Was Vista really that bad? No, not really. There were some serious issues at the start mostly related to the shift to 64-bit at the last moment screwing over most drivers, and of course the whole "Vista Capable" thing. It's still windows, but it isn't windows ME v2.
Were Vista sales really that bad? Yes, considering the time/money spent developing it.
It could turn out that 7 is just Vista with a new logo, and I still don't see any compelling reason to prefer windows 7 on my next computer other then Microsoft dropping support for XP... which is probably MS's main problem just now. Honestly, if MS's biggest competitor for vista hadn't been XP (which they could, and did, completely remove from the market by "not selling it more") they probably would be sunk, or nearly sunk. As it is, they're still afloat but another flop OS could shake their monopoly. And so... marketing.
If you have a wifi card that isn't supported by windows... just what magic do you think is going to be preformed to make it work?
If you have a wifi card that *is* supported by Ubuntu, it... works. Honestly, I wiped my windows and Ubuntu installs on the same computer and reinstalled from the installation disks for both.
Ubuntu recognized my wifi card and connected to the internet *while I was installing it.* It recognized my windows partition and mounted it. It also asked me if I wanted the restricted NVIDIA driver then had dual-monitor support (with one widescreen Dell laptop monitor and one non-widescreen Gateway external monitor) and full 3d video. I had to install a program to successfully use my logitech mouse, but disabling the touchpad was simple.
Windows XP... failed to have the drivers for the wifi card after installation (there's probably another CD somewhere with the drivers, but Ubuntu had them all on one CD...). I had to boot to Ubuntu, download the drivers, put them on my windows desktop, then boot back to windows to install them. I had to find and install the graphics drivers before I could scroll in windows without a several second lag. I had to find and install 2 different programs to mount my linux partition. I had to install a program to successfully use my logitech mouse, and another to disable the touchpad. And then I realized that because there was an external harddrive attached to the computer when I installed windows, my primary drive was drive "E" and so every single default install location doesn't exist.
So yes, if you buy a computer with windows pre-installed without checking to see if Ubuntu supports the parts, you'll probably find it easier to start using windows. On the other hand, if you start with a computer with no OS with parts supported by both windows and ubuntu, and the install CD for each... my guess is that you'll find it easier to start using Ubuntu.
That's easy, you just have to include instructions on exactly what voltage/amp electricity you'll need to run it, and a clear description of the encoding format. Of course, you'll have to make sure this information is recorded for a billion years as well... so just record it with this nanotech memory! It's a perfectly reasonable and not-at-all-completely-retarded solution!
What? That's... the lightest amount of caffeine of anyone you know? Wow.
Personally, it's one glass of soda with caffeine in maybe 3 days a week. I've never been one to do things because it's "cool" or "part of society" - I don't like the taste of coffee and don't see why I should "acquire" the taste. Especially when I see what people addicted to caffeine look like in the morning if the coffee is slow or absent. I wake up perfectly fine without, thank you very much.
Well yes, but that is also being posted on April first, so I still wouldn't be terribly surprised if it was gone tomorrow... though I have to admit a good deal of work seems to have gone into it, so I wouldn't be surprised if it stayed either.
The real solution to "not locking your keys in your car" apparently came a few years after your car. My car requires me to use the key to lock the drivers door. Very hard to lock your key in the car when you need your key out of the car to do it. Not like it's even that much trouble - you had your key in your hand about 2 seconds ago.
Now someone has to preform the rare and enviable "reverse car analogy" to figure out how UAC *ought* to be.
That seems to me a common misunderstanding. Presidential candidates spend their time in states that are split 50/50, not in small states. Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio are hardly small states, but those are where the vast majority of time was spent in the last three elections... because a few votes there could swing 20+ electoral votes. Why campaign in a state that's already 70% in favor of you, even if each vote there is a more substantial portion of the electoral college then a vote in Florida?
The change to national popular vote will move presidential campaigns to where the largest number of undecided voters are, which is really how it should be. Also, every vote will be weighted equally (instead of small states counting for more) and each vote will *matter* equally (instead of votes in 'key' or 'swing' areas being worth a thousand times as much effort to win as those in 'strongly democrat' or 'strongly republican' areas).
And so swing states probably won't pass this kind of thing until it already has 270 electoral votes... but there's no reason a small state wouldn't.
First of all it's my opinion that we're probably separated from other civilizations by time rather then space. A thousand years after the first radio signal seems a bit brief, but 10 thousand or a hundred thousand doesn't seem unreasonable... and our galaxy is billions of years old.
Next, given a reasonable number of civilizations capable of automated self-replicators active in the last few hundred million years... (a dozen? a score? a hundred?) it isn't that hard to assume some decent cryptography was in place on the instruction set of each set of probes such that they couldn't mutate, and that they were instructed to leave only a single meter-across probe in each solar system... possibly with a rocky shell to hide longer and/or for protection.
Now, how sure are you there isn't one of those hidden somewhere in our solar system? Wikipedia tells me "a survey in the infrared wavelengths shows that the main [asteroid] belt has 700,000 to 1.7 million asteroids with a diameter of 1 km or more." Now, if we have a 70% margin of error on the number of rocks bigger then a freaking kilometer in our asteroid belt, what do you think the chances are that we'd spot a single 10-meter-wide probe that happened to be coated in dust from nearby asteroids? Even if there were a thousand of them spaced evenly around the asteroid belt and each one was a perfect parabola pointed at earth, I doubt if we'd know.
Now, if there was an alien civilization that *wanted* its replicators to be found by the first race to get into space, obviously we'd see something like a big geometric shape on the dark side of the moon... but I don't think we can assume that.
Wrong. The only reason inbreeding causes genetic issues is because recessive traits become far more likely to crop up twice then in the general population. If you pick an individual who doesn't have any negative recessive genetic traits, there's no problem... *or* if you genetically tweak the DNA before you go about the procedure to remove those genetic traits you don't want to show up.
Of course the genetic manipulation required to do this on an animal who's species is already extinct is extremely difficult if not impossible with modern techniques... but so is producing a truly viable clone of an extinct species in the first place (one that lives a full life, not 7 minutes, or even the half-life we found cloned sheep got).
That's like saying "well, we managed to break our clock with only a rubber mallet, so obviously we're capable of fixing it". It's usually easy to break something, not so easy to fix it. Take a look at the BIOSPHERE 1 and 2 experiments... we don't even know what exactly it takes to make a balanced environment without a few million years of evolution, much what how we would go about fixing it on a global scale.
I certainly believe we'll *probably* find some way through this, but I also believe there's a significant chance it'll come down to "have 90% of us die while the rest of us wait out the 1000 years of broken climate" or of course "make things worse by accident".
Because we need a space program and the first completely-private orbital launch took place in 2008? Seriously, private enterprise is great and everything, but it doesn't do very well at the type of thing that won't show a profit for 50 years. While NASA is certainly not the height of efficiency it *does* take billions in research before you have anything to show when you're trying something really new.
I'd love to see a thriving private space program, I just don't think that's likely to happen any time soon without a healthy public space program leading the way.
No, I'm pretty sure the problem with that plan is that you *can* tap fiber-optics. Without cutting an entire undersea cable to do it. You would have to cut into the cable, but I'm sure a good submarine (it's the US you're thinking is tapping, right?) could seal a section of cable off from the ocean and drain the water out, if that was its mission. From that point it'd just be sitting there a while until you managed to install whatever tap it is you want, seal the thing off, and leave.
Besides, nobody your plan fails because this happened in 10 minutes. They'll get fixed in order of "which is closer to the ship that will fix them" and even if they weren't 10 minutes is nothing on top of the time it'll take to get them repaired.
People were going crazy assuming the US was going to invade Iran last time this happened... and we didn't. It's possible someone's sabotaging them, but I doubt it's to eavesdrop or cover an invasion. More likely someone wants whoever's cables they were to go broke. Also the cables were apparently near each other, so accident isn't as far-fetched as it sounds.
Having seen this once myself, having seen two first posts mentioning it, and having seen one reply to each first post mentioning that subscribers see this for posts "in the mysterious future" I've concluded... that it means nobody's gone and posted in the thread yet, or even that it's so new nobody has even looked at it since it officially went up or something.
Basically "this post is really, really new" and possibly "hey, you can get first post if you like."
I suspect at this point there are three problems with vista.
The first is word-of-mouth. Vista is bad because everyone says so. This started out as an informed opinion among IT people playing with Vista before SP1 and seeing that it was clearly slower then XP and with some sudden problems (like stalling of file copies and way too many UAC prompts and very few drivers). Many of those issues were fixed, but by then the informed opinion of people who know what they're talking about had been spread to people who like to think they're in the first group. These people eventually tried windows, probably poorly configured and certainly with cynical expectations, and naturally found instances of all the problems they were told about. Then, regardless of if these issues were reduced or even removed the opinion that vista was bad gets spread to the average user. They probably never try it at all, but just listen to the local guy who knows how to install things and open word without help. Basically... there were issues, and people told about these issues will continue to see them no matter how thoroughly they were fixed, because that's how expectations work.
The second issue is... the lack of obvious improvements. Ok, Vista's security model is better then XP's. It probably has some back-end improvements, and the move to 64-bit standard lays the groundwork for more theoretical improvement down the road. But does it run faster then XP? Is the user interface, to someone who's been using previous versions of windows all their life, easier to use then XP's? Is it easier to preform common tasks? No. Vista uses more resources then XP and on low-end PC's XP is way faster. Vista makes big changes to user interface, and while they're probably better for the long run, a long-time PC user will be lost when they first see Vista's UI... and may decide then and there that XP's was better. They'll try to open word, type something, and print it and find it takes twice as long on Vista. Maybe they'd eventually learn to do it faster in Vista then they did in XP, but by then they've already bought their downgrade rights and never looked back.
Finally, people are starting to get pissed off that they're being *forced* to an OS they don't want to use. Making DirectX 10 Vista only was a shitty thing to do to customers. All the talk about DRM and how they'll need all new everything from cables to televisions to watch "premium content" put people off, regardless of truth. And most of all, telling people that to use XP they'll have to buy Vista and then pay more isn't exactly endearing. People who want to use Linux have known for years how hard it is to get a standard, mass produced PC without paying for windows... and now for the first time people who want XP are finding that they can't just get an XP CD out of a bargin bin and get a computer without an OS. It's Vista or... Vista. Not even Vista or nothing.
Yes. A "microwave safe" plate is probably ceramic or plastic, put something that needs to be microwaved on one and touch an edge when it comes out. The center will be hot because there's been something hot sitting on it for a few minutes, but the rim should be safe to touch. Just remember that putting in *only* the plate is the same as running the microwave empty. Try either at your own risk.
Are *you* suggesting that we shouldn't use calculators in schools either? Sure, you still teach addition, but you're allowed to use calculators on most tests be the time you get to Higher Math. Sure, we should still teach people to do things the old fashioned way... but once they can do it, I don't see any reason not to let them use the tools they'll use in real life.
Obviously you shouldn't just be learning to google your research paper - but learning to use a proper academic database would certainly be positive. It'd be nice if every freshman and sophomore college class didn't have to assume half the class was used to writing research papers using a few decade old books from their highschool library.
As a terminally broke college student, I don't see a serious ethical difference between "taking it out of the library, scanning a copy for personal use, and deleting it when I have to return the book, repeat every time I want to read the book" and "pirating it"... except that of course the first is far more work. Except that if nobody is selling the ebook legally, then I can't be said to be "stealing" that work *from* anyone.
I mean, you can make a pretty good argument that the work involved in making a digital readable copy of the book with nice type-setting and such means you're stealing an ebook even if you could get the book from the library (obviously it's worth *something* to you or you'd just go to the library). But when you're reading an OCR'd book full of misspelled or incorrect words with erratic formatting who's scanning someone knowingly donated to the public, and there's no "legal" version available you just can't really make that case. Especially since the book is out of print and most publishers probably consider re-selling books just as unethical as pirating an ebook.
So yea, I'd pirate it. This is assuming I had an ebook reader, I could never make it all the way through a book on my laptop. As things stands I'd just go to the library.
Indirectly everyone in the US, technically. The money goes to the US government, which then gets to take out about half a billion less in loans (after $85M+ in attorneys fees and such). Then a few years down the road we (the taxpayers) have a few million less in interest to pay back to the chinese!
Blink was probably my favorite episode, so I guess I might as well find out for you...
From wikipedia:
"Blink" is the tenth episode of the third series of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It was first broadcast on 9 June 2006, and is the only episode in the 2007 series written by Steven Moffat.
You are certainly not the last of a dying breed in this respect - the vast majority of people prefer paper to an LCD screen. I know personally I read way too much stuff online, but I haven't yet been able to bring myself to get through more then a chapter of a book.
On the other hand, by all (most) accounts, e-paper is just as good as regular paper. If you find yourself going to a library rather then reading something off e-paper in 5-10 years, *then* you'll be the last of a dying breed. Personally I'm gunning for a second or third generation kindle or sony e-book reader.
Simple: because *we* are on the edge of being able to do real-time video of useful quality from space. Seriously, we could count tanks in the middle of the cold war, and a few years ago you could see a deck of cards on a table... and now you can read license plates.
So... explain again why aliens capable of interstellar travel would actually need to enter earth's atmosphere to do their photography?
I'll give you that there *could* be aliens monitoring the earth (though I'll need some evidence to actually believe they *are*)... but I don't think I can give you the idea that we could routinely spot the aliens doing the surveillance in their UFO's in the atmosphere.
There's also the fact that we've only been transmitting radio signals for 80 years, we've only had visible civilization for maybe 10k years, and there has been life on earth for billions of years. "Life on earth" has been around plenty of time for someone to come, see that there's nothing interesting, and leave. Civilization hasn't been around long enough for a monitor to notice sudden farms and call in some live observers from the other end of the galaxy, and radio waves haven't been around long enough for even observers a few dozen light-years away to get here after they heard them.
So unless there has been constant monitoring since the earth was noticed by an alien civ, there's no good way they'd be here already. The time frame is just too short for lightspeed travel. (obviously FTL travel could change that, but...)
No, no it doesn't. Even ignoring the fact that you're misusing "beg the question", this issue is already pretty much shot by evolution. Exactly how do you define a species? A population that can interbreed?
Fine, lets define three populations, "A" "B" and "C" where all members of groups "A" are the same species by this definition, and all members of group "B" are the same species, and all members of group "C" are the same species, but members of group "A" and "C" aren't the same species. Now consider that "A" "B" and "C" are made of one member of each generation of a population that over time evolved from a species that included "A" to a species that included "C" via a species that contained "B". Some members of "B" could, therefor, interbreed with members of "A" while others could interbreed with members of "C". There may even be some members of "B" that can interbreed with some members of both "A" and "C" equally well. By that definition, some members of the species that includes "B" are *also* members of the species that contain "A" and "C".
These situations *actually do* occur. And even in space instead of time - see "ring species". And so your "new" question is actually just a subset of a larger "old" question.
1.) You start with the entire cable in geostationary orbit and extend it in both directions, keeping the center of mass in geosynchronous orbit. The opposite end is probably a huge rock after only a short cable, but it is center of mass that's important and that would be easy enough to regulate.
2.) Depends hugely on how strong the cable is. Most recent plans have the initial cable holding just a small weight, but the first few hundred payloads would be more cables to increase the payload. Just remember the distances involved - it's 35,786 km from the surface of the earth to geostationary orbit. Even at a decent speed that'll take a week or more. How many simultaneous payloads.... again depends on the cable.
3.) The space end of the tether shouldn't be a serious issue. The net forces of climbing up and back down should even out - and with the tether to the ground and an appropriately weighted counterweight it shouldn't drift. Still, it might... but if it did you could just send a rocket as the next payload and fix it. Maintenance of the tether itself, though... it could either be a huge, dealbreaking issue or nothing. It'd be impossible to say without a feasible cable design.
The only reason shuttle re-entry is such a big deal is their huge speed relative to the earth. They orbit the earth something like once every 8 minutes... that's pretty freaking fast. To land they have to come to a dead stop, and they don't have long to do it.
Someone on the top of a space elevator, on the other hand, is already at rest with respect to the surface of the earth. They could put on a space suit and a parachute and they'd be pretty much fine in an emergency. More realistically you'd have an escape pod, because you will pick up *some* speed before you hit the atmosphere and slow down to terminal velocity, and escape pods would be easier to get into and launch quickly, easier to maintain, and safer. It'd still just be a metal shell with some parachutes, though, they wouldn't have to worry about huge heat shields or burning up in the atmosphere or anything.
And of course the *problem* with all this is that your line snaps if you make it out of anything we can produce today. In theory if we made an inch-thick cable out of thousand-mile-long carbon nanotubes and there weren't any defects it would just barely hold. So to make this work we need either to *greatly* improve the defect rate in carbon nanotubes and then start mass-producing as much as we have undersea fiber-optics (a whole lot, but not such an impossible amount as it sounds when you start saying exactly how long it is...) OR the preferable solution of an entirely new material that is a hundred times as strong as carbon nanotubes so we have some margin of safety so the multi-billion-dollar-cable doesn't snap when a bird clips it.
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Was Vista really that bad? No, not really. There were some serious issues at the start mostly related to the shift to 64-bit at the last moment screwing over most drivers, and of course the whole "Vista Capable" thing. It's still windows, but it isn't windows ME v2.
Were Vista sales really that bad? Yes, considering the time/money spent developing it.
It could turn out that 7 is just Vista with a new logo, and I still don't see any compelling reason to prefer windows 7 on my next computer other then Microsoft dropping support for XP... which is probably MS's main problem just now. Honestly, if MS's biggest competitor for vista hadn't been XP (which they could, and did, completely remove from the market by "not selling it more") they probably would be sunk, or nearly sunk. As it is, they're still afloat but another flop OS could shake their monopoly. And so... marketing.
If you have a wifi card that isn't supported by windows... just what magic do you think is going to be preformed to make it work?
If you have a wifi card that *is* supported by Ubuntu, it... works. Honestly, I wiped my windows and Ubuntu installs on the same computer and reinstalled from the installation disks for both.
Ubuntu recognized my wifi card and connected to the internet *while I was installing it.* It recognized my windows partition and mounted it. It also asked me if I wanted the restricted NVIDIA driver then had dual-monitor support (with one widescreen Dell laptop monitor and one non-widescreen Gateway external monitor) and full 3d video. I had to install a program to successfully use my logitech mouse, but disabling the touchpad was simple.
Windows XP... failed to have the drivers for the wifi card after installation (there's probably another CD somewhere with the drivers, but Ubuntu had them all on one CD...). I had to boot to Ubuntu, download the drivers, put them on my windows desktop, then boot back to windows to install them. I had to find and install the graphics drivers before I could scroll in windows without a several second lag. I had to find and install 2 different programs to mount my linux partition. I had to install a program to successfully use my logitech mouse, and another to disable the touchpad. And then I realized that because there was an external harddrive attached to the computer when I installed windows, my primary drive was drive "E" and so every single default install location doesn't exist.
So yes, if you buy a computer with windows pre-installed without checking to see if Ubuntu supports the parts, you'll probably find it easier to start using windows. On the other hand, if you start with a computer with no OS with parts supported by both windows and ubuntu, and the install CD for each... my guess is that you'll find it easier to start using Ubuntu.
That's easy, you just have to include instructions on exactly what voltage/amp electricity you'll need to run it, and a clear description of the encoding format. Of course, you'll have to make sure this information is recorded for a billion years as well... so just record it with this nanotech memory! It's a perfectly reasonable and not-at-all-completely-retarded solution!
What? That's... the lightest amount of caffeine of anyone you know? Wow.
Personally, it's one glass of soda with caffeine in maybe 3 days a week. I've never been one to do things because it's "cool" or "part of society" - I don't like the taste of coffee and don't see why I should "acquire" the taste. Especially when I see what people addicted to caffeine look like in the morning if the coffee is slow or absent. I wake up perfectly fine without, thank you very much.
Well yes, but that is also being posted on April first, so I still wouldn't be terribly surprised if it was gone tomorrow... though I have to admit a good deal of work seems to have gone into it, so I wouldn't be surprised if it stayed either.
The real solution to "not locking your keys in your car" apparently came a few years after your car. My car requires me to use the key to lock the drivers door. Very hard to lock your key in the car when you need your key out of the car to do it. Not like it's even that much trouble - you had your key in your hand about 2 seconds ago.
Now someone has to preform the rare and enviable "reverse car analogy" to figure out how UAC *ought* to be.
That seems to me a common misunderstanding. Presidential candidates spend their time in states that are split 50/50, not in small states. Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio are hardly small states, but those are where the vast majority of time was spent in the last three elections... because a few votes there could swing 20+ electoral votes. Why campaign in a state that's already 70% in favor of you, even if each vote there is a more substantial portion of the electoral college then a vote in Florida?
The change to national popular vote will move presidential campaigns to where the largest number of undecided voters are, which is really how it should be. Also, every vote will be weighted equally (instead of small states counting for more) and each vote will *matter* equally (instead of votes in 'key' or 'swing' areas being worth a thousand times as much effort to win as those in 'strongly democrat' or 'strongly republican' areas).
And so swing states probably won't pass this kind of thing until it already has 270 electoral votes... but there's no reason a small state wouldn't.
First of all it's my opinion that we're probably separated from other civilizations by time rather then space. A thousand years after the first radio signal seems a bit brief, but 10 thousand or a hundred thousand doesn't seem unreasonable... and our galaxy is billions of years old.
Next, given a reasonable number of civilizations capable of automated self-replicators active in the last few hundred million years... (a dozen? a score? a hundred?) it isn't that hard to assume some decent cryptography was in place on the instruction set of each set of probes such that they couldn't mutate, and that they were instructed to leave only a single meter-across probe in each solar system... possibly with a rocky shell to hide longer and/or for protection.
Now, how sure are you there isn't one of those hidden somewhere in our solar system? Wikipedia tells me "a survey in the infrared wavelengths shows that the main [asteroid] belt has 700,000 to 1.7 million asteroids with a diameter of 1 km or more." Now, if we have a 70% margin of error on the number of rocks bigger then a freaking kilometer in our asteroid belt, what do you think the chances are that we'd spot a single 10-meter-wide probe that happened to be coated in dust from nearby asteroids? Even if there were a thousand of them spaced evenly around the asteroid belt and each one was a perfect parabola pointed at earth, I doubt if we'd know.
Now, if there was an alien civilization that *wanted* its replicators to be found by the first race to get into space, obviously we'd see something like a big geometric shape on the dark side of the moon... but I don't think we can assume that.
Wrong. The only reason inbreeding causes genetic issues is because recessive traits become far more likely to crop up twice then in the general population. If you pick an individual who doesn't have any negative recessive genetic traits, there's no problem... *or* if you genetically tweak the DNA before you go about the procedure to remove those genetic traits you don't want to show up.
Of course the genetic manipulation required to do this on an animal who's species is already extinct is extremely difficult if not impossible with modern techniques... but so is producing a truly viable clone of an extinct species in the first place (one that lives a full life, not 7 minutes, or even the half-life we found cloned sheep got).
That's like saying "well, we managed to break our clock with only a rubber mallet, so obviously we're capable of fixing it". It's usually easy to break something, not so easy to fix it. Take a look at the BIOSPHERE 1 and 2 experiments... we don't even know what exactly it takes to make a balanced environment without a few million years of evolution, much what how we would go about fixing it on a global scale.
I certainly believe we'll *probably* find some way through this, but I also believe there's a significant chance it'll come down to "have 90% of us die while the rest of us wait out the 1000 years of broken climate" or of course "make things worse by accident".
Because we need a space program and the first completely-private orbital launch took place in 2008? Seriously, private enterprise is great and everything, but it doesn't do very well at the type of thing that won't show a profit for 50 years. While NASA is certainly not the height of efficiency it *does* take billions in research before you have anything to show when you're trying something really new.
I'd love to see a thriving private space program, I just don't think that's likely to happen any time soon without a healthy public space program leading the way.
No, I'm pretty sure the problem with that plan is that you *can* tap fiber-optics. Without cutting an entire undersea cable to do it. You would have to cut into the cable, but I'm sure a good submarine (it's the US you're thinking is tapping, right?) could seal a section of cable off from the ocean and drain the water out, if that was its mission. From that point it'd just be sitting there a while until you managed to install whatever tap it is you want, seal the thing off, and leave.
Besides, nobody your plan fails because this happened in 10 minutes. They'll get fixed in order of "which is closer to the ship that will fix them" and even if they weren't 10 minutes is nothing on top of the time it'll take to get them repaired.
People were going crazy assuming the US was going to invade Iran last time this happened... and we didn't. It's possible someone's sabotaging them, but I doubt it's to eavesdrop or cover an invasion. More likely someone wants whoever's cables they were to go broke. Also the cables were apparently near each other, so accident isn't as far-fetched as it sounds.
Having seen this once myself, having seen two first posts mentioning it, and having seen one reply to each first post mentioning that subscribers see this for posts "in the mysterious future" I've concluded... that it means nobody's gone and posted in the thread yet, or even that it's so new nobody has even looked at it since it officially went up or something.
Basically "this post is really, really new" and possibly "hey, you can get first post if you like."
I suspect at this point there are three problems with vista.
The first is word-of-mouth. Vista is bad because everyone says so. This started out as an informed opinion among IT people playing with Vista before SP1 and seeing that it was clearly slower then XP and with some sudden problems (like stalling of file copies and way too many UAC prompts and very few drivers). Many of those issues were fixed, but by then the informed opinion of people who know what they're talking about had been spread to people who like to think they're in the first group. These people eventually tried windows, probably poorly configured and certainly with cynical expectations, and naturally found instances of all the problems they were told about. Then, regardless of if these issues were reduced or even removed the opinion that vista was bad gets spread to the average user. They probably never try it at all, but just listen to the local guy who knows how to install things and open word without help. Basically... there were issues, and people told about these issues will continue to see them no matter how thoroughly they were fixed, because that's how expectations work.
The second issue is... the lack of obvious improvements. Ok, Vista's security model is better then XP's. It probably has some back-end improvements, and the move to 64-bit standard lays the groundwork for more theoretical improvement down the road. But does it run faster then XP? Is the user interface, to someone who's been using previous versions of windows all their life, easier to use then XP's? Is it easier to preform common tasks? No. Vista uses more resources then XP and on low-end PC's XP is way faster. Vista makes big changes to user interface, and while they're probably better for the long run, a long-time PC user will be lost when they first see Vista's UI... and may decide then and there that XP's was better. They'll try to open word, type something, and print it and find it takes twice as long on Vista. Maybe they'd eventually learn to do it faster in Vista then they did in XP, but by then they've already bought their downgrade rights and never looked back.
Finally, people are starting to get pissed off that they're being *forced* to an OS they don't want to use. Making DirectX 10 Vista only was a shitty thing to do to customers. All the talk about DRM and how they'll need all new everything from cables to televisions to watch "premium content" put people off, regardless of truth. And most of all, telling people that to use XP they'll have to buy Vista and then pay more isn't exactly endearing. People who want to use Linux have known for years how hard it is to get a standard, mass produced PC without paying for windows... and now for the first time people who want XP are finding that they can't just get an XP CD out of a bargin bin and get a computer without an OS. It's Vista or... Vista. Not even Vista or nothing.
Yes. A "microwave safe" plate is probably ceramic or plastic, put something that needs to be microwaved on one and touch an edge when it comes out. The center will be hot because there's been something hot sitting on it for a few minutes, but the rim should be safe to touch. Just remember that putting in *only* the plate is the same as running the microwave empty. Try either at your own risk.
Are *you* suggesting that we shouldn't use calculators in schools either? Sure, you still teach addition, but you're allowed to use calculators on most tests be the time you get to Higher Math. Sure, we should still teach people to do things the old fashioned way... but once they can do it, I don't see any reason not to let them use the tools they'll use in real life.
Obviously you shouldn't just be learning to google your research paper - but learning to use a proper academic database would certainly be positive. It'd be nice if every freshman and sophomore college class didn't have to assume half the class was used to writing research papers using a few decade old books from their highschool library.
As a terminally broke college student, I don't see a serious ethical difference between "taking it out of the library, scanning a copy for personal use, and deleting it when I have to return the book, repeat every time I want to read the book" and "pirating it"... except that of course the first is far more work. Except that if nobody is selling the ebook legally, then I can't be said to be "stealing" that work *from* anyone.
I mean, you can make a pretty good argument that the work involved in making a digital readable copy of the book with nice type-setting and such means you're stealing an ebook even if you could get the book from the library (obviously it's worth *something* to you or you'd just go to the library). But when you're reading an OCR'd book full of misspelled or incorrect words with erratic formatting who's scanning someone knowingly donated to the public, and there's no "legal" version available you just can't really make that case. Especially since the book is out of print and most publishers probably consider re-selling books just as unethical as pirating an ebook.
So yea, I'd pirate it. This is assuming I had an ebook reader, I could never make it all the way through a book on my laptop. As things stands I'd just go to the library.
Indirectly everyone in the US, technically. The money goes to the US government, which then gets to take out about half a billion less in loans (after $85M+ in attorneys fees and such). Then a few years down the road we (the taxpayers) have a few million less in interest to pay back to the chinese!
Blink was probably my favorite episode, so I guess I might as well find out for you...
From wikipedia:
"Blink" is the tenth episode of the third series of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It was first broadcast on 9 June 2006, and is the only episode in the 2007 series written by Steven Moffat.
You are certainly not the last of a dying breed in this respect - the vast majority of people prefer paper to an LCD screen. I know personally I read way too much stuff online, but I haven't yet been able to bring myself to get through more then a chapter of a book.
On the other hand, by all (most) accounts, e-paper is just as good as regular paper. If you find yourself going to a library rather then reading something off e-paper in 5-10 years, *then* you'll be the last of a dying breed. Personally I'm gunning for a second or third generation kindle or sony e-book reader.
Simple: because *we* are on the edge of being able to do real-time video of useful quality from space. Seriously, we could count tanks in the middle of the cold war, and a few years ago you could see a deck of cards on a table... and now you can read license plates.
So... explain again why aliens capable of interstellar travel would actually need to enter earth's atmosphere to do their photography?
I'll give you that there *could* be aliens monitoring the earth (though I'll need some evidence to actually believe they *are*)... but I don't think I can give you the idea that we could routinely spot the aliens doing the surveillance in their UFO's in the atmosphere.
There's also the fact that we've only been transmitting radio signals for 80 years, we've only had visible civilization for maybe 10k years, and there has been life on earth for billions of years. "Life on earth" has been around plenty of time for someone to come, see that there's nothing interesting, and leave. Civilization hasn't been around long enough for a monitor to notice sudden farms and call in some live observers from the other end of the galaxy, and radio waves haven't been around long enough for even observers a few dozen light-years away to get here after they heard them.
So unless there has been constant monitoring since the earth was noticed by an alien civ, there's no good way they'd be here already. The time frame is just too short for lightspeed travel. (obviously FTL travel could change that, but...)
No, no it doesn't. Even ignoring the fact that you're misusing "beg the question", this issue is already pretty much shot by evolution. Exactly how do you define a species? A population that can interbreed?
Fine, lets define three populations, "A" "B" and "C" where all members of groups "A" are the same species by this definition, and all members of group "B" are the same species, and all members of group "C" are the same species, but members of group "A" and "C" aren't the same species. Now consider that "A" "B" and "C" are made of one member of each generation of a population that over time evolved from a species that included "A" to a species that included "C" via a species that contained "B". Some members of "B" could, therefor, interbreed with members of "A" while others could interbreed with members of "C". There may even be some members of "B" that can interbreed with some members of both "A" and "C" equally well. By that definition, some members of the species that includes "B" are *also* members of the species that contain "A" and "C".
These situations *actually do* occur. And even in space instead of time - see "ring species". And so your "new" question is actually just a subset of a larger "old" question.
1.) You start with the entire cable in geostationary orbit and extend it in both directions, keeping the center of mass in geosynchronous orbit. The opposite end is probably a huge rock after only a short cable, but it is center of mass that's important and that would be easy enough to regulate.
2.) Depends hugely on how strong the cable is. Most recent plans have the initial cable holding just a small weight, but the first few hundred payloads would be more cables to increase the payload. Just remember the distances involved - it's 35,786 km from the surface of the earth to geostationary orbit. Even at a decent speed that'll take a week or more. How many simultaneous payloads.... again depends on the cable.
3.) The space end of the tether shouldn't be a serious issue. The net forces of climbing up and back down should even out - and with the tether to the ground and an appropriately weighted counterweight it shouldn't drift. Still, it might... but if it did you could just send a rocket as the next payload and fix it. Maintenance of the tether itself, though... it could either be a huge, dealbreaking issue or nothing. It'd be impossible to say without a feasible cable design.
The only reason shuttle re-entry is such a big deal is their huge speed relative to the earth. They orbit the earth something like once every 8 minutes... that's pretty freaking fast. To land they have to come to a dead stop, and they don't have long to do it.
Someone on the top of a space elevator, on the other hand, is already at rest with respect to the surface of the earth. They could put on a space suit and a parachute and they'd be pretty much fine in an emergency. More realistically you'd have an escape pod, because you will pick up *some* speed before you hit the atmosphere and slow down to terminal velocity, and escape pods would be easier to get into and launch quickly, easier to maintain, and safer. It'd still just be a metal shell with some parachutes, though, they wouldn't have to worry about huge heat shields or burning up in the atmosphere or anything.
And of course the *problem* with all this is that your line snaps if you make it out of anything we can produce today. In theory if we made an inch-thick cable out of thousand-mile-long carbon nanotubes and there weren't any defects it would just barely hold. So to make this work we need either to *greatly* improve the defect rate in carbon nanotubes and then start mass-producing as much as we have undersea fiber-optics (a whole lot, but not such an impossible amount as it sounds when you start saying exactly how long it is...) OR the preferable solution of an entirely new material that is a hundred times as strong as carbon nanotubes so we have some margin of safety so the multi-billion-dollar-cable doesn't snap when a bird clips it.