According to the wikipedia article this stuff is stable to temperatures of 18C, and the average temperature where it's found at is between 0C and 2C, so you temperature at the bottom of the ocean would need to rise by 16C. If it's hot enough that the ocean bottoms temperature has been raised 16C we're already screwed, as most crops would probably already be dead and most animal life as well.
Well, in the hybrid case it's not quite so simple. Because they switch between electric and gasoline depending on driving conditions you can't really gauge the performance in the same way you could a regular car. I suppose you could run it totally off the gas engine and measure the MPG for that with the understanding that in actual operation you going to see massively better performance, but that kind of makes the MPG figure useless for a comparison to non-hybrid cars. I suppose that could give some sort of mean MPG figure but I still suspect there would be awful lot of variance on that.
1) They're easily searchable.
2) They're highly portable (10 or more in your pocket)
3) If you have a computer available, or the reader supports some sort of wireless you can always download new books without leaving your home (or hotel or whatever)
4) If the reader uses LCD or has a light you can read them in the dark without needing an extra light
5) Easier to read one handed (not much of a feature, but true nonetheless)
As for your list, 3 and 5 are duplicates, 10 is irrelevant as the book or eBook has nothing to do with some moron starting a fight, and 8 is also true of eBooks. As for 1 there are many places you can get eBook files for free. Project Gutenburg comes to mind, but there are others as well, and other cheaper options than Amazon as well.
Ok, it's changed somewhat since I last saw a technical breakdown of it. The early concept was centered around charged particles that oriented themselves around a magnetic field, one side of the particle was black, the other white. Depending on the polarity of the field the particle would show up as either white or black.
What e-reader gives you the option of writing notes in your books? I believe the iLiad has that option. It's been mentioned in several posts, but it's also rather pricey.
What is it about the eBook articles on slashdot (a tech geek site FFS) that seems to bring all the Ludites out of the woodwork? I can understand people complaining about DRM, but at least half the negative posts are people saying eBooks are stupid and you should just buy the paperback. What's wrong with these people? Are they also going around campaigning for the return of the slide rule? I can appreciate if they give reasons why they think eBooks aren't ready yet, or what changes they'd like to see in eBooks, but just flat out condemning the technology for no reason other than they don't like it is silly.
There will always be a place for certain books in the physical realm (I've got first editions of all the Myst books in hardcover which are cool to look at), but it would be nice to have a big collection of stuff for reference or that you just want a copy to flip through every now and then in digital form leaving more room on the shelves for the really nice hardcovers.
As for the refresh rate, that would be zero. The e-ink technology works by updating the screen once and then leaving it that way. This is why e-ink takes a brief but noticeable time to update on page-turns and why battery usage per page flip is fairly consistent across all page content. In the context of e-ink refresh rate is usually meant to be the mean time to redraw the page. That brief but noticeable delay you mention is exactly what I was complaining about.
The trick is to mount an LCD light on the frame (with its own battery if you feel like it), that shines down along the screen. I had considered that arrangement and they sell lights like that designed to be used with actual paper books as well, but I've always found the lighting on those to be just a bit less than optimal. It usually results in one edge of the page being a little bit too bright and the other one being not quite bright enough. I'm thinking more along the lines of a OLED panel mounted directly behind the e-ink display so it shines through the e-ink. The tough part is going to be getting it to shine through without tinging the whites and washing out the blacks. I don't know, I guess I'd have to actually see how the side mounted one looked on an actual eBook. Being a fixed flat plane as opposed to a curved page as in a real book probably improves the quality considerably I imagine, so maybe it's sufficient.
Actually the Sony one (not sure about Kindle as I haven't physically seen one of those yet) is almost the perfect size. It's a tad bit bigger than I'd like (maybe shave an inch or so off the diagonal) but still small enough to be considered "pocket sized" while still having a large display area.
Actually the ability to accelerate in a car is an important safety feature. It's significantly more dangerous driving in traffic in a vehicle with poor acceleration (and deceleration, mustn't forget the brakes as well). As for SUVs, I hate them and think they should be banned, but that's besides the point, as the real point is they're actually less safe then most other vehicles. As for computers, well, I need one to do my job so not much of a "rationalization" there, and I don't own a camera (well, my phone has one, but if I had the option to get it without the camera and have it cost less I would have taken it).
I also happen to want an eBook reader as I'd load it with all my O'Reilly reference books for work, as well as whatever other books I happen to be reading at the time. Yes the information in the O'Reilly books is available elsewhere on the internet for free (as one other commenter pointed out), but having it available collected in one location makes it worth having.
Speaking of a back-lit reader, I wonder how difficult it would be to back-light an e-ink display. I like e-ink even if the refresh rate is less than stellar for the amazingly efficient energy usage, but adding a back-light that could be turned on at night would make it just about the perfect display for mostly static content such as that found in books.
It seems to me that "not Amazon" is about an equal push so we are back to which one. Unless of course someone can nominate a third option with features comparable to the ones on offer from the other two corporate behemoths. My dream eBook reader would have support for txt, pdf, html, rtf, doc, and maybe a couple of the actual eBook formats, have an e-ink display with a optional light (for reading in the dark), have some form of wireless (either wifi or cell), and be small enough to fit in your pocket without needing a crowbar. They're getting pretty close at this point, but I don't think any of the ones on offer quite hit all the bullet points.
If you buy something made from dead trees, you can keep it forever and still use it in 20 years, sell it on e-bay, loan it to friends/relatives. Also, dead trees do not need batteries (as long as you have enough light), never go obsolete, and you can still use it even if the publisher goes belly-up. Of course they're somewhat less useful in the dark, or when you need to transport 100 of them in a 1'x6"x1" space.
In most contexts people are referring to the last one, A device you can upload documents to for reading. Sometimes it can also refer to the first one. Some people argue that a dedicated reader is stupid and that they should just get a PDA or tablet PC, but that overlooks certain design decisions incorporated into dedicated readers should as incredibly long battery life, ergonomic design (for holding in your hand for long periods), and typically light and minimal design so it's simple to transport. Sometimes they also incorporate a light if the display is not backlit or otherwise illuminated.
Unless he picked it up at one of the specialty locations like wickedlasers it's highly unlikely this was a high power laser. Most likely it was something like this. I doubt anyone is going to go out and drop $700 for a high power green laser like the type you're talking about and then sit in their front yard and shine it into the sky.
He isn't saying that causing those symptoms isn't a big deal, he's saying the pilot is BSing and there's no way in hell that he experienced symptoms like that from having a green laser shined into the helicopters cabin. Now, you could get those symptoms if you stared directly into the beam for 30 seconds or so, but at distances of even 100 ft with one person in a helicopter and the other holding the laser in his hand it's just about impossible to stare directly into the beam for even a few seconds. Unless the pilot was wearing nightvision or something this just could not happen (and if he was even a flashlight would probably be painful if shined directly at the helicopter).
So if I pay you 4 pounds of rice for a new chair, what's the sales tax on that? It's unreasonable to not have a government defined currency as it would boil down to all the corporations just creating private currency (which they already do on their gaming networks, just look at the Wii and XBox Live points) which wouldn't be accepted everywhere. Sorry, I rather take US Dollars than Microsoft Dollars any day of the week. What people don't understand is that money only has value because everyone agrees it has value, it doesn't matter if you're using paper, seashells, gold coins, or rice as your currency, just that everyone agrees to use it.
Not really. Ultimately it comes down to the utility of the medium. Gold in and of itself, outside of personal decoration and some uses in industry such as plating for conductors is really rather worthless. As it is, I much rather carry around a dollar bill than a gold coin, as the dollar bill is much simpler to transport (weighs less, can be folded, and you don't worry about it losing value from wear). True dollars are only worth something because everyone agrees they are, but the same can be said of gold. It has no intrinsic value outside of what people have agreed to prescribe to it. The only reason people even bother with it is because other people seem to think it has value, which coincidentally is the same argument for why people use dollar bills. Of course, we could go back to the pure barter system where everything really did have an intrinsic value, but I rather not lug a pig to Best Buy while the cashier tries to figure out how many chickens she owes me as change for a copy of The Simpsons movie.
Agreed. FSM help us if the Christian zealots ever manage to take over. If you want to see a serious scary movie check out Jesus Camp. Those people are seriously deranged. At one point they have one of the preachers talking about how the Muslims are beating us because they have jihade fighters, so Christians need to train their children to fight Muslims. They actually have one clip where they have a bunch of kids in camo wearing bandoleers with fake grenades and holding crosses and bibles, while they preach to them about how it's their duty as Christians to be warriors for God and to kill non-Christians.
Probably a marketing guy hoping to snag any middle management that was there. Classic case of a "workshop" that's really a sales pitch. Reason he spent so long on the widgets and skipped out on the details of the PLC stuff was that the managers (read buyers) would have started to drift off, but if you show them some blinky lights and pictures you can hold their attention longer.
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According to the wikipedia article this stuff is stable to temperatures of 18C, and the average temperature where it's found at is between 0C and 2C, so you temperature at the bottom of the ocean would need to rise by 16C. If it's hot enough that the ocean bottoms temperature has been raised 16C we're already screwed, as most crops would probably already be dead and most animal life as well.
Well, in the hybrid case it's not quite so simple. Because they switch between electric and gasoline depending on driving conditions you can't really gauge the performance in the same way you could a regular car. I suppose you could run it totally off the gas engine and measure the MPG for that with the understanding that in actual operation you going to see massively better performance, but that kind of makes the MPG figure useless for a comparison to non-hybrid cars. I suppose that could give some sort of mean MPG figure but I still suspect there would be awful lot of variance on that.
...unless you want to see some pretty cool carbon dioxide emissions (explosions) from deep water reserves in the next fifty years. Uh... what?1) They're easily searchable.
2) They're highly portable (10 or more in your pocket)
3) If you have a computer available, or the reader supports some sort of wireless you can always download new books without leaving your home (or hotel or whatever)
4) If the reader uses LCD or has a light you can read them in the dark without needing an extra light
5) Easier to read one handed (not much of a feature, but true nonetheless)
As for your list, 3 and 5 are duplicates, 10 is irrelevant as the book or eBook has nothing to do with some moron starting a fight, and 8 is also true of eBooks. As for 1 there are many places you can get eBook files for free. Project Gutenburg comes to mind, but there are others as well, and other cheaper options than Amazon as well.
Ok, it's changed somewhat since I last saw a technical breakdown of it. The early concept was centered around charged particles that oriented themselves around a magnetic field, one side of the particle was black, the other white. Depending on the polarity of the field the particle would show up as either white or black.
Time to blow some karma.
What is it about the eBook articles on slashdot (a tech geek site FFS) that seems to bring all the Ludites out of the woodwork? I can understand people complaining about DRM, but at least half the negative posts are people saying eBooks are stupid and you should just buy the paperback. What's wrong with these people? Are they also going around campaigning for the return of the slide rule? I can appreciate if they give reasons why they think eBooks aren't ready yet, or what changes they'd like to see in eBooks, but just flat out condemning the technology for no reason other than they don't like it is silly.
There will always be a place for certain books in the physical realm (I've got first editions of all the Myst books in hardcover which are cool to look at), but it would be nice to have a big collection of stuff for reference or that you just want a copy to flip through every now and then in digital form leaving more room on the shelves for the really nice hardcovers.
Actually the Sony one (not sure about Kindle as I haven't physically seen one of those yet) is almost the perfect size. It's a tad bit bigger than I'd like (maybe shave an inch or so off the diagonal) but still small enough to be considered "pocket sized" while still having a large display area.
Actually the ability to accelerate in a car is an important safety feature. It's significantly more dangerous driving in traffic in a vehicle with poor acceleration (and deceleration, mustn't forget the brakes as well). As for SUVs, I hate them and think they should be banned, but that's besides the point, as the real point is they're actually less safe then most other vehicles. As for computers, well, I need one to do my job so not much of a "rationalization" there, and I don't own a camera (well, my phone has one, but if I had the option to get it without the camera and have it cost less I would have taken it).
I also happen to want an eBook reader as I'd load it with all my O'Reilly reference books for work, as well as whatever other books I happen to be reading at the time. Yes the information in the O'Reilly books is available elsewhere on the internet for free (as one other commenter pointed out), but having it available collected in one location makes it worth having.
Speaking of a back-lit reader, I wonder how difficult it would be to back-light an e-ink display. I like e-ink even if the refresh rate is less than stellar for the amazingly efficient energy usage, but adding a back-light that could be turned on at night would make it just about the perfect display for mostly static content such as that found in books.
In most contexts people are referring to the last one, A device you can upload documents to for reading. Sometimes it can also refer to the first one. Some people argue that a dedicated reader is stupid and that they should just get a PDA or tablet PC, but that overlooks certain design decisions incorporated into dedicated readers should as incredibly long battery life, ergonomic design (for holding in your hand for long periods), and typically light and minimal design so it's simple to transport. Sometimes they also incorporate a light if the display is not backlit or otherwise illuminated.
Unless he picked it up at one of the specialty locations like wickedlasers it's highly unlikely this was a high power laser. Most likely it was something like this. I doubt anyone is going to go out and drop $700 for a high power green laser like the type you're talking about and then sit in their front yard and shine it into the sky.
He isn't saying that causing those symptoms isn't a big deal, he's saying the pilot is BSing and there's no way in hell that he experienced symptoms like that from having a green laser shined into the helicopters cabin. Now, you could get those symptoms if you stared directly into the beam for 30 seconds or so, but at distances of even 100 ft with one person in a helicopter and the other holding the laser in his hand it's just about impossible to stare directly into the beam for even a few seconds. Unless the pilot was wearing nightvision or something this just could not happen (and if he was even a flashlight would probably be painful if shined directly at the helicopter).
So if I pay you 4 pounds of rice for a new chair, what's the sales tax on that? It's unreasonable to not have a government defined currency as it would boil down to all the corporations just creating private currency (which they already do on their gaming networks, just look at the Wii and XBox Live points) which wouldn't be accepted everywhere. Sorry, I rather take US Dollars than Microsoft Dollars any day of the week. What people don't understand is that money only has value because everyone agrees it has value, it doesn't matter if you're using paper, seashells, gold coins, or rice as your currency, just that everyone agrees to use it.
Wait till we reach the diamond age, then everything will be valued in Carbon.
Not really. Ultimately it comes down to the utility of the medium. Gold in and of itself, outside of personal decoration and some uses in industry such as plating for conductors is really rather worthless. As it is, I much rather carry around a dollar bill than a gold coin, as the dollar bill is much simpler to transport (weighs less, can be folded, and you don't worry about it losing value from wear). True dollars are only worth something because everyone agrees they are, but the same can be said of gold. It has no intrinsic value outside of what people have agreed to prescribe to it. The only reason people even bother with it is because other people seem to think it has value, which coincidentally is the same argument for why people use dollar bills. Of course, we could go back to the pure barter system where everything really did have an intrinsic value, but I rather not lug a pig to Best Buy while the cashier tries to figure out how many chickens she owes me as change for a copy of The Simpsons movie.
Agreed. FSM help us if the Christian zealots ever manage to take over. If you want to see a serious scary movie check out Jesus Camp. Those people are seriously deranged. At one point they have one of the preachers talking about how the Muslims are beating us because they have jihade fighters, so Christians need to train their children to fight Muslims. They actually have one clip where they have a bunch of kids in camo wearing bandoleers with fake grenades and holding crosses and bibles, while they preach to them about how it's their duty as Christians to be warriors for God and to kill non-Christians.
Probably also true. I know every salary quote I've ever seen for a teacher is entry level or less for it's respective field.
That's almost as good as the old line about "That's not a bug, it's a feature!".
Probably a marketing guy hoping to snag any middle management that was there. Classic case of a "workshop" that's really a sales pitch. Reason he spent so long on the widgets and skipped out on the details of the PLC stuff was that the managers (read buyers) would have started to drift off, but if you show them some blinky lights and pictures you can hold their attention longer.