The second statement is true. MS Office is barely usable. If you need to write a document more sophisticated than a letter to mom, then forget about word. The spreadsheet is terrible and doesn't use styles, has terribly limiting charts, (though in truth spreadsheets are not meant for plotting). Have you ever tried printing graphs in excel on which you might have superimposed guiding lines or comments? Right. It does not look at all like what you drew in. Everything has changed position. OpenOffice is what you see is what you get.
Again, with the slides, you have the possibility to use styles in OpenOffice. The graphics support is much better across all applications. And it's easy to use styles in the word-processor. Oh yeah, and try setting up your own variables in Word (without having to resort to VBA). Right. You can insert a field with a variable, but it does not let you natively define a new variable and assign it a value. And last time I checked it didn't let me do simple calculations in a table (PO forms are easier to generate in a text document). Also, the mailmerge in Word is almost impossible to use, and certainly not as versatile as OpenOffice's, it does not have Master Documents (awesome when writing a thesis, book, etc), and the labels/business cards feature is simply laughable (no option for syncing the whole page, which I thought would be a no-brainer).
In essence, Word, and MS Office if for little children just starting to learn to use office software on a computer. Real users will prefer OpenOffice any day of the week (and won't have to suffer the Ribbon either).
I'm fully expecting that some of those pictures will find their way on the internet. It will be interesting to see the people who pushed for those machines in the first place try to explain themselves.
Yes indeed. From geologic data, to construction codes and reports, it really is nice to visit a number of US public agencies. Most governments are not that open about the data that their taxpayers money has paid for, but to which the same taxpayers cannot easily get access. I wish my own government had more policies like those in place. However, things do seem to be improving. At least where the geospatial data is concerned, I'm starting to see some movement.
Actually, this should be an issue with the religious authorities. When you think about it, it is just pure blasphemy to put references to Jesus on a weapon. It always strikes me as strange, that the people who claim to be the most religious seem always to stray the furthest from the teachings of the faith they claim to practice. Jesus and references to him do not belong on a weapon. There is definitely no turning the other cheek there, or "not doing onto others" what you wouldn't want done to you. No "Love thy neighbour". It's all about imposing your faith on others, which also runs contrary to the basic tenets of said faith.
I believe it has already been done in Spain [http://noalprestamodepago.org/]. I'm not aware of the current status of the idiocy, but as far as I recall, the libraries there were going to charge a lending fee for the books for the "benefit of the authors". It is crazy that governments would allow to do this, and that people would not go "en masse" to the streets to oppose this abuse. The libraries were instituted to grant access to knowledge to everyone.
There needs to be a balance between protecting private interests and the public interests. The balance needs to be restored urgently, or nasty things may happen. Humans seem to have a propensity to ignore growing problems until they reach a boiling point, and then, the consequences tend to be most unfortunate for all parties involved.
I agree. Maybe what some users really want is a "Wine Destop Environment". Something that would use the Wine File Manager (and improvements thereof), and have a task bar and program menu managed by wine installation manager. etc. All the programs executed would be the win(e/dows) programs, and basically make this as seamless as possible.
On the other hand, we've been unundated with stories where people make threats of killing people at xxx school etc. And actually carry it out. There is a difference between shouting something akin to "I'm gonna kill you" when you are frustrated, and putting your frustration up on display on a very public billboard. One is just the current frustration, the other "may" indicate some deeper trouble that authorities will be blamed for ignoring once it's been made so public.
Maybe these social networks make it too easy to post things from a handy cell-phone etc. and it blurrs the line for some people between what constitutes "shouting in frustration" and making a public threat, in print, so that many can witness it. Users of public sites like Facebook and Twitter, or/., need to understand that it's not a private forum for them and their buddies. It is a very public forum, and anything they say there is broadcast to everybody and their aunts. It WAS a public threat. Was it outburst of frustration? Probably. Have people killed other people out of frustration? Definitely.
My advice is: if you are prone to make exaggerated comments out of frustration, and cannot distinguish between twitter and your good buddies, then you should consider staying out of social networks altogether. As for the authorities, given the number of deranged people who have actually carried out their public blog threats of killing people in public places, they cannot afford to ignore these public outbursts.
And I think I remember a report from a few weeks back on BBC saying how we have been consuming more Uranium in existing nuclear plants than we have been producing... if it hadn't been for stockpiles we wouldn't have been able to run currently existing nuclear plants. It is very coincidental that we not speak of this "alternative fuel".
It is also a very bad news when people talk about the "boom in tar sands" as a good thing. Tar sands are expensive (energy wise) to exploit, and wouldn't be put into production in any kind of massive scale if better sources of oil existed. It is a very bad indicator of the state of the energy supplies.
I've noticed that ever since global oil production peaked in 2008, there has been a "flurry of green initiatives" in the news worldwide. Under the pretense of showing increased concern about the environment, I have no doubt that it reflects more a state of panic of the higher ups that the warnings so long ignored have come to be true.
Sadly any alternative source of energy, requires time to develop and deploy, and will itself become an energy sink during that development/deployment phase. That is why those who first warned of peak oil, and general limits to growth, also mentioned that it was necessary to start preparing for the peak BEFORE it happened, one or even two decades before if possible. The current salvation is the slowed down economy, but it won't last forever, and demand will soon hit the ceiling again... which will likely cause further economic hardships, which in turn will have a direct influence on the development and deployment of alternatives.
It's a catch 22 scenario. I just wish we'd had 40 years forewarning so we could prepare. Wait, we actually did. And we haven't even started talking about the population problem yet. Maybe if we keep ignoring it, that problem will also go away without any kind of hardship for anybody. (and yes both problems WILL take care of themselves even if we ignore them, just like global warming will too, in the same way that mother nature always uses to take care of such problems... the human species, along with many others, may not like how she does things, however, which is why maybe we could have tried to engineer our way out of it by alternate means).
But who am I to talk? I'm sure that our government/corporate overlords, under the wise guidance of conventional economists know better. So no need to fear.
Re:This kind of hype was exactly the problem
on
The Long Shadow of Y2K
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Yes. It's very similar to the problems faced by health services on occasions like the H1N1 vaccination program. If the vaccination efforts are successful, and no alarming wave of deaths hits the world, then "obviously it was oversold and all those vaccination programs are money down the drain". If they turn out not to have covered all the bases and something terrible happens, then obviously "they failed to take proper measure to protect the population". Even a major success in public health can only be perceived as a failure for the lack of consequences (unless they tackle and endemic disease that has taken its toll for generations, but many of those cases have been tackled already). They are permanently stuck in a no-win situation.
Even somebody in the marketing business. I would assume that they do consider "negative consumer impact" or some similar variable. Coercion usually ends up associating bad feelings with the advertised products.
Actually, if you're concerned about intelligence, bird brains are supposedly much more efficient than mammal brains (need lots of processing power with low mass, which supposedly has driven efficiency of cognitive processes). Apparently, as reported several times in the last few months, many corvids score higher than most primates, including most apes (I'm excluding humans here), in intelligence scores. And some are quite adept at making tools (though so far only for a limited number of tasks as far as I've seen reported).
I for one welcome our future feathered overlords.
But in the meantime, if it bothers you to eat smart food, you might try to drop the chicken from your diet.
The ribbon is useless. Has an illogical grouping of elements that rely far too much on graphics to access. It lacks the scroll sideways once then only mostly down approach of the menu, and pales to insignificance when compared to the very, very, very useful, context-sensitive popup menu that OpenOffice currently has. I rarely go to the main menu bar in OpenOffice since the context-sensitive menu already does a terrific job of hiding unneeded information based on context. It is wonderful, and enhances productivity tremendously. The standard menubar degrades productivity as compared to the pop-up contextual menu, however it does not downgrade it anywhere as much as the ribbon, with its "scattered everywhere" approach to grouping that requires constant movement back and forth across the screen. I have rarely seen a productivity killer such as the ribbon. I have no way of logically finding a rarely used feature (what does "Quick Parts" mean anyway?). I don't want OpenOffice to go that route, and if it ever does, I hope many slashdotters will band together and Fork It. The ribbon must be declared a Forkkable crime against both users and good taste.
Another thing in which OpenOffice must NOT emulate excel is in Number formatting, where you need to select "Custom" to be able to enter a custom number format. The custom format text window should always be accessible. Microsoft overdoes the layering of commands beyond multiple required clicks of buttons or other controls.
Presentations are not too bad, the spreadsheet is mediocre, and the word processor is abysmal.
Unfortunately, most people would want to use the word processor.
As a prof, I do use the spreadsheet regularly, shared among the TAs of my class to log assignment and exam marks. As it allows shared editing, I always have the latest grades input from the TAs for the class. I don't have to try to get individual spreadsheets and try to integrate the data at the last minute, hoping that everybody's names list match (even when provided... there are ALWAYS changes to the number and order of the names at then end of the semester on each spreadsheet).
So it is useful, in a very limited context. What's more, Google episodes of no connectivity have clearly shown the severe limitations of cloud computing. And I'm not event talkign security concerns here. OpenOffice will remain my primary office suite for teh foreseeable future, thank you very much. And besides, isn't Byzantine OS doing exactly what Chrome OS is supposed to do? Why are we reinventing the wheel again?
I would rather be holding a book to reading stuff onscreen. I would rather be holding a reflective flexible reader (e-ink and the like) to holding a newspaper. Most noticeable reasons: a newspaper is disgusting to hold, and it kills lots of trees for mostly meaningless content that will be irrelevant by tomorrow. For durable content, go dead tree. Makes sense. For transitory content, don't waste valuable resources and energy converting trees into landfill bulk. Leave it in the for of transient electrical charges. We can always print a hardcopy for archiving purposes.
Those little mounds look very much like the byproduct of the interpolation algorithm. When your data is spaced out, and the ground surface very variable, there is no smooth transition between the data points. Interpolation algorithms will then tend to show little "islands", or "hollows" at the points of known elevations which tend toward some sort of average value of the neighboring points as you go away from them. It's a typical artifact of such algorithms.
This recession will not last years because pundits say so. Unlike other recessions, this one was predicted decades ago. (have a look at the book "Limits to growth" and the neat time line for peak global industrial output peak. The timing match is quite scary actually). It is not a coincidence that the banking system collapsed on the heels of 140$ a barrel for oil. There is no other currency than energy. Without energy (including food to keep people going), there is no economic "activity". Food production has peaked too, on a global scale. What will happen now, is that as soon as the economy starts moving again, demand of fuel will increase until we reach a level somewhat lower than the peak 85 million barrels a day or so, at which point, due the limited oil production, prices will skyrocket again, and a fragile economy will go right back into recession. The only way out, is reducing quickly energy consumption. And increasing alternatitve energy sources.. However, there is 150 years of infrastructure in oil, and even more in coal.... you can't replace that in a couple of years. It takes decades during which global population will continue to grow, and food production decrease (at an accelerated rate with the decreased availability of natural gas and gasoline). It's not the pundits that predict a long recession. It's mother nature.
Why concrete? Cement is ridiculously energy intensive to produce. Why not stick with water, or if you really want something more complicated to handle but heavier, go with good ol' rock. We'll need to conserver all the cement and steel that we can in the coming years.
I've had good luck with Wengophone to connect with family members abroad who are tied to Windows. It uses SIP, so you should be able to chat with people using ekiga or netmeeting too. I have connected to a cousin using wengophone on Windows, but through the ekiga network (for some reason, wengo is currently not accepting new members). But because you are free to choose your SIP phone book server, you can move around. I can report successful video/audio conferences. Furthermore, Wengophone allows you to connect to Jabber, MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ and some other networks so you can keep all your accounts tidily bundled together.
Yes. I realize that they plan to use bugs to eat agricultural waste. But said waste will not go into the production of compost. Hence farms deprived of that compost will need chemical fertilizers, which requires energy from sources others than the "sun" that produced the raw material for the original waste. Ultimately, it is still a form of solar energy collector with chemical storage. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but it can't compete with the shear concentrated energy value of petroleum. How much waste will have to be used for one barrel of oil? Transportation costs of the waste? That's what I mean by OPEC providing cheap ENERGY and not cheap OIL. It does not take away the value of the research. Not ahving to redo the infrastructure means that we get away from spending lots of energy upfront for the conversion. However we are still stuck the en environmental problems paused by gasoline leaks contaminating the groundwater table etc. It IS a wonderful discovery. It just is NOT free energy.
Correction. It would NOT destabilize OPEC. OPEC does not provide cheap oil. It provides cheap ENERGY (yes cheap, considering that a barrel of oil is said to represent the yearly labour of 12 people... how much would you pay THEM over the year? Probably more than 140$ How much do YOU make per year?). If you can produce crude oil by some process, it still requires ENERGY to produce. Where are you getting it from? There will undoubtely be losses. How many OPEC countries have not reached peak yet? Indonesia just abandonned OPEC because it is now a net importer of oil. Mexico is due to become a net importer by 2011. Countries hit peak way before they become net importers. The worse thing OPEC can do now is increase production (if they even physically can, how many countries other than Saudi Arabia have been wise enough to keep any slack?) as it steals away our only avenue of mitigating the impact of peak oil: TIME to develop and DEPLOY alternatives (because when an alternative is developped NOW, it won't replace 150 years of infrastructure TOMORROW). So this research has no bearing on OPEC countries (Saudi Arabia could develop huge solar farms in its desert, non-agricultural land surface for instance, and it still produces the energy NOW that people need). It does allow us to cut back on the need to deploy an entirely different infrasctructure to use the energy we obtain from alternative means (how many people will have electric cars tomorrow even if we sprang overnight the estimated 10 000 Nuclear Power plants that could produce the energy we get from oil ?). However, be prepared to sustain energy losses in the conversion of electricity (or heat, the two most likely forms of alternative energy collected) into the synthetic crude oil.
I thought the whole point of not running dedicated lines was that it was prohibitively expensive. Cell phone data services is pretty much prohibitively expensive too. A minimum of 45$ includes the bare minimum data service. Not worth the cost. And I'm not even talking roaming fees.
I am no expert, but as I understand it, the total amount of light collected is only a factor in increasing the power of the telescope. So, two telescopes of a certain size would collect the same amount of light however fare apart they were. However, when the light is combined they can use interferometry principles to obtain a higher resolution image than would be otherwise be possible from the same location (and no, the kind of distance apart that they are would not provide meaningful parallax info at stellar distances). So, having them further apart will increase the resolving power of the telescope. Basically, the distant stars and galaxies will look just as bright, but it's the difference between seeing a bright spec, blurred by maladjusted lenses, compared to a sharp image, with lots of detail given by well focused lenses. Total surface area provides brightness. Spacing provides detail and resolution. At least this is how I understand it. Those more knowledgeable will be able to answer better.
On the other hand she is implying that people may have friends running Linux. Considering that the Linux using croud is still composed mostly of geeks, and that geeks being dorks and all don't really have friends, she could have limited the options to finding someone with a Mac.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Linux user and I have no friends.... Will you be my friend?)
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revolutionary
The second statement is true. MS Office is barely usable. If you need to write a document more sophisticated than a letter to mom, then forget about word. The spreadsheet is terrible and doesn't use styles, has terribly limiting charts, (though in truth spreadsheets are not meant for plotting). Have you ever tried printing graphs in excel on which you might have superimposed guiding lines or comments? Right. It does not look at all like what you drew in. Everything has changed position. OpenOffice is what you see is what you get.
Again, with the slides, you have the possibility to use styles in OpenOffice. The graphics support is much better across all applications. And it's easy to use styles in the word-processor. Oh yeah, and try setting up your own variables in Word (without having to resort to VBA). Right. You can insert a field with a variable, but it does not let you natively define a new variable and assign it a value. And last time I checked it didn't let me do simple calculations in a table (PO forms are easier to generate in a text document). Also, the mailmerge in Word is almost impossible to use, and certainly not as versatile as OpenOffice's, it does not have Master Documents (awesome when writing a thesis, book, etc), and the labels/business cards feature is simply laughable (no option for syncing the whole page, which I thought would be a no-brainer).
In essence, Word, and MS Office if for little children just starting to learn to use office software on a computer. Real users will prefer OpenOffice any day of the week (and won't have to suffer the Ribbon either).
I'm fully expecting that some of those pictures will find their way on the internet. It will be interesting to see the people who pushed for those machines in the first place try to explain themselves.
Yes indeed. From geologic data, to construction codes and reports, it really is nice to visit a number of US public agencies. Most governments are not that open about the data that their taxpayers money has paid for, but to which the same taxpayers cannot easily get access. I wish my own government had more policies like those in place. However, things do seem to be improving. At least where the geospatial data is concerned, I'm starting to see some movement.
Actually, this should be an issue with the religious authorities. When you think about it, it is just pure blasphemy to put references to Jesus on a weapon. It always strikes me as strange, that the people who claim to be the most religious seem always to stray the furthest from the teachings of the faith they claim to practice. Jesus and references to him do not belong on a weapon. There is definitely no turning the other cheek there, or "not doing onto others" what you wouldn't want done to you. No "Love thy neighbour". It's all about imposing your faith on others, which also runs contrary to the basic tenets of said faith.
I believe it has already been done in Spain [http://noalprestamodepago.org/]. I'm not aware of the current status of the idiocy, but as far as I recall, the libraries there were going to charge a lending fee for the books for the "benefit of the authors". It is crazy that governments would allow to do this, and that people would not go "en masse" to the streets to oppose this abuse. The libraries were instituted to grant access to knowledge to everyone.
There needs to be a balance between protecting private interests and the public interests. The balance needs to be restored urgently, or nasty things may happen. Humans seem to have a propensity to ignore growing problems until they reach a boiling point, and then, the consequences tend to be most unfortunate for all parties involved.
I agree. Maybe what some users really want is a "Wine Destop Environment". Something that would use the Wine File Manager (and improvements thereof), and have a task bar and program menu managed by wine installation manager. etc. All the programs executed would be the win(e/dows) programs, and basically make this as seamless as possible.
Just a thought.
On the other hand, we've been unundated with stories where people make threats of killing people at xxx school etc. And actually carry it out. There is a difference between shouting something akin to "I'm gonna kill you" when you are frustrated, and putting your frustration up on display on a very public billboard. One is just the current frustration, the other "may" indicate some deeper trouble that authorities will be blamed for ignoring once it's been made so public. Maybe these social networks make it too easy to post things from a handy cell-phone etc. and it blurrs the line for some people between what constitutes "shouting in frustration" and making a public threat, in print, so that many can witness it. Users of public sites like Facebook and Twitter, or /., need to understand that it's not a private forum for them and their buddies. It is a very public forum, and anything they say there is broadcast to everybody and their aunts. It WAS a public threat. Was it outburst of frustration? Probably. Have people killed other people out of frustration? Definitely.
My advice is: if you are prone to make exaggerated comments out of frustration, and cannot distinguish between twitter and your good buddies, then you should consider staying out of social networks altogether. As for the authorities, given the number of deranged people who have actually carried out their public blog threats of killing people in public places, they cannot afford to ignore these public outbursts.
And I think I remember a report from a few weeks back on BBC saying how we have been consuming more Uranium in existing nuclear plants than we have been producing... if it hadn't been for stockpiles we wouldn't have been able to run currently existing nuclear plants. It is very coincidental that we not speak of this "alternative fuel".
It is also a very bad news when people talk about the "boom in tar sands" as a good thing. Tar sands are expensive (energy wise) to exploit, and wouldn't be put into production in any kind of massive scale if better sources of oil existed. It is a very bad indicator of the state of the energy supplies.
I've noticed that ever since global oil production peaked in 2008, there has been a "flurry of green initiatives" in the news worldwide. Under the pretense of showing increased concern about the environment, I have no doubt that it reflects more a state of panic of the higher ups that the warnings so long ignored have come to be true.
Sadly any alternative source of energy, requires time to develop and deploy, and will itself become an energy sink during that development/deployment phase. That is why those who first warned of peak oil, and general limits to growth, also mentioned that it was necessary to start preparing for the peak BEFORE it happened, one or even two decades before if possible. The current salvation is the slowed down economy, but it won't last forever, and demand will soon hit the ceiling again... which will likely cause further economic hardships, which in turn will have a direct influence on the development and deployment of alternatives.
It's a catch 22 scenario. I just wish we'd had 40 years forewarning so we could prepare. Wait, we actually did. And we haven't even started talking about the population problem yet. Maybe if we keep ignoring it, that problem will also go away without any kind of hardship for anybody. (and yes both problems WILL take care of themselves even if we ignore them, just like global warming will too, in the same way that mother nature always uses to take care of such problems... the human species, along with many others, may not like how she does things, however, which is why maybe we could have tried to engineer our way out of it by alternate means).
But who am I to talk? I'm sure that our government/corporate overlords, under the wise guidance of conventional economists know better. So no need to fear.
Yes. It's very similar to the problems faced by health services on occasions like the H1N1 vaccination program. If the vaccination efforts are successful, and no alarming wave of deaths hits the world, then "obviously it was oversold and all those vaccination programs are money down the drain". If they turn out not to have covered all the bases and something terrible happens, then obviously "they failed to take proper measure to protect the population". Even a major success in public health can only be perceived as a failure for the lack of consequences (unless they tackle and endemic disease that has taken its toll for generations, but many of those cases have been tackled already). They are permanently stuck in a no-win situation.
Not to mention they don't actually have a mechanism to submit bug reports.
Even somebody in the marketing business. I would assume that they do consider "negative consumer impact" or some similar variable. Coercion usually ends up associating bad feelings with the advertised products.
Actually, if you're concerned about intelligence, bird brains are supposedly much more efficient than mammal brains (need lots of processing power with low mass, which supposedly has driven efficiency of cognitive processes). Apparently, as reported several times in the last few months, many corvids score higher than most primates, including most apes (I'm excluding humans here), in intelligence scores. And some are quite adept at making tools (though so far only for a limited number of tasks as far as I've seen reported). I for one welcome our future feathered overlords. But in the meantime, if it bothers you to eat smart food, you might try to drop the chicken from your diet.
The ribbon is useless. Has an illogical grouping of elements that rely far too much on graphics to access. It lacks the scroll sideways once then only mostly down approach of the menu, and pales to insignificance when compared to the very, very, very useful, context-sensitive popup menu that OpenOffice currently has. I rarely go to the main menu bar in OpenOffice since the context-sensitive menu already does a terrific job of hiding unneeded information based on context. It is wonderful, and enhances productivity tremendously. The standard menubar degrades productivity as compared to the pop-up contextual menu, however it does not downgrade it anywhere as much as the ribbon, with its "scattered everywhere" approach to grouping that requires constant movement back and forth across the screen. I have rarely seen a productivity killer such as the ribbon. I have no way of logically finding a rarely used feature (what does "Quick Parts" mean anyway?). I don't want OpenOffice to go that route, and if it ever does, I hope many slashdotters will band together and Fork It. The ribbon must be declared a Forkkable crime against both users and good taste. Another thing in which OpenOffice must NOT emulate excel is in Number formatting, where you need to select "Custom" to be able to enter a custom number format. The custom format text window should always be accessible. Microsoft overdoes the layering of commands beyond multiple required clicks of buttons or other controls.
Presentations are not too bad, the spreadsheet is mediocre, and the word processor is abysmal. Unfortunately, most people would want to use the word processor. As a prof, I do use the spreadsheet regularly, shared among the TAs of my class to log assignment and exam marks. As it allows shared editing, I always have the latest grades input from the TAs for the class. I don't have to try to get individual spreadsheets and try to integrate the data at the last minute, hoping that everybody's names list match (even when provided... there are ALWAYS changes to the number and order of the names at then end of the semester on each spreadsheet). So it is useful, in a very limited context. What's more, Google episodes of no connectivity have clearly shown the severe limitations of cloud computing. And I'm not event talkign security concerns here. OpenOffice will remain my primary office suite for teh foreseeable future, thank you very much. And besides, isn't Byzantine OS doing exactly what Chrome OS is supposed to do? Why are we reinventing the wheel again?
I would rather be holding a book to reading stuff onscreen. I would rather be holding a reflective flexible reader (e-ink and the like) to holding a newspaper. Most noticeable reasons: a newspaper is disgusting to hold, and it kills lots of trees for mostly meaningless content that will be irrelevant by tomorrow. For durable content, go dead tree. Makes sense. For transitory content, don't waste valuable resources and energy converting trees into landfill bulk. Leave it in the for of transient electrical charges. We can always print a hardcopy for archiving purposes.
Those little mounds look very much like the byproduct of the interpolation algorithm. When your data is spaced out, and the ground surface very variable, there is no smooth transition between the data points. Interpolation algorithms will then tend to show little "islands", or "hollows" at the points of known elevations which tend toward some sort of average value of the neighboring points as you go away from them. It's a typical artifact of such algorithms.
This recession will not last years because pundits say so. Unlike other recessions, this one was predicted decades ago. (have a look at the book "Limits to growth" and the neat time line for peak global industrial output peak. The timing match is quite scary actually). It is not a coincidence that the banking system collapsed on the heels of 140$ a barrel for oil. There is no other currency than energy. Without energy (including food to keep people going), there is no economic "activity". Food production has peaked too, on a global scale. What will happen now, is that as soon as the economy starts moving again, demand of fuel will increase until we reach a level somewhat lower than the peak 85 million barrels a day or so, at which point, due the limited oil production, prices will skyrocket again, and a fragile economy will go right back into recession. The only way out, is reducing quickly energy consumption. And increasing alternatitve energy sources.. However, there is 150 years of infrastructure in oil, and even more in coal.... you can't replace that in a couple of years. It takes decades during which global population will continue to grow, and food production decrease (at an accelerated rate with the decreased availability of natural gas and gasoline). It's not the pundits that predict a long recession. It's mother nature.
Why concrete? Cement is ridiculously energy intensive to produce. Why not stick with water, or if you really want something more complicated to handle but heavier, go with good ol' rock. We'll need to conserver all the cement and steel that we can in the coming years.
I've had good luck with Wengophone to connect with family members abroad who are tied to Windows. It uses SIP, so you should be able to chat with people using ekiga or netmeeting too. I have connected to a cousin using wengophone on Windows, but through the ekiga network (for some reason, wengo is currently not accepting new members). But because you are free to choose your SIP phone book server, you can move around. I can report successful video/audio conferences. Furthermore, Wengophone allows you to connect to Jabber, MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ and some other networks so you can keep all your accounts tidily bundled together.
Yes. I realize that they plan to use bugs to eat agricultural waste. But said waste will not go into the production of compost. Hence farms deprived of that compost will need chemical fertilizers, which requires energy from sources others than the "sun" that produced the raw material for the original waste. Ultimately, it is still a form of solar energy collector with chemical storage. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but it can't compete with the shear concentrated energy value of petroleum. How much waste will have to be used for one barrel of oil? Transportation costs of the waste? That's what I mean by OPEC providing cheap ENERGY and not cheap OIL. It does not take away the value of the research. Not ahving to redo the infrastructure means that we get away from spending lots of energy upfront for the conversion. However we are still stuck the en environmental problems paused by gasoline leaks contaminating the groundwater table etc. It IS a wonderful discovery. It just is NOT free energy.
Correction. It would NOT destabilize OPEC. OPEC does not provide cheap oil. It provides cheap ENERGY (yes cheap, considering that a barrel of oil is said to represent the yearly labour of 12 people... how much would you pay THEM over the year? Probably more than 140$ How much do YOU make per year?). If you can produce crude oil by some process, it still requires ENERGY to produce. Where are you getting it from? There will undoubtely be losses. How many OPEC countries have not reached peak yet? Indonesia just abandonned OPEC because it is now a net importer of oil. Mexico is due to become a net importer by 2011. Countries hit peak way before they become net importers. The worse thing OPEC can do now is increase production (if they even physically can, how many countries other than Saudi Arabia have been wise enough to keep any slack?) as it steals away our only avenue of mitigating the impact of peak oil: TIME to develop and DEPLOY alternatives (because when an alternative is developped NOW, it won't replace 150 years of infrastructure TOMORROW). So this research has no bearing on OPEC countries (Saudi Arabia could develop huge solar farms in its desert, non-agricultural land surface for instance, and it still produces the energy NOW that people need). It does allow us to cut back on the need to deploy an entirely different infrasctructure to use the energy we obtain from alternative means (how many people will have electric cars tomorrow even if we sprang overnight the estimated 10 000 Nuclear Power plants that could produce the energy we get from oil ?). However, be prepared to sustain energy losses in the conversion of electricity (or heat, the two most likely forms of alternative energy collected) into the synthetic crude oil.
I thought the whole point of not running dedicated lines was that it was prohibitively expensive. Cell phone data services is pretty much prohibitively expensive too. A minimum of 45$ includes the bare minimum data service. Not worth the cost. And I'm not even talking roaming fees.
I am no expert, but as I understand it, the total amount of light collected is only a factor in increasing the power of the telescope. So, two telescopes of a certain size would collect the same amount of light however fare apart they were. However, when the light is combined they can use interferometry principles to obtain a higher resolution image than would be otherwise be possible from the same location (and no, the kind of distance apart that they are would not provide meaningful parallax info at stellar distances). So, having them further apart will increase the resolving power of the telescope. Basically, the distant stars and galaxies will look just as bright, but it's the difference between seeing a bright spec, blurred by maladjusted lenses, compared to a sharp image, with lots of detail given by well focused lenses. Total surface area provides brightness. Spacing provides detail and resolution. At least this is how I understand it. Those more knowledgeable will be able to answer better.
On the other hand she is implying that people may have friends running Linux. Considering that the Linux using croud is still composed mostly of geeks, and that geeks being dorks and all don't really have friends, she could have limited the options to finding someone with a Mac.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Linux user and I have no friends.... Will you be my friend?)