I agree that at altitude there is less to suck but the setup does beg the question. What is being measured? If you are measuring vacuum and getting 27 inHg that would indicate you are 27 inHg, or 13.26 psi, below ambient. If we consult the handy chart you so thoughtfully provided we see that nominal atmospheric pressure at 3,000 ft is only 13.16 psi. Given that information I can conclude that you must have performed the test on a day with a high pressure weather system in place and it was likely quite a nice day. I say that because if a low pressure weather pattern was providing a dreary day then there wouldn't be 27 inHg available to suck.
What you really want to know, as stated above, is absolute pressure which is a bit trickier without an absolute pressure sensor. Fortunately we have this handy material we can use as a substitute if we know the temperature, it's water. If you grab a chart, this one at wikipedia should do, you'll notice the vapor pressure of water at 20 degrees Celsius is 17.3 mmHg so a 20 ºC glass of water placed in REHAB will boil once the absolute pressure reaches that mark.
Now then, you know what to do so off you go and see if you can suck her down to the point she boils over.
At the rate it's going it should be valued fairly by the end of the week for a buy in for anyone who is interested. That is, of course, unless you want to wait another week when it should become a decent buy. Let's see assuming a drop of 7% per day for ten days, that's about $18.50, hmmm better wait an extra few days just to be sure.
Re: "the navigation is streamlined and intuitive..."
I think he is saying the final release will have a pair of silky tapered orbs which are controlled by a matched set of nipples. Meh, it couldn't be worse than having Metro on your workstation and IMHO a much better replacement for Aero eye candy.
First there were 421 million shares floated and out of that only 43% were offered by Facebook Inc. Now consider that if this was such a great deal, why were the remaining 57% of the shares available from Facebook insiders? My take is that a whole bunch of folks who sold those 240 million shares are pretty happy with their take and many are probably looking to jump ship for the good life.
Seriously folks, if they were expecting the price of shares to rise dramatically, why wouldn't they hold the shares until after the IPO popped and rake in a lot more cash? I'd wager it was because the best value for them was to get paid now.
There is a problem with taking ads and it means that people may see articles as being less objective. It could also create a potentially legal situation where an advertiser may feel tempted to rescind funding if a page appears that is less than flattering by, lets say, implying the advertiser is a baby eating, syphilitic, gonorrhea ridden, necrophiliac bitch; perhaps even by using stronger and less kind verbiage.
"Wealth isn't really CREATED--it's FOUND. Like petroleum. Its wealth value was always there, but someone had to locate it underground first and then figure out how to refine it into useable fuel before its value can be tapped. People invest in new technologies in exchange for a share of this value should it work out."
So we agree that petroleum is a commodity, good, it's a start. I won't say the "Mona Lisa", "Venus de Milo" or "Statue of David" wasn't always there and just needed to be found by the artist because it's really immaterial to the discussion. The problem is that you're not even recognizing a rather large sector of the economy, services. In service sectors absolutely nothing is found as it is based on the utility people derive from the services, in either free time, a particular expertise, a pleasant atmosphere or whatever else. Perhaps it's having someone tend to the lawn or a night out at a restaurant on Mother's Day. I see how it gets confusing but once you figure out quickie take out food joints first sell convenience and the food is only for differentiation, it becomes a little clearer.
Case in point, one of the wealthiest people I know is a school chum who was waiter for 20+ years but he didn't "find" a plate of food and decide to sell it for $37.50. He just provided a level of service that was beyond the expectations of nearly everyone and retired in '07 at 39 years old, bought a boat big enough to live on and moved to Belize. He didn't find anything, he made it.
"Economics is, at its heart, the sciences involved in the distribution of a finite quantity: wealth (since wealth is based on matter, and matter is finite--ask any physicist--therefore wealth is finite, too). Economics NECESSARILY involves the transfer of wealth, and these transfers must necessarily be from one party to another..."
You're in luck, I'm a physicist who minored in resource economics. Your premise strikes me as false inasmuch as general economics isn't a zero sum game. Consider two markets, the stock market and the commodities market. The commodities market is a zero sum game where on person's gain are necessarily the loss of another, as there are only so many barrels of oil, pork bellies, etc. at a given time. Contrast this with the stock market which is not a zero sum game and aggregate wealth can be created and there needn't be any losers because it isn't based on "matter" but on another concept more commonly associated with "utility".
Certainly it may appear that the stock market is based on matter since every fule knows that the price of AAPL is based on how many bits of matter known as iP"odd" devices that Apple sells. That would be true if there wasn't any value, in the form of utility, added to the materials that constitute an iP"odd" in the same way that the commodities market works, pork belly in = pork belly out. It's that added value that doesn't come from "matter" that makes it different and yet it is the same inasmuch as it comes from energy in the form of labor, electricity and heat (that's blood, sweat and tears to you and me). How convenient it is then that you should bring up physics where we know that matter and energy are interchangable. Here we come to a rub since a fair deal of human energy comes from the sun via nutrition from vegetation, for you obligate carnivores that is regardless of whether rabbits eat it first (aside; preferably served with a nice sangiovese), and for practical purposes the sun's energy may as well be unlimited since when it goes dark the point rapidly becomes moot.
Should we find a way to shuffle off this terran coil what I'm uncertain of is that energy, and therefore matter, is limited and, lest this digress into a dissertation as to whether the universe is endothermic or exothermic and all hell breaks loose or hell freezes over, this should be left to another day.
"... it has been given a bad rep by those corrupt leaders who tried to impose it on their people."
No, actually it has been given a bad rep because it must be imposed on the people and there are always some who will oppose that, or any, imposition on lifestyle choice as a matter of principle.
"It's been a victim of a major assault of FUD by those who stand to loose[sic] everything (the Rich and Powerful) if it was ever implemented properly..."
I'd like to understand this clearly, proper implementation means some will lose everything. You are of course aware that statement by itself certainly eliminates doubt and ensures fear of anything close to either socialism or communism.
Surely, they wouldn't change from the officialLDB length standard at this point.
Now then, the screen would be 1.42 linguine if it exists at all. That said, perhaps a new unit is called for to define resolution and it should be based on how many pixels occupy a given angle at a particular viewing distance along the lines of sub-pixels per steradian, SPPS for now. This should take into account whether a device is monochrome, color, hand held, wall mounted, etc. and be accompanied by suitable standards, such as SPPS3L which would be sub-pixels per steradian at 3 linguine or SPPS.5DDB which is measured at 1/2 a double-decker bus. Mind, I'm just spit balling, I'll leave the real details to the unit pros at El Reg.
Granted it would be nice but the main problem with reviews is that nearly every setup is going to be different and that makes it particularly hard for MB manufacturers to guestimate. Should they use a baseline with 4 GB ram? Do we assume all ram chips are created equal, 1066/1300/etc? What about video cards, how many usb devices, hard drives, etc. We haven't even gotten to the biggest elephant in the room which is the power supply where the efficiency changes, sometimes greatly, depending on how hard it's being hit. Sure, the manufacturers could slap together a base config and measure the DC power but we all know everyone will have a different base config.
To top it all off, here in the US some tool will get all the exact same parts, put it together, plug it into the shoddy wiring in the shed, kick off some automated test program to measure the power with a $10 meter rated at 1800 watts with +/-10% full scale accuracy while he goes and uses a stick welder to make up a sparkly new case, on the same circuit of course, and comes back to find it drew 22 watts more than was "advertised by the manufacturer". Naturally, he decides he should sue claiming false advertising, hurt feelings and loss of welding rod while his lawyer figures this should play out nicely as a class action gig worth at least a meeellion dollars.
Sorry but you've struck a bit of raw nerve here. In short, no, they don't. Protectionism hurts everyone, always and there is no such thing as a little bit.
As example consider a simple little tariff to protect political allies sugar farmers in Florida from the low prices of sugar farmers in Brazil which winds up raising the price of sugar for every American and pushes soft drink manufacturers to switch to high fructose corn syrup to save money. It is now an artificial subsidy to the corn farmer who gets to raise the price of corn to meet the higher demand. This artificial inflation means people have to be paid more money just to stay even. This in turn raises the cost of everything their employers produce and this repeats until some new equilibrium point is established where some people lose their jobs in order for their former employer to remain competitive. Meanwhile in Brazil there is a surplus of sugar driving the price of sugar down even further so the living wage farmers there were making before is harder to achieve but at least they can turn to producing rum and alcohol fuels changing the economic balance for someone else and so on. The end result is everyone is worse off, even without a retaliatory tariff, all because some idiot pol decided his campaign contributing friend shouldn't have to modernize or adapt or change crops to remain competitive.
Consider when the UN gangs up on a country and applies reverse protectionism in the form of economic sanctions. They aren't doing it to protect that countries economy and industry.
"You can't expect to get everything done by other countries and have a thriving economy."
You're right, but you do have to figure out where your advantage lies and rather than give a further dissertation on comparative and competitive advantage, I'll leave that as an exercise for the interested.
You haven't been paying attention we've had elected fundamentalism in the US for as long as I can remember and my beard, if I had one, would be nearly completely gray. The fundamentalists don't all agree and wear different color hats but it's still two competing teams of fundys, both of whom are largely dysfunctional and totally incompetent.
It's likely you're right but it seems pretty easy already. They ask me every time I'm at the DMV regardless of why I'm there, which is usually twice a year, and they don't even bother to notice that box is already checked on my drivers license. Perhaps its also that FB also applies to passengers, cyclists and pedestrians as well and isn't limited to just drivers. Given the way people drive around here, I'm always a bit surprised there is a donor shortage, well except for the ones who play beat the train across the crossing as there's probably little left worth donating.
Unfortunately that's becoming standard practice here in the US. Sue anyone even remotely connected on the premise that many will just hand over some cash to make it go away and the deeper the pockets the better. It's what happens when lawyers make the rules.
Exactly right but this was Pennsylvania so with the educational discount even a MacBook Air is under $1k so even if they were of the Air variety we'd be talking 36 of them maybe even 40+ in bulk. Either way it was probably enough for entire classroom. Of course why they hand out laptops to the kiddies is beyond me. Perhaps they've never heard of thin clients or even a Mac Mini.
It certainly seems to me that the elephant in the room will be the textbook market. Right now B&N is operating the bookstores on 600 university campuses and that places them in both the first and second hand markets. I think whomever figures that out and makes it work in the e-book space will benefit greatly. Indeed the only reason I can figure the price of textbooks and frequency of new editions is precisely because of the second hand market. Sure you get to sell N new books the first year and N/20 books every year after until a new edition is required when the cycle starts over again. I can't imagine there are a whole bunch of non-physics majors who want to hang on to that $230 physics textbook they had to buy, preferably used, to fulfill a mandatory science elective when they can sell it back and maybe have 80% of the price of the next used book they will need for exactly one semester.
I imagine in a campus setting it wouldn't be too hard (I'm imagining remember) to keep login access to a cloud kept version of an e-book that a student only pays a nominal fee to access for a semester and it disappears from their e-bookshelf after that. It could even be automatic and included with the course registration and have the option for the student to "keep" a downloadable copy. The trick is it would have to be seamless and not an immediate "the server ate my homework" excuse.
Doesn't this person think they will have a tough time after the name change? Let's face it, single names can get confusing and calling yourself "yours" is certain to raise a red flag. Wait, should that be capitalized? Heck, they should go all in and change the last name to Truly just for added lols.
Does anyone else think his name is already Jebodiah?
Nice list, I'd have to put "#14 - Drunk people are not allowed to come in a bar" right up there but I suppose it has to do with some sort of indecency or public nudity law. Sorry Paris, you won't be checking that off your bucket list in Alaska.
Given the amount of personal, private data that gets sucked off of g+ and facebook alone we should all easily be able to find enough bugs to get filthy stonking rich. Let's do it, bitch!
Huh... what do you mean g+ and facebook are designed that way?
"So why do you collectively keep voting for such politicians then?"
That's the whole mayo vs mustard thing. The majority of political news coverage is about a few selected talking points that really differentiates one candidate from the next. Candidates that really are different from the rest are typically labeled kooks because they aren't savvy enough to keep their mouth shut on subjects that give the media laugh tracks instead of sound bites. This ensures that regardless of which candidates remain at the end the basic authoritarian core remains intact.
Add to that the fact that the primaries are mainly attended by only the extreme members of either party and the authoritarian model is a lock. Notice there is about 50% of voters who typically stay out of primaries because they look at the field and shudder at the usually horrid selection but more importantly there is a re-run of Married with Children on that night which takes precedence.
That said, yes it's very true that we need to strip economic incentives from our law enforcement and judicial governmental departments.
Coincidentally I came across this Businessweek article by Paul Barrett on Richard Feldman and I couldn't help but think Mr. Feldman is only scratching lightly on the corroded surface of justice in the U.S.
"No because they love that their government acts like world police"
Umm, no actually we don't. We actually would prefer that our gubbermint stop acting like the tyrannical teething baby it too often is. Please don't confuse the vast majority of us with the megalomaniacal fucks who buy and sell candidates to both parties in the Republocrap Democant cartel. Oh joy we get another election, big deal, maybe folks will get tired of politics as usual and vote for their choice of mayo or mustard but regardless of which they pick it's going on the same shit sandwich and we'll have to eat it for another four years when maybe we'll get the honor of being able to choose ketchup.
And FFS if all you've got to say is just the verbal equivalent to the skid marks in your pants there streaky, the least you could do is choose the icon more carefully. It's pretty clear you wanted the one just to the left of what you clicked.
I can see the next claim being, "while fixing a ticket in the cruiser the claimant suffered psychological distress and physical injury when the ticketee bit down hard on claimant's todger after claimant accidentally kicked on the siren".
Seriously though, does this mean STDs now fall under workers comp and not medical? Damn medical insurance companies seem to get out from under everything these days.
"The White House has struck a pro-privacy stance on online security legislation"
Where am I? Is this Bizarro? Who is in the White House and what have they done to the President? Could this be the break from intrusive tyranny we've been waiting for? Need some tequila and a lay down to try and make sense of this...
Oh wait, they want more control, for their benefit not ours, over their corporate informant lackeys. Whew, for a second I thought the executive branch was actually giving a shit about the average Joe. Good to know things haven't really changed but I could still use that tequila but don't worry, a single malt will do.
I like the direction but one point, drilling rigs are problematic in that they tend to be large and heavy pieces of equipment and drill pipe is pretty heavy when you start talking kilofeet depth. A better solution for such a remote application would be a small tunnel boring machine that can produce the well casing as it digs by combining the displaced dirt with some sort of bonding agent that could produce rigid walls. It would also be easier to make directional changes on the fly as required based on some sort of data acquired from embedded radar/sonar/seismic sensors.
My thoughts exactly. This is going to have those old enough to remember look back on J. Edgar and McCarthyism with fond nostalgia. Just imagine fast and furious Eric Holder with a Super-MongoDB on Hadoop able to pick off his political enemies at will. Mao never had it so good.
My bad, it doesn't mandate a 30% margin. Theoretically a retailer could have any margin they want so long as the retail price is fixed equal to or higher than Apple's price but that would just increase the retailer's cost with the increase going to Simon, Shyster, et al.
There's one in Grand Central Station and, as the US Government would have people believe given their stance on internet gambling, it is located at the point of presence where the consumer makes the transaction. Uncle Sam gets to reach across the world on that little gem.
Besides, what California wants is only relevant to what is in California, they don't have the ability to regulate interstate commerce and neither does Apple. Also note the Apple policy doesn't prevent loss leaders, it mandates a minimum margin of 30%. I don't think even Cali-fuckin'-ya would consider a 29.5% margin a loss leader, do you?
Can't the US Tirade Rectum be both? I just mean if he isn't it would put him at a serious disadvantage with the rest of the crowd in the Dick-trick of Colon-aperture.
"There was a report today that said that in Texas all of these can result in a class E felony."
Missed something somewhere. Texas, as a state, doesn't have a class E anything so perhaps there was some confusion with another state like Tenn. Texas has class A, B and C misdemeanors and there are 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree felonies as well as a "state jail" felony but nothing even making a fifth tier in either category. Granted that doesn't stop an individual county or city from making additional levels of crap just because they can so it could still be in Texas but not apply to all of Texas.
Perhaps the U.S. could sell off both Texas and California to get rid of the extremes at both ends and use the cash to pay off the national debt, well part of the national debt given the current real estate market.
Why can't a President put this guy on the Supreme Court? Oh right, the members of both parties of the political cartel probably hate Judge Kozinski's commitment to the crazier things, you know life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it's a post 9-11 world you know.
Win95's 20th anniversary. Are you going to combine the re-review of Win95 and MS Bob together or separately? You aren't going to forget Bob, are you? I mean you even included this updated Bob icon. I admit I haven't kept in touch over the past 17 years, so did he finally get contacts or lasik?
The high price of the stock certainly keeps most if not all of the high frequency traders out of the stock so I'll give them that. Granted, averaging 20M shares a day is a lot higher than GOOG at about 2.5M but it seems pretty low compared to real h.f. targets like BAC which is averaging close to 300M daily trades. I'm thinking the reason for the stock buyback is exactly to drive up the price so they can split and maintain a high price afterward to keep h.f. out of the game.
Similarly I find myself conflicted as to what was more disgusting, the begging by a member of one of the richest organizations in the world or the ritualistic cannibalism that brought him there. The gay porn doesn't even make the list because that has the potential to be tastefully done.
The good old greenback isn't what she used to be. I remember living by the Canadian border and feeling a bit peeved when I got Canadian quarters back from a vending machine, now I'd feel almost giddy.
Oh Neil, you have that the other way 'round according to Yahoo! one USD is about .96 AUD.
No worries though, printing cash is Ben's way of ensuring that deflation isn't actually going on and convincing folks that the economy really is getting better. Sadly he's probably right to given how much of people's economic behavior is based on perception and not research.
RIM doesn't want cocks on twitter? Capon now, wattle we do for lolz? I've really comb to dislike the way companies feel spurred to coop up their customers.
"If you know nothing and have no clue, next time please also say nothing too."
Yes and we shirley wouldn't want an article about governmental largess, political abuses or human trafficking given an equal amount of factual evidence, oh wait... maybe we would.
Frankly I find this to be another example of the honesty of ElReg. An interesting ort of data was found that might be of interest to the rest of the community so some digging was done with minimal results and those results were handed up with a sincere "we don't know". What's the problem with that? Let's face it there are many other media outlets who would publish blindly made up shit with absolute certainty of the thing based on a chat with a guy in rags holding a stolen iPad by an author whose IT experience is limited to having used MS Word to write the article. So AC if you don't mind, kindly umount /dev/high_horse m'kay thx.
Here I always felt those eggs were perhaps the most disgustingly sweet and horrid tasting things ever devised. Now I find out these things made by Hershey are mere poseurs. Perhaps I can find one on the next trip across the pond.
But, but... what about the naturally present flora/fauna? You can't build a gut chip without the usual buggy suspects. I suppose it's good to see what would grow in the absence of normal gut bugs but like everything else, what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.
Not just for dumb people it's also for the ones who don't want to deal with the hassle of spending months complaining to SoCal Edison trying to convince them that you didn't actually use more than 3 times as much electricity during the month they "upgraded" the meter than any other month before or since the "upgrade". In fact I could probably show I wouldn't use that much electricity even if I left the door open and the AC on during the whole of August.
Some still do here in the US. A family friend has had to jump through hoops in order to connect her work laptop from home. In the past six months I know she has resorted to a variety of things after two different brands of routers got kicked off by the carrier, including switching the connection and rebooting the modem and running both computers and "sharing" the connection. Finally we have her hooked up with an older atom powered PC running m0n0wall which seems to be working a treat... for now. Unfortunately for her there isn't a telco box near enough for DSL so she is stuck with the local cable monopoly or dialup.
Register
1274 posts • joined Friday 27th April 2007 15:21 GMT
Page:
Re: Performance loss at altitude?
I agree that at altitude there is less to suck but the setup does beg the question. What is being measured? If you are measuring vacuum and getting 27 inHg that would indicate you are 27 inHg, or 13.26 psi, below ambient. If we consult the handy chart you so thoughtfully provided we see that nominal atmospheric pressure at 3,000 ft is only 13.16 psi. Given that information I can conclude that you must have performed the test on a day with a high pressure weather system in place and it was likely quite a nice day. I say that because if a low pressure weather pattern was providing a dreary day then there wouldn't be 27 inHg available to suck.
What you really want to know, as stated above, is absolute pressure which is a bit trickier without an absolute pressure sensor. Fortunately we have this handy material we can use as a substitute if we know the temperature, it's water. If you grab a chart, this one at wikipedia should do, you'll notice the vapor pressure of water at 20 degrees Celsius is 17.3 mmHg so a 20 ºC glass of water placed in REHAB will boil once the absolute pressure reaches that mark.
Now then, you know what to do so off you go and see if you can suck her down to the point she boils over.
Re: Good idea
"There's prior art - Jaguar won a safety award back in 2006 for exactly this idea."
So there's a 90% chance it can be patented in the US given the current "grant it and let the courts find out if it's valid" system.
-- patent troll
Look on the bright side
At the rate it's going it should be valued fairly by the end of the week for a buy in for anyone who is interested. That is, of course, unless you want to wait another week when it should become a decent buy. Let's see assuming a drop of 7% per day for ten days, that's about $18.50, hmmm better wait an extra few days just to be sure.
Re: "the navigation is streamlined and intuitive..."
I think he is saying the final release will have a pair of silky tapered orbs which are controlled by a matched set of nipples. Meh, it couldn't be worse than having Metro on your workstation and IMHO a much better replacement for Aero eye candy.
few minutesday's tradeStaying away, far away
First there were 421 million shares floated and out of that only 43% were offered by Facebook Inc. Now consider that if this was such a great deal, why were the remaining 57% of the shares available from Facebook insiders? My take is that a whole bunch of folks who sold those 240 million shares are pretty happy with their take and many are probably looking to jump ship for the good life.
Seriously folks, if they were expecting the price of shares to rise dramatically, why wouldn't they hold the shares until after the IPO popped and rake in a lot more cash? I'd wager it was because the best value for them was to get paid now.
Re: I have a serious question:
There is a problem with taking ads and it means that people may see articles as being less objective. It could also create a potentially legal situation where an advertiser may feel tempted to rescind funding if a page appears that is less than flattering by, lets say, implying the advertiser is a baby eating, syphilitic, gonorrhea ridden, necrophiliac bitch; perhaps even by using stronger and less kind verbiage.
@Charles 9
"Wealth isn't really CREATED--it's FOUND. Like petroleum. Its wealth value was always there, but someone had to locate it underground first and then figure out how to refine it into useable fuel before its value can be tapped. People invest in new technologies in exchange for a share of this value should it work out."
So we agree that petroleum is a commodity, good, it's a start. I won't say the "Mona Lisa", "Venus de Milo" or "Statue of David" wasn't always there and just needed to be found by the artist because it's really immaterial to the discussion. The problem is that you're not even recognizing a rather large sector of the economy, services. In service sectors absolutely nothing is found as it is based on the utility people derive from the services, in either free time, a particular expertise, a pleasant atmosphere or whatever else. Perhaps it's having someone tend to the lawn or a night out at a restaurant on Mother's Day. I see how it gets confusing but once you figure out quickie take out food joints first sell convenience and the food is only for differentiation, it becomes a little clearer.
Case in point, one of the wealthiest people I know is a school chum who was waiter for 20+ years but he didn't "find" a plate of food and decide to sell it for $37.50. He just provided a level of service that was beyond the expectations of nearly everyone and retired in '07 at 39 years old, bought a boat big enough to live on and moved to Belize. He didn't find anything, he made it.
Re: @Titus
I like broccoli, both raw and cooked, so what exactly are you saying. Then again, I'm a bit of an iodine freek.
@Charles 9 Re: @Jonas
"Economics is, at its heart, the sciences involved in the distribution of a finite quantity: wealth (since wealth is based on matter, and matter is finite--ask any physicist--therefore wealth is finite, too). Economics NECESSARILY involves the transfer of wealth, and these transfers must necessarily be from one party to another..."
You're in luck, I'm a physicist who minored in resource economics. Your premise strikes me as false inasmuch as general economics isn't a zero sum game. Consider two markets, the stock market and the commodities market. The commodities market is a zero sum game where on person's gain are necessarily the loss of another, as there are only so many barrels of oil, pork bellies, etc. at a given time. Contrast this with the stock market which is not a zero sum game and aggregate wealth can be created and there needn't be any losers because it isn't based on "matter" but on another concept more commonly associated with "utility".
Certainly it may appear that the stock market is based on matter since every fule knows that the price of AAPL is based on how many bits of matter known as iP"odd" devices that Apple sells. That would be true if there wasn't any value, in the form of utility, added to the materials that constitute an iP"odd" in the same way that the commodities market works, pork belly in = pork belly out. It's that added value that doesn't come from "matter" that makes it different and yet it is the same inasmuch as it comes from energy in the form of labor, electricity and heat (that's blood, sweat and tears to you and me). How convenient it is then that you should bring up physics where we know that matter and energy are interchangable. Here we come to a rub since a fair deal of human energy comes from the sun via nutrition from vegetation, for you obligate carnivores that is regardless of whether rabbits eat it first (aside; preferably served with a nice sangiovese), and for practical purposes the sun's energy may as well be unlimited since when it goes dark the point rapidly becomes moot.
Should we find a way to shuffle off this terran coil what I'm uncertain of is that energy, and therefore matter, is limited and, lest this digress into a dissertation as to whether the universe is endothermic or exothermic and all hell breaks loose or hell freezes over, this should be left to another day.
Re: Really? @AC 01:58
"... it has been given a bad rep by those corrupt leaders who tried to impose it on their people."
No, actually it has been given a bad rep because it must be imposed on the people and there are always some who will oppose that, or any, imposition on lifestyle choice as a matter of principle.
"It's been a victim of a major assault of FUD by those who stand to loose[sic] everything (the Rich and Powerful) if it was ever implemented properly..."
I'd like to understand this clearly, proper implementation means some will lose everything. You are of course aware that statement by itself certainly eliminates doubt and ensures fear of anything close to either socialism or communism.
Oh sorry, were you being ironic?
Re: Don't start...
Surely, they wouldn't change from the officialLDB length standard at this point.
Now then, the screen would be 1.42 linguine if it exists at all. That said, perhaps a new unit is called for to define resolution and it should be based on how many pixels occupy a given angle at a particular viewing distance along the lines of sub-pixels per steradian, SPPS for now. This should take into account whether a device is monochrome, color, hand held, wall mounted, etc. and be accompanied by suitable standards, such as SPPS3L which would be sub-pixels per steradian at 3 linguine or SPPS.5DDB which is measured at 1/2 a double-decker bus. Mind, I'm just spit balling, I'll leave the real details to the unit pros at El Reg.
This post has been deleted by its author
Re: power consumption
Granted it would be nice but the main problem with reviews is that nearly every setup is going to be different and that makes it particularly hard for MB manufacturers to guestimate. Should they use a baseline with 4 GB ram? Do we assume all ram chips are created equal, 1066/1300/etc? What about video cards, how many usb devices, hard drives, etc. We haven't even gotten to the biggest elephant in the room which is the power supply where the efficiency changes, sometimes greatly, depending on how hard it's being hit. Sure, the manufacturers could slap together a base config and measure the DC power but we all know everyone will have a different base config.
To top it all off, here in the US some tool will get all the exact same parts, put it together, plug it into the shoddy wiring in the shed, kick off some automated test program to measure the power with a $10 meter rated at 1800 watts with +/-10% full scale accuracy while he goes and uses a stick welder to make up a sparkly new case, on the same circuit of course, and comes back to find it drew 22 watts more than was "advertised by the manufacturer". Naturally, he decides he should sue claiming false advertising, hurt feelings and loss of welding rod while his lawyer figures this should play out nicely as a class action gig worth at least a meeellion dollars.
Re: Protectionism
"Countries need some level of protectionism."
Sorry but you've struck a bit of raw nerve here. In short, no, they don't. Protectionism hurts everyone, always and there is no such thing as a little bit.
As example consider a simple little tariff to protect
political alliessugar farmers in Florida from the low prices of sugar farmers in Brazil which winds up raising the price of sugar for every American and pushes soft drink manufacturers to switch to high fructose corn syrup to save money. It is now an artificial subsidy to the corn farmer who gets to raise the price of corn to meet the higher demand. This artificial inflation means people have to be paid more money just to stay even. This in turn raises the cost of everything their employers produce and this repeats until some new equilibrium point is established where some people lose their jobs in order for their former employer to remain competitive. Meanwhile in Brazil there is a surplus of sugar driving the price of sugar down even further so the living wage farmers there were making before is harder to achieve but at least they can turn to producing rum and alcohol fuels changing the economic balance for someone else and so on. The end result is everyone is worse off, even without a retaliatory tariff, all because some idiot pol decided his campaign contributing friend shouldn't have to modernize or adapt or change crops to remain competitive.Consider when the UN gangs up on a country and applies reverse protectionism in the form of economic sanctions. They aren't doing it to protect that countries economy and industry.
"You can't expect to get everything done by other countries and have a thriving economy."
You're right, but you do have to figure out where your advantage lies and rather than give a further dissertation on comparative and competitive advantage, I'll leave that as an exercise for the interested.
Elected fundamentalism??
You haven't been paying attention we've had elected fundamentalism in the US for as long as I can remember and my beard, if I had one, would be nearly completely gray. The fundamentalists don't all agree and wear different color hats but it's still two competing teams of fundys, both of whom are largely dysfunctional and totally incompetent.
@AC
It's likely you're right but it seems pretty easy already. They ask me every time I'm at the DMV regardless of why I'm there, which is usually twice a year, and they don't even bother to notice that box is already checked on my drivers license. Perhaps its also that FB also applies to passengers, cyclists and pedestrians as well and isn't limited to just drivers. Given the way people drive around here, I'm always a bit surprised there is a donor shortage, well except for the ones who play beat the train across the crossing as there's probably little left worth donating.
Re: pedantic but hey it's the register
Looks more like some sort of protofeathers to me.
Re: Self abuse of process?
Unfortunately that's becoming standard practice here in the US. Sue anyone even remotely connected on the premise that many will just hand over some cash to make it go away and the deeper the pockets the better. It's what happens when lawyers make the rules.
Re: Seems a little implausible
Exactly right but this was Pennsylvania so with the educational discount even a MacBook Air is under $1k so even if they were of the Air variety we'd be talking 36 of them maybe even 40+ in bulk. Either way it was probably enough for entire classroom. Of course why they hand out laptops to the kiddies is beyond me. Perhaps they've never heard of thin clients or even a Mac Mini.
It certainly seems to me that the elephant in the room will be the textbook market. Right now B&N is operating the bookstores on 600 university campuses and that places them in both the first and second hand markets. I think whomever figures that out and makes it work in the e-book space will benefit greatly. Indeed the only reason I can figure the price of textbooks and frequency of new editions is precisely because of the second hand market. Sure you get to sell N new books the first year and N/20 books every year after until a new edition is required when the cycle starts over again. I can't imagine there are a whole bunch of non-physics majors who want to hang on to that $230 physics textbook they had to buy, preferably used, to fulfill a mandatory science elective when they can sell it back and maybe have 80% of the price of the next used book they will need for exactly one semester.
I imagine in a campus setting it wouldn't be too hard (I'm imagining remember) to keep login access to a cloud kept version of an e-book that a student only pays a nominal fee to access for a semester and it disappears from their e-bookshelf after that. It could even be automatic and included with the course registration and have the option for the student to "keep" a downloadable copy. The trick is it would have to be seamless and not an immediate "the server ate my homework" excuse.
Oh no
Doesn't this person think they will have a tough time after the name change? Let's face it, single names can get confusing and calling yourself "yours" is certain to raise a red flag. Wait, should that be capitalized? Heck, they should go all in and change the last name to Truly just for added lols.
Does anyone else think his name is already Jebodiah?
Re: Weird laws for sure
@Jesthar,
Nice list, I'd have to put "#14 - Drunk people are not allowed to come in a bar" right up there but I suppose it has to do with some sort of indecency or public nudity law. Sorry Paris, you won't be checking that off your bucket list in Alaska.
Cool, let's get rich
Given the amount of personal, private data that gets sucked off of g+ and facebook alone we should all easily be able to find enough bugs to get filthy stonking rich. Let's do it, bitch!
Huh... what do you mean g+ and facebook are designed that way?
@AC 05:25
"So why do you collectively keep voting for such politicians then?"
That's the whole mayo vs mustard thing. The majority of political news coverage is about a few selected talking points that really differentiates one candidate from the next. Candidates that really are different from the rest are typically labeled kooks because they aren't savvy enough to keep their mouth shut on subjects that give the media laugh tracks instead of sound bites. This ensures that regardless of which candidates remain at the end the basic authoritarian core remains intact.
Add to that the fact that the primaries are mainly attended by only the extreme members of either party and the authoritarian model is a lock. Notice there is about 50% of voters who typically stay out of primaries because they look at the field and shudder at the usually horrid selection but more importantly there is a re-run of Married with Children on that night which takes precedence.
That said, yes it's very true that we need to strip economic incentives from our law enforcement and judicial governmental departments.
Coincidentally I came across this Businessweek article by Paul Barrett on Richard Feldman and I couldn't help but think Mr. Feldman is only scratching lightly on the corroded surface of justice in the U.S.
Re: Don't care...@Omgwtfbbqtime
OMGWTF?!?!
Re: Can that prosecutor please explain...
"No because they love that their government acts like world police"
Umm, no actually we don't. We actually would prefer that our gubbermint stop acting like the tyrannical teething baby it too often is. Please don't confuse the vast majority of us with the megalomaniacal fucks who buy and sell candidates to both parties in the Republocrap Democant cartel. Oh joy we get another election, big deal, maybe folks will get tired of politics as usual and vote for their choice of mayo or mustard but regardless of which they pick it's going on the same shit sandwich and we'll have to eat it for another four years when maybe we'll get the honor of being able to choose ketchup.
And FFS if all you've got to say is just the verbal equivalent to the skid marks in your pants there streaky, the least you could do is choose the icon more carefully. It's pretty clear you wanted the one just to the left of what you clicked.
So presumably
I can see the next claim being, "while fixing a ticket in the cruiser the claimant suffered psychological distress and physical injury when the ticketee bit down hard on claimant's todger after claimant accidentally kicked on the siren".
Seriously though, does this mean STDs now fall under workers comp and not medical? Damn medical insurance companies seem to get out from under everything these days.
Huh, wha????
"The White House has struck a pro-privacy stance on online security legislation"
Where am I? Is this Bizarro? Who is in the White House and what have they done to the President? Could this be the break from intrusive tyranny we've been waiting for? Need some tequila and a lay down to try and make sense of this...
Oh wait, they want more control, for their benefit not ours, over their corporate informant lackeys. Whew, for a second I thought the executive branch was actually giving a shit about the average Joe. Good to know things haven't really changed but I could still use that tequila but don't worry, a single malt will do.
Re: @Trevor_Pott
"But you learn things..."
So... "is she interested in photographs?... nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more."
Re: Political problems aside
I like the direction but one point, drilling rigs are problematic in that they tend to be large and heavy pieces of equipment and drill pipe is pretty heavy when you start talking kilofeet depth. A better solution for such a remote application would be a small tunnel boring machine that can produce the well casing as it digs by combining the displaced dirt with some sort of bonding agent that could produce rigid walls. It would also be easier to make directional changes on the fly as required based on some sort of data acquired from embedded radar/sonar/seismic sensors.
Re: Uh, yeah. Right....
My thoughts exactly. This is going to have those old enough to remember look back on J. Edgar and McCarthyism with fond nostalgia. Just imagine fast and furious Eric Holder with a Super-MongoDB on Hadoop able to pick off his political enemies at will. Mao never had it so good.
Great stuff
Now then, I'm off to stock up on bacillus subtilis just in case one of these cave dwelling Jurassic super dino-bacteria spawn up here in the light.
It's the one with camel poo in the pocket.
Re: Re: On the other hand...
My bad, it doesn't mandate a 30% margin. Theoretically a retailer could have any margin they want so long as the retail price is fixed equal to or higher than Apple's price but that would just increase the retailer's cost with the increase going to Simon, Shyster, et al.
Re: On the other hand...
"Now where was Apple located again?"
There's one in Grand Central Station and, as the US Government would have people believe given their stance on internet gambling, it is located at the point of presence where the consumer makes the transaction. Uncle Sam gets to reach across the world on that little gem.
Besides, what California wants is only relevant to what is in California, they don't have the ability to regulate interstate commerce and neither does Apple. Also note the Apple policy doesn't prevent loss leaders, it mandates a minimum margin of 30%. I don't think even Cali-fuckin'-ya would consider a 29.5% margin a loss leader, do you?
But, but
Can't the US Tirade Rectum be both? I just mean if he isn't it would put him at a serious disadvantage with the rest of the crowd in the Dick-trick of Colon-aperture.
Re: Sense as prevailed across the pond...
"There was a report today that said that in Texas all of these can result in a class E felony."
Missed something somewhere. Texas, as a state, doesn't have a class E anything so perhaps there was some confusion with another state like Tenn. Texas has class A, B and C misdemeanors and there are 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree felonies as well as a "state jail" felony but nothing even making a fifth tier in either category. Granted that doesn't stop an individual county or city from making additional levels of crap just because they can so it could still be in Texas but not apply to all of Texas.
Perhaps the U.S. could sell off both Texas and California to get rid of the extremes at both ends and use the cash to pay off the national debt, well part of the national debt given the current real estate market.
Pity
Why can't a President put this guy on the Supreme Court? Oh right, the members of both parties of the political cartel probably hate Judge Kozinski's commitment to the crazier things, you know life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it's a post 9-11 world you know.
Only 3 years
Win95's 20th anniversary. Are you going to combine the re-review of Win95 and MS Bob together or separately? You aren't going to forget Bob, are you? I mean you even included this updated Bob icon. I admit I haven't kept in touch over the past 17 years, so did he finally get contacts or lasik?
Only one thing
The high price of the stock certainly keeps most if not all of the high frequency traders out of the stock so I'll give them that. Granted, averaging 20M shares a day is a lot higher than GOOG at about 2.5M but it seems pretty low compared to real h.f. targets like BAC which is averaging close to 300M daily trades. I'm thinking the reason for the stock buyback is exactly to drive up the price so they can split and maintain a high price afterward to keep h.f. out of the game.
Re: I find it more shocking...
Similarly I find myself conflicted as to what was more disgusting, the begging by a member of one of the richest organizations in the world or the ritualistic cannibalism that brought him there. The gay porn doesn't even make the list because that has the potential to be tastefully done.
Ah yes
The good old greenback isn't what she used to be. I remember living by the Canadian border and feeling a bit peeved when I got Canadian quarters back from a vending machine, now I'd feel almost giddy.
Oh Neil, you have that the other way 'round according to Yahoo! one USD is about .96 AUD.
No worries though, printing cash is Ben's way of ensuring that deflation isn't actually going on and convincing folks that the economy really is getting better. Sadly he's probably right to given how much of people's economic behavior is based on perception and not research.
What??
RIM doesn't want cocks on twitter? Capon now, wattle we do for lolz? I've really comb to dislike the way companies feel spurred to coop up their customers.
Re: "We have no idea"
"If you know nothing and have no clue, next time please also say nothing too."
Yes and we shirley wouldn't want an article about governmental largess, political abuses or human trafficking given an equal amount of factual evidence, oh wait... maybe we would.
Frankly I find this to be another example of the honesty of ElReg. An interesting ort of data was found that might be of interest to the rest of the community so some digging was done with minimal results and those results were handed up with a sincere "we don't know". What's the problem with that? Let's face it there are many other media outlets who would publish blindly made up shit with absolute certainty of the thing based on a chat with a guy in rags holding a stolen iPad by an author whose IT experience is limited to having used MS Word to write the article. So AC if you don't mind, kindly umount /dev/high_horse m'kay thx.
Dear me
Here I always felt those eggs were perhaps the most disgustingly sweet and horrid tasting things ever devised. Now I find out these things made by Hershey are mere poseurs. Perhaps I can find one on the next trip across the pond.
Translate?
I'd wager one has to drink the Bong water.
Re: Finally, the iShit
D'oh, how'd I miss that? Must read more carefully in future.
[hangs head in shame]
Finally, the iShit
But, but... what about the naturally present flora/fauna? You can't build a gut chip without the usual buggy suspects. I suppose it's good to see what would grow in the absence of normal gut bugs but like everything else, what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.
I don't know
I laughed, I cried, I screamed, I cried some more. Perhaps I'm not seeing the plot of this theater show; Broadway it ain't.
Even Paris is confused.
Re: Dumb meters for dumb people
Not just for dumb people it's also for the ones who don't want to deal with the hassle of spending months complaining to SoCal Edison trying to convince them that you didn't actually use more than 3 times as much electricity during the month they "upgraded" the meter than any other month before or since the "upgrade". In fact I could probably show I wouldn't use that much electricity even if I left the door open and the AC on during the whole of August.
Some are still trying
Some still do here in the US. A family friend has had to jump through hoops in order to connect her work laptop from home. In the past six months I know she has resorted to a variety of things after two different brands of routers got kicked off by the carrier, including switching the connection and rebooting the modem and running both computers and "sharing" the connection. Finally we have her hooked up with an older atom powered PC running m0n0wall which seems to be working a treat... for now. Unfortunately for her there isn't a telco box near enough for DSL so she is stuck with the local cable monopoly or dialup.
Page: