We could do without the friction on the wheels for propultion without much difficulty.
Not without ditching wheels altogether. And with wheels... well, think of even starting to move a car on the low friction surface of something like wet ice, or slippery tires in the mud. Friction is what keeps the wheel from slipping on the surface, without it you might as well be using a sled.
Lossless storage (FLAC, Apple, etc.) is the only way to go that makes any sense at all.
Completely agree. I was only trying to point out that having a personal preference (even one that I dislike - but hey, if it works for him who am I to throw stones?) does not one make a FUD-spreading shill. OTOH ~300kbps WMA is better than 128kbps AAC, regardless of how fit is to choose WMA as a high-rate codec anyway. And since I have no idea whether he really must do with WMA or not, I would defer judgement on that. But speaking for myself, if WMA ever were a choice, it would be the one discarded first.
With iTunes you are stuck with 128kbps AAC encoded by their in house encoding/DRM software. When you rip a song yourself you have the option of using any one of myriad different encoders, algorithms, bitrates, configurations, and etc. I usually use 240-355 VBR WMA encoding for personal use.
Oh great, another Microsoft fan spreading FUD about Apple.
Aren't you jumping the gun a little? The way I see it, he didn't put any FUD about Apple - unless you can buy songs at a higher bitrate than 128kbps. Also, his statement about ripping flexibility is correct - you can use the highest bitrate available for your favorite codec, or go lossless. Then he stated a personal preference, high-rate WMA. Now, I'm no MS user (let alone fan of WM(A|V) ) but perhaps the guy didn't want to bother with installing a new ripper on his WinXP and, since MediaPlayer rips to WMA, he went for the highest quality available. Heck, I'm doing an equivalent thing on my machine - why bother installing another lossless encoder (monkey's audio, apple lossless) when flac is available from my distro and does the job nicely? For that matter, would you install something else when iTunes gives you AAC and apple lossless?
Just because he's not worshiping the not-so-high-rate AAC encoding that Apple uses for the iTunes store does not make him a 'MS fan spreading FUD about Apple'.
First of all, WMA has been shown to be the worst (or second worst) CODEC in all the audio tests that have been done.
And that was for low-to-medium bitrates, AFAIR. High bitrate encodings are pretty much on par across the established codecs. So depending on your favorite software and the trade-offs you're willing to live with, you can choose any of them. Who is spreading FUD now?
TFSite (yeah, I know, clicking on details in TFA is... too far away) says the screen is lexan-protected. No mention on the controls, though - probably open (touch-sensitive through a bullet-proof material is a bit hard) just as ports are open.
Yes, you're paying for "unlimited" 5Mbps cable modem service, or whatever. And *you* can get and use that, *today*. And you can keep that pipe full 24/7 in many markets without raising an eyebrow. As long as you're one of the "1%" customers: the small group of customers that use a majority of the resources. What happens when that "1%" grows to 15? 25? 50? What happens when $50/month for 5Mbps service no longer covers their costs?
Cue in laughter from the non-americans that already have significantly faster connections that they do abuse simultaneously with things like IPTV and VOIP in addition to regular internet use. And for a cheaper price. Isn't competition wonderful? wait, no it's not when there is none.
What about DSL providers whose operations may largely be supported by telephone business? What happens if they lose a quarter, third, or half of their paying $30/month landline customers to VoIP? You might argue they're already losing them to cell phones, and so on, and I'd agree. But the bottom line is, they're looking for ways to continue to support their operations five years down the road.
Oh, certainly. Long live obsolete technology. I say we should all have to pay a levy to the makers of phonograph cylinders for any music purchases we make. After all, how are they going to survive? The telephone business that has wire to my place would better offer me a compelling reason to use it. I have no obligation to use their existing infrastructure if it does not meet my needs, or to pay for their upgrades and pay again when they will want to 'recover costs' through higher access fees. What, you thought that they'd switch you to fiber for free and give you the same rate once they have it installed?
It's easy to sit here and say Google already pays to be connected to Level3 or Cogent and I already pay to be connected to Charter. But what if I and a hundred thousand others all of a sudden start downloading a few 1 gig movies from a legitimate commercial provider every other night between 6 and 10pm? How can they support that?
Are you that simple? ISP level caching and connection throttling can do it now. So you aren't going to get the full 5mbs download speed, but was that advertised as the top or the steady value? Besides, what you're talking about is streaming (otherwise why the same hours?) so the requirement is smooth video, not top speed download.
The real story here is that telcos want more money under the guise of 'investitions'; oh, there will be investitions, but the beauty is that others have to pay upfront for them without any guarantee that the investition will happen. And I have little doubt that, if they're going to be allowed to get away with this, they'll take their sweet time to blunder through rewiring fiber - or not, as the case might be if they decide your neighborhod does not have enough 'growth potential'. And in the end expect to have still poorer service than many places abroad, due to wonderful copetition here, or lack thereof. Speaking of which, I wonder if they'll flip a coin when you access services outside the US between severely throttling the connection and charging you extra for it. Why, those pesky aliens can't use our pipes for free, can they now?
I know you're just flamming, but hey, you made my morning laugh. So...
try actually configuring an equal dell to any mac and it'll come up more or it'll have a serious disadvantage, like a laptop being 2" thick with a 45 min battery life, try acctually checking the facts before posting apple flaimbait as the mac pro and soon to be released xserve are very economic choices.
What's that about laptops again? the GP was talking servers, are you running your servers on MacBooks? And speaking of facts-checking, do show me a 4P+ XServe, please. I'll not even ask for heavy-hitter systems with almost everything being hot-pluggable. Yeah, XServe is a very economic choice - if money is your main concern.
And to justify my 4P request - the hot thing nowadays is server virtualisation (you know, more efficient use of resources and all that jazz) and 4P-8P systems are just what the doctor ordered. Running... you guessed it, not OSX (Linux and Solaris, most typically)
apple has always been reasonably priced they just appear expensive due to the face they don't do the low end tower which best buy flogs for $299
Again, you seem slightly confused about what server hardware is. Let me fix that for you: "Apple does flog low-end servers (well, they will as soon as they start shipping xserves) at $2999". The funny thing is, Linux is making a killing in that market and Apple has nothing to stop it.
Business users. If migrating the business desktop to Linux gains enough traction MS will have to do it to keep at least some revenue stream from those customers. The other incentive that's been growing lately is government desktops. Unlike Apple users, individual Linux users are not likely to pay for MSOffice - but an IT department is a different kettle of fish.
Actually, his solution is correct. His workings are complete bullshit though.
Not exactly. His workings are correct, too - what sucks is the formatting. Do it yourself and you'll see that specifically sqare roots are missing: cos B = 3/4 => sin B = sqrt(7)/4 and so on. However trivial the problem was, though, he wouldn't have gotten the right answer by bungling the math so badly as his submission formatting would suggest.
The standard memory management on 32bit x86 archs is 2GB reserved for the OS and the remaining 2GB available for the application (and sometimes, with some OS-level tweaks, a 1GB OS, 3GB apps partitioning can be achieved). One big boon for 32bit apps running on a 64bit/x86-64 OS is that the kernel no longer needs to reserve part of the 4GB segment for itself, so the application gets it all to play with.
No, it wouldn't be anticompetitive - but I bet shareholders won't be happy with it. That's giving away a large chunk of marketshare with little tangible gains - ATi probably moves more Intel chipsets than the amount of AM2 chipsets they would be moving if they stuck to only that.
It would, however, be smart to make your competitor dependent on your chipsets. Then you get lots of small knobs to twist and produce interesting effects. Of course, Intel wouldn't like that and will have to revamp its chipset production/downscale CPU production/increase prices. All nice side effects.
Personall, though, I think this is nonsense. AMD is too tied to nVidia these days and chipset/video is not their main problem right now (at least not on the short term; on a slightly longer term they'll want to have a low-power solution for laptops to compete with Intel, but buying ATi for that is overkill)
Perhaps compared to MS Word the OOo equation editor is a marvel, but coming from Latex it's atrocious. It feels like a bastardized version of what one would have done in tex and with close to no control on the way the output will appear. My feeling was that it's useless for anything lenghtier than a short presentation. Of course, YMMV.
Actually, that's not true. CDs have a "copy inhibit bit", much like the proposed broadcast flag.
Right. SCMS. Which is supposed to forbid copying a copy, not an original. Ripping/copying original disks is still technically legal (remember, SCMS it's supposed to say 'original, copy allowed')
Well, unlike DVDs where ripping requires decrypting the signal, CD ripping saves un-protected audio output to a file. The CD drive producing this signal is not breaking any copy protection, as that is its intended functionality. Your argument would work for the proposed anti-analog-hole legislation, but even that would only be for the case of CDs having the audio signal watermarked/whatever so as to mean 'copy forbidden' - leaving plenty of CDs legally ripable.
OK, so to restate my points: first, there is no DMCA case in ripping CDDA tracks off a conforming audio CD - the proper argument here is copyright, not DMCA; second, not all countries have DMCA equivalents, so saying DMCA breach == ilegal is only true in some particular jurisdictions (hence false as an all-encompassing statement)
Anyway, concerning your encrypted backup argument, I have some doubts that it would work in a technical enough court. The case is, while I can certainly make a backup of the encrypted content, DVD writers will not allow me to restore it to a perfect equivalent of the original, since I cannot write back the disk key. Thus my 'backup' copy is all but useless. If I am legally entitled to make personal backups under some fair-use exception in the local copyright law, then the backup should better be restoreable, which only leaves unencrypted backups.
Make no mistake, "ripping" you CDs is definitely illegal.
That is usually called wishful thinking.
Almost all CDs today come with some form of ant-ripping technology.
OK, that was probably anti-ripping - myself, I wouldn't much care for ripping ants, whether using CDs or not. But nevermind that - you might as well have dropped 'almost', as all CDs come with a copyright notice and in some people's mind that in itself should make ripping illegal, right? Well, let's see
By admitting that you have "ripped" your CDs, you are admitting guilt to breaking the DMCA laws.
Implicit assumptions: an existing DMCA law and either no Fair Use laws or precedents of the DMCA-like laws trumping Fair Use. Let me assure you, frient, you're on VERY shaky ground here. You might also not be aware that some countries allow by law one copy for non-commercial use (private copy/fair use/backup copy, etc.) so your sweeping assertion is clearly wrong in those cases.
In the end, you come off sounding suspiciously like a RIAA troll. There are still legal exceptions to the author's rights, no matter how much the entertainment industry would wish otherwise. Please take your FUD elsewhere.
Yet I believe you could use it to argue intent. Leaving aside the matter of jurisdiction, MSFT continued a type of business practice that was deemed illegal in a court of law. This is hardly the behavior of an innocent company. So one can argue that if the EU finds MSFT's behavior illegal in their jurisdiction as well, their punitive measures should be stronger than the ones US imposed, which did not appear to have the intended effect (that is, stopping MSFT from abusing their position, whether you want to call it monopoly or not)
I can see an interesting situation where you could have a traditional CPU, to which you could plug in additional external processor modules as your needs expand.
Indeed. It sounds like a Cell-type Opteron configuration waiting to happen. If AMD manages to pull something like that off, Intel will have to eat dust for a while. For now, though, it's a fun speculation.
I don't quite see how socketed CPUs are a surprise in the x86 world. Coming from the PowerPC Macs you might call it different, but hardly surprising. It would have been surprising for Apple not to use the default and least expensive option.
Yeah it was. They called it Longhorn back in 2000, then renamed it as vista.
So? That's just the codename - just as the 'next Vista' (Blackcomb/Vienna) codename has been around for a while. How could Longhorn/Vista have been delayed 6 years when the current release estimate is not even 6 years from the original XP launch? (which iirc was in October 2001)
If my timeline is right, Longhorn was originally supposed to be shipping sometime in 2003, so that makes it 'only' somewhere between 3 and 4 years late. Still a record, although compared with Duke Nukem Forever it's going to be almost on time.
It cant possibly be that Venus is 23 million miles closer to the sun. It cant be that Venus is 25% closer to the Sun than the Earth. Has to be the carbon dioxide. After all there can be only one cause for any effect.
Well, let's see... according to wikipedia, here's a small list:
Mercury surface temperature: 90 K (min) 440 K (avg) 700 K (max)
Venus surface temperature: 228 K (min, cloud tops) 737 K (avg) 773 K (max)
Earth surface temperature: 185 K (min) 287 K (avg) 331 K (max)
to make
Mars surface temperature: 133 K(min) 210 K (avg) 293 K (max)
Now, if distance to the Sun is all there is to explain it, someone messed up really bad with our basic knowledge of the Solar System, for Venus is the hottest inner planet and should obviously be the closest to the Sun. No way it could be about twice further from it than Mercury.
Also, could you please enlighten us how can it be that the temperature difference between night and day on Venus is so small in spite of the rotation period being about 243 Earth days? wouldn't ~4 Earth-months worth of night be enough to cool that side of the planet? after all, Mercury's day is almost 4 timers shorter than Venus' and the max. temperature is close, but the min temperature on Mercury is low enough for high Tc superconductivity.
Not to worry, they'll be taxing you the license you bought - just as it is for a software purchase. Buy a retail version of Win XP in a brick-and-mortar store, pay tax. And it's not just because the CD constitutes a tangible asset, since the intrinsic value of a CD is minuscule. So it's not even an issue of 'software programs' - they'll be taxing license purchases, be it for software, music, movies, podcasts or whatever novelty will pop up next year. Just as soon as someone hits them with the right clue-stick.
Well, as one thing leads to another, you'll have taxes on subscription music services, then or general pay-for 'net subscriptions... next thing you know, you'll have to pay tax on that/. subscription. Now that would be a news item.
There's a difference between the strength of a gravitational field and a gravitational gradient. It's like at the center of the Earth. The gravitational gradient there (relative to the Earth's field) is zero, but the force of all that overhanging rock is pretty high. You wouldn't float there comfortably with no force acting on you. You'd be squished.
ouch! no. At least, not if you assume spherical symmetry. Baby analytical mech. example: the uniform sphere. Gravitational force is linear inside, going to zero.
You'd be squashed, alright, but not by gravity. It's the pressure in all that rock around you that you have to watch for. But if you manage to stabilize the hole you supposedly dug in the center of the Earth against the surrounding pressure, then you'd be floating quite comfortably.
All this climate study has to be taken cum grano salis apparently. Regarding your plot, there's an interesting tidbit in Eos Vol. 85, No. 39 (sorry, this pdf is the quickest ref I found) about its relevance past 1980. So whom to trust? unfortunately a cursory look is nowhere near enough.
To make it more specific, if you have a driving force and your system has large enough dampening you'll be following the force with some phase difference. Decrease the dampening, make the system multi-mode with strong enough couplings and you'll lose the simple correlation. So... of course solar activity matters - after all, Sun is the energy source for the lot of us here. The question is, however, is Earth doing the same thing it's always been doing with that extra heat from the Sun? Are we getting the 'normal' temperature increases, or are local effects amplifying it? (if so by how much)
Sadly, there is too much politics in this topic and not just in good ol' US of A. And the devil is in the details, as with all science - just what politicians love for their spin.
Slashdot Mirror
Not without ditching wheels altogether. And with wheels
Completely agree. I was only trying to point out that having a personal preference (even one that I dislike - but hey, if it works for him who am I to throw stones?) does not one make a FUD-spreading shill. OTOH ~300kbps WMA is better than 128kbps AAC, regardless of how fit is to choose WMA as a high-rate codec anyway. And since I have no idea whether he really must do with WMA or not, I would defer judgement on that. But speaking for myself, if WMA ever were a choice, it would be the one discarded first.
Aren't you jumping the gun a little? The way I see it, he didn't put any FUD about Apple - unless you can buy songs at a higher bitrate than 128kbps. Also, his statement about ripping flexibility is correct - you can use the highest bitrate available for your favorite codec, or go lossless. Then he stated a personal preference, high-rate WMA. Now, I'm no MS user (let alone fan of WM(A|V) ) but perhaps the guy didn't want to bother with installing a new ripper on his WinXP and, since MediaPlayer rips to WMA, he went for the highest quality available. Heck, I'm doing an equivalent thing on my machine - why bother installing another lossless encoder (monkey's audio, apple lossless) when flac is available from my distro and does the job nicely? For that matter, would you install something else when iTunes gives you AAC and apple lossless?
Just because he's not worshiping the not-so-high-rate AAC encoding that Apple uses for the iTunes store does not make him a 'MS fan spreading FUD about Apple'.
And that was for low-to-medium bitrates, AFAIR. High bitrate encodings are pretty much on par across the established codecs. So depending on your favorite software and the trade-offs you're willing to live with, you can choose any of them. Who is spreading FUD now?
TFSite (yeah, I know, clicking on details in TFA is ... too far away) says the screen is lexan-protected. No mention on the controls, though - probably open (touch-sensitive through a bullet-proof material is a bit hard) just as ports are open.
If all you need is authentication, LDAP is overkill - just use kerberos. If you want directory services though, LDAP is your friend (or enemy)
Cue in laughter from the non-americans that already have significantly faster connections that they do abuse simultaneously with things like IPTV and VOIP in addition to regular internet use. And for a cheaper price. Isn't competition wonderful? wait, no it's not when there is none.
Oh, certainly. Long live obsolete technology. I say we should all have to pay a levy to the makers of phonograph cylinders for any music purchases we make. After all, how are they going to survive?
The telephone business that has wire to my place would better offer me a compelling reason to use it. I have no obligation to use their existing infrastructure if it does not meet my needs, or to pay for their upgrades and pay again when they will want to 'recover costs' through higher access fees. What, you thought that they'd switch you to fiber for free and give you the same rate once they have it installed?
Are you that simple? ISP level caching and connection throttling can do it now. So you aren't going to get the full 5mbs download speed, but was that advertised as the top or the steady value? Besides, what you're talking about is streaming (otherwise why the same hours?) so the requirement is smooth video, not top speed download.
The real story here is that telcos want more money under the guise of 'investitions'; oh, there will be investitions, but the beauty is that others have to pay upfront for them without any guarantee that the investition will happen. And I have little doubt that, if they're going to be allowed to get away with this, they'll take their sweet time to blunder through rewiring fiber - or not, as the case might be if they decide your neighborhod does not have enough 'growth potential'. And in the end expect to have still poorer service than many places abroad, due to wonderful copetition here, or lack thereof. Speaking of which, I wonder if they'll flip a coin when you access services outside the US between severely throttling the connection and charging you extra for it. Why, those pesky aliens can't use our pipes for free, can they now?
What's that about laptops again? the GP was talking servers, are you running your servers on MacBooks? And speaking of facts-checking, do show me a 4P+ XServe, please. I'll not even ask for heavy-hitter systems with almost everything being hot-pluggable. Yeah, XServe is a very economic choice - if money is your main concern.
And to justify my 4P request - the hot thing nowadays is server virtualisation (you know, more efficient use of resources and all that jazz) and 4P-8P systems are just what the doctor ordered. Running
apple has always been reasonably priced they just appear expensive due to the face they don't do the low end tower which best buy flogs for $299
Again, you seem slightly confused about what server hardware is. Let me fix that for you: "Apple does flog low-end servers (well, they will as soon as they start shipping xserves) at $2999". The funny thing is, Linux is making a killing in that market and Apple has nothing to stop it.
Who will use this?
Business users. If migrating the business desktop to Linux gains enough traction MS will have to do it to keep at least some revenue stream from those customers. The other incentive that's been growing lately is government desktops. Unlike Apple users, individual Linux users are not likely to pay for MSOffice - but an IT department is a different kettle of fish.
Not exactly. His workings are correct, too - what sucks is the formatting. Do it yourself and you'll see that specifically sqare roots are missing: cos B = 3/4 => sin B = sqrt(7)/4 and so on. However trivial the problem was, though, he wouldn't have gotten the right answer by bungling the math so badly as his submission formatting would suggest.
The standard memory management on 32bit x86 archs is 2GB reserved for the OS and the remaining 2GB available for the application (and sometimes, with some OS-level tweaks, a 1GB OS, 3GB apps partitioning can be achieved). One big boon for 32bit apps running on a 64bit/x86-64 OS is that the kernel no longer needs to reserve part of the 4GB segment for itself, so the application gets it all to play with.
No, it wouldn't be anticompetitive - but I bet shareholders won't be happy with it. That's giving away a large chunk of marketshare with little tangible gains - ATi probably moves more Intel chipsets than the amount of AM2 chipsets they would be moving if they stuck to only that.
It would, however, be smart to make your competitor dependent on your chipsets. Then you get lots of small knobs to twist and produce interesting effects. Of course, Intel wouldn't like that and will have to revamp its chipset production/downscale CPU production/increase prices. All nice side effects.
Personall, though, I think this is nonsense. AMD is too tied to nVidia these days and chipset/video is not their main problem right now (at least not on the short term; on a slightly longer term they'll want to have a low-power solution for laptops to compete with Intel, but buying ATi for that is overkill)
Perhaps compared to MS Word the OOo equation editor is a marvel, but coming from Latex it's atrocious. It feels like a bastardized version of what one would have done in tex and with close to no control on the way the output will appear. My feeling was that it's useless for anything lenghtier than a short presentation. Of course, YMMV.
Actually, that's not true. CDs have a "copy inhibit bit", much like the proposed broadcast flag.
Right. SCMS. Which is supposed to forbid copying a copy, not an original. Ripping/copying original disks is still technically legal (remember, SCMS it's supposed to say 'original, copy allowed')
Well, unlike DVDs where ripping requires decrypting the signal, CD ripping saves un-protected audio output to a file. The CD drive producing this signal is not breaking any copy protection, as that is its intended functionality. Your argument would work for the proposed anti-analog-hole legislation, but even that would only be for the case of CDs having the audio signal watermarked/whatever so as to mean 'copy forbidden' - leaving plenty of CDs legally ripable.
OK, so to restate my points: first, there is no DMCA case in ripping CDDA tracks off a conforming audio CD - the proper argument here is copyright, not DMCA; second, not all countries have DMCA equivalents, so saying DMCA breach == ilegal is only true in some particular jurisdictions (hence false as an all-encompassing statement)
Anyway, concerning your encrypted backup argument, I have some doubts that it would work in a technical enough court. The case is, while I can certainly make a backup of the encrypted content, DVD writers will not allow me to restore it to a perfect equivalent of the original, since I cannot write back the disk key. Thus my 'backup' copy is all but useless. If I am legally entitled to make personal backups under some fair-use exception in the local copyright law, then the backup should better be restoreable, which only leaves unencrypted backups.
Make no mistake, "ripping" you CDs is definitely illegal.
That is usually called wishful thinking.
Almost all CDs today come with some form of ant-ripping technology.
OK, that was probably anti-ripping - myself, I wouldn't much care for ripping ants, whether using CDs or not. But nevermind that - you might as well have dropped 'almost', as all CDs come with a copyright notice and in some people's mind that in itself should make ripping illegal, right? Well, let's see
By admitting that you have "ripped" your CDs, you are admitting guilt to breaking the DMCA laws.
Implicit assumptions: an existing DMCA law and either no Fair Use laws or precedents of the DMCA-like laws trumping Fair Use. Let me assure you, frient, you're on VERY shaky ground here. You might also not be aware that some countries allow by law one copy for non-commercial use (private copy/fair use/backup copy, etc.) so your sweeping assertion is clearly wrong in those cases.
In the end, you come off sounding suspiciously like a RIAA troll. There are still legal exceptions to the author's rights, no matter how much the entertainment industry would wish otherwise. Please take your FUD elsewhere.
According to an Australian study, our geek wonder-drink of choice might turn us into yes-men.
Try stating it this way:
According to an Australian study, our geek wonder-drink of choice might turn them into yes-women.
Next time you're hitting that bar think of buying her a drink as the reason for following up with a coffee later.
Yet I believe you could use it to argue intent. Leaving aside the matter of jurisdiction, MSFT continued a type of business practice that was deemed illegal in a court of law. This is hardly the behavior of an innocent company. So one can argue that if the EU finds MSFT's behavior illegal in their jurisdiction as well, their punitive measures should be stronger than the ones US imposed, which did not appear to have the intended effect (that is, stopping MSFT from abusing their position, whether you want to call it monopoly or not)
I can see an interesting situation where you could have a traditional CPU, to which you could plug in additional external processor modules as your needs expand.
Indeed. It sounds like a Cell-type Opteron configuration waiting to happen. If AMD manages to pull something like that off, Intel will have to eat dust for a while. For now, though, it's a fun speculation.
I don't quite see how socketed CPUs are a surprise in the x86 world. Coming from the PowerPC Macs you might call it different, but hardly surprising. It would have been surprising for Apple not to use the default and least expensive option.
Yeah it was. They called it Longhorn back in 2000, then renamed it as vista.
So? That's just the codename - just as the 'next Vista' (Blackcomb/Vienna) codename has been around for a while. How could Longhorn/Vista have been delayed 6 years when the current release estimate is not even 6 years from the original XP launch? (which iirc was in October 2001)
If my timeline is right, Longhorn was originally supposed to be shipping sometime in 2003, so that makes it 'only' somewhere between 3 and 4 years late. Still a record, although compared with Duke Nukem Forever it's going to be almost on time.
Well, let's see
Now, if distance to the Sun is all there is to explain it, someone messed up really bad with our basic knowledge of the Solar System, for Venus is the hottest inner planet and should obviously be the closest to the Sun. No way it could be about twice further from it than Mercury.
Also, could you please enlighten us how can it be that the temperature difference between night and day on Venus is so small in spite of the rotation period being about 243 Earth days? wouldn't ~4 Earth-months worth of night be enough to cool that side of the planet? after all, Mercury's day is almost 4 timers shorter than Venus' and the max. temperature is close, but the min temperature on Mercury is low enough for high Tc superconductivity.
Not to worry, they'll be taxing you the license you bought - just as it is for a software purchase. Buy a retail version of Win XP in a brick-and-mortar store, pay tax. And it's not just because the CD constitutes a tangible asset, since the intrinsic value of a CD is minuscule. So it's not even an issue of 'software programs' - they'll be taxing license purchases, be it for software, music, movies, podcasts or whatever novelty will pop up next year. Just as soon as someone hits them with the right clue-stick.
... next thing you know, you'll have to pay tax on that /. subscription. Now that would be a news item.
Well, as one thing leads to another, you'll have taxes on subscription music services, then or general pay-for 'net subscriptions
There's a difference between the strength of a gravitational field and a gravitational gradient. It's like at the center of the Earth. The gravitational gradient there (relative to the Earth's field) is zero, but the force of all that overhanging rock is pretty high. You wouldn't float there comfortably with no force acting on you. You'd be squished.
ouch! no. At least, not if you assume spherical symmetry. Baby analytical mech. example: the uniform sphere. Gravitational force is linear inside, going to zero.
You'd be squashed, alright, but not by gravity. It's the pressure in all that rock around you that you have to watch for. But if you manage to stabilize the hole you supposedly dug in the center of the Earth against the surrounding pressure, then you'd be floating quite comfortably.
drats, the link went missing. Stanford as well, for your pleasure. Apologies for double posting.
All this climate study has to be taken cum grano salis apparently. Regarding your plot, there's an interesting tidbit in Eos Vol. 85, No. 39 (sorry, this pdf is the quickest ref I found) about its relevance past 1980. So whom to trust? unfortunately a cursory look is nowhere near enough.
... of course solar activity matters - after all, Sun is the energy source for the lot of us here. The question is, however, is Earth doing the same thing it's always been doing with that extra heat from the Sun? Are we getting the 'normal' temperature increases, or are local effects amplifying it? (if so by how much)
To make it more specific, if you have a driving force and your system has large enough dampening you'll be following the force with some phase difference. Decrease the dampening, make the system multi-mode with strong enough couplings and you'll lose the simple correlation. So
Sadly, there is too much politics in this topic and not just in good ol' US of A. And the devil is in the details, as with all science - just what politicians love for their spin.