if it alienated stupid people?
...then they will be quite used to many current sites not working properly! I think we already established that these hypothetical people are using Internet Explorer anyway. If the server detects that the browser supports XML+Stylesheet then it sends XML+Stylesheet.
Most modern browsers support CSS-styled XML anyway - the problem is that CSS is so tricky to use (properly), relies on lots of work arounds and can't re-order or re-nest elements very well.
But, on past performance, IE will then implement a broken version of HTML 5 and the problem will just get worse.
So, instead of producing yet another standard that browser producers will screw up, produce an XML+Stylesheet rendering web app in one or more of AJAX/Java/Flash/ActiveX that runs in the browser and renders pages properly...
Without breaking Slashdot tradition and reading TFA, why not:
Sorry, I did mean to put quotes around "most scientists" in each of those sentences - sadly, these hypothetical "most scientists" are heavily discredited in the public eye and I did go on to point out that the real problem was politicians "cherry picking" the uncertainties.
That's also a good example of my point about scientific proof vs. risk analysis - there's more than enough evidence to justify "doing something" about it on a risk analysis basis, but until the complete theory of Global Warming (not just the basic greenhouse theory) has all the 'i's dotted and the 't's crossed and is ready to take its place alongside F=ma and E=mc^2 the skeptics will always be able to cry "this has not been proven".
Rightly or wrongly, you won't convince the public and politicians with a "scientific consesnsus" argument any more. Unfortunately, the media is full of feuding "scientists" and very few people are saying "Look - if the worst predictions are correct and we do nothing, we all die. If we do something and the predictions are wrong then OPEC loses some money, we end up with cleaner cities, and our grandchildren get left with some coal and oil to make useful stuff from. Which would you rather?"
...and, yes, that's a loaded question. So?
No, its not Futurama that's sad. Futurama deserves to be very happy. Its all those other shows (and that includes the CSI genre as well as SF) with less intelligent references to science (and more glaring scientific errors) in an entire season than Futurama has in 25 minutes that are sad. SF shows like BSG, Heroes and Firefly have succeeded (OK so one of those only "succeeded" on DVD) by upping the drama and characterization ante, but in the process have dumped all of the science (turning the sound off in space only gets you so much credit). ...and the least said about Trek "science" the better.
Ok, so Futurama has the advantage that when they want to violate the laws of nature to advance the plot they can make a joke out of it...
There was also "Old Fortran" and Kleiner (in a very odd-shaped bottle) :-)
Speaking of Futurama, a week or two back, the BBC's intellectual quiz show "University Challenge" had a whole round (3 questions) on "Science References in Futurama"!
If I remember the questions were along the lines of:
(I.e. the contestants could conceivably have got the answers without knowing the show - more detail was given for q1 than I can remember - although they didn't do too well and Paxo looked a bit bemused).
I think that this confirms the sad truth that "Futurama" must be the most intellectual TV show of recent years (excluding University Challenge).
Problem is, most members of the general public (at least here in the UK) remember the little debacle a few years back when
Consequently, the general public can be forgiven for suspecting that "most scientists" get altogether too much funding from Big Agrobusiness to have an impartial view on the matter. This is rather unfair to "most scientists" and probably more due to politicians not understanding the difference between conclusive scientific proof and risk/benefit analysis (when the only benefit is to the coffers of Big Agrobusiness; the starving third world can't afford GM seed and the overfed first world has no particular need for more efficient agriculture).
What!? and ruin all those scare-stories about "radiation" from mobile phone masts and WiFi boiling your brain? :-)
You're quite right : If you compared the force of the Earth's and Moon's gravity from (say) a million miles away, the earth's would be 80x that of the moon.
but you mean the gravity at the planet's surface and although gravity goes up linearly with mass, it goes down with the square of your distance from the centre of mass. So, the earth has 80 times the mass of the moon but you're about 4 times further away from the centre - so you multiply by 80 and divide by 4x4 => 5 times the gravity (or 6 if you use more accurate figures).
Think about this the next time you watch a Sci-Fi movie in which an interstellar starship gets dragged off course by a black hole: from several A.U. away the gravity will be no different than a large star - all that jazz about wobbly visual effects, sphaghettification, theramin music, mystical visions of hell and time slowing down (or, in a more pedestrian universe, getting torn apart and turned into a brief x-ray fart) only happens when you get much closer to the centre than the surface of any reasonable star would be.
Well - from the Amazon product page:
So its a bit like the iPod situation (speaking as a happy iPod owner who has never spent a penny on iTunes) - the "lock in" is an artifact of DRM - if you can get unprotected content you can use it on the hardware. Now, if I can just find the "Book drive" in my computer so I can rip my book collection... Ah. Problem :-)
Its just a shame that the Kindle looks so fugly - and, unless the guy holding it has very small hands, exactly the wrong size (screen still a bit small for tech/illustrated books but the whole thing looks too big to slip in a pocket c.f. a paperback- if they could make the whole unit about the size of the display).
Correct me if I am wrong, but can't USAians avoid tax by buying from out-of-state?
Anyway, although you may need to ignore the tax to get the full £1=$1 ripoff story, the price differences in question are often far more than the tax.
E.g. Adobe CS 3 Design Standard Full from the Adobe online store: UK Price £895 *excluding* tax, US price $1,199 (About £600)...
Anyway, in the past (certainly in the era of that HD drive I quoted) the "VAT inclusive" rule only applied to "retail" shops and consumer goods Anything vaguely resembling business equipment or commercial supplies was advertised without tax, with maybe a little "*excluding VAT" in the small print. The rationale for this is that most businesses can reclaim any VAT that they pay on materials or equipment.
Hah. When I were a lad you could get a 7 MEGABYTE Winchester Hard Disk for a mere £3500 (what, about $5000?). (Source, 1981 copy of Personal Computer World).
That's about £10k in modern money (according to this calculator - a.k.a. $20k dollars (or $10k at Microsoft/Adobe screw-the-Brits rates).
Now, if you think that 1981 was, like, ancient history then GET OFF MY LAWN! If the usual growth rate applies, 1TB solid state drives will be cheap and plentiful by the time you get round to repainting your house.
As an old and wise person once said:
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish, and he can starve because while he's been overfishing the lake to exhaustion to supply Kwik-E-Mart, nobody has planted any rice.
(Or something like that)
Perhaps if he'd had a better education he'd have set up a local fisherman's co-operative, negotiated a better deal with Kwik-E-Mart and ensured that the profits from fishing were re-invested in local infrastructure. Maybe playing some well-designed ecological simulation games on his OLPC or download some good books on sustainable economics via the clever peer-to-peer mesh network would do this trick. On the other hand, maybe building a proper school with a roof to keep the books dry would also work.
There was a comment on the OLPC site at one stage about the back-lit display possibly being the first electric light some of the customers had seen. I'm afraid I had an instant image of an OLPC hanging from the roof of a tent casting a wam glow over a family reading books...
Then the second bit becomes:
Electric engine: (locate) -> (extract) -> (transport to refinery) -> (refine) -> (transport to power station) -> Chemical energy-> heat -> mechanical energy -> electrical energy -> (step up transformer) -> (power line) -> (step down transformer) -> (charger) -> chemical energy (in the battery) -> electrical energy -> mechanical energy.
OK if we're talking about coal "refine" may just be "grid off the dirt and smash into pieces of the appropriate size" but it still has to be done, and coal doesn't run along pipelines nicely so it has to be carted around in ships, trains and trucks - especially if you want the nice low-sulphur coal that doesn't occur locally.
The whole point is that oil, coal, nuclear, solar etc. are energy sources (i.e. the energy comes from outside of the thin layer of air and dirt that comprises our ecosystem) whereas electricity is just a way of moving around energy from other sources.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not banging the drum for oil here. I'm not even saying (without doing a lot of research) that "indirectly coal fired" electric cars won't be a few percent more energy efficient than gas engines - but the sort of massive, order-of-magnitude savings needed to actually stay ahead of growth seem implausible.
The meme that electric cars somehow get their energy from "electricity" is a dangerous one, and the G.P. question is very, very important. If you're worried about global warming then the only way electric cars will make a significant difference is in conjunction with nuclear power generation (discuss!)