Aside from it being incrementally more legal than just handing the money directly to the manufacturer, why would the US be helping France pay for MQ-9s? Is there any way in which this isn't a pure handout to General Atomics, essentially Uncle Sam offering a manufacturer's rebate on their behalf?
"hese are people who want power for themselves. It's not because they believe Gates does a poor job."
If Microsoft is lucky it's just a power grab. It's also possible that they think that Gates is excessively sentimental about wanting his baby to succeed, long term, as a company, and that they could make more money by cashing it out in the near term, or by sending it to the M&A chop-shop.
I'm pretty sure that large-scale shareholders consider small scale shareholders to be sort of like krill. Numerous; but not really worth much except to be filtered out and devoured in numbers large enough to be tasty.
Oh, he beats the hell out of a lot of other choices(like, say, any active employee of a defense contractor with a stake in the situation they are talking about, a depressingly common move); but it always made me a bit queasy that a novelist was treated as a serious option for comment on military or geopolitical 'News' shows.
Although his writing was pretty mechanical, his stories were real page turners. It's sad to see him go.
The one thing I won't miss is the occasional "Let's trot out Tom Clancy" nonsense that various TV outfits would engage in when they needed the appearance of military expertise...
Seriously. Textbooks have used multiple representations of fractions for years, one of which is linear, because the education research has indicated that different children learn better with different representations of fractions.
Well, at least we now know how long it takes for education research to trickle into the classroom: decades.
It's important to remember that (assuming qualified faculty, an assumption that is...widely variable... in its truth; but is definitely nonfalse in better systems and some parts of worse ones) educational research can make it into a classroom from the top or from the bottom:
Your top-down approach (curriculum design followed by mandate, textbooks 'aligned' with that curriculum) is nominally research based; but ponderous as hell and perpetually mired in comittee and trying to appease the wackjobs in Texas and the wackjobs in California at the same time. It's primary virtue is that, sooner or later, their work trickles down to even the most burned-out and ossified classrooms; because the faculty and local admin have no choice.
On the other hand, faculty enjoy some freedom to teach as their training and experience deems best, and the ones with recent educational education and/or professional development are probably familiar with the research. This happens a great deal faster, especially in situations with new teachers or districts that do a good job of encouraging faculty not to ossify. However, it can take unbounded amounts of time to have any effect in situations with lousy faculty and local administration.
They need to use neither.
Give 'em the good axiomatic definition of a fraction. And them later on give the examples with pies and tootsies.
Oh, you'll loath some of the bullshit that gets added to math curricula to pad out the vocab lists...
Hey kids, because it's fucking pointless, we are going to be learning about 'proper fractions', 'improper fractions' and 'mixed numbers'! Open your copybooks now: "A proper fraction is a fraction where the numerator is smaller than the denominator. An improper fraction is a fraction where the numerator is larger than the denominator. A mixed number is a number written with a whole number component and a fractional component." All of these are basically just division problems that are being left unevaluated for reasons of convenience, or because the resulting decimal representation may not be entirely well behaved, so this shit is pointless; but it will be on the quiz.
Good thing that OSX is Naturally Superior for photoshop-wielding 'creatives' so they can handle doing that manually.
And wasn't Apple the company with the reputation for delivering remotely-usable-by-people-who-are-neither-uber-geeks-nor-UNIX-workstation-buyers multi-monitor support atypically early in the game, somtime back in the classic era?
There isn't anything necessarily incompatible with 'mobile' use and multi-monitor use (indeed, many contemporary mobile devices have both a screen and a video-out, and some of them can even treat them both independently, rather than the video-out being a fixed mirror of the screen); but, as a matter of priorities (not of actual technical conflicts) the fashion for 'mobile' seems to have led to some remarkably shoddy treatment of multi-monitor scenarios being allowed to ship on desktop/laptop OSes. Not just Ubuntu, either. The UI-formerly-known-as-'Metro' shipped supporting 'apps' only on the primary monitor (WTF, guys? You built explicit support for multiple-apps 'tiling'/'snapping' and didn't allow that behavior to be used across multiple monitors?) and Apple just slapped a grey background wallpaper across your second monitor if you fullscreened anything until either 10.7 or 10.8.
My point was not that the two are technologically incompatible in any way; but that a focus on 'What Would iPads Do?' design seems to be leading to solid support for additional displays, and coherent integration into the UI of that possibility, being ignored.
It's weird because all this is happening just as multiple output support is solidly moving down into even the cheapest and nastiest computers (we can't even buy boring Dell typingboxes with support for less than three heads at work these days) and monitors have never been cheaper....
Was it pure failure,or today's sick fascination with 'mobile' that would lead a 'modern-replacement-for-X' project to have "multi-monitor issues"?
I can be sympathetic to the weirdness sometimes experienced in that area with classic X, given that it's a hoary design from the age when 'multi-monitor' meant "Computer that costs more than everybody in front of it" bodged and genetic-drifted into a totally alien environment; but this is the future, the one where you are hard pressed to buy a motherboard without at least two built-in video outputs, not infrequently more, you'd think that that would be a major consideration in any new graphics system design.
Sometimes not even then: ask the Spanish about the exciting inflationary action that trying to build an economy on the galleon-loads of bullion smash-and-grabbed from South America led to... They scored a massive pile of gold for the cost of a few shiploads of hardened psychos; but you can only buy so much actually-useful stuff for gold before you distort the precious metals market.
When was the last time that invading somebody for their cash was actually cost effective? Early Roman Empire? Modern war is damned expensive; plus it tends to play scorched earth with various flavors of stored value (human and physical capital destroyed, fiat money's health contingent largely on who wins(and there's always the alternative of just printing what the opposition has squirreled away into worthlessness rather than trying to grab it), markets for assorted intangible assets disrupted, you are basically back to stealing big chests of gold coins, if you can find any). Plus, unlike the good old days of barbaric plunder heaps, modern weapons are so costly that you had better plunder quite efficiently indeed.
I'm honestly a bit surprised that Nielsen is still alive. They are the landline-polling of TV audience metrics. On the pure TV/content industry hell side, you've got things like Tivos and cable boxes, which tend not to leave HQ guessing about who is watching what(Remember Tivo's casual little announcement that 'nipplegate' was the most rewound event in history? What've you got, Nielsen?) On the internet side, you've got your assorted 'social' gatekeepers and search jockeys, who pretty much see every word you type a few hundred milliseconds after you do, and are thus well placed to see who's talking about what.
Where does the exhaustive sample of 'Nielson households' fit in here?
Seriously, marketing research groups could be gleaning this kind of data from Slashdot too if they wanted to but no one gives a fuck. How much do people know about you from your Slashdot profile? Only as much as you let them know. Why are "social network" sites held up to a different standard?
Well, I suspect that I'm talking to a particularly belligerent wall here; but somebody else might read it: 'social' networks are explicitly and fundamentally, designed to produce profiles based both on what you provide and what people you have real-world connections with provide (eg. people who don't even have facebook accounts; but are still tagged and machine-visioned in the image libraries of people who do). Your Slashdot-type profile is probably more vulnerable to a clever analyst than casual inspection would suggest; but the value of information provided by 3rd parties on the system about you is overwhelmingly lower, leaving the question of how 'knowable' you are much more in your hands.
Also, of course, 'real name' policies are a fairly obvious attempt to both extirpate dupes and ACs (presumably because the quality of discussion is already low enough, and because uniques with attached data are worth more as eyeballs); but also quash pseudonyms in the process. Again, many pseudonyms are vulnerable to clever or sustained attack; but in casual use they allow the virtues of consistent 'characters' to emerge (Yeah, that guy, he impersonates a fungus on the internet. Fucked if I know...); but leaves it up to you whether to connect that to other parts of your life or not. Some people use pseudonyms; some use pseudonyms by preference but make little or no effort to hide who they are, some post under their real names, up to you.
It probably didn't help that (at fundamental cost to battery life, and significant but theoretically solvable cost in fancy management) phones got powerful enough to just do email. No second set of not-exactly-mailservers in the loop (either for reliability or security concerns), on the corporate side you now need to sell a BES(and as the 'better than your existing mailserver alone' option rather than the 'well, do you want mobile email or not?' option), on the consumer side you need to sell a telco on giving you a cut of the action in exchange for a modest reduction in data transfer, and the handset customer on an increasingly uncompetitive device.
Even if it were perfect, RIM's fancy proprietary network was not exactly getting more viable with age. Any deviations from perfection were just nails in the coffin.
Maybe all their genuinely cool stuff was taken out back and shot before it saw the light of day; but I'm not sure (based on what they actually sent to market) that "We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than they did."
There are companies where you can clearly say "Wow, Company X is under the insane delusion that $SOMETHING$ is the future, all evidence to the contrary, and damn are they ever stubbornly shoveling that something into the utter indifference of the marketplace!" This isn't a compliment, exactly; but being a high-functioning delusive beats being a dysfunctional one.
Blackberry, though? The greatest compliment you can pay to their earlier years, and the greatest condemnation of their later ones, is that they seemed frozen in time, only worse. They weren't quite frozen (had they been, you'd at least be able to read your text-only communications and basic voice for a zillion hours with modern battery and silicon tech); but they never went anywhere. Their OS just got slower and more confusing as it mutated toward no particular goal, battery-sapping quasi-smart features were grafted on, cargo-cult style, to a system that never really made anything of them.
Oh, people do that sort of thing all the time, just not often enough that you can safely assume it about everyone in just about any class of people. Some norms are more normative than others; but you can usually find people who are rationalizing and people who are sincerely unbothered.
Or you and they actually have differing positions on the timeline for the onset of moral personhood... It's one of the universe's great injustices; but sometimes people who apparently disagree with you actually do, rather than living in secret, guilt-wracked, recognition that you were right all along.
In a shocking and atypical display of foresight (notably absent in, say, chronically underfunded "Pension funds", back when those existed), the NRC actually requires plant operators to sock away enough money to decommission the plant when they are finished with it, even if they become insolvent.
I assume that they didn't really want to be stuck with a bunch of glow-in-the-dark superfund sites....
Unfortunately, litigation to internalize externalities tends to be the finest in tragicomedy about how easy it is for the guy with deeper pockets to stall, obstruct, and just plain outlast would-be challengers. People have certainly tried litigating against polluters who damage their persons or property, on occasion they even win; but the process is pretty brutal.
"Costs" has a fairly common definition when you get to the section in ye econ book about 'externalities' and the various mechanisms for internalizing them.
Did you actually just suggest that people have abortions because they are confused about what fetuses are going to turn into, rather than because they know exactly what fetuses turn into?
Slashdot Mirror
I think that it's about time for a Benelli/Raid co-branding exercise.
Aside from it being incrementally more legal than just handing the money directly to the manufacturer, why would the US be helping France pay for MQ-9s? Is there any way in which this isn't a pure handout to General Atomics, essentially Uncle Sam offering a manufacturer's rebate on their behalf?
"hese are people who want power for themselves. It's not because they believe Gates does a poor job."
If Microsoft is lucky it's just a power grab. It's also possible that they think that Gates is excessively sentimental about wanting his baby to succeed, long term, as a company, and that they could make more money by cashing it out in the near term, or by sending it to the M&A chop-shop.
I'm pretty sure that large-scale shareholders consider small scale shareholders to be sort of like krill. Numerous; but not really worth much except to be filtered out and devoured in numbers large enough to be tasty.
Oh, he beats the hell out of a lot of other choices(like, say, any active employee of a defense contractor with a stake in the situation they are talking about, a depressingly common move); but it always made me a bit queasy that a novelist was treated as a serious option for comment on military or geopolitical 'News' shows.
Although his writing was pretty mechanical, his stories were real page turners. It's sad to see him go.
The one thing I won't miss is the occasional "Let's trot out Tom Clancy" nonsense that various TV outfits would engage in when they needed the appearance of military expertise...
... and somebody read a school textbook.
Seriously. Textbooks have used multiple representations of fractions for years, one of which is linear, because the education research has indicated that different children learn better with different representations of fractions.
Well, at least we now know how long it takes for education research to trickle into the classroom: decades.
It's important to remember that (assuming qualified faculty, an assumption that is...widely variable... in its truth; but is definitely nonfalse in better systems and some parts of worse ones) educational research can make it into a classroom from the top or from the bottom:
Your top-down approach (curriculum design followed by mandate, textbooks 'aligned' with that curriculum) is nominally research based; but ponderous as hell and perpetually mired in comittee and trying to appease the wackjobs in Texas and the wackjobs in California at the same time. It's primary virtue is that, sooner or later, their work trickles down to even the most burned-out and ossified classrooms; because the faculty and local admin have no choice. On the other hand, faculty enjoy some freedom to teach as their training and experience deems best, and the ones with recent educational education and/or professional development are probably familiar with the research. This happens a great deal faster, especially in situations with new teachers or districts that do a good job of encouraging faculty not to ossify. However, it can take unbounded amounts of time to have any effect in situations with lousy faculty and local administration.
They need to use neither. Give 'em the good axiomatic definition of a fraction. And them later on give the examples with pies and tootsies.
Oh, you'll loath some of the bullshit that gets added to math curricula to pad out the vocab lists...
Hey kids, because it's fucking pointless, we are going to be learning about 'proper fractions', 'improper fractions' and 'mixed numbers'! Open your copybooks now: "A proper fraction is a fraction where the numerator is smaller than the denominator. An improper fraction is a fraction where the numerator is larger than the denominator. A mixed number is a number written with a whole number component and a fractional component." All of these are basically just division problems that are being left unevaluated for reasons of convenience, or because the resulting decimal representation may not be entirely well behaved, so this shit is pointless; but it will be on the quiz.
Good thing that OSX is Naturally Superior for photoshop-wielding 'creatives' so they can handle doing that manually.
And wasn't Apple the company with the reputation for delivering remotely-usable-by-people-who-are-neither-uber-geeks-nor-UNIX-workstation-buyers multi-monitor support atypically early in the game, somtime back in the classic era?
There isn't anything necessarily incompatible with 'mobile' use and multi-monitor use (indeed, many contemporary mobile devices have both a screen and a video-out, and some of them can even treat them both independently, rather than the video-out being a fixed mirror of the screen); but, as a matter of priorities (not of actual technical conflicts) the fashion for 'mobile' seems to have led to some remarkably shoddy treatment of multi-monitor scenarios being allowed to ship on desktop/laptop OSes. Not just Ubuntu, either. The UI-formerly-known-as-'Metro' shipped supporting 'apps' only on the primary monitor (WTF, guys? You built explicit support for multiple-apps 'tiling'/'snapping' and didn't allow that behavior to be used across multiple monitors?) and Apple just slapped a grey background wallpaper across your second monitor if you fullscreened anything until either 10.7 or 10.8.
My point was not that the two are technologically incompatible in any way; but that a focus on 'What Would iPads Do?' design seems to be leading to solid support for additional displays, and coherent integration into the UI of that possibility, being ignored.
It's weird because all this is happening just as multiple output support is solidly moving down into even the cheapest and nastiest computers (we can't even buy boring Dell typingboxes with support for less than three heads at work these days) and monitors have never been cheaper....
Was it pure failure,or today's sick fascination with 'mobile' that would lead a 'modern-replacement-for-X' project to have "multi-monitor issues"?
I can be sympathetic to the weirdness sometimes experienced in that area with classic X, given that it's a hoary design from the age when 'multi-monitor' meant "Computer that costs more than everybody in front of it" bodged and genetic-drifted into a totally alien environment; but this is the future, the one where you are hard pressed to buy a motherboard without at least two built-in video outputs, not infrequently more, you'd think that that would be a major consideration in any new graphics system design.
Also, Soylent Grey tastes lousy, so they don't even have that going for them.
Sometimes not even then: ask the Spanish about the exciting inflationary action that trying to build an economy on the galleon-loads of bullion smash-and-grabbed from South America led to... They scored a massive pile of gold for the cost of a few shiploads of hardened psychos; but you can only buy so much actually-useful stuff for gold before you distort the precious metals market.
When was the last time that invading somebody for their cash was actually cost effective? Early Roman Empire? Modern war is damned expensive; plus it tends to play scorched earth with various flavors of stored value (human and physical capital destroyed, fiat money's health contingent largely on who wins(and there's always the alternative of just printing what the opposition has squirreled away into worthlessness rather than trying to grab it), markets for assorted intangible assets disrupted, you are basically back to stealing big chests of gold coins, if you can find any). Plus, unlike the good old days of barbaric plunder heaps, modern weapons are so costly that you had better plunder quite efficiently indeed.
I'm honestly a bit surprised that Nielsen is still alive. They are the landline-polling of TV audience metrics. On the pure TV/content industry hell side, you've got things like Tivos and cable boxes, which tend not to leave HQ guessing about who is watching what(Remember Tivo's casual little announcement that 'nipplegate' was the most rewound event in history? What've you got, Nielsen?) On the internet side, you've got your assorted 'social' gatekeepers and search jockeys, who pretty much see every word you type a few hundred milliseconds after you do, and are thus well placed to see who's talking about what.
Where does the exhaustive sample of 'Nielson households' fit in here?
Seriously, marketing research groups could be gleaning this kind of data from Slashdot too if they wanted to but no one gives a fuck. How much do people know about you from your Slashdot profile? Only as much as you let them know. Why are "social network" sites held up to a different standard?
Well, I suspect that I'm talking to a particularly belligerent wall here; but somebody else might read it: 'social' networks are explicitly and fundamentally, designed to produce profiles based both on what you provide and what people you have real-world connections with provide (eg. people who don't even have facebook accounts; but are still tagged and machine-visioned in the image libraries of people who do). Your Slashdot-type profile is probably more vulnerable to a clever analyst than casual inspection would suggest; but the value of information provided by 3rd parties on the system about you is overwhelmingly lower, leaving the question of how 'knowable' you are much more in your hands.
Also, of course, 'real name' policies are a fairly obvious attempt to both extirpate dupes and ACs (presumably because the quality of discussion is already low enough, and because uniques with attached data are worth more as eyeballs); but also quash pseudonyms in the process. Again, many pseudonyms are vulnerable to clever or sustained attack; but in casual use they allow the virtues of consistent 'characters' to emerge (Yeah, that guy, he impersonates a fungus on the internet. Fucked if I know...); but leaves it up to you whether to connect that to other parts of your life or not. Some people use pseudonyms; some use pseudonyms by preference but make little or no effort to hide who they are, some post under their real names, up to you.
It probably didn't help that (at fundamental cost to battery life, and significant but theoretically solvable cost in fancy management) phones got powerful enough to just do email. No second set of not-exactly-mailservers in the loop (either for reliability or security concerns), on the corporate side you now need to sell a BES(and as the 'better than your existing mailserver alone' option rather than the 'well, do you want mobile email or not?' option), on the consumer side you need to sell a telco on giving you a cut of the action in exchange for a modest reduction in data transfer, and the handset customer on an increasingly uncompetitive device.
Even if it were perfect, RIM's fancy proprietary network was not exactly getting more viable with age. Any deviations from perfection were just nails in the coffin.
Just you wait: if Qualcomm buys them out we can have BREWberry, the world's most hostile mobile development environment!
Maybe all their genuinely cool stuff was taken out back and shot before it saw the light of day; but I'm not sure (based on what they actually sent to market) that "We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than they did."
There are companies where you can clearly say "Wow, Company X is under the insane delusion that $SOMETHING$ is the future, all evidence to the contrary, and damn are they ever stubbornly shoveling that something into the utter indifference of the marketplace!" This isn't a compliment, exactly; but being a high-functioning delusive beats being a dysfunctional one.
Blackberry, though? The greatest compliment you can pay to their earlier years, and the greatest condemnation of their later ones, is that they seemed frozen in time, only worse. They weren't quite frozen (had they been, you'd at least be able to read your text-only communications and basic voice for a zillion hours with modern battery and silicon tech); but they never went anywhere. Their OS just got slower and more confusing as it mutated toward no particular goal, battery-sapping quasi-smart features were grafted on, cargo-cult style, to a system that never really made anything of them.
Oh, people do that sort of thing all the time, just not often enough that you can safely assume it about everyone in just about any class of people. Some norms are more normative than others; but you can usually find people who are rationalizing and people who are sincerely unbothered.
Or you and they actually have differing positions on the timeline for the onset of moral personhood... It's one of the universe's great injustices; but sometimes people who apparently disagree with you actually do, rather than living in secret, guilt-wracked, recognition that you were right all along.
In a shocking and atypical display of foresight (notably absent in, say, chronically underfunded "Pension funds", back when those existed), the NRC actually requires plant operators to sock away enough money to decommission the plant when they are finished with it, even if they become insolvent.
I assume that they didn't really want to be stuck with a bunch of glow-in-the-dark superfund sites....
Unfortunately, litigation to internalize externalities tends to be the finest in tragicomedy about how easy it is for the guy with deeper pockets to stall, obstruct, and just plain outlast would-be challengers. People have certainly tried litigating against polluters who damage their persons or property, on occasion they even win; but the process is pretty brutal.
"Costs" has a fairly common definition when you get to the section in ye econ book about 'externalities' and the various mechanisms for internalizing them.
Did you actually just suggest that people have abortions because they are confused about what fetuses are going to turn into, rather than because they know exactly what fetuses turn into?