You might be right. I'd agree that there are very few unbiased news sources (I'm hard pressed trying to think of one myself).
Nevertheless, there are sources (such as the Economist or the Wall Street Journal) that present generally factually accurate news. If you two or three of these papers that don't all have the same bias, you can get a pretty good picture of what might be close to facts. You're likely to not get all the details from one source, but you'll probably get them if you look at various perspectives. In the end, critical judgment is important, and sometimes the best you can do is acknowledge that you don't know everything, and not make any biased/hasty judgments yourself.
I'm having trouble determining whether above post was a joke... In case it was, I guess I missed the "woosh". Either way, I'm sure some people are actually asking the question, even on/.
3G doesn't refer to the memory, but refers to the network capabilities and how fast it can handle data. Currently, iPhones work with EDGE, which is essentially a souped-up version of GPRS. EDGE is generally described as 2.5G, and is not very fast.
The new iPhones will be 3G (HSDPA/UMTS on GSM networks), providing a much faster bandwidth for viewing websites etc.
I grew up on espresso and I love it, but I haven't yet found a good espresso in the US of A. It's kind of demoralizing. I've stopped drinking coffee because of that.
I have to agree pretty much entirely with Arancaytar. Wikipedia has several good uses, as long as you are aware of the limitations:
1. You can use it informally, to get a basic understanding or background on something. Keep in mind it may be wrong, biased or overly simplified, so take everything you read with a grain of salt.
2. You can use it to start "research" (call it search if you want) for a college paper, and perhaps even for a higher-level academic paper. Why? Because most Wikipedia articles have a number of (sometimes primary) sources at the bottom. Use Wikipedia to find good reliable sources. Again, you can't trust just any source linked on Wikipedia, but if it's from an established peer-reviewed journal or something, it can definitely be used if properly cited.
But I don't think the professor is a moron for saying what he did. I've seen way too many people actually cite Wikipedia as a source, and literally quote from a Wikipedia article, with nothing but a URL. This is bad practice not only because (as stated above) Wikipedia articles aren't trustworthy for academic purposes but also because a Wikipedia article may be edited and may change over time.
Conclusion: Wikipedia CAN be used as a means of finding good sources, but should not be used as a source.
Although there is undeniably a "cool factor" associated with Apple products these days, the majority of people buying Macs now are doing so because of the quality of the product, both the physical exterior design (which is not limited to looks, with for example the cool integrated iSight cameras) as well as the design and function of the operating system. Macs always had pretty and interesting designs (with a few occasional blunders), but it's not until the first version of OS X that they really started capturing a wider market. Since then, Panther, Tiger and Leopard have been growing successes.
(Heads off to buy more Apple stock). your tale leads me in the opposite direction [...] are we reaching a point where no one will buy an Apple because everyone's buying Apple? Apple becoming too popular doesn't seem like a good reason to me not to buy their stock. If you want to be different, it might be a reason not to buy a Mac, but (market conditions abstracted) a company selling an increasing number of products at a solid margin is usually not going to bring their stock down.
I'm not saying the stock is going to go up or that everyone's going to buy Apple computers. But if everyone were to buy Apple computers, my bet is the stock would go up.
You say they have nuclear weapons. Well, we have more, and as China is a smaller nation in terms of land area, we have the advantage of having less square footage to wipe out.
From the CIA World Factbook:
USA:
total: 9,826,630 sq km land: 9,161,923 sq km
water: 664,707 sq km
note: includes only the 50 states and District of Columbia
China:
total: 9,596,960 sq km land: 9,326,410 sq km
water: 270,550 sq km
No, it can't be said that a single satellite radio company would result in a market monopoly because their product is comparable and interchangeable with AM/FM radio. I'm not saying it isn't a superior product (that's up to you to decide), but if Sirius-XM were to hike their prices up, consumers would have a choice to revert to "conventional" radio.
To make an analogy, it would be similar to a situation in which there were only one hybrid car manufacturer. If the hybrid cars are too expensive, people can accomplish essentially the same actions with a regular gasoline-engine car.
However, the same cannot be said if there were only a single car manufacturer. People would not be able to accomplish the same actions using bicycles or motorcycles, hence it would be a market monopoly.
You could say this merger will result in a satellite radio monopoly, but that's not necessarily going to hurt consumers. In the end, they will have to keep their prices down to remain attractive (read "compete") against regular AM/FM radio, i.e. there will still be a competitive landscape.
I'm not very well versed in chip design, as I only took one class a few years ago. Could someone please confirm or disprove the following hypothesis?
Assumption: The energy dissipated in a chip generates heat, which could be avoided by the use of lasers, resulting in lower heat generation and energy consumption.
I'm fully aware that my speculative hypothesis may be completely unfounded, especially given that not much heat should be dissipated when electricity flows through a superconductor. If someone who is more informed (i.e. physicist or chip designer) could answer my question, I would appreciate it.
And yes, the lowered energy consumption would be offset by the energy spent in feeding the sharks.
You gotta love it when Slashdot turns everything into a corporate evil privacy issue.
Yes, there would be an issue if the camera had to send video (of you) or other information about you over the cable network. But has anyone actually considered that this camera could simply be used on the TV/set-top box without sending any information? The recognition software (however it works) could reside in the TV/STB and wouldn't even be directly connected to the network (would only impact the STB settings). Privacy issue solved.
No, I didn't RTFA, so I have no clue how Comcast's implementation works, but I'm guessing I'm not the only one.
No debt is not always a good thing. Healthy debt (good interest rate) is an indication of a stable company with a growth strategy. Most large companies have debt, even if they have lots of liquid assets (cash) lying around. Debt is the (usually cheap) way to raise capital without diluting ownership, and capital is necessary for growth, especially for a company like Nvidia that most likely has a lot of R&D.
Parent wrote:
Prior to Einstein, and certainly in Joseph Smith's day, the Scientific Establishment as it then existed was resoundingly Creatio Ex Nihilo. Hmm, it just so happens that the law of conservation of mass was formulated in the 18th century by Antoine Lavoisier, a very famous chemist. There's a quite famous quote by him too... "Rien ne se perd, rien ne se cree, tout se transforme", in English that's roughly "Nothing is lost, nothing is created, all is transformed."
As far as Ex-nihilo is concerned, there are some very serious scientific theories that suggest a particle of matter can be created in conjunction with its counterpart of antimatter, essentially from nothing. I am by no means an expert on this matter, so I speculate much further... Here's an interesting quote:
In modern physics, there is no such thing as "nothing." Even in a perfect vacuum, pairs of virtual particles are constantly being created and destroyed. The existence of these particles is no mathematical fiction. Though they cannot be directly observed, the effects they create are quite real. The assumption that they exist leads to predictions that have been confirmed by experiment to a high degree of accuracy. (Morris, 1990, 25)
I'm not sure how far you can stretch it, but probably quite a bit. TFA mentions that he heats the bottle in order to stretch it, which makes sense. However, since he's increasing the area while keeping the amount of plastic constant, I'm assuming he's making the surface much thinner, hence why he needs to reinforce it with carbon fiber or kevlar.
But I really doubt that even if you waited around for an eternity, you'd ever see a monkey fly out of my ass.
Anyway we can "help" the odds a little? I'm curious as to what this would look like.
And the worst example: name calling when someone points out a grammatical error instead of saying "Thank you very much for pointing out my ignorance on this point, you have saved me from much embarrassment in future".
In future what? Did you mean "in future posts" or perhaps even "in the future"?
I might be wrong, and if that is the case I thank you in advance for pointing out my ignorance.
Well, actually a lack of belief would be better characterized as agnosticism. Atheism is the actual conviction that God does NOT exist. It's the difference between "I don't know" and "I know God doesn't exist".
Interestingly, you can be both an atheist and an agnostic, in the sense that you can hold an atheist conviction towards a specific religion (e.g. you believe that the Catholic God doesn't exist because you have found contradictions in the Bible that simply preclude His existence) and be agnostic towards a vague and general idea of god(s) as an above entity (because you have no scientific evidence to support his existence, but no evidence to disprove it either).
Mark Zuckerberg is definitely not stupid, and Facebook is a cash cow. Its purpose is to generate money through advertising by providing a "free" (ad-supported) social network service to users. If I remember correctly, when only 5 or 6 schools had access to Facebook there were already ads being sold (it was, depending on the school size and Facebook's popularity, around $15 a day for an ad). It seems to me that generating ad revenue is Facebook's goal, and honestly, for all that's being said about profitable corporations being evil and what not, that's what most companies do. Facebook has always been a corporate sellout, whether that's a bad thing is up to you to decide. Being able to pay skilled engineers to support the product has its advantages.
My point here is that what Facebook does -- even if it gets a little bit of bad publicity here for its privacy policies -- is overall generating more revenue. News feeds caused an uproar due to lots of FUD, but in the end I think the majority of users loved it (I like it, now that I can control what information is published in the feeds). It's obvious that in general, people aren't educated enough to have privacy concerns (or else they are educated but choose to ignore it anyway). When using 3rd party apps on Facebook, it is VERY CLEAR that you are giving away your information ("by clicking, you agree to allow Superpoke to access your information", etc).
I believe that Facebook forces its 3rd party application to abide to a certain privacy policy, although I'm not sure about the details. If you care about your privacy but still want to use Facebook, make sure to manage your privacy settings, and don't use any 3rd party apps!
If you really really care about your privacy... well, you're fighting a losing battle anyway. First, I'd suggest ripping out the Ethernet cable.
Slashdot Mirror
2008 - Year of the Linux Desktop!
Did I just hear the loud "wooosh" of a joke flying over someone's head?
...does it run Linux?
You might be right. I'd agree that there are very few unbiased news sources (I'm hard pressed trying to think of one myself).
Nevertheless, there are sources (such as the Economist or the Wall Street Journal) that present generally factually accurate news. If you two or three of these papers that don't all have the same bias, you can get a pretty good picture of what might be close to facts. You're likely to not get all the details from one source, but you'll probably get them if you look at various perspectives. In the end, critical judgment is important, and sometimes the best you can do is acknowledge that you don't know everything, and not make any biased/hasty judgments yourself.
Seriously though, do you really want to buy a iPhone now that you know the 3G one is coming out in June?
3G makes a helluva difference from my experience.
I'm having trouble determining whether above post was a joke... In case it was, I guess I missed the "woosh". Either way, I'm sure some people are actually asking the question, even on /.
3G doesn't refer to the memory, but refers to the network capabilities and how fast it can handle data. Currently, iPhones work with EDGE, which is essentially a souped-up version of GPRS. EDGE is generally described as 2.5G, and is not very fast.
The new iPhones will be 3G (HSDPA/UMTS on GSM networks), providing a much faster bandwidth for viewing websites etc.
I grew up on espresso and I love it, but I haven't yet found a good espresso in the US of A. It's kind of demoralizing. I've stopped drinking coffee because of that.
No problem! All that means is that you have to wait a week for your coffee. Apparently, you can also just sit down and have a coffee while waiting.
But I don't think the professor is a moron for saying what he did. I've seen way too many people actually cite Wikipedia as a source, and literally quote from a Wikipedia article, with nothing but a URL. This is bad practice not only because (as stated above) Wikipedia articles aren't trustworthy for academic purposes but also because a Wikipedia article may be edited and may change over time.
Conclusion: Wikipedia CAN be used as a means of finding good sources, but should not be used as a source.
- Although there is undeniably a "cool factor" associated with Apple products these days, the majority of people buying Macs now are doing so because of the quality of the product, both the physical exterior design (which is not limited to looks, with for example the cool integrated iSight cameras) as well as the design and function of the operating system. Macs always had pretty and interesting designs (with a few occasional blunders), but it's not until the first version of OS X that they really started capturing a wider market. Since then, Panther, Tiger and Leopard have been growing successes.
-
(Heads off to buy more Apple stock). your tale leads me in the opposite direction [...] are we reaching a point where no one will buy an Apple because everyone's buying Apple? Apple becoming too popular doesn't seem like a good reason to me not to buy their stock. If you want to be different, it might be a reason not to buy a Mac, but (market conditions abstracted) a company selling an increasing number of products at a solid margin is usually not going to bring their stock down.
I'm not saying the stock is going to go up or that everyone's going to buy Apple computers. But if everyone were to buy Apple computers, my bet is the stock would go up.So... to find this person, should I just use Google or do I have to find a person?
From the CIA World Factbook:
USA:
total: 9,826,630 sq km
land: 9,161,923 sq km
water: 664,707 sq km
note: includes only the 50 states and District of Columbia
China:
total: 9,596,960 sq km
land: 9,326,410 sq km
water: 270,550 sq km
No, it can't be said that a single satellite radio company would result in a market monopoly because their product is comparable and interchangeable with AM/FM radio. I'm not saying it isn't a superior product (that's up to you to decide), but if Sirius-XM were to hike their prices up, consumers would have a choice to revert to "conventional" radio.
To make an analogy, it would be similar to a situation in which there were only one hybrid car manufacturer. If the hybrid cars are too expensive, people can accomplish essentially the same actions with a regular gasoline-engine car.
However, the same cannot be said if there were only a single car manufacturer. People would not be able to accomplish the same actions using bicycles or motorcycles, hence it would be a market monopoly.
You could say this merger will result in a satellite radio monopoly, but that's not necessarily going to hurt consumers. In the end, they will have to keep their prices down to remain attractive (read "compete") against regular AM/FM radio, i.e. there will still be a competitive landscape.
I'm not very well versed in chip design, as I only took one class a few years ago. Could someone please confirm or disprove the following hypothesis?
Assumption: The energy dissipated in a chip generates heat, which could be avoided by the use of lasers, resulting in lower heat generation and energy consumption.
I'm fully aware that my speculative hypothesis may be completely unfounded, especially given that not much heat should be dissipated when electricity flows through a superconductor. If someone who is more informed (i.e. physicist or chip designer) could answer my question, I would appreciate it.
And yes, the lowered energy consumption would be offset by the energy spent in feeding the sharks.
You gotta love it when Slashdot turns everything into a corporate evil privacy issue.
Yes, there would be an issue if the camera had to send video (of you) or other information about you over the cable network. But has anyone actually considered that this camera could simply be used on the TV/set-top box without sending any information? The recognition software (however it works) could reside in the TV/STB and wouldn't even be directly connected to the network (would only impact the STB settings). Privacy issue solved.
No, I didn't RTFA, so I have no clue how Comcast's implementation works, but I'm guessing I'm not the only one.
No debt is not always a good thing. Healthy debt (good interest rate) is an indication of a stable company with a growth strategy. Most large companies have debt, even if they have lots of liquid assets (cash) lying around. Debt is the (usually cheap) way to raise capital without diluting ownership, and capital is necessary for growth, especially for a company like Nvidia that most likely has a lot of R&D.
I'm curious too... What is this cloned meat you speak of?
Forklifts work great apparently.
I'm not sure how far you can stretch it, but probably quite a bit. TFA mentions that he heats the bottle in order to stretch it, which makes sense. However, since he's increasing the area while keeping the amount of plastic constant, I'm assuming he's making the surface much thinner, hence why he needs to reinforce it with carbon fiber or kevlar.
Anyway we can "help" the odds a little? I'm curious as to what this would look like.
To quote Churchill: "That is behavior up with which I will not put."
(the quote appears with several slight variations but here is the essence of it)
In future what? Did you mean "in future posts" or perhaps even "in the future"?
I might be wrong, and if that is the case I thank you in advance for pointing out my ignorance.
Well, actually a lack of belief would be better characterized as agnosticism. Atheism is the actual conviction that God does NOT exist. It's the difference between "I don't know" and "I know God doesn't exist".
Interestingly, you can be both an atheist and an agnostic, in the sense that you can hold an atheist conviction towards a specific religion (e.g. you believe that the Catholic God doesn't exist because you have found contradictions in the Bible that simply preclude His existence) and be agnostic towards a vague and general idea of god(s) as an above entity (because you have no scientific evidence to support his existence, but no evidence to disprove it either).
Mark Zuckerberg is definitely not stupid, and Facebook is a cash cow. Its purpose is to generate money through advertising by providing a "free" (ad-supported) social network service to users. If I remember correctly, when only 5 or 6 schools had access to Facebook there were already ads being sold (it was, depending on the school size and Facebook's popularity, around $15 a day for an ad). It seems to me that generating ad revenue is Facebook's goal, and honestly, for all that's being said about profitable corporations being evil and what not, that's what most companies do. Facebook has always been a corporate sellout, whether that's a bad thing is up to you to decide. Being able to pay skilled engineers to support the product has its advantages.
My point here is that what Facebook does -- even if it gets a little bit of bad publicity here for its privacy policies -- is overall generating more revenue. News feeds caused an uproar due to lots of FUD, but in the end I think the majority of users loved it (I like it, now that I can control what information is published in the feeds). It's obvious that in general, people aren't educated enough to have privacy concerns (or else they are educated but choose to ignore it anyway). When using 3rd party apps on Facebook, it is VERY CLEAR that you are giving away your information ("by clicking, you agree to allow Superpoke to access your information", etc).
I believe that Facebook forces its 3rd party application to abide to a certain privacy policy, although I'm not sure about the details. If you care about your privacy but still want to use Facebook, make sure to manage your privacy settings, and don't use any 3rd party apps!
If you really really care about your privacy... well, you're fighting a losing battle anyway. First, I'd suggest ripping out the Ethernet cable.