Posts by Joe Futrelle15 posts • joined Wednesday 18th April 2007 19:10 GMT
Agreed that it needs mark all as read, but otherwise it's great.
I love the FB integration. I can quickly scan, comment on, and "like" FB posts without using the slow, buggy official FB app. WIN.
Upgrade hosed my Jaunty install, putting it in a non-bootable state, and a state where GRUB2 was unable to boot into the old system either. Spent a day looking for a fix before I gave up and did a clean install over the old partition, and even that didn't go smoothly--the wireless driver needed to be uninstalled and installed before it worked, and the xorg config didn't support the resolution I needed.
The upgrade from Intrepid to Jaunty was relatively smooth, so this is a big regression.
I find the study and article amusing. Lighten up, commentards!
lynx forever!
http://weather.ou.edu/faculty_details.php?FacID=28
"the detection of hazardous local weather using dynamically adaptive radars" means that when coarse-scale storms are detected, data gets fetched from higher-resolution radar closer to the ground (e.g., mounting doppler radar sensors on cell phone towers) which can increase forecast resolution down to about a city block at least six hours in advance--but only with fast enough computers. As a poster upthread said, we still need to build out denser sensor networks before we can get the data that these forecasting techniques require.
I talked to a computational fluid dynamics person and he said that CFG researchers were essentially left with nothing to do in the 1990's because supercomputers had become fast to solve most of their problems for non-turbulent flows. But computers still aren't fast enough to do useful turbulence simulation. So many of the researchers left CFG to work in molecular dynamics. If computers become fast enough to solve real turbulence problems, it will generate a lot of new and useful results, as well as providing insight into one of the few remaining unsolved problems in classical physics.
"Most issues in science today are computational in nature,"
Nope. Most of the issue is data management--how do I represent scientific data and manage it over its lifecycle, and how do I track the relationship between observed data and derived data, etc.
No amount of cycles and storage can solve that problem, which is why it remains unsolved decade after decade.
http://sitasingstheblues.com/
a visual spectacle and huge hit by a single animator, working pretty much alone
I for one welcome our new leadfooted robotic overlords.
Ah, but once everyone in "The Community" gets their mandatory Google brain implants, then it's go go go.
http://www.usfa.dhs.gov/citizens/all_citizens/home_fire_prev/electrical.shtm
choice quotes:
During a typical year, home electrical problems account for 67,800 fires, 485 deaths, and $868 million in property losses.
The home appliances most often involved in electrical fires are electric stoves and ovens, dryers, central heating units, televisions, radios and record players.
Why have this device *and* a camera?
Put a large high-res screen and hard drive in a good camera, add some media playback controls, and boom. No need for this product.
> We're slowly, but steadily, transforming into a post-scarcity society
Uh, no. If you look at the commodities markets, particularly for energy commodities like oil and natural gas, the idea that we're in a "post-scarcity society" is completely unsupportable. Global oil production *is peaking now* and the only near-term-deployable substitutes are neither renewable nor carbon-neutral. At the same time demand for energy continues to grow. We're looking at massive energy scarcity, starting now.
And it's not just energy commodities either. If you consume silver or gold, which the IT industry does on a significant scale, you'll notice that there's been a rapid run-up in the prices of those commodities in the last few of years and they're running at or around all-time records.
If you have capital and want to make money, you could do pretty well with commodities futures right now. Hell, if there was a futures market for US postage stamps, futures contracts for the new "forever stamps" would be selling like hotcakes, given that the price of postage is more or less pegged to fuel prices.
Global warming is not a "trivial" issue either--Australia is experiencing crippling drought (that's an entire *continent* we're talking about) as are numerous other regions, like Italy whose water and hydroelectric power are so compromised by the lack of snowmelt from the alps that a state of emergency has been declared IIRC.
We don't need more "long boom" rhetoric to figure out how to address these serious issues. We need honest analysis of *real* data from our *actual* economy.
I would like the ability to go on record as having "no comment" on a particular story. Unfortunately, the only way I can do that in the current Reg comments implementation is to make a "comment".
The other feature I want would be to make a "meta-comment" which would become a new top-level story for which the story I was meta-commenting on would become a comment.
Comments welcome.
Major new observations supporting an existing theory count as discoveries. For instance gravity probe B is intended to provide major new evidence for frame-dragging in general relativity, and if it succeeds that will be significant discovery, but it will neither "prove" general relativity nor constitute the discovery of general relativity. Journalists often use stories about this kind of data-gathering research as an opportunity to educate the public about the theories the data is intended to support, and if they spin it as the discovery of the theories or readers misinterpret it that way, that's not the scientists' fault--the peer review process (when it works) prevents scientists from taking credit in their journal papers for theories they're only collecting data for.
There is absolutely no way we can continue to consume the amount of energy we do now without cheap oil. Net energy on renewables will never come close to what we get from oil now.
We have no alternative but to consume less.
The debate over which energy source to use to power our vehicles so we can drive them as much as we do now is moot.
