I'm very fond of old laserjets myself(my trusty 4L did 13 years of service until I lost it, still in perfect working order, in a move). However, they are not low power devices. Especially when heating the fuser, you can easily spike to some hundreds of watts (HP quotes "330 watts average" while printing, 16-18 unless hard powered off, and that 'average' may well conceal a rush as the fuser first warms up, not kind to a low power/inverter operated environment).
They'll produce better output; but that's a good factor of ten more power than a dot matrix.
Do you seriously suspect that this crackdown will work? Mubarak spent the better part of his time in office flexing his (ample) willingness to exercise 'emergency powers' and a bit of the old extralegal detention and torture trying to get rid of them, and look how successful that wasn't.
Once in power, the Brotherhood turned out to be as incompetent as they were autocratic, so their charm wore off a bit; but several decades of steady state violence didn't keep them from being the best prepared outfit when the original voting happened.
There are pretty substantial variations in intestinal normal flora between individuals (non-human cells in your body outnumber the human ones about 10-1, and many of them live in the gut), so that would be my guess. I'm not nearly enough microbiologist to suggest which organisms or strains are involved; but gut bacteria are a significant variable (since they vary based on where you were first innoculated with them, internal competition between organisms, antibiotics you've taken, etc.) that changes markedly faster than any human genetic or epigenetic component does.
Only some of the owners (the proposed class consists of people who bought stock during a specific period when the allegedly false/misleading reports were made) are suing the company, which also has (many more) owners who aren't in that class.
I have no opinion over whether the suit has merit or not; but it would be a fairly simple matter for the members of the class, a smallish subset of the owners, to be compensated by the company at the expense of the people who owned the company during the time when it allegedly misbehaved(though, obviously, other stockholders' liabilities would be limited to the value of their stock).
If all the stockholders were suing the company, you'd have to go after individual executives or directors for it to make any sense; but here only a modest slice of the stockholders are involved. It may or may not be a groundless suit; but the math works.
I wouldn't necessarily bet on them doing so; but MS has the private key needed to sign payloads that the firmware will boot. If they wanted to get rid of them, it would not be a significant challenge to either 1) create a signed firmware update that removes the signature requirement, or 2) create a signed firmware update that adds the public key of the outfit they are selling the things to, or 3) offer a signing service to whoever buys the things, so they can whip up a Tegra3 Android image and have it bootable with the existing firmware.
I suspect that they'll try to avoid it coming to that, and will attempt to trickle the remainder out with more moderate discounts (they've done some heavier discounting in the educational sector, which they probably view as a safe dumping ground/marketing exercise) and only do anything really drastic once the Tegra3 and relatively feeble screen are simply an embarrassment at any price they'd be comfortable letting a copy of Windows go for.
My bad judgement is my fault; but if you are allowed to lie through your teeth to me, the quality of my judgement becomes nearly irrelevant: maliciously crafted garbage in? Garbage out.
Given that part of MS' struggle with RT arises from the desire to not cannibalize their cash cows, I'd be surprised if they ever let something with a copy of Windows(even a gimped one) and a copy of Office (even with restrictive license terms) baked in out the door for $99. Even if they were OK with that, I suspect Dell wouldn't be amused, nor would the various sellers of (modestly less doomed) Atom-based Win8 mostly-tablet things.
I'd honestly be unsurprised to see them sold wholesale to be stripped for components, or debranded and flashed into mysterious pacific rim non-brand Androids, or otherwise quietly disposed of rather than dumped on the retail market at more than a modest discount.
HP's little fire sale, to the degree it made sense at all, only made sense because they had no less-doomed products in potentially competing areas, so if blowing them out at retail was the best deal they could get, per unit, it was the best thing to do.
Is there no value in making illegally lying to investors and potential investors a riskier and potentially more costly activity?
Obviously, in an ideal world, the penalties exacted from Microsoft would fully compensate the wronged parties, even after the potential hit is taken into account; but even if that isn't possible, never enforcing anything that might cause stock prices to fall means never enforcing anything. It's the publicly-traded equivalent of 'we can't punish anyone because it might make their family sad!'
The problem is the mentality that something is only worth doing if it makes you feel better right now. This "solution" only makes things worse. It's like a parent trying to get compliance by bribing their toddler with candy.
It doesn't help that the described 'invention' will actually make the task slower in the attempt to make it palatable; while making the bribe worse by trying to make it 'relevant'. Does anyone suspect that a computer throwing together clip art is going to produce especially compelling footage(except occasionally by sheer accidental absurdity)? Or that time spent watching stock footage of guys with swords is something that helps you in actually reading the text?
If you wanted to bribe kiddo, it'd be far easier to just tell him to read the damn book in exchange for some time to screw around on youtube. This concept has all the vices of bribery; but isn't even as good as the conventional form.
Unless you are built like a low-poly linebacker, there isn't anywhere on your torso where something as large as a tablet won't rest awkwardly with at least one protruding corner, unless you wear a McMurdo-grade winter jacket at all times.
Since you can't hide something of that size, you might as well go with a small messenger bag, which will have the same capacity as a very large holster; but won't look utterly ridiculous.
I have no reason to suspect that patients are particularly good at choosing the best option to suit their problem; but I've always found the 'But I learned about demand curves in EC101, and demand always increases when price decreases!' school rather delusional. Outside of Münchausen's cases (who do need treatment, just not the kind they seek), who goes to the doctor, much less undergoes any serious procedures, for fun? When everything is working properly, you go because the cure is less ghastly than the disease; but that's a pretty low standard for recreation...
The way AC talked about 'risk pooling' (in a sense so utterly unlike the common use of the term) makes me wonder if 'risk pooling' is some byzantine term of art in the context of legislative haggling or something. I'd certainly never heard it used except as a description of what insurance is supposed to do (and, in the case of medicine, with its potential for unpredictable, enormous, and life-critical expenses, a more or less necessary function), so being flamed about it makes me wonder if it means something else in our specific legislative context.
As long as the payers for service and consumers of it are different entities, this sort of nonsense will keep happening.
Does your scheme include room for the risk-pooling functions that people tend to like in situations with low-probability very-high-cost possibilities?
I'm not sure that there is a worse implementation of insurance than our present one; but a medical payment system without some provision for risk-pooling is DOA.
It's also worth remembering the other reasons that we kill mice, when doing the arithmetic.
Want to kill mice in your garage? No problem, man, just head down to the hardware store and take your pick. A classic Victor M150 if you prefer some neck-snapping action, glue traps if you prefer to kill them personally (or let them dehydrate or starve, very hands-off), or Brodifacoum bait if massive internal bleeding is more your style.
Want to anesthetize mice in your lab and do neurology research? You sick monster, did the IRB approve this? How can you justify their suffering?
It's far rarer than dreaming; but 'Anton-Babinski Syndrome' provides some examples of a strange situation where a person is blind; but remains unaware of, and in denial of, that fact. If pressed for visual details, they will readily (but no more correctly than any other blind person taking an educated guess) confabulate descriptions of what the are 'seeing'. Very curious.
Then you've got the odd case of 'blindsight', where the is blind (they no longer 'see' consciously); but the eyes and some aspects of the visual system are intact, so they, despite being incapable of describing the scene and performing other tasks we associate with sight, are capable of performing well above chance on certain tests that rely on visual stimuli. It feels like guessing; but they are substantially better than ordinary blind people (who guess at chance, as one would expect) on those tests.
Given that individual cells handle their own metabolism (bulk assimilation of outside supplies depends on the lungs and digestive system; but the final stages are handled in-cell) it's hard to imagine that even instantaneous blood loss would cause immediate total shutdown. Has to be enough ATP in there for any cells not mechanically destroyed to freak out briefly.
This EEG work certainly suggests that communications between cells may also remain briefly functional. What it doesn't tell us is whether what is happening is 'awareness' as we usually think of it, or whether it is something significantly different.
Farmers do not "owe" anyone something to eat just because their product is eatable. They produce a product to sell for a profit.
Certainly, I agree. However, farmers are also not owed subsidies/fuel-blend mandates that make otherwise economically nonsensical biofuel production profitable, or any of the various other market distortions we load the farm bill with every time it comes around to keep corn fed senators happy.
If we were talking about a (at this point largely hypothetical, at least in an American context) biofuel crop that was actually profitable(on its own, not because taxpayers have the pleasure of helping pretend that it is), I would have no objections. As it is, though, growing biofuels is, in large part, a procedure for harvesting subsidies, not an actual good idea. Not as dramatic as a good Stalinist collectivization; but actually pretty close to being farms that are run without thought to profit according to what the state will pay extra for.
Space has more raw materials, though. Incredibly more. Gravity and atmospheric pressure can be established with a bit of effort in space, but you'll never be able to find of iron or hydrogen on Earth.
Most of the good hydrogen spots are gravity wells, often formidable ones, in themselves, which makes shipping more difficult (sure, there's Lots of hydrogen in interstellar clouds; but when a few hundred atoms per cubic meter counts as 'dense', collecting it is a dubious proposition). The assorted metallic asteroids, though, might be more amenable to 'parking' in orbit and just deorbiting on top of something unimportant as occasion requires. (Not that I actually endorse this plan; but we are talking 'hypothetical alternatives to building a space station to escape the oppressed, squalid, masses, so plans involving being a terrible person are arguably on the table...)
It is odd that the page is still up. That means someone is still paying some host to keep it online or it was paid in advance for several decades.
Several decades? C/1995 01 isn't expected to make another pass until sometime in the mid to late 44th century, certainly wouldn't want anybody to miss out on their next chance of boarding...
Sprint's policy is "Haha, No." Slightly surprising given that they are Verizon's whipping boy, and you'd think that they'd try to compete on service; but no.
Plus, almost unlimited water ice(most of it fairly clean and desalinated, to boot). Radiothermal generators are unimpressive at producing electricity, because of lousy thermocouple efficiency; but you'd have water to swim in with a quite manageably sized Pu238 source and a supply of ice, and you'd still be getting 80%-ish of the original heat output two decades from installation.
I wouldn't want to be the PR flack for a plan like that; but Antarctica + heat would probably be nicer than some places that people actually live in.
It's based on a Qualcomm MSM7225A, so Not A Chance.
Qualcomm has a GPLed kernel shim; but it is wholly useless without the userspace binary blob that does mysterious things by twiddling the interfaces the shim provides.
Unless I'm much mistaken, the entire world of mobile GPUs is pretty much a clusterfuck from an openness perspective. Intel will probably die-shrink their way to cramming a GMA that isn't a licensed PowerVR part into a phone before any of the ARM SoC vendors open up.
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I'm very fond of old laserjets myself(my trusty 4L did 13 years of service until I lost it, still in perfect working order, in a move). However, they are not low power devices. Especially when heating the fuser, you can easily spike to some hundreds of watts (HP quotes "330 watts average" while printing, 16-18 unless hard powered off, and that 'average' may well conceal a rush as the fuser first warms up, not kind to a low power/inverter operated environment).
They'll produce better output; but that's a good factor of ten more power than a dot matrix.
Do you seriously suspect that this crackdown will work? Mubarak spent the better part of his time in office flexing his (ample) willingness to exercise 'emergency powers' and a bit of the old extralegal detention and torture trying to get rid of them, and look how successful that wasn't.
Once in power, the Brotherhood turned out to be as incompetent as they were autocratic, so their charm wore off a bit; but several decades of steady state violence didn't keep them from being the best prepared outfit when the original voting happened.
Day 1. Algae slurry.
Day 2. Algae slurry.
...
...
Day N. Algae slurry.
Day N+1 Algae slurry.
There are pretty substantial variations in intestinal normal flora between individuals (non-human cells in your body outnumber the human ones about 10-1, and many of them live in the gut), so that would be my guess. I'm not nearly enough microbiologist to suggest which organisms or strains are involved; but gut bacteria are a significant variable (since they vary based on where you were first innoculated with them, internal competition between organisms, antibiotics you've taken, etc.) that changes markedly faster than any human genetic or epigenetic component does.
Only some of the owners (the proposed class consists of people who bought stock during a specific period when the allegedly false/misleading reports were made) are suing the company, which also has (many more) owners who aren't in that class.
I have no opinion over whether the suit has merit or not; but it would be a fairly simple matter for the members of the class, a smallish subset of the owners, to be compensated by the company at the expense of the people who owned the company during the time when it allegedly misbehaved(though, obviously, other stockholders' liabilities would be limited to the value of their stock).
If all the stockholders were suing the company, you'd have to go after individual executives or directors for it to make any sense; but here only a modest slice of the stockholders are involved. It may or may not be a groundless suit; but the math works.
I wouldn't necessarily bet on them doing so; but MS has the private key needed to sign payloads that the firmware will boot. If they wanted to get rid of them, it would not be a significant challenge to either 1) create a signed firmware update that removes the signature requirement, or 2) create a signed firmware update that adds the public key of the outfit they are selling the things to, or 3) offer a signing service to whoever buys the things, so they can whip up a Tegra3 Android image and have it bootable with the existing firmware.
I suspect that they'll try to avoid it coming to that, and will attempt to trickle the remainder out with more moderate discounts (they've done some heavier discounting in the educational sector, which they probably view as a safe dumping ground/marketing exercise) and only do anything really drastic once the Tegra3 and relatively feeble screen are simply an embarrassment at any price they'd be comfortable letting a copy of Windows go for.
That's pretty much the point of disclosure rules:
My bad judgement is my fault; but if you are allowed to lie through your teeth to me, the quality of my judgement becomes nearly irrelevant: maliciously crafted garbage in? Garbage out.
Given that part of MS' struggle with RT arises from the desire to not cannibalize their cash cows, I'd be surprised if they ever let something with a copy of Windows(even a gimped one) and a copy of Office (even with restrictive license terms) baked in out the door for $99. Even if they were OK with that, I suspect Dell wouldn't be amused, nor would the various sellers of (modestly less doomed) Atom-based Win8 mostly-tablet things.
I'd honestly be unsurprised to see them sold wholesale to be stripped for components, or debranded and flashed into mysterious pacific rim non-brand Androids, or otherwise quietly disposed of rather than dumped on the retail market at more than a modest discount.
HP's little fire sale, to the degree it made sense at all, only made sense because they had no less-doomed products in potentially competing areas, so if blowing them out at retail was the best deal they could get, per unit, it was the best thing to do.
Is there no value in making illegally lying to investors and potential investors a riskier and potentially more costly activity?
Obviously, in an ideal world, the penalties exacted from Microsoft would fully compensate the wronged parties, even after the potential hit is taken into account; but even if that isn't possible, never enforcing anything that might cause stock prices to fall means never enforcing anything. It's the publicly-traded equivalent of 'we can't punish anyone because it might make their family sad!'
The problem is the mentality that something is only worth doing if it makes you feel better right now. This "solution" only makes things worse. It's like a parent trying to get compliance by bribing their toddler with candy.
It doesn't help that the described 'invention' will actually make the task slower in the attempt to make it palatable; while making the bribe worse by trying to make it 'relevant'. Does anyone suspect that a computer throwing together clip art is going to produce especially compelling footage(except occasionally by sheer accidental absurdity)? Or that time spent watching stock footage of guys with swords is something that helps you in actually reading the text?
If you wanted to bribe kiddo, it'd be far easier to just tell him to read the damn book in exchange for some time to screw around on youtube. This concept has all the vices of bribery; but isn't even as good as the conventional form.
Unless you are built like a low-poly linebacker, there isn't anywhere on your torso where something as large as a tablet won't rest awkwardly with at least one protruding corner, unless you wear a McMurdo-grade winter jacket at all times.
Since you can't hide something of that size, you might as well go with a small messenger bag, which will have the same capacity as a very large holster; but won't look utterly ridiculous.
I have no reason to suspect that patients are particularly good at choosing the best option to suit their problem; but I've always found the 'But I learned about demand curves in EC101, and demand always increases when price decreases!' school rather delusional. Outside of Münchausen's cases (who do need treatment, just not the kind they seek), who goes to the doctor, much less undergoes any serious procedures, for fun? When everything is working properly, you go because the cure is less ghastly than the disease; but that's a pretty low standard for recreation...
The way AC talked about 'risk pooling' (in a sense so utterly unlike the common use of the term) makes me wonder if 'risk pooling' is some byzantine term of art in the context of legislative haggling or something. I'd certainly never heard it used except as a description of what insurance is supposed to do (and, in the case of medicine, with its potential for unpredictable, enormous, and life-critical expenses, a more or less necessary function), so being flamed about it makes me wonder if it means something else in our specific legislative context.
As long as the payers for service and consumers of it are different entities, this sort of nonsense will keep happening.
Does your scheme include room for the risk-pooling functions that people tend to like in situations with low-probability very-high-cost possibilities?
I'm not sure that there is a worse implementation of insurance than our present one; but a medical payment system without some provision for risk-pooling is DOA.
It's also worth remembering the other reasons that we kill mice, when doing the arithmetic.
Want to kill mice in your garage? No problem, man, just head down to the hardware store and take your pick. A classic Victor M150 if you prefer some neck-snapping action, glue traps if you prefer to kill them personally (or let them dehydrate or starve, very hands-off), or Brodifacoum bait if massive internal bleeding is more your style.
Want to anesthetize mice in your lab and do neurology research? You sick monster, did the IRB approve this? How can you justify their suffering?
It's far rarer than dreaming; but 'Anton-Babinski Syndrome' provides some examples of a strange situation where a person is blind; but remains unaware of, and in denial of, that fact. If pressed for visual details, they will readily (but no more correctly than any other blind person taking an educated guess) confabulate descriptions of what the are 'seeing'. Very curious.
Then you've got the odd case of 'blindsight', where the is blind (they no longer 'see' consciously); but the eyes and some aspects of the visual system are intact, so they, despite being incapable of describing the scene and performing other tasks we associate with sight, are capable of performing well above chance on certain tests that rely on visual stimuli. It feels like guessing; but they are substantially better than ordinary blind people (who guess at chance, as one would expect) on those tests.
Given that individual cells handle their own metabolism (bulk assimilation of outside supplies depends on the lungs and digestive system; but the final stages are handled in-cell) it's hard to imagine that even instantaneous blood loss would cause immediate total shutdown. Has to be enough ATP in there for any cells not mechanically destroyed to freak out briefly.
This EEG work certainly suggests that communications between cells may also remain briefly functional. What it doesn't tell us is whether what is happening is 'awareness' as we usually think of it, or whether it is something significantly different.
Farmers do not "owe" anyone something to eat just because their product is eatable. They produce a product to sell for a profit.
Certainly, I agree. However, farmers are also not owed subsidies/fuel-blend mandates that make otherwise economically nonsensical biofuel production profitable, or any of the various other market distortions we load the farm bill with every time it comes around to keep corn fed senators happy.
If we were talking about a (at this point largely hypothetical, at least in an American context) biofuel crop that was actually profitable(on its own, not because taxpayers have the pleasure of helping pretend that it is), I would have no objections. As it is, though, growing biofuels is, in large part, a procedure for harvesting subsidies, not an actual good idea. Not as dramatic as a good Stalinist collectivization; but actually pretty close to being farms that are run without thought to profit according to what the state will pay extra for.
Space has more raw materials, though. Incredibly more. Gravity and atmospheric pressure can be established with a bit of effort in space, but you'll never be able to find of iron or hydrogen on Earth.
Most of the good hydrogen spots are gravity wells, often formidable ones, in themselves, which makes shipping more difficult (sure, there's Lots of hydrogen in interstellar clouds; but when a few hundred atoms per cubic meter counts as 'dense', collecting it is a dubious proposition). The assorted metallic asteroids, though, might be more amenable to 'parking' in orbit and just deorbiting on top of something unimportant as occasion requires. (Not that I actually endorse this plan; but we are talking 'hypothetical alternatives to building a space station to escape the oppressed, squalid, masses, so plans involving being a terrible person are arguably on the table...)
It is odd that the page is still up. That means someone is still paying some host to keep it online or it was paid in advance for several decades.
Several decades? C/1995 01 isn't expected to make another pass until sometime in the mid to late 44th century, certainly wouldn't want anybody to miss out on their next chance of boarding...
Sprint's policy is "Haha, No." Slightly surprising given that they are Verizon's whipping boy, and you'd think that they'd try to compete on service; but no.
Plus, almost unlimited water ice(most of it fairly clean and desalinated, to boot). Radiothermal generators are unimpressive at producing electricity, because of lousy thermocouple efficiency; but you'd have water to swim in with a quite manageably sized Pu238 source and a supply of ice, and you'd still be getting 80%-ish of the original heat output two decades from installation.
I wouldn't want to be the PR flack for a plan like that; but Antarctica + heat would probably be nicer than some places that people actually live in.
It's based on a Qualcomm MSM7225A, so Not A Chance.
Qualcomm has a GPLed kernel shim; but it is wholly useless without the userspace binary blob that does mysterious things by twiddling the interfaces the shim provides.
Unless I'm much mistaken, the entire world of mobile GPUs is pretty much a clusterfuck from an openness perspective. Intel will probably die-shrink their way to cramming a GMA that isn't a licensed PowerVR part into a phone before any of the ARM SoC vendors open up.
For inspiration do not see Heaven's Gate.
It beats the north pole; but minerals extraction in Antarctica would be nontrivial. I suppose that that's what colonies are for, though.