from the article: Gas-electric hybrids are the most fuel-efficient passenger cars on the road and ecologically there isn't a more viable option. Until something big changes, though, the industry-high efficiency can't economically offset the steep sticker price.
This is quite a sweeping claim, and one that I would contest. The VW Jetta TDI (diesel) gets consistently 55-60 mpg -- about as good as the best hybrids out there. What's more, diesel fuel uses less fuel in its manufacture than regular gasoline, meaning that the "embedded fuel" is significantly lower.
I tend to agree that much of the hybrid talk is hype and that getting 25 more miles out of a gallon of fuel does not make your car "green". What's much more, though, is the idea that hybrids get better mileage than any other cars on the road. Diesels, particularly some of the models by VW and Audi (in Europe, at least), prove that efficiency is more than just fancy technology.
My volkswagon jetta diesel gets ~55-60 mpg, runs on biodiesel, and is comfortable, safe, and has a kickin' sound system. When running on biodielel it uses 0 gallons of gasoline, is carbon-dioxide neutral, and emits fewer particulates than a Geo Metro. Audi makes a diesel sportscar in Europe that gets 100 miles to the gallon. Look into biodiesel for the real "green" car.
Another story that sounds great for an instant until you relise it's US only.
you spelled realize wrong
Re:No matter how careful you are, you aren't enoug
on
ID Theft Made Easy
·
· Score: 1
I'm not a smoker, but I signed anyway to get the freebie. I always wonder if insurance companies could get their hands on that info and use it against people.
YES, THEY CAN.
American Spirit has a "free carton" offer always going on, where they will send you a free carton of cigarettes to "try out". We were about to do this on a massive scale to provide free cigarettes for the students of my college, but we found out that American Spirit sells that information to the insurance companies, who use it to identify certified smokers.
Dirty, dirty tricks.
Apple could learn a lot from these videos alone. OS X set the bar in 2000 (or whenever) with drop-shadow windows, scalable icons, and live-rendering-while-morphing windows, and it improved usability and feel immensely. But if we really want inert lights on a flat surface to feel like objects, more needs to be done.
I think one of the coolest parts of the wobbly windows demo is the way that new windows don't just appear, they sort of fade in and splat onto the desktop. I think some sort of physics model for movement/creation/disappearance of windows and menus is the next important step in the feel of the end-user experience.
Maybe in Mac OS X 10.5? (ie 2007)
How long 'til this shows up in standard linux distros?
As our Anonymous Coward friend says, STERN Pinball is still producing games. You are correct that Williams, who was the only one at the time, shut down. Since then, though, others have stepped up. Illinois Pinball Company (which doesn't appear to have a website) bought the rights to all the WMS games, and supposedly plans to rerelease some of them at some point.
That's the best news I've heard in a long time, thanks!
Soon, we could compartmentalize each separate part of the game code to a seperate processor.
In the ideal world, would the CPU be responsible only for keeping track of ammo and managing the save-game dialogues?
Nope.
Pinball is officially dead. Williams stopped producing it, as well as the other manufacturer (who's name slips my memory right now). If anybody's still making machines, it's Sega, but Sega's machines are shoddy and almost always broken.
There's just not a market for games that require maintenance anymore... Sad but true.
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple was in negotiation with the TV companies right now, trying to work out a way to add an "Episode store" to iTunes (or quicktime or iMovie or something).
As the iPod funds the iTunes Music Store, though, they would need something to fund it (ie a product that buying tv shows through them would encourage you to buy). Could be a iPod video, but I doubt it. More likely a MacMini-type "entertainment box" that hooks up to your TV. Products like this have never taken off before, just like mp3 players never took off until iTunes/iPod; people need a reason to buy a new paradigm of technology.
I see it like this. Apple launches iTunes Video Store and the iBox home entertainment center at the same time. At first, the iBox sales are sucky, but people start downloading episodes from iTunes (easier than finding pirated versions). Then people want an easy way to watch these series' on their 90-inch plasmatic television, and iBox sales take off.
And people like me, without a TV, would be happy to pay the occasional few dollars for a TV show to watch...
I have been interested in computerized Go for a while now, but have never actually gotten my feet wet in the subject.
One approach I have always wanted to try is this:
set up a massive neural net that takes the state of the entire board as input, goes through way too many intermediate layers, and spits out a preference for spots to play. The state of the neural net could be exhaustively described with a few tens of thousands of [0,1] doubles.
Then set up "breeding" algorithm, make a few hundred instances of the program, each with its own neural net, and then have them pretend to be users on an internet Go site. Don't try to understand how they play, just let them figure it out. You could even, on occasion, let them play eachother...
I don't know if this would produce a good genome ever, but I'd be interested to see where it went regardless.
Does anybody know if this sort of thing has been tried before?
A couple of days ago some ne'rdowell got a hold of my credit card number and started buying italian airline tickets with it. Fortunately, my credit card company noticed and gave me a call.
T-mobile is about the only website I give my credit card number to. Could their weak system be the culprit? I don't know enough about hacking to know if this is possible, but it seems like quite a coincidence...
The sky is neither mauve nor blue, it has no colour. Blue light scatters in the atmosphere causing it to look blue.
I, then, would argue that the sky (or the atmosphere, anyway) is orange. If you hold a white light behind it, the blue light gets scattered (or absorbed, if you will), letting through everything else, i.e. orange.
Nonetheless, mauve is just absurd.
"Which country would that be?"
Nicaragua, Haiti, El Salvador, and Venezuela, to name a few from this hemisphere.
I don't want to provide money to my government so they can abuse the rights of others. Do you really call that "taking the $$$ from the funds allocated for international aid". I think you must have a frightening idea of "international aid".
I agree.
I think it would work better, though, if the federal gov't funded the states to do it themselves.
If we think it's worthwhile to give the weathiest people in the country huge tax cuts (how am I benefitting from that?), then I don't see why we wouldn't think it's a good idea to do something useful for a fraction of the price...
How 'bout this: next time we want to fund a coup against a democratic government in some backwater developing country, let's spend the money on providing a service to US citizens instead.
I can't stand the "not with my tax dollars" arguments from people that would vote for someone like Bush.
I think it would behoove MS to consider a Mac OS X version of IE7. IE for Mac is laughably out of date. I don't know a single mac user who even keeps it on her computer.
If macs keep gaining market share (as I think they will), MS better get their foot in the door while they still can.
Of course, unless they came up with something really surprising, I don't forsee myself using it in any event, so maybe what's the point...
I think that Apple did the OS X transition with utmost class, but to be fair, 10-year-old apps don't run "on" OS X (with the exception of old UNIX command-line stuff). "Classic" apps run in an emulator on top of OS X.
In fact, I think that Apple's approach was classier than traditional backwards-compatibility. They didn't release OS X until they had a very well designed OS 9 emulator in place, so users could upgrade their system without needing to replace any apps. The upside is that only those who need pre-X features need to have all the pre-X compatibility loaded. I haven't had OS 9 on my machine for years now, but if, for some reason, I needed to run an older app, I could install it in less than an hour.
Therefore, I say screw backwards-compatibility. I say backwards-emulatability is more versatile and clean.
Type "congress.org" into your browser, enter you zip, and call and email you senators telling them your feelings on this! If half the people that complained about laws in YRO communicated directly with their representatives, that would be a pretty big force against anti-privacy legislation. So stop reading this. Go write...Go!
Deporting all illegal immigrants would have one of two effects:
1) A hell of a lot of citizens would need to be willing to work 60 hours per week for minimum wage (or less).
OR
2) All of us would need to get used to paying much more for everything we buy (particularly food).
So, i think it might be a good thing in the end. Force the US to come to terms with its lopsided economy. Either make us pay for what we get, or make us change the laws so we acknowledge what we're doing.
Not to beat the dead horse, but...
on
Mapping Google Maps
·
· Score: 3, Funny
"hateful fearmongers in Washington, DC" returns just one, infinitely appropriate result.
Slashdot Mirror
New Audi car gets about 79 mpg.
from the article:
Gas-electric hybrids are the most fuel-efficient passenger cars on the road and ecologically there isn't a more viable option. Until something big changes, though, the industry-high efficiency can't economically offset the steep sticker price.
This is quite a sweeping claim, and one that I would contest. The VW Jetta TDI (diesel) gets consistently 55-60 mpg -- about as good as the best hybrids out there. What's more, diesel fuel uses less fuel in its manufacture than regular gasoline, meaning that the "embedded fuel" is significantly lower.
I tend to agree that much of the hybrid talk is hype and that getting 25 more miles out of a gallon of fuel does not make your car "green". What's much more, though, is the idea that hybrids get better mileage than any other cars on the road. Diesels, particularly some of the models by VW and Audi (in Europe, at least), prove that efficiency is more than just fancy technology.
I honestly didn't even know Netscape still existed...
My volkswagon jetta diesel gets ~55-60 mpg, runs on biodiesel, and is comfortable, safe, and has a kickin' sound system. When running on biodielel it uses 0 gallons of gasoline, is carbon-dioxide neutral, and emits fewer particulates than a Geo Metro.
Audi makes a diesel sportscar in Europe that gets 100 miles to the gallon.
Look into biodiesel for the real "green" car.
oh, how i hope it's the former.
Dirty, dirty tricks.
Apple could learn a lot from these videos alone. OS X set the bar in 2000 (or whenever) with drop-shadow windows, scalable icons, and live-rendering-while-morphing windows, and it improved usability and feel immensely. But if we really want inert lights on a flat surface to feel like objects, more needs to be done.
I think one of the coolest parts of the wobbly windows demo is the way that new windows don't just appear, they sort of fade in and splat onto the desktop. I think some sort of physics model for movement/creation/disappearance of windows and menus is the next important step in the feel of the end-user experience.
Maybe in Mac OS X 10.5? (ie 2007)
How long 'til this shows up in standard linux distros?
I wonder if he's running a premade distro like Yellow Dog? Or (possibly more likely) did he compile his own PPC kernal from source?
Soon, we could compartmentalize each separate part of the game code to a seperate processor.
In the ideal world, would the CPU be responsible only for keeping track of ammo and managing the save-game dialogues?
Nope.
Pinball is officially dead. Williams stopped producing it, as well as the other manufacturer (who's name slips my memory right now). If anybody's still making machines, it's Sega, but Sega's machines are shoddy and almost always broken.
There's just not a market for games that require maintenance anymore... Sad but true.
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple was in negotiation with the TV companies right now, trying to work out a way to add an "Episode store" to iTunes (or quicktime or iMovie or something).
As the iPod funds the iTunes Music Store, though, they would need something to fund it (ie a product that buying tv shows through them would encourage you to buy). Could be a iPod video, but I doubt it. More likely a MacMini-type "entertainment box" that hooks up to your TV. Products like this have never taken off before, just like mp3 players never took off until iTunes/iPod; people need a reason to buy a new paradigm of technology.
I see it like this. Apple launches iTunes Video Store and the iBox home entertainment center at the same time. At first, the iBox sales are sucky, but people start downloading episodes from iTunes (easier than finding pirated versions). Then people want an easy way to watch these series' on their 90-inch plasmatic television, and iBox sales take off.
And people like me, without a TV, would be happy to pay the occasional few dollars for a TV show to watch...
I have been interested in computerized Go for a while now, but have never actually gotten my feet wet in the subject.
One approach I have always wanted to try is this:
set up a massive neural net that takes the state of the entire board as input, goes through way too many intermediate layers, and spits out a preference for spots to play. The state of the neural net could be exhaustively described with a few tens of thousands of [0,1] doubles.
Then set up "breeding" algorithm, make a few hundred instances of the program, each with its own neural net, and then have them pretend to be users on an internet Go site. Don't try to understand how they play, just let them figure it out. You could even, on occasion, let them play eachother...
I don't know if this would produce a good genome ever, but I'd be interested to see where it went regardless.
Does anybody know if this sort of thing has been tried before?
A couple of days ago some ne'rdowell got a hold of my credit card number and started buying italian airline tickets with it. Fortunately, my credit card company noticed and gave me a call.
T-mobile is about the only website I give my credit card number to. Could their weak system be the culprit? I don't know enough about hacking to know if this is possible, but it seems like quite a coincidence...
Nonetheless, mauve is just absurd.
"Which country would that be?"
Nicaragua, Haiti, El Salvador, and Venezuela, to name a few from this hemisphere.
I don't want to provide money to my government so they can abuse the rights of others. Do you really call that "taking the $$$ from the funds allocated for international aid". I think you must have a frightening idea of "international aid".
I agree.
I think it would work better, though, if the federal gov't funded the states to do it themselves.
If we think it's worthwhile to give the weathiest people in the country huge tax cuts (how am I benefitting from that?), then I don't see why we wouldn't think it's a good idea to do something useful for a fraction of the price...
How 'bout this: next time we want to fund a coup against a democratic government in some backwater developing country, let's spend the money on providing a service to US citizens instead.
I can't stand the "not with my tax dollars" arguments from people that would vote for someone like Bush.
http://dijjer.org/get/http://filebox.vt.edu/users/ jkbrooks/pictures/hitchhikersguide.mov
I think it would behoove MS to consider a Mac OS X version of IE7. IE for Mac is laughably out of date. I don't know a single mac user who even keeps it on her computer.
If macs keep gaining market share (as I think they will), MS better get their foot in the door while they still can.
Of course, unless they came up with something really surprising, I don't forsee myself using it in any event, so maybe what's the point...
I think that Apple did the OS X transition with utmost class, but to be fair, 10-year-old apps don't run "on" OS X (with the exception of old UNIX command-line stuff). "Classic" apps run in an emulator on top of OS X.
In fact, I think that Apple's approach was classier than traditional backwards-compatibility. They didn't release OS X until they had a very well designed OS 9 emulator in place, so users could upgrade their system without needing to replace any apps. The upside is that only those who need pre-X features need to have all the pre-X compatibility loaded. I haven't had OS 9 on my machine for years now, but if, for some reason, I needed to run an older app, I could install it in less than an hour.
Therefore, I say screw backwards-compatibility. I say backwards-emulatability is more versatile and clean.
Great!
Now whack it over the head and take it from him. We've been looking for that.
Damn octopi...
Type "congress.org" into your browser, enter you zip, and call and email you senators telling them your feelings on this! If half the people that complained about laws in YRO communicated directly with their representatives, that would be a pretty big force against anti-privacy legislation.
So stop reading this. Go write...Go!
Deporting all illegal immigrants would have one of two effects:
1) A hell of a lot of citizens would need to be willing to work 60 hours per week for minimum wage (or less).
OR
2) All of us would need to get used to paying much more for everything we buy (particularly food).
So, i think it might be a good thing in the end. Force the US to come to terms with its lopsided economy. Either make us pay for what we get, or make us change the laws so we acknowledge what we're doing.
"hateful fearmongers in Washington, DC" returns just one, infinitely appropriate result.