Sigh. This old canard again? Every mouse and trackpad sold by Apple since the mighty mouse and the glass trackpad has had right-button functionality built-in. OSX has supported right mouse clicks since forever.
Of course modern Apple pointing hardware only has one microswitch and relies on capacitance multi-touch technology to identify if the user is clicking on the right hand or left hand side of the device.
Being charitable i'll assume that's what you meant by one button. Why not try using the hardware to discover its actual functional capabilities? You never know, you might like it. I did despite my initial prejudices (as a dremel-wielding, cryo-cooling, case-modding hardcore PC fan).
Whoa, time out! NYCL is the local Slashdot guru on all things RIAA and IIRC, been personally involved in the good fight for quite some time. I don't recall him ever advocating Scientology in the past. Several thousand knowledgable and well-researched posts to Slashdot on RIAA matters over a period of many years just to trick people into clicking on a Scientology ad today would have to constitute the most over-engineered setup of all time.
Remember... never attribute to bad Thetans that which can be adequately explained by the vagaries of third party ad servers. (with apologies to Hanlon's razor)
Hmmm. By and large, *thinking* before *you* post helps you to make your point more clearly. That way the grumpy folk don't have to pick their way through your careless and imprecise language in order to understand your meaning.
Indeed, if you took more notice of the trees once in a while, you might actually read what other people write before over-emoting in response. Notice, for instance, the emphasis deliberately placed on the phrase "Earth's winter" in my post? See there it is, hidden in full sight in the first line.
My point (in case the reference to Sydney passed you by) was that *Earth doesn't have a winter*. Hemispheres of the Earth do. As we define them in this reality, 'winter' and 'summer' are effects of the axial tilt therefore there can be no such thing as *Earth's winter*
Your initial post referred to "Earth's winter taking it out past Mars", did it not? But "Earth's winter" could not carry it out past Mars because: (i) "Earth's winter" doesn't exist (see above); and, more fundamentally (ii) any season is a consequence of solar radiation incident upon the planet *not* a driver of orbital dynamics - winter (of any kind) can't *take* Earth anywhere.
See how a posting without thinking lead to poor phrasing which hindered the point you were trying to make?
Now after all that sighing and harumphing you finally rephrased yourself and properly enunciated your original point. And, guess what? It's actually a reasonably sensible point. Yes, if the Earth's orbital eccentricity were substantially greater, it might indeed have a comparable or greater effect upon the climate than axial tilt (though, as others have pointed out, climate is not merely a linear function of instantaneous distance from the Sun). Indeed, our definitions of 'seasons', 'winter' and 'summer' might well be different in such an alternate reality. Fortunately for our health (but unfortunately for the clarity of your post), we don't live in that reality.
So please, enough of the name calling. Just THINK before you post and the grumpy people will go away. Hell they might even agree with you and mod you informative.
As a Scotchlander, I can assure you that there's no such thing as "UK law". There may be regulations, but I challenge you to point to a single "UK" statute, outside the Act of Union.
Even if you are a lawyer, you might want to consider not playing on one Slashdot.
Heh, thank you! I'd forgotten about my sig - I usually browse with sigs turned off. You know I really can't remember where it came from - part of me remembers making it up after a stroke of inspiration one boring afternoon in the office, but with hindsight, it's way above my usual dreary levels of prose and therefore I suspect I stole it from someone else - although I'm very sure it wasn't Godel!
Please mod parent up. If I had a nickel for every person who spouted that same upscaled DVD tripe, then, then, then I'd have enough to buy a Blu Ray disk;)
There is a world of difference between 1080p and DVD quality - but you'll never see it if your TV can't natively display 1080p (or at least 720) or you use a composite video interconnect rather than HDMI/DVI or component (yes, I know, but you'd be surprised how many people still do...)
Whilst I can imagine that a true 1080p picture might look similar to upscaled DVD on a small screen (which necessarily has very small dot pitch), the difference becomes clear as you scale up the screen beyond 30 inches or so (and bleeding obvious once you get beyond 42"). Interpolation and post-processing can only get you so far. Notwithstanding CSI, even high-end upscaling cannot create genuine detail that didn't exist in the original image - and the more post-processing you do, the more artifacts you are going to see.
I've been running a Pioneer BR player via HDMI to a 1080p 60" plasma for 6 months and whilst upscaled DVD is nice, it can't hold a candle to the 1080 BR picture. Double blind test anyone on a similar system and there's no way you'd get anything but a 100% success rate of identifying HD BR vs upscaled DVD.
TFA claims that the VLA's silver screen debut was in "Contact". But don't I remember seeing Heywood Floyd sitting on one at the start of the film "2010"? Or was that a different array?
On another note, I drove to see the VLA in Socorro a year or so back. Absolutely awesome - in fact, so good that I just had to go to Hawaii to see the very long baseline array's western outlying dish. Now all I need to do is get to the eastern outlier in the Virgin Islands and I can send away for a free box of cornflakes:)
Because Virgin Galactic exists to make money - not 'to boldly go'. Assume that the service lifetime of the SS2 family is about a decade. Ask yourself, is there a good chance that they will make a healthy profit on their investment within that lifetime? That is what their shareholders will be asking.
When asking the question, you need to bear in mind that getting to orbit is hard and expensive. Yes, a handful of tourists have taken orbital flights, but at an enormous cost. The higher the ticket price the lower the pool of tourists willing/able to pay. Even the most efficient state-of-the-art systems today are so costly per pound that orbital tourism in any volume is not going to be a viable proposition for at least a decade.
In contrast, building 'affordable' sub-orbital tourist systems like SS2 is far less capital and time intensive and given SC/VG's head start, they can start pretty quickly. This presents an obvious window of opportunity to make money by being the lead/only provider in the field selling sub-orbital flights at a order of magnitude cheaper than orbital flights for at least the next decade until orbital flight systems have advanced sufficiently to be viable for reasonable volume tourism (100s per year rather than 1 every few years).
Porche salesmen still make good money even though Lambourghinis are more desirable .
From a purely engineering point of view I can understand where Rei is coming from in terms of SS2 not being an incremental step towards orbital tourism. Very little of the R&D work going into SS2 has any major relevance to orbital flight. It's a bit like saying that my jetski could get to Europe if only I could upgrade the engines and add bigger fuel tanks. By the time you've finished modding your jetski/SS2 to make the longer journey it becomes clear that the only part of the original vehicle remaining is the pilot's chair.
However, from a business point of view, what VG are doing *is* an incremental step towards orbital tourism. It generates public interest, generates investor interest, results in the building of infrastructure which can be reused for orbital flights, kick-starts the regulators into starting to create certification and regulatory frameworks, is a first step toward getting insurance companies interested, and builds public confidence in safety. SS2 may be a dead-end as a product offering, but you can bet that if it is succesful, a true orbital tourism project is more likely to be funded and built by VG or others.
Of course, that's only a problem if you assume a long term goal for the process (i.e. a specific point or zone in the phase space). But the whole point of evolution by natural selection is that there is no such long term goal - the only thing that counts is the ability of individuals in the current generation to reproduce. In the natural world, evolution is not *trying* to design a human, a giraffe or a word processor. It is not trying to do anything. It just *is*. Yes, there will be certain plateau points in any phase space from which the only way to become more optimal is to become less optimal first. Thus getting off such a plateau by increments is hard and extremely unlikely. But your analysis assumes that what is optimal in the phase space is fixed. This may hold for a simple 'evolve a circuit board' algorithm where you have a definite goal in mind, but it doesn't hold in the natural world where being optimal just means being able to reproduce in an environment which is constantly changing.
So, actually you have not proved the analogy wrong at all. Micro evolution does imply macro evolution given sufficient iterations and a sufficiently divere environment. Take a population of species A and split it into two groups separated from each other and placed into different environments (eg. group A in a wet environment and group B in a dry one). Allow each group to reproduce for some arbitrary large number of generations. If you accept micro-evolution, you will expect that group A will become more adapted to dry conditions and group B to wet in response to the environments in which they find themselves. Thus the two populations will inevitably diverge from each other. There will come a point where, if you were to reintegrate the two groups they would be physically too different to produce viable offspring through sexual reproduction. This may take a very large number of increments before it happens, but it will happen eventually.
Always. The only way I can see them as craters is to rotate the image around and blink a lot until eventually my brain 'clicks'... It's even worse with canyons (like Valles Marineris).
I'm so pleased to hear that I'm not the only person with this brain-OS 'feature'...
Assuming that the cracking was due to durability issues rather than dropping the laptop, PC World do not have a leg to stand on.
In the UK (where the PC World in question is located), your statutory consumer rights will trump any nonsense that PC World may include in their 'warranty policy'.
It's really simple:
Section 14(2) of the Sale of Goods Act 1979 imposes a statutory implied warranty that goods sold in the course of a business are of 'satisfactory quality'. This expressly includes issues of durability.
Section 6 of the Unfair Contract Terms Act states that when dealing with a consumer, liability arising from a breach of the s. 14 implied warranty cannot be excluded or restricted by reference to any contract term.
I'd suggest you put that in writing and ask the PC World manager to confirm within 7 days that it will comply with its statutory obligations and repair or replace the laptop noting that you will: (a) instruct your solicitor; and (b) take the matter up with the local Trading Standards office if the company does not respond.
Yes IAAL and yes I dislike PC World intensely for precisely this kind of crap. Give them hell from me.
In the UK (where the PC World in question is located), the vendor cannot avoid liability by limiting its warranty.
Section 14(2) of the Sale of Goods Act 1979 imposes a statutory implied warranty that goods sold in the course of a business are of 'satisfactory quality'. This expressly includes issues of durability. Section 6 of the Unfair Contract Terms Act states that when dealing with a consumer, liability arising from a breach of the s. 14 implied warranty cannot be excluded or restricted by reference to any contract term.
Slashdot Mirror
I see what you did there.
Wish I had mod points :)
Sigh. This old canard again? Every mouse and trackpad sold by Apple since the mighty mouse and the glass trackpad has had right-button functionality built-in. OSX has supported right mouse clicks since forever.
Of course modern Apple pointing hardware only has one microswitch and relies on capacitance multi-touch technology to identify if the user is clicking on the right hand or left hand side of the device.
Being charitable i'll assume that's what you meant by one button. Why not try using the hardware to discover its actual functional capabilities? You never know, you might like it. I did despite my initial prejudices (as a dremel-wielding, cryo-cooling, case-modding hardcore PC fan).
ORLY?
OK, I'll feed the troll. What's your "clear and unambiguous experimental and observational falsification" of Big Bang cosmology?
Whoa, time out! NYCL is the local Slashdot guru on all things RIAA and IIRC, been personally involved in the good fight for quite some time. I don't recall him ever advocating Scientology in the past. Several thousand knowledgable and well-researched posts to Slashdot on RIAA matters over a period of many years just to trick people into clicking on a Scientology ad today would have to constitute the most over-engineered setup of all time.
Remember... never attribute to bad Thetans that which can be adequately explained by the vagaries of third party ad servers. (with apologies to Hanlon's razor)
Hmmm. By and large, *thinking* before *you* post helps you to make your point more clearly. That way the grumpy folk don't have to pick their way through your careless and imprecise language in order to understand your meaning.
Indeed, if you took more notice of the trees once in a while, you might actually read what other people write before over-emoting in response.
Notice, for instance, the emphasis deliberately placed on the phrase "Earth's winter" in my post? See there it is, hidden in full sight in the first line.
My point (in case the reference to Sydney passed you by) was that *Earth doesn't have a winter*. Hemispheres of the Earth do. As we define them in this reality, 'winter' and 'summer' are effects of the axial tilt therefore there can be no such thing as *Earth's winter*
Your initial post referred to "Earth's winter taking it out past Mars", did it not? But "Earth's winter" could not carry it out past Mars because: (i) "Earth's winter" doesn't exist (see above); and, more fundamentally (ii) any season is a consequence of solar radiation incident upon the planet *not* a driver of orbital dynamics - winter (of any kind) can't *take* Earth anywhere.
See how a posting without thinking lead to poor phrasing which hindered the point you were trying to make?
Now after all that sighing and harumphing you finally rephrased yourself and properly enunciated your original point. And, guess what? It's actually a reasonably sensible point. Yes, if the Earth's orbital eccentricity were substantially greater, it might indeed have a comparable or greater effect upon the climate than axial tilt (though, as others have pointed out, climate is not merely a linear function of instantaneous distance from the Sun). Indeed, our definitions of 'seasons', 'winter' and 'summer' might well be different in such an alternate reality. Fortunately for our health (but unfortunately for the clarity of your post), we don't live in that reality.
So please, enough of the name calling. Just THINK before you post and the grumpy people will go away. Hell they might even agree with you and mod you informative.
*Earth's* winter?
I'm guessing you've never crossed the equator then? Ho hum. Check out the temperatures in Sydney at Christmas.
You do know that axial tilt is the main cause of the seasons on Earth rather than the eccentricity of its orbit?
aka "Impact engineering"
I fully agree with your conclusion that capacity is king for moist consumers, but... ...this is a 2.5 inch drive.
I'd like to subscribe to your reality if it has Terabyte-sized 2.5 inch drives. Where do I sign up?
Unless, of course, you apply a lossy compression algorithm to the data, e.g. mp3.
Oops - URL fubar...
The whole Act is applicable to the entire UK
The Data Protection Act 1998.
I claim my five pounds.
Heh, thank you!
I'd forgotten about my sig - I usually browse with sigs turned off.
You know I really can't remember where it came from - part of me remembers making it up after a stroke of inspiration one boring afternoon in the office, but with hindsight, it's way above my usual dreary levels of prose and therefore I suspect I stole it from someone else - although I'm very sure it wasn't Godel!
Please mod parent up. If I had a nickel for every person who spouted that same upscaled DVD tripe, then, then, then I'd have enough to buy a Blu Ray disk ;)
There is a world of difference between 1080p and DVD quality - but you'll never see it if your TV can't natively display 1080p (or at least 720) or you use a composite video interconnect rather than HDMI/DVI or component (yes, I know, but you'd be surprised how many people still do...)
Whilst I can imagine that a true 1080p picture might look similar to upscaled DVD on a small screen (which necessarily has very small dot pitch), the difference becomes clear as you scale up the screen beyond 30 inches or so (and bleeding obvious once you get beyond 42"). Interpolation and post-processing can only get you so far. Notwithstanding CSI, even high-end upscaling cannot create genuine detail that didn't exist in the original image - and the more post-processing you do, the more artifacts you are going to see.
I've been running a Pioneer BR player via HDMI to a 1080p 60" plasma for 6 months and whilst upscaled DVD is nice, it can't hold a candle to the 1080 BR picture. Double blind test anyone on a similar system and there's no way you'd get anything but a 100% success rate of identifying HD BR vs upscaled DVD.
You insensitive clod! I have an inch-thick monitor and giant expensive glasses.
oh wait...
Erm, "Orc" is an anagram of "Roc" maybe?
TFA claims that the VLA's silver screen debut was in "Contact". But don't I remember seeing Heywood Floyd sitting on one at the start of the film "2010"?
:)
Or was that a different array?
On another note, I drove to see the VLA in Socorro a year or so back. Absolutely awesome - in fact, so good that I just had to go to Hawaii to see the very long baseline array's western outlying dish. Now all I need to do is get to the eastern outlier in the Virgin Islands and I can send away for a free box of cornflakes
You Cretan!
F6 is if you want to install RAID storage drivers etc when installing XP.
Because Virgin Galactic exists to make money - not 'to boldly go'. Assume that the service lifetime of the SS2 family is about a decade. Ask yourself, is there a good chance that they will make a healthy profit on their investment within that lifetime? That is what their shareholders will be asking.
When asking the question, you need to bear in mind that getting to orbit is hard and expensive. Yes, a handful of tourists have taken orbital flights, but at an enormous cost. The higher the ticket price the lower the pool of tourists willing/able to pay. Even the most efficient state-of-the-art systems today are so costly per pound that orbital tourism in any volume is not going to be a viable proposition for at least a decade.
In contrast, building 'affordable' sub-orbital tourist systems like SS2 is far less capital and time intensive and given SC/VG's head start, they can start pretty quickly. This presents an obvious window of opportunity to make money by being the lead/only provider in the field selling sub-orbital flights at a order of magnitude cheaper than
orbital flights for at least the next decade until orbital flight systems have advanced sufficiently to be viable for reasonable volume tourism (100s per year rather than 1 every few years).
Porche salesmen still make good money even though Lambourghinis are more desirable .
From a purely engineering point of view I can understand where Rei is coming from in terms of SS2 not being an incremental step towards orbital tourism. Very little of the R&D work going into SS2 has any major relevance to orbital flight. It's a bit like saying that my jetski could get to Europe if only I could upgrade the engines and add bigger fuel tanks. By the time you've finished modding your jetski/SS2 to make the longer journey it becomes clear that the only part of the original vehicle remaining is the pilot's chair.
However, from a business point of view, what VG are doing *is* an incremental step towards orbital tourism. It generates public interest, generates investor interest, results in the building of infrastructure which can be reused for orbital flights, kick-starts the regulators into starting to create certification and regulatory frameworks, is a first step toward getting insurance companies interested, and builds public confidence in safety. SS2 may be a dead-end as a product offering, but you can bet that if it is succesful, a true orbital tourism project is more likely to be funded and built by VG or others.
Keyboard without a backspace?
Like a 2007 model Mac laptop you mean...
Of course, that's only a problem if you assume a long term goal for the process (i.e. a specific point or zone in the phase space). But the whole point of evolution by natural selection is that there is no such long term goal - the only thing that counts is the ability of individuals in the current generation to reproduce. In the natural world, evolution is not *trying* to design a human, a giraffe or a word processor. It is not trying to do anything. It just *is*. Yes, there will be certain plateau points in any phase space from which the only way to become more optimal is to become less optimal first. Thus getting off such a plateau by increments is hard and extremely unlikely. But your analysis assumes that what is optimal in the phase space is fixed. This may hold for a simple 'evolve a circuit board' algorithm where you have a definite goal in mind, but it doesn't hold in the natural world where being optimal just means being able to reproduce in an environment which is constantly changing.
So, actually you have not proved the analogy wrong at all. Micro evolution does imply macro evolution given sufficient iterations and a sufficiently divere environment. Take a population of species A and split it into two groups separated from each other and placed into different environments (eg. group A in a wet environment and group B in a dry one). Allow each group to reproduce for some arbitrary large number of generations. If you accept micro-evolution, you will expect that group A will become more adapted to dry conditions and group B to wet in response to the environments in which they find themselves. Thus the two populations will inevitably diverge from each other. There will come a point where, if you were to reintegrate the two groups they would be physically too different to produce viable offspring through sexual reproduction. This may take a very large number of increments before it happens, but it will happen eventually.
Always. The only way I can see them as craters is to rotate the image around and blink a lot until eventually my brain 'clicks'...
It's even worse with canyons (like Valles Marineris).
I'm so pleased to hear that I'm not the only person with this brain-OS 'feature'...
He was elected?
Assuming that the cracking was due to durability issues rather than dropping the laptop, PC World do not have a leg to stand on.
In the UK (where the PC World in question is located), your statutory consumer rights will trump any nonsense that PC World may include in their 'warranty policy'.
It's really simple:
Section 14(2) of the Sale of Goods Act 1979 imposes a statutory implied warranty that goods sold in the course of a business are of 'satisfactory quality'. This expressly includes issues of durability.
Section 6 of the Unfair Contract Terms Act states that when dealing with a consumer, liability arising from a breach of the s. 14 implied warranty cannot be excluded or restricted by reference to any contract term.
I'd suggest you put that in writing and ask the PC World manager to confirm within 7 days that it will comply with its statutory obligations and repair or replace the laptop noting that you will: (a) instruct your solicitor; and (b) take the matter up with the local Trading Standards office if the company does not respond.
Yes IAAL and yes I dislike PC World intensely for precisely this kind of crap. Give them hell from me.
In the UK (where the PC World in question is located), the vendor cannot avoid liability by limiting its warranty.
Section 14(2) of the Sale of Goods Act 1979 imposes a statutory implied warranty that goods sold in the course of a business are of 'satisfactory quality'. This expressly includes issues of durability. Section 6 of the Unfair Contract Terms Act states that when dealing with a consumer, liability arising from a breach of the s. 14 implied warranty cannot be excluded or restricted by reference to any contract term.