"You wouldn't download a car". Either this project is doomed to fail, or MPAA has been *wrong* all this time!
Re:in this case correlation is causation
on
The Privacy Paradox
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Exactly! People here on slashdot seem to have the habit that if they see anything related to a study, they always use the "correlationisnotcausation" tag. Yes, it is good to remember that they are not synonymous things, but in a controlled environment, it quite often is the case. Otherwise, there would be no point in doing any studies about anything.
No, it does not need any registration or password (there is a welcome page, though, if I recall correctly). It is quite reliable and fast. The biggest downside is that the coverage area is pretty limited (downtown, university, some other locations). But I think that it is very good for a tourist, for example.
The biggest problem with 3G is, in my opinion, the power usage. The cellphone needs to be pretty much in the charger all the time, and even then it barely holds the charge. Of course that probably depends much on the signal strength, but still seems like a problem on the go.
Hmm. Say that the display tehcnology draws 30 watts less power (my laptop uses around 40 watts IIRC, so the display can't really use much more than that). During 10k hours, that makes 300 kWh, which would be pretty much match price of the new display (depends on your electricity price, but anyhow).
Switching your display creates waste. So unless the waste is less toxic or the manufacturing process more environmentally friendly, I think that the 10k hours is a bit low, after all. Of course, that also depends on how the durability compares to other technologies.
Still, so far, I think a much better way to save energy is to switch to a laptop or enable the power save features of the computer (surprisingly many people never do that).
The flash video codecs aren't really that cpu intensive. You once were able to download for example the youtube videos in flv format from cache.googlevideo.com/get_video?video_id=<youtube_video_id> (I tried this now, and it didn't seem to work anymore). That video could then be played with MPlayer, to mention one *. Unfortunately, MPlayer was not able to play all videos (I guess that's because flv is actually a container format, and can have several codecs). But those videos that did play, plaid with a much better performance.
I don't really think that it is the codec that is the problem. I guess that the biggest problem is that Adobe refuses to use any of the acceleration techniques for the playback. While that probably makes the code much more portable between different architectures and operating systems, it really is a performance bottleneck.
*) That's what the uktube of ukmplayer (http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2008/ukmp/) does on N8x0. It seems to do some further tricks with the url, and therefore works even though the cache.googlevideo.com doesn't work anymore.
I agree that it is impossible to get every citizen the best possible health care, but I don't see this being asked for in the parent post. What I believe is that the society should give a reasonably good health care when taking into consideration the status of the economics of the country and the cost and the efficiency of the treatment.
Welfare provision in the contemporary world tends to be more advanced in the countries with stronger and more developed economies. Poor countries, on the other hand, tend to have limited social services. Within developed economies, all of whom have extensive social safety nets, however, there is very little correlation between economic performance and welfare expenditure.
I guess that this might have something to do with the fact that in several cases, treatment actually ends up saving money for the economy, even if being expensive: a person can keep on doing work for longer and thus gives tax incomes for the government. So, if a good health care is pretty much a +/- 0 for the economy, I know for sure which system I'm for: with the high welfare, you can both eat the cake and have the cake.
I always see these benchmarks and wonder "why does this matter?". The only time I ever see Javascript run too slow or tax my CPU is when it's buggy and then it'll probably throw up all sorts of warnings anyway. This is on any browser I've used and any system.
For example, on my computer (933 MHz Pentium III - not really the bleeding edge anymore, but IMHO should be more than enough for browsing the web), the new Slashdot discussion system works quite slow during the page loading, especially if there are many comments. Don't get me wrong, I think that the new system is great: no more getting lost in the discussion threads, or stumbling across the same comments over and over again. But even with this discussion - with a bit over 400 comments - I got the warning that a script on this site is making the browser unresponsive, blah blah.
So yes, this would affect at least my daily browsing. And with the fixed memory leaks and other performance improvements, I'm really waiting for the stable version, and I'm thinking of giving those beta releases a try, too.
Looking at the title, so many questions pop into my head - "Messenger Flies by Mercury" What are those Messenger flies? What are they doing by mercury? Is it not poisonous?
You have to memorize the results again even when using degrees, because tan(90 degrees) is not 1. It is undefined.
And of course, the results are the same, no matter whether using radians or degrees as units. For example, 180 degrees = pi radians, so sin(180 degrees) = sin(pi) = 0.
Gzip and bzip2 compress only one file into one package*, and the common method thus is to use tar+gzip or tar+bzip2. While this may not make any difference for video and audio, I think that it makes at least some difference for the documents. The article does not say anything about tar, so I wonder if that might have changed the results, at least a bit. The man page of gzip at least say that using an archive such as tar before packaging improves the results.
On the other hand, tar could be used in combination with other packages as well - maybe it would have changed their results, too..? But still,.tar.gz and.tar.bzip2 are so common combination, that in a sense, they can be considered as an archive format, imho.
*) Although for bzip2, you can concatenate the packages (you can concatenate even gzipped files, but they can't be uncompressed into separate files, and you don't usually want that). I haven't tried this ever, though, but that's what the man page says.
It's not about whether it creates CO2 when burned or not. It's about where the coal for it comes. In vegetable oil, it comes from the plants, which get it from air, from - yes, CO2.
And that CO2 would be released after the plant dies anyway, because of all microbic activity etc. So why not to use the released energy tp move a car instead of as food for microbes. So it's kind of recycling the CO2.
But when you burn fossile oils, then you are creating CO2 from coal that would have staid under ground for a looooong time, so in that case you woud release CO2 into air without getting any CO2 away.
Slashdot Mirror
"You wouldn't download a car". Either this project is doomed to fail, or MPAA has been *wrong* all this time!
Exactly! People here on slashdot seem to have the habit that if they see anything related to a study, they always use the "correlationisnotcausation" tag. Yes, it is good to remember that they are not synonymous things, but in a controlled environment, it quite often is the case. Otherwise, there would be no point in doing any studies about anything.
No, it does not need any registration or password (there is a welcome page, though, if I recall correctly). It is quite reliable and fast. The biggest downside is that the coverage area is pretty limited (downtown, university, some other locations). But I think that it is very good for a tourist, for example.
The biggest problem with 3G is, in my opinion, the power usage. The cellphone needs to be pretty much in the charger all the time, and even then it barely holds the charge. Of course that probably depends much on the signal strength, but still seems like a problem on the go.
Hmm. Say that the display tehcnology draws 30 watts less power (my laptop uses around 40 watts IIRC, so the display can't really use much more than that). During 10k hours, that makes 300 kWh, which would be pretty much match price of the new display (depends on your electricity price, but anyhow).
Switching your display creates waste. So unless the waste is less toxic or the manufacturing process more environmentally friendly, I think that the 10k hours is a bit low, after all. Of course, that also depends on how the durability compares to other technologies.
Still, so far, I think a much better way to save energy is to switch to a laptop or enable the power save features of the computer (surprisingly many people never do that).
The flash video codecs aren't really that cpu intensive. You once were able to download for example the youtube videos in flv format from cache.googlevideo.com/get_video?video_id=<youtube_video_id> (I tried this now, and it didn't seem to work anymore). That video could then be played with MPlayer, to mention one *. Unfortunately, MPlayer was not able to play all videos (I guess that's because flv is actually a container format, and can have several codecs). But those videos that did play, plaid with a much better performance.
I don't really think that it is the codec that is the problem. I guess that the biggest problem is that Adobe refuses to use any of the acceleration techniques for the playback. While that probably makes the code much more portable between different architectures and operating systems, it really is a performance bottleneck.
*) That's what the uktube of ukmplayer (http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2008/ukmp/) does on N8x0. It seems to do some further tricks with the url, and therefore works even though the cache.googlevideo.com doesn't work anymore.
I agree that it is impossible to get every citizen the best possible health care, but I don't see this being asked for in the parent post. What I believe is that the society should give a reasonably good health care when taking into consideration the status of the economics of the country and the cost and the efficiency of the treatment.
Also, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_state#The_welfare_state_and_social_expenditure. It says among other things this:
I guess that this might have something to do with the fact that in several cases, treatment actually ends up saving money for the economy, even if being expensive: a person can keep on doing work for longer and thus gives tax incomes for the government. So, if a good health care is pretty much a +/- 0 for the economy, I know for sure which system I'm for: with the high welfare, you can both eat the cake and have the cake.
For example, on my computer (933 MHz Pentium III - not really the bleeding edge anymore, but IMHO should be more than enough for browsing the web), the new Slashdot discussion system works quite slow during the page loading, especially if there are many comments. Don't get me wrong, I think that the new system is great: no more getting lost in the discussion threads, or stumbling across the same comments over and over again. But even with this discussion - with a bit over 400 comments - I got the warning that a script on this site is making the browser unresponsive, blah blah.
So yes, this would affect at least my daily browsing. And with the fixed memory leaks and other performance improvements, I'm really waiting for the stable version, and I'm thinking of giving those beta releases a try, too.
I guess that the pun was intended, but anyhow, your comment brought into my mid this: http://xkcd.com/37/
Looking at the title, so many questions pop into my head - "Messenger Flies by Mercury" What are those Messenger flies? What are they doing by mercury? Is it not poisonous?
You have to memorize the results again even when using degrees, because tan(90 degrees) is not 1. It is undefined.
And of course, the results are the same, no matter whether using radians or degrees as units. For example, 180 degrees = pi radians, so sin(180 degrees) = sin(pi) = 0.
Gzip and bzip2 compress only one file into one package*, and the common method thus is to use tar+gzip or tar+bzip2. While this may not make any difference for video and audio, I think that it makes at least some difference for the documents. The article does not say anything about tar, so I wonder if that might have changed the results, at least a bit. The man page of gzip at least say that using an archive such as tar before packaging improves the results.
.tar.gz and .tar.bzip2 are so common combination, that in a sense, they can be considered as an archive format, imho.
On the other hand, tar could be used in combination with other packages as well - maybe it would have changed their results, too..? But still,
*) Although for bzip2, you can concatenate the packages (you can concatenate even gzipped files, but they can't be uncompressed into separate files, and you don't usually want that). I haven't tried this ever, though, but that's what the man page says.
Now, I wonder when they will invent a way to reverse the process so that I can make wine and beer of my old clothes.
It's not about whether it creates CO2 when burned or not. It's about where the coal for it comes. In vegetable oil, it comes from the plants, which get it from air, from - yes, CO2.
And that CO2 would be released after the plant dies anyway, because of all microbic activity etc. So why not to use the released energy tp move a car instead of as food for microbes. So it's kind of recycling the CO2.
But when you burn fossile oils, then you are creating CO2 from coal that would have staid under ground for a looooong time, so in that case you woud release CO2 into air without getting any CO2 away.
So there IS a difference. A very significant one.