Comment Re:The political issues are being way oversold (Score 1) 391
Pandemic is a measure of how widespread a disease is, not its lethality.
Comment Re:Cue the apologists... (Score 1) 271
If you take an individual country the size of Sweden or Canada
WTF are you on about? That's quite a wide range you're tarring with one brush. Sweden is relatively small. Canada is totally enormous.
Comment Re:Interesting (Score 1) 214
I was in Japan in September as well this year. They did have the iPhone as you pointed out, but I think most importantly is that every place that was selling was giving it away for free (0 Yen). That price was there for the full time I was there. I don't know if the carriers were fully subsiding the phone or if Apple was cutting prices because they were having a difficult time selling it.
Comment Re:not surprising (Score 1) 386
Hey I am one of the people who has paid for all the media on my computers and devices. What bugs me is the restriction on the media I buy. I can load a DVD but I can't loan a digital copy. For that matter the digital copy that came with my batman DVD is absolutely useless because the developer didnt have the foresight to check for space before initiating a connection to mark up my tally so when I tried to use it on a dummy PC first I burned up all three licenses without even getting to use it. Forcing me to decrypt the volume. I am ok with people protecting their media, I am not OK with them rendering something I paid for useless and calling me a thief.
Comment Re:LIKE WE DID ANY BETTER. (Score 2, Interesting) 391
Also, Clinton did produce a balanced budget. It took some years of doing to get there, but he did. It was, of course, immediately trashed by the Bush Administration.
Umm, no. National Debt increased every year of Clinton's terms. Yes, I'm aware that popular mythology has the last year (or two) of Clinton's Presidency "balanced", but whatever the budget says about "deficit", if "debt" increases, the budget wasn't really balanced.
Remember those first five years of the Bush II Presidency, when the Republicans controlled Congress, too...That's were about half the deficit came from.
I did indeed forget that the Republicans didn't lose the Senate till 2006. My bad.
That said, the Debt run up in those six years was more like 1/3 of the debt, not half. Though it was (slightly) more than the debt Obama will be running up in his first two years....
Comment Re:Creepy (Score 4, Funny) 86
A thin hand drawn glass needle.
"Universal Jigsaw Puzzle" Hits Stores In Japan 241
Riktov writes "I came across this at a Tokyo toy store last week, and it's one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. Jigazo Puzzle is a jigsaw puzzle, but you can make anything with it. It has just 300 pieces which are all just varying shades of a single color, though a few have gradations across the piece; i.e., each piece is a generic pixel. Out of the box, you can make Mona Lisa, JFK, etc, arranging it according to symbols printed on the reverse side. But here's the amazing thing: take a photo (for example, of yourself) with a cell-phone, e-mail it to the company, and they will send you back a pattern that will recreate that photo.
This article is in Japanese, but as they say, a few pictures are worth a million words. And 300 pixels are worth an infinite number of pictures."
Comment Re:As a Canadian, ... (Score 1) 280
You're right. I'm definitely not a lawyer.
And I wasn't really using the word 'precedent' in its legal sense, more as an informal way to reflect on what has happened with the RIAA and CRIA in the past. The RIAA has pushed for Canada to reform its copyright law, which sparked a consultation at http://copyright.econsultation.ca/ in July, with the consensus between most of the posters that this was what happened. But instead of the RIAA pushing on the CRIA to pass new legislation, with some Americans aware of what's happening in Canada with the CRIA right now, it may very well be that this will spark some lawsuits in the US over similar things, because there are compilation CDs in the US too.
To the grandparent (or great-grandparent... anyway, to the lawyer's post): I knew there was some treaty between the US and Canada that would make some things applicable to both countries if a company was in both; I figured that if it wasn't NAFTA, it would have been something else. Thanks for making me learn something!
Comment Re:Actual Link to the zip (Score 2, Insightful) 605
I know your post was meant to be a joke, but a
Comment As a Canadian, ... (Score 4, Informative) 280
... and as someone who doesn't really trust companies that much, let me just say that, if the CRIA gets fined for willful infringement, I hope that this is the precedent that ends up being applied to the United States, not the reverse.
Now the recording industry's argument is going to be less and less well-received by the general population, and this can only be a good thing.
SETI@Home Install Leads To School Tech Supervisor's Resignation 621
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently the most prolific of users in the SETI@Home community has resigned his job as a school technology supervisor after it was revealed he had the software installed on some 5000 school machines. The school claims to have lost $1 million in upkeep on the affected machines."
Comment Re:My first hand experience on Modern Warfare 2 (Score 1) 560
Thunder bolts of lightning very very frightening me!
Lifecycle Energy Costs of LED, CFL Bulbs Calculated 400
necro81 writes "The NY Times is reporting on a new study from Osram, a German lighting manufacturer, which has calculated the total lifecycle energy costs of three lightbulb technologies and found that both LEDs and CFLs use approximately 20% of the energy of incandescents over their lifetimes. While it is well known that the newer lighting technologies use a fraction of the energy of incandescents to produce the same amount of light, it has not been proven whether higher manufacturing energy costs kept the new lighting from offering a net gain. The study found that the manufacturing and distribution energy costs of all lightbulb technologies are only about 2% of their total lifetime energy cost — a tiny fraction of the energy used to produce light." The study uses the assumption that LEDs last 2.5 times longer than CFLs, and 25 times longer than incandescents.
STS-129 Ascent Video Highlights 117
An anonymous reader sends in this link to a video of 12-1/2 minutes of Space Shuttle pr0n. The people at the Johnson Space Center put together this video of the ascent of STS-129 using multiple imagery assets — ground, air, booster, and the shuttle itself. The booster's-eye view of splashdown and immersion is something you don't see every day. As a bonus, another anonymous reader shared a beautiful photo of the shuttle flying over rugged terrain after it separated from the ISS last week.
Modeling the Economy As a Physics Problem 452
University of Utah physicist Tim Garrett has published a study that approaches the economy and its relation to global warming as a physics problem — and comes to some controversial conclusions: that rising carbon dioxide emissions cannot be stabilized unless the world's economy collapses or society builds the equivalent of one new nuclear power plant each day. The study was panned by economists and was rejected by several journals before its acceptance in the journal Climatic Change. "[Garrett discovered that] Throughout history, a simple physical constant... links global energy use to the world's accumulated economic productivity, adjusted for inflation. So it isn't necessary to consider population growth and standard of living in predicting society's future energy consumption and resulting carbon dioxide emissions. ... 'I'm not an economist, and I am approaching the economy as a physics problem,' Garrett says. 'I end up with a global economic growth model different than they have.' Garrett treats civilization like a 'heat engine' that 'consumes energy and does "work" in the form of economic production, which then spurs it to consume more energy,' he says. That constant is 9.7 (plus or minus 0.3) milliwatts per inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar. So if you look at economic and energy production at any specific time in history, 'each inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar would be supported by 9.7 milliwatts of primary energy consumption,' Garrett says. ... Perhaps the most provocative implication of Garrett's theory is that conserving energy doesn't reduce energy use, but spurs economic growth and more energy use."
