The Newton was the PDA equivalent of the Lisa. Great concept, but too expensive. I don't think that we'll see the return of the Newton as a PDA--PDA's are dying and being replaced by smartphones, and Apple already has that niche occupied with the iPhone.
But the big gap in Apple's product line is a notebook/tablet computer. So I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple resurrect the Newton name for a product of this nature. I'd imagine that it would be a Mac, rather than a locked product like the iPhone, but incorporate the iPhone's touch interface.
Yes, I wouldn't put it past the Boston police to draw on a kid with a bright green water pistol, and defend it with "why take a chance?"
A circuit board is not a weapon. It is not an imitation weapon. It is a standard component of a million benign electronic devices--probably 90% of the people in that terminal had a circuit board somewhere in their possession. And a circuit board with lights, prominently displayed on an article of clothing, is less likely to be a bomb than any random suitcase, purse, or backpack.
So she's so elite that she shouldn't be burdened with understanding how the unwashed commoners live their pathetic lives? Or perhaps she thought it would be delightfully witty to tweak a few of the retarded serfs at the airport with some highbrow MIT humor? Please. She deliberately set out to provoke a response and got one.
I'd be surprised if it so much as occurred to her that anybody could be stupid enough to mistake her electronic jewelry for a bomb.
Why else wouldn't she respond when questioned about what was on her chest?
Haven't you ever been in crowded, noisy airport with lots of people talking at once? Perhaps she was simply walking away and didn't hear the question or didn't realize that it was directed at her.
What if it was real and she blew herself up? What then?
What if? What if the suitcase carried by the guy next to her contained a bomb and it blew up (a suitcase can carry a lot more explosives than a little circuit board stuck to somebody's chest). Or the backpack on the guy behind her in line? Or the purse carried by the woman behind him?
Face it. Any reasonably large suitcase, purse, or backpack can carry enough high explosives to do serious damage. The one person in the room who is least likely to be a terrorist bomber is the girl with the little, attention grabbing lightup doohickey on her chest, because bombs usually are not designed to call attention to themselves. So if you are serious about protecting the public from hidden bombs, then move security to the entrance and check every suitcase, purse, and backpack. But if you aren't willing to inconvenience people with real security, don't think that you can make up for it by pulling a gun on anybody with flashing lights on them. And the fact that they are doing something so stupid means that they have no clue where a real threat is likely to come from.
1. Built-in Keynote, with VGA quality video out 2. GPS 3. Apple-authorized 3rd party apps 4. Bluetooth keyboard capability 5. Java 6. Bluetooth stereo headset 7. Voice dialing 8. Flash 9. EDGE is fine, but more speed would be nice--but only if it doesn't compromise size or battery life.
Even if you think that, if it's not a bomb, why can't she be released? Why does somebody have to be held for carrying something that we thought was a bomb but turned out not to be? The situation is normal so everybody can go home, or am I missing something?
She will be held, and charged with something, because releasing her would be tantamount to admitting, "We made a mistake and overreacted." People could be demoted or lose their jobs. Clearly, saving the jobs of the incompetents who are in charge of protecting us against terrorism is far more important than justice toward an innocent student whose only crime seems to be underestimating the stupidity of the police (as an MIT student, she probably doesn't have a lot of day-to-day contact with morons).
Once again, Boston police prove that they don't know the difference between blinking lights and a bomb.
Because everybody knows that terrorists always display their bombs prominently with attention-attracting blinking lights, right?
Although I suppose we should all count ourselves lucky that the Boston cops are too stupid to know that every cell phone, iPod, and GameBoy has a circuit board suspiciously hidden inside. Otherwise we'd all be facing drawn guns every time we walked into the airport.
Unfortunately, the storage space isn't big enough for my music collection. I'd like to have at least 32GB of storage available before I think about buying
Probably in a year or two. Of course, by then your music collection will be 64 GB.
changing from 480i to 480p will not improve the quality of the image produced. It will still be less than 1/4 the number of pixels an HDTV is capable of displaying. The only thing changing to progressive scan will do is increase the rate of refresh and therefor reduce motion blur. At best this will make edges more crisp which will actually make the image look more grainy than it would interlaced as the oversized pixels will be more pronounced. At 19 inches the difference between a 480 and 1080 image is very little, but at even 40 or more images the difference is staggering. Those of us that have viewed a 1080 image regularly have a hard time watching 480 images when we have the choice.
Not quite. With a HD or ED TV receiving 480i input, the TV still produces a 480p image at its standard frame rate (60 Hz in the US), but since it isn't receiving actual picture information for alternate scanlines, it fills them in with the TVs best guess at what should be there--usually a blurry average of the scan lines above and below. If the source (game or progressive DVD player) is providing 480p data, then those alternate scanlines get filled in with actual picture info. Depending on how good your TV is at interpolating scanlines, the difference can be quite dramatic.
Yes, I was shocked not to find a RGB cable in the box. And it doesn't work with the Gamecube RGB cable, either. They could easily have provided a cable with outputs for RGB, NTSC, and s-video.
The Wii is still hard to find outside of pricey bundles, but the shortage seems to be easing. You can check availability on this web site. Nobody has them today, but last week I picked up a console at list price from ToysRUs, and earlier this week Sears had it.
Sound like you are trying to have it both ways. Inflation theory was developed to account for observations about the universe. So if string theory cannot support inflation, then it is not going to be consistent with those observations. Which indicates that observations of the universe can be used to test string theory.
Who says that this is the only occasion when he stands on principle? A person does not need to explain why he chooses to exercise his rights.
My own policy is that I will show the contents of my bag if asked by a courteous checker at the door. I know that I am not obliged to do so, but I have a certain amount of sympathy with the plight of merchants with respect to shoplifting. However, I will not stop at the door and wait if an alarm goes off or somebody yells at me, because they are not entitled to delay me merely because their theft-detection system produces false positives. If they want to talk to me, they can chase after me. If somebody chases after me and asks politely, I will show them my bag, but I will not return to the store. If they aren't polite, I keep walking.
OK, I may be making a fool of myself here, but how can the entire Universe's angular momentum be non-zero? Surely momentum can only ever be relative to your frame of reference - and by definition, any frame of reference you can think of will be within the system you're trying to measure.
This idea was suggested by Mach. Einstein was reputedly very intrigued by this, and tried to work it into his theory of relativity, but in the end did not do so--in his theory accelerated movements such as rotation are not dependent on frame of reference.
The widescreen issue originally was raised by a few widescreen owners who were upset that owners of 4:3 TVs get to see "more" than they do (4:3 TVs show the same horizontal field of view, but more of the ceiling, the floor, and your character's virtual wrist), and who insisted that the game was not "true" widescreen, but just "cropped narrowscreen." Ultimately, the developer responded that the game was in fact developed specifically for widescreen, that the action and gameplay was tuned specifically for a particular field of view, so they chose to cram the entire field of view into the width of the 4:3 display, and chose to open up the screen vertically rather than resort to unsightly letterboxing. Some widescreen owners then complained that the field of view was simply too narrow, causing everything to look "zoomed." A few people reported experiencing "simulator sickness" after playing the game, and attributed to the game's "broken" field of view. In reality, it turns out that the field of view for Bioshock is about 75 degrees. This corresponds pretty well to the fraction of the player's field of vision occupied by the screen at typical viewing distances, which means that the perspective and field of view are correct for objects and characters to appear "actual size"--i.e. the size they would appear if the screen were an actual window into the game world. It may be that the reason that a few people get nauseous after playing the game is that the perspective is simply too realistic.
In any case, the developer, while not backing away from the position that the field of view of the game is carefully optimized to produce the best play experience, has nevertheless committed to releasing an official patch to allow users to expand the field of view if they find it necessary.
And I wouldn't be surprised if a biologist wouldn't call them science anyway. "Just math" would be a likely response I suspect.
As a biologist, I certainly regard string theory as science, because it is not abstract but rather directed toward describing physical reality. Whether it will turn out to be a useful theory in inspiring informative experiments (which is more important for science than rather a theory is actually correct) remains to be seen. The math is clearly very difficult, but it took many years to figure out how to test many of the predictions of relativity and quantum theory. A
AT&T is the largest provider because it is more competitive on a cost basis and service basis in the United States. By making the iphone superior to other products, I can absolutely guarantee that iphone sales are enhanced. YOu claim that customers can go elsehwere is also true. Some will, some won't.
AT&T is not that popular. The biggest complaint people have had about the iPhone is that you have to deal with AT&T. If this is a feature that people want, they would go elsewhere to get it. Except that it turns out that some other cell companies--companies without iPhones to push--are also disabling this feature. Which suggests that there are other reasons to do that besides selling the iPhone.
And does it help AT&T? AT&T thinks it does, or they wouldn't have done it. How does it help them?
I can certainly think of a lot of reasons why AT&T and other companies might think that disabling this feature helps them, reasons that have nothing to do with trying to influence customers to buy one of their cell phones and not another (which they could easily do simply by adjusting prices, if they wanted to). Every feature is going to generate some overhead in the form of customer service calls, so the only reason why a company would enable a particular feature is if they think the amount of revenue that it will generate in the form of additional customers is greater than its customer service cost. Or they could be working on a plan to charge for GPS, and they don't want to roll out service until they have the details worked out, because people are a lot more annoyed if you start charging them for something that they formerly had for free than they are if you offer them something additional, and by the way there's a small charge.
The practice of crippling phones is standard trade practice, and it's extremely unlikely that AT&T or Apple is going to get into any trouble over this instance of it.
Not if AT&T is doing it for good business reasons (of which, as we see, there are several) and not to hurt one particular company in order to help their competitor.
For one thing, it's just product differentiation. You can't have too many products at the same level. If you spread out the quality and price, you attract more sales.
Produce differentiation makes sense for a manufacturer, because each additional product has costs associated with it, so redundant products that offer no unique appeal to the buyer end up costing the company money, and adding features to a cheap product can make your high-end product redundant, which is not a good thing for the bottom line. But AT&T is not the manufacturer here, they are a retailer, and retailers gain by offering customers what they want, and charging accordingly. They don't gain by driving customers away from any product that they do offer--unless Apple is directly or indirectly bribing them to do so. Which would be illegal.
Apple probably insisted that AT&T do this. No other explanation makes sense. It's not evil, it's just business. The iPhone is supposed to be the ultimate phone with maximum flexibility. I'm sure to many people, it actually seems that way. No reason to hate Apple for this. It's the way this industry works.
If Apple is actually pressuring a retailer to cripple a competitor's product, they could end up in serious hot water legally.
But it doesn't make sense, because it doesn't benefit Apple and it doesn't benefit AT&T. AT&T is not the only game in town. People don't choose the iPhone because they prefer AT&T, they are going to AT&T to get the iPhone.; if AT&T is crippling a product that customers prefer at Apple's behest, the customers can just go elsewhere. Driving customers away from their retailer is hardly in Apple's interest. And of course, it is even less in AT&T's interest.
1: Gross price does not equal profit. If AT&T has two plans, one $40/mo and one $100/mo, but their profits are $10/mo and $1/mo respectively, they'll push you to the first plan. Why? Because that's where their profit is.
What, do you think that AT&T has no control over their own profit margins? If they want more of a profit margin on the Blackberry plan, all they need to do is increase the price. If they increase the price too much, then people will go to the other plan without any need to "push" them there.
It's a site dedicated to looking at the surface stations which the data comes from and auditing their compliance with the US Weather Station rules.
So far a lot have been found to be faulty. A post above puts it stronger - in many cases we seem to be measuring the spread of air conditioning!
Kind of a waste of time, because the data are already corrected for the major source of errors. So far, nobody has found any errors that make any difference in the conclusions. So it's a lot like the 1934/1998 tempest in a teapot--people obsessing about tiny measurement errors that make no contribution to the overall conclusion that there is global warming. It is one thing to quibble about the best way to measure temperature--in the real world, measurements are always "faulty" to some extent, and the real science is in coming up with methods of analysis that are robust enough that conclusions are not impacted by the inevitable measurement errors and biases. So there is always going to be room to quibble about the best way to analyze the data and to make tiny corrections. But so far, nobody has been able to come up with any way of analyzing the climate data that alters the conclusion--which is why they are making a such huge fuss about statistically insignificant corrections like this one.
Before the correction, the US temperature in 1934 and 1998 were in a virtual tie. Some estimates had 1934 a hair above 1998, others had it the other way around. In 2001, Hansen wrote
The U.S. annual (January-December) mean temperature is slightly warmer in 1934 than in 1998 in the GISS analysis. This contrasts with the USHCN data, which has 1998 as the warmest year in the century.
After the correction, the US temperatures in 1934 and 1998 are still in a statistical dead heat (no pun intended), too close to call. The correction was much smaller than the uncertainty in the the measurements. So this only matters to people who don't understand statistics. Scientists don't place much store in records like hottest years, because peaks in any signal are heavily influenced by statistical "noise" and are often misleading. The real science is based on the average trends, which aren't significantly impacted b by this minute correction.
The real study is that an expert statistician has been assiduously searching for errors in the climate data, and so far the most he has been able to come up with is this negligible correction.
Not only does it perhaps hurt people's understanding of physics, but it makes for bad special effects. We all have a lot of experience with weight and motion, so when something is physically impossible, it just looks "wrong" and makes it harder to maintain suspension of disbelief. Movie directors often seem to think, "It's all fantasy, none of this is possible anyway, so why does it matter?" But a rule long understood by science fiction writers is that the bigger the impossibility you ask the reader to swallow, the greater the care you must take to make other things as realistic as possible.
Some of the most jarring (and common) special effects that I've seen are:
A person is hit, and flies horizontally across a room to slam into a wall, with no suggestion of an arc. This is a smaller, and more familiar case of the "bus jumping the gap." No matter how hard you are hit, your trajectory will not be horizontal.
The strong villain picks up a victim by the throat, and holds him off the ground at arms length. This is again a more familiar case of the error cited with the Green Goblin holding the cable. Unless your feet are glued to the floor, or you are immensely heavy, it is not physically possible to hold another human off the ground at arms length, because the center of gravity will be beyond your forward leg--i.e. you will topple over.
Still, there is some evidence of progress. In the second Spider-man movie, I was impressed by how believable Doctor Octopus's movement was. The animators clearly paid attention to his base and attachments when he was "walking" with his arms or lifting heavy objects. And I read that in the third Spider-man movie, they checked Spider-man's leaps and swings with a physics model. That doesn't mean that they didn't cheat for dramatic effect, but they tried to stay close enough to physical reality to avoid jarring impossibilities.
All that and you still didn't get the point. Whether or not a person believes in Intelligent Design doesn't affect whether he/she is a real biologist or not. You can argue that in that specific issue they are not being particularly scientific, but not that they aren't real biologists at all.
No, but whether they are a biologist affects whether they believe in Intelligent Design. I've been a biologist for decades, and I've never met a biologist who takes ID seriously. So if they exist, they are rarer than hen's teeth. The only one I've even heard of is Behe, from his book and what what I've seen of his writing on the subject, he seems to be pretty much a crackpot.
So... the contiguous 48 isn't part of the world now? What you're basically saying is "the data doesn't fit my conclusion, ignore the data". If the US hasn't seen warming as was previously reported, well, sure that doesn't mean the whole world hasn't seen it, but on a global scale it certainly decreases the average warming!
Before the correction: The US data show a clear warming trend. 1998 is the warmest year since 1934, maybe even a hair warmer--they are too close to distinguish statistically.
After the correction: The US data show a clear warming trend. 1998 is the warmest year since 1934, maybe a hair cooler--they are too close to distinguish statistically.
Slashdot Mirror
The Newton was the PDA equivalent of the Lisa. Great concept, but too expensive. I don't think that we'll see the return of the Newton as a PDA--PDA's are dying and being replaced by smartphones, and Apple already has that niche occupied with the iPhone.
But the big gap in Apple's product line is a notebook/tablet computer. So I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple resurrect the Newton name for a product of this nature. I'd imagine that it would be a Mac, rather than a locked product like the iPhone, but incorporate the iPhone's touch interface.
Yes, I wouldn't put it past the Boston police to draw on a kid with a bright green water pistol, and defend it with "why take a chance?"
A circuit board is not a weapon. It is not an imitation weapon. It is a standard component of a million benign electronic devices--probably 90% of the people in that terminal had a circuit board somewhere in their possession. And a circuit board with lights, prominently displayed on an article of clothing, is less likely to be a bomb than any random suitcase, purse, or backpack.
I'd be surprised if it so much as occurred to her that anybody could be stupid enough to mistake her electronic jewelry for a bomb.
Haven't you ever been in crowded, noisy airport with lots of people talking at once? Perhaps she was simply walking away and didn't hear the question or didn't realize that it was directed at her.
What if? What if the suitcase carried by the guy next to her contained a bomb and it blew up (a suitcase can carry a lot more explosives than a little circuit board stuck to somebody's chest). Or the backpack on the guy behind her in line? Or the purse carried by the woman behind him?
Face it. Any reasonably large suitcase, purse, or backpack can carry enough high explosives to do serious damage. The one person in the room who is least likely to be a terrorist bomber is the girl with the little, attention grabbing lightup doohickey on her chest, because bombs usually are not designed to call attention to themselves. So if you are serious about protecting the public from hidden bombs, then move security to the entrance and check every suitcase, purse, and backpack. But if you aren't willing to inconvenience people with real security, don't think that you can make up for it by pulling a gun on anybody with flashing lights on them. And the fact that they are doing something so stupid means that they have no clue where a real threat is likely to come from.
1. Built-in Keynote, with VGA quality video out
2. GPS
3. Apple-authorized 3rd party apps
4. Bluetooth keyboard capability
5. Java
6. Bluetooth stereo headset
7. Voice dialing
8. Flash
9. EDGE is fine, but more speed would be nice--but only if it doesn't compromise size or battery life.
Even if you think that, if it's not a bomb, why can't she be released? Why does somebody have to be held for carrying something that we thought was a bomb but turned out not to be? The situation is normal so everybody can go home, or am I missing something?
She will be held, and charged with something, because releasing her would be tantamount to admitting, "We made a mistake and overreacted." People could be demoted or lose their jobs. Clearly, saving the jobs of the incompetents who are in charge of protecting us against terrorism is far more important than justice toward an innocent student whose only crime seems to be underestimating the stupidity of the police (as an MIT student, she probably doesn't have a lot of day-to-day contact with morons).
Once again, Boston police prove that they don't know the difference between blinking lights and a bomb.
Because everybody knows that terrorists always display their bombs prominently with attention-attracting blinking lights, right?
Although I suppose we should all count ourselves lucky that the Boston cops are too stupid to know that every cell phone, iPod, and GameBoy has a circuit board suspiciously hidden inside. Otherwise we'd all be facing drawn guns every time we walked into the airport.
Probably in a year or two. Of course, by then your music collection will be 64 GB.
changing from 480i to 480p will not improve the quality of the image produced. It will still be less than 1/4 the number of pixels an HDTV is capable of displaying. The only thing changing to progressive scan will do is increase the rate of refresh and therefor reduce motion blur. At best this will make edges more crisp which will actually make the image look more grainy than it would interlaced as the oversized pixels will be more pronounced. At 19 inches the difference between a 480 and 1080 image is very little, but at even 40 or more images the difference is staggering. Those of us that have viewed a 1080 image regularly have a hard time watching 480 images when we have the choice.
Not quite. With a HD or ED TV receiving 480i input, the TV still produces a 480p image at its standard frame rate (60 Hz in the US), but since it isn't receiving actual picture information for alternate scanlines, it fills them in with the TVs best guess at what should be there--usually a blurry average of the scan lines above and below. If the source (game or progressive DVD player) is providing 480p data, then those alternate scanlines get filled in with actual picture info. Depending on how good your TV is at interpolating scanlines, the difference can be quite dramatic.
Yes, I was shocked not to find a RGB cable in the box. And it doesn't work with the Gamecube RGB cable, either. They could easily have provided a cable with outputs for RGB, NTSC, and s-video.
The Wii is still hard to find outside of pricey bundles, but the shortage seems to be easing. You can check availability on this web site. Nobody has them today, but last week I picked up a console at list price from ToysRUs, and earlier this week Sears had it.
Sound like you are trying to have it both ways. Inflation theory was developed to account for observations about the universe. So if string theory cannot support inflation, then it is not going to be consistent with those observations. Which indicates that observations of the universe can be used to test string theory.
No, it isn't. It makes no verifiable or falsifiable claims, and therefore isn't science.
But if that were true, it couldn't very well be inconsistent with inflation, which is based upon verifiable observations about the universe, could it?
Who says that this is the only occasion when he stands on principle? A person does not need to explain why he chooses to exercise his rights.
My own policy is that I will show the contents of my bag if asked by a courteous checker at the door. I know that I am not obliged to do so, but I have a certain amount of sympathy with the plight of merchants with respect to shoplifting. However, I will not stop at the door and wait if an alarm goes off or somebody yells at me, because they are not entitled to delay me merely because their theft-detection system produces false positives. If they want to talk to me, they can chase after me. If somebody chases after me and asks politely, I will show them my bag, but I will not return to the store. If they aren't polite, I keep walking.
This idea was suggested by Mach. Einstein was reputedly very intrigued by this, and tried to work it into his theory of relativity, but in the end did not do so--in his theory accelerated movements such as rotation are not dependent on frame of reference.
The widescreen issue originally was raised by a few widescreen owners who were upset that owners of 4:3 TVs get to see "more" than they do (4:3 TVs show the same horizontal field of view, but more of the ceiling, the floor, and your character's virtual wrist), and who insisted that the game was not "true" widescreen, but just "cropped narrowscreen." Ultimately, the developer responded that the game was in fact developed specifically for widescreen, that the action and gameplay was tuned specifically for a particular field of view, so they chose to cram the entire field of view into the width of the 4:3 display, and chose to open up the screen vertically rather than resort to unsightly letterboxing. Some widescreen owners then complained that the field of view was simply too narrow, causing everything to look "zoomed." A few people reported experiencing "simulator sickness" after playing the game, and attributed to the game's "broken" field of view. In reality, it turns out that the field of view for Bioshock is about 75 degrees. This corresponds pretty well to the fraction of the player's field of vision occupied by the screen at typical viewing distances, which means that the perspective and field of view are correct for objects and characters to appear "actual size"--i.e. the size they would appear if the screen were an actual window into the game world. It may be that the reason that a few people get nauseous after playing the game is that the perspective is simply too realistic.
In any case, the developer, while not backing away from the position that the field of view of the game is carefully optimized to produce the best play experience, has nevertheless committed to releasing an official patch to allow users to expand the field of view if they find it necessary.
As a biologist, I certainly regard string theory as science, because it is not abstract but rather directed toward describing physical reality. Whether it will turn out to be a useful theory in inspiring informative experiments (which is more important for science than rather a theory is actually correct) remains to be seen. The math is clearly very difficult, but it took many years to figure out how to test many of the predictions of relativity and quantum theory. A
AT&T is not that popular. The biggest complaint people have had about the iPhone is that you have to deal with AT&T. If this is a feature that people want, they would go elsewhere to get it. Except that it turns out that some other cell companies--companies without iPhones to push--are also disabling this feature. Which suggests that there are other reasons to do that besides selling the iPhone.
I can certainly think of a lot of reasons why AT&T and other companies might think that disabling this feature helps them, reasons that have nothing to do with trying to influence customers to buy one of their cell phones and not another (which they could easily do simply by adjusting prices, if they wanted to). Every feature is going to generate some overhead in the form of customer service calls, so the only reason why a company would enable a particular feature is if they think the amount of revenue that it will generate in the form of additional customers is greater than its customer service cost. Or they could be working on a plan to charge for GPS, and they don't want to roll out service until they have the details worked out, because people are a lot more annoyed if you start charging them for something that they formerly had for free than they are if you offer them something additional, and by the way there's a small charge.
Not if AT&T is doing it for good business reasons (of which, as we see, there are several) and not to hurt one particular company in order to help their competitor.
Produce differentiation makes sense for a manufacturer, because each additional product has costs associated with it, so redundant products that offer no unique appeal to the buyer end up costing the company money, and adding features to a cheap product can make your high-end product redundant, which is not a good thing for the bottom line. But AT&T is not the manufacturer here, they are a retailer, and retailers gain by offering customers what they want, and charging accordingly. They don't gain by driving customers away from any product that they do offer--unless Apple is directly or indirectly bribing them to do so. Which would be illegal.
If Apple is actually pressuring a retailer to cripple a competitor's product, they could end up in serious hot water legally.
But it doesn't make sense, because it doesn't benefit Apple and it doesn't benefit AT&T. AT&T is not the only game in town. People don't choose the iPhone because they prefer AT&T, they are going to AT&T to get the iPhone.; if AT&T is crippling a product that customers prefer at Apple's behest, the customers can just go elsewhere. Driving customers away from their retailer is hardly in Apple's interest. And of course, it is even less in AT&T's interest.
What, do you think that AT&T has no control over their own profit margins? If they want more of a profit margin on the Blackberry plan, all they need to do is increase the price. If they increase the price too much, then people will go to the other plan without any need to "push" them there.
Kind of a waste of time, because the data are already corrected for the major source of errors. So far, nobody has found any errors that make any difference in the conclusions. So it's a lot like the 1934/1998 tempest in a teapot--people obsessing about tiny measurement errors that make no contribution to the overall conclusion that there is global warming. It is one thing to quibble about the best way to measure temperature--in the real world, measurements are always "faulty" to some extent, and the real science is in coming up with methods of analysis that are robust enough that conclusions are not impacted by the inevitable measurement errors and biases. So there is always going to be room to quibble about the best way to analyze the data and to make tiny corrections. But so far, nobody has been able to come up with any way of analyzing the climate data that alters the conclusion--which is why they are making a such huge fuss about statistically insignificant corrections like this one.
After the correction, the US temperatures in 1934 and 1998 are still in a statistical dead heat (no pun intended), too close to call. The correction was much smaller than the uncertainty in the the measurements. So this only matters to people who don't understand statistics. Scientists don't place much store in records like hottest years, because peaks in any signal are heavily influenced by statistical "noise" and are often misleading. The real science is based on the average trends, which aren't significantly impacted b by this minute correction.
The real study is that an expert statistician has been assiduously searching for errors in the climate data, and so far the most he has been able to come up with is this negligible correction.
Not only does it perhaps hurt people's understanding of physics, but it makes for bad special effects. We all have a lot of experience with weight and motion, so when something is physically impossible, it just looks "wrong" and makes it harder to maintain suspension of disbelief. Movie directors often seem to think, "It's all fantasy, none of this is possible anyway, so why does it matter?" But a rule long understood by science fiction writers is that the bigger the impossibility you ask the reader to swallow, the greater the care you must take to make other things as realistic as possible.
Some of the most jarring (and common) special effects that I've seen are:
A person is hit, and flies horizontally across a room to slam into a wall, with no suggestion of an arc. This is a smaller, and more familiar case of the "bus jumping the gap." No matter how hard you are hit, your trajectory will not be horizontal.
The strong villain picks up a victim by the throat, and holds him off the ground at arms length. This is again a more familiar case of the error cited with the Green Goblin holding the cable. Unless your feet are glued to the floor, or you are immensely heavy, it is not physically possible to hold another human off the ground at arms length, because the center of gravity will be beyond your forward leg--i.e. you will topple over.
Still, there is some evidence of progress. In the second Spider-man movie, I was impressed by how believable Doctor Octopus's movement was. The animators clearly paid attention to his base and attachments when he was "walking" with his arms or lifting heavy objects. And I read that in the third Spider-man movie, they checked Spider-man's leaps and swings with a physics model. That doesn't mean that they didn't cheat for dramatic effect, but they tried to stay close enough to physical reality to avoid jarring impossibilities.
No, but whether they are a biologist affects whether they believe in Intelligent Design. I've been a biologist for decades, and I've never met a biologist who takes ID seriously. So if they exist, they are rarer than hen's teeth. The only one I've even heard of is Behe, from his book and what what I've seen of his writing on the subject, he seems to be pretty much a crackpot.
Before the correction: The US data show a clear warming trend. 1998 is the warmest year since 1934, maybe even a hair warmer--they are too close to distinguish statistically.
After the correction: The US data show a clear warming trend. 1998 is the warmest year since 1934, maybe a hair cooler--they are too close to distinguish statistically.