It's not unreasonable to pay for editing/publishing in a high-profile journal that also has to assume bandwidth and other costs. For most research, having to pay for that service (instead of submitting as "closed access") is a non-issue. Simply put, if someone has a major project and wants to publish in a prestigious journal (say, Nature) they can usually find 2-3000 for publication (even 2-3 times that would not be a problem for a career-changing publication). This money is peanuts for a big science project of the kind that get published there anyway and it can also be added in the budget. You can ask your funding to cover publication costs, obviously.
Isn't the technology for nuclear ships kind of mega secret? Would a commercial entity be able to get access to all the know-how? And the fuel?
Also, would passengers actually use a nuclear-fueled vessel? Isn't this negative publicity? I'm not questioning the facts, but if people see it this way, it could be detrimental do business.
At this point, SNP genotyping is pretty much obsolete for health-related uses because you can now get a full genome sequence for about $1,000 from just a few drop of saliva - well the raw data, at least - a custom interpretation for a suspected genetic condition might easily run you $20K. SNP genotyping can still be useful for detecting losses or duplications of large parts of a chromosome ("structural" variations) - but mainly because the analysis software is more mature.
I am aware of the difference between the cost of data and the cost of healthcare resulting from said data, but the poster was explicitly asking about the relevance of "open source" raw data so that he could do the interpretation himself. I am also explicitly mentioning arrays, because this is the cheapest technology and the one used by 23andme. Nevertheless, this kind of technology (and yes, the genome too!) has not made a very meaningful impact in clinical practice, with the obvious exception of clinical genetics. Now, you probably already know that today it's much easier to get a diagnosis of some rare muscular dystrophy or some weird anomaly of metabolism thanks to genome sequencing. However, with the exception of some genetic conditions (BRCA1/2, Lynch syndrome, Cystic fibrosis), clinical genetics are only useful for a small percentage of the population. That is exactly what I am saying: there is great progress for a small percentage of the population with rare, high-penetrance, devastating diseases, but there is not meaningful genetic test for type 2 diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, COPD and other frequent conditions. I already explained the reason above but you can also read more about it elsewhere (for example: http://www.nature.com/nrg/jour..., frequent diseas)
Based on the presentations at the American Society for Human Genetics (ASHG) in Baltimore last month, many of the major healthcare organization in the USA are making plans to implement genetic testing for adverse reactions to these drugs. It may be a few more years before it all actually gets rolled out universally (there are currently a number of large pilot studies ongoing) - and it may just be full genome sequencing rather than SNP genotyping - but this is coming. It's a question of "when" rather than "if".
I agree, which is why I said that this kind of application is more mature and that's why I called it an "exception". I already occasionally ask for DPYD or UGT1A1 genotyping for my patients, so certainly this is not a very remote scenario. Nevertheless, some kind of HARD data will have to justify the expense: reduction of hospitalisations, chemotherapy mortality or something similar. Just showing that universal genotyping predicts... genotype is not enough. There has to be a meaningful clinical advantage for a significant number of patients.
There were quite a few people who found out through 23andMe that they were carriers for dangerous BRCA variants. 23andMe almost certainly saved some people from dying of breast cancer. Personally, I'd say that not dying of breast cancer is useful.
Well, that is an interesting byproduct of chance and certainly these people were lucky. However, you are certainly aware that SNP genotyping is NOT a valid test for BRCA variants for many different reasons. So, I would counter argue that some people were also falsely reassured by a negative result of a suboptimal test. If people need to know their BRCA status, they need a proper test (=sequencing with sufficient depth at an accredited lab), a proper interpretation of variants (especially class 2-3!) and discussion of the family tree by a medical geneticist. I understand that cheap DIY healthcare is appreciated in the US, but you can't seriously consider 23andme results as sufficient in this context.
The data is quite simple. At the most basic level it's just a photo of bright spots on a chip, as read by the machine. Knowing that spot A corresponds to variant A and spot B to variant B, an algorithm then decides ("calls"), depending on the relative brightness whether the person has variants AA, AB or BB (or impossible to tell). This is the only real processing and there IS open source software for that (packages for R, most famously CRLMM).
So, the whole point is getting the variant calls, ie what sort of nucleotide the person has at specific positions, for example rs314159 --- yes I chose that based on pi, but it does exist. If you have the variant calls, you can then try to decide, based on available literature, what this means for your health.
The not-so-obvious reason why SNP genotyping has not yet made it to the clinic is that polymorphisms (the stuff that genotyping arrays discover) are either frequent or associated with significant effect, but rarely both. Some rare variants (for example BRCA1/2) have important consequences and some variants are very frequent (for example, for hair color) but don't have important health consequences. This is the result of natural selection: bad genetics tend to get thrown away and become rare.
Simply put, most of the information associated with frequent polymorphisms only modifies risk by a relatively weak amount (relative risk 1.2-2, for example) and may also depend on other polymorphisms or entire haplotypes (a whole bloc of DNA) or even the environment. The resulting information is NOT of sufficient quality to dictate anything beyond things that we already know, ie don't smoke, eat healthy, moderate exercise etc. There are a few exceptions, for example in pharmacogenetics, where some people react differently to drugs, especially important or highly toxic drugs (clopidogrel, 5-fluorouracil, irinotecan etc). In these cases, there is some interest in genotyping and the FDA does mention cases where it could matter. Nevertheless, genetic testing for pharmacogenetics is not universally performed and is not generally required.
In the end, at the current state of affairs, the information provided by 23andme is most useful for ancestry but not particularly useful for health-related decisions. Which is why the FDA stopped them in the past.
Anyway, don't underestimate the interest 23andme has in farming your data (like Google). Even anonymized data without phenotype correlations can be scientifically very interesting. This is not necessarily a problem, but is likely to be the case with all similar genotyping offers.
What is the likelihood that, in three years' time, they have made any significant innovations on the hardware front whatsoever, aside from stacking memory modules on top of one another?
To me this looks like an attempt to continue to milk yesterday's fabrication processes and throw in a few minor bones (like improved VCE, new API support) while not really improving in areas that count, like power efficiency, performance per compute core, cost per compute core, and overall performance per dollar.
They explicitly mentioned 50% more perf-per-watt with respect to the R9-290X. In the end, if you get the performance you want and a reasonable power consumption, what do you care if it's made in 28nm or 22nm or whatever? Process technology is only relevant if it enables these targets.
Lipid formulations of cancer drugs already exist, notably liposomal doxorubicin. Usually these result in better intracellular delivery and less toxicity. The problem is that making stable lipid formulations is quite hard and the resulting product quite expensive. If this, apparently simple, method can create liposomal carboplatin (or whatever other drug), it could allow cheaper and more diverse liposomal anti-cancer drugs. That would be nice. Especially carboplatiin (and cisplatin) are extremely important for many, many different chemotherapy protocols.
Ebanking often depends on two-factor authentication. Furthermore, this is exactly the kind of situation that would rapidly generate enormous publicity. Do you think that people losing thousands or millions are not going to notice? A firmware trojan in that situation would be very short-lived. Everything is possible, of course, but I would be more inclined to think industrial espionage or three-letter agencies, where this kind of "weapon" is likely to be used with discretion and over a long time.
Firmware is usually not signed. Furthermore, I am not even sure that most drives support reading the firmware. Overwriting with a "fresh" firmware might also be impossible, since I assume it happens through vendor extensions of said firmware. A malicious version could be able to thus protect itself.
In the end, such an elaborate scheme is probably directed towards very high value targets. I don't think this is the kind of trojan that runs out in the wild. I could be mistaken, though.
Like you, I do wish it becomes more secure in the future. If anyone has a list of vulnerable targets (brands, models etc), I would be interested to know.
I think it is rather obvious that there should be a way to have more options. Competition is good, choice is good. Can't someone fork a version without systemd? Also, note that other distribution, like Slackware, don't depend on systemd, but the pressure is mounting.
I would just like to mention a rather dubious automatic yearly renewal I got with BitDefender. Although I normally wouldn't mind being given a reminder, in that case I only discovered the item in my VISA card statement. Annoyingly, they didn't even apply the discount that was running at their website at that moment, so I was charged something like $89 for a product that was selling $49 or so.
Anyway, be sure to check this if you are running or planning on buying BitDefender.
I had the same thoughts when I tried installing CM on an old Android device. In the end, the platform was never meant to be secure or really open to user scrutiny. I suppose with a considerable amount of effort you could achieve some sense of security by inspecting all major components, but if you are inclined to invest a considerable amount of effort, then you probably want much better security and are looking at the wrong place. Phones/tablets are fundamentally insecure, and this is probably by design.
I don't really think that is true. Just read Science and Nature on a regular basis. Lots and lots of new insights and discoveries by mostly US centers. It can and should be better - we're on a Red Queen type journey and much of our problems can be solved either by dropping us back into the Bronze age or moving forward understanding our world and how to live in it. Standing around staring at the scenery isn't going to get society very far.
Although I don't doubt for a second that US centers produce first-tier research, I am also inclined to believe that publishing in Nature is far easier when you come from a big US center. So, it is, in a way, a self-sustaining situation. Friends who have been to famous US centers (Dana-Farber, NIH, MIT), find it far more difficult to publish when they come back to Europe, and that is even after having established connections around the world.
With respect to TFA, I would just like to add two parallel phenomena that possibly contribute to the apparent "lack" of funding for young scientistis: - Research is becoming exorbitantly expensive, therefore grants are more likely to be big and only distributed to the people at the top. Funding twenty young researchers with 100k is unfortunately much less productive than funding a big consortium with 2M because the barrier of entry (equipment, regulatory overhead etc) is very high. - The PhD "inflation" means that today a scientist is considered senior/lab head after one and maybe two post-docs. It used to be that after the PhD someone would get a tenure-track job and the associated funds. Today this step occurs at a later age. Naturally, researchers under 35 are seen as "beginners" while a hollywood star or athlete is seen as a veteran at age 35. Such is life for the modern scientist...
This economy baffles me. I rent a house, lease a car, subscribe to a Adobe software, pay-per-view TV, stream music, and play online-DRM games and god knows what else. The day I stop having income, I don't own a thing. I am not by any means going back to the age of carrying chunks of gold on my person, but I get the impression property is quickly being replaced by service in too many aspects of our living. Although practical and convenient, this can only amplify the financial insecurity of the middle/lower classes.
Well, if the shit hits the fan, I can always listen to my vinyl collection.
I'd generally agree about the quality of the speaker, but even in pure mathematical terms a piano is a very complex instrument with hundreds of moving parts and multiple configurations (pedals, chords etc). In fact you can connect most electric pianos to a hifi of your choice, but I don't think it's enough. I would try this, but I don't have a high-end speaker handy;-)
If it were that simple, we could also completely emulate any instrument like a piano or a violin. Electric pianos can do wonders (I own one) but they can't copy the real thing (which I also own). The point is that a turntable is, in that sense, a complex transformation, like an instrument. You may like it or hate it, but it isn't that simple to emulate.
That being said,I'm sure people have mentioned the simple pleasure of actually owning stuff (instead of a virtual license to some bits on some server). Vinyl has that.
EIZO has a series of displays specifically targeted to air traffic control with 2048x2048 at 28". They also make displays for medical uses, surveillance etc, with redundant connectors and PSUs.
There was some sort of sexual adventure between a male bot and a woman, but the story, although situated in the Foundation "universe", does not take place in the Foundation series itself. Actually, the story takes place in the distant past, before the appearance of the Foundation.
Why not just add touch to the 11" macbook and be done with it? Not that I like touch, most of the time it's a horrible idea, but it would tick most of the right boxes: size, keyboard, touch, battery life etc...
The list of features is quite telling...
on
GNOME 3.14 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The Gnome environment has a direction. One that does not interest me. Things like "multitouch" are clearly not important to me, but all three users using Gnome on their tablets might care. I am even more surprised to see the new "Weather app" up in the list of exciting new features. The hours I spend daily looking at the weather forecast will now be much more pleasurable.
Anyway, I really want to like Gnome but don't see anything that matters to me. Linux Mint and the Cinnamon environment seem more suited to my needs and, I suspect, to the needs of the "typical" linux user. In a parallel universe where Apple fans decide to use Linux, Gnome will be there for them.
You really don't get it. The vendors want that data; it's not a burden for them to be processing it on their servers.
Sending everything I say to a server far away is a good reason not to use voice recognition on my phone. Then again, I already send my unencrypted voice over the network when I speak to someone. How hard would it be to implement some decent encryption? Hardware-assisted encryption is already commonplace.
It all comes down to software. Nobody knows what future software might do. Imagine, for example, some pretty decent AI running locally on the phone, accurate (and fluent) voice and face recognition and powerful augmented reality or virtual reality applications and you really start pushing the envelope.
Then again, you could already do all that on a desktop but nobody seems to care enough to develop that kind of stuff. So, here I am in front of a multi-gazzilion-FLOP desktop running the same Office application I used ten years ago and listening to MP3s (which I first encoded on a Pentium in the previous century).
Which is why we may, or may not, see the need for better phone specifications, depending on the evolution of their software ecosystems.
This IPO is interesting because it's a test case for how well China can provide a code of laws assurance to the worldwide investor. So far, so good. But the Chineese system has a similar habit of disenfranchising shareholders, and in this case, it could happen in the blink of an eye.
It's too early to say how it would function in an hypothetical situation. Clearly, that question will have to be settled in the coming decade: what happens when a Chinese company does not behave well? For the moment, people are just hoping for a quick buck, just as with most IPOs.
Until recently, multiple classes of stock were prohibited for NYSE-listed companies, which tended to discourage doing this. (The classic exception was Ford, which has two classes of stock, the voting shares controlled by the Ford family. This predates that NYSE rule.)
Thanks for sharing this information. This explains some things.
The market is fully capable of pricing the fact that Alibaba stockholders don't actually own a direct claim on Alibaba's Chinese assets and can't elect its board. Truth be told, shareholders don't "own" any company; they own whatever rights are specified in the share agreement........
You are right of course. Personally, I'm a bit bothered by stocks that don't give dividends (as a rule!) or voting rights. I know it's common and Alibaba is not the only example. Investing without any kind of control and without expecting dividends (I don't know if it's the case for Alibaba) only seems to reinforce the perception that stocks are some sort of casino. I prefer the vision of stock ownership as holding a small piece of a real business: contributing to decision-making and getting a part of the profits just like you would if you owned a percentage of the restaurant next-door. I feel that this would reinforce much more responsible corporate behavior and saner investment strategies. It's a pity that many technology companies operate this way.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not unreasonable to pay for editing/publishing in a high-profile journal that also has to assume bandwidth and other costs. For most research, having to pay for that service (instead of submitting as "closed access") is a non-issue. Simply put, if someone has a major project and wants to publish in a prestigious journal (say, Nature) they can usually find 2-3000 for publication (even 2-3 times that would not be a problem for a career-changing publication). This money is peanuts for a big science project of the kind that get published there anyway and it can also be added in the budget. You can ask your funding to cover publication costs, obviously.
Isn't the technology for nuclear ships kind of mega secret? Would a commercial entity be able to get access to all the know-how? And the fuel?
Also, would passengers actually use a nuclear-fueled vessel? Isn't this negative publicity? I'm not questioning the facts, but if people see it this way, it could be detrimental do business.
At this point, SNP genotyping is pretty much obsolete for health-related uses because you can now get a full genome sequence for about $1,000 from just a few drop of saliva - well the raw data, at least - a custom interpretation for a suspected genetic condition might easily run you $20K. SNP genotyping can still be useful for detecting losses or duplications of large parts of a chromosome ("structural" variations) - but mainly because the analysis software is more mature.
I am aware of the difference between the cost of data and the cost of healthcare resulting from said data, but the poster was explicitly asking about the relevance of "open source" raw data so that he could do the interpretation himself. I am also explicitly mentioning arrays, because this is the cheapest technology and the one used by 23andme. Nevertheless, this kind of technology (and yes, the genome too!) has not made a very meaningful impact in clinical practice, with the obvious exception of clinical genetics. Now, you probably already know that today it's much easier to get a diagnosis of some rare muscular dystrophy or some weird anomaly of metabolism thanks to genome sequencing. However, with the exception of some genetic conditions (BRCA1/2, Lynch syndrome, Cystic fibrosis), clinical genetics are only useful for a small percentage of the population. That is exactly what I am saying: there is great progress for a small percentage of the population with rare, high-penetrance, devastating diseases, but there is not meaningful genetic test for type 2 diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, COPD and other frequent conditions. I already explained the reason above but you can also read more about it elsewhere (for example: http://www.nature.com/nrg/jour..., frequent diseas)
Based on the presentations at the American Society for Human Genetics (ASHG) in Baltimore last month, many of the major healthcare organization in the USA are making plans to implement genetic testing for adverse reactions to these drugs. It may be a few more years before it all actually gets rolled out universally (there are currently a number of large pilot studies ongoing) - and it may just be full genome sequencing rather than SNP genotyping - but this is coming. It's a question of "when" rather than "if".
I agree, which is why I said that this kind of application is more mature and that's why I called it an "exception". I already occasionally ask for DPYD or UGT1A1 genotyping for my patients, so certainly this is not a very remote scenario. Nevertheless, some kind of HARD data will have to justify the expense: reduction of hospitalisations, chemotherapy mortality or something similar. Just showing that universal genotyping predicts ... genotype is not enough. There has to be a meaningful clinical advantage for a significant number of patients.
There were quite a few people who found out through 23andMe that they were carriers for dangerous BRCA variants. 23andMe almost certainly saved some people from dying of breast cancer. Personally, I'd say that not dying of breast cancer is useful.
Well, that is an interesting byproduct of chance and certainly these people were lucky. However, you are certainly aware that SNP genotyping is NOT a valid test for BRCA variants for many different reasons. So, I would counter argue that some people were also falsely reassured by a negative result of a suboptimal test.
If people need to know their BRCA status, they need a proper test (=sequencing with sufficient depth at an accredited lab), a proper interpretation of variants (especially class 2-3!) and discussion of the family tree by a medical geneticist. I understand that cheap DIY healthcare is appreciated in the US, but you can't seriously consider 23andme results as sufficient in this context.
The data is quite simple. At the most basic level it's just a photo of bright spots on a chip, as read by the machine. Knowing that spot A corresponds to variant A and spot B to variant B, an algorithm then decides ("calls"), depending on the relative brightness whether the person has variants AA, AB or BB (or impossible to tell). This is the only real processing and there IS open source software for that (packages for R, most famously CRLMM).
So, the whole point is getting the variant calls, ie what sort of nucleotide the person has at specific positions, for example rs314159 --- yes I chose that based on pi, but it does exist. If you have the variant calls, you can then try to decide, based on available literature, what this means for your health.
The not-so-obvious reason why SNP genotyping has not yet made it to the clinic is that polymorphisms (the stuff that genotyping arrays discover) are either frequent or associated with significant effect, but rarely both. Some rare variants (for example BRCA1/2) have important consequences and some variants are very frequent (for example, for hair color) but don't have important health consequences. This is the result of natural selection: bad genetics tend to get thrown away and become rare.
Simply put, most of the information associated with frequent polymorphisms only modifies risk by a relatively weak amount (relative risk 1.2-2, for example) and may also depend on other polymorphisms or entire haplotypes (a whole bloc of DNA) or even the environment. The resulting information is NOT of sufficient quality to dictate anything beyond things that we already know, ie don't smoke, eat healthy, moderate exercise etc. There are a few exceptions, for example in pharmacogenetics, where some people react differently to drugs, especially important or highly toxic drugs (clopidogrel, 5-fluorouracil, irinotecan etc). In these cases, there is some interest in genotyping and the FDA does mention cases where it could matter. Nevertheless, genetic testing for pharmacogenetics is not universally performed and is not generally required.
In the end, at the current state of affairs, the information provided by 23andme is most useful for ancestry but not particularly useful for health-related decisions. Which is why the FDA stopped them in the past.
Anyway, don't underestimate the interest 23andme has in farming your data (like Google). Even anonymized data without phenotype correlations can be scientifically very interesting. This is not necessarily a problem, but is likely to be the case with all similar genotyping offers.
What is the likelihood that, in three years' time, they have made any significant innovations on the hardware front whatsoever, aside from stacking memory modules on top of one another?
To me this looks like an attempt to continue to milk yesterday's fabrication processes and throw in a few minor bones (like improved VCE, new API support) while not really improving in areas that count, like power efficiency, performance per compute core, cost per compute core, and overall performance per dollar.
They explicitly mentioned 50% more perf-per-watt with respect to the R9-290X. In the end, if you get the performance you want and a reasonable power consumption, what do you care if it's made in 28nm or 22nm or whatever? Process technology is only relevant if it enables these targets.
Lipid formulations of cancer drugs already exist, notably liposomal doxorubicin. Usually these result in better intracellular delivery and less toxicity. The problem is that making stable lipid formulations is quite hard and the resulting product quite expensive. If this, apparently simple, method can create liposomal carboplatin (or whatever other drug), it could allow cheaper and more diverse liposomal anti-cancer drugs. That would be nice. Especially carboplatiin (and cisplatin) are extremely important for many, many different chemotherapy protocols.
Ebanking often depends on two-factor authentication. Furthermore, this is exactly the kind of situation that would rapidly generate enormous publicity. Do you think that people losing thousands or millions are not going to notice? A firmware trojan in that situation would be very short-lived. Everything is possible, of course, but I would be more inclined to think industrial espionage or three-letter agencies, where this kind of "weapon" is likely to be used with discretion and over a long time.
Firmware is usually not signed. Furthermore, I am not even sure that most drives support reading the firmware. Overwriting with a "fresh" firmware might also be impossible, since I assume it happens through vendor extensions of said firmware. A malicious version could be able to thus protect itself.
In the end, such an elaborate scheme is probably directed towards very high value targets. I don't think this is the kind of trojan that runs out in the wild. I could be mistaken, though.
Like you, I do wish it becomes more secure in the future. If anyone has a list of vulnerable targets (brands, models etc), I would be interested to know.
I think it is rather obvious that there should be a way to have more options. Competition is good, choice is good. Can't someone fork a version without systemd? Also, note that other distribution, like Slackware, don't depend on systemd, but the pressure is mounting.
I would just like to mention a rather dubious automatic yearly renewal I got with BitDefender. Although I normally wouldn't mind being given a reminder, in that case I only discovered the item in my VISA card statement. Annoyingly, they didn't even apply the discount that was running at their website at that moment, so I was charged something like $89 for a product that was selling $49 or so.
Anyway, be sure to check this if you are running or planning on buying BitDefender.
I had the same thoughts when I tried installing CM on an old Android device. In the end, the platform was never meant to be secure or really open to user scrutiny. I suppose with a considerable amount of effort you could achieve some sense of security by inspecting all major components, but if you are inclined to invest a considerable amount of effort, then you probably want much better security and are looking at the wrong place. Phones/tablets are fundamentally insecure, and this is probably by design.
I don't really think that is true. Just read Science and Nature on a regular basis. Lots and lots of new insights and discoveries by mostly US centers. It can and should be better - we're on a Red Queen type journey and much of our problems can be solved either by dropping us back into the Bronze age or moving forward understanding our world and how to live in it. Standing around staring at the scenery isn't going to get society very far.
Although I don't doubt for a second that US centers produce first-tier research, I am also inclined to believe that publishing in Nature is far easier when you come from a big US center. So, it is, in a way, a self-sustaining situation. Friends who have been to famous US centers (Dana-Farber, NIH, MIT), find it far more difficult to publish when they come back to Europe, and that is even after having established connections around the world.
With respect to TFA, I would just like to add two parallel phenomena that possibly contribute to the apparent "lack" of funding for young scientistis:
- Research is becoming exorbitantly expensive, therefore grants are more likely to be big and only distributed to the people at the top. Funding twenty young researchers with 100k is unfortunately much less productive than funding a big consortium with 2M because the barrier of entry (equipment, regulatory overhead etc) is very high.
- The PhD "inflation" means that today a scientist is considered senior/lab head after one and maybe two post-docs. It used to be that after the PhD someone would get a tenure-track job and the associated funds. Today this step occurs at a later age. Naturally, researchers under 35 are seen as "beginners" while a hollywood star or athlete is seen as a veteran at age 35. Such is life for the modern scientist...
In a much smaller house?
This economy baffles me. I rent a house, lease a car, subscribe to a Adobe software, pay-per-view TV, stream music, and play online-DRM games and god knows what else. The day I stop having income, I don't own a thing. I am not by any means going back to the age of carrying chunks of gold on my person, but I get the impression property is quickly being replaced by service in too many aspects of our living. Although practical and convenient, this can only amplify the financial insecurity of the middle/lower classes.
Well, if the shit hits the fan, I can always listen to my vinyl collection.
I'd generally agree about the quality of the speaker, but even in pure mathematical terms a piano is a very complex instrument with hundreds of moving parts and multiple configurations (pedals, chords etc). In fact you can connect most electric pianos to a hifi of your choice, but I don't think it's enough. I would try this, but I don't have a high-end speaker handy ;-)
If it were that simple, we could also completely emulate any instrument like a piano or a violin. Electric pianos can do wonders (I own one) but they can't copy the real thing (which I also own). The point is that a turntable is, in that sense, a complex transformation, like an instrument. You may like it or hate it, but it isn't that simple to emulate.
That being said,I'm sure people have mentioned the simple pleasure of actually owning stuff (instead of a virtual license to some bits on some server). Vinyl has that.
EIZO has a series of displays specifically targeted to air traffic control with 2048x2048 at 28". They also make displays for medical uses, surveillance etc, with redundant connectors and PSUs.
There was some sort of sexual adventure between a male bot and a woman, but the story, although situated in the Foundation "universe", does not take place in the Foundation series itself. Actually, the story takes place in the distant past, before the appearance of the Foundation.
Why not just add touch to the 11" macbook and be done with it? Not that I like touch, most of the time it's a horrible idea, but it would tick most of the right boxes: size, keyboard, touch, battery life etc...
The Gnome environment has a direction. One that does not interest me. Things like "multitouch" are clearly not important to me, but all three users using Gnome on their tablets might care. I am even more surprised to see the new "Weather app" up in the list of exciting new features. The hours I spend daily looking at the weather forecast will now be much more pleasurable.
Anyway, I really want to like Gnome but don't see anything that matters to me. Linux Mint and the Cinnamon environment seem more suited to my needs and, I suspect, to the needs of the "typical" linux user. In a parallel universe where Apple fans decide to use Linux, Gnome will be there for them.
You really don't get it. The vendors want that data; it's not a burden for them to be processing it on their servers.
Sending everything I say to a server far away is a good reason not to use voice recognition on my phone. Then again, I already send my unencrypted voice over the network when I speak to someone. How hard would it be to implement some decent encryption? Hardware-assisted encryption is already commonplace.
It all comes down to software. Nobody knows what future software might do. Imagine, for example, some pretty decent AI running locally on the phone, accurate (and fluent) voice and face recognition and powerful augmented reality or virtual reality applications and you really start pushing the envelope.
Then again, you could already do all that on a desktop but nobody seems to care enough to develop that kind of stuff. So, here I am in front of a multi-gazzilion-FLOP desktop running the same Office application I used ten years ago and listening to MP3s (which I first encoded on a Pentium in the previous century).
Which is why we may, or may not, see the need for better phone specifications, depending on the evolution of their software ecosystems.
This IPO is interesting because it's a test case for how well China can provide a code of laws assurance to the worldwide investor. So far, so good. But the Chineese system has a similar habit of disenfranchising shareholders, and in this case, it could happen in the blink of an eye.
It's too early to say how it would function in an hypothetical situation. Clearly, that question will have to be settled in the coming decade: what happens when a Chinese company does not behave well? For the moment, people are just hoping for a quick buck, just as with most IPOs.
Until recently, multiple classes of stock were prohibited for NYSE-listed companies, which tended to discourage doing this. (The classic exception was Ford, which has two classes of stock, the voting shares controlled by the Ford family. This predates that NYSE rule.)
Thanks for sharing this information. This explains some things.
The market is fully capable of pricing the fact that Alibaba stockholders don't actually own a direct claim on Alibaba's Chinese assets and can't elect its board. Truth be told, shareholders don't "own" any company; they own whatever rights are specified in the share agreement........
You are right of course. Personally, I'm a bit bothered by stocks that don't give dividends (as a rule!) or voting rights. I know it's common and Alibaba is not the only example. Investing without any kind of control and without expecting dividends (I don't know if it's the case for Alibaba) only seems to reinforce the perception that stocks are some sort of casino. I prefer the vision of stock ownership as holding a small piece of a real business: contributing to decision-making and getting a part of the profits just like you would if you owned a percentage of the restaurant next-door. I feel that this would reinforce much more responsible corporate behavior and saner investment strategies. It's a pity that many technology companies operate this way.