Any work of art (or any physical object) will be lost at some point. Maybe not today, maybe not this century, but for any artwork, at some point, the circumstances will will collude to lose it it some manner. Increasing the efforts to counteract that may delay the inevitable, but will not prevent it.
So, what do you do? Encase the piece in extreme layers of security to stave off its inevitable dissolution - but then also greatly hinder any real appreciation of the work by spectators? It's not easy to enter a contemplative frame of mind facing a painting at four or five meters, through ten cm of safety glass and surrounded by armed guards.
Or, we accept its eventual destruction or loss as inevitable, relax the measures a bit, and let people appreciate it - _really_ appreciate it, up close and undisturbed - while it lasts.
If I'd been a sappy touchy-feely type, I'd made a comment about how that is a lesson for life as well, but I'm not, so I won't.
Re:Nerds demand real results?
on
Upgrade Your Dog
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Well the author probably did concentrate on substance - abuse thereof, to be sure, but substance nevertheless.
"Some people have even told me that have a low usser number.."
Well, that's all depending on the perspectve...
On Topic: Your complaint on choice boils down to the same question as when people decry the existence of mutliple desktop environment projects - who is supposed to enforce anything?
Ok, assue that we have too many distros, and that it is hurting the community in some unsepcified way. How do you suggest reducing the number? You can assume that people building on, or using, any given distro aren't willing to volontarily dump their work just because someone says so. So how, then?
And once you've accomplished your purge, how do you propose avoiding a couple hundred new distro projects popping up like mushrooms after rain?
Of course, since the nature of the data will be very different depending on what kind of image sensor you have, the format will either be useless for your purpose, or so underspecified to allow for any and all weird variation, that the standardization becomes almost pointless.
"The United States is known as being the world's most stable democracy."
A nitpick, I know, but this is not strictly true. You've had a civil war, after all, which does not make it stable. There's quite a few other countries with as good, or better, record in this respect.
They support community standards, have a better-safe-than-sorry policy on patent-encumbered stuff, fully support a Free, rapid-release cycle distro with no GPL incompatible components at all (unlike some other large distros have done). They have not bought out or killed off other distributions or done anything else that would be unconcionable. So how, exactly, do they become "the MS of the linux world"?
So why do bicycles generally have large wheels at all? For mountainbikes it makes sense - you need large diameters to handle very uneven terrain - but for road bikes, small wheels really should be preferable.
Gearing is not an answer; just change the gear ratio earlier in the drive train. Stability isn't an answer either. I currently use a high-end foldable bike with 14" wheels, and it's just as steady as my previous, full-size wheeled, bike.
Of course, some of the best connected countries in the world, like Sweden and Finland, have population densities that are lower than the US, and just as unevenly distributed.
It may be part of the explanation, but not the whole thing.
As others have been pointing out, it's the trend that is interesting, not the raw numbers. And when you see the same trend happening on a number of different sites - with very different starting proportions, and thus likely pretty different readership - then it seems fairly likely that the trend is real.
The other way around: a server has a bunch of stuff that your workstation really doesn't need, and that pushes up the price and noise level enough that it more than pays to have separate product lines. Rackmounts and high-speed SCSI drives sound cool - until you are actually forced to be in the same room for an extended period of time.
The resolution is not good enough, I think. Since you are taking panoramic pictures with a lot of small detail, you really want high resolution or any particular ground feature will just devolve into a few fuzzy pixels. To take really good arial pictures, I would expect black and white film photography probably is by far the best (though perhaps least convenient) choice.
Well, first you persuade other countries to open up their economies to your imports, claiming this will enable them to step up on the ladder towards geater societal wealth and towards a more skill-based economy.
Then, when they actually do, and start reaping some rewards from it, you start acting like it's the second coming of antichrist.
So what do you suggest? Stop outsourcing, stop manufacturing abroad? Are you also then prepared to accept the trade retaliations from the rest of the world? Some people applauded your steel tariffs as something good. Of course, the US ended up losing a lot more money - and more jobs - total than it saved in that particular sector by postponing an inevitable restructuring.
I have not bought any Belkin products since they pulled this little number.
And good for you. During the past couple of years, you have been exposed to scores of advertising or info on companies that pissed you off at the time; you do not recall most of them conciously today. For every Belkin (the incident in itself being rather more extreme than annoying advertising), there are probably dozens of companies and products that you did not like, but which you today would be more likely to purchase.
I did say "more likely to", not "in every single case".
Unfortunately, it doesn't really work that way. Negative or not, they did get brand recognition. You may think that company X are rear orifices for advertising laundry detergent Y in this way, but at least you remember detergent Y.
Three weeks later, as you are standing in the aisle, choosing a detergent from the fivehundredmillion varieties dumped upon us, you will react emotionally to the sight of detergent Y. You do not have an emotional reaction (positive or negative) to the others. Of course, it been three weeks, so you don't actually remember why you have a reaction. The negativity was most likely attached to the company, not the brand, and since you don't really recall the connection to the company, the negative attributions are mostly gone. All you remember is that you have emotions for detergent Y and not for the others.
IANAAP, but I believe electrostatic speakers covers that aspect pretty well already. There, the entire surface of the membrane is moving in concert as well.
I saw Steamboy a month ago, and wrote a small review for my friends on my blog. May be of interest to some here:
[Steamboy] is a new anime by Katsuhiro Otomo (of Akira fame), set in England in 1851, around the time of the world exhibition in Londons Crystal Palace.
Visually, the movie is stunning. The characters are expressive and individualistic, the backdrops are beautiful, and, of course, the movie is replete with larger-than-life nineteenth-century steam technology. There is enough dramatic machinery and unlikely "science" in this movie to sate even the most rabid steampunk fetishist.
The story is complex and varied. I'm not going to detail it here - mainly because my Japanese just isn't up to the task of actually understanding all the twist and turns. I lost track about halfway through, to be honest, and Ritsuko too had trouble follwing it, in part because the speech tended to be fast and garbled. Nevertheless, they have managed to create believable characters with at least some depth, while at the same time all the clichés we know and love are well and truly fulfilled. The villain, for example, has an partial facemask and mechanical hand - I guess that adding a white cat and a monocle would have been a little over the top.
Did I like it? Yes, with a few reservations. This is a looong movie - 2h20m to be more precise. A bathroom break before seeing it is advisable. An of course, I can't really judge the story fairly when I don't really understand it - the end seemed to me to be a little artificial (not to mention wildly contrary to any scientific intuition), but as I couldn't follow the character motivations and interactions by that time, I can't be sure I understood it correctly.
Should you see it? If you like anime or steampunk, absolutely! And even if you don't, it has enough of an Indiana Jones kind of feel to it that I think you'll be entertained in any case.
I've seen this offered almost a year ago. The phones also seem to be able to receive at least some ordinary ground-based telecasts. Not first, in other words.
That said, I saw no possible reason why I'd want this, and apparently, neither do most other people here.
You said it yourself - IKEA. Their stuff tends towards simplicity, with few materials, so it's easy for you to inspect beforehand to see if it works for you. Stuff like fabrics and upholstery are allergy tested (at least they are in Sweden) - we've had plenty of people worrying (rightly or wrongly) about these issues for a long time already, and so they've adapted to it. And it won't make a large gouge in your wallet either.
As for computers - try getting a second-hand mouse and keyboard (grab an IBM Model M if you can find it), as the plastic softener emissions degrease over time. For monitor, perhaps a metal-beveled LCD model could work. LCD's do have the benefit of not creating static fields in front, which tends to attract dust on to the skin (which people sometimes react to).
Re:Now if they could only get humans to evolve aga
on
Prions, Darwin's Friend
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It was so bad, that from looking at mitochondrial DNA it looks like we are all descend from a one woman.
_Every_ animal and plant species trivially descends from one individual (counted as females from mitochondrial DNA for simplicity, but it holds for the "real" DNA as well). Nothing strange about it.
What makes our recent past interesting is that the youngest common ancestor is a lot younger than the species. That can indicate a population crunch - though it is not proof of it by any means.
A speciation event would look just the same, for instance - a separate subgroup splits off and grows to dominate, while the original species dies off. Of course, nobody would see it as a speciation event until enough time has passed for the distinct groups to actually differ enough to no longer be able to interbreed.
What I want to see is the politicians go door to door, meet people, talk to them.
Let's see, an american election period seems to be roughly six months - say 180 days, which comes out to 15552000 seconds (assuming the candidate spends zero time on non-candidacy stuff like sleeping). As a ballpark estimate, there are 75 million potential voters in that country.
So, 75000000/1552000 is around 0.2 seconds per voter. If political campains are to be face-to-face, that does not leave a whole lot of time to inform each voter on the candidate's position.
Say we economize, and run town meetings. On average, I would guess you can cover 100 people by one meeting. That would give you 20 seconds or so per meeting. Note that we do not subtract anything for eating, sleeping or travelling.
I would hazard a guess and say that technological means of reaching out are pretty much necessary.
Re:I'd be interested to hear...
on
No Noise PC Reviewed
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
With an external box, you can use serious sound-dampening foam, and you have the space to use large, low-rpm fans, rather than small, speedy fans which generate a lot more sound. Also, all air channels can be designed non-straight, with extra insulating foam, thus dampening out most or all of the sound from the fans.
I have a sound box like that, and it is a marvel. A desktop machine that unaided sounds like an Airbus taking off turns into a comfortable whirr that is barely audible at all when it is placed beneath the desk.
"removable Drive Bays" - or, as the rest of the world calls them, CD's: The box has an ingenious invention called "door" which opens at the twist of a small latch. This gives full frontal nudity^H^H^H^Haccess to the drives.
Slashdot Mirror
Any work of art (or any physical object) will be lost at some point. Maybe not today, maybe not this century, but for any artwork, at some point, the circumstances will will collude to lose it it some manner. Increasing the efforts to counteract that may delay the inevitable, but will not prevent it.
So, what do you do? Encase the piece in extreme layers of security to stave off its inevitable dissolution - but then also greatly hinder any real appreciation of the work by spectators? It's not easy to enter a contemplative frame of mind facing a painting at four or five meters, through ten cm of safety glass and surrounded by armed guards.
Or, we accept its eventual destruction or loss as inevitable, relax the measures a bit, and let people appreciate it - _really_ appreciate it, up close and undisturbed - while it lasts.
If I'd been a sappy touchy-feely type, I'd made a comment about how that is a lesson for life as well, but I'm not, so I won't.
Well the author probably did concentrate on substance - abuse thereof, to be sure, but substance nevertheless.
Its an UNmanned mission.
There we go again, the UN going meddling in things where it doesn't belong! Black helicopters, I tell you, black helicopters...
"Some people have even told me that have a low usser number.."
Well, that's all depending on the perspectve...
On Topic: Your complaint on choice boils down to the same question as when people decry the existence of mutliple desktop environment projects - who is supposed to enforce anything?
Ok, assue that we have too many distros, and that it is hurting the community in some unsepcified way. How do you suggest reducing the number? You can assume that people building on, or using, any given distro aren't willing to volontarily dump their work just because someone says so. So how, then?
And once you've accomplished your purge, how do you propose avoiding a couple hundred new distro projects popping up like mushrooms after rain?
Of course, since the nature of the data will be very different depending on what kind of image sensor you have, the format will either be useless for your purpose, or so underspecified to allow for any and all weird variation, that the standardization becomes almost pointless.
"The United States is known as being the world's most stable democracy."
A nitpick, I know, but this is not strictly true. You've had a civil war, after all, which does not make it stable. There's quite a few other countries with as good, or better, record in this respect.
...they are the MS of the linux world.
Could you elaborate on that?
They support community standards, have a better-safe-than-sorry policy on patent-encumbered stuff, fully support a Free, rapid-release cycle distro with no GPL incompatible components at all (unlike some other large distros have done). They have not bought out or killed off other distributions or done anything else that would be unconcionable. So how, exactly, do they become "the MS of the linux world"?
So why do bicycles generally have large wheels at all? For mountainbikes it makes sense - you need large diameters to handle very uneven terrain - but for road bikes, small wheels really should be preferable.
Gearing is not an answer; just change the gear ratio earlier in the drive train. Stability isn't an answer either. I currently use a high-end foldable bike with 14" wheels, and it's just as steady as my previous, full-size wheeled, bike.
Of course, some of the best connected countries in the world, like Sweden and Finland, have population densities that are lower than the US, and just as unevenly distributed.
It may be part of the explanation, but not the whole thing.
As others have been pointing out, it's the trend that is interesting, not the raw numbers. And when you see the same trend happening on a number of different sites - with very different starting proportions, and thus likely pretty different readership - then it seems fairly likely that the trend is real.
The other way around: a server has a bunch of stuff that your workstation really doesn't need, and that pushes up the price and noise level enough that it more than pays to have separate product lines. Rackmounts and high-speed SCSI drives sound cool - until you are actually forced to be in the same room for an extended period of time.
Storage would be one example. I bet there are others.
The resolution is not good enough, I think. Since you are taking panoramic pictures with a lot of small detail, you really want high resolution or any particular ground feature will just devolve into a few fuzzy pixels. To take really good arial pictures, I would expect black and white film photography probably is by far the best (though perhaps least convenient) choice.
Well, first you persuade other countries to open up their economies to your imports, claiming this will enable them to step up on the ladder towards geater societal wealth and towards a more skill-based economy.
Then, when they actually do, and start reaping some rewards from it, you start acting like it's the second coming of antichrist.
So what do you suggest? Stop outsourcing, stop manufacturing abroad? Are you also then prepared to accept the trade retaliations from the rest of the world? Some people applauded your steel tariffs as something good. Of course, the US ended up losing a lot more money - and more jobs - total than it saved in that particular sector by postponing an inevitable restructuring.
I have not bought any Belkin products since they pulled this little number.
And good for you. During the past couple of years, you have been exposed to scores of advertising or info on companies that pissed you off at the time; you do not recall most of them conciously today. For every Belkin (the incident in itself being rather more extreme than annoying advertising), there are probably dozens of companies and products that you did not like, but which you today would be more likely to purchase.
I did say "more likely to", not "in every single case".
Unfortunately, it doesn't really work that way. Negative or not, they did get brand recognition. You may think that company X are rear orifices for advertising laundry detergent Y in this way, but at least you remember detergent Y.
Three weeks later, as you are standing in the aisle, choosing a detergent from the fivehundredmillion varieties dumped upon us, you will react emotionally to the sight of detergent Y. You do not have an emotional reaction (positive or negative) to the others. Of course, it been three weeks, so you don't actually remember why you have a reaction. The negativity was most likely attached to the company, not the brand, and since you don't really recall the connection to the company, the negative attributions are mostly gone. All you remember is that you have emotions for detergent Y and not for the others.
Guess what? You are more likely to buy it.
Shuttle Program == Manned Space Program
Shuttle Program == USA Government Manned Space Program.
I don't see China abandoning their program if the shuttle is gone; neither do I see any other interested parties doing so.
IANAAP, but I believe electrostatic speakers covers that aspect pretty well already. There, the entire surface of the membrane is moving in concert as well.
I saw Steamboy a month ago, and wrote a small review for my friends on my blog. May be of interest to some here:
[Steamboy] is a new anime by Katsuhiro Otomo (of Akira fame), set in England in 1851, around the time of the world exhibition in Londons Crystal Palace.
Visually, the movie is stunning. The characters are expressive and individualistic, the backdrops are beautiful, and, of course, the movie is replete with larger-than-life nineteenth-century steam technology. There is enough dramatic machinery and unlikely "science" in this movie to sate even the most rabid steampunk fetishist.
The story is complex and varied. I'm not going to detail it here - mainly because my Japanese just isn't up to the task of actually understanding all the twist and turns. I lost track about halfway through, to be honest, and Ritsuko too had trouble follwing it, in part because the speech tended to be fast and garbled. Nevertheless, they have managed to create believable characters with at least some depth, while at the same time all the clichés we know and love are well and truly fulfilled. The villain, for example, has an partial facemask and mechanical hand - I guess that adding a white cat and a monocle would have been a little over the top.
Did I like it? Yes, with a few reservations. This is a looong movie - 2h20m to be more precise. A bathroom break before seeing it is advisable. An of course, I can't really judge the story fairly when I don't really understand it - the end seemed to me to be a little artificial (not to mention wildly contrary to any scientific intuition), but as I couldn't follow the character motivations and interactions by that time, I can't be sure I understood it correctly.
Should you see it? If you like anime or steampunk, absolutely! And even if you don't, it has enough of an Indiana Jones kind of feel to it that I think you'll be entertained in any case.
For me, Spirited Away. Wonderful movie.
I've seen this offered almost a year ago. The phones also seem to be able to receive at least some ordinary ground-based telecasts. Not first, in other words.
That said, I saw no possible reason why I'd want this, and apparently, neither do most other people here.
You said it yourself - IKEA. Their stuff tends towards simplicity, with few materials, so it's easy for you to inspect beforehand to see if it works for you. Stuff like fabrics and upholstery are allergy tested (at least they are in Sweden) - we've had plenty of people worrying (rightly or wrongly) about these issues for a long time already, and so they've adapted to it. And it won't make a large gouge in your wallet either.
As for computers - try getting a second-hand mouse and keyboard (grab an IBM Model M if you can find it), as the plastic softener emissions degrease over time. For monitor, perhaps a metal-beveled LCD model could work. LCD's do have the benefit of not creating static fields in front, which tends to attract dust on to the skin (which people sometimes react to).
It was so bad, that from looking at mitochondrial DNA it looks like we are all descend from a one woman.
_Every_ animal and plant species trivially descends from one individual (counted as females from mitochondrial DNA for simplicity, but it holds for the "real" DNA as well). Nothing strange about it.
What makes our recent past interesting is that the youngest common ancestor is a lot younger than the species. That can indicate a population crunch - though it is not proof of it by any means.
A speciation event would look just the same, for instance - a separate subgroup splits off and grows to dominate, while the original species dies off. Of course, nobody would see it as a speciation event until enough time has passed for the distinct groups to actually differ enough to no longer be able to interbreed.
What I want to see is the politicians go door to door, meet people, talk to them.
Let's see, an american election period seems to be roughly six months - say 180 days, which comes out to 15552000 seconds (assuming the candidate spends zero time on non-candidacy stuff like sleeping). As a ballpark estimate, there are 75 million potential voters in that country.
So, 75000000/1552000 is around 0.2 seconds per voter. If political campains are to be face-to-face, that does not leave a whole lot of time to inform each voter on the candidate's position.
Say we economize, and run town meetings. On average, I would guess you can cover 100 people by one meeting. That would give you 20 seconds or so per meeting. Note that we do not subtract anything for eating, sleeping or travelling.
I would hazard a guess and say that technological means of reaching out are pretty much necessary.
With an external box, you can use serious sound-dampening foam, and you have the space to use large, low-rpm fans, rather than small, speedy fans which generate a lot more sound. Also, all air channels can be designed non-straight, with extra insulating foam, thus dampening out most or all of the sound from the fans.
I have a sound box like that, and it is a marvel. A desktop machine that unaided sounds like an Airbus taking off turns into a comfortable whirr that is barely audible at all when it is placed beneath the desk.
"removable Drive Bays" - or, as the rest of the world calls them, CD's: The box has an ingenious invention called "door" which opens at the twist of a small latch. This gives full frontal nudity^H^H^H^Haccess to the drives.