Well, of course, but you're talking about powering a crystal radio you can barely hear even with the best headphones and Tesla was talking about running ocean liners by just dropping a wire in the water, or powering every train in the world just by adding a rod to the top of them. He jumped directly from "crystal radio" to "magical power transmission" without any type of sanity check in-between, and he wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars building his apparatus.
What I meant is that the way Tesla worked was to experiment and see what combination of electrical components did what, then come up with an ad-hoc explanation after the fact. Although he made dozens of discoveries, his method wasn't very scientific. For instance, (IIRC the anecdote correctly) he designed a radio-controlled model boat without realizing it was actually being controlled by radio; instead he thought it was some kind of wireless power transfer from his controller.
Everyone's different. Like you, I frequently have movies going as background to whatever I'm doing-- as long as the movie is a great classic. If it's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, It's A Wonderful Life, etc, I'll stop what I'm doing and either have to stop the movie, or start paying full attention to the movie. I also usually have my own movie, or sometimes movie background sound, going while playing video games, I virtually always turn the video game music off. And with World of Warcraft, all bets are off. I've actually played WOW and Civilization 4 at the same time before. (Civ IV is turn-based of course, but it's still normally pretty consuming.)
Attention game makers: ALL games should have windowed mode! Don't make me choose between your game and a DVD, let me do both at once! That is all.
Tesla died broke because he spent all his money trying to create a "wireless power distribution" that made no sense. If he had spent more time reading physics and less time building 100+ foot Tesla coils. Were some of his inventions stolen? Undoubtedly. But I think he has only himself to blame for losing all his money.
He went a bit wacko, also, Howard Hughes-style wacko.
Expand your horizons, too. There are tons of materials we have today that could be extremely valuable at any time in history. If you've seen "The Gods Must Be Crazy" you already know the kind of impact something as simple as a glass bottle can have to a people who've never seen one before. But also, plastics of every kind, most of which didn't exist before the 20th century. Bring one of those mood-ring materials that change color when you change their temperature. Maybe a Superball would be good, too, or Scotch Tape.
America has been paying lip service to being the good guy whilst screwing with other countries' regimes, selling arms into unstable areas, invading and destabilising all sorts of places and all the whole preaching to the rest of the world about "freedom", "justice" and the "American Way", which it makes clear by its actions it doesn't believe in and only applies to US citizens.
That explains why we removed dictatorships in Afghanistan and Iraq, because we don't think "freedom" should apply to the people who lived there. Good thinking. Oh wait, what's the standard liberal response, we did it for access to oil? Go ahead, I'll wait. You can even use one of those cute liberal nicknames, like Chimpy McHalliburton.
I love the UN. They reside in an American city, taking tons of funds from American taxpayers (look up on how long it's been since they paid the lease in that beautiful center they have!), and then spend all their time griping at the US. It's so crazy.
Need I remind you how US was before WWI and why US didn't do jack before they were attacked?
I'm pretty sure you meant to say World War II.
Hard to say what he meant... the US was attacked in both WWI and WWII. Remember the Lusitania? (At least the Japanese in WWII attacked a military target.) And the US culture was famously isolationist before and during most of WWI.
That being said, the history of European countries as international offenders does nothing to legitimize the practices of the United States today (or its own history of informal imperialism in South America and elsewhere).
Let's come up with a single measure of "offense points", then assign them to every nation. How many "offense points" does the US have compared to all of Europe? But oh wait, most European nations/governments have been around longer than the US, so we should come up with "offense points per decade" or some other measure. Someone total up then tell us whether the US beats out Europe or not.
First of all, the word "democratic" is one of those nice-sounding words that people use all the time, and the US fits the vague concept of "democratic." However, our actual government is, and always has been, a Republic. Many states are democratic, but the US government is not.
In any case, pretty much all the countries in the UN Security Council have created undemocratic regimes at one point or another. And at least the US has never (well, hardly ever) participated in colonization-- what's worse, creating an undemocratic Panama, or completely screwing up the economy of a dozen equatorial nations to get cheap cotton?
If you want to see something much closer to a true democracy, take a look at India. Their government is about as close as any government has come, I believe.
Bring some Aluminum. It's dirt cheap now that we have the electrical power to create it artificially, but it's extremely hard-to-find naturally and for most of history, aluminum has been one of the most rare metals there is. Napoleon dined with aluminum silverware, reserving the gold for his guests.
Next time acknowledge that you realized it was a joke, and I won't 'woosh' you.;)
Sorry, I go my entire life surrounded by people who reply to obvious wisecracks in a serious manner, then when you explain it was a joke, they say "oh I know." Ugh, so aggravating!
That's fine, but the real problem is that the work here SUCKS.
If you read the comments, you're ok, but only because the first couple of posts are usually about how misleading or just plain wrong the frontpage article is. If you came to this site and only read the frontpage article, you'd be getting LESS educated about technology, not more educated. Front page articles are wrong probably a solid third of the time, and not just a little wrong, but a lot wrong.
I mean a lot of people complain about the spelling and grammar. That doesn't bother me as much; what bothers me is that the editors are just as likely to put up a wrong, or at least very misleading, article summary when there were probably 10 good ones written on the same story. That's not something I'd pay for.
Yeah, but that said, I think you can get graphics like that, or damned close to it, on an Xbox 360 or (presumably) a PS3. Gears of War looks about that good, and it's been out quite a while now.
What kind of screen is on this thing that it could actually DISPLAY HD content? The original Zune was only 320x240, and I can't imagine this one, even if improved, could be more than SD-resolution.
Is the complaint that the Zune doesn't allow you to play content that it's physically unable to display? Because, even for Slashdot, that's retarded.
Nah, your opinion is fine. Really, Microsoft's biggest image problem is that they frankly don't have a lot of control of what their end customers see. No matter how great their product is (and I'm not saying it's great), Dell or HP or Toshiba or whoever can completely eff it up before it's delivered, and there's nothing MS can do about it. (Well, they've started to be more strict about signed drivers and the such...)
Happily, the British are a little more politically aware than their transatlantic cousins, and managed to kick up a stink about it.
Whoa whoa whoa. Do the British have a single civil liberty left? More politically aware, maybe, but they don't seem particularly interested in defending rights.
I'd rather have 95% of Americans not politically aware at all if the other 5% fought tooth and nail to keep every civil liberty and right we have.
Greenpeace is anti-nuclear, so you're just arguing the same points that they would be. Which is why I'll never contribute money, or for that matter even talk to the enthused college kids they have handing out flyers in Seattle.
What's interesting to me is that quoting the stats on nuclear plants from Greenpeace, which are nearly guaranteed to be designed to make nuke plants look as bad as possible, you still came to the conclusion that Greenpeace *supports* nuclear power.
But we shouldn't even consider building any until we have a *completed* (very) long-term storage/disposal solution for nuclear waste. Deferring it to the next generation is not OK.
This is crazy. Do coal plants, currently generating a massive proportion of the electricity in the US, have a long-term storage/disposal solution for all the wastes coming out of their smokestacks? Why hold nuclear, which by all accounts is cleaner and uses much less fuel, to a standard that existing power producers aren't held to?
Did you stop and think before writing that down? Or do you think existing power comes from magical gnomes? (And the gnomes have a long-term storage/disposal solution!)
For the record, on my new Dell with Vista Home Premium (then upgraded to Ultimate) I don't see the following:
# Sound -- even on a pre-configured system, the sound system would SKIP worse than a 90s CD player if you tried to, say, move a window. Also, during MP3 playback, my shiny new CPU would spik to 75% usage. Joy. # Dual monitor support -- I have used two monitors for quite a while -- it's a godsend. Vista liked to forget all of my dual-monitor settings with every resolution change and restart, which is incredibly annoying when setting it back using their awful menus takes about 5 minutes. And if you play games, you switch resolutions a LOT. # DVD Playback -- in Windows Media Player, any DVD would "pause" for a second at chapter switches on DVDs. Completely ruins any movie. No problem at all on XP. # Performance -- I don't play cutting-edge games, but on my older games, I got much worse performance in Vista than I do on XP. Everquest crashed constantly, and did the herky-jerky. CS, I would often dip below 60 fps. Both run at glass-smooth 100 fps on XP.
I don't run Steam so I can't comment on it, except to say it's probably Valve's fault if things in Steam don't work... Valve's had access to Vista betas for, what, two years now? If they haven't fixed their product to support Vista, I don't see how that's Microsoft's fault/problem. (The reason I don't install Steam is that when I first tried it it was a bloated, crashing piece of crap that took 15 minutes to 'authorize' a game. I bought Orange Box on Xbox specifically to avoid Steam.) Ditto with Everquest.
The reason a lot of software "breaks" in Vista is that Vista enforces the rules that Windows has had from the start, but previous versions never really enforced. Mostly permissions issues; for programs that blithely place files all over the drive without any consideration of where they are supposed to go, those programs "break" in Vista. Then again, they were already broken in XP if you use fast-user-switching, or non-admin accounts... Vista just makes the brokenness more obvious.
And yes, I do have dual monitors. Vista's never forgotten my monitor settings.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, of course, but you're talking about powering a crystal radio you can barely hear even with the best headphones and Tesla was talking about running ocean liners by just dropping a wire in the water, or powering every train in the world just by adding a rod to the top of them. He jumped directly from "crystal radio" to "magical power transmission" without any type of sanity check in-between, and he wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars building his apparatus.
What I meant is that the way Tesla worked was to experiment and see what combination of electrical components did what, then come up with an ad-hoc explanation after the fact. Although he made dozens of discoveries, his method wasn't very scientific. For instance, (IIRC the anecdote correctly) he designed a radio-controlled model boat without realizing it was actually being controlled by radio; instead he thought it was some kind of wireless power transfer from his controller.
Everyone's different. Like you, I frequently have movies going as background to whatever I'm doing-- as long as the movie is a great classic. If it's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, It's A Wonderful Life, etc, I'll stop what I'm doing and either have to stop the movie, or start paying full attention to the movie. I also usually have my own movie, or sometimes movie background sound, going while playing video games, I virtually always turn the video game music off. And with World of Warcraft, all bets are off. I've actually played WOW and Civilization 4 at the same time before. (Civ IV is turn-based of course, but it's still normally pretty consuming.)
Attention game makers: ALL games should have windowed mode! Don't make me choose between your game and a DVD, let me do both at once! That is all.
Tesla died broke because he spent all his money trying to create a "wireless power distribution" that made no sense. If he had spent more time reading physics and less time building 100+ foot Tesla coils. Were some of his inventions stolen? Undoubtedly. But I think he has only himself to blame for losing all his money.
He went a bit wacko, also, Howard Hughes-style wacko.
Expand your horizons, too. There are tons of materials we have today that could be extremely valuable at any time in history. If you've seen "The Gods Must Be Crazy" you already know the kind of impact something as simple as a glass bottle can have to a people who've never seen one before. But also, plastics of every kind, most of which didn't exist before the 20th century. Bring one of those mood-ring materials that change color when you change their temperature. Maybe a Superball would be good, too, or Scotch Tape.
America has been paying lip service to being the good guy whilst screwing with other countries' regimes, selling arms into unstable areas, invading and destabilising all sorts of places and all the whole preaching to the rest of the world about "freedom", "justice" and the "American Way", which it makes clear by its actions it doesn't believe in and only applies to US citizens.
That explains why we removed dictatorships in Afghanistan and Iraq, because we don't think "freedom" should apply to the people who lived there. Good thinking. Oh wait, what's the standard liberal response, we did it for access to oil? Go ahead, I'll wait. You can even use one of those cute liberal nicknames, like Chimpy McHalliburton.
I love the UN. They reside in an American city, taking tons of funds from American taxpayers (look up on how long it's been since they paid the lease in that beautiful center they have!), and then spend all their time griping at the US. It's so crazy.
Need I remind you how US was before WWI and why US didn't do jack before they were attacked?
I'm pretty sure you meant to say World War II.
Hard to say what he meant... the US was attacked in both WWI and WWII. Remember the Lusitania? (At least the Japanese in WWII attacked a military target.) And the US culture was famously isolationist before and during most of WWI.
That being said, the history of European countries as international offenders does nothing to legitimize the practices of the United States today (or its own history of informal imperialism in South America and elsewhere).
Let's come up with a single measure of "offense points", then assign them to every nation. How many "offense points" does the US have compared to all of Europe? But oh wait, most European nations/governments have been around longer than the US, so we should come up with "offense points per decade" or some other measure. Someone total up then tell us whether the US beats out Europe or not.
Tongue-in-cheek, BTW.
First of all, the word "democratic" is one of those nice-sounding words that people use all the time, and the US fits the vague concept of "democratic." However, our actual government is, and always has been, a Republic. Many states are democratic, but the US government is not.
In any case, pretty much all the countries in the UN Security Council have created undemocratic regimes at one point or another. And at least the US has never (well, hardly ever) participated in colonization-- what's worse, creating an undemocratic Panama, or completely screwing up the economy of a dozen equatorial nations to get cheap cotton?
If you want to see something much closer to a true democracy, take a look at India. Their government is about as close as any government has come, I believe.
Bring some Aluminum. It's dirt cheap now that we have the electrical power to create it artificially, but it's extremely hard-to-find naturally and for most of history, aluminum has been one of the most rare metals there is. Napoleon dined with aluminum silverware, reserving the gold for his guests.
Next time acknowledge that you realized it was a joke, and I won't 'woosh' you. ;)
Sorry, I go my entire life surrounded by people who reply to obvious wisecracks in a serious manner, then when you explain it was a joke, they say "oh I know." Ugh, so aggravating!
I should add that I don't block ads, so really I *do* pay for the site in ad impressions.
That's fine, but the real problem is that the work here SUCKS.
If you read the comments, you're ok, but only because the first couple of posts are usually about how misleading or just plain wrong the frontpage article is. If you came to this site and only read the frontpage article, you'd be getting LESS educated about technology, not more educated. Front page articles are wrong probably a solid third of the time, and not just a little wrong, but a lot wrong.
I mean a lot of people complain about the spelling and grammar. That doesn't bother me as much; what bothers me is that the editors are just as likely to put up a wrong, or at least very misleading, article summary when there were probably 10 good ones written on the same story. That's not something I'd pay for.
Haha, my friends and I in psychology class used to always use the line, "Good! Now let's see what happens when we take away the puppy..."
Yeah, but that said, I think you can get graphics like that, or damned close to it, on an Xbox 360 or (presumably) a PS3. Gears of War looks about that good, and it's been out quite a while now.
Kind of a woosh there. I posted that because Viper was nothing but an hour-long Chrysler ad loosely based on Knight Rider.
Crazily, he actually *pays* for Slashdot. Subscribers can see stories like a half hour early and compose their reply during that time.
Paying for Slashdot? *shakes head slowly*
Ok, wait, don't get the complaint here.
What kind of screen is on this thing that it could actually DISPLAY HD content? The original Zune was only 320x240, and I can't imagine this one, even if improved, could be more than SD-resolution.
Is the complaint that the Zune doesn't allow you to play content that it's physically unable to display? Because, even for Slashdot, that's retarded.
Wait, wait, wait, you're telling me that there was product placement in my favorite show ever: Viper?
And terrorists in real life don't drive around cities in identical brand-new Dodge Caravans?
Ridiculous!!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108983/
Nah, your opinion is fine. Really, Microsoft's biggest image problem is that they frankly don't have a lot of control of what their end customers see. No matter how great their product is (and I'm not saying it's great), Dell or HP or Toshiba or whoever can completely eff it up before it's delivered, and there's nothing MS can do about it. (Well, they've started to be more strict about signed drivers and the such...)
Happily, the British are a little more politically aware than their transatlantic cousins, and managed to kick up a stink about it.
Whoa whoa whoa. Do the British have a single civil liberty left? More politically aware, maybe, but they don't seem particularly interested in defending rights.
I'd rather have 95% of Americans not politically aware at all if the other 5% fought tooth and nail to keep every civil liberty and right we have.
Greenpeace is anti-nuclear, so you're just arguing the same points that they would be. Which is why I'll never contribute money, or for that matter even talk to the enthused college kids they have handing out flyers in Seattle.
What's interesting to me is that quoting the stats on nuclear plants from Greenpeace, which are nearly guaranteed to be designed to make nuke plants look as bad as possible, you still came to the conclusion that Greenpeace *supports* nuclear power.
But we shouldn't even consider building any until we have a *completed* (very) long-term storage/disposal solution for nuclear waste. Deferring it to the next generation is not OK.
This is crazy. Do coal plants, currently generating a massive proportion of the electricity in the US, have a long-term storage/disposal solution for all the wastes coming out of their smokestacks? Why hold nuclear, which by all accounts is cleaner and uses much less fuel, to a standard that existing power producers aren't held to?
Did you stop and think before writing that down? Or do you think existing power comes from magical gnomes? (And the gnomes have a long-term storage/disposal solution!)
Three Mile Island was a story of how *well* the reactor safeguards worked. People who use that "horror story" aren't really thinking much about it.
For the record, on my new Dell with Vista Home Premium (then upgraded to Ultimate) I don't see the following:
# Sound -- even on a pre-configured system, the sound system would SKIP worse than a 90s CD player if you tried to, say, move a window. Also, during MP3 playback, my shiny new CPU would spik to 75% usage. Joy.
# Dual monitor support -- I have used two monitors for quite a while -- it's a godsend. Vista liked to forget all of my dual-monitor settings with every resolution change and restart, which is incredibly annoying when setting it back using their awful menus takes about 5 minutes. And if you play games, you switch resolutions a LOT.
# DVD Playback -- in Windows Media Player, any DVD would "pause" for a second at chapter switches on DVDs. Completely ruins any movie. No problem at all on XP.
# Performance -- I don't play cutting-edge games, but on my older games, I got much worse performance in Vista than I do on XP. Everquest crashed constantly, and did the herky-jerky. CS, I would often dip below 60 fps. Both run at glass-smooth 100 fps on XP.
I don't run Steam so I can't comment on it, except to say it's probably Valve's fault if things in Steam don't work... Valve's had access to Vista betas for, what, two years now? If they haven't fixed their product to support Vista, I don't see how that's Microsoft's fault/problem. (The reason I don't install Steam is that when I first tried it it was a bloated, crashing piece of crap that took 15 minutes to 'authorize' a game. I bought Orange Box on Xbox specifically to avoid Steam.) Ditto with Everquest.
The reason a lot of software "breaks" in Vista is that Vista enforces the rules that Windows has had from the start, but previous versions never really enforced. Mostly permissions issues; for programs that blithely place files all over the drive without any consideration of where they are supposed to go, those programs "break" in Vista. Then again, they were already broken in XP if you use fast-user-switching, or non-admin accounts... Vista just makes the brokenness more obvious.
And yes, I do have dual monitors. Vista's never forgotten my monitor settings.