"Well, water vapor is far and away the most significant greenhouse gas, but there's no obvious way to make it precipitate any faster than it does, unless you want to try orbiting a vast sunshade to reduce the amount of light striking the atmosphere. Occluding an area the size of Texas should do the trick."
There's also the problem that we need the water vapor because it's what rain is made out of.
"Useless to him, certainly not useless to millions of poor people."
I think it's useless to most poor people, but it would be very useful in education, and in municipal government at the village or town level.
It's like those 3rd-world people who get a microloan to buy a phone and phone service, which they resell cheaply to neighbors, or one of those multi-purpose generator engine tools (kind of like a king-size gas-powered Dremel) which provides a variety of milling and grinding services to the community, for a small fee. Most of the people around there can't afford such things, and wouldn't really be able to utilize one very well, because they don't need one all the time, can't maintain one, don't have the infrastructure, etc.
The best case is to get the tech into situations where it can be shared among a group of people (improving utilization, rather than having it sit idle and not benefitting anyone) or where it is used by people and institutions for the benefit of groups of poor people (schools, news organizations, healthcare institutions, trade organizations checking prices in distant markets so that local merchants know what to charge and don't get scammed by better-informed traders.)
It doesn't do that much to help the world's poor if a village's relatively more affluent persons can afford to buy a $100 computer, but it sits unused on their desk most of the time, inaccessible to anyone else in the community.
First the suit, now this
on
Golf in Space
·
· Score: 1
I figure there are two likely explanations for the recent outbreak of trailer park science in orbit.
1) They're trying to make the best of a very bad situation, and improvising experiments with what little they have on hand or that can be fit into a supply capsule without displacing too much necessary cargo (food, etc).
2) They're trying to embarrass NASA and the Congress into raising their funding.
" Sure, one the move a mule can eat some grass, but that becomes harder in the middle of the desert or while being shipped across the ocean."
Then maybe the military should be breeding big hulking pack dogs. Teams of work dogs work pretty well in the food-scarce Arctic, after all. Feeding them would probably be easier, being carnivores, so the food would have a higher energy density (ie, the food required for the trip would take up less space and weigh less.)
Plus, big hullking dogs have certain advantages in war that mules just can't match.
"The sort of mystifying thing is that they simultaneously released the media center machine and the stereo system that don't work together particularly well."
Heck, they could have made the Mini with a Dock connector in the bottom, which would let you mate your Mini with the Hi-Fi.
"We need to be prepared for a climate change instead of trying to prevent it. We need to work on preparation for this "feature" of the planet instead of trying to disable it. "
Um, not to be insensitive or anything, but antisemitic genocide is also a "feature" of this planet, of long standing. I don't see Israel taking your approach of "preparing" for it "instead of trying to prevent it."
Increasing elevation (though only at high altitudes) could actually be a sign of increased temperature.
The increased elevation must be coming from snowfall, which requires that there be moisture in the air. That moisture comes from either sublimation of the icecap, or from the air that moves in from over the ocean. The moisture from sublimation is probably insignificant and can be ignored.
As for the humid sea air: I'm no meteorologist, but it seems to me that the colder the air is over Greenland, the faster the sea air should dump its moisture as snow as the air mass moves onto Greenland and mixes with the cold local air. Which means that the colder Greenland is, the less moisture should be in the air when it reaches the interior of Greenland, because it will have been dumped closer to the coasts, leaving the air dry and unable to produce much snow.
On the other hand, if Greenland is warming, then the sea air would retain moisture longer as it passes over Greenland, and there would be more left to precipitate out as snow in the interior, especially at colder high elevations.
So, basically, it looks to me like the evidence shows that Greenland is in fact warming up.
Yes, I know the ones I love, and I delete the ones I hate. Why would I keep songs that I hate?
I find I have songs I can listen to all the time, songs I would rather hear less often, and songs that I want to keep but don't want in regular rotation.
I end up using the ratings as being proxies for how often I want to hear a song - not necessarily an indication of which songs are great and which songs suck.
For what it's worth, I only have 2499 tracks, so rating them wasn't that onerous of a task. If you have more than that, it may be less desirable.
You can use multiple criteria, so you could have playlists of rated metal songs that exclude everything else, playlists of rated classical music that exclude everything else, and playlists of rated tracks that exclude both death metal and classical.
"The whole concept of smart playlists and these "content managers" just seems stupid to me. I dont have the time to rate my music, just like I dont have the time to tag my images or other documents. The time I spend on tagging is far more than I would ever save on searching."
Then rate everything as a "3", and when ever the mood strikes you, tweak the current playing song up or down a notch or two. If you decide the current song is a little tired and you don't want to hear it much, knock it down to a 2. If you like it a lot, boost it up to a four.
I have a set of playlists, for 0 stars and up, 1 star and up,... through 5 stars. Using the above scheme, you could just use "3 stars and up" all the time, until you reach a critical mass of rated songs.
Personally, I set newly acquired songs to 4 stars, and listen to the 4+ star playlist most of the time. If I decide I don't like a new song that much, I knock it down a few pegs.
Contact manufacturers are a dime a dozen, cut each others' throat for assembly work, and generally don't make much money at all. At least not nearly as much as Apple.
Right, though they can increase their margins a little by improving their efficiency so that it costs even less to produce each unit than they originally contracted at.
However, it won't be long before they pass that savings on to the customers, in order to beat competitors for contracts, thus setting the manufacturer back to square one's slimmer margins.
If you want to be a jerk, and fill the pockets of some Russian crooks, rather than the people who actually entertain you, go right ahead and use AllOfMP3.
And if you consider yourself a "fan" of an artist, it's a real slap in their face to screw them over this way.
"Doing what I have been doing since my first attempt to copy a record to a cassette tape - this was in 1965/66? I'd pipe the audio output into the line-in jack of my Lafayette (now defunct electronics retailer) cassette recorder, and record away."
Well, nothing's going to *stop* you, but it's about a thousand times more convenient to just burn your DRM'd ITMS songs to DRM-free audio CD.
But whatever turns you on. I'm sure you could figure out a way to transmit them wirelessly to an old fashioned mono crystal radio, and record from that onto wax cylinders or magnetized wire.
"but - they LIKE you to think that way, and they WANT you to buy that way - and before long you wont be ABLE to buy CDs and build a collection. "
They LIKE even more for you to have a fetish for shiny discs that can pile up into dust-gathering stacks around your home, serving no useful purpose when you aren't listening to them.
They LIKE it even more when you WANT to "collect" these things, as if the material objects have some particular value apart from the entertainment value of the music they contain.
Who's the sucker? The utilitarian who buys digital tracks, or the material fetishist?
" i for one would prefer to see technology and the free markets provide the answers"
Yeah, like how technology and the free markets arrived out of nowhere like superheroes to save New Orleans from hurricane damage and flooding, days before the hurricane hit.
Oh, wait, that never happened. Despite being a known threat for decades, no private-sector profit-oriented firm popped up with a solution for saving New Orleans.
Sorry, but "Technology and the free markets" don't do anything. People do. Guided by management and investors, technology and the free markets chase money. They will ignore many significant problems unless other people spend money on those problems. In the case of most problems larger than personal entertainment and transportation, that means government. That's just reality.
Markets lag demand, for the most part. The problem with climate change is that we need to take steps long before the shit hits the fan.
The solution to air pollution was not to wait until the air became unbreathable and "technology and the free market" provided "solutions" consisting of air tanks and comfortable, affordable mass-produced respirators. The solution was to institute regulations to keep the air from getting to that point.
Then, the existence of the regulations creates demand for ways to reduce costs, which spurs "technology and the free market" to produce solutions so companies can more economically meet the requirements of the regulations.
As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. We can wait until climate change has provided "necessity" by screwing things up, causing trillions of dollars of damage, and killed millions. Or governments can provide the necessity through regulations, before any of that heavy loss of capital and life.
As an addendum, there is one place where I think this business model would work well...
Airports. The ideal market for this would be travellers facing a few hours on a plane, who probably would appreciate being able to pick up a video to watch without being encumbered by a DVD case, bag, plastic wrapper, etc.
Especially if the service allowed the movie to be loaded onto a laptop for customers without a video iPod.
The thing is, portable DVD players are already cheaper than video iPods. And regular DVD players are cheaper than an iPod Shuffle.
Going with the iPod really doesn't get you much of an advantage. The screen is smaller, the video is lower quality when hooked up to a TV. The only advantage might be that you can keep more than one movie on the iPod, but that strikes me as being much less significant than the ability to keep thousands of songs on an iPod versus a few songs on a CD.
There's no way Blockbuster is going to try to make a business out of selling or renting iPod-based movies to the few customers who would prefer to watch on their wee small iPod screen, and would leave home to go to a Blockbuster in order to do so.
I can't see many people doing that. If you're going to drive to the store, you're likely to grab a DVD to watch on your TV.
Slashdot Mirror
"Well, water vapor is far and away the most significant greenhouse gas, but there's no obvious way to make it precipitate any faster than it does, unless you want to try orbiting a vast sunshade to reduce the amount of light striking the atmosphere. Occluding an area the size of Texas should do the trick."
There's also the problem that we need the water vapor because it's what rain is made out of.
The problem is getting it to condense.
"Useless to him, certainly not useless to millions of poor people."
I think it's useless to most poor people, but it would be very useful in education, and in municipal government at the village or town level.
It's like those 3rd-world people who get a microloan to buy a phone and phone service, which they resell cheaply to neighbors, or one of those multi-purpose generator engine tools (kind of like a king-size gas-powered Dremel) which provides a variety of milling and grinding services to the community, for a small fee. Most of the people around there can't afford such things, and wouldn't really be able to utilize one very well, because they don't need one all the time, can't maintain one, don't have the infrastructure, etc.
The best case is to get the tech into situations where it can be shared among a group of people (improving utilization, rather than having it sit idle and not benefitting anyone) or where it is used by people and institutions for the benefit of groups of poor people (schools, news organizations, healthcare institutions, trade organizations checking prices in distant markets so that local merchants know what to charge and don't get scammed by better-informed traders.)
It doesn't do that much to help the world's poor if a village's relatively more affluent persons can afford to buy a $100 computer, but it sits unused on their desk most of the time, inaccessible to anyone else in the community.
I figure there are two likely explanations for the recent outbreak of trailer park science in orbit.
1) They're trying to make the best of a very bad situation, and improvising experiments with what little they have on hand or that can be fit into a supply capsule without displacing too much necessary cargo (food, etc).
2) They're trying to embarrass NASA and the Congress into raising their funding.
They're enthusastic to go where no woman has gone before.
" Sure, one the move a mule can eat some grass, but that becomes harder in the middle of the desert or while being shipped across the ocean."
Then maybe the military should be breeding big hulking pack dogs. Teams of work dogs work pretty well in the food-scarce Arctic, after all. Feeding them would probably be easier, being carnivores, so the food would have a higher energy density (ie, the food required for the trip would take up less space and weigh less.)
Plus, big hullking dogs have certain advantages in war that mules just can't match.
"The sort of mystifying thing is that they simultaneously released the media center machine and the stereo system that don't work together particularly well."
Heck, they could have made the Mini with a Dock connector in the bottom, which would let you mate your Mini with the Hi-Fi.
"We need to be prepared for a climate change instead of trying to prevent it. We need to work on preparation for this "feature" of the planet instead of trying to disable it. "
Um, not to be insensitive or anything, but antisemitic genocide is also a "feature" of this planet, of long standing. I don't see Israel taking your approach of "preparing" for it "instead of trying to prevent it."
Increasing elevation (though only at high altitudes) could actually be a sign of increased temperature.
The increased elevation must be coming from snowfall, which requires that there be moisture in the air. That moisture comes from either sublimation of the icecap, or from the air that moves in from over the ocean. The moisture from sublimation is probably insignificant and can be ignored.
As for the humid sea air: I'm no meteorologist, but it seems to me that the colder the air is over Greenland, the faster the sea air should dump its moisture as snow as the air mass moves onto Greenland and mixes with the cold local air. Which means that the colder Greenland is, the less moisture should be in the air when it reaches the interior of Greenland, because it will have been dumped closer to the coasts, leaving the air dry and unable to produce much snow.
On the other hand, if Greenland is warming, then the sea air would retain moisture longer as it passes over Greenland, and there would be more left to precipitate out as snow in the interior, especially at colder high elevations.
So, basically, it looks to me like the evidence shows that Greenland is in fact warming up.
Yes, I know the ones I love, and I delete the ones I hate. Why would I keep songs that I hate?
I find I have songs I can listen to all the time, songs I would rather hear less often, and songs that I want to keep but don't want in regular rotation.
I end up using the ratings as being proxies for how often I want to hear a song - not necessarily an indication of which songs are great and which songs suck.
For what it's worth, I only have 2499 tracks, so rating them wasn't that onerous of a task. If you have more than that, it may be less desirable.
You can use multiple criteria, so you could have playlists of rated metal songs that exclude everything else, playlists of rated classical music that exclude everything else, and playlists of rated tracks that exclude both death metal and classical.
"The whole concept of smart playlists and these "content managers" just seems stupid to me. I dont have the time to rate my music, just like I dont have the time to tag my images or other documents. The time I spend on tagging is far more than I would ever save on searching."
Then rate everything as a "3", and when ever the mood strikes you, tweak the current playing song up or down a notch or two. If you decide the current song is a little tired and you don't want to hear it much, knock it down to a 2. If you like it a lot, boost it up to a four.
I have a set of playlists, for 0 stars and up, 1 star and up,... through 5 stars. Using the above scheme, you could just use "3 stars and up" all the time, until you reach a critical mass of rated songs.
Personally, I set newly acquired songs to 4 stars, and listen to the 4+ star playlist most of the time. If I decide I don't like a new song that much, I knock it down a few pegs.
Contact manufacturers are a dime a dozen, cut each others' throat for assembly work, and generally don't make much money at all. At least not nearly as much as Apple.
Right, though they can increase their margins a little by improving their efficiency so that it costs even less to produce each unit than they originally contracted at.
However, it won't be long before they pass that savings on to the customers, in order to beat competitors for contracts, thus setting the manufacturer back to square one's slimmer margins.
Isn't the Nano built with Korean Flash?
When you're buying a politician, bad is better.
It's probably more like buying some stinky cheese where the worse it smells the "better" it is.
Well, he's a guy with a Wankeriffic pseudonym. Thomas Hawk? Please.
Other than that, I don't know anything about him.
If you want to be a jerk, and fill the pockets of some Russian crooks, rather than the people who actually entertain you, go right ahead and use AllOfMP3.
And if you consider yourself a "fan" of an artist, it's a real slap in their face to screw them over this way.
"Doing what I have been doing since my first attempt to copy a record to a cassette tape - this was in 1965/66? I'd pipe the audio output into the line-in jack of my Lafayette (now defunct electronics retailer) cassette recorder, and record away."
Well, nothing's going to *stop* you, but it's about a thousand times more convenient to just burn your DRM'd ITMS songs to DRM-free audio CD.
But whatever turns you on. I'm sure you could figure out a way to transmit them wirelessly to an old fashioned mono crystal radio, and record from that onto wax cylinders or magnetized wire.
"but - they LIKE you to think that way, and they WANT you to buy that way - and before long you wont be ABLE to buy CDs and build a collection. "
They LIKE even more for you to have a fetish for shiny discs that can pile up into dust-gathering stacks around your home, serving no useful purpose when you aren't listening to them.
They LIKE it even more when you WANT to "collect" these things, as if the material objects have some particular value apart from the entertainment value of the music they contain.
Who's the sucker? The utilitarian who buys digital tracks, or the material fetishist?
" i for one would prefer to see technology and the free markets provide the answers"
Yeah, like how technology and the free markets arrived out of nowhere like superheroes to save New Orleans from hurricane damage and flooding, days before the hurricane hit.
Oh, wait, that never happened. Despite being a known threat for decades, no private-sector profit-oriented firm popped up with a solution for saving New Orleans.
Sorry, but "Technology and the free markets" don't do anything. People do. Guided by management and investors, technology and the free markets chase money. They will ignore many significant problems unless other people spend money on those problems. In the case of most problems larger than personal entertainment and transportation, that means government. That's just reality.
Markets lag demand, for the most part. The problem with climate change is that we need to take steps long before the shit hits the fan.
The solution to air pollution was not to wait until the air became unbreathable and "technology and the free market" provided "solutions" consisting of air tanks and comfortable, affordable mass-produced respirators. The solution was to institute regulations to keep the air from getting to that point.
Then, the existence of the regulations creates demand for ways to reduce costs, which spurs "technology and the free market" to produce solutions so companies can more economically meet the requirements of the regulations.
As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. We can wait until climate change has provided "necessity" by screwing things up, causing trillions of dollars of damage, and killed millions. Or governments can provide the necessity through regulations, before any of that heavy loss of capital and life.
Both are correct. Where do you think the coastal glaciers start, anyway?
As an addendum, there is one place where I think this business model would work well...
Airports. The ideal market for this would be travellers facing a few hours on a plane, who probably would appreciate being able to pick up a video to watch without being encumbered by a DVD case, bag, plastic wrapper, etc.
Especially if the service allowed the movie to be loaded onto a laptop for customers without a video iPod.
The thing is, portable DVD players are already cheaper than video iPods. And regular DVD players are cheaper than an iPod Shuffle.
Going with the iPod really doesn't get you much of an advantage. The screen is smaller, the video is lower quality when hooked up to a TV. The only advantage might be that you can keep more than one movie on the iPod, but that strikes me as being much less significant than the ability to keep thousands of songs on an iPod versus a few songs on a CD.
There's no way Blockbuster is going to try to make a business out of selling or renting iPod-based movies to the few customers who would prefer to watch on their wee small iPod screen, and would leave home to go to a Blockbuster in order to do so.
I can't see many people doing that. If you're going to drive to the store, you're likely to grab a DVD to watch on your TV.
"Thus, the only market will be for people who don't have internet or cable."
And people who can't get broadband internet or cable probably don't have a Blockbuster nearby.
copyright - the right to make copies.
When you buy a book, you are not buying the right to make copies. That would be considerably more expensive.
Jobs still gets $1 salary at Apple. It's in the annual 10-K report with the SEC.
I think he gets the same at Pixar.