Or what if I want to zoom in and then resize so that I can still see all of the document. On windows if I'm reading a pdf in zoom to fixed width mode and I maximize the window then the page zooms in so that there's no whitespace.
Perfectly easy to get a pdf to take up the full screen (-taskbar, scrollbar and toolbars). On OSX I have to drag the window to the top left. Manually resize the window and then rezoom. It takes a lot longer (if you're doing it often) when all you want to do is be able to read some text. Instead there's a green button which doesn't appear to do anything sometimes.
I like OSX but it is something I find very infuriating.
Of all the stupid irrelevant measures to fight terrorism. Forcing everyone to carry ID will just make the existing millions of people in America who are out of the system go further underground. It will make it much easier for the terrorists to hide if they want to stay in America and it will be harder for the FBI to track anyone.
It's because people reuse the name passwords for different accounts. If one account gets compromised that password can be used on other accounts. Force people to change and they might have to use more than one password for everything.
Making melting down the coins illegal is one of those things that will just give petty criminals ideas.
They should just add some sulphur to the coins. It makes them more machinable (not much use for stamped coins though) and utterly destroys their value for recycling.
Maybe the real reason they're doing this is that they've added RFID chips to coins and they don't want people destroying lots of them.
According to Microsoft, "SuperFetch understands which applications you use most, and preloads these applications into memory, so your system is more responsive".
It's Microsoft, remember? They'll use superfetch to optimise Office and IE7 and a few OS functions.
Then they'll start making a big deal about Firefox and OOo being slower.
But it could also be seen as a way of grouping things. Put your nail gun and your hammer together in your toolbox so that you can either easily when you want to put a nail in something. Keep them with your nails In fact have a whole section for fasteners where your rivot gun and ball hammer are grouped together with your rivets.
The metaphor isn't about using less tools it's about using them together. MacOS has an applications folder where everything goes. People might have 4 or 5 programs that can view/edit photos depending on their needs. Why not keep them separate (at a UI level) from your compilers.
Recent research has indicated that one of the short term effects of SO2 is to reduce climate forcings but the long term implications are less clear.
For example SO2 causes acid rain which damages vegatation releasing CO2. It's far to early to tell whether increasing SO2 emissions will help or will just cause a lot more damage. It's an interesting theory but it's still not well understood.
We've gone from trying to predict whether it will rain this afternoon to trying to predict the climate for 100 years. It's the complicated and difficult modelling challenge in human history and it's no wonder why people find it so hard to understand the issues.
Sulphur is nasty. Best to wait a few years before doing anything about it.
Access to credit is one of the most important ways for people to be able to improve their wealth. Large parts of Europe used to be owned by rich nobles who were landlords over massive estates. People had to work hard just to pay the rent and were left with little for themselves.
Over the years there's been movements to increase the proportion of the population owning their own home. Easily available credit has been crucial in allowing people to buy their own homes. Very few people could buy their first home without getting a mortgage.
Worldwide the gap between rich and poor is widening mostly due to demographic reasons. Rich areas have increasing wealth due to technological improvements and static or declining populations. Therefore wealth per person increases.
In poorer countries the population is increasing but wealth isn't increasing as quickly because productivity is lower. Increasing population is mostly children who don't work yet and don't add to total wealth. Therefore wealth per person increases more slowly (but AFAIK is still increasing).
Even in America most people have little in the way of assets. They have a house filled with stuff. Increasing property prices tend to decrease the proportion of wealth held by the top 10% but actually increase the gap between middle class (and rich) and poor.
Interesting I wonder why people even talk about the gap between rich and poor. The size of the middle and lower classes and the differences between them are more useful indications.
Ultimately, the problems with Kyoto are more political than technical or economic. While it does little to directly reduce emissions it also neglects technological solutions in favour of looking at direct emissions in developed countries. That is only part of the solution and focusing on emissions put other solutions in the background. It also gave ammunition to people who supported BAU (businness as usual) and confused people sitting on the fence.
Kyoto was doing quite well and would have passed until negotiations between the EU and America stalled over interpretation of certain clauses.
England achieved their target reduction well ahead of schedule. Most of the reduction was accounted for by a single measure. They switched most of their oil burning power stations to burning natural gas which saved approximately half the CO2 from those plants. There's a reasonable chance they'd have done it already. Russia's emissions had dropped because of economic collapse and they would most likely receive income through signing the treaty. Allowing carbon trading between developing nations and developed nations freely would have brought about the emission reductions at low cost.
The Americans could have just paid a few billion Brazil and a few other poor countries and not have had to reduce emissions at all. I remember the outrage here in Europe when people realised that America could increase emisssions and still fulfil their Kyoto obligations. Whether rightly or wrongly there was no mood for tolerance and a hard line was adopted. Kyoto was dead in the water after that.
I remember there being almost no sympathy for the hardships America would have had to go through to fulfil it's obligations (unlike Britain). They shouldn't all be driving SUVs and even (pause for effect) Humvees. But America had been in a huge economic boom for 10 years so porportionally their reductions were huge.
There were three quick methods to reduce emisssions that severely that quickly without transforming the economy radically.
1: Switch to nuclear power. Probably already too slow given the time frame and with little chance of not being delayed. 2: Shutdown much of the steel industry and essentially export steel production (and emissions) to developing countries which were exempt from tight environmental regulations. This would decimate the economy of already stuggling areas of America and possibly increase global emissions. 3: Switch coal burning plants to oil. But if peak oil is true or close this would cause a massive and sustained increase in the price of oil and natural gas. There's a reasonably high likelyhood of 70s style gas shortages. Developing countries wouldn't have benefited.
None of these would have been feasible under the contempary political situation.
These were all issues but insisting on the most rigid interpretation of Kyoto made it a non starter. Similarly the insistance that there was no middle ground between BAU and Kyoto prevented other solution being discussed.
Global deforestation alone amounts to more than the CO2 savings through Kyoto. It's not a suitable long term solution but why was it ignored. Save the diversity in the rainforests and reduce global warming all for less money than Kyoto.
Lomborg doesn't dispute the current scientific position. He supports it. All he's arguing about is the effectiveness of mitigation strategies. He uses IPCC figures.
In his case the reaction to his work was unfavourable and he was censured initially by FUD and personal attacks. IPCC are responsible but he was vilified for pointing out WWF errors and inaccuracy.
How can you make correct policy decisions if the information you are getting has been deliberately distorted? It's the same problem whether it's environmentalists or Big Energy.
If they're both allowed to fire lies at each other then the debate is stifled and confusing as people can't trust either side. By separating what he calls the Litany which is pseudoscience apart from credible peer reviewed science he's done a service to the global warming debate.
Lomborg set out an economic case based on the costs of mitigation that showed that flaws in the way Kyoto work will make it very ineffective and excessively expensive.
Kyoto has damaged the environment by diverting resources and mindshare away from efforts which would have been more effective at reducing global warming.
Even the Stern report contains such admissions. Certain mitigation strategies (carbon sequestration in biomass) will not be discussed for years because they are not covered within the scope of Kyoto and the barriers against implementing them were primarily political and not technical.
By that I mean that more effort to save rainforests wasn't made despite interest in the method because participants in the treaty couldn't agree on how to count the reduction and who should get credit for it.
It's better just to delete the spam references to such non notable people in otherwise informative articles.
That is a much more serious problem because it undermines good articles if they become filled up with references and sections about unimportant events, people and places.
Microsoft have prevented all but the most expensive versions of Vista (Ultimate) from running within a virtual machine.
They seem quite concerned about virtualisation but are going for the high taxation approach to keeping it from becoming significant.
That could be Parallels biggest problem over the next few years. A $399 Windows license + $80 + extra RAM (recommended) for Parallels is a lot for someone who doesn't absolutely need it. Might be cheaper to buy a separate Windows desktop/laptop if you need Windows that badly.
It's still a great product but it will be a much smaller niche at those prices. Using Bootcamp you just buy the cheapest Vista license if you can get away with it.
This is really good for Parallels and will be important for the company in several ways.
Obviously it is a big feature for users who might be interested in Boot Camp and Parallels. One license, keeping the same settings etc.
The thing that will bring the real benefits to Parallels though are related to development. Working with Boot Camp means that Parallels can access the Boot Camp drivers for Windows that Apple writes. Every time Apple updates their hardware they'll update Boot Camp with new drivers. This will make it much easier for Parallels to keep up with new hardware.
Boot Camp adds a driver for the touchpad that includes Apple's right click implementation. Suddenly it's in Parallels automagically. Apple ads a driver to operate the inbuilt iSight. Parallels can start using it too.
Shared documents are potentially great. Apple should work with Parallels to ensure things like the iTunes library (and iTS purchased music) is available in the Windows partition.
Apple have already said that they are not going to include virtualisation in Leopard because they are so happy with the performance of Parallels.
If necessary they'd buy Parallels to ensure that development keeps going on. They might do it anyway to reduce the costs.
The Irish networks are GSM and it's reasonably well known that the networks can turn on and control phones with the signature of a sufficiently senior police officer.
I'm actually surprised more people here hadn't heard about it.
The importance of the discount rate it important for extrapolating the study to corporate entities. It is also important because of vendor lock-in. There's no guarantee that the discount will be available (or as good) in 5 years time.
They spent 3 months trying to tinker with Gnome before switching to KDE. It's easy to see how costs could add up quickly doing that.
There are plenty of ways around that situation which can be enshrined in law. You can exempt the family home, farmland, etc. and/or only the value of estates above a certain threshold.
The money raised through inheritance tax is significant and mostly due to a small number of wealthy owners. Assets passed from generation to generation are by definition the assets least likely to be in circulation in the economy. Think about it. The prudent course of action for anyone who doesn't want to just squander their inheritance would be to invest it wisely and not to spend it. This doesn't help the economy to have money sitting under the proverbial mattress. If you were trying to cut taxes to stimulate an economy there isn't actually a less effective way. If you're going to squander it then there's no real loss to have to pay some of it in taxes since you obviously don't care about leaving it for anyone.
Money invested in a reasonable manner will still increase over generations even with inheritance tax.
That example has nothing to do with money. If he (or she) is willing to do it for free then you still can't ask them.
Allowing unlimited inheritance in all essence establishes financial oligarchy, Royalty by another name.
Indeed. Inheritance tax is potentially one of the fairest and most progressive taxes possible. It puts more money into the economy than any other. It came surprisingly close to being abolished in the US IMHO.
It's not about children and grandchildren having earnt the money it's about the hard working parents being free to decide what they want to do with their money.
If I work hard I should be allowed do what I want with my money. If I want to give it to my children then that's my right. Money well spent as far as I'm concerned.
Unlimited inheritance encourages rich children to put their money in the bank, take no financial risks and live off some of the interest.
Sensible inheritance taxes can do a lot to reduce this behaviour and stop people from merely hoarding assets over generations.
Some sort of patent system is necessary to protect genuine innovators. The problem with the current system is that is has been gamed so that it now does almost nothing to help innovation in some cases.
The system clearly needs reform. Talking about the founding fathers wanted with patents is a bit misleading though. Modern patents were invented (sic) in Venice in 1474 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_patent_law
Rhys-Davies height put him in correct height proportion to the hobbit actors. This way any scene involving Gimli and the hobbits could be shot directly and it only took two settings for forced perspective to be used in all the scenes.
The advantages in filming were significant but yeah it was ironic.
It's pretty standard in the film industry. New Line took huge risks by funding 3 movies at once but they also made a lot more money. It was a complicated deal that created opportunities to fiddle the books. They didn't just stiff Jackson though. Tolkien Enterprises also sued New Line http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien_Enterprises for $20m.
The details of the deal aren't too well known. In fact Jackson wasn't aware until recently that the rights would expire at all. It's hard to speculate but it appears that New Line still have time to make the Hobbit and the deal should cover some overrun so that work can still continue on an unfinished project.
After that the rights revert to Tolkien Enterprises so unless there's a clause in the contract that stops Tolkien Enterprises from reshooting the Hobbit immediately it's entirely possible that Jackson could make another version within a year or two (or within months if they were to write the script and do preproduction before they acquire the rights).
A New Line Hobbit film is likely to be profitable so there's a good chance they might try that and hope that Jackson doesn't want to take the risk to compete with a later attempt.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like combining bittorrent and usenet to get the best of both worlds. It's the natural progression.
Or what if I want to zoom in and then resize so that I can still see all of the document. On windows if I'm reading a pdf in zoom to fixed width mode and I maximize the window then the page zooms in so that there's no whitespace.
Perfectly easy to get a pdf to take up the full screen (-taskbar, scrollbar and toolbars). On OSX I have to drag the window to the top left. Manually resize the window and then rezoom. It takes a lot longer (if you're doing it often) when all you want to do is be able to read some text. Instead there's a green button which doesn't appear to do anything sometimes.
I like OSX but it is something I find very infuriating.
Terrorists don't carry ID.
Of all the stupid irrelevant measures to fight terrorism. Forcing everyone to carry ID will just make the existing millions of people in America who are out of the system go further underground. It will make it much easier for the terrorists to hide if they want to stay in America and it will be harder for the FBI to track anyone.
It's because people reuse the name passwords for different accounts. If one account gets compromised that password can be used on other accounts. Force people to change and they might have to use more than one password for everything.
Making melting down the coins illegal is one of those things that will just give petty criminals ideas.
They should just add some sulphur to the coins. It makes them more machinable (not much use for stamped coins though) and utterly destroys their value for recycling.
Maybe the real reason they're doing this is that they've added RFID chips to coins and they don't want people destroying lots of them.
According to Microsoft, "SuperFetch understands which applications you use most, and preloads these applications into memory, so your system is more responsive".
It's Microsoft, remember? They'll use superfetch to optimise Office and IE7 and a few OS functions.
Then they'll start making a big deal about Firefox and OOo being slower.
You do backup don't you? Just de-authorize as you do your final backup
But it could also be seen as a way of grouping things. Put your nail gun and your hammer together in your toolbox so that you can either easily when you want to put a nail in something. Keep them with your nails In fact have a whole section for fasteners where your rivot gun and ball hammer are grouped together with your rivets.
The metaphor isn't about using less tools it's about using them together. MacOS has an applications folder where everything goes. People might have 4 or 5 programs that can view/edit photos depending on their needs. Why not keep them separate (at a UI level) from your compilers.
Recent research has indicated that one of the short term effects of SO2 is to reduce climate forcings but the long term implications are less clear.
For example SO2 causes acid rain which damages vegatation releasing CO2. It's far to early to tell whether increasing SO2 emissions will help or will just cause a lot more damage. It's an interesting theory but it's still not well understood.
We've gone from trying to predict whether it will rain this afternoon to trying to predict the climate for 100 years. It's the complicated and difficult modelling challenge in human history and it's no wonder why people find it so hard to understand the issues.
Sulphur is nasty. Best to wait a few years before doing anything about it.
iTV
[/speculation]
Access to credit is one of the most important ways for people to be able to improve their wealth. Large parts of Europe used to be owned by rich nobles who were landlords over massive estates. People had to work hard just to pay the rent and were left with little for themselves. Over the years there's been movements to increase the proportion of the population owning their own home. Easily available credit has been crucial in allowing people to buy their own homes. Very few people could buy their first home without getting a mortgage. Worldwide the gap between rich and poor is widening mostly due to demographic reasons. Rich areas have increasing wealth due to technological improvements and static or declining populations. Therefore wealth per person increases. In poorer countries the population is increasing but wealth isn't increasing as quickly because productivity is lower. Increasing population is mostly children who don't work yet and don't add to total wealth. Therefore wealth per person increases more slowly (but AFAIK is still increasing). Even in America most people have little in the way of assets. They have a house filled with stuff. Increasing property prices tend to decrease the proportion of wealth held by the top 10% but actually increase the gap between middle class (and rich) and poor. Interesting I wonder why people even talk about the gap between rich and poor. The size of the middle and lower classes and the differences between them are more useful indications.
Ultimately, the problems with Kyoto are more political than technical or economic. While it does little to directly reduce emissions it also neglects technological solutions in favour of looking at direct emissions in developed countries. That is only part of the solution and focusing on emissions put other solutions in the background. It also gave ammunition to people who supported BAU (businness as usual) and confused people sitting on the fence.
Kyoto was doing quite well and would have passed until negotiations between the EU and America stalled over interpretation of certain clauses.
England achieved their target reduction well ahead of schedule. Most of the reduction was accounted for by a single measure. They switched most of their oil burning power stations to burning natural gas which saved approximately half the CO2 from those plants. There's a reasonable chance they'd have done it already. Russia's emissions had dropped because of economic collapse and they would most likely receive income through signing the treaty. Allowing carbon trading between developing nations and developed nations freely would have brought about the emission reductions at low cost.
The Americans could have just paid a few billion Brazil and a few other poor countries and not have had to reduce emissions at all. I remember the outrage here in Europe when people realised that America could increase emisssions and still fulfil their Kyoto obligations. Whether rightly or wrongly there was no mood for tolerance and a hard line was adopted. Kyoto was dead in the water after that.
I remember there being almost no sympathy for the hardships America would have had to go through to fulfil it's obligations (unlike Britain). They shouldn't all be driving SUVs and even (pause for effect) Humvees. But America had been in a huge economic boom for 10 years so porportionally their reductions were huge.
There were three quick methods to reduce emisssions that severely that quickly without transforming the economy radically.
1: Switch to nuclear power. Probably already too slow given the time frame and with little chance of not being delayed.
2: Shutdown much of the steel industry and essentially export steel production (and emissions) to developing countries which were exempt from tight environmental regulations. This would decimate the economy of already stuggling areas of America and possibly increase global emissions.
3: Switch coal burning plants to oil. But if peak oil is true or close this would cause a massive and sustained increase in the price of oil and natural gas. There's a reasonably high likelyhood of 70s style gas shortages. Developing countries wouldn't have benefited.
None of these would have been feasible under the contempary political situation.
These were all issues but insisting on the most rigid interpretation of Kyoto made it a non starter. Similarly the insistance that there was no middle ground between BAU and Kyoto prevented other solution being discussed.
Global deforestation alone amounts to more than the CO2 savings through Kyoto. It's not a suitable long term solution but why was it ignored. Save the diversity in the rainforests and reduce global warming all for less money than Kyoto.
Lomborg doesn't dispute the current scientific position. He supports it. All he's arguing about is the effectiveness of mitigation strategies. He uses IPCC figures.
In his case the reaction to his work was unfavourable and he was censured initially by FUD and personal attacks. IPCC are responsible but he was vilified for pointing out WWF errors and inaccuracy.
How can you make correct policy decisions if the information you are getting has been deliberately distorted? It's the same problem whether it's environmentalists or Big Energy.
If they're both allowed to fire lies at each other then the debate is stifled and confusing as people can't trust either side. By separating what he calls the Litany which is pseudoscience apart from credible peer reviewed science he's done a service to the global warming debate.
Lomborg set out an economic case based on the costs of mitigation that showed that flaws in the way Kyoto work will make it very ineffective and excessively expensive.
Kyoto has damaged the environment by diverting resources and mindshare away from efforts which would have been more effective at reducing global warming.
Even the Stern report contains such admissions. Certain mitigation strategies (carbon sequestration in biomass) will not be discussed for years because they are not covered within the scope of Kyoto and the barriers against implementing them were primarily political and not technical.
By that I mean that more effort to save rainforests wasn't made despite interest in the method because participants in the treaty couldn't agree on how to count the reduction and who should get credit for it.
It's better just to delete the spam references to such non notable people in otherwise informative articles.
That is a much more serious problem because it undermines good articles if they become filled up with references and sections about unimportant events, people and places.
Microsoft have prevented all but the most expensive versions of Vista (Ultimate) from running within a virtual machine.
They seem quite concerned about virtualisation but are going for the high taxation approach to keeping it from becoming significant.
That could be Parallels biggest problem over the next few years. A $399 Windows license + $80 + extra RAM (recommended) for Parallels is a lot for someone who doesn't absolutely need it. Might be cheaper to buy a separate Windows desktop/laptop if you need Windows that badly.
It's still a great product but it will be a much smaller niche at those prices. Using Bootcamp you just buy the cheapest Vista license if you can get away with it.
This is really good for Parallels and will be important for the company in several ways.
Obviously it is a big feature for users who might be interested in Boot Camp and Parallels. One license, keeping the same settings etc.
The thing that will bring the real benefits to Parallels though are related to development. Working with Boot Camp means that Parallels can access the Boot Camp drivers for Windows that Apple writes. Every time Apple updates their hardware they'll update Boot Camp with new drivers. This will make it much easier for Parallels to keep up with new hardware.
Boot Camp adds a driver for the touchpad that includes Apple's right click implementation. Suddenly it's in Parallels automagically. Apple ads a driver to operate the inbuilt iSight. Parallels can start using it too.
Shared documents are potentially great. Apple should work with Parallels to ensure things like the iTunes library (and iTS purchased music) is available in the Windows partition.
Apple have already said that they are not going to include virtualisation in Leopard because they are so happy with the performance of Parallels.
If necessary they'd buy Parallels to ensure that development keeps going on. They might do it anyway to reduce the costs.
The Irish networks are GSM and it's reasonably well known that the networks can turn on and control phones with the signature of a sufficiently senior police officer.
I'm actually surprised more people here hadn't heard about it.
The importance of the discount rate it important for extrapolating the study to corporate entities. It is also important because of vendor lock-in. There's no guarantee that the discount will be available (or as good) in 5 years time. They spent 3 months trying to tinker with Gnome before switching to KDE. It's easy to see how costs could add up quickly doing that.
There are plenty of ways around that situation which can be enshrined in law. You can exempt the family home, farmland, etc. and/or only the value of estates above a certain threshold.
The money raised through inheritance tax is significant and mostly due to a small number of wealthy owners. Assets passed from generation to generation are by definition the assets least likely to be in circulation in the economy. Think about it. The prudent course of action for anyone who doesn't want to just squander their inheritance would be to invest it wisely and not to spend it. This doesn't help the economy to have money sitting under the proverbial mattress. If you were trying to cut taxes to stimulate an economy there isn't actually a less effective way. If you're going to squander it then there's no real loss to have to pay some of it in taxes since you obviously don't care about leaving it for anyone.
Money invested in a reasonable manner will still increase over generations even with inheritance tax.
They can't afford that Steve.
They're stuck with the other one
Allowing unlimited inheritance in all essence establishes financial oligarchy, Royalty by another name.
Indeed. Inheritance tax is potentially one of the fairest and most progressive taxes possible. It puts more money into the economy than any other. It came surprisingly close to being abolished in the US IMHO.
It's not about children and grandchildren having earnt the money it's about the hard working parents being free to decide what they want to do with their money.
If I work hard I should be allowed do what I want with my money. If I want to give it to my children then that's my right. Money well spent as far as I'm concerned.
Unlimited inheritance encourages rich children to put their money in the bank, take no financial risks and live off some of the interest.
Sensible inheritance taxes can do a lot to reduce this behaviour and stop people from merely hoarding assets over generations.
Some sort of patent system is necessary to protect genuine innovators. The problem with the current system is that is has been gamed so that it now does almost nothing to help innovation in some cases.
w
The system clearly needs reform. Talking about the founding fathers wanted with patents is a bit misleading though. Modern patents were invented (sic) in Venice in 1474 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_patent_la
Rhys-Davies height put him in correct height proportion to the hobbit actors. This way any scene involving Gimli and the hobbits could be shot directly and it only took two settings for forced perspective to be used in all the scenes.
The advantages in filming were significant but yeah it was ironic.
It's pretty standard in the film industry. New Line took huge risks by funding 3 movies at once but they also made a lot more money. It was a complicated deal that created opportunities to fiddle the books. They didn't just stiff Jackson though. Tolkien Enterprises also sued New Line http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien_Enterprises for $20m.
The details of the deal aren't too well known. In fact Jackson wasn't aware until recently that the rights would expire at all. It's hard to speculate but it appears that New Line still have time to make the Hobbit and the deal should cover some overrun so that work can still continue on an unfinished project.
After that the rights revert to Tolkien Enterprises so unless there's a clause in the contract that stops Tolkien Enterprises from reshooting the Hobbit immediately it's entirely possible that Jackson could make another version within a year or two (or within months if they were to write the script and do preproduction before they acquire the rights).
A New Line Hobbit film is likely to be profitable so there's a good chance they might try that and hope that Jackson doesn't want to take the risk to compete with a later attempt.