And how is one supposed to find out anything about this? There is just the front page available, no apparent links to anywhere. Or are they dumb enough to have made a site that only lets IE7 users in?

@unknownuser said:

" in order to work on OS X, I needed to install this X11. It essentially allows you to run a program designed for Windows on a Mac"

No! It most certainly does not do that. X11 is the usual unix system window server; it provides the basic display management etc. You then run an actual windowmanager (say twm, or openstep or whatever) on top of that. OSX has an X11 subsystem that enables you to run programs written to run on unix with X11 on your Mac. For example 'Inkscape' which I think is the only X11 app I use right now aside from occasionally Kerkythera.

The X11 stuff is included on your OSX install disc. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System

To run windows stuff you'd need to either
a) use BootCamp which allows you to dual boot your mac
b) run something like VMWare/fusion which lets you run windows apps in parallel with OSX and share the system.
In either case you'd have to buy a copy of windows.

Get the biggest you can and then get another one!

I use a 24" iMac with a 20" hp2025 beside it and I still run out of room. Dual 30" is my aim sometime.

I small quibble with that second image - you managed to get eye height at exactly the step height and it makes the step look almost like a rendering mistake. A little higher would give a view of the step that makes it clear what it is. But generally, wow.

A quick scan suggests it doesn't run on OSX; therefore it is of about as much interest to me as liver and onions.

So far as I can see SU is not Applescriptable, so we can't handle it that way. I'd guess that a relatively simple ruby script ought to be able to open all your models and save them with the preview image - but I'm not a rubyite and have no intention of becoming one. Might be worth asking the regular viewers of the ruby section of the forums.

@gaganraj said:

@unknownuser said:

Please note there is NO friction between parts.

unless it is in a vacuum it is impossible to have a system with no friction, there is always some... however minimal.

Not even then. If you use 'magnetic bearings' then there will be magnetic drag. In the ultimate there will be gravitic frame dragging! It's really simple - you can't extract work from a system for long without something replenishing it. If you take any of these perpetual motion machines and extract any energy at all from them they will run down and stop.
And that by the way includes tidal power since it requires energy that is extracted from the earth/moon system. So far that energy extraction has increased the size of the moon's orbit very dramatically (it's currently figured at about 3.8 cm a year) and slowed the Earth's rotation (by about 20uSec/year). Humans building tidal barrages will accelerate that process.

@unknownuser said:

"Mike Lucey" this kind of PC

Nuttin' to do with PC. Just plain Daily Mail Moron Paranoia.

For some people no amount of threatened nor actual punishment will change how they behave. For many people the experience of prison will make them determined not to go back; for some others a 'positive' prison experience (education, training, whatever) will turn them into 'decent people' - whatever that means. Some people are so damaged by prison that you might as well have given them a machine gun upon release. For other people simply having to appear in a magistrate's court is so terrifying that it is all the punishment they could ever need, whatever their crime.

The point of a justice system is to apply justice; not to be merely a clerical system ticking boxes and adding up a score. Sometimes that means giving a different sentence than the common person might think is needed; sometimes much longer in jail, sometimes less, sometimes something different. Occasionally it might even benefit the culprit and the victim to meet and try to reconcile. Judges and their assorted colleagues have a hard job, assuming they take it more seriously than "hang'em all!" - and that's where we hit trouble. Just like any other job there are plenty of people in law enforcement/execution/review that don't or won't do their job properly. Prejudice, laziness, incompetence, all come into play to ensure that there will always be improper convictions as well as culprits getting away with it. One person's failure can ruin the honest work of hundreds.

Capital punishment is the arena where all that adds up to make for truly tragic errors. Recently the advent of DNA tests has made it quite obvious that a large number of people have been wrongly executed over the years. That makes everyone in the polity using capital punishment - everyone with a political voice - guilty of murder by reckless legal driving. How about we make it so that in cases of wrongful execution all the people that got it wrong (police, lawyers, media, jurors, judges, prison guards, executioner, politicians that voted for the death penalty etc) face the same penalty? Maybe that would concentrate theirs minds on something more than an easy arrest, a headline, a vote, whatever?

My favourite was a slight misprint -
"Tim is the wisest counsellor"

tickle her nose and she sneezes
click on her glasses and they go away.
click on her jumper and it

doesn't go away ;-(

@unknownuser said:

4. Toyota Prius car - producing the toxic batteries for it apparently outweighs most of the environmental benefit of driving it.

This turns out to be so inaccurate that it's not even wrong.

The batteries are not toxic waste; they recycle almost completely and you get a bounty for returning them. Not that there is much evidence of anyone having to turn them in as yet. There are taxis in Vancouver that have clocked up in excess of a quarter of a million miles on their first set and still whirring along. Taxis are of course the epitome of the best usage pattern for a hybrid.

The place where the nickel is mined is not a toxic wasteland used by NASA to train lunar astronauts. Subdury mine actually opened in 1850 (ish) and like most mines was a pretty ugly place until they started cleaning it up a while back. They have awards for it now.

Nor is Prius production responsible for all the nickel mining related devastation (that doesn't happen). Production of all the Prius battery packs has used somewhere around 0.1% of annual global nickel production. Most nickel goes into stainless steel. For things like kitchen sinks, medical instruments, turbines, coinage, blah blah blah.

On the other hand, the existence of the Prius and other hybrids has unleashed so much toxic waste on the net that perhaps we would be better off without them.

Science; the one process that helps us to find truth, establish facts, understand reality and works to correct itself.
Technology; the process of turning what we learn from science into usable stuff for living.
Everything - everything - comes from those two.

@cheffey said:

Hey Dave!
These look pretty nice in video form too.

Ooh, now that shows a need for having multiple watermarks that are chosen in a randomish manner to provide the flickering of old film strips....

The free 'Inkscape' application does it quite well, too. In fact Inkscape is really rather a good application so long as you can ignore the rather unpleasant visual quality of the UI - on a Mac it has to run under the X Windows library and the UI look really jars with the nice clean OS X UI.

But it is good and it is free. Hard to argue with that.

That channel 4 'documentary' was the most amazing collection of rubbish. A classic big lie attack in fact.

You should at least take a look at some of the serious climate change sites - http://www.realclimate.org for example is run by actual professional climatologist. Perhaps they might know what they're talking about a touch more than media pundits taking a day off commenting on Britney or Oprah? Y'know, just maybe?

tim

Science: it works, bitches

This is probably a good time to recommend a UPS. For around 100 bucks you can get a UPS that will keep most machines going for 5-15 minutes, perhaps even more. A couple of hundred will get you perhaps half an hour - of course it depends a lot on the exact machine you are using. As a bonus a typical UPS makes a very good filter.

I have an APC Back-UPS 1500 for my iMac and phone and a Belkin 550VA unit for my minimac, timecapsule and DSL modem. Worth every cent. Living out in the wilds we frequently get short outages during the winter as snow pulls on wiring. Those of you in cities are more likely to get problems in summer due to A/C use.

@perk said:

I saw a report about the decline in the bee population and they said that if bees were to become extinct humans would follow 5-10 years later. I dont remember where I saw this report but I do know that it was a somewhat reliable show.

While bees are very important pollinators they are hardly the only ones. Rather a large fraction of insects are involved in pollination. A number of bird species are pollinators - some are the exclusive pollinators of commensal species. Some mammals are pollinators. Huge numbers of species of plant are pollinated by wind.

Bee colony collapse is not a new thing. Just this morning I was listening to the BBC 'Material World' show and the had a question about the issue and the presenter said that he recalled having spoken about the problem - and then admitted that he had discovered on checking that it was seven years ago.

There are a number of things that would cause the rapid extinction of humanity (large asteriod strike, airborne AIDS/Ebola/etc, solar flare of larger than typical power, supernova/gamma-ray burster too near, election of another republican dictator, to name a few) but commercial bee colony collapse is likely not on the list.

@rodentpete said:

@remus said:

Organic apples all the way

All apples are organic - so are all plants, animals and plastics.
(I get irritated by the 'organic' buzzword )

You're mixing chemistry and farming terminology.
Organic chemistry is anything involving carbon compounds, as noted above.
Organic farming is a practical and philosophical methodology of food production that used to include caring for the long term health of the land, local production to reduce the transport time of foodstuffs as well as the no synthetic pesticides and fertilisers approach. Ever since big farming companies got involved the first few bits of the philosophy seem to have been ignored by most of the market.
I don't go for the woo part of organic food but I certainly approve of the "care for your land's long term health" bit. And I'm quite certain that locally produced food will usually be better than that transported across huge distances and stored for long periods. Luckily for me I have farm just a mile down the road from which I can get almost all my veg. There really isn't anything better tasting than veg that was cut just half an hour ago. As long as you don't hear the screams of the carrots in your sleep..

What sort of mac, which release of SU?

I have a 2.4GHz 24" iMac and a 1.8GHz MB; no problems that I know of on the iMac with SUpro 6.4.245 and the previously mentioned selection related problems on the MB.