I'm pretty sure i've seen a couple advertised with enough resolution for 1080i, but rediculously expensive. 1024x768 are pretty cheap, compared to the same size screen you'd get with other technologies AND have a much smaller form factor (tiny box, just have to paint the wall white) why aren't more people doing this?
Yeah but the thing is.. have you ever bent a CD until it breaks? it shatters into a hundred shards, held together by the foil itself or glue or something weak. These cuts were clean, straight and only on one side. I find it very hard to believe that stuffing caused that kind of damage.
Never happened to me, but i did get a bunch of suspiciously damaged disks when I was a member. A clean cut radially from the center to the edge.. didn't even notice the first one till it was making noises in my player. So.. i'm betting they didn't notice either. That happened 3 times, anyone else get that?
I did find that the turnaround was a lot quicker if i dropped off the disks at the main branch post office and used the individual packages.
If they bought the car to save at the pump, then all they've proven is that they can't do math. Granted, i'm sure that there are quite a few that just like the idea of using less fuel, but i don't see how it follows that those people are more likely than others to know how to block the signal.
\begin{rant}
These cars tend to cost thousands more than their non-hybrid counterparts ~5k in the case of the honda civic. Since our economy is based less on actual physical labor and more on leveraging the power of machines to accomplish tasks (i.e. trucks, mechanized farming, etc.), it is appropriate to state that the purchace price is indicitave of the energy used to produce the product. Since that energy generally comes from fossil fuels, $5k price difference roughly means that about 100 extra barrels of crude had to be pumped out of the earth to make the hybrid instead of the regular car. Now this number should drop as it becomes more efficient to produce these cars, but regardless, it is something to think about.
The question cali should ask themselves is why are the roads public in the first place? Would it not make sense to simply turn over all the maintenance and collection schemes to a regulated "RoadCorp [tm]?" ok why not?
You have to consider the fixed costs vs. the marginal costs. It may very well be that the marginal cost on that extra 4% would be extremely low thereby making the profit those sales generate be nearly 100%. It's not unreasonable to assume that the that particular 4% of revinue might represent more than 4% of the profit....
"If they sold 4% more units, profit would go up 8%" is not an unreasonable statement to make, though i have no idea what the fixed costs are in this instance and so can't say whether the difference in profit is 5% or 1 million percent.
People vote for Presidents, representatives, school board members.
Who cares if it's Howard Dean or Martha Stewart? The people who were actually elected to office control the "direction" of the party. The principle job of the DNC chairman therefore is to run the conventions.
Come to think of it, this seems like it would be a job at which Martha Stewart would excel!
I thougth dean's campaign failed because Kerry mortgaged his wife's house to fund an all-out campaign in Iowa, thereby cementing his status as the "electable" candidate for all the primaries from then on.
Yeah that makes sense, but why wasn't that in the news reports. I mean, "engineer screwed up and forgot to turn on switch" is a great headline i guess, but the articles should have made some mention of the fact that there was a backup system in place and it also worked.
Every other week, "Hans Blix and the Weapons Inspectors" changed their position. One week it was, "we didn't find any therefore they aren't there" the next week it was, "We didn't find any but Saddam wouldn't let us in key areas, so they're probably there" then it was "Saddam didn't let us in those key areas, but based on not finding them anywhere else, we don't think they're there either" Then a combination of the first two, and repeat.
Given that kind of intelligence, what assumption can you make? "everything's hunky dory, nothing to see here" or "well the statis quo seems ok, but there's a chance saddam is preparing for another major assault that could threaten US or world interest"
Not to mention the fact that the invasion was about iraq's culture conducive to terrorism, terrorist training camps that had plane fusilages, payments to terror-bomber's families by saddam's regime, violations of the no-fly zone, suspicions of violations the "oil-for-food"^h^h^h^h^hfrench weapons program, and oh yeah, posible mass produciton of biological and chemical weapons. All of which have been found, though the evidnece for that last appears to have been ambiguous enough to discount. In the US, the big news corp's harped on a 15 second exerpt from Colin Powel's speach before the UN and thus "The war was about WMD's, i mean.. we didn't talk about anything else" -- anchorbot5000 (MS-ABCNNBCBS). I'm surprised you haven't heard about any of this in foreign countries where the news is much better (TM). The paradox is that the coalition went to war to enforce UN resolutions, but in the process proved the UN's very irrelevance due to said organisation's unwillingness to enforce it's own resolutions.
I was surprised that the wmd's were not found, but i'm more concerned with the answers to two questions: "if there are no wmd's, then why were the weapons inspectors blocked?" and "if there were wmd's then where are they now?" I would very much like for the answer to the first make the second irrelevant.
so.. if an embryo starts to become too much like a human is he obligated to kill it?
The problem i have with theraputic cloning is that it's exactly the kind of cloning we shouldn't allow, being the microscopic (or in a particularly ghoulish world, full-size) equilvalent of having a baby to harvest its heart.
I really don't understand why people opposed to reproductive cloning on some kind of moral argument can turn around and support theraputic cloning. I mean, so what if people want to have vanity babies that are nearly copies of themselves?
planets make light on their own too. The peak wavelength is in the infrared or longer generally however. The radiation flux from earth to satellites for instance is non-trivial heat transfer problem.
If i remember my astronomy class correctly, planet comes from a greek word meaning "wanderer" objects which are clearly not stars as they were not "fixed" in the sky. Even in the ancient world, the motions of planets could be observed. Using that definition is useless however, since moons, asteroids and even the sun should be included and earthlike objects sufficiently far away would be excluded.
I thought the upshot of digital controls was that they could be made more complicated... Analog controls are easy (and definately superior) if it's just 'linear change in measurement, increase throttle by x*m', but when you get controls that need to be (change in x1, x2, dx1/dt, x3, x4,... xn -> change {throttle, timing, someother stuff} by [A]x +[B]) it starts to get a little more complicated to do with analog electronics or mechanical systems and a microprocessor becomes more necessary. The question we should be asking is.. do we really want our cars' performance to be dependant on so many variables?
the fact that people are willing to pay for this stuff shouldn't immediatly make you think, "how can i stop it" or "how can the game company stop it." It should make you think, "how can i take those suckers money" and the game company should definately be thinking, "how can we use this to enhance our revinue without hurting gamplay for other users" undercutting the competition for virtual goods seems an interesting option i.e. having preimium goods you can buy in game using real money instead of virtual money. Why arent the game companies getting in on this? They can create unlimited amounts of the virtual goods with zero man-hours.
Consider the cost of policing every keyword bid for trademark infringement, if this cost is greater than the potential revinue from the ad, it is cheaper to simply ignore the bid rather than do the research... supposing that eventually this cost is greater than the potential revinue to the advertiser from the ad, they will not bother to post a bid. Further supposing that this becomes the case for all ads, there would be no more revinue to google in that market and therefore no reason to index pages there.
Now does anyone have any numbers to back up/refute this supposition?
I'll admit my bias is that i'd like it to be supported. it would force France to rethink the application of its laws in this case, which i personally disagree with. I don't see from the article that google "[sold] the Louis Vuitton trademark to third parties."
Not necessarily, the light could also "transmit" through the medium. hold a CD or DVD up to a light and look through the dvd at the light.. i'll bet that if you hold the disk close enough to your eye, you could make out quite a few details. I don't know much about the chemistry involved so i'll refrain from suggesting that the shiny ones might indicate metallic content in the pigment. I also usually buy the shiny ones, but only because they look cooler.
Although SS is a ponzi scheme, it has recently been taking in more money than it needs to maintain the pyramid. This money is being invested in government bonds. When those bonds need to be cashed in, where's that money going to come from?
why do we concentrate so much on the first ammendment? it's only two sentences in the whole document, there are 26 other ammendments, not to mention the articles. for instance,
Amendment 9 The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
This affirms the idea put forth in the founding documents that the constitution's one and only function, much like the magna carta that preceed it, is to limit the actions of government so as not to interfere with the rights of men (mankind) as "endowed by their creator." The constitution does not create rights, as is believed by many. The rights were already there, the constitution is there to spell out what the feds may or may not do.
Amendment 10 The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. Everyone seems to forget about this one. This is the one that is supposed to protect us from boondoggles like national education, national crazy art subsidies, and national "welfare" (corporate or otherwise) as well as a host of other well meaning, but not federally mandated (as in: explicitly stated in the constitution) activities currently engaged in by the federal government. This is not to say that there should not be government programs doing those and other things, only that the Federal government is prohibited from doing them. Of course the freedom to act should increase as we get more local, with the people being the ultimate free actors.
From Article 1, section 9: The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it. As far as i know, this means that persons may not be imprisioned for an unlimited period without trial, unless there are extenuating circumstances (like a war against terrorists perhaps)
Of course, all of us here at slashdot recognize these exerpts from our founding document, right? right? (ok you people from other countries than the USA are excused, but I suspect you may be more familiar than the locals)
The first ammendment does not say that we should pay for it. Those "hicks" which you have so colorfully described might not like paying to have themselves painted as backward hicks. The NEA should go simply because there is no acceptible compromise which does not 'censor' someone.
In fact.. Why isn't this done already? I always wondered why there isn't a DC input on the power supplies to connect to DC output in the UPSs. what sense does it make to use an inverter (likely less than 50% effecient) to create AC power which must then be converted back to DC using transformers and a bridge (also likely less than 50% effecient), when a direct connection would immediately result in significant gains in the time availiable. On the case side, it's just a matter of splicing some wires and having an extra socket on the back - not a backbreaking expense. On the ups side, it might be a little more complicated: needs a multi-cell battery to get the voltages right, not sure if there are suppsoed to be independant 12v and 5v busses and if combining them would be problematic, but surely people who are serious about power management would be willing to pay a little extra for 4x increase in efficiency. If the cases were set up with care, selected drives and peripherals could be disabled under power outage situation.
Just something to think about: If my printer needs a separate power supply, why do computer manufacturers insist on putting the second (and sometimes first) most heat producing device IN the case?
They didn't just put the entire original frame (of whatever ratio it is) on the DVD and also include a file describing a bounding box for each frame for whatever format you want. I can't see a file that contains 4 numbers per frame (2 coordinates are all you need to describe a BOX) taking up enough space on the disk to be noticeable, but the value of having ALL the formats on the disk would be much better than having to choose, especially when one format costs more than the other.
i.e. what if I take it to a friend's house and my friend only has a 15" television.. i'd want the full screen version so i wouldn't be annoyed by how small the picture was, but if I had another friend with a HD widescreen plasma display, well i'd probably want the widescreen version, or whatever was closest to the "raw" format.
Just because Al Gore said it doesn't make it bad. On the contrary, if he did, that would have been a good, though naive temporary solution to the problem: at least we'd be talking about it in the right way.
The second is that it doesn't matter whether the government takes your money or borrows the money (on YOUR credit btw) or even if it prints the money out of whole cloth. The wealth that that money represents is being removed from the economy and being used for other purposes than improving the economy. In the last case, it might not be noticed since the economy would appear to be improving despite (or possibly because of) massive inflation. One might come the conclusion that taxes and debt are simply accounting measures to combat inflation, which is in general bad for lenders and good for borrowers.
Your last statement is correct, i was less than clear in that sentence but was trying to say the same thing you said. Obviously there are some programs which are necessary and can only really be accomplished at the national level. national defense is the number one project that fits this purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure i've seen a couple advertised with enough resolution for 1080i, but rediculously expensive. 1024x768 are pretty cheap, compared to the same size screen you'd get with other technologies AND have a much smaller form factor (tiny box, just have to paint the wall white) why aren't more people doing this?
"Ah the game is afoot, I'll take the rapist for 1000" - "sean connery"
Yeah but the thing is.. have you ever bent a CD until it breaks? it shatters into a hundred shards, held together by the foil itself or glue or something weak. These cuts were clean, straight and only on one side. I find it very hard to believe that stuffing caused that kind of damage.
Never happened to me, but i did get a bunch of suspiciously damaged disks when I was a member. A clean cut radially from the center to the edge.. didn't even notice the first one till it was making noises in my player. So.. i'm betting they didn't notice either. That happened 3 times, anyone else get that?
I did find that the turnaround was a lot quicker if i dropped off the disks at the main branch post office and used the individual packages.
If they bought the car to save at the pump, then all they've proven is that they can't do math. Granted, i'm sure that there are quite a few that just like the idea of using less fuel, but i don't see how it follows that those people are more likely than others to know how to block the signal.
t _cost_to_own/
http://money.cnn.com/2004/05/18/pf/autos/efficien
\begin{rant}
These cars tend to cost thousands more than their non-hybrid counterparts ~5k in the case of the honda civic. Since our economy is based less on actual physical labor and more on leveraging the power of machines to accomplish tasks (i.e. trucks, mechanized farming, etc.), it is appropriate to state that the purchace price is indicitave of the energy used to produce the product. Since that energy generally comes from fossil fuels, $5k price difference roughly means that about 100 extra barrels of crude had to be pumped out of the earth to make the hybrid instead of the regular car. Now this number should drop as it becomes more efficient to produce these cars, but regardless, it is something to think about.
The question cali should ask themselves is why are the roads public in the first place? Would it not make sense to simply turn over all the maintenance and collection schemes to a regulated "RoadCorp [tm]?" ok why not?
\end{rant}
You have to consider the fixed costs vs. the marginal costs. It may very well be that the marginal cost on that extra 4% would be extremely low thereby making the profit those sales generate be nearly 100%. It's not unreasonable to assume that the that particular 4% of revinue might represent more than 4% of the profit....
"If they sold 4% more units, profit would go up 8%" is not an unreasonable statement to make, though i have no idea what the fixed costs are in this instance and so can't say whether the difference in profit is 5% or 1 million percent.
People vote for Presidents, representatives, school board members.
Who cares if it's Howard Dean or Martha Stewart? The people who were actually elected to office control the "direction" of the party. The principle job of the DNC chairman therefore is to run the conventions.
Come to think of it, this seems like it would be a job at which Martha Stewart would excel!
I thougth dean's campaign failed because Kerry mortgaged his wife's house to fund an all-out campaign in Iowa, thereby cementing his status as the "electable" candidate for all the primaries from then on.
Yeah that makes sense, but why wasn't that in the news reports. I mean, "engineer screwed up and forgot to turn on switch" is a great headline i guess, but the articles should have made some mention of the fact that there was a backup system in place and it also worked.
Every other week, "Hans Blix and the Weapons Inspectors" changed their position. One week it was, "we didn't find any therefore they aren't there" the next week it was, "We didn't find any but Saddam wouldn't let us in key areas, so they're probably there" then it was "Saddam didn't let us in those key areas, but based on not finding them anywhere else, we don't think they're there either" Then a combination of the first two, and repeat.
Given that kind of intelligence, what assumption can you make? "everything's hunky dory, nothing to see here" or "well the statis quo seems ok, but there's a chance saddam is preparing for another major assault that could threaten US or world interest"
Not to mention the fact that the invasion was about iraq's culture conducive to terrorism, terrorist training camps that had plane fusilages, payments to terror-bomber's families by saddam's regime, violations of the no-fly zone, suspicions of violations the "oil-for-food"^h^h^h^h^hfrench weapons program, and oh yeah, posible mass produciton of biological and chemical weapons. All of which have been found, though the evidnece for that last appears to have been ambiguous enough to discount. In the US, the big news corp's harped on a 15 second exerpt from Colin Powel's speach before the UN and thus "The war was about WMD's, i mean.. we didn't talk about anything else" -- anchorbot5000 (MS-ABCNNBCBS). I'm surprised you haven't heard about any of this in foreign countries where the news is much better (TM). The paradox is that the coalition went to war to enforce UN resolutions, but in the process proved the UN's very irrelevance due to said organisation's unwillingness to enforce it's own resolutions.
I was surprised that the wmd's were not found, but i'm more concerned with the answers to two questions: "if there are no wmd's, then why were the weapons inspectors blocked?" and "if there were wmd's then where are they now?" I would very much like for the answer to the first make the second irrelevant.
to point the telescopes there in the first place?
so.. if an embryo starts to become too much like a human is he obligated to kill it?
The problem i have with theraputic cloning is that it's exactly the kind of cloning we shouldn't allow, being the microscopic (or in a particularly ghoulish world, full-size) equilvalent of having a baby to harvest its heart.
I really don't understand why people opposed to reproductive cloning on some kind of moral argument can turn around and support theraputic cloning. I mean, so what if people want to have vanity babies that are nearly copies of themselves?
planets make light on their own too. The peak wavelength is in the infrared or longer generally however. The radiation flux from earth to satellites for instance is non-trivial heat transfer problem.
If i remember my astronomy class correctly, planet comes from a greek word meaning "wanderer" objects which are clearly not stars as they were not "fixed" in the sky. Even in the ancient world, the motions of planets could be observed. Using that definition is useless however, since moons, asteroids and even the sun should be included and earthlike objects sufficiently far away would be excluded.
I thought the upshot of digital controls was that they could be made more complicated... Analog controls are easy (and definately superior) if it's just 'linear change in measurement, increase throttle by x*m', but when you get controls that need to be (change in x1, x2, dx1/dt, x3, x4, ... xn -> change {throttle, timing, someother stuff} by [A]x +[B]) it starts to get a little more complicated to do with analog electronics or mechanical systems and a microprocessor becomes more necessary. The question we should be asking is.. do we really want our cars' performance to be dependant on so many variables?
the fact that people are willing to pay for this stuff shouldn't immediatly make you think, "how can i stop it" or "how can the game company stop it." It should make you think, "how can i take those suckers money" and the game company should definately be thinking, "how can we use this to enhance our revinue without hurting gamplay for other users" undercutting the competition for virtual goods seems an interesting option i.e. having preimium goods you can buy in game using real money instead of virtual money. Why arent the game companies getting in on this? They can create unlimited amounts of the virtual goods with zero man-hours.
Well maybe.
Consider the cost of policing every keyword bid for trademark infringement, if this cost is greater than the potential revinue from the ad, it is cheaper to simply ignore the bid rather than do the research... supposing that eventually this cost is greater than the potential revinue to the advertiser from the ad, they will not bother to post a bid. Further supposing that this becomes the case for all ads, there would be no more revinue to google in that market and therefore no reason to index pages there.
Now does anyone have any numbers to back up/refute this supposition?
I'll admit my bias is that i'd like it to be supported. it would force France to rethink the application of its laws in this case, which i personally disagree with. I don't see from the article that google "[sold] the Louis Vuitton trademark to third parties."
of course.. if i'd RTFA first, i'd have known the answer to that...
Not necessarily, the light could also "transmit" through the medium. hold a CD or DVD up to a light and look through the dvd at the light.. i'll bet that if you hold the disk close enough to your eye, you could make out quite a few details. I don't know much about the chemistry involved so i'll refrain from suggesting that the shiny ones might indicate metallic content in the pigment. I also usually buy the shiny ones, but only because they look cooler.
Although SS is a ponzi scheme, it has recently been taking in more money than it needs to maintain the pyramid. This money is being invested in government bonds. When those bonds need to be cashed in, where's that money going to come from?
So they'll be using all that power to pay for the performance hit of OO programming?
why do we concentrate so much on the first ammendment? it's only two sentences in the whole document, there are 26 other ammendments, not to mention the articles. for instance,
Amendment 9
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
This affirms the idea put forth in the founding documents that the constitution's one and only function, much like the magna carta that preceed it, is to limit the actions of government so as not to interfere with the rights of men (mankind) as "endowed by their creator." The constitution does not create rights, as is believed by many. The rights were already there, the constitution is there to spell out what the feds may or may not do.
Amendment 10
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Everyone seems to forget about this one. This is the one that is supposed to protect us from boondoggles like national education, national crazy art subsidies, and national "welfare" (corporate or otherwise) as well as a host of other well meaning, but not federally mandated (as in: explicitly stated in the constitution) activities currently engaged in by the federal government. This is not to say that there should not be government programs doing those and other things, only that the Federal government is prohibited from doing them. Of course the freedom to act should increase as we get more local, with the people being the ultimate free actors.
From Article 1, section 9:
The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.
As far as i know, this means that persons may not be imprisioned for an unlimited period without trial, unless there are extenuating circumstances (like a war against terrorists perhaps)
Of course, all of us here at slashdot recognize these exerpts from our founding document, right? right? (ok you people from other countries than the USA are excused, but I suspect you may be more familiar than the locals)
The first ammendment does not say that we should pay for it. Those "hicks" which you have so colorfully described might not like paying to have themselves painted as backward hicks. The NEA should go simply because there is no acceptible compromise which does not 'censor' someone.
In fact.. Why isn't this done already? I always wondered why there isn't a DC input on the power supplies to connect to DC output in the UPSs. what sense does it make to use an inverter (likely less than 50% effecient) to create AC power which must then be converted back to DC using transformers and a bridge (also likely less than 50% effecient), when a direct connection would immediately result in significant gains in the time availiable. On the case side, it's just a matter of splicing some wires and having an extra socket on the back - not a backbreaking expense. On the ups side, it might be a little more complicated: needs a multi-cell battery to get the voltages right, not sure if there are suppsoed to be independant 12v and 5v busses and if combining them would be problematic, but surely people who are serious about power management would be willing to pay a little extra for 4x increase in efficiency. If the cases were set up with care, selected drives and peripherals could be disabled under power outage situation.
Just something to think about: If my printer needs a separate power supply, why do computer manufacturers insist on putting the second (and sometimes first) most heat producing device IN the case?
\end{rant}
They didn't just put the entire original frame (of whatever ratio it is) on the DVD and also include a file describing a bounding box for each frame for whatever format you want. I can't see a file that contains 4 numbers per frame (2 coordinates are all you need to describe a BOX) taking up enough space on the disk to be noticeable, but the value of having ALL the formats on the disk would be much better than having to choose, especially when one format costs more than the other.
i.e. what if I take it to a friend's house and my friend only has a 15" television.. i'd want the full screen version so i wouldn't be annoyed by how small the picture was, but if I had another friend with a HD widescreen plasma display, well i'd probably want the widescreen version, or whatever was closest to the "raw" format.
You missed a few of my points.
Just because Al Gore said it doesn't make it bad. On the contrary, if he did, that would have been a good, though naive temporary solution to the problem: at least we'd be talking about it in the right way.
The second is that it doesn't matter whether the government takes your money or borrows the money (on YOUR credit btw) or even if it prints the money out of whole cloth. The wealth that that money represents is being removed from the economy and being used for other purposes than improving the economy. In the last case, it might not be noticed since the economy would appear to be improving despite (or possibly because of) massive inflation. One might come the conclusion that taxes and debt are simply accounting measures to combat inflation, which is in general bad for lenders and good for borrowers.
Your last statement is correct, i was less than clear in that sentence but was trying to say the same thing you said. Obviously there are some programs which are necessary and can only really be accomplished at the national level. national defense is the number one project that fits this purpose.