I guess I'm not sure why it's needed to build a case against him; the evidence and eye witness accounts are overwhelmingly damning as-is.
And why shouldn't the US treat Loughner as a criminal suspect? If a bunch of people see you shooting a lot of people in the head, that's a pretty good reason to be suspected of committing a crime.
The dual-core ARMs do not have CPU performance better than the PS3, and while there are mobile GPUs that outperform the PS3's, they're pretty power-hungry (the higher end ATI/Nvidia parts). You could make a handheld with an i5/i7 and higher-end mobile GPU, but yeah, lots of heat generation and poor battery life.
Even the 45nm Cell CPUs are very power-hungry for a mobile part (as they... aren't), and I don't think compatibility with the PS3 would be possible.
Of course, the interpretation of what Sony means by "as powerful" may mean something else entirely than what we immediately think of.
I agree -- it is irrational. Even in Britain, consider the fate of Tony Blair and the Labour party's decline. Hatred and anger dominate politics to an unfortunate degree.
Widespread approval in Europe? Not today, no -- and probably not anytime soon in the future -- I was referring to the initial invasion of Afghanistan, before Iraq. Support for the US polled much higher then.
I don't have a link handy, but the poll was by the BBC and hosted on their website as a PDF. It was remarkable to me because the Afghan approval of US forces was higher than domestic approval at the time. This was several years ago. The poll mentioned the strongest concern of Afghans was the US's inability to prevent the resurgence of the Taliban. Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened. The Taliban approval among Afghans polled *extremely* low.
The US supported the mujahideen, not the Taliban. The leader of the mujahideen in Afghanistan went on to become an extremist, but the majority of them are now a political party. Afghans were quite grateful to the US for its assistance with the Russian invasion.
I don't see how it's the US's fault that Russia invaded Afghanistan, either. In the 1960s Afghanistan was well on its way to becoming a democracy. The Soviets installed a puppet government, and later invaded, doing terrible damage to the country and its people.
After the Afghans defeated the Red Army through attrition, the resulting power vacuum allowed the Taliban to seize power.
So what was the US's fault in that-- helping the Afghans fight the invading Red Army, something they were incredibly grateful for? For not rebuilding the country after that? So, we can let them get slaughtered by Mil Mi-24D Hinds and ignore their plight? We got involved because Senator Charlie Wilson and president Ronald Reagan felt sympathy for the Afghans and wanted to help them.
Afghanistan and Iraq, like most of Africa and many other regions in the world, are unstable and have had oppressive governments as a direct result of European colonialism, which the US did to a very minimal extent. The history of colonialism is one of exploitation and racism. No matter what the US did, or did not do, these countries and their people were harmed long ago, and then abandoned by the European powers.
If Europe truly cared about their former colonies and the harm they inflicted, there are still many of them today that are suffering and have very low standards of living. Why does Europe do nothing, and instead condemn the world to future instability and conflict? Even close to the US in Mexico, the legacy of the conquistadors has created a fragmented and poor Mexican society and endless border troubles. How about Spain reimburses Mexico the gold they plundered?
Had Europe simply treated people equally, with respect, and did not seek to exploit them due to greed, none of this would have happened. But it did. And it will probably all happen again. And it will be America who bears most of this burden, paying the price of Europe's deeds with American blood and iron.
The invasion of Afghanistan was widely supported in Europe at the time. Also, last I looked, a poll of Afghans by the BBC put approval of US forces in Afghanistan at 80%+. Afghans do not like, and have never liked, the Taliban -- a hostile, alien force from Pakistan.
Iraq wasn't exactly rainbows and sunshine under Saddam Hussein either. This was the direct result of a power vacuum created by British colonialism. Either way -- under Saddam, or via collateral damage in liberation -- the people of Iraq were dealt a losing hand long ago, and it wasn't by the US.
Also, the US military is the largest humanitarian relief organization in the world. The US spends more than any country on humanitarian efforts, and if you look in your country's history, has probably brought aid to it.
The "DERP DERP I HATE GEORGE W BUSH" hate train that's so trendy to hop on to today might win you peer approval at the moment, but it's a rather petty sentiment in the grand scheme of things.
Just because we contract some of our military stuff out to NATO partner countries doesn't mean we lack the capability of domestic production. Yeah, military hardware costs more than commercial off-the-shelf stuff, but it's also hardened and more reliable. Do you really want ICBMs with Chinese electrolytic caps? Yikes.
And the F-22 and F-35 are quite excellent aircraft. I don't believe the modern Russian aircraft suck or anything (the Su-35 etc) but the F-22 and F-35 likely do have air superiority in the studies I've seen. This is a silly point anyway, as Britain helped us develop the F-35.
I also am not sure why you think the Abrams is a "joke" compared to the panther. The firepower and electronics of the tanks are quite comparable, as is their speed/weight, but the Abrams has an edge in armor due to the use of depleted uranium, a capability which German manufacturing lacks due to political reasons. Compare the RHA equivalents for both tanks if you don't believe me.
Yes, you're quite correct in asserting most of our military is deployed overseas. Further, recent military cuts have reduced our capability of fighting multiple wars simultaneously. The US however still maintains the deterrence of a large nuclear arsenal, and if attacked and pressed by hostile nation states, I have little doubt we'd use them if we were pushed far enough and it was a matter of survival. Nuclear weapons as an ultimate deterrence make conventional forces seem weak, though it's hard to perform police actions or fight proxy wars with nukes. No, Germany does not have nuclear weapons, but it is not from a lack of trying.
I have great respect for Germany's armed forces throughout history, and Germany's industrial and technological superiority to the US for most of our existence. Today's battlefields and tactics are still defined by German technology.
At the battle of Kasserine Pass where Erwin Rommel defeated a much larger US force, do you think he would've won by being contemptuous and undervaluing the US forces?
Humans are ultimately tribal animals. We do not necessarily have universal compassion for all other humans, and have done very terrible things to each other throughout history. It is easy for us to have compassion for our nuclear families and tribes. Less so, for "the others".
The laws are as they are... in the US... Elsewhere in the world and throughout history, it was not always so, nor will it always be so in the future.
There are many examples in the past in the US of those with mental disabilities not being treated equally. I doubt they've been treated anywhere near equally throughout human history. Universal compassion is a rare exception, not a historical constant.
I would imagine most people on Slashdot have more compassion for their dogs than other humans who disagree with their political beliefs.
Make a comment like "George W. Bush was actually a much better president than most people give him credit for" or "socialized medicine is a grand idea" and you'll see how quickly universal human compassion falls apart.
There's no speculation about it. Numerous studies have shown everything down to rats certainly have self-awareness, emotion, and even metacognition.
The old argument that what makes humans special is emotion is ridiculous. Emotions come from the limbic system, one of the most primitive regions of the brain, that is almost identical in humans in structure and function to many other mammals. Our frontal lobe is what sets us apart.
You can find any of this easily on PubMed, but if you've owned a dog it should be quite obvious it was self-aware and had emotions. If there's any animal species humans owe a lot to, it is canis lupus, dogs and wolves, who have been our companions and helped us survive since the dawn of man.
Further, animals certainly do have mythology and philosophy. Just because it wasn't assigned reading in college like Kant doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or it's easy to communicate. But it is there. Pigeons famously have been shown to have superstition, and here some quotes from non-human primates:
Gorilla, Volume 8, Number 1, from December, 1984. (Conversation between Koko and Maureen Sheehan)
MS: Where do gorillas go when they die?
Koko: Comfortable hole bye.
MS: When do gorillas die?
K: Trouble, old.
MS: How do gorillas feel when they die, happy, sad, afraid?
K: Sleep.
Gorilla, Volume 8, Number 2. (December 18, 1984, three days after All Ball had been killed, with Dr. Penny Patterson:)
PP: Do you want to talk about your kitty?
K: Cry.
PP: What happened to your kitty?
K: Sleep cat.
PP: Yes, he's sleeping.
K: Koko good.
(3/10/81 - Mike the Gorilla and Barbra Walters)
BW: Any dreams last night? Dreams?
M: Why. Why do you trouble quiet?
BW: Any dreams last night?
M: Dream cat bird eat taste
BW: Oh dear, bad dream about cats eating birds?
M: Sad. Cat devil
PP: Would it be fun if kittens could sign?
K: Stupid.
And I have to go with Koko on that one. Kittens aren't gorillas. And gorillas, and dolphins, aren't people. They are animals. And that alone is worthy of respect and some rights. How much? I don't know, but if serial animal abusers got executed for their crimes, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. At the same time, remember that dolphins, dogs, etc are predators. They take prey, as do we. Gorillas have pets, as do we. Things are never equal.
How to make this one of the greatest movies of all time:
1. Neil Patrick Harris as Captain Kirk
2. NPH as Kirk
3. NPH as Kirk
4. Kumar as some cast member (can't have Harold solo)
5. The climax of the movie must involve a fight between "Spock" and Nero, where "Spock" uses telekenesis to slam him into a wall and open his skull
Lost used the idea of magnetic monopoles as a science experiment gone wrong leading to an "incident" after which you have to push a button every 108 minutes or there is a "SYSTEM FAILURE" and the world ends.
Fear not, Luddites, David Desmond Hume shall save the world for you.
You mistake my personal opinion for a political stance seeking to ban things. This is not the case.
It is very difficult to not own a car (SUV, truck, etc). Even if you're Lance Armstrong, sometimes you're ill, have injuries, the weather sucks, you need to haul cargo, give someone a ride, go somewhere that is difficult on a bike, go a long distance, etc.
You already choose between walking vs. driving even without a bike, and with a car, for some tasks. To get the mail, I must walk approximately one block. I've seen my neighbor equidistant to the mailbox use their car for this. Sort of like the old sitcom thing of backing out of the garage in your car just to get the paper.
Biking is simply in the continuum of transportation options you already employ; it cannot match the speed (in most cases), cargo capacity, protection from the elements, and power of a motor vehicle. Neither can walking. But yet there are still times where you can choose between walking and driving, even deciding how far away from something you park.
The threshold at which one bikes, is like that of the threshold at which one walks. It is a personal choice based off fitness, weather, desire, distance, time, cost, etc. Just as I walk to the mailboxes while my neighbor drives, I may bike 6 miles but not 15, while yet someone else will.
No, I don't really see the need to make driving to your mailbox illegal over such a distance, or legally saying what transportation you ought to be using for X, Y, or Z.
My argument instead comes to simply selfishness: wanting what is best for yourself. The OP I initially replied with the Honda Insight was talking about the superiority of hybrid vehicles with lightweight Al bodies for commuting vs. hybrid vehicles with steel bodies vs. non-hybrid vehicles. His argument came down to this: since you don't need to carry cargo or passengers, a two-door coupe hybrid with a lightweight body is a superior commuting vehicle due to efficiency.
Yes, it is superior for that single purpose to a slightly larger hybrid getting 5% worse fuel economy, or a non-hybrid vehicle. So? So fucking what?
Even a hybrid vehicle is fantastically inefficient. If we are only considering commuting, with no cargo, in an urban environment, over short distances, a bicycle is a significantly more efficient mode of transportation. And even if you aren't up to the tribal fitness standards, an electric motor for the bike is ridiculously efficient and costs very little over its lifetime.
So if we're going to rail against hybrid vehicles with the audacity to have 4 doors instead of 2 for commuting, or, Allah forbid, a non-hybrid vehicle (infidels!) then the only logical conclusion is that in the scope of the original argument, the proposed vehicle also represents an inefficient choice. Sure, this is overly pedantic, but since you insisted...
Are bikes a commuting solution for everyone? No. Are they the only transportation you should have? Probably not. If you're a hardcore cyclist, are you going to bike 100% of the time? No.
But I believe a bike is a valid option for commuting for most people, most of the time, especially hybrid bicycles that combine not batteries and internal combustion, but batteries and human muscle.
Speaking of presumptuous jackasses, I can't stand that from hybrid owners at all, hence my initial reply. My Honda Element (SUVish) gets ~27mpg. Bob's Prius gets 55. So? So fucking what? I put less miles on my Element in a year due to the bike, to the degree that I consume less fuel and spend less on it. I enjoy the bike ride along scenic bike trails more than interstate driving, get exercise, and save a good deal of money. Charging the bike's batteries consumes so little energy it's not really worth measuring. And that is the power of efficiency.
And yet Bob the Prius owner will still be smug he's driving his little Prius. Yet f
Your reply doesn't even make sense. The material properties of steel and aluminum alloys including tensile strength are simply not a matter of "using it correctly"?
Biking is not necessarily slower (depending on route / speed), and it is not necessarily an opportunity cost depending on your valuation of exercise even if slower. Structured exercise can also have opportunity and direct monetary costs.
If you don't want to show up sweaty, replace your cotton clothing with moisture-wicking synthetics or carry a change. If your bike has an electric motor, you control the amount of exercise you get -- you can have as little as riding a motorcycle if you desire.
Fact is, if you think you need a car to go a couple of miles, you're wrong. Even if you don't want to elevate your heart rate vs. being in a car (the horror of Americans doing something physical! Oh God! Make it stop!) a motorcycle, scooter, or electric bike is far more efficient. And the dude in South America probably takes in quite a few more kcals/day anyway, he just uses them instead of storing them.
Hey, I'm a pretty libertarian-type guy. You want to drive a Hummer H1 for your 5 mile commute to work, that's fine with me. I simply ask why we continue to pursue inefficiency out of habit when the greatest personal benefit to us might lie in another choice.
1.8" drives aren't significantly larger or heavier and hard drives actually use less power than cheap flash memory. It's only the very best SSDs that represent a power savings vs. hard drives. A good hard drive / notebook will also have the ability to detect impacts and will retract the head, making it no more vulnerable to that. (I've never dropped a notebook, personally...)
I own a Fujitsu P1610, which is smaller, lighter, has superior battery life, speed, display, and yes, a hard drive. Of course it cost $1800 and not $450, but hey, made in Japan quality and efficiency isn't cheap.
Could I get a SSD for my Fujitsu? Sure. And it would make some things faster. But considering how little power the HDD actually draws, it would have a minor effect on battery life at best, and that's assuming I got a high-end SLC SSD that actually used less power.
No, I don't really think a hard drive and a small laptop are mutually exclusive. While flash memory is cooler, go look at actual figures and you'd be surprised how good hard drives still are.
That's part of it certainly-- at some point through mechanisms we don't really understand the memory has to be referenced-- but it's also more than that; the correlates in regional activity mirror structures that tend to serve more active roles in the experience than in memory encoding per se.
imo a (rough) computer analogy would be something akin to having a Counter-Strike screenshot also be a partial memory dump from very specific regions of the processor and your 3D card, and opening that screenshot later loads those memory dumps and overwrites what you were doing, forcing those same things to be re-executed. (fortunately computers don't do that, and that's one reason they don't have emotional problems;) )
That isn't the point; the study isn't claiming to have deduced how memory works (I like the fun theories involving microtubules and quantum fields there, but hey). It simply shows that activation patterns during recall correlate with those during actual experience, much like is the case with memory encoding in REM sleep.
This is significant because those correlations in experience and recall can profoundly effect our current mental state and environment. Imagery is a tool used very efficiently in sports psychology and works on the same principles.
On the other hand, other studies have shown in recovering from traumatic events, those who recount the negatives of the experience, focus on pain recall, how they were hurt, etc actually have much worse outcomes than patients not receiving any therapy.
Other studies have yet shown similar correlations involving mirror neurons for observing someone else performing an action; if they lift their hand, and we watch them with full attention, the part of our motor cortex correlating with actually performing that action will activate in us. And this is actually used to create procedural ("muscle") memory without ever having actually done that action!
The take home lesson is that what is active and what is not active in your brain right now is influenced by not only what you experience, but also by what you remember, what you think about, and what you imagine. And these things are both good and bad, and are controlled to a significant degree by you.
If you don't need to carry cargo, why don't you just get a bicycle with an electric motor? No taxes or licensing and is still considered a bicycle in most locations.
I own an electric bike and a Honda Element, and think ultra-small hybrid cars aren't particularly useful. City commuting is most efficiently done by a bike or electric bike, and other tasks are best suited to a vehicle with more versatility and cargo room. Some days you DO need to carry 10 bags or cement.
And yes, I live in a state with cold and snow. (MT) My commute takes me 15 minutes by car, and a slightly more direct route via bike takes 30 minutes (~6 miles). If you're an uber road cyclist who can do 40mph instead of 15mph like me, you could probably actually get there more quickly on the bike.
Also, aluminum is not significantly lighter than steel for the same tensile strength, provided you use a quality steel alloy. It's lighter by volume, but that's not really the same thing.
Anyway, bottomline is IMO-- all cars are oversized for commuting, unless you're carrying a lot of cargo/passengers or the weather is bad and you don't own any technical clothing. Most people's commutes are only a couple miles and would be most economical to bike. Not to mention the exercise perks.
Go to any indigenous tribe in South America that hasn't been industrialized, and they could pretty much all easily run your commute without it even being challenging. The notion that we need a metal, inefficient powered carriage that is 10 feet wide to move a couple miles isn't really rational or natural considering human evolution. Making the 10 foot wide metal carriage be only 95% inefficient instead of 96% inefficient is sort of going in the wrong direction, you know?
update: I just measured my 65nm PS3 with a watt meter. Results:
F@H with visuals (map + protein thumbnail): 148 watts
F@H with screensaver: 131 watts
Oddly the screensaver did not drop it by the same number of watts despite the fact the GPU is the same die size as on older PS3s; in fact, it was only 57% the decrease experienced on the 90nm PS3. I am uncertain as to why this may be.
Regardless, 131 watts is still only ~$120/year for me, and that's certainly manageable for the sheer amount of work and folding the PS3 is doing. I probably wouldn't want to pay for an older Pentium 4 box guzzling 2-3x the PS3's power consumption for several orders of magnitude less work, though.
Old PS3s (90nm): Folding@Home with visuals: 215 watts.
Folding@Home screen saver: 185 watts.
New PS3s (65nm): Running Folding @ home 157
Considering the GPU is still 90nm, that 157 figure should drop to ~127 watts when the screen saver kicks in.
Typical energy costs are also more like $.10/kWh.
127W x 24h/d x 365d/y = 1112520 Watt-hours/y or 1113 kWh/y
at $.10/kWh that actually costs moar like: $111/y. Or if for some reason you're paying $12/kWh, that's still only $134, less than half of your estimate.
Please stop spreading FUD about F@H and inflating the costs by more than a factor of two. It's important science that benefits everyone and the PS3 is actually very power efficient -- drawing less energy with F@H than your desktop 3D card does idle doing nothing.
If you don't want to participate in F@H and help science and humanity, that's your choice, but at least post the correct data to support your argument.
I really hope no one got dissuaded by the bad data in your argument into not running F@H when they might've contributed a key bit of research important for understanding drug candidates for P53 cancer suppression or Alzheimer's disease treatments. Perhaps I'm being melodramatic, but arguing against F@H makes me a sad panda.
Unless of course you're a highly developed tumor who figured out how to post on Slashdot and fear F@H as a matter of self-preservation, which I could hardly blame you for.
XPe is a componentized version of XP Professional. XPe ships the same binaries as XP Professional, but with XPe an OEM is free to choose only the components needed thereby reducing operating system footprint and also reducing attack area as compared with XP Professional.(wikipedia)
The thing with XPe is that yes, it can be stripped down to run off a small CF card, but doing so requires removing a lot of user UI / shell components, drivers, etc. XPe would allow Asus to create a smaller installer, but considering that it would be running in user mode with a full UI/shell I'm not sure you can strip that much from it.
And I'm not sure it would resolve Asus's complaints here, which are performance (not disk footprint) related. I suspect the issue here is the RAM footprint of the OS and the speed of using virtual memory with flash's slow read/write speeds.
I think this is mostly just Asus being cheap, because on Newegg you can get 4gb of DDR2 notebook memory for $50. Perhaps Asus shouldn't be trying to use 512MB or 1GB of RAM with XP when RAM is so cheap.
Would it be such a horrible thing for them to go crazy and put a full $25's worth of 2GB of RAM in an Eee?
I run Vista SP1 on my Fujitsu P1610, with 1GB of RAM, a 60GB 4200rpm HDD, and a Core Solo 1.2ghz CPU; granted it's spec'd higher than the Eee PC but after some hardcore tweaking I'm quite pleased at Vista's performance.
After gutting a lot of the services and registry hacking, I did in fact strip it down feature-wise to be more on-par with XP.
The startup/shutdown times, app launch, and sleep/resume times are all better than XP. And in fact, Vista is much better at resuming wireless internet connections after being suspended than XP, so there's no longer a huge delay for that.
I've done similar tweaks for family members who have purchased Vista boxes with only 1GB of RAM, and I turned a box filled with bloatware and abysmal performance into something that they were so pleased with they didn't bother to upgrade the RAM.
And I didn't even do anything particularly amazing or use the tools to cut down the install size. I suspect an optimized version of Vista would run just fine on Eee-class machines.
XP, 2k, and Vista all share the same core. I don't understand the XP worship here-- I run it on my desktop, but it's hardly a significant improvement from Win2K. It had what... the ugly Luna UI and Windows Firewall? Win2K was faster than XP in benchmarks and had a smaller memory footprint.
So hell, why not go with good old Win2K on the Eee PC then? Because I think we all know that you can get something very close to Win2K's memory footprint and performance with either XP or Vista after some tweaking.
Another thing-- using XIP flash memory apps, you can make pretty much any Windows component or application run from flash memory without using hardly any RAM at all. At the cost of being more difficult to update. But here's a thought: Microsoft could pretty easily extend Superfetch and Readyboost to create XIP apps either automatically or at the user's behest in a semi-permanent manner, and update the XIP images as the app is updated.
Sort of like what was done with the Omnibook 300 back in the day, if anyone remembers that... only with the advantages of flash memory.
I think Vista runs better than most people expect, especially with tweaking, and through innovation and design could run better on Eee-type devices than even Win2K, which to me seems far preferable to regression. Dynamic XIP in flash memory is an example of one way which this could be accomplished.
Alas, while SP1 improves a lot of aspects of Vista performance at the low-end, it does not actually perform said tweaking for you, and MS hasn't started developing features that would improve things on lower-power devices. I think the problem is less Vista, and more bureaucracy than anything.
Well, CE is pretty limited and not really a great OS for the Eee PC but... it's hardly related to Windows 3.11. It's a true 32-bit OS, the only problem is its numerous platform incompatibilities and small software library. I've owned CE devices from 2.0 to Windows Mobile 5.
I don't think MS would ever say CE competes with Linux in all situations, but it did try to market CE on Eee-formfactor devices once, like the IBM Workpad z50 (which I used to own) and the HP Jornada 820.
It actually was pretty decent... good battery life, and as long as you didn't mind the limitations of CE, it was an OK experience. But the devices were pretty expensive (before everyone score the z50s on closeout sales).
Previous to that, the only flash-based laptop was the HP Omnibook 300 (425, 430, 530) which did in fact run Windows 3.1. If anything, the Omnibook 300 was the precursor of the Eee, in all measures except cost. And just recalling Trumpet Winsock... well trust me, the internet experience in Windows CE was much better.
CE isn't a terrible OS, it's just that the design choices MS made required too many target platforms that make it annoying to develop for. In reality, a complex CE (Windows Mobile) app requires tweaks/a version for every device it runs on. At its conception MS wanted CE to be more platform agnostic than NT (which CE is based on) but it ended up being far less, and now, only running on a single CPU architecture (ARM/XScale).
CE has successfully competed against Linux and won, however, in the handheld/PDA marketplace. It also currently is somehow managing to outsell the iPhone in the smartphone arena. So... I wouldn't declare MS a total loser here. But yeah, I'll take Linux over CE on a notebook-type device.
Well said. Why does what he makes bother anyone else? No, I don't like his movies (other than the 5 seconds of nudity in BloodRayne) but there is something very disturbing about the popularity of this "censorship through the will of the majority" thing going on here. I think most of the people who take this petition thing a bit too seriously just need to go watch Rand's "The Fountainhead" on loop until they understand or start getting Bioshock twitches.
But yeah. Everyone is quite correct in stating his movies suck. How he got so many (relatively) big actors for his terrible Dungeon Siege movie is completely beyond me. I certainly don't feel a need to petition that, though.
There are many causes worthy of a petition. Hatred towards an irrelevant movie producer is not one of them. It's not like he's kicking out modern equivalents of Triumph Des Willens or Birth of a Nation anyway... they're video game movies, people.
Not long after the experiments began, however, there was... an 'incident'... and since that time, the following protocol has been observed:
... every 108 minutes, the button must be pushed. From the moment the alarm sounds, you will have 4 minutes to enter the code into the microcomputer processor... *...duction into the program. When the alarm sounds, either you or your partner must input the code. It is highly recommended that you and your partner take alternating shifts. In this manner you will both stay as fresh and alert... *...most importance, that when the alarm sounds, the code be entered correctly and in a timely fashion.
Maybe it's just me, but that one about magnetic monopoles sounds a little too much like Season #2 of "Lost". I'm pretty sure I saw the other two scenarios as Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes. But perhaps their fears can be assuaged regarding magnetic monopoles if we build a bunker with a flip-clock and Apple II+.
Seriously though, last I checked, if monopoles exist at all, they are so massive they cannot possibly be uncovered in any particle accelerator we could hope to build in the foreseeable future.
On behalf of the DeGroots, Alvar Hanso, and all of us at the DHARMA Initiative, thank you, namaste, and... good luck.
Slashdot Mirror
And why shouldn't the US treat Loughner as a criminal suspect? If a bunch of people see you shooting a lot of people in the head, that's a pretty good reason to be suspected of committing a crime.
Even the 45nm Cell CPUs are very power-hungry for a mobile part (as they... aren't), and I don't think compatibility with the PS3 would be possible.
Of course, the interpretation of what Sony means by "as powerful" may mean something else entirely than what we immediately think of.
Show me on the doll where America touched you.
I agree -- it is irrational. Even in Britain, consider the fate of Tony Blair and the Labour party's decline. Hatred and anger dominate politics to an unfortunate degree.
I don't have a link handy, but the poll was by the BBC and hosted on their website as a PDF. It was remarkable to me because the Afghan approval of US forces was higher than domestic approval at the time. This was several years ago. The poll mentioned the strongest concern of Afghans was the US's inability to prevent the resurgence of the Taliban. Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened. The Taliban approval among Afghans polled *extremely* low.
The US supported the mujahideen, not the Taliban. The leader of the mujahideen in Afghanistan went on to become an extremist, but the majority of them are now a political party. Afghans were quite grateful to the US for its assistance with the Russian invasion.
I don't see how it's the US's fault that Russia invaded Afghanistan, either. In the 1960s Afghanistan was well on its way to becoming a democracy. The Soviets installed a puppet government, and later invaded, doing terrible damage to the country and its people.
After the Afghans defeated the Red Army through attrition, the resulting power vacuum allowed the Taliban to seize power.
So what was the US's fault in that-- helping the Afghans fight the invading Red Army, something they were incredibly grateful for? For not rebuilding the country after that? So, we can let them get slaughtered by Mil Mi-24D Hinds and ignore their plight? We got involved because Senator Charlie Wilson and president Ronald Reagan felt sympathy for the Afghans and wanted to help them.
Afghanistan and Iraq, like most of Africa and many other regions in the world, are unstable and have had oppressive governments as a direct result of European colonialism, which the US did to a very minimal extent. The history of colonialism is one of exploitation and racism. No matter what the US did, or did not do, these countries and their people were harmed long ago, and then abandoned by the European powers.
If Europe truly cared about their former colonies and the harm they inflicted, there are still many of them today that are suffering and have very low standards of living. Why does Europe do nothing, and instead condemn the world to future instability and conflict? Even close to the US in Mexico, the legacy of the conquistadors has created a fragmented and poor Mexican society and endless border troubles. How about Spain reimburses Mexico the gold they plundered?
Had Europe simply treated people equally, with respect, and did not seek to exploit them due to greed, none of this would have happened. But it did. And it will probably all happen again. And it will be America who bears most of this burden, paying the price of Europe's deeds with American blood and iron.
And of course, Europe will blame us for it.
Iraq wasn't exactly rainbows and sunshine under Saddam Hussein either. This was the direct result of a power vacuum created by British colonialism. Either way -- under Saddam, or via collateral damage in liberation -- the people of Iraq were dealt a losing hand long ago, and it wasn't by the US.
Also, the US military is the largest humanitarian relief organization in the world. The US spends more than any country on humanitarian efforts, and if you look in your country's history, has probably brought aid to it.
The "DERP DERP I HATE GEORGE W BUSH" hate train that's so trendy to hop on to today might win you peer approval at the moment, but it's a rather petty sentiment in the grand scheme of things.
And the F-22 and F-35 are quite excellent aircraft. I don't believe the modern Russian aircraft suck or anything (the Su-35 etc) but the F-22 and F-35 likely do have air superiority in the studies I've seen. This is a silly point anyway, as Britain helped us develop the F-35.
I also am not sure why you think the Abrams is a "joke" compared to the panther. The firepower and electronics of the tanks are quite comparable, as is their speed/weight, but the Abrams has an edge in armor due to the use of depleted uranium, a capability which German manufacturing lacks due to political reasons. Compare the RHA equivalents for both tanks if you don't believe me.
Yes, you're quite correct in asserting most of our military is deployed overseas. Further, recent military cuts have reduced our capability of fighting multiple wars simultaneously. The US however still maintains the deterrence of a large nuclear arsenal, and if attacked and pressed by hostile nation states, I have little doubt we'd use them if we were pushed far enough and it was a matter of survival. Nuclear weapons as an ultimate deterrence make conventional forces seem weak, though it's hard to perform police actions or fight proxy wars with nukes. No, Germany does not have nuclear weapons, but it is not from a lack of trying.
I have great respect for Germany's armed forces throughout history, and Germany's industrial and technological superiority to the US for most of our existence. Today's battlefields and tactics are still defined by German technology.
At the battle of Kasserine Pass where Erwin Rommel defeated a much larger US force, do you think he would've won by being contemptuous and undervaluing the US forces?
The laws are as they are... in the US... Elsewhere in the world and throughout history, it was not always so, nor will it always be so in the future.
There are many examples in the past in the US of those with mental disabilities not being treated equally. I doubt they've been treated anywhere near equally throughout human history. Universal compassion is a rare exception, not a historical constant.
I would imagine most people on Slashdot have more compassion for their dogs than other humans who disagree with their political beliefs.
Make a comment like "George W. Bush was actually a much better president than most people give him credit for" or "socialized medicine is a grand idea" and you'll see how quickly universal human compassion falls apart.
The old argument that what makes humans special is emotion is ridiculous. Emotions come from the limbic system, one of the most primitive regions of the brain, that is almost identical in humans in structure and function to many other mammals. Our frontal lobe is what sets us apart.
You can find any of this easily on PubMed, but if you've owned a dog it should be quite obvious it was self-aware and had emotions. If there's any animal species humans owe a lot to, it is canis lupus, dogs and wolves, who have been our companions and helped us survive since the dawn of man.
Further, animals certainly do have mythology and philosophy. Just because it wasn't assigned reading in college like Kant doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or it's easy to communicate. But it is there. Pigeons famously have been shown to have superstition, and here some quotes from non-human primates:
Gorilla, Volume 8, Number 1, from December, 1984. (Conversation between Koko and Maureen Sheehan)
MS: Where do gorillas go when they die?
Koko: Comfortable hole bye.
MS: When do gorillas die?
K: Trouble, old.
MS: How do gorillas feel when they die, happy, sad, afraid?
K: Sleep.
Gorilla, Volume 8, Number 2. (December 18, 1984, three days after All Ball had been killed, with Dr. Penny Patterson:)
PP: Do you want to talk about your kitty?
K: Cry.
PP: What happened to your kitty?
K: Sleep cat.
PP: Yes, he's sleeping.
K: Koko good.
(3/10/81 - Mike the Gorilla and Barbra Walters)
BW: Any dreams last night? Dreams?
M: Why. Why do you trouble quiet?
BW: Any dreams last night?
M: Dream cat bird eat taste
BW: Oh dear, bad dream about cats eating birds?
M: Sad. Cat devil
PP: Would it be fun if kittens could sign?
K: Stupid.
And I have to go with Koko on that one. Kittens aren't gorillas. And gorillas, and dolphins, aren't people. They are animals. And that alone is worthy of respect and some rights. How much? I don't know, but if serial animal abusers got executed for their crimes, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. At the same time, remember that dolphins, dogs, etc are predators. They take prey, as do we. Gorillas have pets, as do we. Things are never equal.
How to make this one of the greatest movies of all time:
1. Neil Patrick Harris as Captain Kirk
2. NPH as Kirk
3. NPH as Kirk
4. Kumar as some cast member (can't have Harold solo)
5. The climax of the movie must involve a fight between "Spock" and Nero, where "Spock" uses telekenesis to slam him into a wall and open his skull
Fear not, Luddites, David Desmond Hume shall save the world for you.
You mean modulus of elasticity in a rope, right?
You mistake my personal opinion for a political stance seeking to ban things. This is not the case.
It is very difficult to not own a car (SUV, truck, etc). Even if you're Lance Armstrong, sometimes you're ill, have injuries, the weather sucks, you need to haul cargo, give someone a ride, go somewhere that is difficult on a bike, go a long distance, etc.
You already choose between walking vs. driving even without a bike, and with a car, for some tasks. To get the mail, I must walk approximately one block. I've seen my neighbor equidistant to the mailbox use their car for this. Sort of like the old sitcom thing of backing out of the garage in your car just to get the paper.
Biking is simply in the continuum of transportation options you already employ; it cannot match the speed (in most cases), cargo capacity, protection from the elements, and power of a motor vehicle. Neither can walking. But yet there are still times where you can choose between walking and driving, even deciding how far away from something you park.
The threshold at which one bikes, is like that of the threshold at which one walks. It is a personal choice based off fitness, weather, desire, distance, time, cost, etc. Just as I walk to the mailboxes while my neighbor drives, I may bike 6 miles but not 15, while yet someone else will.
No, I don't really see the need to make driving to your mailbox illegal over such a distance, or legally saying what transportation you ought to be using for X, Y, or Z.
My argument instead comes to simply selfishness: wanting what is best for yourself. The OP I initially replied with the Honda Insight was talking about the superiority of hybrid vehicles with lightweight Al bodies for commuting vs. hybrid vehicles with steel bodies vs. non-hybrid vehicles. His argument came down to this: since you don't need to carry cargo or passengers, a two-door coupe hybrid with a lightweight body is a superior commuting vehicle due to efficiency.
Yes, it is superior for that single purpose to a slightly larger hybrid getting 5% worse fuel economy, or a non-hybrid vehicle. So? So fucking what?
Even a hybrid vehicle is fantastically inefficient. If we are only considering commuting, with no cargo, in an urban environment, over short distances, a bicycle is a significantly more efficient mode of transportation. And even if you aren't up to the tribal fitness standards, an electric motor for the bike is ridiculously efficient and costs very little over its lifetime.
So if we're going to rail against hybrid vehicles with the audacity to have 4 doors instead of 2 for commuting, or, Allah forbid, a non-hybrid vehicle (infidels!) then the only logical conclusion is that in the scope of the original argument, the proposed vehicle also represents an inefficient choice. Sure, this is overly pedantic, but since you insisted...
Are bikes a commuting solution for everyone? No. Are they the only transportation you should have? Probably not. If you're a hardcore cyclist, are you going to bike 100% of the time? No.
But I believe a bike is a valid option for commuting for most people, most of the time, especially hybrid bicycles that combine not batteries and internal combustion, but batteries and human muscle.
Speaking of presumptuous jackasses, I can't stand that from hybrid owners at all, hence my initial reply. My Honda Element (SUVish) gets ~27mpg. Bob's Prius gets 55. So? So fucking what? I put less miles on my Element in a year due to the bike, to the degree that I consume less fuel and spend less on it. I enjoy the bike ride along scenic bike trails more than interstate driving, get exercise, and save a good deal of money. Charging the bike's batteries consumes so little energy it's not really worth measuring. And that is the power of efficiency.
And yet Bob the Prius owner will still be smug he's driving his little Prius. Yet f
Your reply doesn't even make sense. The material properties of steel and aluminum alloys including tensile strength are simply not a matter of "using it correctly"?
Biking is not necessarily slower (depending on route / speed), and it is not necessarily an opportunity cost depending on your valuation of exercise even if slower. Structured exercise can also have opportunity and direct monetary costs.
If you don't want to show up sweaty, replace your cotton clothing with moisture-wicking synthetics or carry a change. If your bike has an electric motor, you control the amount of exercise you get -- you can have as little as riding a motorcycle if you desire.
Fact is, if you think you need a car to go a couple of miles, you're wrong. Even if you don't want to elevate your heart rate vs. being in a car (the horror of Americans doing something physical! Oh God! Make it stop!) a motorcycle, scooter, or electric bike is far more efficient. And the dude in South America probably takes in quite a few more kcals/day anyway, he just uses them instead of storing them.
Hey, I'm a pretty libertarian-type guy. You want to drive a Hummer H1 for your 5 mile commute to work, that's fine with me. I simply ask why we continue to pursue inefficiency out of habit when the greatest personal benefit to us might lie in another choice.
1.8" drives aren't significantly larger or heavier and hard drives actually use less power than cheap flash memory. It's only the very best SSDs that represent a power savings vs. hard drives. A good hard drive / notebook will also have the ability to detect impacts and will retract the head, making it no more vulnerable to that. (I've never dropped a notebook, personally...)
I own a Fujitsu P1610, which is smaller, lighter, has superior battery life, speed, display, and yes, a hard drive. Of course it cost $1800 and not $450, but hey, made in Japan quality and efficiency isn't cheap.
Could I get a SSD for my Fujitsu? Sure. And it would make some things faster. But considering how little power the HDD actually draws, it would have a minor effect on battery life at best, and that's assuming I got a high-end SLC SSD that actually used less power.
No, I don't really think a hard drive and a small laptop are mutually exclusive. While flash memory is cooler, go look at actual figures and you'd be surprised how good hard drives still are.
That's part of it certainly-- at some point through mechanisms we don't really understand the memory has to be referenced-- but it's also more than that; the correlates in regional activity mirror structures that tend to serve more active roles in the experience than in memory encoding per se.
;) )
imo a (rough) computer analogy would be something akin to having a Counter-Strike screenshot also be a partial memory dump from very specific regions of the processor and your 3D card, and opening that screenshot later loads those memory dumps and overwrites what you were doing, forcing those same things to be re-executed. (fortunately computers don't do that, and that's one reason they don't have emotional problems
That isn't the point; the study isn't claiming to have deduced how memory works (I like the fun theories involving microtubules and quantum fields there, but hey). It simply shows that activation patterns during recall correlate with those during actual experience, much like is the case with memory encoding in REM sleep.
This is significant because those correlations in experience and recall can profoundly effect our current mental state and environment. Imagery is a tool used very efficiently in sports psychology and works on the same principles.
On the other hand, other studies have shown in recovering from traumatic events, those who recount the negatives of the experience, focus on pain recall, how they were hurt, etc actually have much worse outcomes than patients not receiving any therapy.
Other studies have yet shown similar correlations involving mirror neurons for observing someone else performing an action; if they lift their hand, and we watch them with full attention, the part of our motor cortex correlating with actually performing that action will activate in us. And this is actually used to create procedural ("muscle") memory without ever having actually done that action!
The take home lesson is that what is active and what is not active in your brain right now is influenced by not only what you experience, but also by what you remember, what you think about, and what you imagine. And these things are both good and bad, and are controlled to a significant degree by you.
If you don't need to carry cargo, why don't you just get a bicycle with an electric motor? No taxes or licensing and is still considered a bicycle in most locations.
I own an electric bike and a Honda Element, and think ultra-small hybrid cars aren't particularly useful. City commuting is most efficiently done by a bike or electric bike, and other tasks are best suited to a vehicle with more versatility and cargo room. Some days you DO need to carry 10 bags or cement.
And yes, I live in a state with cold and snow. (MT) My commute takes me 15 minutes by car, and a slightly more direct route via bike takes 30 minutes (~6 miles). If you're an uber road cyclist who can do 40mph instead of 15mph like me, you could probably actually get there more quickly on the bike.
Also, aluminum is not significantly lighter than steel for the same tensile strength, provided you use a quality steel alloy. It's lighter by volume, but that's not really the same thing.
Anyway, bottomline is IMO-- all cars are oversized for commuting, unless you're carrying a lot of cargo/passengers or the weather is bad and you don't own any technical clothing. Most people's commutes are only a couple miles and would be most economical to bike. Not to mention the exercise perks.
Go to any indigenous tribe in South America that hasn't been industrialized, and they could pretty much all easily run your commute without it even being challenging. The notion that we need a metal, inefficient powered carriage that is 10 feet wide to move a couple miles isn't really rational or natural considering human evolution. Making the 10 foot wide metal carriage be only 95% inefficient instead of 96% inefficient is sort of going in the wrong direction, you know?
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. I could've sworn I'd read something similar.
And bonus points to whoever finds the actual study paper on it.
F@H with visuals (map + protein thumbnail): 148 watts
F@H with screensaver: 131 watts
Oddly the screensaver did not drop it by the same number of watts despite the fact the GPU is the same die size as on older PS3s; in fact, it was only 57% the decrease experienced on the 90nm PS3. I am uncertain as to why this may be.
Regardless, 131 watts is still only ~$120/year for me, and that's certainly manageable for the sheer amount of work and folding the PS3 is doing. I probably wouldn't want to pay for an older Pentium 4 box guzzling 2-3x the PS3's power consumption for several orders of magnitude less work, though.
FYI:
Old PS3s (90nm):
Folding@Home with visuals: 215 watts.
Folding@Home screen saver: 185 watts.
New PS3s (65nm):
Running Folding @ home 157
Considering the GPU is still 90nm, that 157 figure should drop to ~127 watts when the screen saver kicks in.
Typical energy costs are also more like $.10/kWh.
127W x 24h/d x 365d/y = 1112520 Watt-hours/y or 1113 kWh/y
at $.10/kWh that actually costs moar like: $111/y.
Or if for some reason you're paying $12/kWh, that's still only $134, less than half of your estimate.
Please stop spreading FUD about F@H and inflating the costs by more than a factor of two. It's important science that benefits everyone and the PS3 is actually very power efficient -- drawing less energy with F@H than your desktop 3D card does idle doing nothing.
If you don't want to participate in F@H and help science and humanity, that's your choice, but at least post the correct data to support your argument.
I really hope no one got dissuaded by the bad data in your argument into not running F@H when they might've contributed a key bit of research important for understanding drug candidates for P53 cancer suppression or Alzheimer's disease treatments. Perhaps I'm being melodramatic, but arguing against F@H makes me a sad panda.
Unless of course you're a highly developed tumor who figured out how to post on Slashdot and fear F@H as a matter of self-preservation, which I could hardly blame you for.
KEEP FOLDING!
XPe is a componentized version of XP Professional. XPe ships the same binaries as XP Professional, but with XPe an OEM is free to choose only the components needed thereby reducing operating system footprint and also reducing attack area as compared with XP Professional.(wikipedia)
The thing with XPe is that yes, it can be stripped down to run off a small CF card, but doing so requires removing a lot of user UI / shell components, drivers, etc. XPe would allow Asus to create a smaller installer, but considering that it would be running in user mode with a full UI/shell I'm not sure you can strip that much from it.
And I'm not sure it would resolve Asus's complaints here, which are performance (not disk footprint) related. I suspect the issue here is the RAM footprint of the OS and the speed of using virtual memory with flash's slow read/write speeds.
I think this is mostly just Asus being cheap, because on Newegg you can get 4gb of DDR2 notebook memory for $50. Perhaps Asus shouldn't be trying to use 512MB or 1GB of RAM with XP when RAM is so cheap.
Would it be such a horrible thing for them to go crazy and put a full $25's worth of 2GB of RAM in an Eee?
I run Vista SP1 on my Fujitsu P1610, with 1GB of RAM, a 60GB 4200rpm HDD, and a Core Solo 1.2ghz CPU; granted it's spec'd higher than the Eee PC but after some hardcore tweaking I'm quite pleased at Vista's performance.
After gutting a lot of the services and registry hacking, I did in fact strip it down feature-wise to be more on-par with XP.
The startup/shutdown times, app launch, and sleep/resume times are all better than XP. And in fact, Vista is much better at resuming wireless internet connections after being suspended than XP, so there's no longer a huge delay for that.
I've done similar tweaks for family members who have purchased Vista boxes with only 1GB of RAM, and I turned a box filled with bloatware and abysmal performance into something that they were so pleased with they didn't bother to upgrade the RAM.
And I didn't even do anything particularly amazing or use the tools to cut down the install size. I suspect an optimized version of Vista would run just fine on Eee-class machines.
XP, 2k, and Vista all share the same core. I don't understand the XP worship here-- I run it on my desktop, but it's hardly a significant improvement from Win2K. It had what... the ugly Luna UI and Windows Firewall? Win2K was faster than XP in benchmarks and had a smaller memory footprint.
So hell, why not go with good old Win2K on the Eee PC then? Because I think we all know that you can get something very close to Win2K's memory footprint and performance with either XP or Vista after some tweaking.
Another thing-- using XIP flash memory apps, you can make pretty much any Windows component or application run from flash memory without using hardly any RAM at all. At the cost of being more difficult to update. But here's a thought: Microsoft could pretty easily extend Superfetch and Readyboost to create XIP apps either automatically or at the user's behest in a semi-permanent manner, and update the XIP images as the app is updated.
Sort of like what was done with the Omnibook 300 back in the day, if anyone remembers that... only with the advantages of flash memory.
I think Vista runs better than most people expect, especially with tweaking, and through innovation and design could run better on Eee-type devices than even Win2K, which to me seems far preferable to regression. Dynamic XIP in flash memory is an example of one way which this could be accomplished.
Alas, while SP1 improves a lot of aspects of Vista performance at the low-end, it does not actually perform said tweaking for you, and MS hasn't started developing features that would improve things on lower-power devices. I think the problem is less Vista, and more bureaucracy than anything.
Well, CE is pretty limited and not really a great OS for the Eee PC but ... it's hardly related to Windows 3.11. It's a true 32-bit OS, the only problem is its numerous platform incompatibilities and small software library. I've owned CE devices from 2.0 to Windows Mobile 5.
I don't think MS would ever say CE competes with Linux in all situations, but it did try to market CE on Eee-formfactor devices once, like the IBM Workpad z50 (which I used to own) and the HP Jornada 820.
It actually was pretty decent... good battery life, and as long as you didn't mind the limitations of CE, it was an OK experience. But the devices were pretty expensive (before everyone score the z50s on closeout sales).
Previous to that, the only flash-based laptop was the HP Omnibook 300 (425, 430, 530) which did in fact run Windows 3.1. If anything, the Omnibook 300 was the precursor of the Eee, in all measures except cost. And just recalling Trumpet Winsock... well trust me, the internet experience in Windows CE was much better.
CE isn't a terrible OS, it's just that the design choices MS made required too many target platforms that make it annoying to develop for. In reality, a complex CE (Windows Mobile) app requires tweaks/a version for every device it runs on. At its conception MS wanted CE to be more platform agnostic than NT (which CE is based on) but it ended up being far less, and now, only running on a single CPU architecture (ARM/XScale).
CE has successfully competed against Linux and won, however, in the handheld/PDA marketplace. It also currently is somehow managing to outsell the iPhone in the smartphone arena. So... I wouldn't declare MS a total loser here. But yeah, I'll take Linux over CE on a notebook-type device.
Apologies for the terrible digression/rambling...
Well said. Why does what he makes bother anyone else? No, I don't like his movies (other than the 5 seconds of nudity in BloodRayne) but there is something very disturbing about the popularity of this "censorship through the will of the majority" thing going on here. I think most of the people who take this petition thing a bit too seriously just need to go watch Rand's "The Fountainhead" on loop until they understand or start getting Bioshock twitches. But yeah. Everyone is quite correct in stating his movies suck. How he got so many (relatively) big actors for his terrible Dungeon Siege movie is completely beyond me. I certainly don't feel a need to petition that, though. There are many causes worthy of a petition. Hatred towards an irrelevant movie producer is not one of them. It's not like he's kicking out modern equivalents of Triumph Des Willens or Birth of a Nation anyway... they're video game movies, people.
Not long after the experiments began, however, there was... an 'incident'... and since that time, the following protocol has been observed:
... every 108 minutes, the button must be pushed. From the moment the alarm sounds, you will have 4 minutes to enter the code into the microcomputer processor... * ...duction into the program. When the alarm sounds, either you or your partner must input the code. It is highly recommended that you and your partner take alternating shifts. In this manner you will both stay as fresh and alert... * ...most importance, that when the alarm sounds, the code be entered correctly and in a timely fashion.
Maybe it's just me, but that one about magnetic monopoles sounds a little too much like Season #2 of "Lost". I'm pretty sure I saw the other two scenarios as Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes. But perhaps their fears can be assuaged regarding magnetic monopoles if we build a bunker with a flip-clock and Apple II+.
Seriously though, last I checked, if monopoles exist at all, they are so massive they cannot possibly be uncovered in any particle accelerator we could hope to build in the foreseeable future.
On behalf of the DeGroots, Alvar Hanso, and all of us at the DHARMA Initiative, thank you, namaste, and... good luck.