Guarana isn't an asian vegetable, though - it's a South American stimulant that is traditionally used to boost the sex drive.
Ginseng, native to Asia and North America both is reputably also an aphrodesiac (and promote well being, yada, yada yada). I found a great quote here -
Don't take Ginseng and Ginseng mixtures with Coffee as it will accelerate the caffine effects on the body and can cause diarrhea.
So basically, they want you to get drunk, buzzing, and horny all at once. I would recommend against this one for most geeks, but you probably would match up well with someone drinking it;)
US law prohibited small breweries before 1977. In 1977 that law was overturned (or repealed or something of that sort) and microbreweries and brewing in the home was permitted for the first time since pre-prohibition. That meant large breweries (the only ones allowed) had ~50 years to change US tastes to a cheap, bitter, rice-based wheat lager in a market they basically had a monopoly over (you had several choices from some core breweries, but they all were basically the same).
Microbreweries didn't take off until the mid-to-late 1980s and the reputation was their beers were bad - and to American US mass brewery tastes, they were right.
Most drinkers start in late high school or early college. Because those are generally lean times financially, the cheapest swill that does the job is chosen. That, of course, is usually the stuff put out by the largest breweries. Even after college, it's hard to turn down 2-for-1 taps for $1 when imports and microbrews go for $5 or more each at the same bar.
Incidentally, and ironically in a way, the custom-brewed beers (in my case, Leinenkeugel's Red) put out by major breweries were my gateway to imports and other quality beers (though I did have a Pete's Wicked Ale long before that, but nobody, including me, liked it). I also no longer like wheat lagers at all... ok, I admit there's a German wheat lager I like (it's like drinking bread), but that's it.
my guess would be that it came with OpenOffice for two reasons 1) Sun can divert (most of the) support to OpenOffice.org 2) Sun does not have to pay for the commercial fonts or other commercial add-ons (pdf exporter is one, I think) in Star Office and pass the cost on to you, the consumer.
It still astounds me that the linked article mentions Star Office as being free at one point, which it's not. The whole purpose of Sun making a commercial version available was to make the option more appealing to businesses - offer support as well as a set of professionally done fonts.
There is a NAT for IPv6, but it's frowned upon by the IPv6 people because it is a hack (and was one for IPv4). The goal of IPv6 is that every machine can be traced back to its owner and therefore can be positively identified as a particular user. Nice from a security standpoint, but pure evil from a privacy standpoint.
I'm from the other camp - NAT helps security and for that matter, increases privacy since you can't identify the machine behind the firewall (especially if they leave the DHCP connection and get a new IP every time they connect). Fun stuff when the feds want to know who's been downloading mp3s over your hotspot and you honestly can't tell them:)
I hit a few bugs in Morrowind, especially pre-patch - for instance there was an early bug in TES:Morrowind where if you fell off the large bridge near the start of the game (one of the first missions you'd get) you could fall into a crack and no longer move (or was it you fall forever... I may be mixing the problem up with one I hit in Gothic, which I was playing at the same time). I couldn't repeat after the first patch but maybe didn't try hard enough. Also, if I played for a really long time (say, 6-8 hours) it would crash unexpectedly (I believe related to save-and-load, because it happened more often when I screwed up badly and needed to restore from save).
Nothing like Daggerfall, tho, which had both installation and runtime problems of epic scale. It was one of the buggiest games I've played, but if you really want to see bugs, dig up an old copy of the original Pax Imperia. Bugs in that game were so bad the developers promised a free upgrade to Pax II, which they never delivered (in part to something like a 5 year release delay).
seems to me America (and probably Russia) had invasion plans all drawn up during the Cold War. I can see how such a belief was perpetuated, though:
a) the point of air burst nuclear weapons was to reduce fallout and therefore enables invasion/capture shortly after the explosion, and b) only the fission source causes long term radiation contamination, so an invading force can move in quickly after air bursting a fusion device (at least to the outskirts of the blast radius). Fission devices are used to initiate a fusion explosion, so there is still some long term radioactive damage and possible fallout.
However, air bursting weapons maximizes kill radius while minimizing damage on the ground... makes sense from a military perspective, since they generally don't intend long term damage.
And actually, the military wanted both types of weapon - one tactical nuclear weapon with a short blast and minimal damage that could be used on the battlefield in front of an assault (preferably a 2-10mile maximum damage radius with a core blast/kill zone of 1-2 miles from what I remember of it) and one long distance high yield threat that could be used from afar. I don't think the tac-nuke was ever fully realized, because the goal of it was to be able to move into the region within a few hours of the blast, but the dependence on a fission source to at least initiate the explosion and the typical larger burst radii of fusion blasts didn't make that possible.
that's crazy talk - ATI makes and manufactures a "Mac Edition" line of graphics cards and creates their own line of drivers for them. ok, maybe they may not make the "Apple branded" ATI card (I don't know), but you can get ATI Radeon Mac Edition cards through ATI or other reputable places.
Try this link or if you specifically need PCI (like I do on my old-ass mac) this link
yes, these are just graphics cards, but the point is ATI manufactures and ships Apple products and drivers for them without the Apple brand name on them and has been doing so for many years. For that matter, you can find PC ATI based graphics cards with other company names on them, too.
that's basically what I was saying - he set a goal, but includes no measures (basically, he expects it to happen by voluntary). I was paraphrasing in the shortest amount of info possible, so the stem cell stuff might have been a bit short.
Actually, a good percentage of the questions were avoided rather than answered. Both Bush and Kerry give numbers and promises without any information on how they would implement the things. I don't like either of the slimy weasels, but that's my opinion - damn politicians:)
I've had good luck with both 2k and XP, but have seen blue screens from some weird things that never happen on my Linux box or even my mac.
XP crashes have always been either driver problems (a bad nVidia driver caused them once), or problems with my memory DIMM (Microsoft's own memory test reported bad mem).
Win 2K had some flakyness when mixing net mounted files with local mounted files, but I haven't seen it in a while. I had problems running a tail app from cygwin or commercial unix distro on a network mounted file.
Aside from that, I'd say my crash rate is about 1 in 500 sessions, far from these results
Paraphasing issues they differ on, and ones they agree on (15 questions, not the 5 analyzed):
Yucca Mt: Bush: for Yucca mountain. Claims safe, but only touting safe for 10000 years, where at least 100000 would be needed for radioactive decay to safe level. Kerry: against Yucca mountain.
Nuclear Weapons Research: Bush: more Nuke spending Kerry: less Nuke spending
Stem Cell research: Bush: keep current - policy leans towards funding by private sector so taxpayers not responsible for paying for "further destruction of human embryos" Kerry: loosen restrictions, as long as still morally acceptable.
NASA/Moon/Mars: Bush: 15 years to manned moon mission (and base?) and use that as a launching point for future missions. Kerry: NASA needs more funding (no real answer on manned mission to moon or Mars)
Mad Cow: Bush: USDA leading taking measures such as banning eating of 'downer cattle' (fyi, animals that can't walk at time of slaughter), prohibiting specific material from older cattle (+30 mos), and expanded surveillence. Kerry: Bush mishandling - need to ensure 1997 ban on bone-meal in feed (fyi, this is usually the ground bones of sheep, where the prions that cause mad cow come from).
Drugs: Bush: US is gold standard for speeding new therapies and drugs to patients. Kerry: Make sure FDA has funding to make sure drugs are safe. Current approval rate may be too fast to be safe.
Things they both agree with, to an extent: missile defense system (continue it), scientist movement (allow, as long as security isn't compromised), WMD (get global community involved), ITER fusion (keep research), biomed (both claim committed to it), endangered species (make changes that best protect the species), and transgenic crops (important to agriculture).
That's not how I read it - the article says it recompiles blocks of code on the fly and caches the most used ones. The difference between this and most other emulators is that most other emulators compile line-by-line (or so the article says).
I noticed that they demo'd OpenGL programs for 3D, of which a graphical equivalent exists on all systems (and many of the functions in hardware) - what happens when you run DirectX, where this is not necessarily true? I suspect the only way would be to run Windows (barring card support - I'm just using this as an example) in emulation. What kind of emulated hardware support if running Windows on MacOS or Linux does such an emulator have?
That is a management problem, not a development problem. The person(s) in charge of the project should set targets and try to meet them in a timely fashion. Vegastrike has made massive strides since I worked on it (I think it was.1) and looks far better, though I haven't tried it in about 2 years, but was well managed from what I remember. Flightgear also was, but I only submitted bug reports to that one;)
oddly enough, I was going to mention puta, because that's the word my brother-in-law uses when he's pissed off, but I know that's not the correct word for it;)
Interestingly, babelfish pulls up hembra for female, too, but my Mexican brother-in-law says no, never ever say that (incidentally, later posts say this is what Microsoft used). He says to use masculino/femenino, as well. Anyhow, I told you how much Spanish I know, so thanks for the extra info:)
There actually used to be singles released on small, ~1/2 sized discs (they called 'em 3 inch in the US, but they also called CDs 5 inch) that required a plastic adapter to fit in the CD player (but played in most players), which was eventually replaced by the groove thing in most players. I thought the (non-sony) mini-discs were dead and I would never see them again, then I bought a 16MB USB storage device that came with one. Of course, only ONE of my CD/DVD/CD+-RW drives have the groove you're talking about (out of 4) and not on the machine I wanted to install it on. Fortunately, I SAMBA mounted the drive and the install worked.
It made me wonder what ever happened to my old adapter and cd singles, though.
Not to mention the idea isn't even that new... there was a mac (only?) racing game several years ago that was entirely paid for by advertisers as an advertising experiment.
I have no recollection of the name of the game, as my mac at the time was far too underpowered to run it.
I wouldn't think this would be easily mistaken - the words are completely different, just as they are in English.
Perra is a female dog, or "bitch" (while a Perro is a male dog)
Female is Hembra (and Hombre is man).
Anyone with a few hours of formal Spanish can probably tell you those (I've had no formal Spanish, myself, just a few hours of self learning and I can tell you, if that says anything).
Potassium Cyanide fishing is a technique used to "stun" fish rather than killing them so they can be caught live and either used in aquariums or served fresh from live tanks (popular in Asia). Potassium cyanide kills the reef where it is applied, but not the fish (the level absorbed by fish is non-fatal to them).
Dynamiting is used to stun fish (by the concussion), so it mainly kills reef by breaking it and stirring up sediment that suffocates the reef. I've always heard of this as grenade fishing, but I suppose it depends on what you're using as the explosive.
I'm surprised shrimp and lobster trawling wasn't mentioned - trawling kills more reef every year than any other method I know of (something like 2-3x the area of the United States yearly, or between 6 and 10 million square nautical miles, depending on source). Maybe those numbers are down, or else maybe the Cyanide/Dynamite numbers are way up and they want people to take notice. I think the cyanide numbers were only about 300000 square nautical miles last year (it was something like 330000, but the marine awareness and presevation class I attended was way back in February).
Being a diver, the 5% number by the poster was suspect to me immediately since no location I've been at (Hawaii, Aruba, Cozumel, Florida) has seen numbers close to that. Yes, a large percentage of reefs are threatened, but certainly not 95% wiped out.
The 5% number is, according to the article, referring to the Maldive islands, a chain to the west-to-southwest of India, not worldwide.
Convergence is inevitable, but sometimes is being pushed before it's time. I once owned a tape deck, 8 track, radio and CD player all as separate components. My first replacement had a tape deck, phonograph, and radio in the same box (with CD ins). My second replacement had a tape deck, CD, MP3 and radio in one box. The video tuner I've looked at recently comes with audio, video, and HDTV tuners. You can buy VCR DVD combo boxes, and I've been tempted to do so - my wife can't figure out the 7 remotes and a switch box required to run it all (the tuner doesn't turn everything on in one button press, unfortunately).
Is a single, more complex device worse than multiple remotes, a wiring nightmare of cascading devices (because of my tuner having only 3 inputs), and requiring an exact combination of devices on just to watch TV (like I need the VCR, tuner, and switchbox for)?
Yeah, quality of stand alones is higher, but if the market were successful, you'd probably start seeing high end gear as well. In geek terms, think motherboards - you could buy a PC from any major manufacturer that will undoubtably come with an ECS junkboard, or you can build it yourself/have it custom made and put in a high end board by ASUS or other reputable manufacturer.
Modularity isn't necessarily the more cost effective path - a DVD/CD player is a perfect example, as the CD player reuses most of the parts of the DVD player. A VCR could reuse parts of the component video system and maybe some circuitry in a combo device. For a game console that uses DVD discs to offer a DVD player option seems completely logical - the cost (outside of the remote and the license for a encoder/decoder key) is completely built in already.
Nobody forces you to buy something based on proprietary tech, and few of these technologies survive in the long run - look at the VCR and its history again (but don't look at Microsoft).
Unfortunately, I think women being turned off by technology starts very young. Back in my pirate/hacker days (Elementary school and Jr-high, mostly), my nerd clique dissed girls who had any interest in computers, or at minimum, hogged the computer time. I only knew two female programmers (sisters that bragged about being babysat by Seymore Cray) by high school and about 30 male (only about 6 good ones), but even those two girls weren't really programming much when I knew them.
By college, there were only a handful of women, and many of them had little practical experience programming, where by that time I had a lifetime. In this way, I believe in the "less confident about computing knowledge" - having programmed since 9 has a very different learning curve than starting at 18 (college, where most of the women I knew/know started programming), although having started at 9 with no formal training means unlearning a lot. One thing it does do, though, is boost confidence - I was completely overconfident that my Apple ][ BASIC knowledge would make Pascal easy (it didn't, but mainly for formal matters like indenting, not coding itself).
Slashdot Mirror
Guarana isn't an asian vegetable, though - it's a South American stimulant that is traditionally used to boost the sex drive.
;)
Ginseng, native to Asia and North America both is reputably also an aphrodesiac (and promote well being, yada, yada yada).
I found a great quote here -
Don't take Ginseng and Ginseng mixtures with Coffee as it will accelerate the caffine effects on the body and can cause diarrhea.
So basically, they want you to get drunk, buzzing, and horny all at once. I would recommend against this one for most geeks, but you probably would match up well with someone drinking it
There's more to it than that.
US law prohibited small breweries before 1977. In 1977 that law was overturned (or repealed or something of that sort) and microbreweries and brewing in the home was permitted for the first time since pre-prohibition. That meant large breweries (the only ones allowed) had ~50 years to change US tastes to a cheap, bitter, rice-based wheat lager in a market they basically had a monopoly over (you had several choices from some core breweries, but they all were basically the same).
Microbreweries didn't take off until the mid-to-late 1980s and the reputation was their beers were bad - and to American US mass brewery tastes, they were right.
Most drinkers start in late high school or early college. Because those are generally lean times financially, the cheapest swill that does the job is chosen. That, of course, is usually the stuff put out by the largest breweries. Even after college, it's hard to turn down 2-for-1 taps for $1 when imports and microbrews go for $5 or more each at the same bar.
Incidentally, and ironically in a way, the custom-brewed beers (in my case, Leinenkeugel's Red) put out by major breweries were my gateway to imports and other quality beers (though I did have a Pete's Wicked Ale long before that, but nobody, including me, liked it). I also no longer like wheat lagers at all... ok, I admit there's a German wheat lager I like (it's like drinking bread), but that's it.
my guess would be that it came with OpenOffice for two reasons
1) Sun can divert (most of the) support to OpenOffice.org
2) Sun does not have to pay for the commercial fonts or other commercial add-ons (pdf exporter is one, I think) in Star Office and pass the cost on to you, the consumer.
It still astounds me that the linked article mentions Star Office as being free at one point, which it's not. The whole purpose of Sun making a commercial version available was to make the option more appealing to businesses - offer support as well as a set of professionally done fonts.
There is a NAT for IPv6, but it's frowned upon by the IPv6 people because it is a hack (and was one for IPv4). The goal of IPv6 is that every machine can be traced back to its owner and therefore can be positively identified as a particular user. Nice from a security standpoint, but pure evil from a privacy standpoint.
:)
I'm from the other camp - NAT helps security and for that matter, increases privacy since you can't identify the machine behind the firewall (especially if they leave the DHCP connection and get a new IP every time they connect). Fun stuff when the feds want to know who's been downloading mp3s over your hotspot and you honestly can't tell them
I hit a few bugs in Morrowind, especially pre-patch - for instance there was an early bug in TES:Morrowind where if you fell off the large bridge near the start of the game (one of the first missions you'd get) you could fall into a crack and no longer move (or was it you fall forever... I may be mixing the problem up with one I hit in Gothic, which I was playing at the same time). I couldn't repeat after the first patch but maybe didn't try hard enough. Also, if I played for a really long time (say, 6-8 hours) it would crash unexpectedly (I believe related to save-and-load, because it happened more often when I screwed up badly and needed to restore from save).
Nothing like Daggerfall, tho, which had both installation and runtime problems of epic scale. It was one of the buggiest games I've played, but if you really want to see bugs, dig up an old copy of the original Pax Imperia. Bugs in that game were so bad the developers promised a free upgrade to Pax II, which they never delivered (in part to something like a 5 year release delay).
seems to me America (and probably Russia) had invasion plans all drawn up during the Cold War. I can see how such a belief was perpetuated, though:
a) the point of air burst nuclear weapons was to reduce fallout and therefore enables invasion/capture shortly after the explosion, and
b) only the fission source causes long term radiation contamination, so an invading force can move in quickly after air bursting a fusion device (at least to the outskirts of the blast radius). Fission devices are used to initiate a fusion explosion, so there is still some long term radioactive damage and possible fallout.
However, air bursting weapons maximizes kill radius while minimizing damage on the ground... makes sense from a military perspective, since they generally don't intend long term damage.
And actually, the military wanted both types of weapon - one tactical nuclear weapon with a short blast and minimal damage that could be used on the battlefield in front of an assault (preferably a 2-10mile maximum damage radius with a core blast/kill zone of 1-2 miles from what I remember of it) and one long distance high yield threat that could be used from afar. I don't think the tac-nuke was ever fully realized, because the goal of it was to be able to move into the region within a few hours of the blast, but the dependence on a fission source to at least initiate the explosion and the typical larger burst radii of fusion blasts didn't make that possible.
that's crazy talk - ATI makes and manufactures a "Mac Edition" line of graphics cards and creates their own line of drivers for them. ok, maybe they may not make the "Apple branded" ATI card (I don't know), but you can get ATI Radeon Mac Edition cards through ATI or other reputable places.
Try this link
or if you specifically need PCI (like I do on my old-ass mac) this link
yes, these are just graphics cards, but the point is ATI manufactures and ships Apple products and drivers for them without the Apple brand name on them and has been doing so for many years. For that matter, you can find PC ATI based graphics cards with other company names on them, too.
am I the only one that thought of the marathon map, not the movie when I read that?
:)
Great map. I think they even ported it to unreal tournament.
Heck, I had no idea there was a movie by that name until now
but Phobos is a moon of Mars...
;)
so close, yet so far away
Trent bounds back into the room (elaborate story ensues).
that's basically what I was saying - he set a goal, but includes no measures (basically, he expects it to happen by voluntary). I was paraphrasing in the shortest amount of info possible, so the stem cell stuff might have been a bit short.
:)
Actually, a good percentage of the questions were avoided rather than answered. Both Bush and Kerry give numbers and promises without any information on how they would implement the things. I don't like either of the slimy weasels, but that's my opinion - damn politicians
I've had good luck with both 2k and XP, but have seen blue screens from some weird things that never happen on my Linux box or even my mac.
XP crashes have always been either driver problems (a bad nVidia driver caused them once), or problems with my memory DIMM (Microsoft's own memory test reported bad mem).
Win 2K had some flakyness when mixing net mounted files with local mounted files, but I haven't seen it in a while. I had problems running a tail app from cygwin or commercial unix distro on a network mounted file.
Aside from that, I'd say my crash rate is about 1 in 500 sessions, far from these results
Paraphasing issues they differ on, and ones they agree on (15 questions, not the 5 analyzed):
Yucca Mt:
Bush: for Yucca mountain. Claims safe, but only touting safe for 10000 years, where at least 100000 would be needed for radioactive decay to safe level.
Kerry: against Yucca mountain.
Nuclear Weapons Research:
Bush: more Nuke spending
Kerry: less Nuke spending
Emissions/Environment.
Bush: voluntary emissions changes
Kerry: greener stance - stronger base emissions guidelines.
Stem Cell research:
Bush: keep current - policy leans towards funding by private sector so taxpayers not responsible for paying for "further destruction of human embryos"
Kerry: loosen restrictions, as long as still morally acceptable.
NASA/Moon/Mars:
Bush: 15 years to manned moon mission (and base?) and use that as a launching point for future missions.
Kerry: NASA needs more funding (no real answer on manned mission to moon or Mars)
Mad Cow:
Bush: USDA leading taking measures such as banning eating of 'downer cattle' (fyi, animals that can't walk at time of slaughter), prohibiting specific material from older cattle (+30 mos), and expanded surveillence.
Kerry: Bush mishandling - need to ensure 1997 ban on bone-meal in feed (fyi, this is usually the ground bones of sheep, where the prions that cause mad cow come from).
Drugs:
Bush: US is gold standard for speeding new therapies and drugs to patients.
Kerry: Make sure FDA has funding to make sure drugs are safe. Current approval rate may be too fast to be safe.
Things they both agree with, to an extent: missile defense system (continue it), scientist movement (allow, as long as security isn't compromised), WMD (get global community involved), ITER fusion (keep research), biomed (both claim committed to it), endangered species (make changes that best protect the species), and transgenic crops (important to agriculture).
That's not how I read it - the article says it recompiles blocks of code on the fly and caches the most used ones. The difference between this and most other emulators is that most other emulators compile line-by-line (or so the article says).
I noticed that they demo'd OpenGL programs for 3D, of which a graphical equivalent exists on all systems (and many of the functions in hardware) - what happens when you run DirectX, where this is not necessarily true? I suspect the only way would be to run Windows (barring card support - I'm just using this as an example) in emulation. What kind of emulated hardware support if running Windows on MacOS or Linux does such an emulator have?
if it's any consolation, it was in my local newspaper (on the front page, even) hours before the post here.
bastards.
That is a management problem, not a development problem. The person(s) in charge of the project should set targets and try to meet them in a timely fashion. Vegastrike has made massive strides since I worked on it (I think it was .1) and looks far better, though I haven't tried it in about 2 years, but was well managed from what I remember. Flightgear also was, but I only submitted bug reports to that one ;)
oddly enough, I was going to mention puta, because that's the word my brother-in-law uses when he's pissed off, but I know that's not the correct word for it ;)
:)
Interestingly, babelfish pulls up hembra for female, too, but my Mexican brother-in-law says no, never ever say that (incidentally, later posts say this is what Microsoft used). He says to use masculino/femenino, as well. Anyhow, I told you how much Spanish I know, so thanks for the extra info
There actually used to be singles released on small, ~1/2 sized discs (they called 'em 3 inch in the US, but they also called CDs 5 inch) that required a plastic adapter to fit in the CD player (but played in most players), which was eventually replaced by the groove thing in most players. I thought the (non-sony) mini-discs were dead and I would never see them again, then I bought a 16MB USB storage device that came with one. Of course, only ONE of my CD/DVD/CD+-RW drives have the groove you're talking about (out of 4) and not on the machine I wanted to install it on. Fortunately, I SAMBA mounted the drive and the install worked.
It made me wonder what ever happened to my old adapter and cd singles, though.
It's also Mexican soap star Thalia's birthday, as well as Branford Marsalis and was the birthday of Mother Theresa, as well.
I just remind myself of that when trying to erase the stigma of sharing a birthday with Macaulay...
Anyhow, you missed Home Alone IV, which was straight-to-TV drivel. It also didn't star MacCaulay.
Not to mention the idea isn't even that new... there was a mac (only?) racing game several years ago that was entirely paid for by advertisers as an advertising experiment.
I have no recollection of the name of the game, as my mac at the time was far too underpowered to run it.
I wouldn't think this would be easily mistaken - the words are completely different, just as they are in English.
Perra is a female dog, or "bitch" (while a Perro is a male dog)
Female is Hembra (and Hombre is man).
Anyone with a few hours of formal Spanish can probably tell you those (I've had no formal Spanish, myself, just a few hours of self learning and I can tell you, if that says anything).
Potassium Cyanide fishing is a technique used to "stun" fish rather than killing them so they can be caught live and either used in aquariums or served fresh from live tanks (popular in Asia). Potassium cyanide kills the reef where it is applied, but not the fish (the level absorbed by fish is non-fatal to them).
Dynamiting is used to stun fish (by the concussion), so it mainly kills reef by breaking it and stirring up sediment that suffocates the reef. I've always heard of this as grenade fishing, but I suppose it depends on what you're using as the explosive.
I'm surprised shrimp and lobster trawling wasn't mentioned - trawling kills more reef every year than any other method I know of (something like 2-3x the area of the United States yearly, or between 6 and 10 million square nautical miles, depending on source). Maybe those numbers are down, or else maybe the Cyanide/Dynamite numbers are way up and they want people to take notice. I think the cyanide numbers were only about 300000 square nautical miles last year (it was something like 330000, but the marine awareness and presevation class I attended was way back in February).
Being a diver, the 5% number by the poster was suspect to me immediately since no location I've been at (Hawaii, Aruba, Cozumel, Florida) has seen numbers close to that. Yes, a large percentage of reefs are threatened, but certainly not 95% wiped out.
The 5% number is, according to the article, referring to the Maldive islands, a chain to the west-to-southwest of India, not worldwide.
Convergence is inevitable, but sometimes is being pushed before it's time. I once owned a tape deck, 8 track, radio and CD player all as separate components. My first replacement had a tape deck, phonograph, and radio in the same box (with CD ins). My second replacement had a tape deck, CD, MP3 and radio in one box. The video tuner I've looked at recently comes with audio, video, and HDTV tuners. You can buy VCR DVD combo boxes, and I've been tempted to do so - my wife can't figure out the 7 remotes and a switch box required to run it all (the tuner doesn't turn everything on in one button press, unfortunately).
Is a single, more complex device worse than multiple remotes, a wiring nightmare of cascading devices (because of my tuner having only 3 inputs), and requiring an exact combination of devices on just to watch TV (like I need the VCR, tuner, and switchbox for)?
Yeah, quality of stand alones is higher, but if the market were successful, you'd probably start seeing high end gear as well. In geek terms, think motherboards - you could buy a PC from any major manufacturer that will undoubtably come with an ECS junkboard, or you can build it yourself/have it custom made and put in a high end board by ASUS or other reputable manufacturer.
Modularity isn't necessarily the more cost effective path - a DVD/CD player is a perfect example, as the CD player reuses most of the parts of the DVD player. A VCR could reuse parts of the component video system and maybe some circuitry in a combo device. For a game console that uses DVD discs to offer a DVD player option seems completely logical - the cost (outside of the remote and the license for a encoder/decoder key) is completely built in already.
Nobody forces you to buy something based on proprietary tech, and few of these technologies survive in the long run - look at the VCR and its history again (but don't look at Microsoft).
Unfortunately, I think women being turned off by technology starts very young. Back in my pirate/hacker days (Elementary school and Jr-high, mostly), my nerd clique dissed girls who had any interest in computers, or at minimum, hogged the computer time. I only knew two female programmers (sisters that bragged about being babysat by Seymore Cray) by high school and about 30 male (only about 6 good ones), but even those two girls weren't really programming much when I knew them.
By college, there were only a handful of women, and many of them had little practical experience programming, where by that time I had a lifetime. In this way, I believe in the "less confident about computing knowledge" - having programmed since 9 has a very different learning curve than starting at 18 (college, where most of the women I knew/know started programming), although having started at 9 with no formal training means unlearning a lot. One thing it does do, though, is boost confidence - I was completely overconfident that my Apple ][ BASIC knowledge would make Pascal easy (it didn't, but mainly for formal matters like indenting, not coding itself).
they all find me Creepy... at least on this forum :)