You really would be surprised at how people struggle with something that might seem totally intuitive to you. Take a pop sample of 10 people and the gesture they would use to bring up "find" or "help" and you might end up with 10 different gestures (or x gestures + x IDKs).
No, you typically get one gesture. It just isn't one that adapts to the keyboard or pad easily. But it's pretty obvious visually.
Interesting idea. But keyboard shortcuts are easily discoverable in Mac OS X. Open any menu, in any application, and keyboard shortcuts are listed right there alongside the commands.
Just like WIndows?
Seems like a good solution, but users still need to be trained to understand what the cloverleaf symbol means.
Like it means "the key with the cloverleaf symbol"? Or is there some other neo cabalistic meaning that has escaped me all of these years?
Okay, but there is one obscurity: try holding a menu open and pressing the option key. You may have to try a few different menus before you see the secret.
Talk about an exception! Most of us don't consider DC to be in the same Universe as everyone else. Judging by the town's inability to consider themselves bound by the same universal laws and constraints (for example, thermodynamics), you all agree...
Don't ACs understand that the world is a complex place that doesn't neatly fall into the little triangles and squares that you use to construct your world view?
that being said, the Chinese would pick up the slack (and arguably already have), but their government is fantastically corrupt and secretive and probably wouldn't make the best flag-bearer for human civilization.
Put the US government in that quote and see how it flies. Although I would much rather live under even the current US political system, 'fantastically corrupt' and 'secretive' sure sound awfully familiar.
Religion, by definition, is superstition. But the faithful are pretty dangerous people at times when they feel they have to defend their faith. As much as "jesus christ" has instructed his followers to turn the other cheek, it's rarely practiced.
Read it again. I don't think China is doing anyone a favor by trashing their environment for short term profit. The balance between environmental regulation and economic opportunity is a difficult one to maintain, but I for one, am happy to pay a bit more for clean water and happy critters.
My point is that with some forethought and planning, it appears possible to increase the US rare earth mining with acceptable environmental damage by centralizing the secondary refinement process so it can be closely controlled and monitored and perhaps reap some benefits of scale. There was an interesting report on this somewhere, can't recall where I found it and Google and my brain aren't working together as a team this afternoon....
In general, China's current approach to trashing the environment on a huge scale is going to come back and bite them in the ass within a generation. Inscrutable long term planning, indeed.
All that is needed is the US government to guarantee purchase at some set price and dozens of new mines would open overnight in the US.
No, the market price by itself would support opening or reopening of rare earth mines. What you may need is a waiver from the EPA.
Rare earth mining is problematic because even 'high quality' ore is very dilute. Vast quantities of material have to be processed in order to obtain any product. The primary extractive processes aren't all that polluting. The mines use a combination of physical process (magnetic separation, water separation) to concentrate the material to about 50% purity. Getting it from 50% to pure metal, however, requires quite a bit of energy and the use of a number of toxic processes.
One way to solve this problem is to do the primary extraction at the mine site and then transport the more valuable (and now quite a bit more concentrated) ore to a central site which has the technology and supervision to further extract the material at minimal environmental risk. The US DOE (Dept. of Energy) is looking into these sorts of issues. Of course, China need not be bothered by any of this mamby pamby Greeny stuff, so they have a built in competitive advantage.
You would think that given how much the US government spends on homeland security and protection against bio/chem threats, they would be able to analyze this faster. Then again, remote Alaskan villages are probably the last place any terrorist would think of to attack.
If it is an unknown fungus, it will take some time to figure out it's phylogeny. Probably the most direct method would be DNA sequencing. This can be done fairly quickly but interpreting the data might take some time.
Since it's unlikely to be a terrorist attack for the reasons you mention, the biggest problem may well be figuring out who should pay for it.
My worries are that moving the asteroid could somehow disrupt the balance of the solar system and have gravitational repercussions with other objects, kind of a butterfly effect... Yes, it's small, but if it disbalances the orbit of another object, and those do the same thing to others... the millon-years-old balance that we have in the solar system could be wrecked. Just a very wild thought. Any astrophysicist that could help me with this? Is it really possible, or is the lack of coffee messing with my mind?
Ironically, one of the major values the medical people imagine for tablets is to get the nurses & physicians directly involved in entering Medicare/Insurance company codes and to establish homogeneity of care. This generally amounts to checking off boxes on a list which are then either tabulated into a code or used to confirm that all aspects of a recommended diagnostic or treatment were performed.
I do hope you aren't serious. The coding is an entirely separate aspect of the medical record and pretty much the last people you want to input the data are the clinicians. In any sort of rationale world, coding would reflect what the clinicians did but at least in the US the coding dictionary (ICD 9, CPT) is a bizarre and ancient construct that reflects medical terminology in the late 19th and early 20th century. US insurers (and the AMA and the hospitals) have stamped and seized and held their breath in order to prevent the ICD 10 system (used, naturally, in the rest of the world) from coming into use.
Now, again in a rationale system (complete with pixie dust and unicorns), an electronic medical record would be standardized enough to make it much easier to translate doctorbabble into insurancebabble and in fact, there are some pretty advanced systems that do all that. But the heavy lifting is done in the dark netherworlds of the Unix servers and never shows up on the shiny tablets.
Not all input requires precision nor speed. I'm thinking of applications that stress portability like in medicine where, for example, a nurse has to carry the input device around with her all day but the actual input is a few letters or numbers at a time. That's real work and can be done quite well with a tablet.
Of course, it can be an iPad or some Android device - it really doesn't matter - but keep in mind that real work doesn't necessarily mean touch typing at 50 wpm or drawing complex diagrams.
These doomsday enthusiasts must be really bored or unhappy people. It seems they get really excited about the prospect of something bringing about an end to their lives. Or they see it as a super-dramatic test where they can prove themselves worthy by surviving it.
Perhaps they should join the armed forces?
If they want to be bored and unhappy and get excited about something that is likely to bring about the end of their lives, they should simply follow the US Presidential Election campaign. Eighteen months and counting!
Slashdot Mirror
Old guys are getting grouchy again. Must be getting on winter.
You really would be surprised at how people struggle with something that might seem totally intuitive to you. Take a pop sample of 10 people and the gesture they would use to bring up "find" or "help" and you might end up with 10 different gestures (or x gestures + x IDKs).
No, you typically get one gesture. It just isn't one that adapts to the keyboard or pad easily. But it's pretty obvious visually.
Interesting idea. But keyboard shortcuts are easily discoverable in Mac OS X. Open any menu, in any application, and keyboard shortcuts are listed right there alongside the commands.
Just like WIndows?
Seems like a good solution, but users still need to be trained to understand what the cloverleaf symbol means.
Like it means "the key with the cloverleaf symbol"? Or is there some other neo cabalistic meaning that has escaped me all of these years?
Okay, but there is one obscurity: try holding a menu open and pressing the option key. You may have to try a few different menus before you see the secret.
Oh, that one is subtle. NOT!
Pulling exactly what out?
I live in the DC metropolitan area.
Talk about an exception! Most of us don't consider DC to be in the same Universe as everyone else. Judging by the town's inability to consider themselves bound by the same universal laws and constraints (for example, thermodynamics), you all agree...
Don't ACs understand that the world is a complex place that doesn't neatly fall into the little triangles and squares that you use to construct your world view?
Certainly you don't.
that being said, the Chinese would pick up the slack (and arguably already have), but their government is fantastically corrupt and secretive and probably wouldn't make the best flag-bearer for human civilization.
Put the US government in that quote and see how it flies. Although I would much rather live under even the current US political system, 'fantastically corrupt' and 'secretive' sure sound awfully familiar.
Religion, by definition, is superstition. But the faithful are pretty dangerous people at times when they feel they have to defend their faith. As much as "jesus christ" has instructed his followers to turn the other cheek, it's rarely practiced.
Well then kill them all. Let God sort it out.
Found it. Interesting read.
!! sarcasm alert !!
Read it again. I don't think China is doing anyone a favor by trashing their environment for short term profit. The balance between environmental regulation and economic opportunity is a difficult one to maintain, but I for one, am happy to pay a bit more for clean water and happy critters.
My point is that with some forethought and planning, it appears possible to increase the US rare earth mining with acceptable environmental damage by centralizing the secondary refinement process so it can be closely controlled and monitored and perhaps reap some benefits of scale. There was an interesting report on this somewhere, can't recall where I found it and Google and my brain aren't working together as a team this afternoon....
In general, China's current approach to trashing the environment on a huge scale is going to come back and bite them in the ass within a generation. Inscrutable long term planning, indeed.
I don't want any kind of 'reluctance' motor in my car, switched or otherwise.
When I step on the pedal, I want the damn thing to go, not to complain about the traffic or the pollution or how much weight I've stuffed in the car.
All that is needed is the US government to guarantee purchase at some set price and dozens of new mines would open overnight in the US.
No, the market price by itself would support opening or reopening of rare earth mines. What you may need is a waiver from the EPA.
Rare earth mining is problematic because even 'high quality' ore is very dilute. Vast quantities of material have to be processed in order to obtain any product. The primary extractive processes aren't all that polluting. The mines use a combination of physical process (magnetic separation, water separation) to concentrate the material to about 50% purity. Getting it from 50% to pure metal, however, requires quite a bit of energy and the use of a number of toxic processes.
One way to solve this problem is to do the primary extraction at the mine site and then transport the more valuable (and now quite a bit more concentrated) ore to a central site which has the technology and supervision to further extract the material at minimal environmental risk. The US DOE (Dept. of Energy) is looking into these sorts of issues. Of course, China need not be bothered by any of this mamby pamby Greeny stuff, so they have a built in competitive advantage.
You would think that given how much the US government spends on homeland security and protection against bio/chem threats, they would be able to analyze this faster. Then again, remote Alaskan villages are probably the last place any terrorist would think of to attack.
If it is an unknown fungus, it will take some time to figure out it's phylogeny. Probably the most direct method would be DNA sequencing. This can be done fairly quickly but interpreting the data might take some time.
Since it's unlikely to be a terrorist attack for the reasons you mention, the biggest problem may well be figuring out who should pay for it.
I am very relieved to find out it wasn't a skull-boring, brain-eating crustacean.
What happens if I tell you it's a skull-boring, brain eating fungus?
Does that make you feel any better?
My worries are that moving the asteroid could somehow disrupt the balance of the solar system and have gravitational repercussions with other objects, kind of a butterfly effect... Yes, it's small, but if it disbalances the orbit of another object, and those do the same thing to others... the millon-years-old balance that we have in the solar system could be wrecked. Just a very wild thought. Any astrophysicist that could help me with this? Is it really possible, or is the lack of coffee messing with my mind?
Everything is perfectly balanced. Don't move....
Damn. You moved. You fool! You've doomed us all!
THAT is why austerity has never gotten anyone out of a recession.
Completely untrue. It can drive you straight from a recession into a depression.
And cast Justin Bieber as Deckard?
No, but he could be a replicant and get blown to bits by Deckard. I could support that.
Classic Apple: take something, remove stuff from it (in this case, half of the thing), innovation!
This is an old technique. In motorcycle racing we used to call it "adding lightness".
I step away from the new PC for a minute and come back to find browser tabs open to newegg and the sound "awww yeah" coming from the speaker.
Apparently, FTFA, if you stepped away from the PC, you would be more likely to find the browser tabs on "laser pointers" and "bulk catnip".
Ironically, one of the major values the medical people imagine for tablets is to get the nurses & physicians directly involved in entering Medicare/Insurance company codes and to establish homogeneity of care. This generally amounts to checking off boxes on a list which are then either tabulated into a code or used to confirm that all aspects of a recommended diagnostic or treatment were performed.
I do hope you aren't serious. The coding is an entirely separate aspect of the medical record and pretty much the last people you want to input the data are the clinicians. In any sort of rationale world, coding would reflect what the clinicians did but at least in the US the coding dictionary (ICD 9, CPT) is a bizarre and ancient construct that reflects medical terminology in the late 19th and early 20th century. US insurers (and the AMA and the hospitals) have stamped and seized and held their breath in order to prevent the ICD 10 system (used, naturally, in the rest of the world) from coming into use.
Now, again in a rationale system (complete with pixie dust and unicorns), an electronic medical record would be standardized enough to make it much easier to translate doctorbabble into insurancebabble and in fact, there are some pretty advanced systems that do all that. But the heavy lifting is done in the dark netherworlds of the Unix servers and never shows up on the shiny tablets.
Not all input requires precision nor speed. I'm thinking of applications that stress portability like in medicine where, for example, a nurse has to carry the input device around with her all day but the actual input is a few letters or numbers at a time. That's real work and can be done quite well with a tablet.
Of course, it can be an iPad or some Android device - it really doesn't matter - but keep in mind that real work doesn't necessarily mean touch typing at 50 wpm or drawing complex diagrams.
A car analogy.
They must follow us here on Slashdot. I am humbled.
These doomsday enthusiasts must be really bored or unhappy people. It seems they get really excited about the prospect of something bringing about an end to their lives. Or they see it as a super-dramatic test where they can prove themselves worthy by surviving it.
Perhaps they should join the armed forces?
If they want to be bored and unhappy and get excited about something that is likely to bring about the end of their lives, they should simply follow the US Presidential Election campaign. Eighteen months and counting!
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/comet_elenin.html
networkworld.com seems overloaded, and I probably don't want to see their ads anyway
Thank you and just to be annoying and all, why are we linking this guy's blog again? Did I miss the memo?
Explains why it took 10 hours to 'defuse' the thing.
"Barnes - the collar is around her neck. Not her chest".
"Er, yessir!"