Groves recording sound?! It wasn't digital?!? No way!
No Gramps, it was grooves that recorded sound. Grove's was a paper based database that recorded biographical information about the musicians that composed and played the sound. My copy ran to two dozen volumes. That's what the Madonna song is about.
It's a real false idea that the major problem in these extremely poor countries is lack of money. Some seem to hold the idea that what is going on is nobody is willing to give them any money, and if we'd just quite being assholes then they'd have plenty. Maybe you're replying to the wrong person, and maybe I didn't make it clear but I agree with this 100%. Poor countries are poor because they are run by thieving bastards, not because they lack money. There are other serious issues of course like most people lack even rudimentary education but democracy would fix most of them in due time by limiting corruption.
Globally it seems like pretty much any culture can become prosperous provided the government dooesn't appropriate things too efficiently. Now it's possible that cultural issues make this impossible in some places of course, like in the Iraq where non tyrannical governments usually mean civil war, so people put up with thieving bastards to have some semblance of security. Those countries are screwed of course - they will never achieve prosperity or produce anything of value culturally. But none of this is something that outsiders can do much about - we can support the least nasty politicicians in a variety of ways, but that can take decades to civilise the country.
Here's a thought, focus on the worst pollution areas of the world like China and reduce air travel by half - why do people fly so much if it's such a hassle to fly, especially to/from/within the USA? Why? A 747 gets 100 miles per gallon per passenger.
http://www.howstuffworks.com/question192.htm
This sounds like a tremendously poor miles-per-gallon rating! But consider that a 747 can carry as many as 568 people. Let's call it 500 people to take into account the fact that not all seats on most flights are occupied. A 747 is transporting 500 people 1 mile using 5 gallons of fuel. That means the plane is burning 0.01 gallons per person per mile. In other words, the plane is getting 100 miles per gallon per person! The typical car gets about 25 miles per gallon, so the 747 is much better than a car carrying one person, and compares favorably even if there are four people in the car. Not bad when you consider that the 747 is flying at 550 miles per hour (900 km/h)! Better than one person in Prius.
http://www.toyota.com/prius/
The Prius boasts an EPA-estimated combined city/highway rating of 46 miles per gallon Two or more in people in Prius will beat a 747. Or maybe not, loading up a car will cause the total miles per gallon to drop as the weight increases. Maybe you need three people in a Prius to be safe. But most cars have one person and lower mpg, so it's not like 747s are worse on average than cars.
You don't need to Google all this stuff yourself of course, you just pick the cheapest way to travel and rely on market forces to make the most energy efficient way the cheapest. Which should be true so long as oil is expensive enough to make it a non neglibable part of total costs.
In the end, all you've really done is created a massive system for the redistribution of wealth from industrialized nations to pre-industrial nations. It's actually worse than that. Russia got assigned carbon credits based on Soviet estimates of the size of the economy, despite the fact that the Soviet Union had at that point collapsed and so had the economy. So Russia was offered a huge pile of emissions credits that it could sell as a sweetner for signing up to Kyoto.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2005/12/28/2238
Russia is Europe's largest producer of greenhouse gases, but Russian businessesespecially its power companiesare hoping to cash in on a provision in the Kyoto Accord, which would help change that. The Kyoto Accord sets certain pollution goals to be met by 2012, and these goals are based on 1990 greenhouse emissions. For instance, the countries in the EU are required to reduce their emissions to 8 percent below their 1990 levels. In a strange twist of irony, Russia is already way below their target as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In fact, Russia produces 43 percent less greenhouse gas by weight than they did in 1990. It is estimated that this difference, which can be sold to other countries in the form of carbon credits ranges in value between US$20-60 billion. So it's not like the cash is going to starving peasants in the Third World, it's actually going to the gangsters who run Gazprom.
In the Middle Ages the Catholic church was theoretically committed to eliminating sin. Mind you eliminating sin requires sacrifice, just like eliminating carbon emissions does. So like the UN they decided to sell indulgences, a sort of sin offset. This is good for the people selling, since they get money. And good for the sinner, since they can continue to sin for a small fee. And if you were rich and well connected, the price of indulgences could be very cheap indeed.
Oddly enough the fee for carbon credits is now very small, since governments have sold far too many of them. The price is now so low they are an effective license to pollute.
http://newsbusters.org/node/10989
Stick with this, folks, because the entire concept of carbon credits could totally implode:
"The Stern Report suggests we need a price for a tonne of carbon emissions of $20, rising to $30, $40 or even $50 to stabilise [the level of CO2 in the atmosphere] at manageable levels," he said. "But there is a good chance that the carbon credits that are meant to provide incentives for reducing emissions will be available for next to nothing." How delicious. The article marvelously continued:
The problems with the European Trading Scheme are well documented with the collapse in the price of a tonne of carbon dating back to May last year when it emerged that most countries in the scheme had set their carbon caps far too high, resulting in fewer firms than expected having to buy credits and causing the price of a tonne of carbon to plummet from over 30 to less than 10. Everybody still with me? Good:
As one delegate observed "with some firms having carbon emissions capped at 110 percent of what they actually required it was always going to fail".
The EU is seeking to rectify the problem ahead of the second phase of the scheme, which starts next year, and recently rejected many member countries proposed emission allowances for the next phase as too high, ordering them to go away and come back with lower caps that will force more firms to cut emissions or buy credits.
However, Jepma argued that with no link existing between the first and second phase of the scheme the cost of carbon credits will drop to almost nothing by the end of the year. Currently the price is already below one euro meaning there is little incentive for firms to cut emissions as it is cheaper to just buy in credits to offset their pollution.
The Costco Mission Statement 1)Obey the law. 2)Take care of our members. 3)Take care of our employees. 4)Respect our vendors. 5)Reward our shareholders 6) Post the Costco Mission Statement on slashdot because it is the Word of God. 7) Destroy Walmart, infidel company.
The sad thing is that most foreign automakers' factories in the US are unionized too. People blaming unions for the downfall of the US auto companies are just looking for an easy scapegoat. Hey this is a union thread! You want to post on it, you use one of our boys. Like Slugger here. He's been goin' to community college and he can read and write pretty good. Can't ya Slugs? But you don't use non union posters. 'Cos maybe slugger don't know what rhetoric is, but he can be pretty persuasive with a baseball bat if you know what I mean.
No, you're looking at it the wrong way. Like most people I'm too lazy to go to the store and buying music is more expensive than downloading it. Also I only want one track, not a CD full of filler. Most of the time I'm some random country and the only stuff I see in record shops is shitty local pop music, not the stuff that I actually listen to it which is pretty much Swedish/English/American alternative stuff.
You can't buy a Meteors CD in Asia no matter how much cash you have, because they only listen to Asian pop that makes me want to pull my ears off and nobody in CD shops speaks English. And it's hot and polluted as fuck out there and people keep jabbering in some incomprehensible but presumably local language when I ask them loudly and slowly in English for "Meteors! Fucking Meteors!", but my hotel is clean and air conditioned and has 100Mbit uncapped and untraceable internet and room service.
So I haven't bought a CD in years. If I can't download, I'd never get any new music. So downloading = good. And this study proves that all the other people downloading who presumably speak the language of the country they live in are buying more music. So I can use it to advocate laws against a crackdown on it on slashdot. I'm sure the RIAA will read this and decide to leave the Pirate Bay alone.
Did you know that in Opera you can right click on a web page, select Edit Site Preferences and disable Javascript, or just disable the features the site abuses. No extension needed! And it runs perfectly fine on older machines since it doesn't leak memory like sieve like certain competing browsers. It's also free and cross platform just like them.
Can it make a spider-shaped object? Specifically, one in which all of the feet touch the ground, but the torso and head of the spider are above the feet (suspended by the legs), and the knees of the legs are above the torso and head of the spider?
You can't make that layer-by-layer in a single pass. You have to make the feet first, go all the way up to the knees, and then back down to the body.
John Connor: I need a minute here. You're telling me that this thing can imitate anything it touches? The Terminator: Anything it samples by physical contact. John Connor: Get real, like it could disguise itself as a pack of cigarettes? The Terminator: No, only an object of equal size. John Connor: Why doesnt it become a bomb or something to get me? The Terminator: It cant form complex machines, guns and explosives have chemicals, moving parts, it doesn't work that way, but it can form solid metal shapes. John Connor: Like what? The Terminator: Knives and stabbing weapons.
Your quarrel is with SI, not me. Go read a Wikipedia article on SI and gigabytes and maybe you'll get some sense knocked into you, Coward. This post is why I love discussions on the Internet. Can I use that as my.sig?
You can strip an XP install down to 80MB just with nLite. And that's just hacking ini files.
Most of XP is still there, including things like plug and play which are not needed on a machine with no expansion ports. I'd guess if you had access to the source code you could strip it down a lot more.
What's the point of setting up a socialized laptop project if people are going to be allowed to run the wrong software on it? You might as well leave it up to the free market in that case.
Windows CE is for embedded devices. You can run it on a x86 but I'd expect compatibility with shrinkwrapped applications wouldn't be too impressive because it only supports a subset of the huge API that the NT based OSs support.
You can't run MS Office for example, only Pocket Office. Which is seriously limited
http://www.softmaker.com/english/ofc_en.htm
In an ideal world, you could create a Microsoft Word or Excel document on your desktop computer, put it on your Handheld PC, edit and format it on the road, and then send it back to the office as a.DOC or.XLS file, with content and all formatting still intact.
This is what Windows CE users expect from their mobile computers.
Unfortunately, this is not how it works right now. Pocket Word, the "word processor" shipping with all Handheld PCs, is perhaps the biggest disappointment for mobile users: No headers or footers. No tables. No outliner. No on-the-fly spell-checking. Severely limited text formatting. Image support? Barely existent.
What about document conversion then? As soon as you move a.DOC file to your mobile device, all features that Pocket Word cannot deal with are stripped and thrown away. Not much more than bold, italic, and a few font variations survive.
No... They are the skulls of White Bears who have fallen through the ice because the water in the arctic got warmed up too much by the water cooling kit this beast requires to operate. You could probably render photorealistic White Bears in realtime on this beasty. And do the AI and physics too. Certainly good enough to use them as enemies in a arctic themed FPS.
I think it's the Saudi princes that own it. Though because they don't do anything themselves they probably don't get as much of the profits than for example the Norwegians do. And it's obviously cheaper for Texaco to pay them off than to pay off the Norwegians, since they only have to pay a few influential people and anyone else that complains can be got rid of. Whereas in Norway all the contracts are open and the government would presumably lose an election if it was perceived to have acted in a correupt way or struck a bad deal for the country.
Basically Norway works and Saudi Arabia doesn't. If the Saudis end up getting screwed over oil it's just a symptom of that.
It's not really though is it? The Muslim world actually has a lock on oil, the most valuable resource in the world. Lots of countries have managed to develop with much less resources than they have, notably around the Pacific Rim.
They're poor because their societies suck, not because other people have hogged resources. Mind you, I'm sure the people that run these countries do see things as a battle for resources, like Saddam did with Kuwait. Which makes it all the more important to have a credible military to keep them at bay.
What about jealousy? There are big chunks of the world that are complete basket cases economically but where people blame all their problems on far away countries that aren't.
Looking from the outside you can see that the state controlled media is encouraging this sentiment because it moves disatisfaction from the kleptocratic leaders of the country to Jews or Americans. But the thing is that the state controlled media didn't invent these prejudices - they've been around for thousands of years. Ironically the kleptocratic leaders gained power by exploiting them.
You can see this in the Clinton years. Clinton did all the things the Muslim world could ask for. He pressured the Israelis to make a generous peace offer, saved the Kosovans from the Serbs. And yet most Arabs blame the dire state of their countries not on local despots but on Israel and America. And rather than learning from US support for the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan that the US was their friend they decided that infidel superpowers could be defeated.
It's actually hard to imagine any possible form of appeasement that would cause the state controlled media to stop whining about Israel and the US.
Mind you, the people that run these counties presumably don't want to have their palaces and families blown to bits, so let them hate so long as they fear the USAF.
Like 90% of the computer users in the world I have loads of documents in Word format. Even if I stopped using it and converted them all, everyone I know still would and would continue to email them to me.
Slashdot Mirror
No Gramps, it was grooves that recorded sound. Grove's was a paper based database that recorded biographical information about the musicians that composed and played the sound. My copy ran to two dozen volumes. That's what the Madonna song is about.
So you want to ban both cars and airplanes? Maybe we should force people to return to an agrarian society -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot#Democratic_Kampuchea_.281975-1979.29
Globally it seems like pretty much any culture can become prosperous provided the government dooesn't appropriate things too efficiently. Now it's possible that cultural issues make this impossible in some places of course, like in the Iraq where non tyrannical governments usually mean civil war, so people put up with thieving bastards to have some semblance of security. Those countries are screwed of course - they will never achieve prosperity or produce anything of value culturally. But none of this is something that outsiders can do much about - we can support the least nasty politicicians in a variety of ways, but that can take decades to civilise the country.
http://www.howstuffworks.com/question192.htm This sounds like a tremendously poor miles-per-gallon rating! But consider that a 747 can carry as many as 568 people. Let's call it 500 people to take into account the fact that not all seats on most flights are occupied. A 747 is transporting 500 people 1 mile using 5 gallons of fuel. That means the plane is burning 0.01 gallons per person per mile. In other words, the plane is getting 100 miles per gallon per person! The typical car gets about 25 miles per gallon, so the 747 is much better than a car carrying one person, and compares favorably even if there are four people in the car. Not bad when you consider that the 747 is flying at 550 miles per hour (900 km/h)! Better than one person in Prius.
http://www.toyota.com/prius/ The Prius boasts an EPA-estimated combined city/highway rating of 46 miles per gallon Two or more in people in Prius will beat a 747. Or maybe not, loading up a car will cause the total miles per gallon to drop as the weight increases. Maybe you need three people in a Prius to be safe. But most cars have one person and lower mpg, so it's not like 747s are worse on average than cars.
You don't need to Google all this stuff yourself of course, you just pick the cheapest way to travel and rely on market forces to make the most energy efficient way the cheapest. Which should be true so long as oil is expensive enough to make it a non neglibable part of total costs.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2005/12/28/2238 Russia is Europe's largest producer of greenhouse gases, but Russian businessesespecially its power companiesare hoping to cash in on a provision in the Kyoto Accord, which would help change that. The Kyoto Accord sets certain pollution goals to be met by 2012, and these goals are based on 1990 greenhouse emissions. For instance, the countries in the EU are required to reduce their emissions to 8 percent below their 1990 levels. In a strange twist of irony, Russia is already way below their target as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In fact, Russia produces 43 percent less greenhouse gas by weight than they did in 1990. It is estimated that this difference, which can be sold to other countries in the form of carbon credits ranges in value between US$20-60 billion. So it's not like the cash is going to starving peasants in the Third World, it's actually going to the gangsters who run Gazprom.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence
In the Middle Ages the Catholic church was theoretically committed to eliminating sin. Mind you eliminating sin requires sacrifice, just like eliminating carbon emissions does. So like the UN they decided to sell indulgences, a sort of sin offset. This is good for the people selling, since they get money. And good for the sinner, since they can continue to sin for a small fee. And if you were rich and well connected, the price of indulgences could be very cheap indeed.
Oddly enough the fee for carbon credits is now very small, since governments have sold far too many of them. The price is now so low they are an effective license to pollute.
http://newsbusters.org/node/10989 Stick with this, folks, because the entire concept of carbon credits could totally implode: "The Stern Report suggests we need a price for a tonne of carbon emissions of $20, rising to $30, $40 or even $50 to stabilise [the level of CO2 in the atmosphere] at manageable levels," he said. "But there is a good chance that the carbon credits that are meant to provide incentives for reducing emissions will be available for next to nothing." How delicious. The article marvelously continued: The problems with the European Trading Scheme are well documented with the collapse in the price of a tonne of carbon dating back to May last year when it emerged that most countries in the scheme had set their carbon caps far too high, resulting in fewer firms than expected having to buy credits and causing the price of a tonne of carbon to plummet from over 30 to less than 10. Everybody still with me? Good: As one delegate observed "with some firms having carbon emissions capped at 110 percent of what they actually required it was always going to fail".
The EU is seeking to rectify the problem ahead of the second phase of the scheme, which starts next year, and recently rejected many member countries proposed emission allowances for the next phase as too high, ordering them to go away and come back with lower caps that will force more firms to cut emissions or buy credits.
However, Jepma argued that with no link existing between the first and second phase of the scheme the cost of carbon credits will drop to almost nothing by the end of the year. Currently the price is already below one euro meaning there is little incentive for firms to cut emissions as it is cheaper to just buy in credits to offset their pollution.
1)Obey the law.
2)Take care of our members.
3)Take care of our employees.
4)Respect our vendors.
5)Reward our shareholders 6) Post the Costco Mission Statement on slashdot because it is the Word of God.
7) Destroy Walmart, infidel company.
No, you're looking at it the wrong way. Like most people I'm too lazy to go to the store and buying music is more expensive than downloading it. Also I only want one track, not a CD full of filler. Most of the time I'm some random country and the only stuff I see in record shops is shitty local pop music, not the stuff that I actually listen to it which is pretty much Swedish/English/American alternative stuff.
You can't buy a Meteors CD in Asia no matter how much cash you have, because they only listen to Asian pop that makes me want to pull my ears off and nobody in CD shops speaks English. And it's hot and polluted as fuck out there and people keep jabbering in some incomprehensible but presumably local language when I ask them loudly and slowly in English for "Meteors! Fucking Meteors!", but my hotel is clean and air conditioned and has 100Mbit uncapped and untraceable internet and room service.
So I haven't bought a CD in years. If I can't download, I'd never get any new music. So downloading = good. And this study proves that all the other people downloading who presumably speak the language of the country they live in are buying more music. So I can use it to advocate laws against a crackdown on it on slashdot. I'm sure the RIAA will read this and decide to leave the Pirate Bay alone.
I used to feel that way until I saw the Search Doggy in XP. How can you dislike a company that makes an OS with a Search Doggy?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=xp+search+dog&btnG=Google+Search
What's that short for? I think you mean.
Did you know that in Opera you can right click on a web page, select Edit Site Preferences and disable Javascript, or just disable the features the site abuses. No extension needed! And it runs perfectly fine on older machines since it doesn't leak memory like sieve like certain competing browsers. It's also free and cross platform just like them.
And it has fewer vulnerabilities -
http://news.softpedia.com/newsImage/Internet-Explorer-vs-Firefox-vs-Safari-vs-Opera-3.png
Plus since it has a tiny market share it's very unlikely anyone will bother to target it.
You can't make that layer-by-layer in a single pass. You have to make the feet first, go all the way up to the knees, and then back down to the body.
Can it do that? Read the FAQ
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103064/quotes
John Connor: I need a minute here. You're telling me that this thing can imitate anything it touches?
The Terminator: Anything it samples by physical contact.
John Connor: Get real, like it could disguise itself as a pack of cigarettes?
The Terminator: No, only an object of equal size.
John Connor: Why doesnt it become a bomb or something to get me?
The Terminator: It cant form complex machines, guns and explosives have chemicals, moving parts, it doesn't work that way, but it can form solid metal shapes.
John Connor: Like what?
The Terminator: Knives and stabbing weapons.
I think they'd give Windows away for free just for the publicity.
You can strip an XP install down to 80MB just with nLite. And that's just hacking ini files.
Most of XP is still there, including things like plug and play which are not needed on a machine with no expansion ports. I'd guess if you had access to the source code you could strip it down a lot more.
What's the point of setting up a socialized laptop project if people are going to be allowed to run the wrong software on it? You might as well leave it up to the free market in that case.
That's my objection to the project - it depends on the kleptocrats that have kept the country poor in the first place distributing the laptops fairly.
I suspect OLPC advocates who've never left the US will tell you that your wrong though.
You can't run MS Office for example, only Pocket Office. Which is seriously limited
http://www.softmaker.com/english/ofc_en.htm In an ideal world, you could create a Microsoft Word or Excel document on your desktop computer, put it on your Handheld PC, edit and format it on the road, and then send it back to the office as a
This is what Windows CE users expect from their mobile computers.
Unfortunately, this is not how it works right now. Pocket Word, the "word processor" shipping with all Handheld PCs, is perhaps the biggest disappointment for mobile users: No headers or footers. No tables. No outliner. No on-the-fly spell-checking. Severely limited text formatting. Image support? Barely existent.
What about document conversion then? As soon as you move a
Oddly enough, that might actually happen
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=163601
So it all works out in the long run.
I think it's the Saudi princes that own it. Though because they don't do anything themselves they probably don't get as much of the profits than for example the Norwegians do. And it's obviously cheaper for Texaco to pay them off than to pay off the Norwegians, since they only have to pay a few influential people and anyone else that complains can be got rid of. Whereas in Norway all the contracts are open and the government would presumably lose an election if it was perceived to have acted in a correupt way or struck a bad deal for the country.
Basically Norway works and Saudi Arabia doesn't. If the Saudis end up getting screwed over oil it's just a symptom of that.
It's not really though is it? The Muslim world actually has a lock on oil, the most valuable resource in the world. Lots of countries have managed to develop with much less resources than they have, notably around the Pacific Rim.
They're poor because their societies suck, not because other people have hogged resources. Mind you, I'm sure the people that run these countries do see things as a battle for resources, like Saddam did with Kuwait. Which makes it all the more important to have a credible military to keep them at bay.
What about jealousy? There are big chunks of the world that are complete basket cases economically but where people blame all their problems on far away countries that aren't.
Looking from the outside you can see that the state controlled media is encouraging this sentiment because it moves disatisfaction from the kleptocratic leaders of the country to Jews or Americans. But the thing is that the state controlled media didn't invent these prejudices - they've been around for thousands of years. Ironically the kleptocratic leaders gained power by exploiting them.
You can see this in the Clinton years. Clinton did all the things the Muslim world could ask for. He pressured the Israelis to make a generous peace offer, saved the Kosovans from the Serbs. And yet most Arabs blame the dire state of their countries not on local despots but on Israel and America. And rather than learning from US support for the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan that the US was their friend they decided that infidel superpowers could be defeated.
It's actually hard to imagine any possible form of appeasement that would cause the state controlled media to stop whining about Israel and the US.
Mind you, the people that run these counties presumably don't want to have their palaces and families blown to bits, so let them hate so long as they fear the USAF.
Like 90% of the computer users in the world I have loads of documents in Word format. Even if I stopped using it and converted them all, everyone I know still would and would continue to email them to me.