I would've thought that a Mac's default textarea, and thus default monospace, font would be Monaco, which is sans-serif.
Anyway, the point the parent was making is that many people (including nearly all American book publishers) think that serif fonts are easier to read, especially for very long blocks of text. The problem is, computer screens still have comparatively low DPI, and aren't very good at rendering serifs, certainly not as good as they are with sans-serif fonts. This goes even moreso for a device made solely for reading text, even though it does indeed have a higher DPI than computer screens.
Of course, you're right that font preference varies from person to person. Myself, I almost exclusively use sans-serif fonts for screen reading, and prefer serif fonts for print. For example, those annoying "advertising" sections in magazines and newspapers often use a sans-serif font, and I find them much more difficult to read (fortunately they're also always devoid of content).
Anyway, given the specs for the Kindle (167 dpi), it should be able to do a pretty good Helvetica, assuming Amazon felt like getting a license from Linotype (the default serif font they use is also from Linotype, so it's possible).
Of course the game in the series I skipped puts the lie to my statement, that's what I get for not being thorough.
Sounds like it was pretty much the multiplayer I described, and was, as you said, mostly ignored. I suppose right now I'm just itching for a more FPS-y game with Prime 3's excellent control scheme. I'm tired of being whooped up on due to my lack of analog stick skills.
Part of me thinks that if parents are really so worried about children's access to the internet like that, then there should just be no E-rated games that have online support (as fun as Mario Kart DS is). I don't quite understand the fervor over this. To date myself (as fairly recent), I was playing games on Battle.net when I was a kid, and I don't remember any public outcry against it. Same for Xbox Live.
Are stupid stories like Nintendo DS predators or the "Playstation Pornable" just artifacts of recent times? I suspect desire to stay out of the news motivates the lack of multiplayer in some Nintendo games. Why isn't there, for example, multiplayer (even local) support anywhere in the Metroid Prime series? Even something of mediocre quality where powerups for Samus are scattered around a map seems like it would be pretty trivial to throw together. Aside from their franchises specifically made for multiplayer (I'm looking at you, Super Smash Bros., Mario Party and Mario Kart), multiplay seems to be mostly ignored in the house of Nintendo.
Argh, whatever. I blame the sensationalist media and so forth.
As a college student, I've never quite understood how the economics of college work out the way they do. Tuition and fees for my school are $3,698.50 a semester for in-state students, and $9,887.50 for out-of-state students. There are roughly 16,000 students enrolled full-time from in state, and around 6,100 from out of state. So, from tuition alone, the school takes in about $59,176,000 twice a year from in-state students, and $60,313,750 from out-of-state students. I'm too lazy for better research right now (as I know the university gets money from the state, thus the lower tuition, and from other sources), but, if my multiplication skills are still good, my single school is directly charging 22,100 students $119,489,750 per semester.
On average, students take 5 classes a semester, so, by my reckoning, on average, students directly pay around $1000 per professor/class. Our student to faculty ratio is something like 16:1. Where does all the money go to here? Despite ever-increasing tuition, the school continues to run a deficit. Rather than update computer labs, students are simply told to bring their (required) laptop computers to labs. Textbooks are paid for by the student, sold at a profit by the university bookstore. I realize that facilities and education cost money, but it seems like someone, or everyone, is on the take here.
As a final note, on your point about student loans. It seems that any system set up to help poor people with something expensive just encourages raising the price. The system that has healthcare be hugely expensive, and solves that problem by paying a company whose sole purpose is to keep the status quo going, is crazily backwards. Same with education. Simply handing out money only strengthens the system. If colleges (or healthcare) are genuinely too expensive for many people, how is a subsidy on their current practices supposed to fix anything?
Nintendo is in a very good position right now, but if you ask me, they already need to be looking to the next console/upgrade. Both Sony and Microsoft are looking to make this console generation a long one, and consumers will probably expect it with the kind of investment they made in a console. Nintendo, however, is in a position where they could reasonably offer some kind of incremental upgrade to the Wii in a few years (not to mention adding say, colors and DVD support). A backwards-compatible Wii2 could create an interesting situation, where the "pick up and play" casual games could be released for the Wii, while the more powerful Wii2 could court cross-platform titles and harder-core gamers. Such a situation is probably just a pipe dream, though (I'm not sure if developers would stay with the old console, even if graphics were the only main difference, and especially the casual gamers could feel betrayed by the release of a Wii "upgrade").
The other strong feeling I have about Nintendo is that they need to take another look at how they're going to support online gaming. It hasn't been too much of an issue yet, mostly because Nintendo seems mostly uninterested in online play, but the "friend code" system seems to me to be unnecessarily unwieldy. I'm somewhat at a loss as to what "security" an annoying alphanumeric code provides you above a "name" you choose yourself. You could still require two-way approval for adding to any friend lists or the like. I presume that in this case, the appearance of family-friendliness is more important to Nintendo than convenience. Then again, Nintendo's now behind by about two generations on any serious online play, and they seem to be doing all right regardless, so maybe it's just a personal issue for me.
Need I remind you how US was before WWI and why US didn't do jack before they were attacked?
I'm pretty sure you meant to say World War II.
And what to you mean, fall apart?
The GP was talking about the history of European countries with regards to the whole colonialism/imperialism/New Imperialism thing. See, for example, the stellar political situation in the aftermath of the "scramble for Africa." The 90 year figure may be a little off, but decolonization didn't really start till about the 1950's.
But yeah, we're clearly the ones that in the last century raped the worlds resources
Also, GP was trying to place the blame on Europe for the history of lusting after the worlds resources before the last century (last time I checked, 90 years is about a century).
That being said, the history of European countries as international offenders does nothing to legitimize the practices of the United States today (or its own history of informal imperialism in South America and elsewhere).
Except if I open up a store and let people pay whatever they want, once someone buys (or takes) something, it's gone forever. They have it, and I don't. Fortunately, digital things don't suffer from this restriction. No matter how many people decide they want to pay $0, I still have unlimited copies left to try and sell to anyone that comes in the door.
If I could actually open up a store where I had an unlimited number of my items for sale and they took up no physical space, I think I'd probably do pretty well for myself, despite the price I charged. Analogies can tend to break down when confronted with the digital world of essentially cost-free copying and distribution.
I tend to like the more obscure ones. Chances are, before I saw Google that day, I didn't know it was, say, Chinese New Year, or Louis Braille's birthday. Christmas, I'm pretty much guaranteed to have a handle on. Plus, don't they do those little 5-logo holiday series around Christmas?
Bottom line to me is, it seems mostly like the logos are just for fun for the company and whoever gets to draw and design them. I'm pretty sure it's not some grand statement that St. Patrick's Day trumps veterans or something. The more obscure, the better.
To tell the truth, I wasn't even aware that it was Veterans Day until I heard it on TV fairly late in the day. It's not really a holiday that I feel like people do too much to observe. At least, not around where I live.
The real dream here is that 20% of the people would ever decide to support the other 80% out of the goodness of their hearts.
These kinds of developments tend to be seen more as a harbinger of doom than pointing towards a future utopia.
Eliminate all menial labor without drastically increasing the quality of education would result in massive unemployment and unrest, I fear. Yes, people would still be having trouble with their DSL, but as a result of the riots.
Well, current swooning over the iPhone aside, I don't think people ever factor in the interface too much into a phone's "cool factor", certainly not as much as the physical materials and "case".
Thing is, a clean interface that allows access to any large number of the phone's capabilities would be astounding, and if it got to a level anyone could call "bare bones" without just ripping features out, I'd strongly consider buying it. The current idea of every screen only having two main functions and then hiding everything else in a menu is ridiculously annoying. There are a whole bunch of screens on a phone where number or text input doesn't make sense, why not make menu choices in a grid corresponding with 1-9 in those cases? It should be relatively intuitive.
The standard cell phone interface is crying out for change. Touch screens like the iPhone are one path, but the standard phone with buttons is going to survive quite a while, and could do with some positive innovations that Motorola, Samsung, Nokia, and the rest of the industry don't really feel like making.
P.S. I happen to think Google's bare-bones website is a triumph in user interface design. There's really only one thing someone coming to google.com wants to do, and Google doesn't get in your way with a bunch of interface cruft. You said it yourself: it's good for what we use it for. What else should an interface aspire to?
Databases like this one, and the one maintained by Choicepoint Seems to be some confusion here. The place that was robbed is a colocation datacenter. So, they basically store servers for a bunch of clients and provide robust connectivity, cooling, electricity, and, ideally, security. The theft was very likely for the hardware itself, which is probably worth quite a bit.
You seem to be talking about the many cases of loss of personal data. While there's certainly some threat of that here, depending on what kind of data C|Host's clients had on the machines that were taken, its nowhere on the scale of the threat posed by losses from Choicepoint and their ilk. Of course, the kinds of losses you hear about in the media are nearly always the result of allowing the data out with employees on laptops, hard drives, flash drives, etc.
It's fun to state your opinions as unqualified facts.
Your suggestions may be something approximating the bare minimum of services a government can provide, but merely because any government that didn't would have a tough time staying in power either because of invasions or revolt.
The role of the government is to do whatever its citizens have given it power to do and surrendered their individual rights and responsibilities for. Where those bounds are, varies widely.
Unless, of course, you use Blockbuster Online. Also, since each movie doubles as a free rental if you take the inconvenience to return it to the store, it's probably more cost-efficient.
Of course, you're then restricted by the somewhat lower variety at Blockbuster Online, and further by the much lower variety at any given Blockbuster store.
No easier way to, say, rent the Battlestar Galactica (insert your favorite TV show) DVDs. With some strategy in queuing, you'll basically always have the next one at the ready.
Except for the drive manufacturers, it's actually just changing the packaging.
You can make some strange argument that changing how sizes are reported is somehow changing the "packaging" of the OS, but that would pretty much be wrong. So it actually doesn't work both ways.
Drive manufacturers are in a position to make the much easier fix though. Changing OSes to report base-10 sizes, or to keep the existing sizes with the *iB notation requires changes from every OS manufacturer, and suddenly leaves them inconsistent with older versions of their products.
Whereas, for storage companies, it's a simple matter of changing the labeling and packaging. A switch to only using the base-2 sizes (my personal favorite) would also probably mean that the drive companies would start subtly altering drive sizes so they wouldn't be selling "85.7 GB" drives and would instead align neatly on a round GB number (which is actually incrementally harder to do now, because drives already are organized with power-of-2 blocks). Otherwise, they could simply list both sizes on the packaging, or include something to the effect "your computer will report this drive as having a capacity of X".
Really, the problem now with the MiB, KiB units is that people in general aren't aware that these are any different than MB and KB, and would likely only increase confusion. Another unit distinction that's still causing confusion is illustrated by your last line (comparing GB's with Gb's).
GB is gigabtye, where Gb is gigabit. So it's very easy to compare these, take Gb's and divide by eight: ta-da, GB. Another confusion taken advantage, this time, mostly by the Internet industry. Modem companies quickly jumped on the terms "56K modem" and such, which helpfully obscure that the K is for kilobits (base-10 again), of course until your computer reports you transferring data at a maximum of something like 5 KB (not to mention physical line limits that further decreased the actual maximum).
Really, computer-related industries seem to like to sow confusion in the market. The distinctions don't matter as much with increased capacities (even though the distinctions themselves increase in size). Take as an example, say you have a file your computer reports is exactly 1.41 MB in size. Ideally, this should fit on a 1.44 MB disk (filesystem usage of the disk aside), but that 1.44 MB is really 1440 KB, where KB is the base-2 unit, or only 1.40625 "standard" MB.
It's probably an artifact of the common labeling of House members as "Congressmen" and Senate members as senators. It makes it seem as if the two groups are exclusive, when really members of both houses could be accurately called "Congressmen(/women/persons/critters)".
Perhaps "Representatives" and "Senators" would be better, but then again, both groups are "representatives", too.
Bottom line, the House needs to get itself a more distinctive name. Too bad for them Senate is already taken.
Of all the amendments to attack, you chose the 17th?
I mean, I've heard the reasoning against direct election before, but it's much closer to the 3rd Amendment than the 2nd on the scale of political and popular uproar.
Not really a fair comparison though. If the PS3's got the next edition of the game that's "not a major improvement " (so, a minor improvement), I'm not sure you can meaningfully point to the older edition as an Xbox exclusive. It's true, but it's still a stretch.
Of course, the general point of the 360 crushing the PS3 right now on exclusives is true, so quibbling over one title is pretty irrelevant.
Actually, their newer games, and I think all the way back to HL2 and maybe before, Valve is both the developer and the publisher (at least this is how they list themselves). Vivendi Universal used to be their distributor, but after a bit of a legal battle centered around Steam, Valve dropped VU Games around 2005, and EA now does distribution for Valve games. Sierra (as a subsidiary of Vivendi) hasn't been associated with the games at all since HL2. New box art only shows the Valve logo.
Of course, your point also applies to their distribution with EA. As much as they love Steam, they clearly know that the key to success lies in retail (especially for their console offerings, obviously).
Almost right, except this is about purchases of retail copies with their plastic boxes and distribution costs. So up your profitable price there a few cents, and you're dead on.
It's no different than DVDs with region locking (assuming these game boxes did actually say they would only work in the specified region), or the crud pharmaceutical companies pull. They charge the maximum they can get away with in every region, and try to stop or inhibit trade of the product between the regions. In many regions, such as places where people in general have less money and/or piracy is rampant, this "maximum price" can be quite low. In such cases, companies are dead-set against offering this cheaper and possibly unprofitable price elsewhere, and will pursue many means to ensure that they don't.
I realize that I'm clearly the exception to the rule here, but I'd just never gotten around to buying Half-Life 2 when it was new, and then just never thought of it when about to buy a game.
However, the desire to essentially play Portal alone made me buy the Orange Box. I'm sure I got lured in by the promise of "5 games for the price of one", but now I've beaten Portal, and I'm finally getting my late start on Half-Life 2 and an enduring love of the gravity gun.
Also, I'm not sure what the situation is in the UK, but it's my impression that Steam-purchased games almost always cost less than their retail counterparts here in the US (the Orange Box was $49.99 on Steam, and oh wait. It seems the PC version retails for the same $49.99, but the Xbox 360 version is the standard console ripoff price of $59.99).
I'm not sure why Steam wouldn't try to always beat retail prices, since it's got to cost less when you cut out all the overhead of packaging, shipping and stocking. I suppose their distribution deals with other publishers prevents them from doing this with games they don't own, and maybe Valve just wants to maximize their profits from their own games. That probably combines with the tendency of content providers to like to overcharge certain regions to make comparatively bad prices in non-US areas.
Tackling your least important point first, "you're" is a contraction, and is a shorter replacement for the words "you are." "Your" is also a word, it's the possessive form of "you." Strangely enough, these different words can be appropriately used in different places.
As just a small point, if, as you say, the ocean will release CO2 when heated and is THE storehouse for CO2, wouldn't small increases in temperature caused by say, otherwise unimportant human-based CO2 sources thereby cause the ocean to release even more CO2, increasing temperatures further? It's not a great idea to mess with a system that's at a delicate stable state.
Well, since CO2 is a greenhouse gas, while it may not itself cause the greenhouse effect, it certainly would alter its intensity. I'm aware that humanity's contribution is on the order of something like 5% of total CO2 emissions per year, but atmospheric CO2 has increased by about 33% since the 1800's.
Accepting that the greenhouse effect exists and that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, one would logically conclude that a large increase would cause at least some effect on global temperatures. One of the real problems is that the CO2 levels are not only consistenly increasing, they are doing so at an increasing rate and with no signs of abating.
I'm sorry that someone who uses a zero when spelling "CO2" and can't correctly use the words "you're" and "humanity's", thinks poorly of my intelligence, but I guess I'll just have to deal with that. I'm not even going to tackle your awesomely accurate "the sun heats the oceans which forms water vapor" description.
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I would've thought that a Mac's default textarea, and thus default monospace, font would be Monaco, which is sans-serif.
Anyway, the point the parent was making is that many people (including nearly all American book publishers) think that serif fonts are easier to read, especially for very long blocks of text. The problem is, computer screens still have comparatively low DPI, and aren't very good at rendering serifs, certainly not as good as they are with sans-serif fonts. This goes even moreso for a device made solely for reading text, even though it does indeed have a higher DPI than computer screens.
Of course, you're right that font preference varies from person to person. Myself, I almost exclusively use sans-serif fonts for screen reading, and prefer serif fonts for print. For example, those annoying "advertising" sections in magazines and newspapers often use a sans-serif font, and I find them much more difficult to read (fortunately they're also always devoid of content).
Anyway, given the specs for the Kindle (167 dpi), it should be able to do a pretty good Helvetica, assuming Amazon felt like getting a license from Linotype (the default serif font they use is also from Linotype, so it's possible).
Of course the game in the series I skipped puts the lie to my statement, that's what I get for not being thorough.
Sounds like it was pretty much the multiplayer I described, and was, as you said, mostly ignored. I suppose right now I'm just itching for a more FPS-y game with Prime 3's excellent control scheme. I'm tired of being whooped up on due to my lack of analog stick skills.
Part of me thinks that if parents are really so worried about children's access to the internet like that, then there should just be no E-rated games that have online support (as fun as Mario Kart DS is). I don't quite understand the fervor over this. To date myself (as fairly recent), I was playing games on Battle.net when I was a kid, and I don't remember any public outcry against it. Same for Xbox Live.
Are stupid stories like Nintendo DS predators or the "Playstation Pornable" just artifacts of recent times? I suspect desire to stay out of the news motivates the lack of multiplayer in some Nintendo games. Why isn't there, for example, multiplayer (even local) support anywhere in the Metroid Prime series? Even something of mediocre quality where powerups for Samus are scattered around a map seems like it would be pretty trivial to throw together. Aside from their franchises specifically made for multiplayer (I'm looking at you, Super Smash Bros., Mario Party and Mario Kart), multiplay seems to be mostly ignored in the house of Nintendo.
Argh, whatever. I blame the sensationalist media and so forth.
As a college student, I've never quite understood how the economics of college work out the way they do. Tuition and fees for my school are $3,698.50 a semester for in-state students, and $9,887.50 for out-of-state students. There are roughly 16,000 students enrolled full-time from in state, and around 6,100 from out of state. So, from tuition alone, the school takes in about $59,176,000 twice a year from in-state students, and $60,313,750 from out-of-state students. I'm too lazy for better research right now (as I know the university gets money from the state, thus the lower tuition, and from other sources), but, if my multiplication skills are still good, my single school is directly charging 22,100 students $119,489,750 per semester.
On average, students take 5 classes a semester, so, by my reckoning, on average, students directly pay around $1000 per professor/class. Our student to faculty ratio is something like 16:1. Where does all the money go to here? Despite ever-increasing tuition, the school continues to run a deficit. Rather than update computer labs, students are simply told to bring their (required) laptop computers to labs. Textbooks are paid for by the student, sold at a profit by the university bookstore. I realize that facilities and education cost money, but it seems like someone, or everyone, is on the take here.
As a final note, on your point about student loans. It seems that any system set up to help poor people with something expensive just encourages raising the price. The system that has healthcare be hugely expensive, and solves that problem by paying a company whose sole purpose is to keep the status quo going, is crazily backwards. Same with education. Simply handing out money only strengthens the system. If colleges (or healthcare) are genuinely too expensive for many people, how is a subsidy on their current practices supposed to fix anything?
Nintendo is in a very good position right now, but if you ask me, they already need to be looking to the next console/upgrade. Both Sony and Microsoft are looking to make this console generation a long one, and consumers will probably expect it with the kind of investment they made in a console. Nintendo, however, is in a position where they could reasonably offer some kind of incremental upgrade to the Wii in a few years (not to mention adding say, colors and DVD support). A backwards-compatible Wii2 could create an interesting situation, where the "pick up and play" casual games could be released for the Wii, while the more powerful Wii2 could court cross-platform titles and harder-core gamers. Such a situation is probably just a pipe dream, though (I'm not sure if developers would stay with the old console, even if graphics were the only main difference, and especially the casual gamers could feel betrayed by the release of a Wii "upgrade").
The other strong feeling I have about Nintendo is that they need to take another look at how they're going to support online gaming. It hasn't been too much of an issue yet, mostly because Nintendo seems mostly uninterested in online play, but the "friend code" system seems to me to be unnecessarily unwieldy. I'm somewhat at a loss as to what "security" an annoying alphanumeric code provides you above a "name" you choose yourself. You could still require two-way approval for adding to any friend lists or the like. I presume that in this case, the appearance of family-friendliness is more important to Nintendo than convenience. Then again, Nintendo's now behind by about two generations on any serious online play, and they seem to be doing all right regardless, so maybe it's just a personal issue for me.
I'm pretty sure you meant to say World War II.
And what to you mean, fall apart?The GP was talking about the history of European countries with regards to the whole colonialism/imperialism/New Imperialism thing. See, for example, the stellar political situation in the aftermath of the "scramble for Africa." The 90 year figure may be a little off, but decolonization didn't really start till about the 1950's.
But yeah, we're clearly the ones that in the last century raped the worlds resourcesAlso, GP was trying to place the blame on Europe for the history of lusting after the worlds resources before the last century (last time I checked, 90 years is about a century).
That being said, the history of European countries as international offenders does nothing to legitimize the practices of the United States today (or its own history of informal imperialism in South America and elsewhere).
Except if I open up a store and let people pay whatever they want, once someone buys (or takes) something, it's gone forever. They have it, and I don't. Fortunately, digital things don't suffer from this restriction. No matter how many people decide they want to pay $0, I still have unlimited copies left to try and sell to anyone that comes in the door.
If I could actually open up a store where I had an unlimited number of my items for sale and they took up no physical space, I think I'd probably do pretty well for myself, despite the price I charged. Analogies can tend to break down when confronted with the digital world of essentially cost-free copying and distribution.
Except that the only risk here is wasting your time...
I tend to like the more obscure ones. Chances are, before I saw Google that day, I didn't know it was, say, Chinese New Year, or Louis Braille's birthday. Christmas, I'm pretty much guaranteed to have a handle on. Plus, don't they do those little 5-logo holiday series around Christmas? Bottom line to me is, it seems mostly like the logos are just for fun for the company and whoever gets to draw and design them. I'm pretty sure it's not some grand statement that St. Patrick's Day trumps veterans or something. The more obscure, the better. To tell the truth, I wasn't even aware that it was Veterans Day until I heard it on TV fairly late in the day. It's not really a holiday that I feel like people do too much to observe. At least, not around where I live.
The real dream here is that 20% of the people would ever decide to support the other 80% out of the goodness of their hearts. These kinds of developments tend to be seen more as a harbinger of doom than pointing towards a future utopia. Eliminate all menial labor without drastically increasing the quality of education would result in massive unemployment and unrest, I fear. Yes, people would still be having trouble with their DSL, but as a result of the riots.
Actually, that second "f" would've been a real bombshell, revealing the horrible truth abou
Well, current swooning over the iPhone aside, I don't think people ever factor in the interface too much into a phone's "cool factor", certainly not as much as the physical materials and "case".
Thing is, a clean interface that allows access to any large number of the phone's capabilities would be astounding, and if it got to a level anyone could call "bare bones" without just ripping features out, I'd strongly consider buying it. The current idea of every screen only having two main functions and then hiding everything else in a menu is ridiculously annoying. There are a whole bunch of screens on a phone where number or text input doesn't make sense, why not make menu choices in a grid corresponding with 1-9 in those cases? It should be relatively intuitive.
The standard cell phone interface is crying out for change. Touch screens like the iPhone are one path, but the standard phone with buttons is going to survive quite a while, and could do with some positive innovations that Motorola, Samsung, Nokia, and the rest of the industry don't really feel like making.
P.S. I happen to think Google's bare-bones website is a triumph in user interface design. There's really only one thing someone coming to google.com wants to do, and Google doesn't get in your way with a bunch of interface cruft. You said it yourself: it's good for what we use it for. What else should an interface aspire to?
You seem to be talking about the many cases of loss of personal data. While there's certainly some threat of that here, depending on what kind of data C|Host's clients had on the machines that were taken, its nowhere on the scale of the threat posed by losses from Choicepoint and their ilk. Of course, the kinds of losses you hear about in the media are nearly always the result of allowing the data out with employees on laptops, hard drives, flash drives, etc.
It's fun to state your opinions as unqualified facts.
Your suggestions may be something approximating the bare minimum of services a government can provide, but merely because any government that didn't would have a tough time staying in power either because of invasions or revolt.
The role of the government is to do whatever its citizens have given it power to do and surrendered their individual rights and responsibilities for. Where those bounds are, varies widely.
Unless, of course, you use Blockbuster Online. Also, since each movie doubles as a free rental if you take the inconvenience to return it to the store, it's probably more cost-efficient.
Of course, you're then restricted by the somewhat lower variety at Blockbuster Online, and further by the much lower variety at any given Blockbuster store.
No easier way to, say, rent the Battlestar Galactica (insert your favorite TV show) DVDs. With some strategy in queuing, you'll basically always have the next one at the ready.
Except for the drive manufacturers, it's actually just changing the packaging.
You can make some strange argument that changing how sizes are reported is somehow changing the "packaging" of the OS, but that would pretty much be wrong. So it actually doesn't work both ways.
Drive manufacturers are in a position to make the much easier fix though. Changing OSes to report base-10 sizes, or to keep the existing sizes with the *iB notation requires changes from every OS manufacturer, and suddenly leaves them inconsistent with older versions of their products.
Whereas, for storage companies, it's a simple matter of changing the labeling and packaging. A switch to only using the base-2 sizes (my personal favorite) would also probably mean that the drive companies would start subtly altering drive sizes so they wouldn't be selling "85.7 GB" drives and would instead align neatly on a round GB number (which is actually incrementally harder to do now, because drives already are organized with power-of-2 blocks). Otherwise, they could simply list both sizes on the packaging, or include something to the effect "your computer will report this drive as having a capacity of X".
Really, the problem now with the MiB, KiB units is that people in general aren't aware that these are any different than MB and KB, and would likely only increase confusion. Another unit distinction that's still causing confusion is illustrated by your last line (comparing GB's with Gb's).
GB is gigabtye, where Gb is gigabit. So it's very easy to compare these, take Gb's and divide by eight: ta-da, GB. Another confusion taken advantage, this time, mostly by the Internet industry. Modem companies quickly jumped on the terms "56K modem" and such, which helpfully obscure that the K is for kilobits (base-10 again), of course until your computer reports you transferring data at a maximum of something like 5 KB (not to mention physical line limits that further decreased the actual maximum).
Really, computer-related industries seem to like to sow confusion in the market. The distinctions don't matter as much with increased capacities (even though the distinctions themselves increase in size). Take as an example, say you have a file your computer reports is exactly 1.41 MB in size. Ideally, this should fit on a 1.44 MB disk (filesystem usage of the disk aside), but that 1.44 MB is really 1440 KB, where KB is the base-2 unit, or only 1.40625 "standard" MB.
It's probably an artifact of the common labeling of House members as "Congressmen" and Senate members as senators. It makes it seem as if the two groups are exclusive, when really members of both houses could be accurately called "Congressmen(/women/persons/critters)".
Perhaps "Representatives" and "Senators" would be better, but then again, both groups are "representatives", too.
Bottom line, the House needs to get itself a more distinctive name. Too bad for them Senate is already taken.
Of all the amendments to attack, you chose the 17th?
I mean, I've heard the reasoning against direct election before, but it's much closer to the 3rd Amendment than the 2nd on the scale of political and popular uproar.
Not really a fair comparison though. If the PS3's got the next edition of the game that's "not a major improvement " (so, a minor improvement), I'm not sure you can meaningfully point to the older edition as an Xbox exclusive. It's true, but it's still a stretch.
Of course, the general point of the 360 crushing the PS3 right now on exclusives is true, so quibbling over one title is pretty irrelevant.
Actually, their newer games, and I think all the way back to HL2 and maybe before, Valve is both the developer and the publisher (at least this is how they list themselves). Vivendi Universal used to be their distributor, but after a bit of a legal battle centered around Steam, Valve dropped VU Games around 2005, and EA now does distribution for Valve games. Sierra (as a subsidiary of Vivendi) hasn't been associated with the games at all since HL2. New box art only shows the Valve logo.
Of course, your point also applies to their distribution with EA. As much as they love Steam, they clearly know that the key to success lies in retail (especially for their console offerings, obviously).
Almost right, except this is about purchases of retail copies with their plastic boxes and distribution costs. So up your profitable price there a few cents, and you're dead on.
It's no different than DVDs with region locking (assuming these game boxes did actually say they would only work in the specified region), or the crud pharmaceutical companies pull. They charge the maximum they can get away with in every region, and try to stop or inhibit trade of the product between the regions. In many regions, such as places where people in general have less money and/or piracy is rampant, this "maximum price" can be quite low. In such cases, companies are dead-set against offering this cheaper and possibly unprofitable price elsewhere, and will pursue many means to ensure that they don't.
I realize that I'm clearly the exception to the rule here, but I'd just never gotten around to buying Half-Life 2 when it was new, and then just never thought of it when about to buy a game.
However, the desire to essentially play Portal alone made me buy the Orange Box. I'm sure I got lured in by the promise of "5 games for the price of one", but now I've beaten Portal, and I'm finally getting my late start on Half-Life 2 and an enduring love of the gravity gun.
Also, I'm not sure what the situation is in the UK, but it's my impression that Steam-purchased games almost always cost less than their retail counterparts here in the US (the Orange Box was $49.99 on Steam, and oh wait. It seems the PC version retails for the same $49.99, but the Xbox 360 version is the standard console ripoff price of $59.99).
I'm not sure why Steam wouldn't try to always beat retail prices, since it's got to cost less when you cut out all the overhead of packaging, shipping and stocking. I suppose their distribution deals with other publishers prevents them from doing this with games they don't own, and maybe Valve just wants to maximize their profits from their own games. That probably combines with the tendency of content providers to like to overcharge certain regions to make comparatively bad prices in non-US areas.
I know I shouldn't bother, but I can't resist.
Tackling your least important point first, "you're" is a contraction, and is a shorter replacement for the words "you are." "Your" is also a word, it's the possessive form of "you." Strangely enough, these different words can be appropriately used in different places.
As just a small point, if, as you say, the ocean will release CO2 when heated and is THE storehouse for CO2, wouldn't small increases in temperature caused by say, otherwise unimportant human-based CO2 sources thereby cause the ocean to release even more CO2, increasing temperatures further? It's not a great idea to mess with a system that's at a delicate stable state.
Well, since CO2 is a greenhouse gas, while it may not itself cause the greenhouse effect, it certainly would alter its intensity. I'm aware that humanity's contribution is on the order of something like 5% of total CO2 emissions per year, but atmospheric CO2 has increased by about 33% since the 1800's.
Accepting that the greenhouse effect exists and that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, one would logically conclude that a large increase would cause at least some effect on global temperatures. One of the real problems is that the CO2 levels are not only consistenly increasing, they are doing so at an increasing rate and with no signs of abating.
I'm sorry that someone who uses a zero when spelling "CO2" and can't correctly use the words "you're" and "humanity's", thinks poorly of my intelligence, but I guess I'll just have to deal with that. I'm not even going to tackle your awesomely accurate "the sun heats the oceans which forms water vapor" description.