Besides that it's election time, you guys have high employment already so it's political suicide for either party to say "hey you couple hundred thousand (or however many work in TSA) low-educated workers, please go find another job as we're shutting you down".
Since 11 Sept, all people caught trying to set off bombs on board planes, boarded those planes outside the US. So they didn't have much to do with US security regulations ('law' is the wrong word for this, GP most likely mean 'regulations' or so).
GPS being from 1994 is indeed just 18 years old. That's simply a young technology.
You obviously having a problem of not knowing exactly where your daughter is every second of the day, that's crazy, and I really don't see why it would be necessary.
Back in the olden days, when my kid was very small and most phones didn't have GPS, she carried one of those mountaineer walkie-talkies with GPS when we were on vacation.
Hard to consider "the olden days" as a period where GPS was so commonplace that you could get them in walkie-talkie format. GPS as technology is young. It available to consumers in an affordable package, even younger. You thinking of that as "the olden days" means you may have some growing up to do as well. And that feeling is confirmed by the rest of the story...
They may not have an expectation of privacy now; however if you are tracking them now and teach them it's a normal thing to do, then in later life they will still consider it a normal thing that they are tracked. After all the tracking has been going on for as long as they can remember, and it's simply part of life.
Is there anything wrong in going to the mall when the study is done? Or even to do the study? At least here in Hong Kong the McDonald's and other fast food restaurants are used as alternative study room. Especially the period before exams you see secondary schools students sitting there, studying.
10 years ago those tablets didn't exist. Smart phones didn't exist. It's going really really fast.
I grew up with a television set at home (though my parents still had a b/w so I went to a friend's house to watch colour - and that's a mere 30 years ago). My parents grew up without TV at home, my father told as a child they had a car, and they were the only ones in the street (and that was an upmarket part of town already) to own one. It was special - while for me, my parents always had a car, nothing new there. They had to go to the cinema to see motion pictures, later maybe a TV at a friend's place.
When I was in primary school, we got our first home computer, an MSX. That was also the era of the Commodore-64. Early secondary school, our first PC (an XT). My child is now growing up in a household where computers and smart phones are part of normal life, where if we need to find our way we look it up on the Internet instead of browsing a time table book.
That's how fast technology has come into our lives. What didn't exist when one generation grew up, is commonplace for the next generation.
On a 2-3yo? Please come up with something realistic. Or think about what you say, before you post (the same accounts for the mods modding this "insightful").
So with a phone, what're you going to do, call your 3yo? Expect them to answer? And if so, tell you where they are? Or do you expect a 3yo to make a call to you in case they get lost? Neither of it is going to happen. Phone getting dumped in a pond, smeared with molten ice cream, smothered in ketchup, banged against walls and the ground: that is what is more likely to happen to it. If it doesn't simply get lost.
The more real-life, efficient, cheap and robust solution: have them wear a tag with their parent's name and mobile phone number. Or even easier, and really no chance of it getting lost, write that number on their arms. Trust me, that works. A phone, not so much. At least not until they're way older. And by then they don't really need the phone to get back to you.
One of the best parts of the BBC CeeFax was the subtitles. It was provided as service for the deaf (so you would get extra notes like "doorbell ringing"), it was also great for people who could not understand English so fluently as it was usually a literal transcription of what was being said. Fantastic help for learning to understand spoken English.
There is a difference between "lost income/profit" which those rights holders claim those huge amounts for (which normally would be taxed if actually realised), and "asset value" of the copyrighted work which should appear on their balance sheet already.
For stuff like wind and solar there's another thing: reliability. Wind can come and go in minutes or even seconds, so one moment you have full output from your wind farm, the next you have nothing. That can upset the grid badly and there are no good solutions for that, yet.
Using wind energy to make petrol this way could help a lot, assuming the process can start up and shut down easily. When the wind blows, you produce petrol, when the wind stops, you sit and wait. Production should average out over time, and the petrol becomes an energy store. You subsequently run a generator on that petrol, and have reliable power supply to the net.
Running your petrol engine at optimal RPMs and power output can greatly improve this. The problem is that in a car the engine can not run at a constant speed, and that causes losses. It's one of the reasons those hybrids are so fuel efficient.
For me: I had to read the comments to get a quick refresh of what happened. My first thoughts were in the lines of "oh, LibreOffice got a new name again?".
One of the reasons I like to use Linux is the completeness of a distro. You install a distro, and you get pretty much any application you can think of with it (try than with Windows...). Free, maintained, virtually guaranteed virus free as long as you stick to your distro's repositories.
Now my distro comes with an office suit. It used to be StarOffice (may have been a separate download at the time, I forgot), then OpenOffice, soon after OpenOffice.org, then LibreOffice. It all looks and works mostly the same, I'm happy. Maybe my distro (currently Ubuntu) may switch to Apache OpenOffice in the future, well then I'll have that one. As long as it works.
Similar with how I and almost anyone else switched from Xfree86 to X.org. It still works.
I don't care about politics in development, let them figure it out, and let my distro maker figure out which software is overall the best. And for corner cases I may override their choices. I know OOo and LO parted ways, I don't care why, who's running what, I trust my distro to choose the best for me (and if I'm not happy with the distro I'll try another, not going to fiddle around with bits and pieces).
Who's going to "win"? Well, let them battle it out. Probably no-one. Let there be two, three, four competing but compatible (using ODF) office suits on the market. The more the merrier, competition is what drives us forward. They all want users, and to get users they have to have the better product.
Stackoverflow is for anything programming related, not just iOS. When googling for many things Python I also more often than not end up on Stackoverflow. Rarely my question is not on there already - and usually I can get an answer rather quickly if I post a new question there.
So true. I'm just a hobby programmer, my weapon of choice being Python, coming from a lineage of Basic and TurboPascal.
Then I decided I needed to get something done on my Android phone. I needed an app that didn't exist. It had to talk to some web site, so well I just looked up how to do this, downloaded the SDK, downloaded Eclipse, and started working.
I'm trying to get something done. In this case to get my phone to do something. That it's got to be done in Java - a language I had never touched before - I considered quite irrelevant to the quest. OK then I'll just have to learn Java and the Android platform, how hard can it be? As expected, that was the easy part.
And now I know pretty much how Java works. And Android. And how to talk to web sites using JSON objects. It was a bit a slow start but classes or online courses? No thanks. Well except for a Java starter tutorial or two, just to figure out the basic structures and how objects and functions are called in that language and more of that stuff.
The only language (or should I say: type of language) that I don't really get is SQL. That's so different from functional languages, I can make simple queries and get my data in and out of the database but anything advanced, not really.
For obvious reasons most of the telescopes would be situated in rural areas.
Not so obvious to put them in rural areas.
Putting them in urban areas has issues with light pollution, but has the advantage of a potentially much larger audience.
Depends on whether you want to use this primarily as research tool, or demonstration tool. Both are important. The vast majority of people is not really interested in staying up late at night looking at tiny little lights in the sky; the tiny minority that is interested can definitely use something like this to kindle that interest. From a city you can still see lots and lots of interesting things, and to get people interested of course you'll have to show them the known-interesting stuff first.
And this accounts of course for many more areas of science. Bring science to the people. Not necessarily Mythbusters-style, even though that might also work in getting people interested in science.
1) searching for exoplanets is hot at the moment, it's a selling point.
2) these smallish telescopes are in the price range of poorer nations - not of the people maybe but certainly in range of the budgets of educational institutions or local governments wanting to please their constituents.
3) the nations mentioned are poor, can't afford expensive stuff, and this may spark off general scientific interest amongst their people.
4) it doesn't make sense promoting it to rich countries, because they'll consider it "too cheap" or "not good enough" or whatever.
So yes, one does have to do with another. Whether a lot of new discoveries will come out of them remains to be seen but with more eyes pointing towards the sky, the overall chance of making discoveries is definitely increasing.
Antennas don't use much power to begin with, if any at all.
And dropped calls: in my experience indeed if you jump on the latest-network-type bandwagon all the time you have more dropped calls. When 3G was new, I moved to 3G, to have more dropped calls than on 2G (from once a year to once a month maybe, nothing spectacular) - more white spots due to incomplete network roll-out. I've moved back to 2G and am still on 2G, as it just works.
3G is just as good by now, I'm sure, but why pay more for effectively the same?
3G uses more power than 2G. 4G probably uses even more power. Bigger displays use a lot of power. That's what cuts battery life; incomplete network roll-out causes dropped calls. Better antennas won't change that much.
Market share of Microsoft's Internet Explorer in Europe has roughly halved since 2008 to 29 percent so far this year as it has lost clients mostly to Google's Chrome.
Chrome controls 29.3 percent of the European browsing market, while Mozilla's Firefox has 30.3 percent of the market, according to web research firm Statcounter.
That's 90% of the market equally shared over three browsers. With the other 10% for the rest. Well I'd call that a rather healthy situation, and a great progress from 90%+ for IE.
Browser selection screen or not, the dominance of IE is obviously broken without any other browser becoming dominant, and that I'd say is good. Very good. The next step is a proper html standard, and a standard interpretation/rendering of that standard.
In Hong Kong it's so common that if you want to book a van the driver asks you to send the address by Whatsapp. Well, I'm one of those that does not have Whatsapp, and being able to use it to send messages from a PC sounds perfect to me.
So what's the big deal with being able to do it from a PC? It's not much more than an IP-phone and instant messaging type of app, isn't it? Or am I missing something really important here?
Those records are usually not (yet) that easy to search on an automated wholesale basis. That's a difference.
Following someone home is even more work, highly accurate of course but it requires a lot of manpower to accomplish. Security by obscurity still works quite well.
You might want to say "like a car mechanic needs tools like a spanner, a software developer needs tools like an IDE and a VCS". Hoping that this is not too technical for them:-)
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Besides that it's election time, you guys have high employment already so it's political suicide for either party to say "hey you couple hundred thousand (or however many work in TSA) low-educated workers, please go find another job as we're shutting you down".
Since 11 Sept, all people caught trying to set off bombs on board planes, boarded those planes outside the US. So they didn't have much to do with US security regulations ('law' is the wrong word for this, GP most likely mean 'regulations' or so).
GPS being from 1994 is indeed just 18 years old. That's simply a young technology.
You obviously having a problem of not knowing exactly where your daughter is every second of the day, that's crazy, and I really don't see why it would be necessary.
Back in the olden days, when my kid was very small and most phones didn't have GPS, she carried one of those mountaineer walkie-talkies with GPS when we were on vacation.
Hard to consider "the olden days" as a period where GPS was so commonplace that you could get them in walkie-talkie format. GPS as technology is young. It available to consumers in an affordable package, even younger. You thinking of that as "the olden days" means you may have some growing up to do as well. And that feeling is confirmed by the rest of the story...
They may not have an expectation of privacy now; however if you are tracking them now and teach them it's a normal thing to do, then in later life they will still consider it a normal thing that they are tracked. After all the tracking has been going on for as long as they can remember, and it's simply part of life.
If you start fucking them, you always run the risk of creating even more children.
Is there anything wrong in going to the mall when the study is done? Or even to do the study? At least here in Hong Kong the McDonald's and other fast food restaurants are used as alternative study room. Especially the period before exams you see secondary schools students sitting there, studying.
10 years ago those tablets didn't exist. Smart phones didn't exist. It's going really really fast.
I grew up with a television set at home (though my parents still had a b/w so I went to a friend's house to watch colour - and that's a mere 30 years ago). My parents grew up without TV at home, my father told as a child they had a car, and they were the only ones in the street (and that was an upmarket part of town already) to own one. It was special - while for me, my parents always had a car, nothing new there. They had to go to the cinema to see motion pictures, later maybe a TV at a friend's place.
When I was in primary school, we got our first home computer, an MSX. That was also the era of the Commodore-64. Early secondary school, our first PC (an XT). My child is now growing up in a household where computers and smart phones are part of normal life, where if we need to find our way we look it up on the Internet instead of browsing a time table book.
That's how fast technology has come into our lives. What didn't exist when one generation grew up, is commonplace for the next generation.
On a 2-3yo? Please come up with something realistic. Or think about what you say, before you post (the same accounts for the mods modding this "insightful").
So with a phone, what're you going to do, call your 3yo? Expect them to answer? And if so, tell you where they are? Or do you expect a 3yo to make a call to you in case they get lost? Neither of it is going to happen. Phone getting dumped in a pond, smeared with molten ice cream, smothered in ketchup, banged against walls and the ground: that is what is more likely to happen to it. If it doesn't simply get lost.
The more real-life, efficient, cheap and robust solution: have them wear a tag with their parent's name and mobile phone number. Or even easier, and really no chance of it getting lost, write that number on their arms. Trust me, that works. A phone, not so much. At least not until they're way older. And by then they don't really need the phone to get back to you.
One of the best parts of the BBC CeeFax was the subtitles. It was provided as service for the deaf (so you would get extra notes like "doorbell ringing"), it was also great for people who could not understand English so fluently as it was usually a literal transcription of what was being said. Fantastic help for learning to understand spoken English.
There is a difference between "lost income/profit" which those rights holders claim those huge amounts for (which normally would be taxed if actually realised), and "asset value" of the copyrighted work which should appear on their balance sheet already.
For stuff like wind and solar there's another thing: reliability. Wind can come and go in minutes or even seconds, so one moment you have full output from your wind farm, the next you have nothing. That can upset the grid badly and there are no good solutions for that, yet.
Using wind energy to make petrol this way could help a lot, assuming the process can start up and shut down easily. When the wind blows, you produce petrol, when the wind stops, you sit and wait. Production should average out over time, and the petrol becomes an energy store. You subsequently run a generator on that petrol, and have reliable power supply to the net.
Running your petrol engine at optimal RPMs and power output can greatly improve this. The problem is that in a car the engine can not run at a constant speed, and that causes losses. It's one of the reasons those hybrids are so fuel efficient.
Exactly.
For me: I had to read the comments to get a quick refresh of what happened. My first thoughts were in the lines of "oh, LibreOffice got a new name again?".
One of the reasons I like to use Linux is the completeness of a distro. You install a distro, and you get pretty much any application you can think of with it (try than with Windows...). Free, maintained, virtually guaranteed virus free as long as you stick to your distro's repositories.
Now my distro comes with an office suit. It used to be StarOffice (may have been a separate download at the time, I forgot), then OpenOffice, soon after OpenOffice.org, then LibreOffice. It all looks and works mostly the same, I'm happy. Maybe my distro (currently Ubuntu) may switch to Apache OpenOffice in the future, well then I'll have that one. As long as it works.
Similar with how I and almost anyone else switched from Xfree86 to X.org. It still works.
I don't care about politics in development, let them figure it out, and let my distro maker figure out which software is overall the best. And for corner cases I may override their choices. I know OOo and LO parted ways, I don't care why, who's running what, I trust my distro to choose the best for me (and if I'm not happy with the distro I'll try another, not going to fiddle around with bits and pieces).
Who's going to "win"? Well, let them battle it out. Probably no-one. Let there be two, three, four competing but compatible (using ODF) office suits on the market. The more the merrier, competition is what drives us forward. They all want users, and to get users they have to have the better product.
To some people having the wrong sexual preference is worse than murder.
Stackoverflow is for anything programming related, not just iOS. When googling for many things Python I also more often than not end up on Stackoverflow. Rarely my question is not on there already - and usually I can get an answer rather quickly if I post a new question there.
Nobody writing drivers or other bare-metal stuff anymore in the US? I can't imagine that such low-level languages ever die out.
Not everything can be written in interpreted languages... and those interpreters are in turn often written in C again.
So true. I'm just a hobby programmer, my weapon of choice being Python, coming from a lineage of Basic and TurboPascal.
Then I decided I needed to get something done on my Android phone. I needed an app that didn't exist. It had to talk to some web site, so well I just looked up how to do this, downloaded the SDK, downloaded Eclipse, and started working.
I'm trying to get something done. In this case to get my phone to do something. That it's got to be done in Java - a language I had never touched before - I considered quite irrelevant to the quest. OK then I'll just have to learn Java and the Android platform, how hard can it be? As expected, that was the easy part.
And now I know pretty much how Java works. And Android. And how to talk to web sites using JSON objects. It was a bit a slow start but classes or online courses? No thanks. Well except for a Java starter tutorial or two, just to figure out the basic structures and how objects and functions are called in that language and more of that stuff.
The only language (or should I say: type of language) that I don't really get is SQL. That's so different from functional languages, I can make simple queries and get my data in and out of the database but anything advanced, not really.
For obvious reasons most of the telescopes would be situated in rural areas.
Not so obvious to put them in rural areas.
Putting them in urban areas has issues with light pollution, but has the advantage of a potentially much larger audience.
Depends on whether you want to use this primarily as research tool, or demonstration tool. Both are important. The vast majority of people is not really interested in staying up late at night looking at tiny little lights in the sky; the tiny minority that is interested can definitely use something like this to kindle that interest. From a city you can still see lots and lots of interesting things, and to get people interested of course you'll have to show them the known-interesting stuff first.
And this accounts of course for many more areas of science. Bring science to the people. Not necessarily Mythbusters-style, even though that might also work in getting people interested in science.
1) searching for exoplanets is hot at the moment, it's a selling point.
2) these smallish telescopes are in the price range of poorer nations - not of the people maybe but certainly in range of the budgets of educational institutions or local governments wanting to please their constituents.
3) the nations mentioned are poor, can't afford expensive stuff, and this may spark off general scientific interest amongst their people.
4) it doesn't make sense promoting it to rich countries, because they'll consider it "too cheap" or "not good enough" or whatever.
So yes, one does have to do with another. Whether a lot of new discoveries will come out of them remains to be seen but with more eyes pointing towards the sky, the overall chance of making discoveries is definitely increasing.
Great marketing spin, but it's nonsensical.
Antennas don't use much power to begin with, if any at all.
And dropped calls: in my experience indeed if you jump on the latest-network-type bandwagon all the time you have more dropped calls. When 3G was new, I moved to 3G, to have more dropped calls than on 2G (from once a year to once a month maybe, nothing spectacular) - more white spots due to incomplete network roll-out. I've moved back to 2G and am still on 2G, as it just works.
3G is just as good by now, I'm sure, but why pay more for effectively the same?
3G uses more power than 2G. 4G probably uses even more power. Bigger displays use a lot of power. That's what cuts battery life; incomplete network roll-out causes dropped calls. Better antennas won't change that much.
FTA:
Market share of Microsoft's Internet Explorer in Europe has roughly halved since 2008 to 29 percent so far this year as it has lost clients mostly to Google's Chrome.
Chrome controls 29.3 percent of the European browsing market, while Mozilla's Firefox has 30.3 percent of the market, according to web research firm Statcounter.
That's 90% of the market equally shared over three browsers. With the other 10% for the rest. Well I'd call that a rather healthy situation, and a great progress from 90%+ for IE.
Browser selection screen or not, the dominance of IE is obviously broken without any other browser becoming dominant, and that I'd say is good. Very good. The next step is a proper html standard, and a standard interpretation/rendering of that standard.
In Hong Kong it's so common that if you want to book a van the driver asks you to send the address by Whatsapp. Well, I'm one of those that does not have Whatsapp, and being able to use it to send messages from a PC sounds perfect to me.
So what's the big deal with being able to do it from a PC? It's not much more than an IP-phone and instant messaging type of app, isn't it? Or am I missing something really important here?
Those records are usually not (yet) that easy to search on an automated wholesale basis. That's a difference.
Following someone home is even more work, highly accurate of course but it requires a lot of manpower to accomplish. Security by obscurity still works quite well.
You might want to say "like a car mechanic needs tools like a spanner, a software developer needs tools like an IDE and a VCS". Hoping that this is not too technical for them :-)