And there's only one way to stop this. Find a viable candidate to run against that politician, preferably in the primary.
Here in California, we're unfortunately stuck with Boxer because her only real competition was Fiorina, who nearly bankrupted one of the largest computer companies in the world because she had such a poor understanding of business and technology, but we can get rid of Feinstein in 2012. Now is the time to start applying pressure, both directly (as in, "You stand no chance of reelection if you vote for this bill") and indirectly (as in choose a Democrat to unseat her in the primary race).
While you're at it, start working now on a constitutional amendment to allow recall of U.S. Senators.
Better example: you post a picture taken at a cafe on Flickr. In the background is the cute girl you just met. Your camera silently geotags the photo with GPS coordinates, showing the bar where you and this girl regularly hang out, and with a date telling when the photo was taken, hinting at when she would likely be in the bar next.
You find out the next week that the girl was in the witness protection program because of her abusive ex-boyfriend. Somehow, he managed to figure out what city she was in, and used facial recognition software on every photo that Flickr identified as having been taken in that area. Because of your photo, he found her and slit her throat.
You lost a girlfriend, the world lost a human being, and all because of a few privacy violations that you didn't even realize were happening. And that is why privacy is important—because there are bad people out there who will take advantage of any scrap of information they can get and use it against you.
Most of the folks coming out as against net neutrality are those who don't fully understand what true net neutrality means. Unfortunately, most of Congress also doesn't, so the folks coming out against it are probably right, if only because the odds of our government getting any complex technological issue right in the first hundred tries are about the same as the odds of our sun going supernova. Congress should instead focus on ensuring that the regulatory agencies have the authority to create the needed regulations.
Yeah, but I'd rather have somebody who actually takes the time to understand why SOPA/PIPA is fundamentally incompatible with DNSSEC than somebody who just works against SOPA/PIPA because the tech people in his/her district tell him/her to do so. Ultimately, the latter merely changes which lobbyists are writing the laws....
My problems are all software problems, but the problem is that they're debilitating software problems that prevent it from carrying out its primary purpose.
One does not play DVDs correctly. This started after a firmware update. At the DVD layer switch, it stalls for anywhere from a fraction of a second up to five or six seconds because it fails to buffer data far enough ahead to handle the layer change.
Both of my Samsung players fail to play the Blu-Ray versions of the last two Harry Potter movies. They seem to skip playback of a frame of audio about every twenty or thirty seconds in certain stretches, resulting in a very noticeable audible glitch. In the worst cases, you can see a visual glitch as well.
These are two different models, bought probably a year apart or more. Both have seen multiple firmware updates since the Harry Potter movies came out, none of which fixed the playback problems (nearly a year after the first problem disc came out). I can only assume, then, that Samsung doesn't care. By contrast, I understand that LG units had trouble playing these same discs, but they quickly released a firmware update to fix the problem.
My hatred for their products is further compounded by the nightmarish power lights. Every piece of Samsung gear I own has power lights that remain lit (sometimes a different color) even when the unit is turned off. I actually ended up putting a piece of black electric tape over the power button on my Samsung TV because it kept me up at night. Unfortunately, this also means I can't tell if I successfully turned it on because I can't see the power light blinking. And, of course, the light is controlled by software, so it would have been trivial for them to add an option to not leave the light on all the time, but they didn't. I don't know what Samsung was thinking, but it's a really horrible user experience, and there's no good way for the user to work around it without negatively impacting the device's operation. By contrast, my LG is completely dark when turned off—the way electronics should be.
So I don't see myself buying Samsung gear again in the near future. I bought their gear because they manufacture some of the best flat panels in the industry. It's a shame that the rest of their design doesn't meet the same high standards. Not by a long shot.
Yes, but the modern PC/104 bus designs are PCIe-based, not ISA-based.
And even if there is still a fair amount of original ISA-based work going on in the embedded space, that's only being done to maintain legacy infrastructure. Eventually, all that gear will have been replaced with newer devices based on PCI or PCIe, and they won't continue building ISA-based PC/104 devices, either. The only reason they still do it now is because the costs of replacing that infrastructure all at once are too high, leading to a much longer phase-out in the embedded space.
Yeah. This article's analysis is WAY off. I still mostly take photos to remember important events, trips, etc. The images I post are mostly the sorts of things that this article describes (for identy and communication), but that's a tiny fraction of the photos I take.
I don't know what Kodak's problem is other than that they focused on the wrong consumers. Sure, a lot of people buy cheap consumer cameras, but the real profit margins are in the DSLR space, which Kodak never really touched. Instead, they built digital backs for film-based SLR cameras, under the assumption that people would want to update their current film cameras to be digital. The problems with this are twofold:
They failed to anticipate that at some point, those pro photographers would decide that digital photos were good enough. Once this happened, there was no longer any reason to use film backs, which meant that there was no reason to use a bulky add-on digital back, either.
Nikon and Canon were smart enough to maintain compatibility with their existing lenses, which meant that users could upgrade to pure-digital cameras very easily, and did.
Because Kodak did not anticipate this transition (and thus did not start making any DSLR cameras of their own), their only remaining sources of income were consumer-grade cameras and sale of image sensors to camera companies. By their very nature, however, consumer-grade cameras are low margin, and worse, their market got heavily cannibalized by camera phones, which seriously cut into those devices as a source of revenue.
This left image sensors. Thus, the only way for Kodak to stay afloat at that point was to continue to be at the forefront of image sensor technology. Unfortunately, the two main camera makers, Canon and Nikon, both build a lot of their own chips, and Sony and Foveon make great chips as well, which nearly eliminates the potential for image sensor sales except in their own cameras.
By the time all was said and done, their only way to make money was to compete in the compact camera market. Unfortunately, this market is almost purely feature-driven, which means that it demands ever-higher megapixel counts. Thus, they either had to buy chips from their competitors or keep up with them in their own image sensor designs. Worse, this meant supporting an image sensor division on sales of compact cameras—sales that were drying up.
At least that's my interpretation of things based on what I've seen/read. Kodak needed to have made a serious foray into the DSLR market instead of (or in addition to) being a temporary enabler for their competition. Had they done this, they would be right up there with Canon and Nikon in the DSLR space by now, and they wouldn't be bankrupt.
Let this be a warning to companies that ignore the pro market: you do so at your peril. The consumer market is great, but fickle. It can go away at a moment's notice, and when it does, if you don't have the loyal pro market, you're out of business.
And yet outside of a few hobbyists, the telegraph is defunct. The short-wave and long-wave radio bands are basically defunct. Analog TV is defunct. Celluloid movies are rapidly becoming defunct. ISA slots are defunct. It's not at all uncommon for a specific type of product in a larger class of products to go away if the replacements completely obviate the need for the original product. I see no reason why traditional desktops can't or shouldn't go the way of X terminals eventually.
That was the conclusion I came to after reading reviews of their Blu-Ray players a few weeks ago as well. I ended up buying an LG.
Then again, all the reviews said that Samsung makes some of the best Blu-Ray players, yet both of mine have been train wrecks to various degrees, which is why I'm replacing the worst of the pair with the LG, so....
Q: What do 1-800-Contacts, Adidas, Americans for Tax Reform, Comcast, the Country Music Association, Estee Lauder, Ford, Nike and Xerox all have in common?
A: They all just made my disqualified vendor list.
To be fair, Ford was already on that list. My Windstar's right turn signal started acting up about a year ago. Now, in addition to having become somewhat worse, the problem has also spread to the driver's side door lock, the driver's side window, and with varying degrees of frequency, both sliding door locks, the passenger's side door lock, and the door open chime/lights. The only door lock that *hasn't* started misbehaving over the last three is the tailgate (and even then, I can't be certain). I'm already on my third check engine light, at least two of which were directly caused by a design flaw in the front valve cover. The transmission has already been rebuilt once, and I've already had to replace both the power steering pump and the steering rack. Oh, and the ABS light regularly comes on. This is at a little over a hundred thousand miles. Like I really need another reason not to buy anything else from them. Ford, where Quality is #1, and Reliability is #2....
The correct statement is, "I have prepared a campaign platform and a war chest with the intent to run against you and unseat you during the primary if you are stupid enough to vote for this bill."
No, not all of them. Many of them just try to shove bad economic policy down our throats. And then there was Schwarzenegger, whose opinions generally made sense more often than not. If we got Republicans like that, I'd have a lot fewer qualms about voting for one every now and then. Unfortunately, we mostly get Republicans whose past achievements include bankrupting major high tech firms or running really sleazy e-businesses.
I've never provided identification when buying a ticket online, unless you consider a credit card number to be identification. And in theory, you have to have a valid photo ID to travel, but I've never had anyone ask for it except when checking baggage.
Still, on a pointless security scale that ranges from "valid photo ID required" to "must walk through the naked porn scanner", I'll take "valid photo ID required" any day. Just saying.
Actually, it does. Unlike airline flights, most train tickets and bus tickets are refundable and changeable. Therefore, the TSA doesn't have nearly the ability to force people to agree to be searched that they do in the airports.
Also, I'm pretty sure the TSA has no legal authority to detain you anywhere other than an airport (and it is dubious even there), which means in the worst case, you just call a cab and beat the bus/train to the next station. That's not so easy with an airplane that doesn't make stops every few miles.
In effect, their enforcement power is near zero everywhere but on airplanes, and the sole reason they have so much power on airplanes is because the airlines allow them that power. That's why I no longer fly unless there is no alternative mode of transportation available. Screw the airlines. Those who are complicit with tyranny are guilty of it themselves.
Not all of them.... With the number of Silicon Valley voters screaming about SOPA/PIPA, Feinstein had best reconsider her support. I'm pretty sure she's not gonna get reelected if she doesn't. In fact, according to recent polls, more people in California favor throwing her out of Congress than reelecting her. This is in California, where they haven't elected a Republican to the U.S. Senate since the 1960s.
Amtrak is actually pretty good when it comes to the way they handle the TSA. Last time the TSA tried to search random passengers, the Amtrak Police had them escorted off the premises nationwide, and they were banned from Amtrak for a substantial period of time.
The Amtrak leadership is well aware that the only reason their ridership has been skyrocketing the past few years is that they don't put passengers through that bullshit. Riding Amtrak sends about as clear a message as you can send, and short of an explicit Congressional order mandating it, you're not going to see them allow the TSA to pull a power trip any time soon. To the extent that they are there at all, it is entirely at the discretion of the Amtrak Police.
More to the point, even the TSA has to be aware that they aren't useful when it come to trains. If a terrorist wanted to blow up a passenger train, there are approximately 21,000 miles of track that carry Amtrak passengers, and all it takes is one bomb on a trestle somewhere to kill an order of magnitude more people than you could kill with any bomb on the train itself. No terrorist is stupid enough to be a suicide bomber when they could achieve a bigger result (and a much longer-term disruption) by being the non-suicide kind, and any politician or other government official who believes otherwise is too dump to flip burgers.
In short, the TSA is about as useful to Amtrak as a tiger-repelling rock. Amtrak knows this, so they aren't afraid to tell the TSA to get bent when they step out of line.
In established scientific fields, that might be true, but on the bleeding edge of research, initial failures quite frequently lead to subsequent successes when the hypothesis is correct, but the test equipment, methodology, or sample size is insufficient. Similarly, initial successes often stop working.
One great example of this is medical research. Frequently, things that aren't initially reproducible in studies later turn out to occur far more reliably in the real world. Half the recalls in medicine occurred because some rare negative side effect that only showed up once in the first test and wasn't reproducible in subsequent small scale tests turned out to be fairly common once the product went out into the wild.
For another great example, consider the cat's whisker radio. Although the initial experiment was a success, later attempts to reproduce the same results were fraught with failure. In spite of that, eventually they figured out how to make it work fairly reliably, and that design became the earliest semiconductor-based diode. Were it not for someone having the courage to try to reproduce those early experiments repeatedly until they figured out what the difference was, the computer you used to type your comment would likely not exist.
All it takes is a single critical difference in an experiment to make the difference between successfully reproducing an outcome and not reproducing it. Since humans are far from perfect, basic logic dictates that a fair number of irreproducible experiments would probably be reproducible if someone hadn't forgotten to document some very subtle detail of the experiment (or worse, some very subtle detail of the test subjects). If you aren't seeing this in practice, it probably indicates that there is a wealth of knowledge waiting for those with the courage and insight to try harder to reproduce experiments that initially seemed unreproducible.
In other words, either you're wrong, or we're missing out on a lot of important discoveries. Take your pick.
Yeah, but "Little Bobby" is not the name of a major company. There are probably hundreds of thousands of pages (if not millions) that link to or talk about that company. The number of them that use words like "crook" should be pretty low, statistically. The chances of such a word being frequently used in connection with that company due to a fluke or one brilliantly net-savvy person with a grudge should be fairly remote. Unless Google's algorithm absolutely sucks, it's far more likely that a lot of people legitimately criticized this business, and they got mad and decided to sue the messenger.
Either way, this is why most businesses over a certain size have entire teams of people that scour the web for unfavorable comments about their business and try to find ways to resolve the situation amicably. If their business isn't doing that, then IMO, it's their own damn fault that their name is associated with such words, whether they are crooks or aren't. Resolving disputes is simply part of doing business as a high-profile company.
Crooks, that is? One really has to wonder how many people they had to screw over for this auto-complete suggestion to be show up. That sort of autocomplete result is usually an indication of a fairly large number of people using those words in the same general context. Even now, the sixth suggestion for them ends with problème....
Maybe Google's argument should not have been that Google wasn't responsible, but rather that it's not libel if it is true (I'm assuming that this is the case under French law) or that it is not possible to defame something that is already a disgrace....
More to the point, maybe the company in question should focus more on improving their image by actually improving their customer service instead of just metaphorically wallpapering over the rotting walls. If enough people think they are crooks to cause the Google search results to suggest this for several years in a row, that strongly suggests a very serious problem with the way they do business. I'm not saying that Lyonnaise de Garantie is a bunch of crooks, but they clearly have a serious image problem, and you can't cure that kind of problem by trying to sue people into silence. Doing so can only result in the Streisand Effect.
Nah. Irreproducible results are a scientific matter. Often one irreproducible result later turns out to be reproducible after controlling for something that you weren't looking for before.
Again, housing is mainly so costly NOT due to the free market, but due to government programs and manipulation (low interest rates, mortgage guarantees, in the us tax deductible interest, restrictive urban planning...)
Even without any of that interference, cities will always cost a lot more than the middle of nowhere because of basic supply and demand. Everyone wants a home close to where they work, and there aren't enough homes, so the cost is going to naturally level off at a much higher price than the cost of construction. It's the nature of the beast.
As to whether it would naturally settle at such a high price, maybe, maybe not. Given how many people in the U.S. have been getting loans that were hopelessly beyond what they could actually afford, I suspect the folks who wanted those homes would still have found a way to take out a loan (thanks to greedy businesses). The only difference is that the rate of default would be higher because of the higher interest rates and lack of mortgage guarantees.
In other words, supply and demand only determine the price if the price affects demand. When it comes to housing, I've seen no evidence that this is the case, other than when the economy is in a nosedive (at which point people stop buying because they expect prices to fall and don't want to pay more than the home will be worth when they sell it). In the normal course of the economy, demand is mostly driven by location.
Funny enough, I was reading an article that in Toronto about an old man who was selling his home he bought in the early 1900s. It cost about 1x the annual income.
It still does if you design the floor plan yourself and build a small house and limit yourself to the basics (carpet, not hardwood, let your builder build your cabinets instead of hiring out to a cabinet maker, use imitation counters instead of granite, no texture on the walls, etc. You can build a very nice, large house for three or four years salary in most parts of the U.S., assuming you aren't building in a major city.
Alternatively, there are some fairly nice double-wide modular homes that will only cost you about $125,000 plus delivery. Admittedly, that's probably two or three years salary, on average, but it's also completely turnkey.
The jackass does not understand story or script. He doesn't know how to recruit and motivate talent, amateur or professional. He won't know why he needs to build sets and props when green screen, CGI and motion capture give him a quick-and-dirty solution....
You're kind of missing the point. There are tens of thousands of former communications majors working in other industries, from corporate marketing to waiting tables in Hollywood while waiting for their big break. There are more people out there who understand the concepts than there are jobs in the field—particularly if you limit yourself to jobs that actually pay well (which is why I double-majored in CS).
Even if only one percent of the people who tried their hand at content creation were good at it, there would still be more creative people working outside the industry than in it.
As for acting, lots of talent-free people try out for things, but that doesn't mean it's hard to find people with talent. Just go to a high school or college play, take notes about who is good, and ask them to act in your indy production. Been there, done that.
BTW, if you think 38 million dollars is a bare bones budget, you don't get it. That's actually above the Hollywood average (which is about $34 million, last I checked). There are many, many films by major studios that cost a fraction of that. $38 million is Hollywood low budget like low Earth orbit is a little too far to hit by batting a baseball.
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And there's only one way to stop this. Find a viable candidate to run against that politician, preferably in the primary.
Here in California, we're unfortunately stuck with Boxer because her only real competition was Fiorina, who nearly bankrupted one of the largest computer companies in the world because she had such a poor understanding of business and technology, but we can get rid of Feinstein in 2012. Now is the time to start applying pressure, both directly (as in, "You stand no chance of reelection if you vote for this bill") and indirectly (as in choose a Democrat to unseat her in the primary race).
While you're at it, start working now on a constitutional amendment to allow recall of U.S. Senators.
Better example: you post a picture taken at a cafe on Flickr. In the background is the cute girl you just met. Your camera silently geotags the photo with GPS coordinates, showing the bar where you and this girl regularly hang out, and with a date telling when the photo was taken, hinting at when she would likely be in the bar next.
You find out the next week that the girl was in the witness protection program because of her abusive ex-boyfriend. Somehow, he managed to figure out what city she was in, and used facial recognition software on every photo that Flickr identified as having been taken in that area. Because of your photo, he found her and slit her throat.
You lost a girlfriend, the world lost a human being, and all because of a few privacy violations that you didn't even realize were happening. And that is why privacy is important—because there are bad people out there who will take advantage of any scrap of information they can get and use it against you.
Most of the folks coming out as against net neutrality are those who don't fully understand what true net neutrality means. Unfortunately, most of Congress also doesn't, so the folks coming out against it are probably right, if only because the odds of our government getting any complex technological issue right in the first hundred tries are about the same as the odds of our sun going supernova. Congress should instead focus on ensuring that the regulatory agencies have the authority to create the needed regulations.
Yeah, but I'd rather have somebody who actually takes the time to understand why SOPA/PIPA is fundamentally incompatible with DNSSEC than somebody who just works against SOPA/PIPA because the tech people in his/her district tell him/her to do so. Ultimately, the latter merely changes which lobbyists are writing the laws....
My problems are all software problems, but the problem is that they're debilitating software problems that prevent it from carrying out its primary purpose.
One does not play DVDs correctly. This started after a firmware update. At the DVD layer switch, it stalls for anywhere from a fraction of a second up to five or six seconds because it fails to buffer data far enough ahead to handle the layer change.
Both of my Samsung players fail to play the Blu-Ray versions of the last two Harry Potter movies. They seem to skip playback of a frame of audio about every twenty or thirty seconds in certain stretches, resulting in a very noticeable audible glitch. In the worst cases, you can see a visual glitch as well.
These are two different models, bought probably a year apart or more. Both have seen multiple firmware updates since the Harry Potter movies came out, none of which fixed the playback problems (nearly a year after the first problem disc came out). I can only assume, then, that Samsung doesn't care. By contrast, I understand that LG units had trouble playing these same discs, but they quickly released a firmware update to fix the problem.
My hatred for their products is further compounded by the nightmarish power lights. Every piece of Samsung gear I own has power lights that remain lit (sometimes a different color) even when the unit is turned off. I actually ended up putting a piece of black electric tape over the power button on my Samsung TV because it kept me up at night. Unfortunately, this also means I can't tell if I successfully turned it on because I can't see the power light blinking. And, of course, the light is controlled by software, so it would have been trivial for them to add an option to not leave the light on all the time, but they didn't. I don't know what Samsung was thinking, but it's a really horrible user experience, and there's no good way for the user to work around it without negatively impacting the device's operation. By contrast, my LG is completely dark when turned off—the way electronics should be.
So I don't see myself buying Samsung gear again in the near future. I bought their gear because they manufacture some of the best flat panels in the industry. It's a shame that the rest of their design doesn't meet the same high standards. Not by a long shot.
Yes, but the modern PC/104 bus designs are PCIe-based, not ISA-based.
And even if there is still a fair amount of original ISA-based work going on in the embedded space, that's only being done to maintain legacy infrastructure. Eventually, all that gear will have been replaced with newer devices based on PCI or PCIe, and they won't continue building ISA-based PC/104 devices, either. The only reason they still do it now is because the costs of replacing that infrastructure all at once are too high, leading to a much longer phase-out in the embedded space.
Yeah. This article's analysis is WAY off. I still mostly take photos to remember important events, trips, etc. The images I post are mostly the sorts of things that this article describes (for identy and communication), but that's a tiny fraction of the photos I take.
I don't know what Kodak's problem is other than that they focused on the wrong consumers. Sure, a lot of people buy cheap consumer cameras, but the real profit margins are in the DSLR space, which Kodak never really touched. Instead, they built digital backs for film-based SLR cameras, under the assumption that people would want to update their current film cameras to be digital. The problems with this are twofold:
Because Kodak did not anticipate this transition (and thus did not start making any DSLR cameras of their own), their only remaining sources of income were consumer-grade cameras and sale of image sensors to camera companies. By their very nature, however, consumer-grade cameras are low margin, and worse, their market got heavily cannibalized by camera phones, which seriously cut into those devices as a source of revenue.
This left image sensors. Thus, the only way for Kodak to stay afloat at that point was to continue to be at the forefront of image sensor technology. Unfortunately, the two main camera makers, Canon and Nikon, both build a lot of their own chips, and Sony and Foveon make great chips as well, which nearly eliminates the potential for image sensor sales except in their own cameras.
By the time all was said and done, their only way to make money was to compete in the compact camera market. Unfortunately, this market is almost purely feature-driven, which means that it demands ever-higher megapixel counts. Thus, they either had to buy chips from their competitors or keep up with them in their own image sensor designs. Worse, this meant supporting an image sensor division on sales of compact cameras—sales that were drying up.
At least that's my interpretation of things based on what I've seen/read. Kodak needed to have made a serious foray into the DSLR market instead of (or in addition to) being a temporary enabler for their competition. Had they done this, they would be right up there with Canon and Nikon in the DSLR space by now, and they wouldn't be bankrupt.
Let this be a warning to companies that ignore the pro market: you do so at your peril. The consumer market is great, but fickle. It can go away at a moment's notice, and when it does, if you don't have the loyal pro market, you're out of business.
And yet outside of a few hobbyists, the telegraph is defunct. The short-wave and long-wave radio bands are basically defunct. Analog TV is defunct. Celluloid movies are rapidly becoming defunct. ISA slots are defunct. It's not at all uncommon for a specific type of product in a larger class of products to go away if the replacements completely obviate the need for the original product. I see no reason why traditional desktops can't or shouldn't go the way of X terminals eventually.
That was the conclusion I came to after reading reviews of their Blu-Ray players a few weeks ago as well. I ended up buying an LG.
Then again, all the reviews said that Samsung makes some of the best Blu-Ray players, yet both of mine have been train wrecks to various degrees, which is why I'm replacing the worst of the pair with the LG, so....
A: They all just made my disqualified vendor list.
To be fair, Ford was already on that list. My Windstar's right turn signal started acting up about a year ago. Now, in addition to having become somewhat worse, the problem has also spread to the driver's side door lock, the driver's side window, and with varying degrees of frequency, both sliding door locks, the passenger's side door lock, and the door open chime/lights. The only door lock that *hasn't* started misbehaving over the last three is the tailgate (and even then, I can't be certain). I'm already on my third check engine light, at least two of which were directly caused by a design flaw in the front valve cover. The transmission has already been rebuilt once, and I've already had to replace both the power steering pump and the steering rack. Oh, and the ABS light regularly comes on. This is at a little over a hundred thousand miles. Like I really need another reason not to buy anything else from them. Ford, where Quality is #1, and Reliability is #2....
The correct statement is, "I have prepared a campaign platform and a war chest with the intent to run against you and unseat you during the primary if you are stupid enough to vote for this bill."
No, not all of them. Many of them just try to shove bad economic policy down our throats. And then there was Schwarzenegger, whose opinions generally made sense more often than not. If we got Republicans like that, I'd have a lot fewer qualms about voting for one every now and then. Unfortunately, we mostly get Republicans whose past achievements include bankrupting major high tech firms or running really sleazy e-businesses.
I've never provided identification when buying a ticket online, unless you consider a credit card number to be identification. And in theory, you have to have a valid photo ID to travel, but I've never had anyone ask for it except when checking baggage.
Still, on a pointless security scale that ranges from "valid photo ID required" to "must walk through the naked porn scanner", I'll take "valid photo ID required" any day. Just saying.
Err... too dumb. I don't know how I made that typo.... A hazard of posting on not enough sleep, I suppose.
Actually, it does. Unlike airline flights, most train tickets and bus tickets are refundable and changeable. Therefore, the TSA doesn't have nearly the ability to force people to agree to be searched that they do in the airports.
Also, I'm pretty sure the TSA has no legal authority to detain you anywhere other than an airport (and it is dubious even there), which means in the worst case, you just call a cab and beat the bus/train to the next station. That's not so easy with an airplane that doesn't make stops every few miles.
In effect, their enforcement power is near zero everywhere but on airplanes, and the sole reason they have so much power on airplanes is because the airlines allow them that power. That's why I no longer fly unless there is no alternative mode of transportation available. Screw the airlines. Those who are complicit with tyranny are guilty of it themselves.
Not all of them.... With the number of Silicon Valley voters screaming about SOPA/PIPA, Feinstein had best reconsider her support. I'm pretty sure she's not gonna get reelected if she doesn't. In fact, according to recent polls, more people in California favor throwing her out of Congress than reelecting her. This is in California, where they haven't elected a Republican to the U.S. Senate since the 1960s.
The cynic in me says that they'll probably also be of a kind that doesn't change color until you've gotten a fatal dose....
Amtrak is actually pretty good when it comes to the way they handle the TSA. Last time the TSA tried to search random passengers, the Amtrak Police had them escorted off the premises nationwide, and they were banned from Amtrak for a substantial period of time.
The Amtrak leadership is well aware that the only reason their ridership has been skyrocketing the past few years is that they don't put passengers through that bullshit. Riding Amtrak sends about as clear a message as you can send, and short of an explicit Congressional order mandating it, you're not going to see them allow the TSA to pull a power trip any time soon. To the extent that they are there at all, it is entirely at the discretion of the Amtrak Police.
More to the point, even the TSA has to be aware that they aren't useful when it come to trains. If a terrorist wanted to blow up a passenger train, there are approximately 21,000 miles of track that carry Amtrak passengers, and all it takes is one bomb on a trestle somewhere to kill an order of magnitude more people than you could kill with any bomb on the train itself. No terrorist is stupid enough to be a suicide bomber when they could achieve a bigger result (and a much longer-term disruption) by being the non-suicide kind, and any politician or other government official who believes otherwise is too dump to flip burgers.
In short, the TSA is about as useful to Amtrak as a tiger-repelling rock. Amtrak knows this, so they aren't afraid to tell the TSA to get bent when they step out of line.
In established scientific fields, that might be true, but on the bleeding edge of research, initial failures quite frequently lead to subsequent successes when the hypothesis is correct, but the test equipment, methodology, or sample size is insufficient. Similarly, initial successes often stop working.
One great example of this is medical research. Frequently, things that aren't initially reproducible in studies later turn out to occur far more reliably in the real world. Half the recalls in medicine occurred because some rare negative side effect that only showed up once in the first test and wasn't reproducible in subsequent small scale tests turned out to be fairly common once the product went out into the wild.
For another great example, consider the cat's whisker radio. Although the initial experiment was a success, later attempts to reproduce the same results were fraught with failure. In spite of that, eventually they figured out how to make it work fairly reliably, and that design became the earliest semiconductor-based diode. Were it not for someone having the courage to try to reproduce those early experiments repeatedly until they figured out what the difference was, the computer you used to type your comment would likely not exist.
All it takes is a single critical difference in an experiment to make the difference between successfully reproducing an outcome and not reproducing it. Since humans are far from perfect, basic logic dictates that a fair number of irreproducible experiments would probably be reproducible if someone hadn't forgotten to document some very subtle detail of the experiment (or worse, some very subtle detail of the test subjects). If you aren't seeing this in practice, it probably indicates that there is a wealth of knowledge waiting for those with the courage and insight to try harder to reproduce experiments that initially seemed unreproducible.
In other words, either you're wrong, or we're missing out on a lot of important discoveries. Take your pick.
Yeah, but "Little Bobby" is not the name of a major company. There are probably hundreds of thousands of pages (if not millions) that link to or talk about that company. The number of them that use words like "crook" should be pretty low, statistically. The chances of such a word being frequently used in connection with that company due to a fluke or one brilliantly net-savvy person with a grudge should be fairly remote. Unless Google's algorithm absolutely sucks, it's far more likely that a lot of people legitimately criticized this business, and they got mad and decided to sue the messenger.
Either way, this is why most businesses over a certain size have entire teams of people that scour the web for unfavorable comments about their business and try to find ways to resolve the situation amicably. If their business isn't doing that, then IMO, it's their own damn fault that their name is associated with such words, whether they are crooks or aren't. Resolving disputes is simply part of doing business as a high-profile company.
Crooks, that is? One really has to wonder how many people they had to screw over for this auto-complete suggestion to be show up. That sort of autocomplete result is usually an indication of a fairly large number of people using those words in the same general context. Even now, the sixth suggestion for them ends with problème....
Maybe Google's argument should not have been that Google wasn't responsible, but rather that it's not libel if it is true (I'm assuming that this is the case under French law) or that it is not possible to defame something that is already a disgrace....
More to the point, maybe the company in question should focus more on improving their image by actually improving their customer service instead of just metaphorically wallpapering over the rotting walls. If enough people think they are crooks to cause the Google search results to suggest this for several years in a row, that strongly suggests a very serious problem with the way they do business. I'm not saying that Lyonnaise de Garantie is a bunch of crooks, but they clearly have a serious image problem, and you can't cure that kind of problem by trying to sue people into silence. Doing so can only result in the Streisand Effect.
Nah. Irreproducible results are a scientific matter. Often one irreproducible result later turns out to be reproducible after controlling for something that you weren't looking for before.
Even without any of that interference, cities will always cost a lot more than the middle of nowhere because of basic supply and demand. Everyone wants a home close to where they work, and there aren't enough homes, so the cost is going to naturally level off at a much higher price than the cost of construction. It's the nature of the beast.
As to whether it would naturally settle at such a high price, maybe, maybe not. Given how many people in the U.S. have been getting loans that were hopelessly beyond what they could actually afford, I suspect the folks who wanted those homes would still have found a way to take out a loan (thanks to greedy businesses). The only difference is that the rate of default would be higher because of the higher interest rates and lack of mortgage guarantees.
In other words, supply and demand only determine the price if the price affects demand. When it comes to housing, I've seen no evidence that this is the case, other than when the economy is in a nosedive (at which point people stop buying because they expect prices to fall and don't want to pay more than the home will be worth when they sell it). In the normal course of the economy, demand is mostly driven by location.
It still does if you design the floor plan yourself and build a small house and limit yourself to the basics (carpet, not hardwood, let your builder build your cabinets instead of hiring out to a cabinet maker, use imitation counters instead of granite, no texture on the walls, etc. You can build a very nice, large house for three or four years salary in most parts of the U.S., assuming you aren't building in a major city.
Alternatively, there are some fairly nice double-wide modular homes that will only cost you about $125,000 plus delivery. Admittedly, that's probably two or three years salary, on average, but it's also completely turnkey.
You're kind of missing the point. There are tens of thousands of former communications majors working in other industries, from corporate marketing to waiting tables in Hollywood while waiting for their big break. There are more people out there who understand the concepts than there are jobs in the field—particularly if you limit yourself to jobs that actually pay well (which is why I double-majored in CS).
Even if only one percent of the people who tried their hand at content creation were good at it, there would still be more creative people working outside the industry than in it.
As for acting, lots of talent-free people try out for things, but that doesn't mean it's hard to find people with talent. Just go to a high school or college play, take notes about who is good, and ask them to act in your indy production. Been there, done that.
BTW, if you think 38 million dollars is a bare bones budget, you don't get it. That's actually above the Hollywood average (which is about $34 million, last I checked). There are many, many films by major studios that cost a fraction of that. $38 million is Hollywood low budget like low Earth orbit is a little too far to hit by batting a baseball.