Money spent on environmental research isn't just evaporated. It doesn't remove any capital at all, it merely changes the channels through which it flows. This by itself is a good thing since the channels this capital has historically flowed down has gotten a bit too wide (thus the sociopolitical benefits of reduction of fossil fuel).
Do you think that by reducing the amount of oil we consume (demand), prices will go up? If there are people who are not able to afford the change-over (I don't disagree that this is possible), the price of oil is going to go down for them, not up. Besides, you can't fail to advance society except when only 100% of the population is going to benefit; there are always going to be people who are late adopters either because it takes that long for it to enter their price range, or simply because they resist change.
The point of alternative energy research is 1) to increase the efficiency of the energy sources we already have (for the most part non-renewable), and 2) to shift away from non-renewable sources of energy. There is no guarantee that in 50 years, cold fusion is going to be a viable source of energy, we need a sustainable model sooner than that. Nuclear fission is certainly one of the cleaner modern energy sources, but it has environmental impacts like anything else (storage of waste material, heating of surrounding air and streams, etc). So does wind power (it can decimate local bird and bat populations). Nuclear fission also depends on non-renewable energy sources; the current supplies would last us about 80 years at present rates of consumption, and although with additional exploration we'd find more ore, there is a limit to how much ore there is available, just as there is with how much fossil fuel there is available.
Importantly our energy needs are not purely expressible in terms of electricity, which is the only energy channel you're willing to devote money to. Alternate energy storage and energy transportation are required to supply energy where wires can't do it. Hydrogen fuel cells are an example of a different way to do this, but supercapacitors, batteries and the like also show promise. More research is needed in this area to find ways to transport and store energy which result in minimal loss of it and adequate convenience (lack of convenience triggers that economic factor; if I have to pay my delivery guy for 30 minutes to refuel instead of 3 minutes, this has cost to me beyond the price of the fuel, thus reducing its economic viability).
Ultimately the answer is likely to be energy diversification, not an energy monoculture. We can mitigate the total environmental impact by using solar, biodiesel, wind, ethanol, nuclear, etc, and getting a portion of our total energy consumption from each source.
-Even if we did not find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, even if they did not exist at all and it was just poor intelligence, the Iraq War action has been very good for us as a whole.-
I'm not sure how you got from my point that I was suggesting that every time the source data is wrong it automatically produces a good result. I'm just saying that in this case, regardless of whether global warming is the phenomenon that it's claimed to be (without making any value judgment whether it is or isn't), the result is still good. This is not a principle that extends to other areas (such as justification for the Iraq war as you would pretend I suggest), it's something to be evaluated on a case by case basis.
Lies have to justify the horrible incursions on liberty and truth that take place in their name
Who has said lies? That's your word, not mine. Also it seems like you think we're discussing Iraq, but I'm discussing the environment; I'm having a hard time seeing the association between the two, and I'm not aware of liberties which are being sacrificed in the pursuit of sustainable energy. Even if such existed, I'd support the pursuit while condemning the loss of liberty. I don't believe for the most part that people are lying about global warming existing (though I think there are people who lie about it not existing), but I'm saying it wouldn't matter even if they were.
Now because you've already gone down that path, let me nip that in the bud. I'm not saying every lie justifies its end, and I'm not saying there's a lie involved here. I'm saying that even if there were, if the result is increased ecological awareness, that's a positive result.
I was going to dissect the rest of your post point by point, but since you seem to be making the same point again and again, I'm not sure it would add any value. For the record, we're talking about environmentalism in the context of global warming, not WMD, Iraq, OBL, or any other such thing. I have no idea how you got there or what parallel you're trying to draw, but it's some of the most poorly crafted straw men I've yet encountered - and I've been on the Internets a little while now, so that's saying something.
You don't suppose that the same economy of scale will eventually have a positive effect on environmentally friendly technology as it has in every other area of technology including as you point out computers?
I'm having a hard time seeing why you think that ecologically positive tech will not reduce in price as it matures and as its adoption rate increases.
In fact the maturity and increase in adoption rate will feed off each other as in every other tech area. As costs come down with refined manufacturing processes, it enters the price point of a wider audience. As more people adopt the technology, more manufacturers are incented to enter the market and at larger volumes, further driving down prices and driving up research efforts.
This is the sort of thing which needs to be kick started because the gain is sufficiently far out that no corporations would be able to justify it to their stock holders because as you point out yourself, the cost effectiveness is not yet there.
Bleh, 2nd paragraph reads poorly. Please allow me to rephrase:
Not because it's impossible to set forth a set of ideals which should be supported by the government, but because any such set of ideals would be tautologically impossible to qualify as a religion.
Not because it's impossible, but because none such exist, and I'm pretty sure that such would be a tautological impossibility. The requirements I'd have for such would automatically make it not a religion.
Nice straw man though. May I suggest a bit more stuffing in the legs? It doesn't stand so well.
It is ok to spend trillions on the ecology because the ecology is worth spending trillions on no matter what the excuse is for doing so.
Maybe I failed to make my point: It doesn't matter what reason is being used, the environment needs to be protected, and we can use technology to facilitate that.
And as computers have increased in complexity from the models in the 50's, 60's, and 70's, so too have they increased in cost and size, right?
New technology is expensive, and it's difficult to find a cost effectiveness sweet spot. As new technology matures it becomes old technology, and old technology becomes increasingly inexpensive as time goes on. We find new, better, more efficient ways to manufacture the same device, and as it matures its cost efficacy also increases.
This is why radical shifts in technology are rare; it's unusual for dramatically new tech to be obviously superior to the old tech when it's still in its infancy. And so from this perspective when the required shift is not dictated by financial forces but some other force, financial reasons are not going to be one of the early motivating factors for the change.
Even if global warming is a purely natural phenomenon, even if it didn't exist at all and this was all just a natural fluctuation, the idea of global warming has been very good for us as a whole.
It's encouraged an ecological awareness, and an understanding that our actions do have an impact on the world around us beyond the immediate.
This is progress that we need to make regardless of whether it's attributed to global warming, global cooling, global purpling, or the smell of some guy's socks in Kansas.
We can't get cocky and say, "Oh, global warming was a naturally occurring phenomenon, let's go back to burning dinosaurs in our cars and triple-wrapping our Endangered Burger." I've long been suspicious that mankind would be able to have this sort of effect in this amount of time for reasons which are too long to go into here, but I nonetheless support the progress that the moniker of global warming promotes. Even if our reasons turn out to be wrong wrong, the result is right.
I'm sure the problems india ink presents in fountain pens is the same as in tube tips. The function is so similar. But an 0/0.5 hasn't seemed to have any issues; it was only my 0/0.35 that would clog up. You could usually get it started again by holding it vertically and tapping its point against the paper a few times. I use a Rapidograph Koh-I-Noor. I think the Rotring was the disposable cartridge pen I used previously.
The capillary action which drives the ink in both fountain and tube pens is based on the surface tension of water; a tube tip should be able to have a wider ink channel than a fountain pen since it can provide a complete meniscus at diameters which should break the action on a fountain tip. So in this regard it seems to me that a tube tip should be less susceptible to clogging from ink residue than a fountain pen, though certainly it is harder to clear the clog when one does happen.
I hear Pelikan Fount India is an India ink which doesn't contain shellac, but I've never tried it. Of course other fountain pen inks should work in a tube tip.
I hate the little gooey strings that ballpoints can leave when you pick up the tip and move it elsewhere. I also hate the fact that the center of the ball pushes ink to the sides, so it's also like a tiny double line all over every letter.
For note taking in meetings, I prefer a pencil. For formal work (record keeping and such where indelible ink is required), I prefer a tube-tip drafting pen.
As an alternative to fountain pens, which are a bit less likely to explode and make a mess, try out tube tip pens. It's the same general idea, capillary action draws the ink to the tip, except the only point where ink can escape is right at the tip.
They sell them as full pens where the ink cannot be refilled - this is the cleanest experience, but over time will be more expensive. But they also sell them with refillable cartridges, for which you'll have a higher initial investment, but a single bottle of India Ink would be difficult for most users to exhaust. Of course fill-it-yourself pens are a bit more likely to leak eventually just because you didn't put something together as well as you thought you had, and of course whenever working with waterproof extremely black thin ink, you run the risk of spilling and having stained hands for a while.
They sell them in a variety of tip thicknesses. In my experience though, you must avoid extremely fine tips as these tend to clog when the ink dries in the tip (unless you use it almost every day). My 0/0.35 (I'm not sure what the numbers mean exactly) tends to clog if I haven't been using it lately, while my 0/0.5 ran fine even if it had been sitting for a few weeks.
You can buy these in most craft stores in the drafting section. They're also typically designed mostly for functionality, they don't tend to be especially pretty pens.
This function has even actually been broken for over a week. When the article that kicked up this storm appeared, I immediately went to the privacy page and clicked on the ads to disable it, except the page had no content. That was on 7/18, and I have been checking it every day since; this morning is the first time that it gave me option to control this setting.
They probably want to departmentalize that to a certain extent; a single source for all military computers would mean a single point of compromise for all military networks.
There are also networks isolated by an air gap which have no outside connection but should still be running patched software.
The difference being that your mechanic isn't (presumably) going out of his way to damage existing perfectly functional parts, as Evnova Computers did according to the article.
The problem of course being that people who take their computers to repair shops almost certainly lack the technical chops to be putting in a blank drive, and aren't going to have a spare blank drive even if they technically knew how. Besides, sometimes the services they provide are things like installing device drivers, cleaning up spyware, etc. - the sorts of thing which requires the affected drive to be in place.
Anecdotally, the first laptop I ever owned was a Dell, and I had to send it in for service after it was damaged in a car accident. They did not require, but strongly recommended that I remove the drive before sending it to them. This was to safeguard both parties - they didn't want to have to even deal with the possibility that their technicians might do something unscrupulous (and were happy to have the indemnity that comes from them not even having the access to do so), but also protects the drive against damage from shipping (even if the parts are insured, the data is not).
There is major error in the article title, summary, and even very nearly every article out there on the net. To demonstrate, let's go to the actual source of the information, the Blizzard press release.
The error is this: the movie is not a World of Warcraft movie. The movie is a Warcraft movie. It's a movie set in the Warcraft universe, not one based on the World of Warcraft game. You're right, out of necessity WoW is fairly static - that's how it is that you have content that's consumed again and again by various and even the same players. However the Warcraft universe is not static.
Especially if you play through the Warcraft III original and expansion games, you'll discover that Blizzard actually has a real talent for telling a story. They even go so far as to kill or dramatically change major characters. Watch the progression of Arthas from human paladin to undead lieutenant to rogue undead eventually to becoming the Lich King. See how they killed Grom Helscream in an epic battle, or how they killed Sylvanas Windrunner and brought her back as Lady Sylvanas, queen of the rogue undead.
Blizzard has an extremely rich lore in the Warcraft universe, and this is fertile ground for a movie or even a series of movies. They've already demonstrated their cinematic prowess and story writing abilities in the in-game and pre-rendered cutscenes in Warcraft III and Diablo II. There's no particular reason to think they would do worse than that with a bigger budget associated with a movie.
A movie based on World of Warcraft would be crap. A movie based on Warcraft though, that has real promise.
This just about gets to the heart of it. "Better" is a subjective term, so choosing better quality images is not going to be something everyone can agree on. Your example nails it. If you have two copies of the same image, one is higher resolution than the other, but saved with a higher compression rate, which is better? The answer is going to be "it depends on if the noise introduced by the higher compression annoys me more than the reduced information in the lower resolution image."
If the compression on the high resolution image is high enough, you might still have better detail in the lower resolution image. If the higher resolution image isn't actually higher resolution, just higher dimensions (it's the smaller image scaled up), this is automatically a lower quality image (you can always recreate the higher resolution image from the lower resolution image, but not vice versa as rounding errors cause information loss whenever you scale an image).
There may also be subjective differences like brightness/contrast/tone mapping differences.
Given that the question being asked is a subjective one, the correlation of file size to subjective image quality should be so high that you may gain only a few percent better predictability with an extremely complex algorithm.
BMI is much easier to measure than % body fat. Accurate BMI measurements exist for pretty much every patient, while accurate body fat percentage exists for a very tiny fraction of patients. It is likely such a low percentage that it's plausible very few to none of the patients with swine flu have a recent value for this on record unless they were specifically involved in a medical study or are a fitness fanatic (neither is likely to be a representative sample).
The only reasonably simple BFP measurement is NIR, and that requires subjective responses from the patient such as activity level to complete the calculation. It also typically only measures a single site (such as the bicep), which can lead to a fairly low accuracy rate overall.
Most patients are not going to want to pay for DXA tests to accurately measure body fat unless it has specific relevance to treating them, and few are willing to undergo a submersion test.
BMI is not a good predictor (especially on an individual level; which is its typical abuse [such as for insurance calculations]), but it is still relatively effective for the purposes of statistical analysis (the percentage of people with high BMI as a result of substantial exercise vs obesity should be reasonably representative for a sufficient population size).
Employers don't want to hear, "I don't like XYZ, so I quit," they want to hear, "I don't like XYZ, here are the problems, and here is a better way to do it."
I understand that sometimes it doesn't matter how good your proposed replacement plan is and how bad things are; some companies are simply not going to hear what you're saying. But an interviewer wants to hear you say what the specific problems were, and what steps you took to try to address them before you gave up. If you tell them you quit because the project was failing, they're going to want you to convince you that you're 1) not a quitter, 2) can critically analyze the gaps, 3) can offer a meaningful and workable solution, and 4) that you can articulate it and be convincing without sounding whiny, angry, annoyed, hotheaded, smug, or any other such negative emotion.
Quitting a project because it's failing is giving up. If you're taking that stance, you'd better be prepared to convince your interviewer that there was no reasonable alternative. I sure don't want to hire you onto my team only to find out that when it gets thick, you split (right when I need you most).
It's certainly possible that for some employers they'd hear you worked on Project X which failed spectacularly, and so they'd want to avoid hiring you. But I'd wager for most employers this isn't a black mark against you unless for some reason you have demonstrably substantial culpability in its failure. Maybe if you had 3 or 4 big failures I'd start to wonder if there was a pattern. But even then I'd ask you why those projects failed, and depending on your answer, this might actually make me more likely to hire you. For example, if you could give me a thoughtful analysis of what went wrong in each case, and could give good thoughts on things which might be done to avoid those mistakes in the future, maybe you have the insights necessary to help my team avoid a similar mistake in the future.
The only things I can think of that would make me not want to hire you (based on association with a specific project) is if you put on your resume that you were the lead developer, project leader, etc... or if the project failed for a very specific reason and I knew you were the cause (such as if you were successfully prosecuted for coding a back door into the project, etc).
There were a lot of excellent crew on the Titanic; the crew of the Challenger disaster were not responsible for its failure. Just because you're associated with a catastrophe doesn't mean you did anything wrong.
I agree that characteristics such as hair and eye color do not very likely have significant survival implications for us today (as they may have in the past). Though there are still two concerns about it. Both of which I already addressed, but I'll touch on them again.
Hair and eye color may be indirectly or directly linked with other characteristics that do have specific survival properties, but which are not identified as linked until substantial damage has already been done. It was a long time until hemophilia was identified to be a genetic defect in many royal family lines in Europe. Any widespread genetic homogeny carries this risk, and likely more so when it's artificially induced than when it occurs through natural selection.
The characteristics we find aesthetically pleasing are not in-born. If widespread adoption of this practice took place, the traits commonly selected today could eventually become so typical that they're no longer identified as a mark of beauty. Instead future generations would key on other characteristics. Maybe it's cheek bone shape, or height. Maybe it's extremely pale skin, or extremely dark skin (both of which do have survival implications). Over time this would drift into areas that we might even find unattractive today - but tastes change. Extremely heavy women were the most attractive in times past because it signified affluence, where extremely thin women are attractive today.
Genetic diversity is always a strength. It permits the most effective response to environmental changes. Diversity has been culled in the past because conditions arise that allow a certain subset of a species to survive in conditions that others do not. But this is natural selection, and it's the diversity that allowed the species to survive.
Suggesting that a genetic monoculture would benefit us in terms of population control is a misnomer; the reality is that it potentially leads to a condition where there is complete species devastation - a new parasite, disease, or virus which is able to destroy a genetically homogeneous species by exploiting a weakness that was never known to be a weakness until this new threat appeared.
As a real-world example, show-quality animals such as purebred dogs and cats are demonstrably genetically inferior to their naturally bred counterparts. They have a whole spate of problems which do not occur in natural species. This is because of selective breeding which furthers the species purely on aesthetic qualities rather than survival qualities. I own a purebred Siamese cat (which I got from a rescue agency). The breeding has introduced several weaknesses into this species such as crossed eyes and a crooked tail (both were once considered to be required show characteristics for this breed). Other breeds and species have even worse problems. Golden retrievers have bladder problems, himalayan cats have severe nasal problems right from birth. Humans are willing to use science to support survival-inferior characteristics in the name of aesthetics. Characteristics which would once have prevented this animal from surviving to breed, thus ending the inferior gene line.
So it's already come true when humans tried their hand at aesthetic breeding. The change will be much more rapid when the selective breeding can happen in the egg and only very specific possibly very obscure characteristics are the deciding factor for survival or not.
Many people are opposed to many things for reasons that have no relevance. Your task is to pay attention only to those which do have relevance. Such as those who are concerned about genetic diversity as a long term species survival strategy.
"Playing God" may be a phrase that are used by some lunatics, but that doesn't mean that the phrase has no value independent of the uses of it that they choose. The arelegious argument behind this phrase has more to do with the fact that natural selection got us to this point because it's an effective solution to overcoming problems. But it depends on genetic diversity to be truly strong, and purposely limiting our genetic diversity in ways which do not contribute in some way to survivability (such as screening out diseases), but rather for purely superficial reasons such as aesthetics, is a recipe for unknowingly excluding survival traits and causing long term, possibly irreversible damage to our genetic heritage.
There are certainly foreseeable scientific / medical implications. Selective fertilization of this nature can potentially have long term (as in long term) negative consequences for the viability of the species as a whole.
If designerism gets to a certain level, it's possible to completely breed out characteristics seen as unappealing but which may have real long term species survivability characteristics associated with it.
As a simple analogy, consider that rats on an island were able to reject fertilized eggs which would yield any color coat but white, and that rats find white coats to be superior aesthetically. Within a generation or two, it's likely that there are no coats but white, and that the genetics for creating other colored coats has now been eliminated from the population. Soon a new predator bird comes along and is able to easily hunt the highly visible rats, and is able to be so successful at securing food that it produces double or triple the normal number of offspring. Within another few generations the rats could be extinct because the undesirable gene line for dark coats had previously been extinguished from the population.
It's easiest to think about it in small terms like above, but the same principles would apply on a larger scale and on a larger time line for human kind. There is strength in diversity, and rejecting genetic pathways based on aesthetics is not a strategy which will be healthy for the species on the long term.
Maybe for humans, hair and eye color has no survival implications (though it seems likely that there are highly correlated or even purely linked characteristics linked to this which are unknown or unconsidered). But if selective implantation becomes commonly practiced there will be drift in which characteristics are deemed worth breeding out, as once certain characteristics become homogeneous, new characteristics will be selected for exclusion. The new characteristics might be something with greater species survival implications.
This, practiced on a large scale, or practiced on a large percentage of a given population, will have the same sort of long term negative effects as inbreeding did for royal families.
That's the point though. It won't be up to you. If this goes as far as such deals have historically gone for cable companies, then every ISP will pay for a bunch of such services, and pass that cost on to you (you won't be able to find a residential ISP that doesn't do this) whether or not you want to consume it.
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Money spent on environmental research isn't just evaporated. It doesn't remove any capital at all, it merely changes the channels through which it flows. This by itself is a good thing since the channels this capital has historically flowed down has gotten a bit too wide (thus the sociopolitical benefits of reduction of fossil fuel).
Do you think that by reducing the amount of oil we consume (demand), prices will go up? If there are people who are not able to afford the change-over (I don't disagree that this is possible), the price of oil is going to go down for them, not up. Besides, you can't fail to advance society except when only 100% of the population is going to benefit; there are always going to be people who are late adopters either because it takes that long for it to enter their price range, or simply because they resist change.
The point of alternative energy research is 1) to increase the efficiency of the energy sources we already have (for the most part non-renewable), and 2) to shift away from non-renewable sources of energy. There is no guarantee that in 50 years, cold fusion is going to be a viable source of energy, we need a sustainable model sooner than that. Nuclear fission is certainly one of the cleaner modern energy sources, but it has environmental impacts like anything else (storage of waste material, heating of surrounding air and streams, etc). So does wind power (it can decimate local bird and bat populations). Nuclear fission also depends on non-renewable energy sources; the current supplies would last us about 80 years at present rates of consumption, and although with additional exploration we'd find more ore, there is a limit to how much ore there is available, just as there is with how much fossil fuel there is available.
Importantly our energy needs are not purely expressible in terms of electricity, which is the only energy channel you're willing to devote money to. Alternate energy storage and energy transportation are required to supply energy where wires can't do it. Hydrogen fuel cells are an example of a different way to do this, but supercapacitors, batteries and the like also show promise. More research is needed in this area to find ways to transport and store energy which result in minimal loss of it and adequate convenience (lack of convenience triggers that economic factor; if I have to pay my delivery guy for 30 minutes to refuel instead of 3 minutes, this has cost to me beyond the price of the fuel, thus reducing its economic viability).
Ultimately the answer is likely to be energy diversification, not an energy monoculture. We can mitigate the total environmental impact by using solar, biodiesel, wind, ethanol, nuclear, etc, and getting a portion of our total energy consumption from each source.
It's like a whole strawman army. Wow.
Actually lies can breed good, but that's got nothing to do with the point I was making. Continuing on.
I'm not sure how you got from my point that I was suggesting that every time the source data is wrong it automatically produces a good result. I'm just saying that in this case, regardless of whether global warming is the phenomenon that it's claimed to be (without making any value judgment whether it is or isn't), the result is still good. This is not a principle that extends to other areas (such as justification for the Iraq war as you would pretend I suggest), it's something to be evaluated on a case by case basis.
Who has said lies? That's your word, not mine. Also it seems like you think we're discussing Iraq, but I'm discussing the environment; I'm having a hard time seeing the association between the two, and I'm not aware of liberties which are being sacrificed in the pursuit of sustainable energy. Even if such existed, I'd support the pursuit while condemning the loss of liberty. I don't believe for the most part that people are lying about global warming existing (though I think there are people who lie about it not existing), but I'm saying it wouldn't matter even if they were.
Now because you've already gone down that path, let me nip that in the bud. I'm not saying every lie justifies its end, and I'm not saying there's a lie involved here. I'm saying that even if there were, if the result is increased ecological awareness, that's a positive result.
I was going to dissect the rest of your post point by point, but since you seem to be making the same point again and again, I'm not sure it would add any value. For the record, we're talking about environmentalism in the context of global warming, not WMD, Iraq, OBL, or any other such thing. I have no idea how you got there or what parallel you're trying to draw, but it's some of the most poorly crafted straw men I've yet encountered - and I've been on the Internets a little while now, so that's saying something.
You don't suppose that the same economy of scale will eventually have a positive effect on environmentally friendly technology as it has in every other area of technology including as you point out computers?
I'm having a hard time seeing why you think that ecologically positive tech will not reduce in price as it matures and as its adoption rate increases.
In fact the maturity and increase in adoption rate will feed off each other as in every other tech area. As costs come down with refined manufacturing processes, it enters the price point of a wider audience. As more people adopt the technology, more manufacturers are incented to enter the market and at larger volumes, further driving down prices and driving up research efforts.
This is the sort of thing which needs to be kick started because the gain is sufficiently far out that no corporations would be able to justify it to their stock holders because as you point out yourself, the cost effectiveness is not yet there.
Bleh, 2nd paragraph reads poorly. Please allow me to rephrase:
Not because it's impossible to set forth a set of ideals which should be supported by the government, but because any such set of ideals would be tautologically impossible to qualify as a religion.
No there aren't any such religions.
Not because it's impossible, but because none such exist, and I'm pretty sure that such would be a tautological impossibility. The requirements I'd have for such would automatically make it not a religion.
Nice straw man though. May I suggest a bit more stuffing in the legs? It doesn't stand so well.
It is ok to spend trillions on the ecology because the ecology is worth spending trillions on no matter what the excuse is for doing so.
Maybe I failed to make my point: It doesn't matter what reason is being used, the environment needs to be protected, and we can use technology to facilitate that.
And as computers have increased in complexity from the models in the 50's, 60's, and 70's, so too have they increased in cost and size, right?
New technology is expensive, and it's difficult to find a cost effectiveness sweet spot. As new technology matures it becomes old technology, and old technology becomes increasingly inexpensive as time goes on. We find new, better, more efficient ways to manufacture the same device, and as it matures its cost efficacy also increases.
This is why radical shifts in technology are rare; it's unusual for dramatically new tech to be obviously superior to the old tech when it's still in its infancy. And so from this perspective when the required shift is not dictated by financial forces but some other force, financial reasons are not going to be one of the early motivating factors for the change.
Even if global warming is a purely natural phenomenon, even if it didn't exist at all and this was all just a natural fluctuation, the idea of global warming has been very good for us as a whole.
It's encouraged an ecological awareness, and an understanding that our actions do have an impact on the world around us beyond the immediate.
This is progress that we need to make regardless of whether it's attributed to global warming, global cooling, global purpling, or the smell of some guy's socks in Kansas.
We can't get cocky and say, "Oh, global warming was a naturally occurring phenomenon, let's go back to burning dinosaurs in our cars and triple-wrapping our Endangered Burger." I've long been suspicious that mankind would be able to have this sort of effect in this amount of time for reasons which are too long to go into here, but I nonetheless support the progress that the moniker of global warming promotes. Even if our reasons turn out to be wrong wrong, the result is right.
I'm sure the problems india ink presents in fountain pens is the same as in tube tips. The function is so similar. But an 0/0.5 hasn't seemed to have any issues; it was only my 0/0.35 that would clog up. You could usually get it started again by holding it vertically and tapping its point against the paper a few times. I use a Rapidograph Koh-I-Noor. I think the Rotring was the disposable cartridge pen I used previously.
The capillary action which drives the ink in both fountain and tube pens is based on the surface tension of water; a tube tip should be able to have a wider ink channel than a fountain pen since it can provide a complete meniscus at diameters which should break the action on a fountain tip. So in this regard it seems to me that a tube tip should be less susceptible to clogging from ink residue than a fountain pen, though certainly it is harder to clear the clog when one does happen.
I hear Pelikan Fount India is an India ink which doesn't contain shellac, but I've never tried it. Of course other fountain pen inks should work in a tube tip.
I hate the little gooey strings that ballpoints can leave when you pick up the tip and move it elsewhere. I also hate the fact that the center of the ball pushes ink to the sides, so it's also like a tiny double line all over every letter.
For note taking in meetings, I prefer a pencil. For formal work (record keeping and such where indelible ink is required), I prefer a tube-tip drafting pen.
As an alternative to fountain pens, which are a bit less likely to explode and make a mess, try out tube tip pens. It's the same general idea, capillary action draws the ink to the tip, except the only point where ink can escape is right at the tip.
They sell them as full pens where the ink cannot be refilled - this is the cleanest experience, but over time will be more expensive. But they also sell them with refillable cartridges, for which you'll have a higher initial investment, but a single bottle of India Ink would be difficult for most users to exhaust. Of course fill-it-yourself pens are a bit more likely to leak eventually just because you didn't put something together as well as you thought you had, and of course whenever working with waterproof extremely black thin ink, you run the risk of spilling and having stained hands for a while.
They sell them in a variety of tip thicknesses. In my experience though, you must avoid extremely fine tips as these tend to clog when the ink dries in the tip (unless you use it almost every day). My 0/0.35 (I'm not sure what the numbers mean exactly) tends to clog if I haven't been using it lately, while my 0/0.5 ran fine even if it had been sitting for a few weeks.
You can buy these in most craft stores in the drafting section. They're also typically designed mostly for functionality, they don't tend to be especially pretty pens.
This function has even actually been broken for over a week. When the article that kicked up this storm appeared, I immediately went to the privacy page and clicked on the ads to disable it, except the page had no content. That was on 7/18, and I have been checking it every day since; this morning is the first time that it gave me option to control this setting.
I'm the @Creator, my name is the first one down there in the copyright =)
They probably want to departmentalize that to a certain extent; a single source for all military computers would mean a single point of compromise for all military networks.
There are also networks isolated by an air gap which have no outside connection but should still be running patched software.
The difference being that your mechanic isn't (presumably) going out of his way to damage existing perfectly functional parts, as Evnova Computers did according to the article.
The problem of course being that people who take their computers to repair shops almost certainly lack the technical chops to be putting in a blank drive, and aren't going to have a spare blank drive even if they technically knew how. Besides, sometimes the services they provide are things like installing device drivers, cleaning up spyware, etc. - the sorts of thing which requires the affected drive to be in place.
Anecdotally, the first laptop I ever owned was a Dell, and I had to send it in for service after it was damaged in a car accident. They did not require, but strongly recommended that I remove the drive before sending it to them. This was to safeguard both parties - they didn't want to have to even deal with the possibility that their technicians might do something unscrupulous (and were happy to have the indemnity that comes from them not even having the access to do so), but also protects the drive against damage from shipping (even if the parts are insured, the data is not).
There is major error in the article title, summary, and even very nearly every article out there on the net. To demonstrate, let's go to the actual source of the information, the Blizzard press release.
The error is this: the movie is not a World of Warcraft movie. The movie is a Warcraft movie. It's a movie set in the Warcraft universe, not one based on the World of Warcraft game. You're right, out of necessity WoW is fairly static - that's how it is that you have content that's consumed again and again by various and even the same players. However the Warcraft universe is not static.
Especially if you play through the Warcraft III original and expansion games, you'll discover that Blizzard actually has a real talent for telling a story. They even go so far as to kill or dramatically change major characters. Watch the progression of Arthas from human paladin to undead lieutenant to rogue undead eventually to becoming the Lich King. See how they killed Grom Helscream in an epic battle, or how they killed Sylvanas Windrunner and brought her back as Lady Sylvanas, queen of the rogue undead.
Blizzard has an extremely rich lore in the Warcraft universe, and this is fertile ground for a movie or even a series of movies. They've already demonstrated their cinematic prowess and story writing abilities in the in-game and pre-rendered cutscenes in Warcraft III and Diablo II. There's no particular reason to think they would do worse than that with a bigger budget associated with a movie.
A movie based on World of Warcraft would be crap. A movie based on Warcraft though, that has real promise.
This just about gets to the heart of it. "Better" is a subjective term, so choosing better quality images is not going to be something everyone can agree on. Your example nails it. If you have two copies of the same image, one is higher resolution than the other, but saved with a higher compression rate, which is better? The answer is going to be "it depends on if the noise introduced by the higher compression annoys me more than the reduced information in the lower resolution image."
If the compression on the high resolution image is high enough, you might still have better detail in the lower resolution image. If the higher resolution image isn't actually higher resolution, just higher dimensions (it's the smaller image scaled up), this is automatically a lower quality image (you can always recreate the higher resolution image from the lower resolution image, but not vice versa as rounding errors cause information loss whenever you scale an image).
There may also be subjective differences like brightness/contrast/tone mapping differences.
Given that the question being asked is a subjective one, the correlation of file size to subjective image quality should be so high that you may gain only a few percent better predictability with an extremely complex algorithm.
BMI is much easier to measure than % body fat. Accurate BMI measurements exist for pretty much every patient, while accurate body fat percentage exists for a very tiny fraction of patients. It is likely such a low percentage that it's plausible very few to none of the patients with swine flu have a recent value for this on record unless they were specifically involved in a medical study or are a fitness fanatic (neither is likely to be a representative sample).
The only reasonably simple BFP measurement is NIR, and that requires subjective responses from the patient such as activity level to complete the calculation. It also typically only measures a single site (such as the bicep), which can lead to a fairly low accuracy rate overall.
Most patients are not going to want to pay for DXA tests to accurately measure body fat unless it has specific relevance to treating them, and few are willing to undergo a submersion test.
BMI is not a good predictor (especially on an individual level; which is its typical abuse [such as for insurance calculations]), but it is still relatively effective for the purposes of statistical analysis (the percentage of people with high BMI as a result of substantial exercise vs obesity should be reasonably representative for a sufficient population size).
Employers don't want to hear, "I don't like XYZ, so I quit," they want to hear, "I don't like XYZ, here are the problems, and here is a better way to do it."
I understand that sometimes it doesn't matter how good your proposed replacement plan is and how bad things are; some companies are simply not going to hear what you're saying. But an interviewer wants to hear you say what the specific problems were, and what steps you took to try to address them before you gave up. If you tell them you quit because the project was failing, they're going to want you to convince you that you're 1) not a quitter, 2) can critically analyze the gaps, 3) can offer a meaningful and workable solution, and 4) that you can articulate it and be convincing without sounding whiny, angry, annoyed, hotheaded, smug, or any other such negative emotion.
Quitting a project because it's failing is giving up. If you're taking that stance, you'd better be prepared to convince your interviewer that there was no reasonable alternative. I sure don't want to hire you onto my team only to find out that when it gets thick, you split (right when I need you most).
It's certainly possible that for some employers they'd hear you worked on Project X which failed spectacularly, and so they'd want to avoid hiring you. But I'd wager for most employers this isn't a black mark against you unless for some reason you have demonstrably substantial culpability in its failure. Maybe if you had 3 or 4 big failures I'd start to wonder if there was a pattern. But even then I'd ask you why those projects failed, and depending on your answer, this might actually make me more likely to hire you. For example, if you could give me a thoughtful analysis of what went wrong in each case, and could give good thoughts on things which might be done to avoid those mistakes in the future, maybe you have the insights necessary to help my team avoid a similar mistake in the future.
The only things I can think of that would make me not want to hire you (based on association with a specific project) is if you put on your resume that you were the lead developer, project leader, etc... or if the project failed for a very specific reason and I knew you were the cause (such as if you were successfully prosecuted for coding a back door into the project, etc).
There were a lot of excellent crew on the Titanic; the crew of the Challenger disaster were not responsible for its failure. Just because you're associated with a catastrophe doesn't mean you did anything wrong.
I agree that characteristics such as hair and eye color do not very likely have significant survival implications for us today (as they may have in the past). Though there are still two concerns about it. Both of which I already addressed, but I'll touch on them again.
Hair and eye color may be indirectly or directly linked with other characteristics that do have specific survival properties, but which are not identified as linked until substantial damage has already been done. It was a long time until hemophilia was identified to be a genetic defect in many royal family lines in Europe. Any widespread genetic homogeny carries this risk, and likely more so when it's artificially induced than when it occurs through natural selection.
The characteristics we find aesthetically pleasing are not in-born. If widespread adoption of this practice took place, the traits commonly selected today could eventually become so typical that they're no longer identified as a mark of beauty. Instead future generations would key on other characteristics. Maybe it's cheek bone shape, or height. Maybe it's extremely pale skin, or extremely dark skin (both of which do have survival implications). Over time this would drift into areas that we might even find unattractive today - but tastes change. Extremely heavy women were the most attractive in times past because it signified affluence, where extremely thin women are attractive today.
Genetic diversity is always a strength. It permits the most effective response to environmental changes. Diversity has been culled in the past because conditions arise that allow a certain subset of a species to survive in conditions that others do not. But this is natural selection, and it's the diversity that allowed the species to survive.
Suggesting that a genetic monoculture would benefit us in terms of population control is a misnomer; the reality is that it potentially leads to a condition where there is complete species devastation - a new parasite, disease, or virus which is able to destroy a genetically homogeneous species by exploiting a weakness that was never known to be a weakness until this new threat appeared.
As a real-world example, show-quality animals such as purebred dogs and cats are demonstrably genetically inferior to their naturally bred counterparts. They have a whole spate of problems which do not occur in natural species. This is because of selective breeding which furthers the species purely on aesthetic qualities rather than survival qualities. I own a purebred Siamese cat (which I got from a rescue agency). The breeding has introduced several weaknesses into this species such as crossed eyes and a crooked tail (both were once considered to be required show characteristics for this breed). Other breeds and species have even worse problems. Golden retrievers have bladder problems, himalayan cats have severe nasal problems right from birth. Humans are willing to use science to support survival-inferior characteristics in the name of aesthetics. Characteristics which would once have prevented this animal from surviving to breed, thus ending the inferior gene line.
So it's already come true when humans tried their hand at aesthetic breeding. The change will be much more rapid when the selective breeding can happen in the egg and only very specific possibly very obscure characteristics are the deciding factor for survival or not.
Many people are opposed to many things for reasons that have no relevance. Your task is to pay attention only to those which do have relevance. Such as those who are concerned about genetic diversity as a long term species survival strategy.
"Playing God" may be a phrase that are used by some lunatics, but that doesn't mean that the phrase has no value independent of the uses of it that they choose. The arelegious argument behind this phrase has more to do with the fact that natural selection got us to this point because it's an effective solution to overcoming problems. But it depends on genetic diversity to be truly strong, and purposely limiting our genetic diversity in ways which do not contribute in some way to survivability (such as screening out diseases), but rather for purely superficial reasons such as aesthetics, is a recipe for unknowingly excluding survival traits and causing long term, possibly irreversible damage to our genetic heritage.
There are certainly foreseeable scientific / medical implications. Selective fertilization of this nature can potentially have long term (as in long term) negative consequences for the viability of the species as a whole.
If designerism gets to a certain level, it's possible to completely breed out characteristics seen as unappealing but which may have real long term species survivability characteristics associated with it.
As a simple analogy, consider that rats on an island were able to reject fertilized eggs which would yield any color coat but white, and that rats find white coats to be superior aesthetically. Within a generation or two, it's likely that there are no coats but white, and that the genetics for creating other colored coats has now been eliminated from the population. Soon a new predator bird comes along and is able to easily hunt the highly visible rats, and is able to be so successful at securing food that it produces double or triple the normal number of offspring. Within another few generations the rats could be extinct because the undesirable gene line for dark coats had previously been extinguished from the population.
It's easiest to think about it in small terms like above, but the same principles would apply on a larger scale and on a larger time line for human kind. There is strength in diversity, and rejecting genetic pathways based on aesthetics is not a strategy which will be healthy for the species on the long term.
Maybe for humans, hair and eye color has no survival implications (though it seems likely that there are highly correlated or even purely linked characteristics linked to this which are unknown or unconsidered). But if selective implantation becomes commonly practiced there will be drift in which characteristics are deemed worth breeding out, as once certain characteristics become homogeneous, new characteristics will be selected for exclusion. The new characteristics might be something with greater species survival implications.
This, practiced on a large scale, or practiced on a large percentage of a given population, will have the same sort of long term negative effects as inbreeding did for royal families.
That's the point though. It won't be up to you. If this goes as far as such deals have historically gone for cable companies, then every ISP will pay for a bunch of such services, and pass that cost on to you (you won't be able to find a residential ISP that doesn't do this) whether or not you want to consume it.