Imagine taking your smartcard/flash/memory stick to the Post Office and getting 50 stamps with a picture of your choice...
The Royal Mail does this, I'm suprised the USPO doesn't.
The answer to the quick-identification problem is tha the personalised stamps have a common part (with the queens head, plus one of a number of designs) with the photo next to that.
Of course, in some ways this means it's no different from having stickers made of your photo and sticking them next to normal stamps...
Maybe the summary and the BBC article are missleading, but if they are comparing developing and printing of chemical photographs with printing of digital ones, the comparison hardly seems interesting. I can't print from my 35mm film, and I don't think having my flash cards dunked in chemicals would be useful.
Of course some of the high street chains will print from digital (though when I went once to try and get a quick print, the list of instructions on the kiosk looked like the toilet instructions in 2001, so I just went home and printed), but they talk about `developers'.
...the fact that your network is relying on floating things 13 miles in the air for its reliability.
This probably improves reliability. No water company to cut through your connection, no fire in the next building bringing the whole thing down (those are the causes of the two longest breaks in my cable connection over the past few years).
Also, I think the environment is relatively stable up there. Cooling is going to be relatively cheap and easy for a start.
Also, as I mentioned before, maintenance will be a real pain.
Why?
Any serious company will have redundant kit, and these guys will be no different. So, if you run N of these platforms you have N+10% (min N+1) of them on hand. When you need to fix/upgrade one, you launch a fixed/upgraded one, then when you are sure it is in place and working you switch the load, land the existing one and fix/upgrade it, and it becomes one of your spares. Apart from the time taken to physically get the things up and down this is no different from any normal update to a working system.
They have changed the way liveconnect in Safari fails miserably with each othe last few updates, so I have no reason to think this one will be different.
(Oh well, I hadn't managed to get time on enough Macs to fix the last one properly, so maybe I can use the immanent release of this one as an excuse...)
Here, we see Apple leveraging their monopoly in personal MP3 players to gain a monopoly in online music downloads.
But they don't have a monopoly, they simply have the currently most popular product. Since MP3 is an open standard, anyone else could produce an iPod killer any day. This is different from windows where, the underlying standard (the Win32 API and so on) are closed and hidden. It's hard to produce something which will `play' Word or Doom3, it's easy to produce something which will play MP3s (the trick is doing it well).
What Apple has a monopoly on is their own propriatory file format. They can change that any time they want. Maybe they will decide next year to change it so that current iPod's can't play new releases, so you have to buy a new one (or an expensive upgrade). Tough shit, that is what iPod owners get for choosing a propriatory format. If they did such a thing it would be a perfectly legitimate (if obnoxious) business decision.
If anyone is suprised that Apple might treat their customers as serfs, they must not have been paying attention for the past couple of decades.
True, the ITER people's optimistic estimate is 2050 for the first commercial generation, so it's receeding into the infinite future at faster than 1 year per year:-).
It's unclear what they'd do with a gazillion tonnes of rape seed and wine grapes:-)
And historically, when the US and EU have used their surplusses in response to famines, it has been to undermine the local economy and create long term dependency for political ends.
Better to drop the subsidies, take a small fragment of the money saved and use it to properly fund aid efforts I would think.
what does it mean to say that "the rainbow is beautiful" in this context? That while the experiments might not yield any practical benefits to the citizens who fund them, they're worthwhile because the scientists sure have a fun time doing them?
No, that we can enjoy watching the scientists and engineers doing them.
Ie. it is worth funding on the same basis that the Hubble telescope was worth funding, or the large hadron collider at CERN is. We don't need a supposed payback in 30 years, the payback comes with the first interesting anomalous readings resulting in a publication.
There are two reasons for doing pure blue-sky science which justify it to me. One is simply that it is the most interesting area of performance art our current society produces. The second is that it is an expression of curiosity, which I believe to be a core drive in homo-sapiens. We'd be less than human if we weren't looking for a new hole to poke a stick down.
People want a return on investment before the next election, not 30 years from now.
I think you are missing the point the writer was making. The 30 is a constant, ie we are always 30 years from fussion. This is not a return in 30 years, but a return an infinite amount of time in the future.
Now, I think the fusion experiments are worth funding because they are fun. I think it's a shame that the political environment is such that the scientists need to pretend there is gold at the end of the rainbow, when the rainbow is so beautiful itself.
We aren't talking big money here in government terms. Eg IIRC the proposed ITER budget is 10 billion Euro over 30 years. The EU pours approximately 100 billion into the common agrecultural policy every year and I presume the USA is operating on basicly the same level, just to prop up buisinesses who produce food no one wants to eat.
I like how you left out the part about Russia not being able to pay for their modules so they could be completed and sent up on time.
That's just a delay in adding bells and whistles, the shuttle being useless has basicly crippled the day to day operation. There would be little problem with the resident's pigging out if the resupply schedule wasn't so touch-and-go.
'Look we gave it the good old college try. If it was meant to be it would be a success already, but alas it isn't working out.'.
Whether it is a sucess depends on what you consider it's purpose to have been. In so far it has a purpose it is to exist and be manned, nothing more, and at that it has suceeded. The problems, beyond the expeted small technical ones, have all been due to America not having a worthwhile launch system to do their end of the job.
All of the other supposed purposes which it has not suceeded against were bogus anyway. No one had a real scientific mission for it for instance. These purposes were just made up to get the budget past politicians who had no interest in space projets per-se. So, except for the politics, there is no reason to worry that it hasn't achieved them.
I remember when that story first broke, I submitted it to/., as did at least one other person, since they mentioned doing so in a comment on another story. However, it never made it onto/..
Consider thinkgeek. All those T-shirts which would tell any sane member of the opposite sex that you were to be avoided at all costs! And Freshmeat, tempting you to stay up late hacking, rather than a similar verb which can lead to reproduction...
So, what would you call the most overrated SF series?
ST-TNG. Just as mediocre as the other neo-trek series, but got lots of praise, basicly because the trekkies had decade long withdrawl symptoms, and any fix felt good.
(note, i'm not saying it was particularly bad, just that it is nothing special, yet got high praise)
Unless you count Quantum Leap as SF. That series was baaaaaaad, even labeling it crap would have been a massive overrating.
Er, Swahilli is quite a significant language. It's the common second language for quite a slice of East Africa. 10s of millions of speakers IIRC.
Since much of that area is relatively poor, it has much less attraction commercially than the number of spekers would normally create, so it's a perfect target for a development project.
Registering itunes.co.uk long after Apple has made the name of its product public is what's known as "passing off".
If that were true, then Apple would have no need to play games, the guy would be prosecuted for passing off, and when he was broke they could pick up the domain name cheap.
But of course, it's not passing off since he is not pretending to be the iTunes site.
Apple had the chance to register itunes.co.uk, they chose not to, someone else took up the option. They have no sane basis upon which to complain.
The nominet rules were set up by and for people like Apple, and so are irrelevent to a discussion of whether Apple are being arseholes. The arsehole always believes he is being reasonable.
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What are the predictions of this theory? What experiments have you performed to test the predictions? How many people have duplicated the results?
With six asses?
The Royal Mail does this, I'm suprised the USPO doesn't.
The answer to the quick-identification problem is tha the personalised stamps have a common part (with the queens head, plus one of a number of designs) with the photo next to that.
Of course, in some ways this means it's no different from having stickers made of your photo and sticking them next to normal stamps...
You bastard! It takes ages to get the coffee out of my keyboard after alaugh like that.
Of course some of the high street chains will print from digital (though when I went once to try and get a quick print, the list of instructions on the kiosk looked like the toilet instructions in 2001, so I just went home and printed), but they talk about `developers'.
OK, who gave Shrub his internet connection back?
This probably improves reliability. No water company to cut through your connection, no fire in the next building bringing the whole thing down (those are the causes of the two longest breaks in my cable connection over the past few years).
Also, I think the environment is relatively stable up there. Cooling is going to be relatively cheap and easy for a start.
Also, as I mentioned before, maintenance will be a real pain.
Why?
Any serious company will have redundant kit, and these guys will be no different. So, if you run N of these platforms you have N+10% (min N+1) of them on hand. When you need to fix/upgrade one, you launch a fixed/upgraded one, then when you are sure it is in place and working you switch the load, land the existing one and fix/upgrade it, and it becomes one of your spares. Apart from the time taken to physically get the things up and down this is no different from any normal update to a working system.
They have changed the way liveconnect in Safari fails miserably with each othe last few updates, so I have no reason to think this one will be different.
(Oh well, I hadn't managed to get time on enough Macs to fix the last one properly, so maybe I can use the immanent release of this one as an excuse...)
But they don't have a monopoly, they simply have the currently most popular product. Since MP3 is an open standard, anyone else could produce an iPod killer any day. This is different from windows where, the underlying standard (the Win32 API and so on) are closed and hidden. It's hard to produce something which will `play' Word or Doom3, it's easy to produce something which will play MP3s (the trick is doing it well).
What Apple has a monopoly on is their own propriatory file format. They can change that any time they want. Maybe they will decide next year to change it so that current iPod's can't play new releases, so you have to buy a new one (or an expensive upgrade). Tough shit, that is what iPod owners get for choosing a propriatory format. If they did such a thing it would be a perfectly legitimate (if obnoxious) business decision.
If anyone is suprised that Apple might treat their customers as serfs, they must not have been paying attention for the past couple of decades.
True, the ITER people's optimistic estimate is 2050 for the first commercial generation, so it's receeding into the infinite future at faster than 1 year per year:-).
Of course, you have to worry about a hacker getting hold of the One Ring and rerouting all your communications.
It's unclear what they'd do with a gazillion tonnes of rape seed and wine grapes:-)
And historically, when the US and EU have used their surplusses in response to famines, it has been to undermine the local economy and create long term dependency for political ends.
Better to drop the subsidies, take a small fragment of the money saved and use it to properly fund aid efforts I would think.
No, that we can enjoy watching the scientists and engineers doing them.
Ie. it is worth funding on the same basis that the Hubble telescope was worth funding, or the large hadron collider at CERN is. We don't need a supposed payback in 30 years, the payback comes with the first interesting anomalous readings resulting in a publication.
There are two reasons for doing pure blue-sky science which justify it to me. One is simply that it is the most interesting area of performance art our current society produces. The second is that it is an expression of curiosity, which I believe to be a core drive in homo-sapiens. We'd be less than human if we weren't looking for a new hole to poke a stick down.
But a dollar now is not worth a dollar ten years ago, so maybe it cancels out.
And isn't this an argument for waiting another 10 years, and so having that dollar perform even better?
The first three words of the above are redundant.
I think you are missing the point the writer was making. The 30 is a constant, ie we are always 30 years from fussion. This is not a return in 30 years, but a return an infinite amount of time in the future.
Now, I think the fusion experiments are worth funding because they are fun. I think it's a shame that the political environment is such that the scientists need to pretend there is gold at the end of the rainbow, when the rainbow is so beautiful itself.
We aren't talking big money here in government terms. Eg IIRC the proposed ITER budget is 10 billion Euro over 30 years. The EU pours approximately 100 billion into the common agrecultural policy every year and I presume the USA is operating on basicly the same level, just to prop up buisinesses who produce food no one wants to eat.
Clearly `conservative' means `keeping all the dictionaries to oneself'.
That's just a delay in adding bells and whistles, the shuttle being useless has basicly crippled the day to day operation. There would be little problem with the resident's pigging out if the resupply schedule wasn't so touch-and-go.
It's not the CPU which is the problem, it's constructing TCP/IP packets out of Lego and squeezing them through the ethernet cable.
They get stuck at every kink in the cable, and someone has to go and clear the blockage by hand.
Mind you, packet fragmentation is far easier than with the traditional hand-whittled wooden packets.
They should never have included those suspicious looking brownies in the last supply run.
Whether it is a sucess depends on what you consider it's purpose to have been. In so far it has a purpose it is to exist and be manned, nothing more, and at that it has suceeded. The problems, beyond the expeted small technical ones, have all been due to America not having a worthwhile launch system to do their end of the job.
All of the other supposed purposes which it has not suceeded against were bogus anyway. No one had a real scientific mission for it for instance. These purposes were just made up to get the budget past politicians who had no interest in space projets per-se. So, except for the politics, there is no reason to worry that it hasn't achieved them.
I remember when that story first broke, I submitted it to /., as did at least one other person, since they mentioned doing so in a comment on another story. However, it never made it onto /..
Consider thinkgeek. All those T-shirts which would tell any sane member of the opposite sex that you were to be avoided at all costs! And Freshmeat, tempting you to stay up late hacking, rather than a similar verb which can lead to reproduction...
ST-TNG. Just as mediocre as the other neo-trek series, but got lots of praise, basicly because the trekkies had decade long withdrawl symptoms, and any fix felt good.
(note, i'm not saying it was particularly bad, just that it is nothing special, yet got high praise)
Unless you count Quantum Leap as SF. That series was baaaaaaad, even labeling it crap would have been a massive overrating.
Er, Swahilli is quite a significant language. It's the common second language for quite a slice of East Africa. 10s of millions of speakers IIRC.
Since much of that area is relatively poor, it has much less attraction commercially than the number of spekers would normally create, so it's a perfect target for a development project.
If that were true, then Apple would have no need to play games, the guy would be prosecuted for passing off, and when he was broke they could pick up the domain name cheap.
But of course, it's not passing off since he is not pretending to be the iTunes site.
Apple had the chance to register itunes.co.uk, they chose not to, someone else took up the option. They have no sane basis upon which to complain.
The nominet rules were set up by and for people like Apple, and so are irrelevent to a discussion of whether Apple are being arseholes. The arsehole always believes he is being reasonable.