A) How do you know it's not noticeable? It's not like you can ask spammers to stop for a moment while you test that.
B) Even if you don't notice the difference, chances are that filtering out all that spam and upgrading pipes are causing your ISP (or theirs) to charge a bit more. In the case of free webmail, that would translate to more ads and less time/money to add non-spam related features.
1) It's a recipe for data loss on shared partitions if you dual boot.
2) I use an SSD and prefer 4 GB of space over saving ~20 seconds by hibernating instead of booting normally.
3) The OS gets a fresh start. This *shouldn't* matter, but often slightly affects speed and memory consumption.
4) Slowed boot time is an indicator of general performance issues. I might not notice a gradual doubling of application start up time, but boot times are more obvious.
It seems to me the that fining businesses something around $50 or $100 per item of information in the event of a data breach would cause an abrupt end to the age of persistence. Collect name, e-mail address, billing address, shipping address, credit card number, phone number, and records of three invoices? That's $450 or $900 per customer in the event some employee loses a laptop with the customer database on it. Some company getting a $10,000,000 fine would a) make the government bean counters happy, b) make companies get serious about information security, and c) make companies seriously question how much information they need, and how long they have to keep it.
My high school (boarding) used websense when they "gave" students laptops. That was 5 years ago, so maybe it's improved since then, but back then I certainly wouldn't have called it "good". It commonly blocked stuff I needed to do research on (such as journal articles on enzymes), and rarely prevented me from stumbling onto unsavory content. And I don't think it stopped anyone (teenage guys) from finding such content intentionally. The only time I remember it "working" was when it messed up and blocked nearly every category. And even then it was trivial to bypass with fragmented HTTP headers.
Now, that the internet is even larger, and given websense's rate of improvement (imperceptible over three years) I wouldn't think it's even close to a "good" solution. Well, unless you don't try to bypass it or go to uncommon sites (e.g. work scenario). The IT people at my school probably thought it was pretty good since I doubt any student actually told them how ineffective it was. OTOH, maybe they knew... I remember them joking that it was supposed to block AOL instant messenger but all it did was block the advertisement, so the client showed the school logo (from the "Blocked" page) in it's stead, making it look officially sanctioned. Same deal when I talked with the BOFH of my local highschool casually a couple years ago... he had complete confidence in large, state-wide filter files as well. In a demonstration it took about 2 minutes to find a proxy type site despite that category being blocked.
Also, what's the point of keeping someone from logging into a site? I mean, it's not like you can't read or post to slashdot, so I fail to see how it's "protecting" you...
Yes, you've noticed that the BeOS is minimalistic. This is by design, not a careless omission. If you want a wizard or your computer to automagically guess what you want and do it for you, then the BeOS is obviously a poor choice. Ditto if you want a 3D accelerated desktop. It is a good choice if you want a quick, responsive OS that doesn't break in mysterious ways.
The BeOS is very simple. This makes common stuff easy enough that it doesn't need to do much hand-holding. Install a piece of hardware? If there's a driver for it then the BeOS will load it, if not it won't complain. Swap your ATI graphics card for nVidia? The BeOS doesn't care... it just boots normally. Want to install an application to a non-default location? Oh no, the horridly complex procedure is to unzip it wherever you want and make a shortcut! (But there is a package installer if you prefer GUIs and the application developer though anyone cared.) How about installing to a new partition? Lets see... format with the BFS and copy a few folders. (That's all the installer does... like I said, the BeOS doesn't care if the hardware is radically different from the last time it booted.)
IMHO this simplicity was more common in older OSes. I have a theory that's why "we" slashdotters had no problems teaching ourselves computers whereas people trying to pick them up now generally have problems. The more complex something is, the harder it is to learn... especially if it attempts to do everything for you without requiring you to know what it's doing or why (or why it doesn't work or can't figure out what you want it to do).
It seems to me that, before the switchover, they should mandate annoying 1 or 2 minute "commercials" (in progressively increasing frequency) saying something to the effect that "This is an analog TV station, it will not work past X, this is how to get a converter box". The key would be to *only* show these commercials on analog stations, perhaps even have shorter ones saying "Your TV is ready for the switchover" on digital ones, satellite, and cable. I don't watch TV, so I don't care much, but it was a challenge figuring out if it was receiving digital channels or not since it's the same content on both. I basically had to judge based on reception artifacts, so I suspect many people are assuming their "new" TVs are ready...
You're completely right if you accept the assumption that stupid means low IQ. Ever since I learned a bit about what IQ is I've disregarded it as a useful measure. As you hinted, it's a linear measurement of a multidimensional quality. A person might be great at math, but horrible with people for example. Psychologists can't even agree on how many dimensions intelligence has (most thought ~7 last time I checked), and each of those might not be measurable with a simple number either.
Here's something else nifty about IQ testing. Who has a greater average IQ, males or females? The dude that pioneered the test thought males would, but it turned out that females scored higher. So now, any question that shows a gender difference is removed from the test. Similarly, african-americans score ten points lower than whites. That could be cultural views and access to education, or it could be the same kind of deal. But questions showing a race difference aren't discarded (to my knowledge). I would expect similar trends for a variety of other factors, so it's hard to compare between populations with IQ testing.
Now, IMHO IQ testing is a poor indicator of intelligence. So what do I use if I must compare intelligence? I gauge it on the ability to make intelligent decisions (in so far as one is able, as other posters have pointed out). Intelligent decision making obviously increases the chance of being successful. Now, I suppose I am cheating a bit by altering the definition of "intelligence" to make my position justifiable, but I can't really see any other way to fairly assess it. No clue if the movie does the same, since I've never seen it.
Now for you first statement, how did that help your point?
Far outweighed? That would imply one has little control over one's life and success is mostly random. That's partially true of course, but I try to be optimistic in believing that it's a lesser factor. It also matches my own non-scientific observation better than mostly attributing success or failure to external factors. I am conflating intelligent with a number of other personal traits though, and assuming that success and lower birthrates are causatively correlated (social evolution).
Hmm... it seems that being stupid could cause all of those factors. That's not saying poor people are stupid, just that stupid people are likely to be poor (separating a fool from his money and all). Ditto for people strongly buying into social expectations and women who don't feel the need to be educated.
According to Google:
United States - Population Growth Rate: 0.883%
The first few hits for Europe suggest that they're in ZPG
The Middle East and Africa are growing fairly quickly
So it's not a decline in the US and Europe. Since Asia wasn't mentioned one can assume their sales increased even more. Similarly, computer prices are presumably keeping up with inflation, so that's not really a factor since they're talking about sales rather than revenue.
to an executable that doesn't even run as an executable. It runs merely as a series of threads.... There was one further step that we were going to take but didn't end up doing, and that is we were going to get rid of threads entirely, and just use interrupt handlers.
That's really nifty... Now, from the other perspective, without knowledge of the program, how can one detect such a thing on your own system? I'm thinking something like System Safety Monitor might catch it in the act, but I wonder if there's a simple way to list these remote threads...
Why not stop people from breathing too, since that produces C02.
My thoughts exactly. It turns out just sitting around for about half an hour produces at least as much CO2 as a Google search apparently. Heaven forbid someone actually exercise... ("I'm not lazy, I'm reducing my carbon footprint!")
(I used the low end of the range for these values. Realistically it's a lot more.)
4% of expired air is CO2 and.4 L of air is expired at rest .04 *.4 =.016 L of CO2 expired at rest
PV = nRT; R = 0.08205746 L*atm/mol/K; CO2 = 44.0095(14) g/mol
1 atm *.016 L /.08205746 / 300 K = 6.5 * 10^-4 mol of CO2 =.0286 g of CO2 per breath .0286 * 10 breaths/minute =.286 g CO2/minute
While I'm not surprised about most Google services not making money, I always just assumed they were used to collect data so advertisements could be better targeted. I.e. looking at my e-mail, calendar, and RSS feeds would give someone a really good idea of the stuff that I (or someone like me) might be interested in purchasing.
Hypothetically, if the $837M judgment could be collected, who would receive it, Facebook or the users who were spammed? (I only ask in an attempt to be less cynical.) I mean, sure, Facebook might have lost a few users due to the spam, and there in had a reduction in the subsequent ad revenue, but $837M worth? It seems to me they're being rewarded for allowing someone to exploit their system...
Clerical mistakes can happen, but in this case it's essentially falsifying data just without the intent. If something unexpected happens then one should look for errors first. Instead, it seems like this researcher just assumed that it was more support for a theory he liked. Little things like this can add up across various studies, leading to a theory being unduly strong (self perpetuating). In any case, it's pretty shoddy work to let an obvious outlier make it into a study.
how ridiculously polarized the global warming debate has become
Quite true. Personally I've become nearly apathetic upon the realization that both sides exaggerate to the point of dishonesty. Well, really it's the extremists on either side that do the lying, but since the issue is so polarized there's the illusion (perhaps becoming reality) that they speak for their respective groups.
Yet another business that's trying to delay their inevitable death by being greedy rather than adapting to new situations so they can survive. I mean, how popular are libraries anymore? Personally, I'm within walking distance of probably more that a dozen, and have only used them when explicitly required by a teacher. The internet has far more information than a single library, and is a lot more convenient. If you want an intro to something, there's Wikipedia, if you need current research then most journals are searchable online.
The way I see it, it's definitely in OCLC's best interest to embrace the internet and help libraries gain some popularity. While the internet is good for gaining general or ultraspecific information, it's slightly lacking in providing the stuff in between. Books, OTOH, are excellent at this. Rather than tightening it's grip on its database, OCLC should be begging Google and such to use it. I.e. if someone does a Google search then various books related to the topic could show up. Integrate this with Google Maps and individual library stocks and you could show the nearest library that has those books. Perhaps even reserve them or request an inter library loan.
And as a side point, what would emotionally charged environmentalists have to gain by stopping sonar exercises around whales?
They'd feel good thinking they'd helped a cause they care about. Also, though unrelated to their direct cause, I'd say most of the emotionally charged environmentalists are not fond of the military anyway, so they probably see impeding it as a plus as well. Environmentalists aren't known for always being practical or effective. E.g. for a while (perhaps even today) many environmentalists oppose the construction of nuclear power plants, and newer fossil fuel plants. So that leaves old fossil fuel plants, with worse pollution controls, increasing their output. Hence being counterproductive, but the environmentalists felt good at having stopped a new source of pollution from being built. That concept was actually a major theme in a bestselling novel a few years ago.
That said, I don't disagree with you. The science should definitely be considered. While the Navy needs to train with sonar, surely there's some way to do that without deafening or beaching whales. Perhaps using it at lower powers, or using an annoying but harmless sound to drive such animals away before starting the exercise.
Not to mention that it isn't useful for the vast majority of reasons you really need to reboot rather than hibernate or standby. Assuming other posters are correct, this is actually just changing your "shutdown" option to "reboot and immediately hibernate". That wouldn't decrease reboot time, so it doesn't help software installation (although rebooting for that reason is very rarely actually necessary). It also wouldn't help for hardware installation since the hibernated ram would not be aware of the hardware changes. Similarly, multiboot systems would be even worse off. (Never hibernate and boot a different OS if the two use a common partition.) So, while I like the idea from a "hey that's nifty" perspective, I can't see it actually being useful. Perhaps when Windows uptimes rarely could exceed a week there might have been a need for this technology.
Interesting, I hate it because now I'm nearly getting out of class in the dark. On the 1st of this month the sun set about 7ish here, on the second it was 6ish. "Fall back" ya know... I can't see how staying at work an hour later would make anyone have more sunlight when they get off... It might work in the spring, but during summer it gets dark quite late anyway. IMHO it'd be better to make DST the new standard time and quit messing with the clocks.
Bullshit? So are you claiming that the book isn't properly cited? Or that the argument isn't logical? That article is more trying to say that the argument is wrong, which does not contradict what I said. In fact, the article states: "There are only a few out-and-out errors, but to be generous, they probably just slipped through the editing process." So how is that bullshit? Also, popularity is a quantifiable measure of worth. I have no way of determining what worth scale you're using, so I defaulted to an objective one.
I often see this article cited as refuting State of Fear... Has anyone actually read either? The first two arguments are about exclamations made by fictional characters. Not them arguing (the arguments are cited, the exclamations are plot devices used to build the characters). The next three are a whole lot of explaining and not a whole lot of refuting. Number four is framing just as badly as the statement it quotes. As far as I'm concerned, they're both wrong. The remaining arguments are more explaining, often completely missing the point of the quote and of the book. I.e. it's trying to out-explain the book, in an attempt to prove it wrong, when the two are mostly in agreement rather than understand the non-global warming related message that's trying to be expressed.
As far as I can tell, this is a perfect example of us-vs-them tribe mentality. A book discusses global warming, so it must be classified as either "alarmist" or "skeptic". Truth be told, very few things actually fit those categories, since the people on the extremes make both sides appear foolish. State of Fear is not the opposite of an Inconvenient Truth. The latter is solely about global warming, whereas the former is about something else entirely. Sure, the former discusses global warming, but far too many people read it intending to love it or hate it based on that aspect.
Here's a final quote to show how people just aren't understanding the book. "Presumably, the author doesn't actually believe that foundation-supported academic research ipso facto is evil and mis-guided, but that is an impression that is left." The article author is very close to realizing that the quote doesn't imply what he thinks it does, since no sane person would hold that position. That quote means that politicized science is bad, and eugenics is an example of this. Global warming != eugenics, nor is academic research bad. It's just an example of two scientific topics that politics screwed with. Perhaps more people would like the book (or consider it "worthwhile") if they actually realized that it's significantly deeper than "global warming is wrong".
And really, he hadn't written anything worthwhile in the last 20 years. And some really awful stuff, most notably "State of Fear", a very dishonest attack on the global warming idea, presented as fiction, so his bogus science can't be questioned, yet often cited as fact.
Nothing worthwhile? "In December 1994, he achieved the unique distinction of having the #1 movie (Jurassic Park), the #1 TV show (ER), and the #1 book (Disclosure, atop the paperback list)." I can only assume that you're not talking about popularity or influence. As far as opinions go, I personally liked Jurassic Park tremendously because it came out right when I was in the "Dinosaur phase" as a young boy. Sure, the other day I was talking about all the stuff it gets wrong, but it was probably the first exposure I had to genetics (my eventual concentration).
As for State of Fear, while I thought the plot was mediocre, I found the arguments quite thought provoking. I started the book as an alarmist, ended as a skeptic. It caused me to read more on the matter, and now I'm more in the middle. In any case, the book doesn't hide behind fiction, as all the anti-global warming stuff is properly cited and logically argued. It's also quite good in exposing many of the misconceptions that people have/had about the topic, hence what makes it effective in convincing skeptics and pissing off alarmists. A point that needed addressing regardless of the author's opinion and the book's conclusion. Although, "global warming is a myth" isn't even the conclusion of the book, it was essentially "politics needs to be removed from science" and global warming was the case study.
Looks like my memory on the terminal velocity of skydivers wasn't accurate. =/ But I still would expect the terminal velocity of small children to be lower than that of adults. Surface area goes by height squared (again, roughly), whereas weight goes by height cubed. So the surface area to weight ratio increases as height decreases. Hence the reason newborns are so susceptible to hypothermia and an ant's terminal velocity isn't terminal.
"You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mineshaft, and on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat would probably be killed, though it can fall safely from the 11th storey of a building; a man is killed, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal's length, breadth and height each by 10; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only to a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively 10 times greater than the driving force." - JBS Haldane, 1927
So more like dropping a 40 pound child from a tall building and hitting a car on the ground? Although, I'd expect the terminal velocity of a small child to be less than 161 km/h... Perhaps giving the child a shopping bag to use as a "parachute" would make it more realistic, since that would keep the child vertical (increasing terminal velocity and reducing compression upon collision).
I was just using the BeOS this morning, and I can assure you that it's not all nostalgia. Sure, it had it's problems, but even so it's still superior to other OSes in several respects. While you seem to be informed about the BeOS and Haiku, some of your arguments are dated. For one, networking did suck in R5, that's why in R5.1 it was replaced with a new stack based on BSD's. Given the lack of 3D games, you may have a point with graphics, or you may not. Disk IO sucks for me, but that's my laptop's hardware, so I can't really address that critism.
You give many reasons that pervasive multi-threading was a poor decision. For networking it probably was, for the GUI I doubt it. Even if it's inefficient, the BeOS is still an order of magnitude faster for most things. Opening a folder on the desktop takes about a second in Linux and Windows, but less than.1 in the BeOS. Application start-up time is similar. A side-effect of the multi-threading is a near absence of modal windows. Sure, it limits developer choice, but from a user's perspective it's great since modal windows kinda suck.
The GUI also "feels" different. This is the part that most BeOS fanboys hark on, but it's very hard to quantify. For one it's responsive. I can't recall ever having to wait for the GUI to catch up like I often do for other OSes. (Seriously, the BeOS will spoil you to the point that using anything else results in frustration at all the one/two second pauses.) You also don't see the "flakiness" associated with other OSes. If you don't know what I mean, try hitting Windows XP's GDI object limit for an extreme example.
It sounds like Naviscope might be helpful if you're using windows (wine might work). It's a local proxy server that shows traffic in real time. I always thought it was a nifty idea, and it teaches you a fair amount about how the websites you go to work. In your situation you could cancel any big downloads when they start since you can see them happening. The program is a bit old, so there are a few glitches on modern operating systems, but it's still quite usable. I'd also look into something to automatically filter out some of the junk on webpages (privoxy, no script, adblock, etc.).
Slashdot Mirror
A) How do you know it's not noticeable? It's not like you can ask spammers to stop for a moment while you test that.
B) Even if you don't notice the difference, chances are that filtering out all that spam and upgrading pipes are causing your ISP (or theirs) to charge a bit more. In the case of free webmail, that would translate to more ads and less time/money to add non-spam related features.
I never use hibernation for a few reasons.
1) It's a recipe for data loss on shared partitions if you dual boot.
2) I use an SSD and prefer 4 GB of space over saving ~20 seconds by hibernating instead of booting normally.
3) The OS gets a fresh start. This *shouldn't* matter, but often slightly affects speed and memory consumption.
4) Slowed boot time is an indicator of general performance issues. I might not notice a gradual doubling of application start up time, but boot times are more obvious.
It seems to me the that fining businesses something around $50 or $100 per item of information in the event of a data breach would cause an abrupt end to the age of persistence. Collect name, e-mail address, billing address, shipping address, credit card number, phone number, and records of three invoices? That's $450 or $900 per customer in the event some employee loses a laptop with the customer database on it. Some company getting a $10,000,000 fine would a) make the government bean counters happy, b) make companies get serious about information security, and c) make companies seriously question how much information they need, and how long they have to keep it.
My high school (boarding) used websense when they "gave" students laptops. That was 5 years ago, so maybe it's improved since then, but back then I certainly wouldn't have called it "good". It commonly blocked stuff I needed to do research on (such as journal articles on enzymes), and rarely prevented me from stumbling onto unsavory content. And I don't think it stopped anyone (teenage guys) from finding such content intentionally. The only time I remember it "working" was when it messed up and blocked nearly every category. And even then it was trivial to bypass with fragmented HTTP headers.
Now, that the internet is even larger, and given websense's rate of improvement (imperceptible over three years) I wouldn't think it's even close to a "good" solution. Well, unless you don't try to bypass it or go to uncommon sites (e.g. work scenario). The IT people at my school probably thought it was pretty good since I doubt any student actually told them how ineffective it was. OTOH, maybe they knew... I remember them joking that it was supposed to block AOL instant messenger but all it did was block the advertisement, so the client showed the school logo (from the "Blocked" page) in it's stead, making it look officially sanctioned. Same deal when I talked with the BOFH of my local highschool casually a couple years ago... he had complete confidence in large, state-wide filter files as well. In a demonstration it took about 2 minutes to find a proxy type site despite that category being blocked.
Also, what's the point of keeping someone from logging into a site? I mean, it's not like you can't read or post to slashdot, so I fail to see how it's "protecting" you...
Yes, you've noticed that the BeOS is minimalistic. This is by design, not a careless omission. If you want a wizard or your computer to automagically guess what you want and do it for you, then the BeOS is obviously a poor choice. Ditto if you want a 3D accelerated desktop. It is a good choice if you want a quick, responsive OS that doesn't break in mysterious ways.
The BeOS is very simple. This makes common stuff easy enough that it doesn't need to do much hand-holding. Install a piece of hardware? If there's a driver for it then the BeOS will load it, if not it won't complain. Swap your ATI graphics card for nVidia? The BeOS doesn't care... it just boots normally. Want to install an application to a non-default location? Oh no, the horridly complex procedure is to unzip it wherever you want and make a shortcut! (But there is a package installer if you prefer GUIs and the application developer though anyone cared.) How about installing to a new partition? Lets see... format with the BFS and copy a few folders. (That's all the installer does... like I said, the BeOS doesn't care if the hardware is radically different from the last time it booted.)
IMHO this simplicity was more common in older OSes. I have a theory that's why "we" slashdotters had no problems teaching ourselves computers whereas people trying to pick them up now generally have problems. The more complex something is, the harder it is to learn... especially if it attempts to do everything for you without requiring you to know what it's doing or why (or why it doesn't work or can't figure out what you want it to do).
It seems to me that, before the switchover, they should mandate annoying 1 or 2 minute "commercials" (in progressively increasing frequency) saying something to the effect that "This is an analog TV station, it will not work past X, this is how to get a converter box". The key would be to *only* show these commercials on analog stations, perhaps even have shorter ones saying "Your TV is ready for the switchover" on digital ones, satellite, and cable. I don't watch TV, so I don't care much, but it was a challenge figuring out if it was receiving digital channels or not since it's the same content on both. I basically had to judge based on reception artifacts, so I suspect many people are assuming their "new" TVs are ready...
You're completely right if you accept the assumption that stupid means low IQ. Ever since I learned a bit about what IQ is I've disregarded it as a useful measure. As you hinted, it's a linear measurement of a multidimensional quality. A person might be great at math, but horrible with people for example. Psychologists can't even agree on how many dimensions intelligence has (most thought ~7 last time I checked), and each of those might not be measurable with a simple number either.
Here's something else nifty about IQ testing. Who has a greater average IQ, males or females? The dude that pioneered the test thought males would, but it turned out that females scored higher. So now, any question that shows a gender difference is removed from the test. Similarly, african-americans score ten points lower than whites. That could be cultural views and access to education, or it could be the same kind of deal. But questions showing a race difference aren't discarded (to my knowledge). I would expect similar trends for a variety of other factors, so it's hard to compare between populations with IQ testing.
Now, IMHO IQ testing is a poor indicator of intelligence. So what do I use if I must compare intelligence? I gauge it on the ability to make intelligent decisions (in so far as one is able, as other posters have pointed out). Intelligent decision making obviously increases the chance of being successful. Now, I suppose I am cheating a bit by altering the definition of "intelligence" to make my position justifiable, but I can't really see any other way to fairly assess it. No clue if the movie does the same, since I've never seen it.
Now for you first statement, how did that help your point?
Far outweighed? That would imply one has little control over one's life and success is mostly random. That's partially true of course, but I try to be optimistic in believing that it's a lesser factor. It also matches my own non-scientific observation better than mostly attributing success or failure to external factors. I am conflating intelligent with a number of other personal traits though, and assuming that success and lower birthrates are causatively correlated (social evolution).
Hmm... it seems that being stupid could cause all of those factors. That's not saying poor people are stupid, just that stupid people are likely to be poor (separating a fool from his money and all). Ditto for people strongly buying into social expectations and women who don't feel the need to be educated.
According to Google:
United States - Population Growth Rate: 0.883%
The first few hits for Europe suggest that they're in ZPG
The Middle East and Africa are growing fairly quickly
So it's not a decline in the US and Europe. Since Asia wasn't mentioned one can assume their sales increased even more. Similarly, computer prices are presumably keeping up with inflation, so that's not really a factor since they're talking about sales rather than revenue.
to an executable that doesn't even run as an executable. It runs merely as a series of threads. ... There was one further step that we were going to take but didn't end up doing, and that is we were going to get rid of threads entirely, and just use interrupt handlers.
That's really nifty... Now, from the other perspective, without knowledge of the program, how can one detect such a thing on your own system? I'm thinking something like System Safety Monitor might catch it in the act, but I wonder if there's a simple way to list these remote threads...
Why not stop people from breathing too, since that produces C02.
My thoughts exactly. It turns out just sitting around for about half an hour produces at least as much CO2 as a Google search apparently. Heaven forbid someone actually exercise... ("I'm not lazy, I'm reducing my carbon footprint!")
.4 L of air is expired at rest
.04 * .4 = .016 L of CO2 expired at rest .016 L / .08205746 / 300 K = 6.5 * 10^-4 mol of CO2 = .0286 g of CO2 per breath
.0286 * 10 breaths/minute = .286 g CO2/minute
(I used the low end of the range for these values. Realistically it's a lot more.)
4% of expired air is CO2 and
PV = nRT; R = 0.08205746 L*atm/mol/K; CO2 = 44.0095(14) g/mol
1 atm *
While I'm not surprised about most Google services not making money, I always just assumed they were used to collect data so advertisements could be better targeted. I.e. looking at my e-mail, calendar, and RSS feeds would give someone a really good idea of the stuff that I (or someone like me) might be interested in purchasing.
Hypothetically, if the $837M judgment could be collected, who would receive it, Facebook or the users who were spammed? (I only ask in an attempt to be less cynical.) I mean, sure, Facebook might have lost a few users due to the spam, and there in had a reduction in the subsequent ad revenue, but $837M worth? It seems to me they're being rewarded for allowing someone to exploit their system...
how ridiculously polarized the global warming debate has become
Quite true. Personally I've become nearly apathetic upon the realization that both sides exaggerate to the point of dishonesty. Well, really it's the extremists on either side that do the lying, but since the issue is so polarized there's the illusion (perhaps becoming reality) that they speak for their respective groups.
Yet another business that's trying to delay their inevitable death by being greedy rather than adapting to new situations so they can survive. I mean, how popular are libraries anymore? Personally, I'm within walking distance of probably more that a dozen, and have only used them when explicitly required by a teacher. The internet has far more information than a single library, and is a lot more convenient. If you want an intro to something, there's Wikipedia, if you need current research then most journals are searchable online.
The way I see it, it's definitely in OCLC's best interest to embrace the internet and help libraries gain some popularity. While the internet is good for gaining general or ultraspecific information, it's slightly lacking in providing the stuff in between. Books, OTOH, are excellent at this. Rather than tightening it's grip on its database, OCLC should be begging Google and such to use it. I.e. if someone does a Google search then various books related to the topic could show up. Integrate this with Google Maps and individual library stocks and you could show the nearest library that has those books. Perhaps even reserve them or request an inter library loan.
And as a side point, what would emotionally charged environmentalists have to gain by stopping sonar exercises around whales?
They'd feel good thinking they'd helped a cause they care about. Also, though unrelated to their direct cause, I'd say most of the emotionally charged environmentalists are not fond of the military anyway, so they probably see impeding it as a plus as well. Environmentalists aren't known for always being practical or effective. E.g. for a while (perhaps even today) many environmentalists oppose the construction of nuclear power plants, and newer fossil fuel plants. So that leaves old fossil fuel plants, with worse pollution controls, increasing their output. Hence being counterproductive, but the environmentalists felt good at having stopped a new source of pollution from being built. That concept was actually a major theme in a bestselling novel a few years ago.
That said, I don't disagree with you. The science should definitely be considered. While the Navy needs to train with sonar, surely there's some way to do that without deafening or beaching whales. Perhaps using it at lower powers, or using an annoying but harmless sound to drive such animals away before starting the exercise.
Not to mention that it isn't useful for the vast majority of reasons you really need to reboot rather than hibernate or standby. Assuming other posters are correct, this is actually just changing your "shutdown" option to "reboot and immediately hibernate". That wouldn't decrease reboot time, so it doesn't help software installation (although rebooting for that reason is very rarely actually necessary). It also wouldn't help for hardware installation since the hibernated ram would not be aware of the hardware changes. Similarly, multiboot systems would be even worse off. (Never hibernate and boot a different OS if the two use a common partition.) So, while I like the idea from a "hey that's nifty" perspective, I can't see it actually being useful. Perhaps when Windows uptimes rarely could exceed a week there might have been a need for this technology.
Interesting, I hate it because now I'm nearly getting out of class in the dark. On the 1st of this month the sun set about 7ish here, on the second it was 6ish. "Fall back" ya know... I can't see how staying at work an hour later would make anyone have more sunlight when they get off... It might work in the spring, but during summer it gets dark quite late anyway. IMHO it'd be better to make DST the new standard time and quit messing with the clocks.
Bullshit? So are you claiming that the book isn't properly cited? Or that the argument isn't logical? That article is more trying to say that the argument is wrong, which does not contradict what I said. In fact, the article states: "There are only a few out-and-out errors, but to be generous, they probably just slipped through the editing process." So how is that bullshit? Also, popularity is a quantifiable measure of worth. I have no way of determining what worth scale you're using, so I defaulted to an objective one.
I often see this article cited as refuting State of Fear... Has anyone actually read either? The first two arguments are about exclamations made by fictional characters. Not them arguing (the arguments are cited, the exclamations are plot devices used to build the characters). The next three are a whole lot of explaining and not a whole lot of refuting. Number four is framing just as badly as the statement it quotes. As far as I'm concerned, they're both wrong. The remaining arguments are more explaining, often completely missing the point of the quote and of the book. I.e. it's trying to out-explain the book, in an attempt to prove it wrong, when the two are mostly in agreement rather than understand the non-global warming related message that's trying to be expressed.
As far as I can tell, this is a perfect example of us-vs-them tribe mentality. A book discusses global warming, so it must be classified as either "alarmist" or "skeptic". Truth be told, very few things actually fit those categories, since the people on the extremes make both sides appear foolish. State of Fear is not the opposite of an Inconvenient Truth. The latter is solely about global warming, whereas the former is about something else entirely. Sure, the former discusses global warming, but far too many people read it intending to love it or hate it based on that aspect.
Here's a final quote to show how people just aren't understanding the book. "Presumably, the author doesn't actually believe that foundation-supported academic research ipso facto is evil and mis-guided, but that is an impression that is left." The article author is very close to realizing that the quote doesn't imply what he thinks it does, since no sane person would hold that position. That quote means that politicized science is bad, and eugenics is an example of this. Global warming != eugenics, nor is academic research bad. It's just an example of two scientific topics that politics screwed with. Perhaps more people would like the book (or consider it "worthwhile") if they actually realized that it's significantly deeper than "global warming is wrong".
And really, he hadn't written anything worthwhile in the last 20 years. And some really awful stuff, most notably "State of Fear", a very dishonest attack on the global warming idea, presented as fiction, so his bogus science can't be questioned, yet often cited as fact.
Nothing worthwhile? "In December 1994, he achieved the unique distinction of having the #1 movie (Jurassic Park), the #1 TV show (ER), and the #1 book (Disclosure, atop the paperback list)." I can only assume that you're not talking about popularity or influence. As far as opinions go, I personally liked Jurassic Park tremendously because it came out right when I was in the "Dinosaur phase" as a young boy. Sure, the other day I was talking about all the stuff it gets wrong, but it was probably the first exposure I had to genetics (my eventual concentration).
As for State of Fear, while I thought the plot was mediocre, I found the arguments quite thought provoking. I started the book as an alarmist, ended as a skeptic. It caused me to read more on the matter, and now I'm more in the middle. In any case, the book doesn't hide behind fiction, as all the anti-global warming stuff is properly cited and logically argued. It's also quite good in exposing many of the misconceptions that people have/had about the topic, hence what makes it effective in convincing skeptics and pissing off alarmists. A point that needed addressing regardless of the author's opinion and the book's conclusion. Although, "global warming is a myth" isn't even the conclusion of the book, it was essentially "politics needs to be removed from science" and global warming was the case study.
Looks like my memory on the terminal velocity of skydivers wasn't accurate. =/ But I still would expect the terminal velocity of small children to be lower than that of adults. Surface area goes by height squared (again, roughly), whereas weight goes by height cubed. So the surface area to weight ratio increases as height decreases. Hence the reason newborns are so susceptible to hypothermia and an ant's terminal velocity isn't terminal.
"You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mineshaft, and on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat would probably be killed, though it can fall safely from the 11th storey of a building; a man is killed, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal's length, breadth and height each by 10; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only to a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively 10 times greater than the driving force." - JBS Haldane, 1927
So more like dropping a 40 pound child from a tall building and hitting a car on the ground? Although, I'd expect the terminal velocity of a small child to be less than 161 km/h... Perhaps giving the child a shopping bag to use as a "parachute" would make it more realistic, since that would keep the child vertical (increasing terminal velocity and reducing compression upon collision).
I was just using the BeOS this morning, and I can assure you that it's not all nostalgia. Sure, it had it's problems, but even so it's still superior to other OSes in several respects. While you seem to be informed about the BeOS and Haiku, some of your arguments are dated. For one, networking did suck in R5, that's why in R5.1 it was replaced with a new stack based on BSD's. Given the lack of 3D games, you may have a point with graphics, or you may not. Disk IO sucks for me, but that's my laptop's hardware, so I can't really address that critism.
.1 in the BeOS. Application start-up time is similar. A side-effect of the multi-threading is a near absence of modal windows. Sure, it limits developer choice, but from a user's perspective it's great since modal windows kinda suck.
You give many reasons that pervasive multi-threading was a poor decision. For networking it probably was, for the GUI I doubt it. Even if it's inefficient, the BeOS is still an order of magnitude faster for most things. Opening a folder on the desktop takes about a second in Linux and Windows, but less than
The GUI also "feels" different. This is the part that most BeOS fanboys hark on, but it's very hard to quantify. For one it's responsive. I can't recall ever having to wait for the GUI to catch up like I often do for other OSes. (Seriously, the BeOS will spoil you to the point that using anything else results in frustration at all the one/two second pauses.) You also don't see the "flakiness" associated with other OSes. If you don't know what I mean, try hitting Windows XP's GDI object limit for an extreme example.
It sounds like Naviscope might be helpful if you're using windows (wine might work). It's a local proxy server that shows traffic in real time. I always thought it was a nifty idea, and it teaches you a fair amount about how the websites you go to work. In your situation you could cancel any big downloads when they start since you can see them happening. The program is a bit old, so there are a few glitches on modern operating systems, but it's still quite usable. I'd also look into something to automatically filter out some of the junk on webpages (privoxy, no script, adblock, etc.).