you guys crack me up. Thousands of dead from a tsunami. Massive destruction in Japan, and you want to continue acting as if the nuclear plant, where no one died by the way, was the evil villain. Christ, the earthquake didn't even do damage to the plant, it was a tsunami larger than anyone would ever expect. Hey I live 6 hours from the gulf. Maybe I should put my house on stilts because the next hurricane could flood me out... Doesn't make much sense does it? You take the worst case based on historical record if you have it, then you add some more to be safe. You don't just pull some giant number out of your ass and build to prevent it.
i don't really agree, but that's cool. I've had enough pics off my point and shoot where half a face is in focus, or 3 out of 5 people and you only have time for one shot. Would be nice to be able to correct those oops moments. Anyway, I was just thinking maybe they could even make the autofocus LESS sensitive. One of the huge problems with most P/S cameras is the loooong delay between pressing the shutter button and the camera actually taking the picture. A lot of the time this is due to the autofocus struggling to get things right. If you could just adjust everything later, it wouldn't be as important to spend the extra time to get it perfect and it could do a best guess.
what this really means is that they know where the real market is. Good enough for Facebook is probably good enough for 90% of the people shopping for cameras.
Don't get me wrong, I've got the whole DSLR thing and still have my medium format film gear, but sometimes I just want to whip out a small camera to get a shot of the kids and it would be nice to know that no matter what, I'll have an in focus shot now or in post processing.
FYI: many planes these days from ultralights up to aircraft like the Cirrus SR22 which runs up to $500k have ballistic parachutes either standard or as an option. It's not a new concept to have a whole plane parachute and there are videos on youtube you can check out to see them working. There's still a lot of debate over effectiveness. There aren't that many plane crashes, and even fewer crash that have ballistic parachutes, so data is limited. Also, a large number of general aviation accidents happen at low speed and low altitude, such as take off and landing. Unfortunately, this is exactly the place where ballistic parachutes are least effective. So, the jury is still out, but I'd personally rather have the chute, rather than not have it and be in a situation where it would have helped...
not sure why you see offering a service through a 3d party as a conspiracy. Companies do this all the time to reach people that they might not otherwise reach. I wouldn't have even suggested it except for the strange requirement of iTunes. It just doesn't make sense that Best Buy would expect to get away with launching a direct competitor to a new Apple service AND use Apples software.
Unfortunately I stopped reading at the graphic and didn't see the how it works section. Looks like it's just reading the iTunes library. Really weird. Not sure why they think some iTunes user would use them rather than iCloud. Good luck Geek Squad...
the weird mandatory iTunes requirement makes me wonder if this is something Apple is offering to retailers as a service. It seems strange that Best Buy would even want to take on the infrastructure side of this themselves, from scratch. I wonder just how much of that $3.99 a month goes to Apple? The benefit to Apple would be obvious, a major retailer pushing iTunes to customers. I suppose Best Buy gets to have a trendy feature to sell to people that don't know they don't need the Geek Squad to pimp their online deals.
Most implies that peapod and freshwhatever are widely available. There is a huge swath of the country that has no access to them or similar services. A very loose use of the word most. Maybe "many" would have been more accurate, or "densely populated metro areas in the northeast".
it's dead in the dallas/forth worth area and has been since home grocer and webvan went belly up. I think there might be one or two stores in upscale areas that deliver, but there's certainly no readily available grocery delivery for 99% of the area. Dunno, but I consider this a major metro area. Maybe it's not New York, but last time I checked the rest of the country ate food too.
The only thing i really miss from the dotcom era is HomeGrocer. I used it every week for as long as it was available in DFW and loved it.
I don't really know, but I always thought it was the delivery side of things that killed it economically. I'd settle for local pick up points. Place order online, show up when it's ready and grab your stuff. Still a huge time saver. Would love to see a local store offer this, have a couple of people prep orders for you to pick up at the store.
i'm getting tired of hearing people protest energy projects because they are "visible from . this was also one of the arguments against the ivanpah solar facility and is also thrown at homeowners that want to place solar panels. Everyone is for green energy as long as they don't have to look at it I guess.
Should it have bearing? No. Does it does have bearing? Yes, because policy makers are politicians. the people that would see nuclear power banned are the ones running around yelling how dangerous it is and that it kills so many people. joe public hears this crap and the sensationalism on the nightly news and writes to his congressman that he's afraid of this new-fangled nuclear power and it should be banned because he doesn't want to die too. Now, go tell joe public that he has a far better chance of dying from contaminated vegetables, lightning, meteor impact, or an elevator malfunction. Yeah, he's probably not going to be so worried about nuclear is he? When people can evaluate the risks relative to the other risks that go with being alive they don't write panicked letters to their congressmen, the people that DO make nuclear policy. Do you really think that whatever he knows as fact matters one bit to a politician that has 100k voting constituents saying no nukes in my state? Hell no, he'll make his decision based on reelection not sound energy policy. It won't be his problem to clean up in 20 years anyway. Maybe you just have far more faith in elected officials than I do.
Deliberately missing the forest for the trees. The propagandist tricks are far more common on the anti nuclear side of the court where small numbers are made into horrific nuclear disasters. Then when someone comes along and says "hey food poisoning kills more people than have ever died of nuclear material" they sidestep the point that the nuclear menace is overblown and argue how they aren't the same animal. Death is death. Really. It's not, or should not be about which death is more appealing.
If you took a list of all the causes of death for the last 100 years and ranked them, nuclear would be near the bottom of the pile. Why don't these people do something useful like protest sprouts or drunk driving or smoking, or whatever 50 things are actually less regulated and more fatal. Oh wait, it was never about saving lives, it was about being part of the fear team...
fun game, maybe a little challenging for a first adventure though. But great atmosphere and music, unique look and interesting story. It was on sale on Steam for like $5 recently. Still go back and play it occasionally. and the protaganist is a girl, so she might like that.
I downloaded the Walgreens app for my Galaxy S phone. Walgreens is a pharmacy for you non-US folks. It was actually pretty slick, you can find a location nearby and send prescription refills in by scanning your bottle. Not amazing, but handy.
Except I noticed my battery life tanked after installing. It turns out the app was polling GPS for location information constantly. When I checked to see what apps were using battery, the Walgreens app had used 85% of my battery and spent 8.5 hours on GPS. And no, turning off GPS at the phone level had no effect, it was off when I installed and remained off according to the phone. The app also had no way to stop this behavior. Deleted. Maybe it's been fixed, it's been about 6 months since this happened.
So, yeah, some seemingly innocuous apps can completely hose a phone. I can't believe I'm saying this but Apple certainly has a leg up when it comes to ensuring this stuff doesn't happen. Who cares though, im a happy iphone to android switcher and i'm not going back. At least my android phone had the tools to identify what the hell was going on.
"if Microsoft is so good at it, why are there products like Norton, McAfee.."
Because Norton and McAfee are very, very good at making people afraid and making PC's seem much more complicated than they are. When Microsoft Security Essentials is less intrusive, hogs far fewer resources and doesn't require a system reinstall to remove, it doesn't say much for the quality of Norton or McAfee products. In fact, most free tools are as good or better. But... McAfee and Norton sell "safe" software in a box on the shelf at Best Buy.
As for DoubleMySpeed... From what I can tell from friends and relatives, the kind of people that end up needing it are the kind that leave all the bloatware on their new pc; install every little app or game that looks cute as well as its attendant crapware/plugin/toolbar; never take a look at the task bar to see that 45 apps are loading on startup, and finally they never, ever uninstall anything. "When did you use that last?" "Oh maybe 2 years ago". Load up any system with a bunch of crap and run it all at once and you'll need double my speed too. It's a user behavior issue mostly.
From the link: "The challenge is the second lawsuit to be filed against Interior's approval of Ivanpah, a project currently under construction by BrightSource Energy "
Unfortunately, the reasonable evironmentalists, who want reasonable protection of nature without a return to the stone age and don't want to obstruct any alternative energy source until 50 years of studies have been done are not the ones filing lawsuits.
Hey, i'm quoting directly from the Wired article, so either they are wrong, or your source is wrong. Take a pick, but don't blame me. Wired is usually pretty accurate and I'm not usually going to spend time fact checking them. The new issue isn't online or i'd just post a link.
While we're on a fact based mission, a quick google maps search shows that the Ivanpah facility is located NEAR the Mojave preserve and not within it. Further confirmation of that comes from the wikipedia article: "The project will occupy about 4,000 acres (16 km2) near Interstate 15 near the California - Nevada border, north of Ivanpah, California, and will be visible from the adjacent Mojave National Preserve"
The town of Ivanpah is located in the park but not the energy facility. So, no one is building anything in a nature preserve, much less in the designated wilderness areas of that preserve. If this encroaches on the borders, well, the National Park Service should have made the park bigger.
sadly, the same environmental crowd that demands an end to nuclear will stonewall that as well. Just saw a lovely article in Wired about the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generator in the Mojave. 5 1/2 square miles of mirrors. 5 1/2. guess what? the environmental crowd is suing to stop it on the grounds that those 5 1/2 square miles of sand are more important as habitat than a 60% increase in US solar generation. Yet they will no doubt be at the next anti-nuclear, anti-fossil fuel rally. What exactly are we supposed to use for power? Happy thoughts maybe?
see that's the deal. guys like you are in love with an Apple computer that doesn't exist anymore. The mass market shinies they sell to the rest of the planet are advertised as electronic miracles that never fail and let even an idiot use them. That's great you're a command line wizard, but Macs are not really targeting you and in fact Apple makes a point of telling people they don't need to be like you to use one. In the mind of most of the Mac users I know, you'd look like the PC guy in an Apple commercial.
It's sad, you can see the denial starts at Apple and flows right on down to the fanboy level. Iphone4, mac hardware issues, malware, it's always the same song: deny, deny, deny, blame user if that doesn't work. some good kool-aid i guess.
you guys are great. Mac folks praise the hand holding and the fact that a Mac just won't let you do anything bad. Then in the same breath they say, well you're just stupid, it's your fault the hand holding, infallible Mac didn't stop you.
Mac, the computer any stupid user can use, but don't come crying when you do something stupid. Despite the fact that we reassured you constantly that your own stupidity wasn't a problem, of course...
Can you guys just make up your minds? Is it the computer for everyman or just the tool of a bunch of elitist trend followers whose idea of "choice" is a locked down platform?
What is this unreliable machine you refer to? I'm sitting here typing on a windows 7 box that's been reliably doing everything i ask it to since windows 7 came out. I have yet to have a BSOD or any other serious issue. To steal a phrase "it just works". And no it's not an email machine. regularly used for video/audio conversion, gaming (black ops, portal2, wow), media server. Everything just runs smoothly and the OS is unobtrusive and stable.
as i understood it from another article, it's 2 hours of cockpit voice and the entire flight worth of flight system data. I'd imagine it's the latter that will take the time to analyze.
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you guys crack me up. Thousands of dead from a tsunami. Massive destruction in Japan, and you want to continue acting as if the nuclear plant, where no one died by the way, was the evil villain. Christ, the earthquake didn't even do damage to the plant, it was a tsunami larger than anyone would ever expect. Hey I live 6 hours from the gulf. Maybe I should put my house on stilts because the next hurricane could flood me out... Doesn't make much sense does it? You take the worst case based on historical record if you have it, then you add some more to be safe. You don't just pull some giant number out of your ass and build to prevent it.
i don't really agree, but that's cool. I've had enough pics off my point and shoot where half a face is in focus, or 3 out of 5 people and you only have time for one shot. Would be nice to be able to correct those oops moments. Anyway, I was just thinking maybe they could even make the autofocus LESS sensitive. One of the huge problems with most P/S cameras is the loooong delay between pressing the shutter button and the camera actually taking the picture. A lot of the time this is due to the autofocus struggling to get things right. If you could just adjust everything later, it wouldn't be as important to spend the extra time to get it perfect and it could do a best guess.
what this really means is that they know where the real market is. Good enough for Facebook is probably good enough for 90% of the people shopping for cameras.
Don't get me wrong, I've got the whole DSLR thing and still have my medium format film gear, but sometimes I just want to whip out a small camera to get a shot of the kids and it would be nice to know that no matter what, I'll have an in focus shot now or in post processing.
FYI: many planes these days from ultralights up to aircraft like the Cirrus SR22 which runs up to $500k have ballistic parachutes either standard or as an option. It's not a new concept to have a whole plane parachute and there are videos on youtube you can check out to see them working.
There's still a lot of debate over effectiveness. There aren't that many plane crashes, and even fewer crash that have ballistic parachutes, so data is limited. Also, a large number of general aviation accidents happen at low speed and low altitude, such as take off and landing. Unfortunately, this is exactly the place where ballistic parachutes are least effective. So, the jury is still out, but I'd personally rather have the chute, rather than not have it and be in a situation where it would have helped...
not sure why you see offering a service through a 3d party as a conspiracy. Companies do this all the time to reach people that they might not otherwise reach. I wouldn't have even suggested it except for the strange requirement of iTunes. It just doesn't make sense that Best Buy would expect to get away with launching a direct competitor to a new Apple service AND use Apples software.
Unfortunately I stopped reading at the graphic and didn't see the how it works section. Looks like it's just reading the iTunes library. Really weird. Not sure why they think some iTunes user would use them rather than iCloud. Good luck Geek Squad...
the weird mandatory iTunes requirement makes me wonder if this is something Apple is offering to retailers as a service. It seems strange that Best Buy would even want to take on the infrastructure side of this themselves, from scratch. I wonder just how much of that $3.99 a month goes to Apple? The benefit to Apple would be obvious, a major retailer pushing iTunes to customers. I suppose Best Buy gets to have a trendy feature to sell to people that don't know they don't need the Geek Squad to pimp their online deals.
Most implies that peapod and freshwhatever are widely available. There is a huge swath of the country that has no access to them or similar services. A very loose use of the word most. Maybe "many" would have been more accurate, or "densely populated metro areas in the northeast".
it's dead in the dallas /forth worth area and has been since home grocer and webvan went belly up. I think there might be one or two stores in upscale areas that deliver, but there's certainly no readily available grocery delivery for 99% of the area. Dunno, but I consider this a major metro area. Maybe it's not New York, but last time I checked the rest of the country ate food too.
The only thing i really miss from the dotcom era is HomeGrocer. I used it every week for as long as it was available in DFW and loved it.
I don't really know, but I always thought it was the delivery side of things that killed it economically. I'd settle for local pick up points. Place order online, show up when it's ready and grab your stuff. Still a huge time saver. Would love to see a local store offer this, have a couple of people prep orders for you to pick up at the store.
i'm getting tired of hearing people protest energy projects because they are "visible from . this was also one of the arguments against the ivanpah solar facility and is also thrown at homeowners that want to place solar panels. Everyone is for green energy as long as they don't have to look at it I guess.
Should it have bearing? No. Does it does have bearing? Yes, because policy makers are politicians. the people that would see nuclear power banned are the ones running around yelling how dangerous it is and that it kills so many people. joe public hears this crap and the sensationalism on the nightly news and writes to his congressman that he's afraid of this new-fangled nuclear power and it should be banned because he doesn't want to die too. Now, go tell joe public that he has a far better chance of dying from contaminated vegetables, lightning, meteor impact, or an elevator malfunction. Yeah, he's probably not going to be so worried about nuclear is he? When people can evaluate the risks relative to the other risks that go with being alive they don't write panicked letters to their congressmen, the people that DO make nuclear policy. Do you really think that whatever he knows as fact matters one bit to a politician that has 100k voting constituents saying no nukes in my state? Hell no, he'll make his decision based on reelection not sound energy policy. It won't be his problem to clean up in 20 years anyway. Maybe you just have far more faith in elected officials than I do.
Deliberately missing the forest for the trees. The propagandist tricks are far more common on the anti nuclear side of the court where small numbers are made into horrific nuclear disasters. Then when someone comes along and says "hey food poisoning kills more people than have ever died of nuclear material" they sidestep the point that the nuclear menace is overblown and argue how they aren't the same animal. Death is death. Really. It's not, or should not be about which death is more appealing.
If you took a list of all the causes of death for the last 100 years and ranked them, nuclear would be near the bottom of the pile. Why don't these people do something useful like protest sprouts or drunk driving or smoking, or whatever 50 things are actually less regulated and more fatal. Oh wait, it was never about saving lives, it was about being part of the fear team...
i think his point was that they sell a "high security" product and then store the keys on an apparently "low security" network. probably a bad idea.
fun game, maybe a little challenging for a first adventure though. But great atmosphere and music, unique look and interesting story. It was on sale on Steam for like $5 recently. Still go back and play it occasionally. and the protaganist is a girl, so she might like that.
I downloaded the Walgreens app for my Galaxy S phone. Walgreens is a pharmacy for you non-US folks. It was actually pretty slick, you can find a location nearby and send prescription refills in by scanning your bottle. Not amazing, but handy.
Except I noticed my battery life tanked after installing. It turns out the app was polling GPS for location information constantly. When I checked to see what apps were using battery, the Walgreens app had used 85% of my battery and spent 8.5 hours on GPS. And no, turning off GPS at the phone level had no effect, it was off when I installed and remained off according to the phone. The app also had no way to stop this behavior. Deleted. Maybe it's been fixed, it's been about 6 months since this happened.
So, yeah, some seemingly innocuous apps can completely hose a phone. I can't believe I'm saying this but Apple certainly has a leg up when it comes to ensuring this stuff doesn't happen. Who cares though, im a happy iphone to android switcher and i'm not going back. At least my android phone had the tools to identify what the hell was going on.
"if Microsoft is so good at it, why are there products like Norton, McAfee.."
Because Norton and McAfee are very, very good at making people afraid and making PC's seem much more complicated than they are. When Microsoft Security Essentials is less intrusive, hogs far fewer resources and doesn't require a system reinstall to remove, it doesn't say much for the quality of Norton or McAfee products. In fact, most free tools are as good or better. But... McAfee and Norton sell "safe" software in a box on the shelf at Best Buy.
As for DoubleMySpeed... From what I can tell from friends and relatives, the kind of people that end up needing it are the kind that leave all the bloatware on their new pc; install every little app or game that looks cute as well as its attendant crapware/plugin/toolbar; never take a look at the task bar to see that 45 apps are loading on startup, and finally they never, ever uninstall anything. "When did you use that last?" "Oh maybe 2 years ago". Load up any system with a bunch of crap and run it all at once and you'll need double my speed too. It's a user behavior issue mostly.
I forgot to respond to your lawsuits comment... Once again a quick google proves your source wrong... http://www.mojavedesertblog.com/2011/01/western-watersheds-project-stands-up.html
From the link: "The challenge is the second lawsuit to be filed against Interior's approval of Ivanpah, a project currently under construction by BrightSource Energy "
Unfortunately, the reasonable evironmentalists, who want reasonable protection of nature without a return to the stone age and don't want to obstruct any alternative energy source until 50 years of studies have been done are not the ones filing lawsuits.
Hey, i'm quoting directly from the Wired article, so either they are wrong, or your source is wrong. Take a pick, but don't blame me. Wired is usually pretty accurate and I'm not usually going to spend time fact checking them. The new issue isn't online or i'd just post a link.
While we're on a fact based mission, a quick google maps search shows that the Ivanpah facility is located NEAR the Mojave preserve and not within it. Further confirmation of that comes from the wikipedia article: "The project will occupy about 4,000 acres (16 km2) near Interstate 15 near the California - Nevada border, north of Ivanpah, California, and will be visible from the adjacent Mojave National Preserve"
The town of Ivanpah is located in the park but not the energy facility. So, no one is building anything in a nature preserve, much less in the designated wilderness areas of that preserve. If this encroaches on the borders, well, the National Park Service should have made the park bigger.
sadly, the same environmental crowd that demands an end to nuclear will stonewall that as well. Just saw a lovely article in Wired about the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generator in the Mojave. 5 1/2 square miles of mirrors. 5 1/2. guess what? the environmental crowd is suing to stop it on the grounds that those 5 1/2 square miles of sand are more important as habitat than a 60% increase in US solar generation. Yet they will no doubt be at the next anti-nuclear, anti-fossil fuel rally. What exactly are we supposed to use for power? Happy thoughts maybe?
see that's the deal. guys like you are in love with an Apple computer that doesn't exist anymore. The mass market shinies they sell to the rest of the planet are advertised as electronic miracles that never fail and let even an idiot use them. That's great you're a command line wizard, but Macs are not really targeting you and in fact Apple makes a point of telling people they don't need to be like you to use one. In the mind of most of the Mac users I know, you'd look like the PC guy in an Apple commercial.
It's sad, you can see the denial starts at Apple and flows right on down to the fanboy level. Iphone4, mac hardware issues, malware, it's always the same song: deny, deny, deny, blame user if that doesn't work. some good kool-aid i guess.
you guys are great. Mac folks praise the hand holding and the fact that a Mac just won't let you do anything bad. Then in the same breath they say, well you're just stupid, it's your fault the hand holding, infallible Mac didn't stop you.
Mac, the computer any stupid user can use, but don't come crying when you do something stupid. Despite the fact that we reassured you constantly that your own stupidity wasn't a problem, of course...
Can you guys just make up your minds? Is it the computer for everyman or just the tool of a bunch of elitist trend followers whose idea of "choice" is a locked down platform?
thanks for your sarcasm, but this was front page of /. this morning : http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/05/19/1410245/Apple-Causes-Religious-Reaction-In-Brains-of-Fans?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+(Slashdot)
so try not to be so smug when someone references it
"unreliable as a Windows desktop machine."
What is this unreliable machine you refer to? I'm sitting here typing on a windows 7 box that's been reliably doing everything i ask it to since windows 7 came out. I have yet to have a BSOD or any other serious issue. To steal a phrase "it just works". And no it's not an email machine. regularly used for video/audio conversion, gaming (black ops, portal2, wow), media server. Everything just runs smoothly and the OS is unobtrusive and stable.
as i understood it from another article, it's 2 hours of cockpit voice and the entire flight worth of flight system data. I'd imagine it's the latter that will take the time to analyze.