Not exactly. "Peak Oil" refers to the current economic realities of oil production. Shale, Sand, Deep Sea Drilling, the Arctic, etc all have vast reserves of petroleum, and we're pursuing those options as fast as we can. The problem is that demand is rising even faster. Peak Oil refers not to "running out of oil" but the point at which production cannot be increased faster than demand is rising. It's an inelastic commodity--we MUST have it regardless of price, as there's no readily available alternative in most cases. Net effect: skyrocketing price. Like now.
If you don't want to pay for text messages, don't send any, then call the customer service rep. T-mobile will credit you the inbound charges in most cases (if you're polite about it and explain you never use text messaging so all that you received was unsolicited).
Still a hassle, but I've heard a rumor that T-mobile will begin allowing customers to opt-out of text messages starting in August when they bump the rates to $0.20.
It's still ridiculously overpriced. This is what happens when the FCC and FTC don't do their jobs and let the companies merge and merge and merge until we're left with oligarchies rather than true competition. I think it should be illegal for phone companies to charge for the first couple minutes of an inbound call and ANY inbound texts.
Right now, they're just milking SMS for all they can because they know its days are numbered. The first phone on the market (i.e. one of the open platforms coming out) that treats text messages as ordinary data and eliminates the phone company's ability to charge outrageous per-message rates will kill this little "profit center" dead.
I disagree. Books are just as vulnerable (moreso, even) than bits on other storage media. Paper burns and rots over time. The only advantage printed books have over conscienciously archived digital data is that they're human readable--you don't need to find a working device (or construct a new one) to read the data they contain, provided they're in good condition.
There are also plenty of other Apple-certified service shops who can upgrade memory and whatnot without voiding an Apple warranty for those who can't do it themselves, so even if you buy a Mac, you've still got choices with regards to upgrades.
A solar sail craft's maximum speed will be considerably less than c. Mass-to-sail ratio and diminishing radiation pressure as the craft travels further from its star will be the biggest limiting factors.
If in 10 years the dominant platform is Linux, or OS X, where does that leave WINE?
I can answer this one. WINE will still be around and used, because the (by then) 30 years worth of Windows software development will include applications still around and being used.
Also, using 10 years as the endpoint for Windows dominance doesn't address what happens between then and now. It's going to have to be gradual, and as development shifts to a different platform, I guarantee some developers will be tweak their code to run in either Windows or WINE, or use Winelibs to shoehorn most of their application onto OSX and Linux.
Then again he skipped a LOT of votes in Illinois as a State Senator, probably for similar political reasons.
If you're referring to his "present" votes, you're misunderstanding a common practice in the Illinois legislature. Voting "Present" is commonly done to represent "No, with comments."
As I understand the theories, any mini-black holes created would evaporate instantly--but assuming Hawking radiation doesn't exist and black holes (no matter how small) are forever, it still wouldn't be much of a threat to the planet.
Oops. Black holes are densely packed matter--in fact, black holes are the most densely packed matter. Thus, they are neither infinitesimal in size, nor that infinitely dense, they are just very, very dense--and relatively small (depending on their mass).
Depends on the model. One of the more popular theories holds that the heart of a black hole is a singularity--a hole in spacetime infinitely small and infinitely dense
It doesn't matter where the black hole is created. It, like all black holes, is infinitesmal in size and infinitely dense. It'll fall right to the center of the Earth as if all the matter in between wasn't even there. Also, having started out life with the mass of a few atoms, it's going to take a looooooooooong time for it to destroy the planet. Black holes don't "suck" matter in. They can only pull matter in with the force of their own gravity--which is going to be very very tiny.
It certainly won't shift the Earth's center of gravity appreciably.
It will probably render ODF just fine (at least initially), but I bet it's gonna create ODFs messier than Word's HTML so other programs will have trouble rendering Office-produce ODFs. Microsoft will try to make the other applications look bad.
A wide-open wifi network, broadcasting its SSID is an invitation to use it. It's a bowl of candy on the front porch at Halloween with a sign that says "help yourself." Ethically, you should only take one piece, and not the whole bowl (i.e. hog all the bandwidth).
The router has been configured, either by its owner or manufacturer, to broadcast its name and assign addresses to any computer that asks for one.
I leave my wifi running this way on purpose. Guests can come over and use my broadband on their iphones, laptops, etc without having to fuss with any settings. If neighbors want to use it, and can actually get a useable signal from my anemic little wireless router, they are welcome to.
If someone is getting all indignant over other people using their wide-open wifi, yet they did not make even the slightest effort to secure it (at least disable SSID broadcast), then I think they're being ridiculous. Even if someone doesn't know how to configure their router, ask a friend. Someone freeloading off your wifi using reasonable bandwidth isn't causing you any harm, and you probably wouldn't even notice anyway.
Yup. *Two* in fact. (well "compatibility layers" is the better term). The open source WINE and Microsoft's very own "Windows on Windows" (WOW) which is for legacy compatibility.
If you get Vista Business, you have downgrade rights to Windows XP. So, for the forseeable future, you can buy a new PC, select Vista Business, but ask for XP installed. You still get a factory install and can move back up to Vista once MS improves it sufficiently (assuming MS actually DOES so).
Very idealistic of you but manufacturers will NEVER bear the cost, it will be passed on to the consumer who will then bitch and moan to their government representation that they are being gouged.
Not necessarily. So long as the market is competitive, manufacturers can't really raise prices arbitrarily. If a manufacturer raises its prices, it sells fewer units and its competitors sell more (all else being equal). Prices will rise and fall to what the market is willing to pay, regardless of production costs. If a new cost is imposed on a manufacturer, they have to cut costs elsewhere or accept less profit. Simply raising the price isn't an option.
Grub on a one-second dual boot will do the trick too. Of course, the best way to protect privacy overseas is to wipe the drive before you leave, and download what you need when you get there. They can't rummage through data that isn't there.
Seems about the only way to avoid junk calls. I never answer if I don't recognize the number, and certainly not if it's private. Pisses the bank off if I forget about a payment or something, but they'll usually send postcards too. If it's a legit call and they can't be bothered to leave a message, then I can't be bothered to call them back.
Of course, once the spam bots start leaving ads in my voicemail, then I'm getting violent.
Alas I live in the deep woods, with a 35-year-old underground telecom wire. And can barely pull 35 Kbs if I'm lucky.
Then that's some good decades-old wiring. 50k is the best you can really get on dialup even in perfect conditions with pristine wiring, 33.6 without downstream tricks.
I do not understand these people who use THE INTERNET to download live action! It slows down even MY pathetic bandwidth!
Fer goodness sakes guys, get a satellite dish. And if it's some illegal movie? Hell- go rent the damn video at your local store! It's faster. And cheaper.
And - it's ILLEGAL? So go get an FTA sat receiver. They are easy enuf to find!
You idiots are destroying the internet! I use the internet for internet-specific tasks (wotever that means; I'm still in WEB-1)
A pox upon your movie torrents!
You're obviously trolling here, but it provides a good jumping off point for what I want to say, so I'll bite. First off, other people watching live streaming video online aren't likely to impact your connection. Satellite TV, Cable and over-the-air antenna don't carry every live video feed of interest to everyone, so that may be someone's only option to see a particular event live. Also, there are lots of legal services to get movies off the Internet--some dinky 2 bit operations you may have heard of called iTunes and Amazon.com. I can download a 2 hour standard def movie in about 20 minutes on my connection, which is on par with how long it would take to go to the rental store, minus the hassles and gasoline. And it's certainly not cheaper to rent.
Nobody's destroying the Internet--well, maybe the cable companies. You see, what's going to happen is we consumers might actually get what we've been asking for these past few decades--ala carte channels. Paying only for the channels and shows you actually want, and the cable company becomes a mere bandwidth provider akin to a utility. No more content, premium channels, pay per view, or any of that crap. You pay for the pipe to your house, and what you want to watch. Cable companies want to retain control and maintain their monopolies, so they'll fight this every step of the way. That's what the net neutrality fight is really all about. The cable companies don't want to relinquish control.
Disclosure: I work for BNY Mellon, and no, I have nothing to do with any of this. But we're not a traditional retail bank. It's mostly asset management (running mutual funds, portfolios, etc.). Not the kind of thing you can really make a "run" on.
I wouldn't use it as a primary general purpose O.S. but it's damn useful as a bag-o-tricks for odds and ends. It's a great little bootdisk with network support for remote drive imaging/restore, it's also great for re-purposing old "dead" PCs into random useful things. One of my more peculiar former bosses wouldn't touch a computer, didn't want to come in to the office, lest pissed investors locate him, and preferred to run the husk of what remained of his company from a speaker phone and fax machine. Anyhoo, I found some old P-IIs in a forgotten junk closet and threw together a DSL image to connect to the office via VPN and act as a print server and a listening VPN client so we could show him powerpoints and crap. As they died, reimage another old box and swap it out.
It's too soon to tell. If the election were tomorrow, McCain would probably get both states, Michigan by a much narrower margin. I think anger at the DNC will soften over time and Michigan will ultimately be blue this year, with Florida in play.
I'm not very familiar with Michigan's demographics, but Florida is a lot like three states. North Florida is a lot like neighboring Georgia and Alabama and also has a very hefty military population. Despite the unpopularity of the war, even amongst military families, McCain will take the northern counties easily. South Florida is very diverse with large Jewish, Senior, Latin and LGBT populations that were very pro-Hillary. So long as they can be brought back into the fold, Obama should capture those counties by a comfortable margin. Central Florida (Greater Orlando, Tampa, and maybe up to Gainesville) has massive college student populations along with a fairly large black vote that will heavily favor Obama, of course this is balanced by large swaths of more rural areas with traditionally conservative voters, making Central Florida the purple battleground area.
Florida will be anybody's game. There's also going to be a gay marriage ban (state constitutional amendment) bringing out lots of voters on both sides of that issue throwing a wrench in the projections too--especially after what's happened in California. I think it's really going to boil down to how well the democrats heal the rift in the party and the Central Florida GOTV effort. Obama puts enough states in play nationwide to have a decent shot at winning the presidency without Florida, but McCain needs it.
Slashdot Mirror
Not exactly. "Peak Oil" refers to the current economic realities of oil production. Shale, Sand, Deep Sea Drilling, the Arctic, etc all have vast reserves of petroleum, and we're pursuing those options as fast as we can. The problem is that demand is rising even faster. Peak Oil refers not to "running out of oil" but the point at which production cannot be increased faster than demand is rising. It's an inelastic commodity--we MUST have it regardless of price, as there's no readily available alternative in most cases. Net effect: skyrocketing price. Like now.
If you don't want to pay for text messages, don't send any, then call the customer service rep. T-mobile will credit you the inbound charges in most cases (if you're polite about it and explain you never use text messaging so all that you received was unsolicited).
Still a hassle, but I've heard a rumor that T-mobile will begin allowing customers to opt-out of text messages starting in August when they bump the rates to $0.20.
It's still ridiculously overpriced. This is what happens when the FCC and FTC don't do their jobs and let the companies merge and merge and merge until we're left with oligarchies rather than true competition. I think it should be illegal for phone companies to charge for the first couple minutes of an inbound call and ANY inbound texts.
Right now, they're just milking SMS for all they can because they know its days are numbered. The first phone on the market (i.e. one of the open platforms coming out) that treats text messages as ordinary data and eliminates the phone company's ability to charge outrageous per-message rates will kill this little "profit center" dead.
I disagree. Books are just as vulnerable (moreso, even) than bits on other storage media. Paper burns and rots over time. The only advantage printed books have over conscienciously archived digital data is that they're human readable--you don't need to find a working device (or construct a new one) to read the data they contain, provided they're in good condition.
There are also plenty of other Apple-certified service shops who can upgrade memory and whatnot without voiding an Apple warranty for those who can't do it themselves, so even if you buy a Mac, you've still got choices with regards to upgrades.
A solar sail craft's maximum speed will be considerably less than c. Mass-to-sail ratio and diminishing radiation pressure as the craft travels further from its star will be the biggest limiting factors.
The Phoenix lander will not be returning to Earth, so we will remain safe from any would-be hitchhiking silica monsters.
I'd prefer http://slashdot.dotslash/
Keeps it symmetrical.
I can answer this one. WINE will still be around and used, because the (by then) 30 years worth of Windows software development will include applications still around and being used.
Also, using 10 years as the endpoint for Windows dominance doesn't address what happens between then and now. It's going to have to be gradual, and as development shifts to a different platform, I guarantee some developers will be tweak their code to run in either Windows or WINE, or use Winelibs to shoehorn most of their application onto OSX and Linux.
If you're referring to his "present" votes, you're misunderstanding a common practice in the Illinois legislature. Voting "Present" is commonly done to represent "No, with comments."
As I understand the theories, any mini-black holes created would evaporate instantly--but assuming Hawking radiation doesn't exist and black holes (no matter how small) are forever, it still wouldn't be much of a threat to the planet.
Depends on the model. One of the more popular theories holds that the heart of a black hole is a singularity--a hole in spacetime infinitely small and infinitely dense
It doesn't matter where the black hole is created. It, like all black holes, is infinitesmal in size and infinitely dense. It'll fall right to the center of the Earth as if all the matter in between wasn't even there. Also, having started out life with the mass of a few atoms, it's going to take a looooooooooong time for it to destroy the planet. Black holes don't "suck" matter in. They can only pull matter in with the force of their own gravity--which is going to be very very tiny.
It certainly won't shift the Earth's center of gravity appreciably.
It will probably render ODF just fine (at least initially), but I bet it's gonna create ODFs messier than Word's HTML so other programs will have trouble rendering Office-produce ODFs. Microsoft will try to make the other applications look bad.
A wide-open wifi network, broadcasting its SSID is an invitation to use it. It's a bowl of candy on the front porch at Halloween with a sign that says "help yourself." Ethically, you should only take one piece, and not the whole bowl (i.e. hog all the bandwidth).
The router has been configured, either by its owner or manufacturer, to broadcast its name and assign addresses to any computer that asks for one.
I leave my wifi running this way on purpose. Guests can come over and use my broadband on their iphones, laptops, etc without having to fuss with any settings. If neighbors want to use it, and can actually get a useable signal from my anemic little wireless router, they are welcome to.
If someone is getting all indignant over other people using their wide-open wifi, yet they did not make even the slightest effort to secure it (at least disable SSID broadcast), then I think they're being ridiculous. Even if someone doesn't know how to configure their router, ask a friend. Someone freeloading off your wifi using reasonable bandwidth isn't causing you any harm, and you probably wouldn't even notice anyway.
Indeed. I think there may be no way at all to differentiate between a router left open deliberately and one left open purposefully.
Clickwrap EULAs have a dubious history in courts.
Yup. *Two* in fact. (well "compatibility layers" is the better term). The open source WINE and Microsoft's very own "Windows on Windows" (WOW) which is for legacy compatibility.
If you get Vista Business, you have downgrade rights to Windows XP. So, for the forseeable future, you can buy a new PC, select Vista Business, but ask for XP installed. You still get a factory install and can move back up to Vista once MS improves it sufficiently (assuming MS actually DOES so).
Not necessarily. So long as the market is competitive, manufacturers can't really raise prices arbitrarily. If a manufacturer raises its prices, it sells fewer units and its competitors sell more (all else being equal). Prices will rise and fall to what the market is willing to pay, regardless of production costs. If a new cost is imposed on a manufacturer, they have to cut costs elsewhere or accept less profit. Simply raising the price isn't an option.
Grub on a one-second dual boot will do the trick too. Of course, the best way to protect privacy overseas is to wipe the drive before you leave, and download what you need when you get there. They can't rummage through data that isn't there.
Seems about the only way to avoid junk calls. I never answer if I don't recognize the number, and certainly not if it's private. Pisses the bank off if I forget about a payment or something, but they'll usually send postcards too. If it's a legit call and they can't be bothered to leave a message, then I can't be bothered to call them back.
Of course, once the spam bots start leaving ads in my voicemail, then I'm getting violent.
Then that's some good decades-old wiring. 50k is the best you can really get on dialup even in perfect conditions with pristine wiring, 33.6 without downstream tricks.
You're obviously trolling here, but it provides a good jumping off point for what I want to say, so I'll bite. First off, other people watching live streaming video online aren't likely to impact your connection. Satellite TV, Cable and over-the-air antenna don't carry every live video feed of interest to everyone, so that may be someone's only option to see a particular event live. Also, there are lots of legal services to get movies off the Internet--some dinky 2 bit operations you may have heard of called iTunes and Amazon.com. I can download a 2 hour standard def movie in about 20 minutes on my connection, which is on par with how long it would take to go to the rental store, minus the hassles and gasoline. And it's certainly not cheaper to rent.
Nobody's destroying the Internet--well, maybe the cable companies. You see, what's going to happen is we consumers might actually get what we've been asking for these past few decades--ala carte channels. Paying only for the channels and shows you actually want, and the cable company becomes a mere bandwidth provider akin to a utility. No more content, premium channels, pay per view, or any of that crap. You pay for the pipe to your house, and what you want to watch. Cable companies want to retain control and maintain their monopolies, so they'll fight this every step of the way. That's what the net neutrality fight is really all about. The cable companies don't want to relinquish control.
Disclosure: I work for BNY Mellon, and no, I have nothing to do with any of this. But we're not a traditional retail bank. It's mostly asset management (running mutual funds, portfolios, etc.). Not the kind of thing you can really make a "run" on.
I wouldn't use it as a primary general purpose O.S. but it's damn useful as a bag-o-tricks for odds and ends. It's a great little bootdisk with network support for remote drive imaging/restore, it's also great for re-purposing old "dead" PCs into random useful things. One of my more peculiar former bosses wouldn't touch a computer, didn't want to come in to the office, lest pissed investors locate him, and preferred to run the husk of what remained of his company from a speaker phone and fax machine. Anyhoo, I found some old P-IIs in a forgotten junk closet and threw together a DSL image to connect to the office via VPN and act as a print server and a listening VPN client so we could show him powerpoints and crap. As they died, reimage another old box and swap it out.
It's too soon to tell. If the election were tomorrow, McCain would probably get both states, Michigan by a much narrower margin. I think anger at the DNC will soften over time and Michigan will ultimately be blue this year, with Florida in play.
I'm not very familiar with Michigan's demographics, but Florida is a lot like three states. North Florida is a lot like neighboring Georgia and Alabama and also has a very hefty military population. Despite the unpopularity of the war, even amongst military families, McCain will take the northern counties easily. South Florida is very diverse with large Jewish, Senior, Latin and LGBT populations that were very pro-Hillary. So long as they can be brought back into the fold, Obama should capture those counties by a comfortable margin. Central Florida (Greater Orlando, Tampa, and maybe up to Gainesville) has massive college student populations along with a fairly large black vote that will heavily favor Obama, of course this is balanced by large swaths of more rural areas with traditionally conservative voters, making Central Florida the purple battleground area.
Florida will be anybody's game. There's also going to be a gay marriage ban (state constitutional amendment) bringing out lots of voters on both sides of that issue throwing a wrench in the projections too--especially after what's happened in California. I think it's really going to boil down to how well the democrats heal the rift in the party and the Central Florida GOTV effort. Obama puts enough states in play nationwide to have a decent shot at winning the presidency without Florida, but McCain needs it.