Hopefully getting their control channel hammered with SMS noise will induce them to offer some sort of reasonably priced modest-speed data mechanism that isn't a horrible pile of hack...
SMS might be over the control channel, but it's also the lowest possible priority over said channel. In short, not only will the latency be ridiculous and the bandwidth tiny, you'll also experience constantly high rates of dropped packets. It's a neat little project in a 'just to see if you can do it' kind of way, but I highly doubt it was ever meant to be practical.
It has been nice not having sales taxes on-line, but it can't last forever.
Why not? The money was taxed when it was given to me (in my paycheck) and will be taxed when Amazon announces their profits, and will be taxed again when Amazon uses it to pay their payroll or buy materials. Unless it goes overseas or gets shoved in a mattress somewhere taxes will capture it eventually. Want to increase tax revenue? Reduce the trade deficit, discourage off shoring, and make sure inflation stays at a nice healthy 2-4% per year (to encourage spending).
I can't be the only person to think that the real reason is that the built in search features on Windows 7 (and Vista for that matter) are actually pretty good. I personally haven't felt the need to go grab a desktop search tool for windows since indexed searching was baked into the OS.
Sell it at $300 and a tiny loss, continue to improve the software (for the love of god how much behind the scenes logging do you really need!?) and as soon as possible put out a hardware revision that drops you below $250 for the bill of materials plus assembly. Killing production is killing the entire platform and, having recently gotten my $99 touchpad, I'd say the platform (with a half dozen patches and tweaks) is actually very strong.
Quite frankly, I wish some of the big players with vested commercial interests in a good-performing internet (like Google, Amazon, or Microsoft) would pitch in on some investment funding to upgrade the infrastructure itself.
You'd have several hundred lawsuits from several dozen companies that have a vested interest in keeping control over the existing infrastructure. You'd have antitrust investigations being called for, contract lawsuits against the cities that promised them monopoly access, and several billion dollars poured into lobbying to make sure that it cannot and will not happen.
And keep in mind, on the low tiers the vast majority of laid fiber is dark, just waiting for someone to actually plug into it and use it. And I'd be shocked if that didn't include the transatlantic lines as well. On the higher tiers, many (most) cities don't have proper conduit installed, which means installing fiber to the front door is going to be an expensive, messy, time consuming process even if they got through the legal and bureaucratic nightmare.
400 years is very recent history? And actually that's just the first example of a legal statute explicitly spelling out the idea of copyright. Actually, the first exclusive licenses to works were given out in the late 1400s, which just happens to coincide with the time that movable type was becoming common. In other words, copyright has existed almost exactly as long as there have been methods to cheaply reproduce a work.
If you paid good money for an "exclusive" license on some photos and then posted them to a public facing website you are incredibly retarded. My data is mine and your data is yours, but as soon as you give me a copy of your data, that copy becomes mine. You have no way to enforce what I do with it (well, you could take me to court if there are copyright or other violations but that is ugly and expensive) after you send it to my browser.
They said "do something to help the environment" not "do something that make it look like your helping the environment without actually producing any measurable benefit". Is there an phrase equivalent to security theater for environmentalism? Greenwashing maybe?
I'd miss it. For every dollar that the EPA spends on stuff like this, or even on less frivolous but still apparently controversial things like protected rivers from over use, they spend dozens on things like keeping factories and power plants in check. Lets not forget what things were like before the EPA. CO2 and global warming would be the least of our problems without someone with the authority to prevent outright abuse of the ecosystem.
Just because centralized communism fails miserably when applied to reality doesn't mean that the issues the GP brings up can't be solved or at least vastly improved. The argument can certainly be made that most of socialized Europe outperforms the US in some or all of those areas.
Citations for any of that? There might be a perceived risk of lawsuit in that situation, but a quick Google search turns up many, many more instances of people suing the school after their kid gets bullied for years on end without the bullies being punished. In fact, the only instances I see on the first page of results are parents suing for wildly inappropriate punishments (locked in a broom closet for 8 hours or tasered in the class room). The only instance that I wouldn't agree with the parents' actions is a case where kids were suspended for drinking on a class trip.
It would be nice if I could convince myself that this is the bottom. I can't see any reasonable way to go lower, but I don't expect whether something is reasonable or not to dissuade someone from trying.
I don't disagree with you but I can't agree with putting something on a kids permanent record for a first offense scuffle.
If there's a fight in which no weapons are used and neither participant is seriously injured it's just a freaking fight. It's happened with teenage boys (and girls for that matter) since... probably since we came down out of the trees for Christ sake. Punishment yes, preferably from the parents but if necessary from the school as well. A second offense I could see maybe trying him for assault, but really to me a second offense should be a visit to the school therapist to see what the hell's really going on, because 9 times out of 10 there's going to be a reason.
Of course, I don't know anything about the OPs story. Could be the kid hit the 14 year old with a baseball bat across the head with no warning, but I think even a doting parent would have blinders that large.
Some changes are probably related to gameplay, San Fransisco just isn't made to drive through at 120 MPH; it wouldn't be more frustrating than fun. I suspect the reason it feels so jarring is because they tried to recreate a real place and then tacked the gameplay modification on top wherever they could. I'd think the GTA technique of designing maps that are good for gameplay then making changes to give the look of the city is probably more effective in actually feeling like the real thing.
Their 'Always connected' DRM would boot you from the game with no warning if it lost it's connection to the network. Connection at startup isn't nearly as onerous, for my use case it probably wouldn't bother me except in very rare circumstances but I still won't put up with that level of DRM, all they have to do is pull the plug on their servers and *poof* "your" copy of the game is useless.
Not in the summary is an opt in feature that will report your memory use (presumably along with what pages you are on and extentions you are using) back to Mozilla so they can finally put the "but FF using 2 GB of RAM on my machine" bugs to rest, either by fixing them or by dispelling the myth depending on which is the case.
Chiropractics is really two fields pretending to be one. On the one side, you have well educated people who are frequently also medical doctors using a range of physical therapy methods to improve back and spinal health. Still concerning in that they tend to see a large number of issues stemming from the spine but they at least try to be analytical and evidence based. On the other side you have people that believe that literally every human ailment is caused by spinal disorders, from a sore back to cancer to AIDS. Goodyear appears to have attended a 4 year university which teaches the former, so I personally don't see that as reason enough to vilify him.
His complete and utter lack of understanding when it comes to the very basics of evolution (though he does at least claim to believe it even if he clearly doesn't understand the concept) is much more concerning for a man in his position.
Fair enough, and I'm certainly not a chemist so I'm in no position to say that you're wrong, and based on what little I know about modeling in the pharmaceutical industry it certainly sounds, on the surface at least, that you're right. Your comment could easily be read as a question, "why didn't they do this earlier?", which is probably a very good question to ask, rather than the way I read it. No offense meant.
What's going on with Slashdot lately? There's a major advance in materials science research and so far a full 100% of the comments are either sarcasm about how stupid the research is or someone arguing that the solution is obvious.
I just... don't even know what to say anymore. Companies have been pouring money down the drain trying to discover these materials and these guys figured out how to do it more quickly, more effectively, and at a fraction of the cost. Obviously this is a problem that has been looked at by hundreds of engineers and scientists, and this is the first group to successfully apply this technique; and all we can muster is a collective circle jerk trying to sound smart.
so why the sudden need for a vague catch-all grant that won't seriously fund much research in any of these areas[?]
Because saying: "In 30 years it will be impossible to feed everyone in the world using current technology due to shortages of petroleum based fertilizers, increased fuel costs, and exhaustion of arable land. We need to invest money into advanced, sustainable hydroponics or we'll be facing a Malthusian catastrophe" just doesn't have the same ring to it. Something like this is designed to capture the public's imagination and even more importantly, is meant to attract attention to a wide range of specialties who wouldn't normally interact.
No kidding. If I personally had to pick, I'd say a generation ship carved out of an asteroid a la Greg Bear's Eon. Though how you get something that large moving at an appreciable speed would be an interesting challange... I don't think even a thermonuclear powered Orion drive could manage to move a mass that large at anything approaching acceptable speeds (and for a generation ship, a thousand years transit time could be deemed 'acceptable')
If the research is useful and worthwhile, it should be defended on its own merits[...]
Ok, how about this. In order to even begin to think about starting to build an interstellar ship there are many, many problems that need to be solved. Each and every one of them has potential benefits to the people right down here on planet Earth.
Cheap transit to LEO. Orbital mining for metals and volatiles. Artificial intelligence and other computer science areas. New energy storage and generation technologies. Genetic engineering. Advanced hydroponics.
[Twitter based trading] made 1.85 percent in its first month of trading, ending in July. This not only beat the S&P, which fell 2.2 percent that month, but it also beat out the average of other hedge funds, at 0.76 percent.
So it's pretty significant. It's all based on a paper which showed that there's a 5-8 day lag in the correlation between Twitter sentiment and stock price. If something is getting negative attention on Twitter, there is a nearly 90% chance that it's stock price will drop ~1 week later with a similar relationship for positive attention. I imagine people hear something on twitter, make an appointment with their financial adviser or make a note, then a few days later actually do the trade based on the information they gathered. There's hardly anything illogical in basing stock trades on consumer sentiment, this is just a new way to gauge consumer sentiment in near real time.
Keep in mind, this is a business where people make millions of dollars based on having information 10 ms before the competition.
Is like saying that playing poker is all luck. Yeah, luck plays a part in it, maybe even a big part, but it's still the same group of 20 top players that finds themselves at the final table at tournament after tournament. People like Warren Buffet didn't become ludicrously rich just because they got lucky.
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully getting their control channel hammered with SMS noise will induce them to offer some sort of reasonably priced modest-speed data mechanism that isn't a horrible pile of hack...
SMS might be over the control channel, but it's also the lowest possible priority over said channel. In short, not only will the latency be ridiculous and the bandwidth tiny, you'll also experience constantly high rates of dropped packets. It's a neat little project in a 'just to see if you can do it' kind of way, but I highly doubt it was ever meant to be practical.
It has been nice not having sales taxes on-line, but it can't last forever.
Why not? The money was taxed when it was given to me (in my paycheck) and will be taxed when Amazon announces their profits, and will be taxed again when Amazon uses it to pay their payroll or buy materials. Unless it goes overseas or gets shoved in a mattress somewhere taxes will capture it eventually. Want to increase tax revenue? Reduce the trade deficit, discourage off shoring, and make sure inflation stays at a nice healthy 2-4% per year (to encourage spending).
To be fair to Buffet, he actually complains about the fact that he pays lower taxes than his secretary.
I can't be the only person to think that the real reason is that the built in search features on Windows 7 (and Vista for that matter) are actually pretty good. I personally haven't felt the need to go grab a desktop search tool for windows since indexed searching was baked into the OS.
Sell it at $300 and a tiny loss, continue to improve the software (for the love of god how much behind the scenes logging do you really need!?) and as soon as possible put out a hardware revision that drops you below $250 for the bill of materials plus assembly. Killing production is killing the entire platform and, having recently gotten my $99 touchpad, I'd say the platform (with a half dozen patches and tweaks) is actually very strong.
Quite frankly, I wish some of the big players with vested commercial interests in a good-performing internet (like Google, Amazon, or Microsoft) would pitch in on some investment funding to upgrade the infrastructure itself.
You'd have several hundred lawsuits from several dozen companies that have a vested interest in keeping control over the existing infrastructure. You'd have antitrust investigations being called for, contract lawsuits against the cities that promised them monopoly access, and several billion dollars poured into lobbying to make sure that it cannot and will not happen.
And keep in mind, on the low tiers the vast majority of laid fiber is dark, just waiting for someone to actually plug into it and use it. And I'd be shocked if that didn't include the transatlantic lines as well. On the higher tiers, many (most) cities don't have proper conduit installed, which means installing fiber to the front door is going to be an expensive, messy, time consuming process even if they got through the legal and bureaucratic nightmare.
400 years is very recent history? And actually that's just the first example of a legal statute explicitly spelling out the idea of copyright. Actually, the first exclusive licenses to works were given out in the late 1400s, which just happens to coincide with the time that movable type was becoming common. In other words, copyright has existed almost exactly as long as there have been methods to cheaply reproduce a work.
If you paid good money for an "exclusive" license on some photos and then posted them to a public facing website you are incredibly retarded. My data is mine and your data is yours, but as soon as you give me a copy of your data, that copy becomes mine. You have no way to enforce what I do with it (well, you could take me to court if there are copyright or other violations but that is ugly and expensive) after you send it to my browser.
They said "do something to help the environment" not "do something that make it look like your helping the environment without actually producing any measurable benefit". Is there an phrase equivalent to security theater for environmentalism? Greenwashing maybe?
I'd miss it. For every dollar that the EPA spends on stuff like this, or even on less frivolous but still apparently controversial things like protected rivers from over use, they spend dozens on things like keeping factories and power plants in check. Lets not forget what things were like before the EPA. CO2 and global warming would be the least of our problems without someone with the authority to prevent outright abuse of the ecosystem.
Just because centralized communism fails miserably when applied to reality doesn't mean that the issues the GP brings up can't be solved or at least vastly improved. The argument can certainly be made that most of socialized Europe outperforms the US in some or all of those areas.
Citations for any of that? There might be a perceived risk of lawsuit in that situation, but a quick Google search turns up many, many more instances of people suing the school after their kid gets bullied for years on end without the bullies being punished. In fact, the only instances I see on the first page of results are parents suing for wildly inappropriate punishments (locked in a broom closet for 8 hours or tasered in the class room). The only instance that I wouldn't agree with the parents' actions is a case where kids were suspended for drinking on a class trip.
It would be nice if I could convince myself that this is the bottom. I can't see any reasonable way to go lower, but I don't expect whether something is reasonable or not to dissuade someone from trying.
I don't disagree with you but I can't agree with putting something on a kids permanent record for a first offense scuffle.
If there's a fight in which no weapons are used and neither participant is seriously injured it's just a freaking fight. It's happened with teenage boys (and girls for that matter) since... probably since we came down out of the trees for Christ sake. Punishment yes, preferably from the parents but if necessary from the school as well. A second offense I could see maybe trying him for assault, but really to me a second offense should be a visit to the school therapist to see what the hell's really going on, because 9 times out of 10 there's going to be a reason.
Of course, I don't know anything about the OPs story. Could be the kid hit the 14 year old with a baseball bat across the head with no warning, but I think even a doting parent would have blinders that large.
Some changes are probably related to gameplay, San Fransisco just isn't made to drive through at 120 MPH; it wouldn't be more frustrating than fun. I suspect the reason it feels so jarring is because they tried to recreate a real place and then tacked the gameplay modification on top wherever they could. I'd think the GTA technique of designing maps that are good for gameplay then making changes to give the look of the city is probably more effective in actually feeling like the real thing.
To be fair, not it isn't.
Their 'Always connected' DRM would boot you from the game with no warning if it lost it's connection to the network. Connection at startup isn't nearly as onerous, for my use case it probably wouldn't bother me except in very rare circumstances but I still won't put up with that level of DRM, all they have to do is pull the plug on their servers and *poof* "your" copy of the game is useless.
Not in the summary is an opt in feature that will report your memory use (presumably along with what pages you are on and extentions you are using) back to Mozilla so they can finally put the "but FF using 2 GB of RAM on my machine" bugs to rest, either by fixing them or by dispelling the myth depending on which is the case.
Chiropractics is really two fields pretending to be one. On the one side, you have well educated people who are frequently also medical doctors using a range of physical therapy methods to improve back and spinal health. Still concerning in that they tend to see a large number of issues stemming from the spine but they at least try to be analytical and evidence based. On the other side you have people that believe that literally every human ailment is caused by spinal disorders, from a sore back to cancer to AIDS. Goodyear appears to have attended a 4 year university which teaches the former, so I personally don't see that as reason enough to vilify him.
His complete and utter lack of understanding when it comes to the very basics of evolution (though he does at least claim to believe it even if he clearly doesn't understand the concept) is much more concerning for a man in his position.
Fair enough, and I'm certainly not a chemist so I'm in no position to say that you're wrong, and based on what little I know about modeling in the pharmaceutical industry it certainly sounds, on the surface at least, that you're right. Your comment could easily be read as a question, "why didn't they do this earlier?", which is probably a very good question to ask, rather than the way I read it. No offense meant.
What's going on with Slashdot lately? There's a major advance in materials science research and so far a full 100% of the comments are either sarcasm about how stupid the research is or someone arguing that the solution is obvious.
I just... don't even know what to say anymore. Companies have been pouring money down the drain trying to discover these materials and these guys figured out how to do it more quickly, more effectively, and at a fraction of the cost. Obviously this is a problem that has been looked at by hundreds of engineers and scientists, and this is the first group to successfully apply this technique; and all we can muster is a collective circle jerk trying to sound smart.
Pathetic
so why the sudden need for a vague catch-all grant that won't seriously fund much research in any of these areas[?]
Because saying: "In 30 years it will be impossible to feed everyone in the world using current technology due to shortages of petroleum based fertilizers, increased fuel costs, and exhaustion of arable land. We need to invest money into advanced, sustainable hydroponics or we'll be facing a Malthusian catastrophe" just doesn't have the same ring to it. Something like this is designed to capture the public's imagination and even more importantly, is meant to attract attention to a wide range of specialties who wouldn't normally interact.
No kidding. If I personally had to pick, I'd say a generation ship carved out of an asteroid a la Greg Bear's Eon. Though how you get something that large moving at an appreciable speed would be an interesting challange... I don't think even a thermonuclear powered Orion drive could manage to move a mass that large at anything approaching acceptable speeds (and for a generation ship, a thousand years transit time could be deemed 'acceptable')
If the research is useful and worthwhile, it should be defended on its own merits[...]
Ok, how about this. In order to even begin to think about starting to build an interstellar ship there are many, many problems that need to be solved. Each and every one of them has potential benefits to the people right down here on planet Earth.
Cheap transit to LEO.
Orbital mining for metals and volatiles.
Artificial intelligence and other computer science areas.
New energy storage and generation technologies.
Genetic engineering.
Advanced hydroponics.
Yep, nothing in there worth researching at all.
From the source of the source...
[Twitter based trading] made 1.85 percent in its first month of trading, ending in July. This not only beat the S&P, which fell 2.2 percent that month, but it also beat out the average of other hedge funds, at 0.76 percent.
So it's pretty significant. It's all based on a paper which showed that there's a 5-8 day lag in the correlation between Twitter sentiment and stock price. If something is getting negative attention on Twitter, there is a nearly 90% chance that it's stock price will drop ~1 week later with a similar relationship for positive attention. I imagine people hear something on twitter, make an appointment with their financial adviser or make a note, then a few days later actually do the trade based on the information they gathered. There's hardly anything illogical in basing stock trades on consumer sentiment, this is just a new way to gauge consumer sentiment in near real time.
Keep in mind, this is a business where people make millions of dollars based on having information 10 ms before the competition.
You can't beat the market long term.
Is like saying that playing poker is all luck. Yeah, luck plays a part in it, maybe even a big part, but it's still the same group of 20 top players that finds themselves at the final table at tournament after tournament. People like Warren Buffet didn't become ludicrously rich just because they got lucky.