I've always thought that being a hairless ape drove our intelligence - we're highly vulnerable to attack, parasites and disease, need to make our own clothing and shelter from the weather, have high food / water demands, infants are completely helpless for years, generally speaking humans have the highest maintenance bodies on the planet - thus requiring an intelligent brain just to reproduce at all.
A lot of the "science" I was taught in the 1970s reflects the simpler linear models they describe - until the enlightened thinking reaches a critical mass where it can be taught to the majority of children in school, I'd say "many have assumed" still applies.
If we don't wipe them out entirely, we may be accelerating the evolution of squid by challenging them. Some challenges (like change in ocean chemistry / temperature) don't have obvious advantages for intelligence, but other challenges like varying their food supply and hunting them should perk up their cognitive gene pool pretty quickly.
How long did astronomers look at the stars before they decided to stand up and say that the Earth was not the center of the Universe?
It seems that it has taken us about 150 years post-Darwin to stand up and say that the human brain is not the center of intelligence on Earth.
Anyone that looks at (fat, wasteful) modern society in proportionate cross-section should see that the vast majority of today's humans are just random actors following mostly reflex / instinct without much cleverness involved. Maybe when life was harder we were more clever because we had to be, but if an alien cognition researcher plucked Joe the Plumber out of middle America and put him to a test of higher cognitive power - I bet he'd come up lacking.
As far as I know, the Apple store (or their shill resellers who give a whopping 5% off) is the only place to buy the DisplayPort converters. I don't think that's likely to change.
I do see some clear advantages of HDMI over DVI - the connector is much smaller and has to be cheaper to make, and it also includes audio in its standard, eliminating the separate audio cable. All good points.
HDMI - MiniVideo all I see is that it was invented by Apple for Apple to include all the features of HDMI plus DRM restrictions. And the converters I saw on the Apple store last week were $49 for MiniVideo->DVI and $99 for MiniVideo->Dual DVI.
Although it's a pain to have to buy adaptors, Apple's Mini DisplayPort is not proprietary - Apple have made it freely licensable.
Right now, I view DisplayPort as proprietary as Sony's BetaMax and MemoryStick, or Microsoft's C#, or Apple's Objective C. Even if the license is free, it's only available if you want to copy and follow Apple - and why would I want that when HDMI has all the same value and less disadvantages?
Owned a MacBook Pro for almost 3 years now - never bought anything through iTunes. Also have resisted temptation to even consider a new MBP due to the proprietary (PITA) display port - and will likely never buy the new MacMini for the same reason, plus the fact that two or three eeeBoxes are far more useful (to me) than one MacMini.
I also have purchased 6 DRM-free Sansa media players over the last 2 years, I really enjoy not worrying about content license issues in case my 6 year old loses his player (it also helps that I got the kids' Sansa shakers for $15 each...)
The only DRMistake I ever made was a PS3 purchase - it's a cool product, but it rankles knowing that it could be streaming Netflix to the big TV if only its makers weren't trying to push their own (overpriced, underfeatured) products down my intertubes...
Yep, bring on the coming ice age - stop burning fossil fuel and just use nuclear power on the moon launch material to build mirrors as needed - much more quickly adjustable and targetable than greenhouse gasses or bio-based systems. And, if we overcook the Earth, we can also put sunshades in orbit, adjust them like a window blind to control how much sunlight gets down.
I really like the idea of a winter farm outside of Anchorage, or even on the North Slope.
Anything on this scale would require a new approach, different from chemical rockets launched from Earth's surface - not only from the damage to the ozone perspective, but also from the basic economy - there are so many more efficient ways to do it that are only impractical because we haven't put in the initial development - the scale of this kind of project justifies the initial development several times over.
10,000 sq km (2.5 million acres) seems like a lot of land area to devote to receiving microwaves from space - how much could you generate from plain old solar power in that area, even with cloud cover? Now, how much could you generate from solar power in 1/100th that area if you put plain old mirrors in space to concentrate the sunlight, instead of a gee-whiz system that converts sunlight to electricity to microwaves?
With the mirrors out at GEO, they would be relatively defensible from ground based attack, and this system would have far greater military potential than the current nukes on ICBMs system.
The power density would probably never be high enough to turn it into a death ray.
A 1" magnifying glass can make solar death rays for ants... any multi giga watt system capable of transmitting that power to the ground in a useful form is going to be capable of frying stuff. It may be "completely harmless by design" - but with what this system is going to cost to build, I can't imagine it getting funded without a military application onboard.
Think: mirrors, concentrated sunlight on a generating station in the desert - or, on unruly cities, or troublesome mountain ranges with AlQueda infested caves.
He's trying to train you so you won't make the same "expensive mistake" next time. Yeah, right. My first boss had me work for over a week to eliminate $12 worth of "unnecessary" transistors on a one-off test jig - too bad that they really were necessary for stability of the system. If he doesn't push you around a bit, he's not being a boss (in his mind.)
Good people have always been worth Nx average people, where:
N=2 in the infantry,
N=1.1 in portfolio management,
N=4 in team sports, and
N=50 in programming
The challenge is in identifying, recruiting, and retaining good people - money isn't the only component necessary. I have found that luck seems to be the most important factor.
Meanwhile, if the boneheads you have working for you are producing slow but at least accurate code, it is certainly cheaper to throw hardware at the problem rather than trying to teach discrete mathematics to a macacque.
Problem I always had was that my boneheads would miss the optimal performance mark by factors of 1000 and more - needs some pretty expensive hardware to make up that kind of ground.
People in that part of the world have put up with "inhuman abuse" for thousands of years - it's a different mindset from "the west."
Oh, well that's all right then.
Actually, it might be for them - I wouldn't want it for myself, but I'm not sure we should be starting wars we cannot finish in the name of making them more like us.
His case is that _he_ did not run up the bill. There's another point here in that the utility did not suffer significant actual loss - yes, they provide a service and the service was used, but I suspect his tariff rates represent greater than 99% profit for the carriers - if he had actually intended to use the service in that manner (to make thousands of hours of calls to Bulgaria or wherever), he could have negotiated a service rate of easily less than $1000 a month, or used an alternate service like VOIP that would have cost even less.
I am reminded of a $12.50 30 second phone call I made from a hotel once, I called to check the rates and they told me that the initial connection charge was $14.95 - damn did I feel lucky to only be billed $12.50 (for a call that would have cost $0.30 on a calling card at the time.) Who is the thief in this situation? Me for not pointing out the error on my bill, or them for not notifying me that a 30 second phone call was going to cost me 20% of the nightly charge for the hotel room? If someone broke into my room and made a hundred of these calls, am I liable for not double-bolting the door?
If the ocean water is cooler and available, it would be more efficient to just circulate it under the sand... I suspect they're using (electric powered) heat pumps at some point in the process. Oil effectively costs them less than drinkable water there, so energy efficiency is a laughable concept in their economy.
I especially like the way the auto industry and energy industry are putting on a repeat performance of 1973, right down to getting everybody to drive big gas guzzlers just before jacking up fuel prices 300%, and the resurgent interest in wind/solar/electric vehicles, etc.
There must be a significant amount of counterfeit currency floating today, because I believe it is actually possible for the government to pay off the total current debt without removing all money from circulation.
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I've always thought that being a hairless ape drove our intelligence - we're highly vulnerable to attack, parasites and disease, need to make our own clothing and shelter from the weather, have high food / water demands, infants are completely helpless for years, generally speaking humans have the highest maintenance bodies on the planet - thus requiring an intelligent brain just to reproduce at all.
A lot of the "science" I was taught in the 1970s reflects the simpler linear models they describe - until the enlightened thinking reaches a critical mass where it can be taught to the majority of children in school, I'd say "many have assumed" still applies.
Insert ID comparison here.
If we don't wipe them out entirely, we may be accelerating the evolution of squid by challenging them. Some challenges (like change in ocean chemistry / temperature) don't have obvious advantages for intelligence, but other challenges like varying their food supply and hunting them should perk up their cognitive gene pool pretty quickly.
How long did astronomers look at the stars before they decided to stand up and say that the Earth was not the center of the Universe?
It seems that it has taken us about 150 years post-Darwin to stand up and say that the human brain is not the center of intelligence on Earth.
Anyone that looks at (fat, wasteful) modern society in proportionate cross-section should see that the vast majority of today's humans are just random actors following mostly reflex / instinct without much cleverness involved. Maybe when life was harder we were more clever because we had to be, but if an alien cognition researcher plucked Joe the Plumber out of middle America and put him to a test of higher cognitive power - I bet he'd come up lacking.
As far as I know, the Apple store (or their shill resellers who give a whopping 5% off) is the only place to buy the DisplayPort converters. I don't think that's likely to change.
I do see some clear advantages of HDMI over DVI - the connector is much smaller and has to be cheaper to make, and it also includes audio in its standard, eliminating the separate audio cable. All good points.
HDMI - MiniVideo all I see is that it was invented by Apple for Apple to include all the features of HDMI plus DRM restrictions. And the converters I saw on the Apple store last week were $49 for MiniVideo->DVI and $99 for MiniVideo->Dual DVI.
How is a license-free and royalty-free port count as "proprietary?" "Uncommon," sure, but "proprietary?" Nopers.
True. There needs to be a different name besides proprietary for "this stuff we just made up."
Although it's a pain to have to buy adaptors, Apple's Mini DisplayPort is not proprietary - Apple have made it freely licensable.
Right now, I view DisplayPort as proprietary as Sony's BetaMax and MemoryStick, or Microsoft's C#, or Apple's Objective C. Even if the license is free, it's only available if you want to copy and follow Apple - and why would I want that when HDMI has all the same value and less disadvantages?
Owned a MacBook Pro for almost 3 years now - never bought anything through iTunes. Also have resisted temptation to even consider a new MBP due to the proprietary (PITA) display port - and will likely never buy the new MacMini for the same reason, plus the fact that two or three eeeBoxes are far more useful (to me) than one MacMini.
I also have purchased 6 DRM-free Sansa media players over the last 2 years, I really enjoy not worrying about content license issues in case my 6 year old loses his player (it also helps that I got the kids' Sansa shakers for $15 each...)
The only DRMistake I ever made was a PS3 purchase - it's a cool product, but it rankles knowing that it could be streaming Netflix to the big TV if only its makers weren't trying to push their own (overpriced, underfeatured) products down my intertubes...
Yep, bring on the coming ice age - stop burning fossil fuel and just use nuclear power on the moon launch material to build mirrors as needed - much more quickly adjustable and targetable than greenhouse gasses or bio-based systems. And, if we overcook the Earth, we can also put sunshades in orbit, adjust them like a window blind to control how much sunlight gets down.
I really like the idea of a winter farm outside of Anchorage, or even on the North Slope.
Anything on this scale would require a new approach, different from chemical rockets launched from Earth's surface - not only from the damage to the ozone perspective, but also from the basic economy - there are so many more efficient ways to do it that are only impractical because we haven't put in the initial development - the scale of this kind of project justifies the initial development several times over.
10,000 sq km (2.5 million acres) seems like a lot of land area to devote to receiving microwaves from space - how much could you generate from plain old solar power in that area, even with cloud cover? Now, how much could you generate from solar power in 1/100th that area if you put plain old mirrors in space to concentrate the sunlight, instead of a gee-whiz system that converts sunlight to electricity to microwaves?
With the mirrors out at GEO, they would be relatively defensible from ground based attack, and this system would have far greater military potential than the current nukes on ICBMs system.
The power density would probably never be high enough to turn it into a death ray.
A 1" magnifying glass can make solar death rays for ants... any multi giga watt system capable of transmitting that power to the ground in a useful form is going to be capable of frying stuff. It may be "completely harmless by design" - but with what this system is going to cost to build, I can't imagine it getting funded without a military application onboard.
Were you requesting bread or circuses? Are you surprised that a broad cross section of the population was bored?
Think: mirrors, concentrated sunlight on a generating station in the desert - or, on unruly cities, or troublesome mountain ranges with AlQueda infested caves.
Not all bosses are like yours, in fact, I think I've had two (of about 8) who weren't just like that.
He's trying to train you so you won't make the same "expensive mistake" next time. Yeah, right. My first boss had me work for over a week to eliminate $12 worth of "unnecessary" transistors on a one-off test jig - too bad that they really were necessary for stability of the system. If he doesn't push you around a bit, he's not being a boss (in his mind.)
Good people have always been worth Nx average people, where:
The challenge is in identifying, recruiting, and retaining good people - money isn't the only component necessary. I have found that luck seems to be the most important factor.
Meanwhile, if the boneheads you have working for you are producing slow but at least accurate code, it is certainly cheaper to throw hardware at the problem rather than trying to teach discrete mathematics to a macacque.
Problem I always had was that my boneheads would miss the optimal performance mark by factors of 1000 and more - needs some pretty expensive hardware to make up that kind of ground.
People in that part of the world have put up with "inhuman abuse" for thousands of years - it's a different mindset from "the west."
Oh, well that's all right then.
Actually, it might be for them - I wouldn't want it for myself, but I'm not sure we should be starting wars we cannot finish in the name of making them more like us.
Arabs are not Jews... Jews do have a very Western mindset.
His case is that _he_ did not run up the bill. There's another point here in that the utility did not suffer significant actual loss - yes, they provide a service and the service was used, but I suspect his tariff rates represent greater than 99% profit for the carriers - if he had actually intended to use the service in that manner (to make thousands of hours of calls to Bulgaria or wherever), he could have negotiated a service rate of easily less than $1000 a month, or used an alternate service like VOIP that would have cost even less.
I am reminded of a $12.50 30 second phone call I made from a hotel once, I called to check the rates and they told me that the initial connection charge was $14.95 - damn did I feel lucky to only be billed $12.50 (for a call that would have cost $0.30 on a calling card at the time.) Who is the thief in this situation? Me for not pointing out the error on my bill, or them for not notifying me that a 30 second phone call was going to cost me 20% of the nightly charge for the hotel room? If someone broke into my room and made a hundred of these calls, am I liable for not double-bolting the door?
If the ocean water is cooler and available, it would be more efficient to just circulate it under the sand... I suspect they're using (electric powered) heat pumps at some point in the process. Oil effectively costs them less than drinkable water there, so energy efficiency is a laughable concept in their economy.
Indoor skiing!!! yeah, it is a pretty drab sounding place, unless you're out to marry a princess.
I especially like the way the auto industry and energy industry are putting on a repeat performance of 1973, right down to getting everybody to drive big gas guzzlers just before jacking up fuel prices 300%, and the resurgent interest in wind/solar/electric vehicles, etc.
There must be a significant amount of counterfeit currency floating today, because I believe it is actually possible for the government to pay off the total current debt without removing all money from circulation.
People in that part of the world have put up with "inhuman abuse" for thousands of years - it's a different mindset from "the west."