For chrissakes, that was four hundred years ago. Jesus christ, is that the best defense of the lying sociopaths at the Heartland Institute, that one of the Pope's predecessors, centuries ago, screwed over an astronomer?

If we increase CO2 emissions, we will fuck those people over in a generation or two, making their lives even worse. And we'll do ourselves some considerable harm.

The Heartland Institute is a mouthpiece for industries that emit CO2. It doesn't give a sweet fuck what happens to the Third World. Hell, these sociopaths don't even care what happens in the First World.

The overwhelming majority of climatologists are essentially paid by the taxpayers of their nations. Whether AGW is true or not, most of them would still be in related fields (atmospheric research, oceanography, geology, etc.) Climatologists have nothing to gain by AGW being demonstrated as happening, but the fossil fuel industry has an enormous amount to lose by it being generally accepted.

Note here that in the climatological community, the number of skeptics is probably around the same as the number of skeptics of evolution to be found in the biology community. There is very little controversy over AGW, no matter how much fossil fuel-funded propaganda outfits like Heartland claim there is.

All that matters is money. That is the only god, and you shall keep no other god.

The resolution is fairly secondary to lag. If there is perceptible lag then VR sickness tends to follow.

I think Uber actually already satisfies most of this. They need external markers on the cars (slap some magnetic signs on), and would probably need to do more safety inspections if MA doesn't already require annual inspections of all registered vehicles, and pay a license fee. They already have $1M insurance coverage and obviously have a list of drivers. I think they do background checks, too, though I'm not completely sure.

Frankly, this seems more like a minimal set of regulations to shut up people who are complaining about the unregulated taxi service. Now they technically won't be unregulated, even though the actual changes to their business will be negligible, assuming the license fee is reasonable.

Grimshaw v. FoMoCo. I know it's in vogue to pooh-pooh Wikipedia, but it's a rare day when it can't answer a question on Slashdot — rarer and rarer, these days.

I don't even.

In principle, I agree with you. In practice, it's often used to insert content that should have come with the game. This doesn't seem to be the case so much with Skyrim, but it's still a thing that happens. I've only just got the expansions as they were on sale.

They don't seem to offer a model with GigE. That's an abject failure, today. Anything contemporary and not heinously expensive?

FWIW, I'm using a C2D PC with 1xGigE, and a QFE card for routing and some ethernet ports, and 5-port switches on both the GigE and 100Mbps segments, then a Mikrotik Routerboard (411, IIRC) running OpenWRT to handle the WiFi. The total cost is somewhere around $120, but it does dramatically more...

If the idea is to make it available to students, then it should be on campus.

It shouldn't be anywhere near the library, because it will be noisy if it's any good.

Glass... is made from the most abundant stuff on earth.

Okay, so you're right: silica (SiO2) is made from the #1 (Oxygen) and #2 (Silicon) most common elements in Earth's crust. But spinel (MgAl2O4) is made from #1, #3 (Aluminum) and #8 (Magnesium), which isn't bad either.

Of course, given that a big sheet of something like Sodium (#6) would probably be pretty damn expensive, I suspect that the abundance of the material's constituent elements is not necessarily the biggest factor in its price.

Interesting idea, but the hardware spec for that device is so lacking in basic facilities that it will probably be a non-starter for a lot of people.

Sure, as long as the batteries last and you have useful reception in your current location (and the base station isn't affected by the outage). These are relevant concerns with a cell phone, while they matter little with a traditional land line.

That's a matter of opinion. Do they crash every five minutes? Of course not. Do they crash often enough to be annoying and potentially dangerous? Yes, every major mobile OS platform has had this problem at various points in recent years. Given this is a device you might need to call an ambulance one day, none of the major platforms has a great record on stability.

As for doing their jobs, there have been a few antennagate-style stories over the years, where some fundamental design flaw has undermined the basic functionality of the device as a phone. It seems popular to make thinner smartphones with larger screens that then bend or break in your pocket lately.

Modern smartphones seem to be about on par with PVRs and so-called Smart TVs. They do their job up to a point, and they do offer some advantages over the devices we used before. On the other hand, they are also trying to do too many different things to do any of them really well, they often try to be a bit too clever about how they do them too, and at some point these things affect the reliability of the system and/or raise security and privacy concerns.

I often have a feature phone in my pocket and a tablet in my case/bag, and I have yet to find anything I want to do while I'm out and about where a typical modern smartphone would be better at it than one or other of the devices I actually use. YMMV, but I'd be genuinely interested to hear of any common tasks that a modern smartphone really is better at than other widely used but more specialised devices, because I can't think of any myself.

Fukushima had three problems. One, design. The design is very old and not very good by modern standards. Two, siting. It was put somewhere even ancient Japanese knew was a bad idea. Three, NIMBY. Area residents didn't want to look at generators on pylons.