I like Sony's digital reader better than my Kindle, can I put my Kindle content on my Sony reader? Or am I at the mercy of what Amazon/Sony/other choose to support?
It sounds strange talking about any kind of copyright related issue, but I really like the way they are handling ebooks. Amazon has not been at all cooperative in the ebook world, and the reason you would not be able to play Kindle content on your Sony or vice versa is squarely the fault of Amazon and the Kindle. They are relying on their own vast book stores to avoid playing ball with everyone else in the industry, which is why I say avoid any iteration of the Kindle like the plague until it uses the same standard format that everyone else is at least giving the option to use.
Sony, on the other hand, used to use a proprietary.lrf format that did not work in other devices, but they have recently switched to ePub, which is an Adobe format based on the Open Publishing Standard. You can get ePub books at any number of online stores, and you can use it in the Sony, B&N, and a dozen other smaller brands. Regarding device support, when Sony converted their store to entirely ePub, they offered to update every single device that could not read ePub for free. No device was made obsolete by the switch, and frankly, I was really impressed.
I know it's strange, but at this point Sony is the only brand I trust in the ebook world at this point. Amazon, however, is the evil wizard locked in his tower destroying the landscape while distracting the people with pretty butterflies and promises of fresh fruits. Or something. I'm not sure where I was going with that.
You defend the idea of Communism, yet hint at exactly why it doesn't work. Pure Communism cannot and will not ever work for the same reasons that pure Democracy cannot and will not work - natural cooperation breaks down when the group size becomes so large that individuals do not know every other member of the group on a personal level. Our congress would not function if it got much larger than it is. If it grew to over 1,000 members our government would almost certainly collapse, as there would be no way to prevent the tyranny of the masses.
Incidentally, Capitalism doesn't get it right either, but it much better accounts for human nature than Communism does on a large scale. Pure Capitalism misses the mark because it assumes we are completely self-serving, seeking only for our own best advantage. This is not the case - there is altruism within us, and while not as prevalent as our self-serving nature, it tends to screw up the Capitalist ideal if not taken account for. Incidentally this altruistic streak really screws with Game Theory, making it completely unreliable. In any case, Capitalism does not correct the wealth disparity between the rich and the poor, however it does improve -everyone's- position, making a poor capitalist much richer than a poor communist.
Regarding Carl Marx, I commit a conscious logical fallacy with any of his ideas ever since I did a research paper on the man in junior high. He was a serious piece of shit human being who would rather bemoan his status in the world than get off his ass and work to provide food for his starving family. I have absolutely no respect for him or any of his ideas, and you will never convince me of the value his concepts while invoking his name. When I read about him, all I really wanted to do was kick his whiny little ass. Incidentally, I feel the same way about-able bodied people who make excuses about why they cannot work or need support when I see for-hire signs not a half a block down from where they panhandle. That Carl Marx was able to gain world wide notariety and respect probably for a number of centuries while being a piece of shit human being just pisses me off even more.
In any case, Bell Labs did not operate in a free market...
But they did, AT&T did not, but Bell Labs entire purpose was to expand it's reach beyond its limited monopoly over phone systems. They had no monopoly anywhere else, but they had the resources to attempt expansion and create new competing products.
It was the free market that drove that, not government funding. The truth is, the amount government funded research is pitiful compared to private research, and large companies - like AT&T back in the day - would pick up a large portion of the slack if government funding wasn't covering the basic research.
Insofar as that is true, how is that a benefit of capitalism?
I believe he simply meant free markets, but the free market is the cornerstone of capitalism.
For a good comparison, look at the Cold War and Communist Russia vs Capitalist America. The Russian standard of living was dropping because Communism does not provide an incentive to increase worker efficiency (other than what you can get by tyranical means), whereas in the US the economy was growing more efficient and the standard of living was skyrocketing. Both the US and Russia were tired and worn after the war, but the free market system and the fact that so many women had joined the work force meant the US economy boomed. The only real difference for Russia was a lack of a free market. The average standard of living in Russia didn't improve until the markets were opened up and made more free.
I am of course ignoring the space race and nuclear arms race, which had little immediate impact on the economy of either country. This was purely government driven for both countries, and as such they ran at similar efficiencies, Russia even beating us to space, but not the moon.
All this to say, Communism looks really nice on paper, but fails once it grows beyond a relatively small size. That isn't to say as Capitalists we don't recognize modern ills and inequalities and attempt to mitigate them, but really it just tends to make things worse, despite good intentions. Simply try to prevent abuse, don't force kindness, and I think things will take care of themselves nicely.
Additionally, revolutionary technology (e.g. the transistor) depends on a background knowledge of science which is generally *not* obtained by companies seeking a profit, but by government funded research.
Ummm... the transistor was invented at Bell Labs, which was a subsidiary of Bell Communications, which was a private company. Bell Labs is still a private institution, and their discoveries are intended to produce items for a profit. They are simply smart enough to realize you can't necessarily tell someone what to invent, and put up with thousands of unmarketable inventions to get the few hugely profitable ones.
I don't know if you know this, but Moscow is not on a mountain. The most likely place for them to get the snow to dump would be over a mountain, so your scenario is completely backwards.
Still, I'm a bit surprised that they would try this, completely eliminating the snow will slow the warm-up process in spring, and any vegetation will have a much harder time coming back. The snow prevents the ground from freezing as deeply - without it a lot of plant roots die during winter. Do they really have so few plants in Moscow that this is no big deal? No parks or anything?
What we do in Alaska is plow the snow up on the sidewalk, and then use single-person driveable snowblowers (like those mini-backhoes you see) to clear the sidewalks. They are wide enough to get the whole sidewalk in one pass, and pedestrians are only inconvenienced a day or two. They would have been trapsing through a foot of snow anyway, so no big change.
For really small streets a single plow will do the job, for medium sized streets two plows tag-team it, and for the major roads it is generally two to three plows plus giant snowblowers dumping snow into trucks for removal (since too much would accumulate on the side of the street).
And of course, we aren't stupid enough to salt the roads here - coarse sand works just as well and won't rust your underbody or kill plant life.
As far as nature goes, that's really small scale. Now, if they were trying to do this for all of eastern Russia, that's different, but they were just trying for Moscow. Less snow in Moscow wouldn't do that much, though it would probably slow the spring recovery a bit - less insulation for the plants during winter means the ground freezes deeper, and no runoff from snow melt means plants get their first watering later.
Having said that, I'm also an avid skier, so it should go without saying that I don't want to see snow-free winters. Ideally I would just like snow to stay where it belongs.
The snow was there first.
Anyway where I live it's 4 or 5 months of glistening white snow, if you like the white stuff but hate the brown, you just need to move further north, that's all. Of course, we still get about a month of nasty brown shit, but it also means things are warming up, and we aren't too upset about that when it comes.;)
The reason people die when it snows is because people are dumbasses. People die in car accidents in the summer also because they (or people who hit them) are dumbasses.
What's this white stuff? Made of ice you say? Well that can't mean it's slippery, and if it isn't slippery why should I slow down and give everyone around me more room?
Dumbasses.
Also, the snow in cold climates is very important to keep plants from dieing in the extreme cold season. For something buried in snow, -20 outside will be right around freezing inside - snow is a fantastic insulator.
If the Ginko was doing anything, it should have shown a slight improvement over the placebo even at 120mg. If the results come back essentially the same, then it is obviously not the Ginko improving memory.
The placebo effect is powerful on its own, and had they used another control group who took nothing you probably would have seen the Ginko and placebo groups both averaging better scores than the control group. That doesn't mean the Ginko itself actually does anything.
Even assuming you are right that Ginko will have literally no affect whatsoever until the dosage is above a certain level (which I find ridiculous, btw), if it is unsafe to use at its effective dosage, what's the point?
That isn't really important when you are looking to determine if the effects of a drug are real or not. If they are real, the effects will be greater than that of the placebo. If not, they will be about the same. That's all you really want to get out of these studies, they aren't looking to study the placebo effect, just the actual effectiveness of the drug.
The second portion of that is unneccessary, because if the drug really works the people who take the placebo will see less of an improvement than the ones taking the drug. There isn't any need to over-complicate it.
If the placebo and the drug both have identical effects, then the drug is actually a placebo also.
The placebo effect is the same as the occasional cancer patient that goes into remission when the best medical science said there was no way to survive. It definitely exists, and there is no good explanation for it. It's like a belief that you will recover, or in the case of placebos that some drug will improve whatever function, triggers something in your body to put out a little extra effort, and it is sometimes enough to turn the tide.
For simple things like a memory test, just believing you have a better chance of doing well allows you to do better than you would ordinarily. If you don't think it works, then it probably won't.
You've got to remember that even cognitive processes rely on physical bodily functions - mood depends on more of one type of chemical firing off than another, so even things like a placebo anti-depressant effect is changing the physical responses in your brain. It's quite impressive, when you think about it.
CDMA is 2g, GSM is 3g, and there is 4g in the works (sprint has rolled out some in limited areas).
Everything new is GSM because GSM is the newer tech. GSM can handle a lot more data than CDMA, which is why there are very few good smartphones that use CDMA. Also, GSM is more popular now than CDMA, so unless you're going to manufacture two different phones, you make a GSM phone only.
It's just progress, CDMA2000 was an slight upgrade to technically bring it up to 3g specs, but the margin is so tight in reality it never gets close. 3g simply allows a better cell phone experience than CDMA.
You can't really blame manufacturers for moving on, smartphones aren't nearly as useful on a CDMA network.
Remember that you have to buy the more expensive smartphone data plans for this phone - usually $30 per month for just the data portion.
The subsidised plan is $80 a month when you take away the price of the phone, so the unsub plan would need to be less than $65 per month to make it cheaper. That's a tough one to get where I live, but it is possible. It's not "vastly cheaper" though. To look at it another way, you need to save at least $15 on the monthly bill to do better with the unsubbed phone. If you're saving $20-25 per month, then you're getting into the "vastly cheaper" area. If you can get a deal like that, I'm extremely jealous regardless of the phone.
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I like Sony's digital reader better than my Kindle, can I put my Kindle content on my Sony reader? Or am I at the mercy of what Amazon/Sony/other choose to support?
It sounds strange talking about any kind of copyright related issue, but I really like the way they are handling ebooks. Amazon has not been at all cooperative in the ebook world, and the reason you would not be able to play Kindle content on your Sony or vice versa is squarely the fault of Amazon and the Kindle. They are relying on their own vast book stores to avoid playing ball with everyone else in the industry, which is why I say avoid any iteration of the Kindle like the plague until it uses the same standard format that everyone else is at least giving the option to use.
Sony, on the other hand, used to use a proprietary .lrf format that did not work in other devices, but they have recently switched to ePub, which is an Adobe format based on the Open Publishing Standard. You can get ePub books at any number of online stores, and you can use it in the Sony, B&N, and a dozen other smaller brands. Regarding device support, when Sony converted their store to entirely ePub, they offered to update every single device that could not read ePub for free. No device was made obsolete by the switch, and frankly, I was really impressed.
I know it's strange, but at this point Sony is the only brand I trust in the ebook world at this point. Amazon, however, is the evil wizard locked in his tower destroying the landscape while distracting the people with pretty butterflies and promises of fresh fruits. Or something. I'm not sure where I was going with that.
You defend the idea of Communism, yet hint at exactly why it doesn't work. Pure Communism cannot and will not ever work for the same reasons that pure Democracy cannot and will not work - natural cooperation breaks down when the group size becomes so large that individuals do not know every other member of the group on a personal level. Our congress would not function if it got much larger than it is. If it grew to over 1,000 members our government would almost certainly collapse, as there would be no way to prevent the tyranny of the masses.
Incidentally, Capitalism doesn't get it right either, but it much better accounts for human nature than Communism does on a large scale. Pure Capitalism misses the mark because it assumes we are completely self-serving, seeking only for our own best advantage. This is not the case - there is altruism within us, and while not as prevalent as our self-serving nature, it tends to screw up the Capitalist ideal if not taken account for. Incidentally this altruistic streak really screws with Game Theory, making it completely unreliable. In any case, Capitalism does not correct the wealth disparity between the rich and the poor, however it does improve -everyone's- position, making a poor capitalist much richer than a poor communist.
Regarding Carl Marx, I commit a conscious logical fallacy with any of his ideas ever since I did a research paper on the man in junior high. He was a serious piece of shit human being who would rather bemoan his status in the world than get off his ass and work to provide food for his starving family. I have absolutely no respect for him or any of his ideas, and you will never convince me of the value his concepts while invoking his name. When I read about him, all I really wanted to do was kick his whiny little ass. Incidentally, I feel the same way about-able bodied people who make excuses about why they cannot work or need support when I see for-hire signs not a half a block down from where they panhandle. That Carl Marx was able to gain world wide notariety and respect probably for a number of centuries while being a piece of shit human being just pisses me off even more.
In any case, Bell Labs did not operate in a free market...
But they did, AT&T did not, but Bell Labs entire purpose was to expand it's reach beyond its limited monopoly over phone systems. They had no monopoly anywhere else, but they had the resources to attempt expansion and create new competing products.
It was the free market that drove that, not government funding. The truth is, the amount government funded research is pitiful compared to private research, and large companies - like AT&T back in the day - would pick up a large portion of the slack if government funding wasn't covering the basic research.
Insofar as that is true, how is that a benefit of capitalism?
I believe he simply meant free markets, but the free market is the cornerstone of capitalism.
For a good comparison, look at the Cold War and Communist Russia vs Capitalist America. The Russian standard of living was dropping because Communism does not provide an incentive to increase worker efficiency (other than what you can get by tyranical means), whereas in the US the economy was growing more efficient and the standard of living was skyrocketing. Both the US and Russia were tired and worn after the war, but the free market system and the fact that so many women had joined the work force meant the US economy boomed. The only real difference for Russia was a lack of a free market. The average standard of living in Russia didn't improve until the markets were opened up and made more free.
I am of course ignoring the space race and nuclear arms race, which had little immediate impact on the economy of either country. This was purely government driven for both countries, and as such they ran at similar efficiencies, Russia even beating us to space, but not the moon.
All this to say, Communism looks really nice on paper, but fails once it grows beyond a relatively small size. That isn't to say as Capitalists we don't recognize modern ills and inequalities and attempt to mitigate them, but really it just tends to make things worse, despite good intentions. Simply try to prevent abuse, don't force kindness, and I think things will take care of themselves nicely.
Additionally, revolutionary technology (e.g. the transistor) depends on a background knowledge of science which is generally *not* obtained by companies seeking a profit, but by government funded research.
Ummm... the transistor was invented at Bell Labs, which was a subsidiary of Bell Communications, which was a private company. Bell Labs is still a private institution, and their discoveries are intended to produce items for a profit. They are simply smart enough to realize you can't necessarily tell someone what to invent, and put up with thousands of unmarketable inventions to get the few hugely profitable ones.
lol
I don't know if you know this, but Moscow is not on a mountain. The most likely place for them to get the snow to dump would be over a mountain, so your scenario is completely backwards.
Still, I'm a bit surprised that they would try this, completely eliminating the snow will slow the warm-up process in spring, and any vegetation will have a much harder time coming back. The snow prevents the ground from freezing as deeply - without it a lot of plant roots die during winter. Do they really have so few plants in Moscow that this is no big deal? No parks or anything?
Sounds like a sad, dreary place if so.
What we do in Alaska is plow the snow up on the sidewalk, and then use single-person driveable snowblowers (like those mini-backhoes you see) to clear the sidewalks. They are wide enough to get the whole sidewalk in one pass, and pedestrians are only inconvenienced a day or two. They would have been trapsing through a foot of snow anyway, so no big change.
For really small streets a single plow will do the job, for medium sized streets two plows tag-team it, and for the major roads it is generally two to three plows plus giant snowblowers dumping snow into trucks for removal (since too much would accumulate on the side of the street).
And of course, we aren't stupid enough to salt the roads here - coarse sand works just as well and won't rust your underbody or kill plant life.
As far as nature goes, that's really small scale. Now, if they were trying to do this for all of eastern Russia, that's different, but they were just trying for Moscow. Less snow in Moscow wouldn't do that much, though it would probably slow the spring recovery a bit - less insulation for the plants during winter means the ground freezes deeper, and no runoff from snow melt means plants get their first watering later.
That reminds me of the move "Elf", when he finds the coffee shop with a sign that said "World's Best Cup of Coffee". The coffee, of course, was shit.
It's like calling a big guy "Tiny", or a midget "Mr. Big".
It's an irony thing - The BEST place on earth *wink wink*.
Having said that, I'm also an avid skier, so it should go without saying that I don't want to see snow-free winters. Ideally I would just like snow to stay where it belongs.
The snow was there first.
Anyway where I live it's 4 or 5 months of glistening white snow, if you like the white stuff but hate the brown, you just need to move further north, that's all. Of course, we still get about a month of nasty brown shit, but it also means things are warming up, and we aren't too upset about that when it comes. ;)
The reason people die when it snows is because people are dumbasses. People die in car accidents in the summer also because they (or people who hit them) are dumbasses.
What's this white stuff? Made of ice you say? Well that can't mean it's slippery, and if it isn't slippery why should I slow down and give everyone around me more room?
Dumbasses.
Also, the snow in cold climates is very important to keep plants from dieing in the extreme cold season. For something buried in snow, -20 outside will be right around freezing inside - snow is a fantastic insulator.
Read much? He mentions that.
That's just because you're hypersensitive.
It's the same thing the colors red, yellow, blue, and white are good for. Not purple though, purple sucks. ;)
The great thing about placebo is it works on whatever you want it to work on!
Got a toothache? Placebo!
Feeling a bit run down? Placebo!
Need to study extra hard for that test? Placebo!
It really is the wonder drug of our modern age. Too bad it doesn't work if you know it's Placebo. :/
That's so cruel, way to spoil your mornings huh?
FFS the GP spelled it wright, why can't you?
ROTFL!!
I love irony.
The real connundrum with psychosomatic medicine is that anybody who knows how to use it, can't.
If the Ginko was doing anything, it should have shown a slight improvement over the placebo even at 120mg. If the results come back essentially the same, then it is obviously not the Ginko improving memory.
The placebo effect is powerful on its own, and had they used another control group who took nothing you probably would have seen the Ginko and placebo groups both averaging better scores than the control group. That doesn't mean the Ginko itself actually does anything.
Even assuming you are right that Ginko will have literally no affect whatsoever until the dosage is above a certain level (which I find ridiculous, btw), if it is unsafe to use at its effective dosage, what's the point?
That isn't really important when you are looking to determine if the effects of a drug are real or not. If they are real, the effects will be greater than that of the placebo. If not, they will be about the same. That's all you really want to get out of these studies, they aren't looking to study the placebo effect, just the actual effectiveness of the drug.
The second portion of that is unneccessary, because if the drug really works the people who take the placebo will see less of an improvement than the ones taking the drug. There isn't any need to over-complicate it.
If the placebo and the drug both have identical effects, then the drug is actually a placebo also.
The placebo effect is the same as the occasional cancer patient that goes into remission when the best medical science said there was no way to survive. It definitely exists, and there is no good explanation for it. It's like a belief that you will recover, or in the case of placebos that some drug will improve whatever function, triggers something in your body to put out a little extra effort, and it is sometimes enough to turn the tide.
For simple things like a memory test, just believing you have a better chance of doing well allows you to do better than you would ordinarily. If you don't think it works, then it probably won't.
You've got to remember that even cognitive processes rely on physical bodily functions - mood depends on more of one type of chemical firing off than another, so even things like a placebo anti-depressant effect is changing the physical responses in your brain. It's quite impressive, when you think about it.
Why? The touchscreen buttons are so much easier.
CDMA is 2g, GSM is 3g, and there is 4g in the works (sprint has rolled out some in limited areas).
Everything new is GSM because GSM is the newer tech. GSM can handle a lot more data than CDMA, which is why there are very few good smartphones that use CDMA. Also, GSM is more popular now than CDMA, so unless you're going to manufacture two different phones, you make a GSM phone only.
It's just progress, CDMA2000 was an slight upgrade to technically bring it up to 3g specs, but the margin is so tight in reality it never gets close. 3g simply allows a better cell phone experience than CDMA.
You can't really blame manufacturers for moving on, smartphones aren't nearly as useful on a CDMA network.
Remember that you have to buy the more expensive smartphone data plans for this phone - usually $30 per month for just the data portion.
The subsidised plan is $80 a month when you take away the price of the phone, so the unsub plan would need to be less than $65 per month to make it cheaper. That's a tough one to get where I live, but it is possible. It's not "vastly cheaper" though. To look at it another way, you need to save at least $15 on the monthly bill to do better with the unsubbed phone. If you're saving $20-25 per month, then you're getting into the "vastly cheaper" area. If you can get a deal like that, I'm extremely jealous regardless of the phone.