The most important question is what is the lifespan of the helium containment. Helium is notorious for getting in to and out of places that other elements can't. For example, in balloon borne cosmic ray experiments, or anything with a calorimeter or hodoscope that utilizes photomultiplier tubes, you have the problem of the helium from the balloon getting into the PMTs, which hold a vacuum. Of course, there are low pressure conditions to consider, but I'm still skeptical of the helium staying in the hard drive.
Disclaimer, I'm no fan of this. However, this is article is missing critical information, namely, how much water do these drought ridden communities normally use? The number 97 billion sounds like a lot, but without some sort of baseline for comparison it could actually be a small percentage of total water demands for a community.
If one does some Fermi math on this, then it is a little less than 2 gallons per person per day per person in Texas. That's less water than a toilet uses. Are any of these drought ridden areas telling people to not flush their toilets?
I use a wiki. Specifically, I use OpenWikiNG, http://sourceforge.net/projects/openwiki-ng/ , however, any wiki software would work. My reason for using OpenWikiNG is that I largely use windows and the software is ASP based and can work with a simple Access database. The way I have it setup, and in hindsight, I would do this differently now, is that I use the personal web server that comes with Windows on my personal home desktop. With the access database, I don't have to worry about some heavy database engine. Since I'm the only user, this has been a very stable setup and trivially easy to migrate to a new machine when needed. Another reason I use OpenWikiNG is that it's open source, very simple, and somewhat easy to hack. It works for me, and that's all I care about.
With wake on LAN capability, I can VPN into my home network and wake my machine if I need remote access. And since this is a wiki, I don't have to install any software on any other device. All I need is a web browser.
In terms of usage, I have my wiki start page as my browser's home page. I have links to site I visit often, some RSS feeds, my daily schedule, even some emails and phone numbers. I use the wiki as sort of a second brain. I have pages where I put my ideas, pages where I put things that are important, things I might need, and all sorts of other resources from computers to food. My personal wiki is a much better bookmarking system than what any browser could ever come up with. I can easily annotate information that I add, and most importantly, I can search.
To give the benefit of my hindsight, I would probably want to use a dedicated LAMP server on my home network. And I would consider something with better file and image management, as OpenWikiNG really sucks at that. To really find something that would suit one's personal taste, I suggest looking at http://www.wikimatrix.org/ to compare them. I have a lot of stuff in my personal wiki, and converting it to some other format really seems like a hassle. So, if you do this, pick a wiki you're comfortable with. The more time you spend using it, the more you lock yourself in.
Mars had liquid water at some point and is outside the habitable zone, for some definitions of habitable zone. So it is entirely possible that planets with liquid water can exist outside the habitable zone. The real issue is with stability.
An interesting take on this is to consider the flux of radiation from the Sun hitting the Earth. For a disk the size of the Earth, one can calculate the distance where water freezes and where water boils as a rough estimate of a "zone" of sorts. When looked at in this way, the Earth is at a point just barely above freezing. That we have the climate that we do beyond that near freezing point is due entirely to greenhouse effects.
There are at least two other android game devices. There is the Archos GamePad, which has already shipped in Europe and looks similar to a PSP in my opinion, and there is the not-yet-released Wikipad, which looks to be just a large size tablet that has a snap on game controller.
And there is the Ouya which was mentioned here on slashdot recently.
I can't help but wonder if the android hardware game device market is about to get really crowded.
Absolutely. I would rather suffer through a thousand trolls or genuinely extremist comments from anonymous persons than not be able to read the thoughtful comments a more timid person may not have written had they been required to attach their name to them.
Good luck finding that comment. Personally, I find that when websites have comment systems in place, like Youtube or Cnn, or (insert website here), then the comments tend to asymptotically approach pure nonsense as the popularity of the website increases.
That operating systems like iOS and Android even give someone the ability to see that certain permissions are required, and by the compliment, that there are permissions that are not required, is a step in a good direction. That granularity feature is absent in desktop applications--essentially all permissions are granted by default. For all I know pkunzip could have been keeping track of all those file_id.diz it encountered in order to build a profile of me, then dialing some BBS to upload the statistics to. That might seem implausible, but since there was no central authoritative repository to download pkunzip, it came from a BBS. That BBS could have replaced it with its own custom version for tracking.
The larger point is that desktop programs could have been doing for years what people are worried about with tablet and phone applications.
That said, it still creeps me out to see a solitaire game needing access to my address book. Maybe this is a case of "out of sight, out of mind."
So far, there are a few hiccups. There were a few add-ons that didn't make the switch, but they were rarely used, so I haven't noticed their absence yet. The tab size is annoying and I haven't figured out how to fix that yet. The old about:config fix doesn't work, and the userchrome.css fix just screws things up more.
I did need to readjust the default layout, the lack of a refresh and stop button is just annoying, but they're easy to add back. I like having a user interface, so yeah, that.
Noscript and Adblock plus work. I recommend the "status-4-evar" addon to get the status bar back.
Overall, I haven't noticed the slowdown or memory consumption. Of course, everyone's mileage will vary.
One new feature, at least new for me, is that you have FF restore all your tabs after you close your browser, but when you start back up, the tabs won't load unless you click on them. I really like this feature. Back in 3.6, it could take a really long time to restore a browsing session.
Overall though, the shock of switching isn't as bad as you think.
I think I should probably end this post with instructions on doing a side-by-side install. Before installing anything, make a copy of your firefox profile. Then edit the 'profiles.ini' to reflect this, it's up a folder or two from the profiles. In the profiles.ini, make a new name, something like myff10stuff for your profile. Then, get the ESR build and install to a different folder, but do not start FF at the end of the install. Edit the existing FF shortcut or make your own, but put -P on the end. it should read something like "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 10\firefox.exe" -P myff10stuff All that is because the profile manager doesn't let you copy an existing profile. You can delete, rename, or create a new one, but you can't copy. You'll probably want to do the same thing to the 3.6 copy and use the 3.6 profile.
For the very reason that Google wouldn't want to give Bing any sort of leg up on their own search engine. I think Mozilla could come out ahead if there happens to be any backroom bidding wars to keep that 3rd place browser out of the other big guy's hands.
In the registration process for getting an API key there is the following question and choices:
How many people do you anticipate will use your application?
1-10 (Just me and mine.)
10-100 (Intranet, protected access.)
100-1,000 (Slashdot me, please!)
1,000-10,000+ (Everyone, I hope.)
I'm sure there is some sort of semantic joke in their somewhere but I can't find it.
It's modded as insightful because the ACID2 test is not well formed code. The ACID2 information page is upfront about this. To pass the test means a browser is to render broken code to a standard, and that's just silly when browsers can't even agree on how to render non-broken code.
For compressing roughly a 100K js, IE7 is far faster than Firefox. I've seen firefox take over an hour to compress js with interruptions that "this script is running too slow", while IE takes only a few minutes. Opera corrupts large scripts, so it's useless in this context. I haven't tested Safari for compressing javascript.
I would have modded Spiked_Three (626260) as a Troll.
I'm surprised VBscript and ActiveX have been forgotten so quickly in the context of web technologies.
As for Flash,
Adobe has opened the source code of the ActionScript Virtual Machine, the high-performance ECMAScript implementation used in Adobe's ubiquitous Flash Player. Adobe has made the source code available under three prominent open source licenses, and contributed it to Mozilla for eventual inclusion in Firefox.
"Ducky" won because "The Problem with Math" pointed out the fundamental flaw of string theory. There's no way to measure or prove string theory.
Not true. String theory predicts proton decay, which can and has been tested for. Proton decay has not been observed, which means string theory's predictions are not coming true.
I would very much like to see a list of things you consider are both real and can't be proven, as well as not have any evidence for existence. The problem is that "real" and "no evidence" are mutually exclusive.
I am both a Vonage and Verizon customer, and there is no traditional concept of copper at all involved that needs to be maintained. I have business class internet over fiber optic cable to the house. Verizon is the data provider and Vongage is the phone provider.
Anyone that gets a traditional phone in this city will have fiber optic cable routed to the house, there is no copper anymore, and the phone line terminates into a box in one's garage where the fiber from the alley terminates.
Regardless of which company I pick, the signal from the phone to digital data is either converted in a little blue linksys box in the house or in a little cream colored box in the garage. Either way, it's digital before it leaves the house.
In terms of features, price, and flexibility, Vongage wins hands down over Verizon.
If Vongage is a "leech", then so is Slashdot and Google and just about every other usefull site on the internet as they call come down the same tube of light in a digital format.
As far as I see it, the internet infrastructure should be considered like railroads and highways. No one company should dictate what travels through them, as they are too fundamental to our society.
Does anyone really consider pizza delivery companies to be leeches of the road system?
so far I haven't seen any other mention demanding a paper ballot when voting. IANAL, but for those that are, can this be done? When I go to vote can I demand a paper ballot instead of using the computers available?
I have no faith in these machines for other reasons. A few years ago I tried to vote the party line and upon reviewing the votes I was about to cast the machine fucked it up and was placing my votes accross both party lines. I have no idea if my votes counted or not on that day.
But back on topic, can I legally demand a paper ballot?
At first I thought this was insightfull but on reading further down the discussion regarding proportions of land size between the two countries in the GP post I came to realize that this is a bit myopic. Granted there are a myriad of hidden costs for US consumers, but given that we, on average compared to European countries, have to travel farther for groceries and work, a cheaper price at the pump helps the economy by allowing poorer-than-middle-class people to work at jobs that require commutes. If the price were $6 a gallon, then people in the lower-than-Bushes-cronies tax bracket would have a much more difficult time simply trying to make ends meet in terms of buying food and paying utilties bills. Gas subsidies are a small part of a larger picture where the major theme of government spending is to achieve a concerted effort of the citizens to make their society better. There may be Marxist undertones in the previous sentence, but I tend to think of government spending as more of an operational upkeep of a capitalistic soceity.
Google has done this years ago, but with web pages
on
Google Image Labeler
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The ACID2 test assumes that the correct interpretation of the following rule is that the background should be yellow. .parser { error: \}; background: yellow }
According to w3.org's grammer page, http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/grammar.html, the only valid use of the backslash character is if it is followed by up to six numbers in base hex. Also on the page http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#parsing-er rors it says that you must match paris of (), [], {}, "", and '' when handling errors.
Given those rules, the logic, as I see it would the following interpretation and if any of this is wrong then it is due to my lack of groking the regular expressions in the grammar doc.
.parser is a class name and this is valid
{ begins the style declaration body
error: is an invalid token so it must be ingored.
\ is not escaping a valid hex notation number, and it should be ignored.
} closes the declaration
background: yellow } is invalid because it is outside the body of this style declaration
The end result is the style should NOT be yellow, contrary to what the ACID2 test states.
The w3 spec says that matching pairs of (), [], {}, "", and '' should be respected, but it doesn't say how to match cases where you have a differing number of opening and closing tokens. There are basically two options when tokening such a heirarchial data stream, and that is outer to inner parsing and the oposite direction inner to outer. The w3 spec doesn't say which order of tokenizing it prefers.
I should also point out that the w3 site has only one other use for the backslash escape, and that is to escape certain characters in an unquoted URI. Specificially the characters are parentheses, commas, whitespace characters, single quotes (') and double quotes ("). The { } are not specified and this ACID2 css rule does not use an unquoted URI, so this escaping does not apply.
Or does it even need activation? having to call MS with your personal information to continue running xp after 60 or so days could be the end of his freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
The most important question is what is the lifespan of the helium containment. Helium is notorious for getting in to and out of places that other elements can't. For example, in balloon borne cosmic ray experiments, or anything with a calorimeter or hodoscope that utilizes photomultiplier tubes, you have the problem of the helium from the balloon getting into the PMTs, which hold a vacuum. Of course, there are low pressure conditions to consider, but I'm still skeptical of the helium staying in the hard drive.
Disclaimer, I'm no fan of this. However, this is article is missing critical information, namely, how much water do these drought ridden communities normally use? The number 97 billion sounds like a lot, but without some sort of baseline for comparison it could actually be a small percentage of total water demands for a community.
If one does some Fermi math on this, then it is a little less than 2 gallons per person per day per person in Texas. That's less water than a toilet uses. Are any of these drought ridden areas telling people to not flush their toilets?
I use a wiki. Specifically, I use OpenWikiNG, http://sourceforge.net/projects/openwiki-ng/ , however, any wiki software would work. My reason for using OpenWikiNG is that I largely use windows and the software is ASP based and can work with a simple Access database. The way I have it setup, and in hindsight, I would do this differently now, is that I use the personal web server that comes with Windows on my personal home desktop. With the access database, I don't have to worry about some heavy database engine. Since I'm the only user, this has been a very stable setup and trivially easy to migrate to a new machine when needed. Another reason I use OpenWikiNG is that it's open source, very simple, and somewhat easy to hack. It works for me, and that's all I care about.
With wake on LAN capability, I can VPN into my home network and wake my machine if I need remote access. And since this is a wiki, I don't have to install any software on any other device. All I need is a web browser.
In terms of usage, I have my wiki start page as my browser's home page. I have links to site I visit often, some RSS feeds, my daily schedule, even some emails and phone numbers. I use the wiki as sort of a second brain. I have pages where I put my ideas, pages where I put things that are important, things I might need, and all sorts of other resources from computers to food. My personal wiki is a much better bookmarking system than what any browser could ever come up with. I can easily annotate information that I add, and most importantly, I can search.
To give the benefit of my hindsight, I would probably want to use a dedicated LAMP server on my home network. And I would consider something with better file and image management, as OpenWikiNG really sucks at that. To really find something that would suit one's personal taste, I suggest looking at http://www.wikimatrix.org/ to compare them. I have a lot of stuff in my personal wiki, and converting it to some other format really seems like a hassle. So, if you do this, pick a wiki you're comfortable with. The more time you spend using it, the more you lock yourself in.
To continue the CKXD comic,
Math is applied Logic
Logic is applied Philosophy
Philosophy is applied Sociology
and "the circle is now complete."
Mars had liquid water at some point and is outside the habitable zone, for some definitions of habitable zone. So it is entirely possible that planets with liquid water can exist outside the habitable zone. The real issue is with stability. An interesting take on this is to consider the flux of radiation from the Sun hitting the Earth. For a disk the size of the Earth, one can calculate the distance where water freezes and where water boils as a rough estimate of a "zone" of sorts. When looked at in this way, the Earth is at a point just barely above freezing. That we have the climate that we do beyond that near freezing point is due entirely to greenhouse effects.
There are at least two other android game devices. There is the Archos GamePad, which has already shipped in Europe and looks similar to a PSP in my opinion, and there is the not-yet-released Wikipad, which looks to be just a large size tablet that has a snap on game controller.
And there is the Ouya which was mentioned here on slashdot recently.
I can't help but wonder if the android hardware game device market is about to get really crowded.
Absolutely. I would rather suffer through a thousand trolls or genuinely extremist comments from anonymous persons than not be able to read the thoughtful comments a more timid person may not have written had they been required to attach their name to them.
Good luck finding that comment. Personally, I find that when websites have comment systems in place, like Youtube or Cnn, or (insert website here), then the comments tend to asymptotically approach pure nonsense as the popularity of the website increases.
That operating systems like iOS and Android even give someone the ability to see that certain permissions are required, and by the compliment, that there are permissions that are not required, is a step in a good direction. That granularity feature is absent in desktop applications--essentially all permissions are granted by default. For all I know pkunzip could have been keeping track of all those file_id.diz it encountered in order to build a profile of me, then dialing some BBS to upload the statistics to. That might seem implausible, but since there was no central authoritative repository to download pkunzip, it came from a BBS. That BBS could have replaced it with its own custom version for tracking.
The larger point is that desktop programs could have been doing for years what people are worried about with tablet and phone applications.
That said, it still creeps me out to see a solitaire game needing access to my address book. Maybe this is a case of "out of sight, out of mind."
I'm in the same boat, I just (two weeks ago) switched from 3.6 to 10. I still have 3.6 installed just in case, but so far I'm adjusting.
In order to have some stability though, try the ESR version, it's what I'm using. http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all.html And if you want to read the FAQ, go with http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/
So far, there are a few hiccups. There were a few add-ons that didn't make the switch, but they were rarely used, so I haven't noticed their absence yet. The tab size is annoying and I haven't figured out how to fix that yet. The old about:config fix doesn't work, and the userchrome.css fix just screws things up more.
I did need to readjust the default layout, the lack of a refresh and stop button is just annoying, but they're easy to add back. I like having a user interface, so yeah, that.
Noscript and Adblock plus work. I recommend the "status-4-evar" addon to get the status bar back.
Overall, I haven't noticed the slowdown or memory consumption. Of course, everyone's mileage will vary.
One new feature, at least new for me, is that you have FF restore all your tabs after you close your browser, but when you start back up, the tabs won't load unless you click on them. I really like this feature. Back in 3.6, it could take a really long time to restore a browsing session.
Overall though, the shock of switching isn't as bad as you think.
I think I should probably end this post with instructions on doing a side-by-side install. Before installing anything, make a copy of your firefox profile. Then edit the 'profiles.ini' to reflect this, it's up a folder or two from the profiles. In the profiles.ini, make a new name, something like myff10stuff for your profile. Then, get the ESR build and install to a different folder, but do not start FF at the end of the install. Edit the existing FF shortcut or make your own, but put -P on the end. it should read something like
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 10\firefox.exe" -P myff10stuff
All that is because the profile manager doesn't let you copy an existing profile. You can delete, rename, or create a new one, but you can't copy. You'll probably want to do the same thing to the 3.6 copy and use the 3.6 profile.
For the very reason that Google wouldn't want to give Bing any sort of leg up on their own search engine. I think Mozilla could come out ahead if there happens to be any backroom bidding wars to keep that 3rd place browser out of the other big guy's hands.
I'm sure there is some sort of semantic joke in their somewhere but I can't find it.
It's modded as insightful because the ACID2 test is not well formed code. The ACID2 information page is upfront about this. To pass the test means a browser is to render broken code to a standard, and that's just silly when browsers can't even agree on how to render non-broken code.
For compressing roughly a 100K js, IE7 is far faster than Firefox. I've seen firefox take over an hour to compress js with interruptions that "this script is running too slow", while IE takes only a few minutes. Opera corrupts large scripts, so it's useless in this context. I haven't tested Safari for compressing javascript.
However, for real 3D, IE7 is really really really slow. Firefox is OK, Safari on windows is the fastest. http://www.abrahamjoffe.com.au/ben/canvascape/textures.htm
I'm surprised VBscript and ActiveX have been forgotten so quickly in the context of web technologies.
As for Flash, from http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061107-8170.html
More info at http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200611/110706Mozilla.html
I would very much like to see a list of things you consider are both real and can't be proven, as well as not have any evidence for existence. The problem is that "real" and "no evidence" are mutually exclusive.
xp is officially 5.1, check the file version on the kernel
I am both a Vonage and Verizon customer, and there is no traditional concept of copper at all involved that needs to be maintained. I have business class internet over fiber optic cable to the house. Verizon is the data provider and Vongage is the phone provider.
Anyone that gets a traditional phone in this city will have fiber optic cable routed to the house, there is no copper anymore, and the phone line terminates into a box in one's garage where the fiber from the alley terminates.
Regardless of which company I pick, the signal from the phone to digital data is either converted in a little blue linksys box in the house or in a little cream colored box in the garage. Either way, it's digital before it leaves the house.
In terms of features, price, and flexibility, Vongage wins hands down over Verizon.
If Vongage is a "leech", then so is Slashdot and Google and just about every other usefull site on the internet as they call come down the same tube of light in a digital format.
As far as I see it, the internet infrastructure should be considered like railroads and highways. No one company should dictate what travels through them, as they are too fundamental to our society.
Does anyone really consider pizza delivery companies to be leeches of the road system?
ThinkGeek is one of the "silver sponsors" linked at the bottom. ThinkGeek and Slashdot.org are both owned by OSTG.
Windows, Screen saver, 3D Pipes (OpenGL)
so far I haven't seen any other mention demanding a paper ballot when voting. IANAL, but for those that are, can this be done? When I go to vote can I demand a paper ballot instead of using the computers available? I have no faith in these machines for other reasons. A few years ago I tried to vote the party line and upon reviewing the votes I was about to cast the machine fucked it up and was placing my votes accross both party lines. I have no idea if my votes counted or not on that day. But back on topic, can I legally demand a paper ballot?
At first I thought this was insightfull but on reading further down the discussion regarding proportions of land size between the two countries in the GP post I came to realize that this is a bit myopic. Granted there are a myriad of hidden costs for US consumers, but given that we, on average compared to European countries, have to travel farther for groceries and work, a cheaper price at the pump helps the economy by allowing poorer-than-middle-class people to work at jobs that require commutes. If the price were $6 a gallon, then people in the lower-than-Bushes-cronies tax bracket would have a much more difficult time simply trying to make ends meet in terms of buying food and paying utilties bills. Gas subsidies are a small part of a larger picture where the major theme of government spending is to achieve a concerted effort of the citizens to make their society better. There may be Marxist undertones in the previous sentence, but I tend to think of government spending as more of an operational upkeep of a capitalistic soceity.
They're either upgrading their pigeons to Slashus-dottus-sapiens or they're outsourcing and putting these pigeons out of work. http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html
According to w3.org's grammer page, http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/grammar.html, the only valid use of the backslash character is if it is followed by up to six numbers in base hex. Also on the page http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#parsing-e
Given those rules, the logic, as I see it would the following interpretation and if any of this is wrong then it is due to my lack of groking the regular expressions in the grammar doc.
.parser is a class name and this is valid- { begins the style declaration body
- error: is an invalid token so it must be ingored.
- \ is not escaping a valid hex notation number, and it should be ignored.
- } closes the declaration
- background: yellow } is invalid because it is outside the body of this style declaration
The end result is the style should NOT be yellow, contrary to what the ACID2 test states.The w3 spec says that matching pairs of (), [], {}, "", and '' should be respected, but it doesn't say how to match cases where you have a differing number of opening and closing tokens. There are basically two options when tokening such a heirarchial data stream, and that is outer to inner parsing and the oposite direction inner to outer. The w3 spec doesn't say which order of tokenizing it prefers.
I should also point out that the w3 site has only one other use for the backslash escape, and that is to escape certain characters in an unquoted URI. Specificially the characters are parentheses, commas, whitespace characters, single quotes (') and double quotes ("). The { } are not specified and this ACID2 css rule does not use an unquoted URI, so this escaping does not apply.
Or does it even need activation? having to call MS with your personal information to continue running xp after 60 or so days could be the end of his freedom.