Well put! And Amazon certainly isn't killing Walmart. Companies with good economies of scale are cheaper than smaller companies, and so many people shop only on price these days.
Not a surprise though. The only movies Disney has managed in the last decade or so with any "legs" (people paying to watch years after release) were Frozen and the Marvel movies. You can bet they're going to monetize those properties aggressively. They'll get lumped together under the umbrella of "what people we pay to watch".
I can live without the streaming. If I can rent the DVDs, that's cool. If not, torrents are easy.
Fair enough. You just see a lot of very loosely defined claims of why my favorite rocket is best in internet discussions. It's as bad as Ford vs Chevy pickup truck discussion.
I would rather say "Saturn V successfully launched a larger payload to LEO than anyone else", or other such specific claim. I do find it amusing that China's planned Death March 9, err, Long March 9 rocket will exactly match the Saturn V in LEO capability. Someone has rocket envy.
It's worth adding that Boeing's Starliner will launch on an Atlas V, which uses Russian rocket engines. Boeing is sppinning it as "US astronauts launched from US soil", but only SpaceX can brag about "US rockets".
ULA hopes to swap out the Russian RD-180 engines on the Atlas V for Blue Origin's BE-4 engines one day, but that's a ways off.
"Commercial" doesn't mean what you think in this context. The previous efforts were NASA projects with components farmed out to different vendors for development. NASA is famously bad as managing cross-vendor projects like that (almost every disaster can be traced to a failure to communicate properly netween vendors). This is different: NASA just set some acceptance criteria for a capsule, and bought them as finished projects from vendors: SpaceX and Boeing. The rocket launches to prove these capsules are also "COTS" launches. Crew Dragon 2 was just an "off the shelf" Falcon 9 payload. Starliner will be an "off the shelf" Atlas V launch.
It's massively cheaper this way as well, even including the grants SpaceX, Boeing, and others got along the way. The difference in cost is a difference in kind, BTW. Launch costs have fallen so far that projects that would have been entirely ridiculous in the 70s are now commonplace. E.g., an Israeli nonprofit putting a lander on the moon for a total budget of around $100M.
. The Saturn V rocket is still the most powerful rocket on record.
Sort of. You can contrive a definition of that statement that makes it true. The Russians certainly launched more powerful rockets, but they didn't do so well. Also, "powerful" could be talking about either thrust or delta-v.
The Apollo Guidance Computer was ahead of its time with performance similar to a 6502 microprocessor found in Apple II and other 8-bit computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Not so much, though it did have a surprising amount of memory. Nearly impossible to reprogram to fix a bug though. Also, it was one of the worst-managed software projects around, and entirely failed to meet its goal. All the burn calculations ended up being done on the ground.
It was amazing in some ways though: first embedded system in a mobile platform. First life-safety system. It was also amazingly robust: it actually crashed (due to external problems) and rebooted during the Apollo 11 landing, and kept doing its job throughout the crash/reboot.
Amazon go does not have any kind of checkout at all. It really is a new model. You verify your identity when you enter, take what you like, and walk out the door. Your account get billed for what you took.
As you might imagine, there are a lot of cameras involved.
It's more that it can be hard to get a bank account when you're poor. It's really a failing of the US banking system (more properly, a failing of the regulators) that there's not a kind of bank account especially for poor people, one with no fees and no ability to overdraw, that banks are required to provide.
So that's why we're having an obesity problem. Too much pie.
That's pretty much true. World obesity problems matched world hunger problems some years ago. It's a real problem for people who transition from never enough food to always enough food - they've never lived in a world where eating less than you could made sense.
There are still a lot of problems in the world, but food supply is decreasingly one of them.
Supporters of the new law argue that "not accepting cash hurts poorer residents who may not be able to afford or qualify for a credit card or who want to avoid fees that come with changing cash into a prepaid debit card," reports Ars. "Additionally, privacy advocates say that being forced to use a digital form of payment to buy things is a de facto requirement to share records of their purchases with third-party companies."
I think that's a good point. While I have some sympathy for Amazon Go trying to do something revolutionary, their stores are effectively closed to people who can't get a credit card. Their model is fundamentally incompatible with paying cash. Doesn't bother me, but I have all the choices of places to shop.
From the privacy perspective, you're boned regardless if you shop at Amazon Go, since lack of privacy is how their system works. That's fine as long as the other option remains.
$2k isn't so bad, if people are actually buying your book, but it's firmly beyond authors who are just getting starting. I find this very annoying for a couple of new authors I like, but who similarly can't afford the step up to audiobooks. I have very little time for reading these days, but listen to books 2 hours a day, so I can only choose a few books that are print (well, e-book) only.
But I am unable to Read a book from start to finish, Unless it has good sized print and adequate spacing.
Kindle is your friend (or some better e-reader). I cna't read printed books any more without reading glasses, but kindle has a font size that makes reading pleasant again. And I'm sure there are better e-Readers that do a better job with typography.
Facebook is nowhere near a monopoly player in online discussion or even general-purpose social media. You could argue that there's a social media oligopoly. Also, again the idea that Facebook should be held to the standard of a publisher if they're going to censor beyond what's legally required is a false dichotomy. To make it real would require sweeping free speech restrictions, in the proper legal sense of the word. I'm not for that.
The oligopoly acts in uniform, is the problem. Deplatforming one outspoken conservative after another (well, specifically those who speak out against Muslim immigration in Europe, again for reasons of corporate profit).
As far as "sweeping free speech restrictions": tell me straight up, do you believe that publicly held corporations have free speech rights?
It doesn't take a generation or two to debunk bad or factually wrong ideas after they're introduced or repopularized
Seems to, when it's more than a fad. And anti-vax has moved beyond fad into deep-seated prejudice. People can't get over the correlation in timing between when kids get vaccines, and when autism first becomes obvious. It's a very strong emotional impact, unlikely to be overcome by reason in the short term. But logical argument does seem to make a difference in what beliefs pass from generation to generation.
But if they really want to stop this, it should be fairly easy to get their lawmakers, particularly Mr. loose-cannon answers-to-noone President Tweety, to limit this and put employer-side legal consequences for illegally hiring non-citizens. That would end it quickly and easily, but they don't. So if they're honestly against corporate control, they're doing a really bad job of it. It's hard to imagine a group so incompetent would direct any violent urges effectively.
You've identified why the average conservative has become so angry. The mainstream GOP is blatantly corrupt and firmly in the pocket of the very very rich. The mainstream Dems are too of course, but that's just expected. The fact that the King of Tweets could do nothing to get a wall up when the GOP held both Houses spoke volumes. Let alone more effective legislation along the lines you describe.
Naturally the right is far more pissed with the GOP than the Dems, as is always the way with schisms.
So if they're honestly against corporate control, they're doing a really bad job of it. It's hard to imagine a group so incompetent would direct any violent urges effectively.
You're inappropriately conflating the politicians with the masses. The discord between them is the heart of current politics.
And it's not so much different on the left. The anger isn't as strong or as focused (yet), but it's also building. In Seattle during the run-up to the 2016 elections, it seemed like every 3rd car had a Bernie sticker on it, but I only saw 1 Hillary sticker that year. And I saw 3 "Giant Meteor of Death 2016" stickers! But the Dem primaries are rigged by design, so we got Trump vs Hillary.
Good luck changing those laws. And quite unfortunately there's no rising tide of sentiment on the right against corporate control,
I fell you have no experiential basis for what's commonly discussed on right-wing forums. The entire immigration debate is about corporate control vs our rights as citizens, from the point of view of the average conservative. And it's the single most important issue. The anger about this has been rising for years, and is getting near to violence now. You clearly have no idea.
The idea that Facebook could ever be forced to choose between being a publisher and being a common carrier is based on a false dichotomy or perhaps a misunderstanding of what a publisher is. They're already liable for what's hosted on their platform, which is why they'll get their pants sued off if they don't promptly take down child porn etc.
Perhaps, but even so, it's a better set of rules to protect us against monopoly control of public discussion. Facebook does not currently have liability in the US for pretty much anything unless they're told to take it down and fail to do so. Publishers are different. They're liable immediately for libel, obscenity, copyright violation, you name it. Facebook is not held to that standard, but it should be if they're going to censor their platform beyond what's legally required.
>The world does not move at internet speed.
Meaning what?
Meaning you seem to be expecting bad ideas to be debunked in a short time, not in a generation or two as is normal.
Well let's say there's one that used to have no limits but now doesn't allow, for example, free and lively discussion of putting puppies in a blender. Is it now worth not much?
Let's say we ban discussion of putting human embryos in a blender, and ban fetal stem cell research. Surely that's OK? As soon as you set limits on discussion, you stop being good at "university".
Another fun example: Chinese scientists, for many years, could not use the term "sun spots", for political reasons. This got really awkward for solar researchers, as you might imagine.
Each and every little thing matters. And therenever just one once you cross the line, there's an ever-rising tide of restrictions, where researchers must carefully edit their publications for political acceptability, and can still be burned for something they published 10 years ago, when the rules were different.
Not any more, it doesn't. Even if women are in charge, women are still the oppressed victims of "internalized patriarchy".
You may be thinking "that makes no logical sense", but what you don't understand is that under post-modernist doctrine logic is a tool of the patriarchy. Every time you point out a logical flaw, you're oppressing women!
I seriously could not make this shit up, I'll never be that creative.
60 Minutes has a long history of bad journalism. They've been busted doing shit like filming different interview questions than the ones the interviewee is answering. They dress it up to look like good journalism, but just like the rest of them they just make shit up.
Slashdot Mirror
Well put! And Amazon certainly isn't killing Walmart. Companies with good economies of scale are cheaper than smaller companies, and so many people shop only on price these days.
Not a surprise though. The only movies Disney has managed in the last decade or so with any "legs" (people paying to watch years after release) were Frozen and the Marvel movies. You can bet they're going to monetize those properties aggressively. They'll get lumped together under the umbrella of "what people we pay to watch".
I can live without the streaming. If I can rent the DVDs, that's cool. If not, torrents are easy.
Fair enough. You just see a lot of very loosely defined claims of why my favorite rocket is best in internet discussions. It's as bad as Ford vs Chevy pickup truck discussion.
I would rather say "Saturn V successfully launched a larger payload to LEO than anyone else", or other such specific claim. I do find it amusing that China's planned Death March 9, err, Long March 9 rocket will exactly match the Saturn V in LEO capability. Someone has rocket envy.
It's always somewhere on YouTube. Disney doesn't seem so eager to make copyright claims on that one, for some reason.
It's worth adding that Boeing's Starliner will launch on an Atlas V, which uses Russian rocket engines. Boeing is sppinning it as "US astronauts launched from US soil", but only SpaceX can brag about "US rockets".
ULA hopes to swap out the Russian RD-180 engines on the Atlas V for Blue Origin's BE-4 engines one day, but that's a ways off.
"Commercial" doesn't mean what you think in this context. The previous efforts were NASA projects with components farmed out to different vendors for development. NASA is famously bad as managing cross-vendor projects like that (almost every disaster can be traced to a failure to communicate properly netween vendors). This is different: NASA just set some acceptance criteria for a capsule, and bought them as finished projects from vendors: SpaceX and Boeing. The rocket launches to prove these capsules are also "COTS" launches. Crew Dragon 2 was just an "off the shelf" Falcon 9 payload. Starliner will be an "off the shelf" Atlas V launch.
It's massively cheaper this way as well, even including the grants SpaceX, Boeing, and others got along the way. The difference in cost is a difference in kind, BTW. Launch costs have fallen so far that projects that would have been entirely ridiculous in the 70s are now commonplace. E.g., an Israeli nonprofit putting a lander on the moon for a total budget of around $100M.
. The Saturn V rocket is still the most powerful rocket on record.
Sort of. You can contrive a definition of that statement that makes it true. The Russians certainly launched more powerful rockets, but they didn't do so well. Also, "powerful" could be talking about either thrust or delta-v.
The Apollo Guidance Computer was ahead of its time with performance similar to a 6502 microprocessor found in Apple II and other 8-bit computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Not so much, though it did have a surprising amount of memory. Nearly impossible to reprogram to fix a bug though. Also, it was one of the worst-managed software projects around, and entirely failed to meet its goal. All the burn calculations ended up being done on the ground.
It was amazing in some ways though: first embedded system in a mobile platform. First life-safety system. It was also amazingly robust: it actually crashed (due to external problems) and rebooted during the Apollo 11 landing, and kept doing its job throughout the crash/reboot.
Amazon go does not have any kind of checkout at all. It really is a new model. You verify your identity when you enter, take what you like, and walk out the door. Your account get billed for what you took.
As you might imagine, there are a lot of cameras involved.
It's more that it can be hard to get a bank account when you're poor. It's really a failing of the US banking system (more properly, a failing of the regulators) that there's not a kind of bank account especially for poor people, one with no fees and no ability to overdraw, that banks are required to provide.
A few more years of development of privacy features and blockchain scaling and it will sweep the world, probably in under 10 years from now.
My calendar has it coming the year after the year of Linux on the desktop, and just before commercial fusion.
So that's why we're having an obesity problem. Too much pie.
That's pretty much true. World obesity problems matched world hunger problems some years ago. It's a real problem for people who transition from never enough food to always enough food - they've never lived in a world where eating less than you could made sense.
There are still a lot of problems in the world, but food supply is decreasingly one of them.
The solution to credit card fraud is for America to do what all the other countries in the world are already doing.
Deny fraud protection when someone gets your card and extracts the PIN? (There's a reason chip and PIN is on version 3 or 4.)
Supporters of the new law argue that "not accepting cash hurts poorer residents who may not be able to afford or qualify for a credit card or who want to avoid fees that come with changing cash into a prepaid debit card," reports Ars. "Additionally, privacy advocates say that being forced to use a digital form of payment to buy things is a de facto requirement to share records of their purchases with third-party companies."
I think that's a good point. While I have some sympathy for Amazon Go trying to do something revolutionary, their stores are effectively closed to people who can't get a credit card. Their model is fundamentally incompatible with paying cash. Doesn't bother me, but I have all the choices of places to shop.
From the privacy perspective, you're boned regardless if you shop at Amazon Go, since lack of privacy is how their system works. That's fine as long as the other option remains.
We both have it better off than SuperKendall.
$2k isn't so bad, if people are actually buying your book, but it's firmly beyond authors who are just getting starting. I find this very annoying for a couple of new authors I like, but who similarly can't afford the step up to audiobooks. I have very little time for reading these days, but listen to books 2 hours a day, so I can only choose a few books that are print (well, e-book) only.
But I am unable to Read a book from start to finish, Unless it has good sized print and adequate spacing.
Kindle is your friend (or some better e-reader). I cna't read printed books any more without reading glasses, but kindle has a font size that makes reading pleasant again. And I'm sure there are better e-Readers that do a better job with typography.
Sorry, again.
Facebook is nowhere near a monopoly player in online discussion or even general-purpose social media. You could argue that there's a social media oligopoly. Also, again the idea that Facebook should be held to the standard of a publisher if they're going to censor beyond what's legally required is a false dichotomy. To make it real would require sweeping free speech restrictions, in the proper legal sense of the word. I'm not for that.
The oligopoly acts in uniform, is the problem. Deplatforming one outspoken conservative after another (well, specifically those who speak out against Muslim immigration in Europe, again for reasons of corporate profit).
As far as "sweeping free speech restrictions": tell me straight up, do you believe that publicly held corporations have free speech rights?
It doesn't take a generation or two to debunk bad or factually wrong ideas after they're introduced or repopularized
Seems to, when it's more than a fad. And anti-vax has moved beyond fad into deep-seated prejudice. People can't get over the correlation in timing between when kids get vaccines, and when autism first becomes obvious. It's a very strong emotional impact, unlikely to be overcome by reason in the short term. But logical argument does seem to make a difference in what beliefs pass from generation to generation.
But if they really want to stop this, it should be fairly easy to get their lawmakers, particularly Mr. loose-cannon answers-to-noone President Tweety, to limit this and put employer-side legal consequences for illegally hiring non-citizens. That would end it quickly and easily, but they don't. So if they're honestly against corporate control, they're doing a really bad job of it. It's hard to imagine a group so incompetent would direct any violent urges effectively.
You've identified why the average conservative has become so angry. The mainstream GOP is blatantly corrupt and firmly in the pocket of the very very rich. The mainstream Dems are too of course, but that's just expected. The fact that the King of Tweets could do nothing to get a wall up when the GOP held both Houses spoke volumes. Let alone more effective legislation along the lines you describe.
Naturally the right is far more pissed with the GOP than the Dems, as is always the way with schisms.
So if they're honestly against corporate control, they're doing a really bad job of it. It's hard to imagine a group so incompetent would direct any violent urges effectively.
You're inappropriately conflating the politicians with the masses. The discord between them is the heart of current politics.
And it's not so much different on the left. The anger isn't as strong or as focused (yet), but it's also building. In Seattle during the run-up to the 2016 elections, it seemed like every 3rd car had a Bernie sticker on it, but I only saw 1 Hillary sticker that year. And I saw 3 "Giant Meteor of Death 2016" stickers! But the Dem primaries are rigged by design, so we got Trump vs Hillary.
The same reason my posts are often marked trolling at random. You have stalkers.
How would we extort effectively without nukes? Do try to keep up.
Cool. Good to see it's not just the dirty Scandis pulling out all the stop to eliminate any gender-based obstacles to career choice.
Oops, hit reply too early.
Good luck changing those laws. And quite unfortunately there's no rising tide of sentiment on the right against corporate control,
I fell you have no experiential basis for what's commonly discussed on right-wing forums. The entire immigration debate is about corporate control vs our rights as citizens, from the point of view of the average conservative. And it's the single most important issue. The anger about this has been rising for years, and is getting near to violence now. You clearly have no idea.
The idea that Facebook could ever be forced to choose between being a publisher and being a common carrier is based on a false dichotomy or perhaps a misunderstanding of what a publisher is. They're already liable for what's hosted on their platform, which is why they'll get their pants sued off if they don't promptly take down child porn etc.
Perhaps, but even so, it's a better set of rules to protect us against monopoly control of public discussion. Facebook does not currently have liability in the US for pretty much anything unless they're told to take it down and fail to do so. Publishers are different. They're liable immediately for libel, obscenity, copyright violation, you name it. Facebook is not held to that standard, but it should be if they're going to censor their platform beyond what's legally required.
>The world does not move at internet speed.
Meaning what?
Meaning you seem to be expecting bad ideas to be debunked in a short time, not in a generation or two as is normal.
Well let's say there's one that used to have no limits but now doesn't allow, for example, free and lively discussion of putting puppies in a blender. Is it now worth not much?
Let's say we ban discussion of putting human embryos in a blender, and ban fetal stem cell research. Surely that's OK? As soon as you set limits on discussion, you stop being good at "university".
Another fun example: Chinese scientists, for many years, could not use the term "sun spots", for political reasons. This got really awkward for solar researchers, as you might imagine.
Each and every little thing matters. And therenever just one once you cross the line, there's an ever-rising tide of restrictions, where researchers must carefully edit their publications for political acceptability, and can still be burned for something they published 10 years ago, when the rules were different.
Not any more, it doesn't. Even if women are in charge, women are still the oppressed victims of "internalized patriarchy".
You may be thinking "that makes no logical sense", but what you don't understand is that under post-modernist doctrine logic is a tool of the patriarchy. Every time you point out a logical flaw, you're oppressing women!
I seriously could not make this shit up, I'll never be that creative.
60 Minutes has a long history of bad journalism. They've been busted doing shit like filming different interview questions than the ones the interviewee is answering. They dress it up to look like good journalism, but just like the rest of them they just make shit up.