Slashdot Mirror

With hindsight, it might have been better for Boeing to modernise the Boeing 757 instead of stretching the role of the Boeing 737 so much: https://www.businessinsider.co...

Try this one:

Musk and Tesla aren’t into sharing, so their Shanghai factory will be wholly Tesla-owned. This is possible because China has carved out a joint-venture exception for all-electric automakers.

Not so hard to find.

Really-- call a tow company in there, block them in, and hook up towing gear, and charge them a stiff fee.

If it isn't a tow away zone then somebody screwed up.

They don't need a tow truck. Teslas have a lot of low-end torque and a Model S or X could easily drag those pickups out of the parking spots.

Forget a damn pick-up truck, a Tesla Model X P100D can, and has towed an actual Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner. That's a 130 tonne aircraft being pulled 300 meters.

See one of these many, many articles. Or this one.

For a Model X, a pick up truck isn't going to be a problem.

And like all federal laws, it applies to anyone within US jurisdiction. That's what "jurisdiction" fucking means. Assange isn't, and wasn't when he did - whatever it's alleged he did.

At a time when Trump is apparently arguing that foreign nationals in the US aren't "subject to its jurisdiction", it seems even more than ordinarily hypocritical for his own justice department to be simultaneously arguing that foreign nationals outside it are.

Nobody reads individual sentences from other books and then takes them (often out of context) as individual snacks of wisdom and truth.

Uh, yes they do. All they time. What is the modern news cycle but a collection of individual sentences (often out of context) from longer speeches or documents, then repackaged as eye catching headlines?

If you want to get more literary, I invite you to read the words of Shakespeare and find out just how many of his individual sentences have passed into common wisdom and truth .

Why don't you start with the coaches. They are consistently the highest paid staff in universities in every state of the US.

ANY mention of Libya to ANYONE who can remember the last 10 years of global politics will immediately bring to mind how the "Libya Model" ended - with the country in chaos and Gaddafi's ugly death. Putin took note, and so did Kim:

"our country is neither Libya nor Iraq which have met miserable fates."

"In order not to follow in Libya’s footstep, we paid a heavy price to build up our powerful and reliable strength"

Forward facing flashing blue lights are illegal in every state.

What about gold?

Your hysterically wrong.
iAds failed https://www.businessinsider.com.au/apple-admits-steve-jobs-vision-for-iad-was-a-huge-flop-2013-6

Your a liar and an apple shill.

https://www.businessinsider.co... 2016, over 500 million computers, 8 million chrome books The US market the world market.

Are you being ironic or ignorant?

https://www.businessinsider.co...

Facebook tested similar already (a month ago) separating "news feed" (public/brand content) from "friend feed".

But I guess the tilt for FB is that doing this forces companies to pay for ads to get into the friend feed rather than have their company FB page show up in the regular feed.

But don't let the truth get in the way... carry on.

Ok sounds like a localised issue. I'm pretty sure apartments in Manhattan or London didn't suffer similar 'corrections'

Yeah they actually did. 70% for Manhattan and 60% for London.

xactly. You can't just blanket 'real estate' as one thing. A shitbox subprime purchase in the rust belt is not equivalent in any way to buying house in say Palo Alto.
Economics is just supply and demand. In a lot of places, the demand is real, the supply is finite. Not all high priced things are bubbles.

"Rustbelt" is now apparently florida which has yet to recover, including large parts of texas, az, and so on.

But how do you tell if a high priced thing is a bubble, or actually sustained by real demand? If you had've said ten years ago that the most popular mobile phones would cost $1000USD you'd be laughed out of the room. Yet here we are. Are iPhones a bubble?

When the number of vacancies in those houses sit empty. In otherwords these are houses, condos, and so on bought on the idea of real estate valuation nothing else. Let's compare a consumable vs building, makes perfect sense! Vancouver for instance the number is estimated to be around 30% empty property with no income, and simply being turned over. That's residential housing. Toronto? Some areas are as high as 45%. One of the reasons there have been foreign ownership taxes, no building residency additions to property tax and so on.

I can't speak for Canada, but I've heard the same arguments in Australia (eg average income vs average house price). One thing to think about is the formula used to calculate such things. I think the classic formulas no longer apply for various reasons, one is most households now have double incomes, most homeowners now have accumulated wealth that wasn't the case in the 1960's/70's, and urbanisation and population growth has crossed a tipping point in major cities to create a positive feedback loop in the demand curve.

Except that Australia is having the same problem. People are actually being priced out of housing, they're sprawling outwards to cheaper property, and being sprawled out more. There is a positive feedback loop, but it's the building and mortgage loop. This is exactly what caused previous real estate crashes in both residential and commercial properties.

To give some perspective, wages in Australia are high and unemployment and interest rates are low. One or all of these things has to change drastically to affect housing demand, and there is no change on the horizon.

Except your perspective is wrong. While "wages are high" the price of housing outstrips that earning. To compare a house in 1980 could be bought for $30k, the average income was around $18k/year. When a combined income family of $100k-300k struggles with mortgage payments on current property and a 0.25% rate hike is enough to put them under water, it's a bubble. Wages have been stagnant since the early 2000's in all of the west, people had better economic growth from the 1980's through to the mid 1990's around 160%. From the early 2000's to this year? It's around 35%. What you're seeing is the classic "cheap credit hog" that creates a bust cycle, after a boom cycle which the housing market is currently in.

Now if you don't understand anything I've written then read this here then read this here. For Australia the crash is already starting, the pace? Well that depends on what the government tries to pull out. The same for Canada, but since Canada borders the US and there's an absolute need to depress the CDN vs the USD by 20-30%, interest rate hikes are on the way. Canada's entire economic system is based on lowering to the USD.

IANAL, however; They're never "carefully defined" they're judged by the court.

In a civil case you'd have to prove you're actually a complete blithering idiot and really believe goji berries can cure cancer.

In a criminal case, the prosecution would have to prove you knew you were going to hasten the deaths of all the other idiots that binged on your berries instead of chemo.

The civil case is winnable, but fruitless because the company has no assets. The criminal case is probably too difficult to make and doesn't have enough political will behind it.

So, it's lose/lose unless you're in China; https://www.businessinsider.co...

In the end it will be insurance that decides the fate of automated vehicles at particular stages of development. Some background https://www.businessinsider.co.... With manufacturers possibly accepting full liability for their automated vehicles in an accident, expect to be attacked by a team of corporate lawyers (who will according to the laws of corrupt capitalism, make deals with your insurance company, to shift liability from them back to you, when the automotive manufacturers basically scams the system by creating fault where none existed).

Consider a simple easy scam, pay law enforcers, who in the US already have shocking records, to claim the individuals blood alchohol was over the limit with cooked tests. Saves them tens of thousands of dollars, plenty to pay of corrupt law enforcers with a couple of thousand a go and they fill their DUI quota to boot.

Automated vehicles and the CIA, political activists will be dying like flies and not a problem for Insurance as proof will be provided that the Russians did it, with no more than a Russian IP address and Russian language in the code as proof.

That's exactly my point. You cannot do that. You may think you can, but all of the research and evidence available points very strongly towards that not being the case ...

I did read your original comment, I realise that's your point. My point is that you are wrong, Oh, and so far as I know, there has been no research whatsoever into my personal lack of objectivity.

[I]f you believe you're special somehow, then you're probably in this group of people: "and worse, they don't recognize that they don't know how."

Of course I'm somehow special, but that is not the point. The point is that there is an ordered methodology by which evidence can be examined. There are canonical presumptions (and they tend to be variations of the null effect presumption ... eg. the presumption of innocence) which guide how evidence is correctly to be applied.

Thus the probability that I am in the group of people who "don't recognize that they don't know how," were it based on the fact that the majority of subjects in "confirmation bias" experiments were shown to demonstrate such lack of self-awareness, should not allow you to conclude that I am, in fact, in that group (of course you didn't, you merely spoke to the probability that I would be). In any case this isn't about me, nor my perhaps unique educational background, or a "special" temperament &c.: the methodological analysis of evidence predates my birth and will endure my demise.

[W]hy you really need multiple people on the job with different viewpoints -- attempt to cancel out those built-in biases by averaging across a population sample ...

To reduce this methodology to absurdity: we might fill a room with people of various self-declared ideological convictions, dispense with all evidence and simply get the assembled crowd to vote on whether a particular item is "fake news" or real. I trust this is not what you envisage, however the point of my reduction is that it is not the summing of biases, but the application of correct method that is necessary for fact checking. The additional problem is that the unconscious ideology shared by people overtly declaring different political allegiances will merely be re-inscribed by any bias balancing methodology.

Take as an example the Monty Hall problem. Most people incline to the wrong answer on first being confronted by it, which most likely reflects a systematic cognitive error which humans in general share. Yet the application of the correct conditional probability will arrive at the correct answer. The human mind is indeed subject to cognitive error, yet it has also been able to devise methods by which our limits may be overcome. I would rather trust fact checking that is not some supposed balancing of biases, but the application of rigorous methodology.

FB's plan is ...

... in part at least, to leverage professional fact-checkers.

My main objection to your argument, what motivated me to write, is that it constitutes an abrogation of responsibility to endeavour to transcend one's biases. The point of studying cognitive failings is not to throw one's hands up in the air and to declare "I cannot challenge my biases!" but rather the opposite.

https://www.businessinsider.co...

I hate to say it, but really it should "just work".. given Microsoft *can* control what drivers are installed, I simply don't understand why hardware drivers aren't maintained through a quality controlled channel, let people choose which version they want, but otherwise have a default currently supported (and tested in at least the most common hardware configurations) driver that is delivered through windows updates or something...

One of the reason's I (as a Windows admin, and Linux admin too) enjoy using an Apple Mac is because I *never* have to dick around with drivers. This is likely also a major contributor to touted enterprise support cost savings at IBM despite higher initial buy cost for their Macbook Pro fleet.

I realise all the myriad configurations would make extensive testing of every configuration improbable, something that Apple has an advantage over by controlling the hardware as well as OS, but I also refuse to believe this is an insurmountable engineering problem.

Of course not. A funding agency doesn't keep funding research into areas that don't need it.

But as I said, there would be a whole new realm of climate science to study if something was found that could disprove all the existing science that we have. There would definitely be a need for more funding. How do you think that we found that global warming was happening without having a goal of needing to save the world? It was that pure science happens even without a goal. You only need to look at the Ig Nobel Prize winners to see the kind of things that get funding that are not aimed at saving the world.

What evidence do you have that their funding would stop? You have none; it's just your assumption.

Twenty five years working in academic research funded by federal and private grants, seeing what does get funded, what doesn't get funded, and what loses funding.

I simply don't believe that for a second. If you have spoken to academics you know that they genuinely believe that global warming is real and poses a danger to our way of life. If they were so cynically and fraudulently manipulating the science to get funding, then why don't more of them take advantage of the money that places like the Heartland Institute are willing to spread around to scientists who are willing to write papers denying climate change? If it is all just one big con, then why is what those small few who do "heroically" get paid by the conservative groups who represent big business produce such woeful science. Surely if they have truth on their side then it should be easy to pick holes in the massive amount of climate science that is out there?

I suppose I am being unfair there. Deniers and those with vested interest have actually done proper science. For example, Exxon did early work in this field until management shut it all down in the 90s, but that work still agreed with the other science being done at the time despite the different funding sources. Also the Koch Brothers funded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project run by skeptic Richard Muller. So why is it that even when a study is divorced from traditional funding sources and is paid for by some well-known deniers, it still confirms what the other scientists say? Richard Muller went from being the darling of the deniers (because he publicly said that he doubted the science) to become a reviled pariah who will never get funding from the conservative organizations again because he was willing to risk his funding source to publish a study that concurred with the overwhelming science of the link between CO2 and warming as well as its human source.

Over the years, the IPCC has been shown to have made a number of mistakes. Virtually ever single time this has been pointed out, it has been done by a scientist, or by a new study that has disproved an old one.

If you really want to provide evidence that the entire scientific community of completely corrupt, you have to provide more than just "[I have talked] with program managers who have the responsibility to make sure the limited budget their programs have gets distributed to important research". You need some actual evidence. Fortunately, it shouldn't be hard. There have been an enormous amount of emails leaked from climate scientists, so there has to be something that proves that scientists have defrauded the entire world for their own self-interests. And this has long been a hot issue (no pun intended) that climate science must attract idealists who want to save the world. That means there must be quite a lot of disillusioned, young scientists who, when confronted with the alleged rampant corruption in their field, have become whistle-blowers who blow the lid of this entire scam. Surely you could quote one of those people.

Surely you have something better than "It's true because I know that it's true".

Wow. I had considered coming here to joke about whether the anti-science deniers would come out of the woodwork to claim that the magnetic field wasn't changing at all and they were just after funding, but it looks like the bullshitters are still fixated on climate change.

that is equally as important as co2, but climate change pushers put all the burden on man.

We can't change the magnetic field (as far as we know), but we can change what we do to the environment. Nobody has ever said that it is only man who is causing climate change, but only man can actually do something about it.

i'm no climate change denier...

Yes you are

i just know ther is way more to this than the gov't and most gov't funded scientists pushing the man made global warming agenda would lead you to believe. follow the $.

The problem with that theory is that when the deniers fund their own study, it also comes to the same conclusion; that climate change is real and that the carbon dioxide curve is the best match to global warming. So following the $ is meaningless, unless you can show evidence that anyone has falsified their climate research to get funding. If not, then there is no basis to the corruption claim. With all the leaked emails in the world, and the massive number of people who would have to collude to perpetrate a hoax, it's amazing that nobody has found any proof to this claim. And that is despite the efforts of the well-funded denial groups out there. Sure, follow the $!

It's less funny when you realize that they are developing a car that can project a "makeshift zebra crossing" onto the road directly in front of it. Why exactly would you want to entice pedestrians to walk out into the road directly in front of a car? Hmmm.

So your pedestrian-killing algorithm has targets to aim for? Quick, turn on the zebra-crossing projector, that's ten points each up ahead!

Only a complete moron would argue that if global warming isn't the cause of all islands disappearing, it can't possible be the cause of any. And if you actually looked at your second link:

The islands apparently were eroded away, a process accelerated by storms and sea level rise.

There's plenty of other examples.

No, what he said about Warren Buffet was wrong. At least according to Warren Buffet: http://www.businessinsider.com...

You're so full of shit its coming out your eyes. When people get sick in other countries they come HERE for help. America has the best health care on planet earth and because of that you pay a premium for it. If you want reduced costs go to your shitty third world communist paradise, please.

wrong

We have the best infrastructure on Earth too. I never understand what you fucking idiots mean by "crumbling infrastructure".

I can only assume you have never traveled outside you borders. http://www.businessinsider.com...

I am guessing based on these wildly inaccurate statements that you are also a Donald Trump supporter...

I guess they had to find some way of cutting costs now that they can no longer underpay staff and take advantage of desperate foreign workers.

5 seconds of google would have found you hundreds of hits, ranging from the demands made of Apple, to the access demands made of MS and google which have all been all over the press. You think those are all just comspiracy theories trying to tarnish the US governments pristine rep do you. http://www.businessinsider.com...

Yeah, such greed.

They're only worth trillions if the demand says so. And demand will not continue for ever - coal is already almost flat. Peak Oil will take longer, but the writing on the wall is already visible, with EVs predicted to make up one quarter of the global market in just 10 years.

This is like complaining about cigarette taxes. Why should anyone have to pay an artificially hiked price for tobacco? Well, that's because tobacco products cost society a huge amount of money in health care costs,

I have never believed that the financial 'burdens' on society caused by smokers is real. Either does this Australian senator who thanks the Australian smoking public for their forced financial contributions to a society that hates and maligns them unfairly. I once saw a very interesting chart showing the rise in lung cancers and it showed a very close correlation with above ground nuclear testing. I am not saying that that is what the cause of the massive spike in lung cancers that started in the fifties is but what does warrant investigation is why lung cancers are still increasing while simultaneously smoking is dropping off rapidly.

the projection though no doubt well-sourced is no more accurate than the models that it is based off

Naturally, though those same sources have been through rigorous peer review, and have been widely accepted by most fellow experts in the field. Again I'm not seeing you cite any evidence like peer-reviewed studies finding those models to be "deeply broken" - only the usual unsourced claims cribbed from the standard rabble of denialist blogs. Plenty of studies supporting them, though. And of course real life.

A key bit of evidence is that the IPCC backpedaled significantly from the Third Assessment Report to the Fifth Assessment Report. For example, here's a collection of weak remarks from the IPCC's latest report on the connection to extreme weather.

Now, let's look at your links. The first link is to a computer model description with no actual data to support the model aside from what they used in the first place. Second, you link to a single bit of extreme weather. One point is not evidence. These two examples show common fallacies associated with extreme weather claims. First, conflating a model with reality. Second, confirmation bias. Even in the complete absence of global warming, we would expect to continue to see "strongest ever" storms.

you don't understand my position

Unsurprisingly, since it's a position you've adopted with no actual evidence. Despite your use of the present tense, you've not shown any examples of said industry "milking the public teat" over climate change (though I can provide many examples of e.g. fossil fuel industries milking away).

Assertions aren't automatically true. Let's look at recent actions that SunCorp Group, the sponsor of the original research claiming elevated claims payouts from certain unproven models of extreme weather, is seeking a huge rate hikes in flood insurance for certain locations that had payouts in recent years:

Suncorp has confirmed that new policies will not be offered in Emerald and Roma - two of the towns worst affected by recent years of flooding.

Existing policyholders face hikes of up to 10-fold.

Suncorp has a reputation for being the only insurer left in some towns abandoned by southern-based companies who are wary of massive payouts.

But Suncorp chief executive Mark Milliner said Queensland's biggest insurer had taken $4 million in premiums in Emerald and Roma in the past two years and paid out $150 million in claims.

Notice the bolded paragraph? Right there we have my original assertion, an insurance company rationalizing after-the-fact rate hikes for making bad risk decisions. They also got burned by recent drought in Australia.

While the outlook is challenging for life insurance, Suncorp says relatively benign weather has so far kept general insurance claims around $25 million below expectations.

However, drought conditions, particularly in north-west Queensland, have resulted in an increase in loan loss provisions, and the bank's holdings of impaired assets rose to $485 million.

I haven't yet figured out what Suncorp's investments are in. But right here we have a reason for the research article - to CYA in a couple of significant losses which otherwise would reflect poorly on management.

the projection though no doubt well-sourced is no more accurate than the models that it is based off

Naturally, though those same sources have been through rigorous peer review, and have been widely accepted by most fellow experts in the field. Again I'm not seeing you cite any evidence like peer-reviewed studies finding those models to be "deeply broken" - only the usual unsourced claims cribbed from the standard rabble of denialist blogs. Plenty of studies supporting them, though. And of course real life.

you don't understand my position

Unsurprisingly, since it's a position you've adopted with no actual evidence. Despite your use of the present tense, you've not shown any examples of said industry "milking the public teat" over climate change (though I can provide many examples of e.g. fossil fuel industries milking away).

I watched the video

I went to the links on the article.

The owner claims that Bill was sneering and depressed about things, and seems to have called NASCAR fans "red state yokels".

I watched the video twice - didn't have anything there on any of that, it was a rather nice conversation with Bloomberg's people about education mostly.

I asked the author of the story, if he could provide me the cites or any information regarding Nye sneering about NASCAR fans, or calling them red state yokels.

But that isn't it at all - is it Slash Dotters. Nye rubs you the wrong way because he believes in global warming, so in the truthiness bubble, he actaully did sneer at those NASCAR fans who are red State yokels. That's what will get repeated by y'all isn't it?

If you actually do read the article, what he said was an opinion, and knowing NASCAR fans myself, a fairly mild one at that.

One of the things he writes:

“There’s no reason why NASCAR couldn’t be like [NASA]: a race with rules designed to reward the coolest, most advanced vehicle technologies,”

Doesn't sound too bad now does it?

Now a more controversial matter, but hardly insulting - He speaks of making a fuel use limit - I'm not all about that, I'de sooner see them burning ally, (just my opinion) but I'm certainly not insulted.

He also notes:

“I get it. I understand the appeal of a stock car race. It’s just exciting, and I’m all for it,” he writes. “I just want NASCAR to adapt to the new mainstream. I want the circuit to produce vehicles that could compete in races anywhere in the world, and win. I want the racing series to spin off new tech that will do more with less. For me, as an American mechanical engineer, I hope NASCAR decides to look forward rather than backward.”

Amazing how those innocuous comments get turned into Sneers and calling NASCAR fans Red State Yokels.

Anyhow, here is the link to a site that isn't grinding an axe, and prefers actual quotes to made up stuff. http://www.businessinsider.com...

in after dozens of "omg he just doesn't like what someone else likes" posts. Why not read the original BI article?

He's not telling anyone not to like NASCAR. On the contrary, he's saying that he likes NASCAR, but that he'd like a slightly different sport even more, where the challenge was similar but the rules were different, to appeal to his mechanical engineering side.

"Why the hell do I pick your overpriced American company instead of the cheaper alternatives? Is it because you'll do a better job [slashdot.org]? Don't make me laugh."

So instead of choosing overpriced Americans (or possibly Europeans) you would choose somebody from India? Because they never have failed IT projects:

http://www.computerworlduk.com...
http://www.computerworld.com/a...
http://www.businessinsider.com...

Show me someone from the open source community who has helped and donated more towards charities than Bill Gates. Uh huh, that's what I thought.

Bill - is that you? Don't forget to lodge your claims for charitable donations - we filed it under "the spit shield fund".

the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (foundation) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust. Both entities are tax-exempt private foundations that are structured as a charitable.

One good thing Bill Gates has done. Though not everyone agrees.

Except I'm not American. I am British by descent, and have lived and worked on three continents. But your point is irrelevant anyway: The term is commonly used outside the USA as well. For example:

UK:
http://arstechnica.co.uk/gamin...
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/new...
http://www.theguardian.com/tec...
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news...
http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2015/...

CA:
http://circanews.com/news/cord...
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/n...
http://www.chathamdailynews.ca...
http://www.canadiancordcutting...
http://shayne.tablotvweb.nomad...

AU:
http://www.computerworld.com.a...
http://www.theaustralian.com.a...
http://www.businessinsider.com...
http://www.cnet.com/au/news/co...
http://www.pcauthority.com.au/...

Just because you're ignorant of its usage, that doesn't mean the term isn't broadly used around the world in countries with large English-speaking populations.

And Apple has copied Braun in everything they have done.

Your point?

What utter horseshit. what if you're poor and can't afford the safer area? You can't defend yourself because you work a menial job, or went into bankruptcy after a major medical condition. Guns are the great equalizer and everyone deserves to have them and defend themselves.

No the great equaliser is creating a society where you don't need weapons to get by, you know like all the places in the world that have higher standards of living than the US: http://www.businessinsider.com...

It isn't a conflation, it's clarity. Power and control is where the money is. When the power imbalance is so great there is no symbiosis, there is only exploitation. Social media users trade away so much for so little return. It's no wonder Mark Zuckerberg thinks Facebook users are dumb fucks.

she was promoted pretty high in the food chain at Google

She was dating Larry Page. http://gawker.com/214051/utter... http://www.businessinsider.com...

She is very ambitious, thus she constantly self-promotes herself. Claiming to work 130 hours a week is part of this self-promotion.

Yes because obviously there's no self-promotion in fucking the CEO..

she was promoted pretty high in the food chain at Google

She was dating Larry Page.
http://gawker.com/214051/utter...
http://www.businessinsider.com...

She is very ambitious, thus she constantly self-promotes herself.
Claiming to work 130 hours a week is part of this self-promotion.

And in what the hell sense is the Xbox brand a dismal failure?

These are all published numbers. Google them yourself.

XBox development costs: 24 billion
RROD writedown: 1.1 billion
Xbox division losses as at 2007: 5 billion

OK, so by 2007 the Xbox brand was worth negative 30 billion dollars. Earnings since then:

2008: +426 million (first profit for Xbox in a calendar year! yay!)
2009: +169 million
2010 +165 million
2011: +210 million
2012: -229 million (ruh-roh, Raggy)

So for Xbox 360's prime earning years, it made 741 million dollars. That doesn't even pay back the 1.1 billion writedown on the RROD fiasco. Let alone the 30 billion dollars Xbox was already in the red.

Negative thirty billion plus zero point seven four one billion equals TRAINWRECK BLACK-HOLE DISASTER.

Microsoft tries to deflect attention from overall Xbox performance by either mixing its numbers up in the greater Home and Entertainment reports, by emphasising "revenue" or "units shipped" or "market share", or by fixating on a small time period - that's how you get shit descriptors like "Microsoft's usually profitable games unit". Yeah, usual in the sense that the unit made annual profits for four straight years. It just cost Microsoft's shareholders thirty billion dollars in the years before that.

OK, how about some more recent numbers:

http://www.businessinsider.com...

Summary: Xbox costs Microsoft two billion dollars a year.

Yep, that's right, Microsoft spent thirty billion dollars setting up a business unit that runs at a loss of two billion dollars a year.

By any sensible reckoning Xbox is arguably the greatest disaster in the history of the tech industry. Microsoft's just good at covering it up.

DDoS have been pretty much solved by now... haven't Sony learned the difference between too many legit users and a hack?

Hmm I suggest the following starting point for an introduction to DDoS and even possible solutions. You should also know that the Microsoft network access was also impacted as well so it was not just Sony.

This worries me enormously. One more step towards 1984. If anyone has not read 1984 I don't think you can really know what you are talking about.

The "crime" problem in the USA stems from the way your society is organised: no democracy (no Proportional Representation), brainless gun culture, moronic belief in the American Dream, crazy oil-based foreign policy, greed is good mentality, enormous and growing gap between rich and poor, and a complete and utter collective ignorance of alternative possibilities. The collective ignorance coupled with overweening nationalism and a conviction that your empire is the best and only way of doing things is scary.

Trying to tackle crime in this context is big time 'ambulance at the bottom of the cliff' stuff.

But while you get yourselves sorted, why not learn from others around the world about how to tackle "crime". Check out the nordics. Get yourself educated about criminology - there's some great science on it in John Pratt, Contrasts in Punishment: An Explanation of Anglophone Excess and Nordic Exceptionalism (Routledge, ISBN: 9780415524735)

And here's a starter pack:

Germany’s Prison Act states “the sole aim of incarceration is to enable prisoners to lead a life of social responsibility free of crime upon release.”

6 reasons why European prisons better than US =
http://www.businessinsider.com...

These Last 6 Months Were The Warmest Humans Have Ever Recorded On Earth

One issue that an all-women space crew could have is that some of them could be too small to fit into space suits. Women under 5’5" can’t wear NASA’s current model, the Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMUs), because they are not made small enough.

http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
http://www.npr.org/templates/s...
http://www.businessinsider.com...

As the Economist notes, due to German and other European solar government incentives, European utilities face an existential threat to their investment future and business model. Utility giants the world over have seen this and decided to fight back against Net Metering and other means whereby homeowners can feed back into the electric grid excess energy production from rooftop solar. Barclays, the British multinational banking giant, agrees that rooftop solar and net metering represent a threat to centralized electric production utilities.

The problem utilities face is that solar tends to maximize output at mid-afternoon, exactly the same time spot prices have traditionally been at maximum. So their solution is to lobby government the world over to reverse net metering laws and end solar subsidies.

OK, time for me to get on a soapbox. I think this is shortsighted. The real problem here is that government and electric utilities have agreed on a price structure and investment plan to build out gas powered and coal powered plants that now appear to be unsustainable due to disruptive shifts in the market from technical innovation in the renewable field. As is noted in TFA, solar is - or will soon be - already cost competitive even without government subsidy.

Market fundamentalists would argue, 'let the utilities die. Their investors bought into a dying technology, the market will decide their fate.' Except that they have an endless stream of money to buy lobbyists and legislators to warp law in their favor. Further, they have a good argument that intermittent renewables will only meet partial demand. You still need baseline generation capacity from central utilities. So the problem - from their perspective - is excess production by renewables.

Except: when has excess energy production ever been a problem?

The real problem is twofold: We want to move off of fossil fuels due to global climate change and they want to maximize their vast infrastructure investments. A real policy solution would meet both needs.

Rooftop solar should be maximized. During periods of excess, gas powered plants should funnel their energy to local raw materials ore processing facilities and manufacturing. This has the benefit of distributing labor where it's needed near mining sites, rather than shipping raw materials where labor is cheapest for exploitation as well. And it keeps utilities running for the next thirty years to generate a viable expected ROI. And government policymakers could then plan a rational transition period away from fossil fuels without the economic dislocation of utility giants imploding worldwide.

Thoughts?

This article explains it more clearly, the author at Discovery is confused.
http://www.businessinsider.com...

For sure the hydrogen and oxygen are much older than the sun, but are the water molecules older than the sun? The formation of the sun may have caused the creation of a lot of new water molecules out of the ancient elements. Or did the water molecules form in interstellar space before the sun's birth?

http://www.businessinsider.com...

Another one, since there's a stock one in the catalog already.

http://preview.tinyurl.com/oex3zwy

Seems odd that neither the summary didn't link to the demonstration video player on Condition One (it's kinda slow to load, and the first couple of scenes aren't '3D'). As you can see in the 2D version, it's just playing a 2D video on a virtual curved screen that extends half way around the user's viewpoint; that's enough to look pretty damned cool in the later scenes with crowds and on an escalator though.

Worth noting all the scenes there involved the viewpoint remaining either static or very predictably and slowly moving in a single direction, so perhaps this movie won't have quite so many barf moments as some of the demo games out there (doing a barrel roll in a spaceship game demo did me in, so I don't think being shaky-cam '3D' videos are going to work for me).