You are correct that climate is easier predict than weather, but your assertion that climate is the main influence on hurricane intensity is not entirely accurate. The study ran models in an idealized environment. The models left out possible external influences such as wind shear that can have serious effects on the strength of a hurricane.
A more accurate way of putting it would be that the climate changes increase the maximum possible strength of a hurricane or that a hurricane given favorable external influences will be more powerful. Hurricane intensity is as sensitive to immediate weather conditions as frequency. In fact, statistical surveys over the past century suggest that every hurricane that forms has an equal chance of being any intensity. It's the external factors that determine how strong it can get.
Yeah, but weather occurs almost entirely in the first 15km of atmosphere. There's another 35km just to get to the ozone layer. Space has nothing to do with it.
"Increasing the overall thermal energy of the planet can only make them more probable.
"
Not exactly. Hurricanes are fueled by convection so they need warm ocean surface temperatures and considerably cooler temperatures aloft. Warmer temperatures aloft don't support convection as well and will either lead to weaker or fewer storms. Also, during years of El Nino warm conditions in the Pacific, the upper level wind shear is less favorable for hurricane formation. All this shows is that weather is much more complicated than just "more thermal energy = more hurricanes".
Check out this faq for tons of info on hurricanes and tropical cyclone prediction.
since they use shots you totally can't get from playing the game
If you're talking about the different colored marines in a warthog, I'm pretty sure that was just clever editing. This is Microsoft we're talking about. I seriously doubt they let them have any part of the Halo engine or source. You can pull off some pretty slick tricks with creative editing too; movie makers have been doing it for almost a century now. Having digital media just makes it easier.
Certainly there's a differnece between a news article and an analysis show. Everyone loves to point at O'Reilly and say, "His opinions affect the things he says! Heresy!" Give me a break. Just because O'Reilly's comentary tends more to the right than, say, Chris Matthews on MSNBC the left lables him and the rest of Fox News as biased.
Sure, anyone who ONLY watched Bill O'Reilly for news would get a view that aligns well with Bill O'Reilly's. The same is equally true for any other news personality. If a comentator is going to provide analisys it's practically impossible for them to keep their own opinions from influencing their analisys. One of the reasons O'Reilly is rated highly isn't because of the way he reports news, it's because his analysis sounds like common sense to a lot of people. If you don't agree with it, watch something else. That's kind of the whole point of the first ammendment right?
The Fox story even talks about the issue the original post was pointing out. The BBC piece just mentions it then goes into a comparison of the different voting methods the country uses.
Maybe if you actually watched Fox News for once instead of blindly believing its opponents' propaganda you could come up with a better criticism.
Really this shouldn't be a surprise. In a fair/close fight all parties take their blows. To support real free trade, you need to be one cold hearted bastard and supremely confident in the security of your job and the ability of your country to make a better product.
Since most people/countries aren't in that position, we have pseudo-free trade: every country for itself, whoever fights dirtiest wins. How else do China and India maintain their positions?
The US's problem is this: to be viable in the knock down, drag out that is foreign trade, you have to get down in the dirt with the rest of them. The tactics that will hurt countries like India and China aren't very desireable and will inevitably hurt the US economy in the short run since they all involve making the foreign labor sources (and labor in general) more expensive. It's not easy to explain to the voting public that such moves are for its own good.
Under no circumstances should the US enter into a bilateral treaty with North Korea. The treaty you describe would give North Korea a free pass to invade South Korea or lob missiles at Japan with the knowledge that the US has said, "If you don't attack us, we won't attack you."
Besides, Clinton tried offering North Korea aid in exchange for not pursuing nuclear weapons. Guess what, they did anyway. Giving in again would only prove that all Kim Jong-il has to do to get whatever he wants is threaten to develop nukes.
If a diplomatic solution is possible, it has to involve the whole region. That's why the US flat out refused bilateral talks.
What happened to good, old fashioned "don't walk down the dark alley alone with nobody watching?"
That's fine most of the time, but sometimes you really don't have a choice. At some point you will be walking bact to the dorm from the library or the CS lab at 3AM and you'll have to pass through some shady areas, even on campus. There's really no way around it on urban campuses like mine in the middle of Atlanta, GA.
Thinking about and planning for what you would do in a dangerous situation isn't a bad thing. The odds of being in a major car accident are pretty low, but you still wear your seatbelt and buy a car with airbags if you can. Sure some people worry excessively, but a little paranoia can be a good thing.
There's nothing stopping developers from creating a third party gaming network for XBox either since they alreadydid.
Both of those services are free in some form, work with games from before XBox Live! (Halo anyone?), and only require a computer, a hub and a network connection.
I don't see how legality can possibly be an issue since all they do is take an XBox's existing LAN support and transmit it over the Internet. Maybe no third party developers make network apps for the Cube because the Cube doesn't come with network support?
(I am not an Economist) The Federal Reserve "creates" (or "destroys") money by regulating how much money a bank is required to keep on hand. If a bank only has to keep 10% of its deposits on hand, then the rest of the money can be loaned out. The person who deposited the money doesn't lose their money and the money that is loaned out is still real so the bank has created money. In reality the bank didn't print up new dollar bills and hand them out, they are just allowing better use of the money that is in circulation. When the federal reserve changes the Reserve Rate (percent of deposits the bank has to hold) they increase or decrease the amount of money in circulation. Changes to the reserve rate are pretty rare and are the Fed's overkill method of controlling the economy.
The Fed also makes overnight loans to banks when they have a shortfall of cash on hand. The rate of these loans is the discount rate that is always talked about in the news. This rate is also used by individual banks to set the rates of their loans. Changing the discount rate has the effect of encouraging banks to keep more or less cash on hand and changes the "cost" of money. Setting interests rates are the prefered method of the Fed to control things like inflation or deflation.
I've been very happy with my Thinkpad R40. It has a 1.4 GHz Pentium M. As long as I use low power settings I usually get about 6 hours of life. I've heard of better, but they're usually ultraportables with tiny screens.
One problem, you won't be gaming or doing anything really CPU intensive if you want to save power. On power conserving settings, the processor runs much slower than the normal speed and the screen is not as bright, but that's going to be the case for any laptop to get the battery life it claims.
Because the human pilot still does much of the work of balancing the exoskeleton. The skeleton just augments their abilities so it can be relatively "dumb". The engineers working on ASIMO have made progress in bipedal robots, but it's still not even as agile as a human in armor.
You also have the problem of how do you effectively control a robot that complex remotely. It would almost take a whole Virtual Reality and Motion Capture set up to do it efficiently.
No, it's not impressive. It's typical Microsoft business tactics and precisely the reason Sony and Nintendo should be wary. Microsoft already has the resources and ambition to become the proverbial 800 pound gorilla in any market they enter. The only variables are how the competition responds and whether they can make a viable product.
Microsoft took zero market share pre-XBox, threw ridiculous amounts of capital at the task, and came out with a viable contender. A company like Microsoft can afford to take a long outlook on the market and is probably better off not going all or nothing on their first shot. Sony shouldn't dismiss MS, they should take the XBox as even greater incentive to make the PS3 the best product possible. In the short run at least, this kind of competition is highly beneficial to the average end user.
Saying "one large monopoly against another" completely defies the definition of Monopoly. What you describe is an Oligopoly and is a non-ideal form of competition. As a previous poster pointed out, an ideally competitive market has a large number of producers and consumers which allows the buyers to determine the price of goods. In an oligopoly each producer has a large enough market share to exert control over the market. This is what lets Microsoft have such an effect on the market. They can depress the market price by selling at less than cost. In the short run this is good for consumers.
Microsoft, however, has no intention of doing what's good for consumers. Their goal is to eventually force Sony to sell bellow cost and make the market un-profitable for them. Whether this is feasible depends on more than simple economics so it is by no means a foregone conclusion. The best case for consumers would be to have numerous, interoperable choices in consoles so the number of producers isn't limited to a select few. The one sure thing is that Microsoft won't start any movements in that direction.
It's already starting. When I visited my (non-techie) parents last week both of them had heard news on the TV or radio about the IE exploit. My dad actually asked me to install Firefox because the story he heard had mentioned it was safer than IE. In a perfect world the mainstream media would keep this up and give Microsoft a real reason to write better code.
Unfortunately we live in the real world. If Micorsoft kept getting large amounts of bad press every time it announced a new exploit it would try even harder to hide the flaws instead of releasing a fix.
I'm a college student and I use a TV tuner exclusively. Since I have to fit everything I own into a Nissan Sentra every other semester I can't carry extra hardware arround. My tuner lets me use a high quality LCD as both my Monitor and my TV. It also has the added benefit of letting me use my computer as a PVR (like TiVo) without paying a subscription fee. The quality is equal to a TV of similar size and it doesn't take up anywhere near the room of a standard TV.
And there is the real problem with ourtsourcing. If you send all the entry level jobs to India, in 20 years when the Veteran American coder retires, where are you going find someone experienced enough to replace him?
If Microsoft would take a release to spend on fixing bugs and performace issues instead of adding more "features" to convince Joe user he needs a new machine, people would start getting better use out of their processors. Instead MS decides to add these "features" on top of its already busted code sapping performance and making their existing problems harder to fix.
Want to see for yourself? Try running Windows 98 and 98 era software on a current machine, if you can get past the constant crashes, the performance will seem faster than current software on XP on the same machine.
Sinister applications aside, targeting a magazine for a specific reader could be pretty good idea. How many magazines do you get that you actually read cover to cover? Personally, I would appreciate a magazine that could leave out the sections I never read and give me the content I'm interested in.
Picture a news magazine that could focus on current events in a reader's area along with the national news or leave out the style section for someone who couldn't care less.
Not in the forums I'm looking at. For many people speed isn't as important as having a computer that is always on, always convenient, and doesn't drown out every other sound in a room. Take, for example, home theater PCs. A good HTPC would have tons of diskspace, quality TV in and out, and a processor that isn't going to die trying to keep up with the broadcast. If you want to keep all that cool (and therefore stable) you need serious cooling without having the roar of the fans drown out your sound system.
How the people the government employs are paid is irrelevant. The comment was meant to illustrate that, when it wants to, the goverrnment can do some pretty good things. Contracting work out just means they require an expertise that can not be paid for at less than a Congressman's salary.
Pathetic Star Wars Fanboy Mode = ON
IIRC in the Star Wars Extended Universe books Kessel is a planetary system that is situated near a black hole. The Kessel run is the route to this planet that has to navigate around this black hole. A faster ship has the ability to plot a course closer to the black hole without being pulled in.
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct that climate is easier predict than weather, but your assertion that climate is the main influence on hurricane intensity is not entirely accurate. The study ran models in an idealized environment. The models left out possible external influences such as wind shear that can have serious effects on the strength of a hurricane.
A more accurate way of putting it would be that the climate changes increase the maximum possible strength of a hurricane or that a hurricane given favorable external influences will be more powerful. Hurricane intensity is as sensitive to immediate weather conditions as frequency. In fact, statistical surveys over the past century suggest that every hurricane that forms has an equal chance of being any intensity. It's the external factors that determine how strong it can get.
Yeah, but weather occurs almost entirely in the first 15km of atmosphere. There's another 35km just to get to the ozone layer. Space has nothing to do with it.
"Increasing the overall thermal energy of the planet can only make them more probable. "
Not exactly. Hurricanes are fueled by convection so they need warm ocean surface temperatures and considerably cooler temperatures aloft. Warmer temperatures aloft don't support convection as well and will either lead to weaker or fewer storms. Also, during years of El Nino warm conditions in the Pacific, the upper level wind shear is less favorable for hurricane formation. All this shows is that weather is much more complicated than just "more thermal energy = more hurricanes".
Check out this faq for tons of info on hurricanes and tropical cyclone prediction.
Certainly there's a differnece between a news article and an analysis show. Everyone loves to point at O'Reilly and say, "His opinions affect the things he says! Heresy!" Give me a break. Just because O'Reilly's comentary tends more to the right than, say, Chris Matthews on MSNBC the left lables him and the rest of Fox News as biased.
Sure, anyone who ONLY watched Bill O'Reilly for news would get a view that aligns well with Bill O'Reilly's. The same is equally true for any other news personality. If a comentator is going to provide analisys it's practically impossible for them to keep their own opinions from influencing their analisys. One of the reasons O'Reilly is rated highly isn't because of the way he reports news, it's because his analysis sounds like common sense to a lot of people. If you don't agree with it, watch something else. That's kind of the whole point of the first ammendment right?
The Fox story even talks about the issue the original post was pointing out. The BBC piece just mentions it then goes into a comparison of the different voting methods the country uses.
Maybe if you actually watched Fox News for once instead of blindly believing its opponents' propaganda you could come up with a better criticism.
Really this shouldn't be a surprise. In a fair/close fight all parties take their blows. To support real free trade, you need to be one cold hearted bastard and supremely confident in the security of your job and the ability of your country to make a better product.
Since most people/countries aren't in that position, we have pseudo-free trade: every country for itself, whoever fights dirtiest wins. How else do China and India maintain their positions?
The US's problem is this: to be viable in the knock down, drag out that is foreign trade, you have to get down in the dirt with the rest of them. The tactics that will hurt countries like India and China aren't very desireable and will inevitably hurt the US economy in the short run since they all involve making the foreign labor sources (and labor in general) more expensive. It's not easy to explain to the voting public that such moves are for its own good.
Under no circumstances should the US enter into a bilateral treaty with North Korea. The treaty you describe would give North Korea a free pass to invade South Korea or lob missiles at Japan with the knowledge that the US has said, "If you don't attack us, we won't attack you."
Besides, Clinton tried offering North Korea aid in exchange for not pursuing nuclear weapons. Guess what, they did anyway. Giving in again would only prove that all Kim Jong-il has to do to get whatever he wants is threaten to develop nukes.
If a diplomatic solution is possible, it has to involve the whole region. That's why the US flat out refused bilateral talks.
Thinking about and planning for what you would do in a dangerous situation isn't a bad thing. The odds of being in a major car accident are pretty low, but you still wear your seatbelt and buy a car with airbags if you can. Sure some people worry excessively, but a little paranoia can be a good thing.
There's nothing stopping developers from creating a third party gaming network for XBox either since they already did.
Both of those services are free in some form, work with games from before XBox Live! (Halo anyone?), and only require a computer, a hub and a network connection.
I don't see how legality can possibly be an issue since all they do is take an XBox's existing LAN support and transmit it over the Internet. Maybe no third party developers make network apps for the Cube because the Cube doesn't come with network support?
(I am not an Economist)
The Federal Reserve "creates" (or "destroys") money by regulating how much money a bank is required to keep on hand. If a bank only has to keep 10% of its deposits on hand, then the rest of the money can be loaned out. The person who deposited the money doesn't lose their money and the money that is loaned out is still real so the bank has created money. In reality the bank didn't print up new dollar bills and hand them out, they are just allowing better use of the money that is in circulation. When the federal reserve changes the Reserve Rate (percent of deposits the bank has to hold) they increase or decrease the amount of money in circulation. Changes to the reserve rate are pretty rare and are the Fed's overkill method of controlling the economy.
The Fed also makes overnight loans to banks when they have a shortfall of cash on hand. The rate of these loans is the discount rate that is always talked about in the news. This rate is also used by individual banks to set the rates of their loans. Changing the discount rate has the effect of encouraging banks to keep more or less cash on hand and changes the "cost" of money. Setting interests rates are the prefered method of the Fed to control things like inflation or deflation.
I've been very happy with my Thinkpad R40. It has a 1.4 GHz Pentium M. As long as I use low power settings I usually get about 6 hours of life. I've heard of better, but they're usually ultraportables with tiny screens.
One problem, you won't be gaming or doing anything really CPU intensive if you want to save power. On power conserving settings, the processor runs much slower than the normal speed and the screen is not as bright, but that's going to be the case for any laptop to get the battery life it claims.
Because the human pilot still does much of the work of balancing the exoskeleton. The skeleton just augments their abilities so it can be relatively "dumb". The engineers working on ASIMO have made progress in bipedal robots, but it's still not even as agile as a human in armor.
You also have the problem of how do you effectively control a robot that complex remotely. It would almost take a whole Virtual Reality and Motion Capture set up to do it efficiently.
No, it's not impressive. It's typical Microsoft business tactics and precisely the reason Sony and Nintendo should be wary. Microsoft already has the resources and ambition to become the proverbial 800 pound gorilla in any market they enter. The only variables are how the competition responds and whether they can make a viable product.
Microsoft took zero market share pre-XBox, threw ridiculous amounts of capital at the task, and came out with a viable contender. A company like Microsoft can afford to take a long outlook on the market and is probably better off not going all or nothing on their first shot. Sony shouldn't dismiss MS, they should take the XBox as even greater incentive to make the PS3 the best product possible. In the short run at least, this kind of competition is highly beneficial to the average end user.
Saying "one large monopoly against another" completely defies the definition of Monopoly. What you describe is an Oligopoly and is a non-ideal form of competition. As a previous poster pointed out, an ideally competitive market has a large number of producers and consumers which allows the buyers to determine the price of goods. In an oligopoly each producer has a large enough market share to exert control over the market. This is what lets Microsoft have such an effect on the market. They can depress the market price by selling at less than cost. In the short run this is good for consumers.
Microsoft, however, has no intention of doing what's good for consumers. Their goal is to eventually force Sony to sell bellow cost and make the market un-profitable for them. Whether this is feasible depends on more than simple economics so it is by no means a foregone conclusion. The best case for consumers would be to have numerous, interoperable choices in consoles so the number of producers isn't limited to a select few. The one sure thing is that Microsoft won't start any movements in that direction.
It's already starting. When I visited my (non-techie) parents last week both of them had heard news on the TV or radio about the IE exploit. My dad actually asked me to install Firefox because the story he heard had mentioned it was safer than IE. In a perfect world the mainstream media would keep this up and give Microsoft a real reason to write better code.
Unfortunately we live in the real world. If Micorsoft kept getting large amounts of bad press every time it announced a new exploit it would try even harder to hide the flaws instead of releasing a fix.
But Iraq didn't choose to outsource its domain.
.iq because Iraq didn't want any domain. When ICANN made the decision Saddam Hussein was not allowing any internet access in Iraq.
This company got
I'm a college student and I use a TV tuner exclusively. Since I have to fit everything I own into a Nissan Sentra every other semester I can't carry extra hardware arround. My tuner lets me use a high quality LCD as both my Monitor and my TV. It also has the added benefit of letting me use my computer as a PVR (like TiVo) without paying a subscription fee. The quality is equal to a TV of similar size and it doesn't take up anywhere near the room of a standard TV.
And there is the real problem with ourtsourcing. If you send all the entry level jobs to India, in 20 years when the Veteran American coder retires, where are you going find someone experienced enough to replace him?
Obligatory MS Bashing...
If Microsoft would take a release to spend on fixing bugs and performace issues instead of adding more "features" to convince Joe user he needs a new machine, people would start getting better use out of their processors. Instead MS decides to add these "features" on top of its already busted code sapping performance and making their existing problems harder to fix.
Want to see for yourself? Try running Windows 98 and 98 era software on a current machine, if you can get past the constant crashes, the performance will seem faster than current software on XP on the same machine.
Sinister applications aside, targeting a magazine for a specific reader could be pretty good idea. How many magazines do you get that you actually read cover to cover? Personally, I would appreciate a magazine that could leave out the sections I never read and give me the content I'm interested in.
Picture a news magazine that could focus on current events in a reader's area along with the national news or leave out the style section for someone who couldn't care less.
Not in the forums I'm looking at. For many people speed isn't as important as having a computer that is always on, always convenient, and doesn't drown out every other sound in a room. Take, for example, home theater PCs. A good HTPC would have tons of diskspace, quality TV in and out, and a processor that isn't going to die trying to keep up with the broadcast. If you want to keep all that cool (and therefore stable) you need serious cooling without having the roar of the fans drown out your sound system.
How the people the government employs are paid is irrelevant. The comment was meant to illustrate that, when it wants to, the goverrnment can do some pretty good things. Contracting work out just means they require an expertise that can not be paid for at less than a Congressman's salary.
Pathetic Star Wars Fanboy Mode = ON IIRC in the Star Wars Extended Universe books Kessel is a planetary system that is situated near a black hole. The Kessel run is the route to this planet that has to navigate around this black hole. A faster ship has the ability to plot a course closer to the black hole without being pulled in.