I myself never use ms office (or other office applications for that sake), but I would be sad if the article is true about Microsoft having removed a pdf-writing ability from MS-office.
As far as I can figure this means that I will still have problems with non-tech people trying to transfer information to me in format's that will give me trouble to access.
I have had a professors at university upload files in MS-word format that I needed, quite annoying to have to spend time finding a good conversion method during a 1 day exam.
Intelligvent people without the least computer knowledge sometimes do have interesting things to say, so there is quite a bit of knowlegde on the web in ms-word document formats.
I find it at bit thought provoking that the phrase "God Bless Mozilla" has not spun of a any comments yet, while any talk about intelligent creation will make/. glow from the furios comments.
And yes you are right that this post is not about anything that has to do with God which of course it the reason for people not commenting this little feature of the./ post.
I don't know if KrayzieKyd partipates in the frequent discussion about (bashing of?) Intelligent Creation here on/., but I can't but feel a bit awkward reading the words on/.
It's probably just me being touchy, so here goes my good karma (which again is a term I according to my previos (lack of) logic of this comment shuold get annoyed by).
I agree about Leisure suit Larry not being funny.
Sure as a 13 year old kid I also found the Leisure suit Larry series interesting, but it sure wasn't the humor that attracted me back then.
Now I was thinking Day of the Tentacle and The Ur-Quan Masters (aka. Star Control 2) was never than the Monkey Island games, but I guess that is because I never played the never version of the Monkey Island series (which is just sad actually... but these games came out after I totally stopped playing computer games as I was not able to control it and computer games had become an addiction to me, uqm was a fall back that showed me that I am still not able to control this addiction)
Well there is a lot more pictures of user A here in the tour.
There are many nice little features to this aprils fools, I like the diffrent error messages and there is even a press release about how the new tool was leaked to/.
One would almost think that this was somehow coordinated between/. and google, these two april fools fit so well together.
Wind power shows some promise but is associated with bird and bat kills and can never scale up to meet our energy consumption.
I agree that wind power will probably never scale to meet energy consumption, but wind turbines are up in the 3-4 MW by now sold comercially. But there are other big advantages of wind energy.
The biggest advantage I see is that it is the only working decentral power solution we have right now, if we totally rely on big power plants, that being coal, nuclear or hydroelectric we are suddenly very vulnerable to enviromental disasters (with the global warming the extreme weather conditions probably aren't getting fewer) and terrorism which also seems to be a problem on the rise.
So investing in wind-power is way to secure power in critical situations for critical needs.
Another great thing about wind power is that if a wind turbine fails... if you are extremely unlucky you might get a wing on your head (that has never happened to anyone you to my knowledge), but compared to the effect of a failure in any of the other central big power solutions that is truly nothing.
As for the bird and bat kills... this is terrible nonsense. I live in Denmark where we have the biggest wind farms of the world or at least they were the biggest for many years, there has been several studies about how these windfarms have been affecting bird life and the conclusion of every study has been pretty much no effect. Yes maybe one bird get's killed once in while but the overall birdlife is not affected at all and the birds breed happily below the wind mills. Actually one of the wind mills farms on the ocean at the west coast of Jutland has become a seal habitat where the seals live on the foundations of the mill's and there is also plenty of birds there, they have totally gotten used to the mills being there and the technicians out there pretty much never see a dead bird but lot's of livings ones (I have been talking to one of the technicians myself).
Yes I am very pro-wind... I once was very strongly against nuclear power (I actually have been sitting on the rails, and doing everything I could peacefully to get past police to block the so called castors which contain nuclear waste that has an "non permanent" depletion place in the area of Gorleben (northern Germany)), but I have by now accepted that for the time being nuclear power is needed, no matter how unpleasent it is. I especially don't like the way nuclear power forms "small governments" outside public and government control (I guess the oil-companies are in no way better when it comes to this) and the waste problem still being pretty much unsolved doesn't make things better... still I am accept that nuclear power is needed for now.
I am not all to certain of what technique is to used here and maybe I should RTFA (I will eventually but it looks at a first glance like a newspaper story without all that much real info in it), but I can't help but wonder is what they are going to do not something similar to what is being done at Sellafield in England and La Hague in France?
I have not done all that much research on this, but from the little I have done the problems that have been at these two "enrichment plants" are not something that makes me think that more of this would be a good idea.
I find it interesting that Mona Sahlin who is from a "center party" is making this statement. I guess it has a lot to do with the swedish greens being part of the government.
No matter how progressive our past government in Denmark were on the enviromental area I don't think Svend Auken would ever have made such a statement in his time as prime minister. So in this way it is nice to see that the green party of sweden actually makes a difference.
Studying geophysics I guess I should be able to answer questions like this one myself, but I am not able to do that right now as I have not had all that many lectures on the nature and forces of vulcanoes (I am mostly studying groundwater and technologies associated with this).
I wonder if this "too large" amount of lava could have anything to do with the blast in 1980? The blast must have caused some change in the way this vulcanoe works. I guess the lack of earthquakes does disprove this idea if the rigedity below St. Helens is correctly estimated.
Anyhow I think this is very interesting, this is something I will try to keep myself updated on by studying articles in the geophysics library (I haven't found the articles of the magazines found there "online for free" so far). As also mentioned in other comments geophysics do know astonishingly little about what is actually going on beneath the crust. Geophysics is a "young science" and there is a lot of new interesting studies and theories coming out all the time, but still none of them doesn't give a decent explanation of everything that is going on that we can detect.
Just wanted to add that these GPS measurement stations put up for this purpose could give valauable information that could also be used for other many purposes, I can mostly think of geophysics purposes as that is what I work with myself, but I imagine such a web could be used for many other things
I remember a paper about the isostatic rebound after the icecap in Scandinavia where GPS recievers were used. A curiosity I remember from the paper was that at the coastal areas there were quite a lot more uncertainty on the vertical movement, which the authors said probably was caused by the bigger amount of snow that assembles on the GPS devices and thereby causing refraction of the waves used for the GPS measurement
GPS information could is also used to determine the absolute movement of plates and I imagine that this system could also with time, be used to predict big earthquakes more precisely and thereby give even more time to prepare for the tsunamies etc.
I wonder if this event will help provide some clue as to what is driving the plate motions.
When I last had lectures in a subject that had to do with plate-tectonics (~1 year ago) there still wasn't any theory that could "give" enough force to create the plate motions that are observed today and should have happened in the past (at least to the knowledge of my professor). For example India should have stopped it's northwards motion long ago but it is still not moving it's way northwards into Eurasia.
From the little I remember from my geophysic lessons, a "point pressure" like this for sure resembles would in "normal crust" cause threee points of major pressure (in the 2D model), that is right below the point of pressure and then points certain distance where the crust "bulps back up" from the pressure. That is what I have learned has happened with the alps and that is proposed to cause some of the seismisity in the meditarrian in areas where there, according to plate-theory alone, should not be much activity.
So I guess I would also look for these earthquakes that would have the same distance to the tower. But, the alps and a tower, that is two very diffrent scales. I do recall a professor telling me that the alps and molehill would have the same effect. But, that was a very simplified theory, that did not take a lot of things into account... probably only useable for teaching and not truly useable in the real world.
Thinking about it the distance to the other two points of "extra pressure" might be smaller than the uncertainty of finding the position of the earthquake, with such relatively small earthquakes described in the article (4 Richter)
I also use Gentoo for this purpose with distcc (I don't really use other distro's but Gentoo) the one thing I really like about working with "older" machines is that you suddenly really feel the diffrence when you compile with optimized parameters. I have X, fluxbox and firefox (which is what I have running most of the time) running smoothly and with a speed that allows it to actually be used decently om my old Compaq Armada laptop with a 366 Mhz processer.
Here in Denmark, where we have plenty of fresh water in aquifiers, only real problem right now is in the north-western part of Zealand, Copenhagen, where all aquifiers have been poluted by the massive population and they get their water from further down south. The two main problem are irrigation and contamination of the aquifiers, both problems mainly caused by the farmers.
Depending on where in Denmark you are in some areas up 70% of the water used goes to irrigation. The problem is that the last 30 vinters have been "a wet period" and there has been plenty of resupply to the aquifiers but if we start having a more dry period, like the 1960'ies again then there won't be enough water for this massive irrigation. Also we tap deeper and deeper into our aquifiers, some of this very high quality water that is over 100's of years old and extremely pure have been for irrigation. There is coming more regulation to this now, but still it is a major problem.
The other problem contamination mostly comes from pesitcides and fertilizers used in most of the farms all over the country. More and more aquifiers can not be used for drinking water anymore because the levels of dangoras leftover from the pesitcides have become to high... this is actually getting a bit of a problem, even in some less populated areas.
These are really the main problems here in Denmark... water has gotten a nice price tag on it the last 10 years or so and the population has cut their water use in half (by methods like the ones mentioned above), which is all very good, but the main problem remains the farms that don't get billed for their water use (they dig their own wells, which of course is regulated, but not pricetagged) and they keep on using huge amounts of pesticides that threathen our drinking water supply in this country (they try to regulate this... but whenever one pesiticide is banned they just come up with another that it takes 10 years before it is found in the ground water and banned... and then they come up with the next one)
As far as I know the law has passed in Denmark also. I remember some discussions about how small an ISP you have to be to be free from these demands as it is a major expense and even worse for small ISP's. I think the limit for this was set to 1000 customers here in Denmark, but I may remember this wrongly.
Does anyone know about these systems being used by the police etc. in the countries where this has been implemented?
From the tensor that does look like a strike slip fault to me, so you are to some degree right.
But this thing would still release enough energy to trigger a major underwater mud-slide and that way releasing the energy for a major tsunami if the slide occurs in the wrong position.
From classes (I study geophysics) I seem to remember there being some pretty steep slopes where these mud-slides could occur.
I too stick with Jpilot and my good old Palm m125. It has everything I need.
I had some problems getting things to sync with Linux back on 2.4 and did more or less stop using my palm-pilot when I switched from windoze to Linux, but after having switched to kernel 2.6 it works like a charm and I have again been able to live a somewhat organised life.
Still I think that paper versions of datebooks are in many ways superior to pda's. I would use a paper version if I had the skill, but for some reason I only seem to my datebook when it is digital.
I tried to use a paper version a few times and was especially impressed by the speed of typing, the ability to add all kinds of things to the pages and that it never ran out of battery. However a problem was that the calendar was always empty even though I was overbooked and I keeped making double appointments, so I had to go back to my palm-pilot again.
Slashdot Mirror
I myself never use ms office (or other office applications for that sake), but I would be sad if the article is true about Microsoft having removed a pdf-writing ability from MS-office. As far as I can figure this means that I will still have problems with non-tech people trying to transfer information to me in format's that will give me trouble to access. I have had a professors at university upload files in MS-word format that I needed, quite annoying to have to spend time finding a good conversion method during a 1 day exam. Intelligvent people without the least computer knowledge sometimes do have interesting things to say, so there is quite a bit of knowlegde on the web in ms-word document formats.
I find it at bit thought provoking that the phrase "God Bless Mozilla" has not spun of a any comments yet, while any talk about intelligent creation will make /. glow from the furios comments.
./ post. /., but I can't but feel a bit awkward reading the words on /.
And yes you are right that this post is not about anything that has to do with God which of course it the reason for people not commenting this little feature of the
I don't know if KrayzieKyd partipates in the frequent discussion about (bashing of?) Intelligent Creation here on
It's probably just me being touchy, so here goes my good karma (which again is a term I according to my previos (lack of) logic of this comment shuold get annoyed by).
I agree about Leisure suit Larry not being funny.
... but these games came out after I totally stopped playing computer games as I was not able to control it and computer games had become an addiction to me, uqm was a fall back that showed me that I am still not able to control this addiction)
Sure as a 13 year old kid I also found the Leisure suit Larry series interesting, but it sure wasn't the humor that attracted me back then.
Now I was thinking Day of the Tentacle and The Ur-Quan Masters (aka. Star Control 2) was never than the Monkey Island games, but I guess that is because I never played the never version of the Monkey Island series (which is just sad actually
Well there is a lot more pictures of user A here in the tour. /. /. and google, these two april fools fit so well together.
There are many nice little features to this aprils fools, I like the diffrent error messages and there is even a press release about how the new tool was leaked to
One would almost think that this was somehow coordinated between
Wind power shows some promise but is associated with bird and bat kills and can never scale up to meet our energy consumption.
... if you are extremely unlucky you might get a wing on your head (that has never happened to anyone you to my knowledge), but compared to the effect of a failure in any of the other central big power solutions that is truly nothing.
... this is terrible nonsense. I live in Denmark where we have the biggest wind farms of the world or at least they were the biggest for many years, there has been several studies about how these windfarms have been affecting bird life and the conclusion of every study has been pretty much no effect. Yes maybe one bird get's killed once in while but the overall birdlife is not affected at all and the birds breed happily below the wind mills. Actually one of the wind mills farms on the ocean at the west coast of Jutland has become a seal habitat where the seals live on the foundations of the mill's and there is also plenty of birds there, they have totally gotten used to the mills being there and the technicians out there pretty much never see a dead bird but lot's of livings ones (I have been talking to one of the technicians myself).
... I once was very strongly against nuclear power (I actually have been sitting on the rails, and doing everything I could peacefully to get past police to block the so called castors which contain nuclear waste that has an "non permanent" depletion place in the area of Gorleben (northern Germany)), but I have by now accepted that for the time being nuclear power is needed, no matter how unpleasent it is. I especially don't like the way nuclear power forms "small governments" outside public and government control (I guess the oil-companies are in no way better when it comes to this) and the waste problem still being pretty much unsolved doesn't make things better ... still I am accept that nuclear power is needed for now.
I agree that wind power will probably never scale to meet energy consumption, but wind turbines are up in the 3-4 MW by now sold comercially. But there are other big advantages of wind energy.
The biggest advantage I see is that it is the only working decentral power solution we have right now, if we totally rely on big power plants, that being coal, nuclear or hydroelectric we are suddenly very vulnerable to enviromental disasters (with the global warming the extreme weather conditions probably aren't getting fewer) and terrorism which also seems to be a problem on the rise.
So investing in wind-power is way to secure power in critical situations for critical needs.
Another great thing about wind power is that if a wind turbine fails
As for the bird and bat kills
Yes I am very pro-wind
I am not all to certain of what technique is to used here and maybe I should RTFA (I will eventually but it looks at a first glance like a newspaper story without all that much real info in it), but I can't help but wonder is what they are going to do not something similar to what is being done at Sellafield in England and La Hague in France?
I have not done all that much research on this, but from the little I have done the problems that have been at these two "enrichment plants" are not something that makes me think that more of this would be a good idea.
but even if I weren't already an atheist it would have been total confirmation that there is no afterlife
Well this experience doesn't necesarily lead into atheism, for me it leads to the conclusion that the soul is not immortal.
Your experience does seem to discredit a lot of belief systems, but for example this one is not discreditet by it.
I find it interesting that Mona Sahlin who is from a "center party" is making this statement. I guess it has a lot to do with the swedish greens being part of the government.
No matter how progressive our past government in Denmark were on the enviromental area I don't think Svend Auken would ever have made such a statement in his time as prime minister. So in this way it is nice to see that the green party of sweden actually makes a difference.
Studying geophysics I guess I should be able to answer questions like this one myself, but I am not able to do that right now as I have not had all that many lectures on the nature and forces of vulcanoes (I am mostly studying groundwater and technologies associated with this).
I wonder if this "too large" amount of lava could have anything to do with the blast in 1980? The blast must have caused some change in the way this vulcanoe works.
I guess the lack of earthquakes does disprove this idea if the rigedity below St. Helens is correctly estimated.
Anyhow I think this is very interesting, this is something I will try to keep myself updated on by studying articles in the geophysics library (I haven't found the articles of the magazines found there "online for free" so far).
As also mentioned in other comments geophysics do know astonishingly little about what is actually going on beneath the crust. Geophysics is a "young science" and there is a lot of new interesting studies and theories coming out all the time, but still none of them doesn't give a decent explanation of everything that is going on that we can detect.
Just wanted to add that these GPS measurement stations put up for this purpose could give valauable information that could also be used for other many purposes, I can mostly think of geophysics purposes as that is what I work with myself, but I imagine such a web could be used for many other things
I remember a paper about the isostatic rebound after the icecap in Scandinavia where GPS recievers were used. A curiosity I remember from the paper was that at the coastal areas there were quite a lot more uncertainty on the vertical movement, which the authors said probably was caused by the bigger amount of snow that assembles on the GPS devices and thereby causing refraction of the waves used for the GPS measurement
GPS information could is also used to determine the absolute movement of plates and I imagine that this system could also with time, be used to predict big earthquakes more precisely and thereby give even more time to prepare for the tsunamies etc.
I wonder if this event will help provide some clue as to what is driving the plate motions.
When I last had lectures in a subject that had to do with plate-tectonics (~1 year ago) there still wasn't any theory that could "give" enough force to create the plate motions that are observed today and should have happened in the past (at least to the knowledge of my professor).
For example India should have stopped it's northwards motion long ago but it is still not moving it's way northwards into Eurasia.
From the little I remember from my geophysic lessons, a "point pressure" like this for sure resembles would in "normal crust" cause threee points of major pressure (in the 2D model), that is right below the point of pressure and then points certain distance where the crust "bulps back up" from the pressure. That is what I have learned has happened with the alps and that is proposed to cause some of the seismisity in the meditarrian in areas where there, according to plate-theory alone, should not be much activity.
... probably only useable for teaching and not truly useable in the real world.
So I guess I would also look for these earthquakes that would have the same distance to the tower. But, the alps and a tower, that is two very diffrent scales.
I do recall a professor telling me that the alps and molehill would have the same effect. But, that was a very simplified theory, that did not take a lot of things into account
Thinking about it the distance to the other two points of "extra pressure" might be smaller than the uncertainty of finding the position of the earthquake, with such relatively small earthquakes described in the article (4 Richter)
I also use Gentoo for this purpose with distcc (I don't really use other distro's but Gentoo) the one thing I really like about working with "older" machines is that you suddenly really feel the diffrence when you compile with optimized parameters.
I have X, fluxbox and firefox (which is what I have running most of the time) running smoothly and with a speed that allows it to actually be used decently om my old Compaq Armada laptop with a 366 Mhz processer.
Here in Denmark, where we have plenty of fresh water in aquifiers, only real problem right now is in the north-western part of Zealand, Copenhagen, where all aquifiers have been poluted by the massive population and they get their water from further down south.
... this is actually getting a bit of a problem, even in some less populated areas.
... water has gotten a nice price tag on it the last 10 years or so and the population has cut their water use in half (by methods like the ones mentioned above), which is all very good, but the main problem remains the farms that don't get billed for their water use (they dig their own wells, which of course is regulated, but not pricetagged) and they keep on using huge amounts of pesticides that threathen our drinking water supply in this country (they try to regulate this ... but whenever one pesiticide is banned they just come up with another that it takes 10 years before it is found in the ground water and banned ... and then they come up with the next one)
The two main problem are irrigation and contamination of the aquifiers, both problems mainly caused by the farmers.
Depending on where in Denmark you are in some areas up 70% of the water used goes to irrigation. The problem is that the last 30 vinters have been "a wet period" and there has been plenty of resupply to the aquifiers but if we start having a more dry period, like the 1960'ies again then there won't be enough water for this massive irrigation.
Also we tap deeper and deeper into our aquifiers, some of this very high quality water that is over 100's of years old and extremely pure have been for irrigation. There is coming more regulation to this now, but still it is a major problem.
The other problem contamination mostly comes from pesitcides and fertilizers used in most of the farms all over the country. More and more aquifiers can not be used for drinking water anymore because the levels of dangoras leftover from the pesitcides have become to high
These are really the main problems here in Denmark
As far as I know the law has passed in Denmark also.
I remember some discussions about how small an ISP you have to be to be free from these demands as it is a major expense and even worse for small ISP's.
I think the limit for this was set to 1000 customers here in Denmark, but I may remember this wrongly.
Does anyone know about these systems being used by the police etc. in the countries where this has been implemented?
link to earthquake info
From the tensor that does look like a strike slip fault to me, so you are to some degree right.
But this thing would still release enough energy to trigger a major underwater mud-slide and that way releasing the energy for a major tsunami if the slide occurs in the wrong position.
From classes (I study geophysics) I seem to remember there being some pretty steep slopes where these mud-slides could occur.
I too stick with Jpilot and my good old Palm m125.
It has everything I need.
I had some problems getting things to sync with Linux back on 2.4 and did more or less stop using my palm-pilot when I switched from windoze to Linux, but after having switched to kernel 2.6 it works like a charm and I have again been able to live a somewhat organised life.
Still I think that paper versions of datebooks are in many ways superior to pda's.
I would use a paper version if I had the skill, but for some reason I only seem to my datebook when it is digital.
I tried to use a paper version a few times and was especially impressed by the speed of typing, the ability to add all kinds of things to the pages and that it never ran out of battery.
However a problem was that the calendar was always empty even though I was overbooked and I keeped making double appointments, so I had to go back to my palm-pilot again.