I think the original source of frustration was that it was unclear whether the iPad would be a tablet Mac, a souped up iPod Touch, or just an oversized iPod Touch that has otherwise similar hardware. If it's a tablet Mac, you expect a more open ecosystem, so the lack of Flash was a disappointment. If it's a souped up iPod Touch, you can't expect anything, but one of the justifications for the "no Flash" rule was limited processing power, so they might have allowed it if processing power was the only concern (but even then, it would be unlikely given the history). But when it became clear that it was basically an oversized iPod Touch with just enough of a hardware upgrade to deal with the larger display, I agree, there was no reason to expect them to allow Flash given the existing precedents.
There's a reason 120 Hz TVs have been pushed lately. That solves the frame rate issue. As for resolution, you shouldn't need to use much more processing power to get 3D from most games; after all, modern graphics are modeled in 3D then flattened. All 3D requires is that you flatten it from two slightly different perspectives; the incremental cost should be small, on the order of 10% or 20%, not enough to require you to drop from 1080p to 720p. One of the few things those extra processors on the PS3 can be used for without requiring a lot of work on the part of the game programmer is "free" stereoscopic 3D.
I'm also a little bothered by the emphasis on winning. Particularly in single-player RPGs, you are usually trying to complete the main plot of the story. You don't win or lose, you simply end. For instance, in Planescape: Torment, it was extremely hard to "lose" (that is, die permanently before reaching the end of the game). Even if you died, with very rare exceptions you would simply wake up in a morgue or an alleyway as your immortal body knitted itself back together. When you eventually reach the end of the game, there were a dozen ways to "win", some of which were more or less satisfying than others; the primary difference was how much they revealed about the mysterious background of your character, and how much of the "solution" was due to intelligence or brute force.
For games like that, you aren't "winning" any more than watching the end of a movie is "winning". Yes, you made choices that changed the course of the story, but it was about discovery, not victory. So even if you use an overly restrictive definition that precludes "winning" from art, you still haven't prevented all video games from being art.
To be clear, in the "ccc" case, seeing nothing for savings or money market would be correct, since none should exist. Their code created it, but then did nothing with it in the "ccc" case.
I had a similar experience. Technically, a correct assignment could be done in different ways, but it was a limited enough assignment that I'd be hard pressed to identify cheating on a correct assignment. Fortunately, the two people who decided to cheat not only did it wrong, they did it hilariously wrong. The assignment was to create "bank accounts" based on an input string (c for checking, s for savings, m for money market). Each account created got $400 more than the previous (the initial account got $500). Then you ran each of them through three months of accruing interest (only difference between account types was interest rate), printing the value at the end of each month. The instructions were far more explicit than I'm being; output was provided for enough example inputs so checking your work was trivial. The two cheaters interpreted it in a hilariously incorrect fashion: they statically created exactly three accounts, one of each type, then used the input string to determine which ones would earn interest. So a string of "csm", instead of creating three accounts and running them through three months interest would run each static account through a single month's interest, then terminate. "ccc" meant the checking account ran for three months, and you saw nothing at all for the savings or money market.
And of course, they were lazy as hell about the cheating. The only difference in the code was variable names, and they weren't even well disguised; rather than changing them, the other submitter just appended to the original name. A variable named "cash" in one submission became "cashMoney" in another.
Lesson to future cheaters: If you're going to cheat, cheat off someone who isn't a complete moron. In CS1, you can only solve the problem correctly in a few ways; identifying cheating is hard, and you're not likely to get called on it unless your solution is character for character identical. But if you solve it in a uniquely dumb way, you'll get caught, and provide amusement to TAs for quite a while.
The patent office isn't occupied by judges. Lots of lawyers with technical backgrounds, but a judge isn't approving this. A patent lawyer with a background in the relevant field would probably be better at identifying junk science than your average judge.
Hey, IBM is making out like a bandit. A corporation doesn't do things for the public good, they do it for the bottom line. Lose your respect (if you had any left) for Florida's elected officials. Personally, I had none left to lose, but then, I read Carl Hiaasen's column in the Miami Herald, which is a great way to completely disillusion yourself.
IBM? Tracking people deemed troublesome to people in government?
Invoking Godwin's Law in 3...2...1...
Yeah, that was one of my original thoughts. IBM really doesn't need this kind of PR. I grew up being told how IBM enabled the Holocaust, and they really don't need to bring that association to mind in a state with a large population of elderly Jews.
That said, there is a big difference between tracking random citizens and essentially creating a preliminary psychological profile of juvenile offenders. By and large, I don't mind taking fingerprints and DNA from people who have been convicted in a court of law. As long as they don't arrest the "high probability offenders" pre-emptively, or use it at trial to prejudice the jury, I'm fine with it.
To be fair, most of the borrowing isn't even financing *our* extravagant lifestyle. We've got a trade deficit of about $750 billion (which is made far worse by China's currency policies, which, not coincidentally, are also providing us with a customer for our debt). With outsourcing, some of that trade deficit is coming back to the U.S. through the corporations engaging in outsourcing; the products produced by U.S. corporations overseas and sold to buyers in other countries don't show on the trade deficit balance sheets, but we're taking a cut of every sale from a Chinese subsidiary to a Parisian shopper. Resolving the China currency issue would not eliminate the deficit, but the effects of the outsourced labor would resolve it for all intents and purposes.
That's all our "extravagant lifestyle" accounts for. Much of the rest is spending on projects that don't directly improve our lifestyle. Our two wars cost $100 billion a year. The cost of maintaining our other overseas bases (effectively removing the burden of defense from the host country) is another cost we pay that doesn't directly benefit us. We're overpaying for health care because we're one of the only countries that doesn't impose cost controls on drugs and medical devices; because of that, we effectively subsidize every other country's health care by massively overpaying for our own. Again, we pay the cost, other countries derive the benefit.
And of course, you're conflating government debt with private debt. As noted, government debt is largely not a product of lifestyle, private debt is. Private debt isn't hereditary, so the unborn aren't responsible. If you believe the foreign expenditures run up by the U.S. government produce worthwhile long term results (arguable, but hear me out), then the unborn are paying for benefits they receive. If you disagree, then yes, it's a waste, but it still has nothing to do with extravagant lifestyles.
That said, U.S. lifestyles are extravagant relatively speaking, and the negative externalities (pollution, cultural "imperialism", for lack of a less inflammatory word) are hard to justify. The solution to the government debt and the extravagant lifestyles could easily be the same thing. Raise the federal gas tax (at least $1 a gallon). Raise the income tax rate at the highest brackets, or create new brackets that target those who are benefiting obscenely from the government's support (e.g. 50% of income over 5 million, 60% over 10 million, 70% over 25 million, 80% over 50 million). A hedge fund manager pulled down over four billion last year (yes, billion with a 'B'). And being primarily capital gains taxes, he likely paid about 15-20% in taxes. If we taxed that to compensate for the fact that that income was only possible due to government aid, then we'd have an extra 2 billion or so in the bank. The top 25 hedge fund managers earned an *average* of a billion dollars a piece, so from 25 people who directly profited from the government bank bailouts, we'd recover 15 billion more than we actually did. Add a moderate VAT (10%) on all goods sold. It's win-win; either the extravagant lifestyles become less extravagant, or the government gets funding to pay down its own debt. People on the low and middle end of the spectrum pay a little more, people at the high end, who benefit the most from government support (after all, even for those who didn't directly benefit from a government bailout, but earn in the multi-million range are earning enough that a society without law and order would lead to them being robbed by small armies at gunpoint).
Tax rates like these aren't growth killers; we had worse under Eisenhower (90-91% on income over $400,000) and the 50s were boom years. And they'd easily enable us to eliminate the federal deficit (and indirectly reduce the trade deficit, since the VAT would reduce spending on frivolous purchases). Hell, if we replaced the existing health care system with a system like Britain's NHS, the reduced cost of health care in the aggregate would free up money to compensate
I'd think the sexual harassment, the "horrid" meals from the cafeterias (no offsite lunch or bring your own food option), the requirement that they buy their own mattresses and bedding, and the lack of bathroom breaks during 12+ hour shifts might counteract the marginal benefit derived from "free" access to cramped dormitories.
Given that a small lunch in the U.S. would run you around $5 (more in large cities, but you get the idea), we could establish a cost of living conversion (as opposed to a straight currency conversion), of about $1=1 yuan. So they are making about $4.50 an hour in terms of buying power. That's below the *old* minimum wage in the U.S., and the old minimum wage in the U.S. wasn't sufficient to support yourself. Which is of course why they work 15 or 16 hour shifts 6 or 7 days a weak; they're essentially doing two jobs worth of work to get as much buying power as someone working a close to minimum wage job for 40 hours a week has in the U.S.
So no, it's not as bad as the 65 cents/hour would have you believe. But it's still exploitative.
No, they don't do a cost of living adjustment. No newspaper does. Because the lowball wages always look more impressive without adjustment. Not to mention the fact that you'd have to determine what part of the U.S. to compare to. The cost of living difference between New York or San Fran vs. living on the outskirts of a middling to large city in the Midwest is substantial.
It's a good thing you didn't choose Logitech due to ethical concerns. Because according to TFA, they outsource production to the exact same company, KYE Systems.
That's going to be a bit of a problem, since most other mouse manufacturers apparently contract out to this outfit too. FTFA:
Companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, Foxconn, Acer, Logitech and Asus also outsource production to KYE Systems.
And it looks like that's just a sample list, not the complete set. The focus on Microsoft is because the article was in a Seattle newspaper, not due to sole complicity by Microsoft.
Depends on your definition of essential. No, most if not all top secret stuff isn't going to be online no matter what, but for anything less critical, there's a risk/reward factor. If you use "enough" security (firewalls and multiple layers of progressively more restricted systems, good encryption and signing, etc.), the benefits derived from being able to share information quickly and easily can outweigh the risks involved. DARPA helped design the internet for a reason; we needed a communications system with enough redundancy to keep going in the face of damage. Why not use it for cases where rapid communication is an imperative?
And now we know the secret of how vampires never seem to want for money. It's not prudent investments carried out over an endless unlife combined with their ability to derive nourishment from the blood of unwilling victims rather than paying for food and drink. Nowadays they just get a store clerk to burn them with an ultra low power LED scanner, curse a bit, then sue for enough money to support themselves indefinitely.
War provided the necessary impetus to develop the technologies. The fact that we invest more in research during war doesn't make investing in research bad. Investing in pure research is hard to sell though, so we hide it behind something more impressive. Personally, I'd rather we hid it behind a peaceful space program, rather than hiding it behind bombing people in the stone age back to the pre-Cambrian, but that's me.
For the record, I don't think Constellation was such a great idea either, but at least it provided a goal. I just wish a president would have the courage to call for enough of a NASA budget to not only go to another planet/moon for visit, but to set up a permanent presence. It's not even the whole extinction worry some people seem to have, I just feel that our pioneering drive was responsible for some of the greatest advances, both cultural and economic, in our history (also some of the greatest atrocities, but we'll have to hope there aren't any natives this time around).
I'm not sure why clout should matter. Evaluate the arguments on their merits where possible. I am a fairly strong Obama supporter on most issues (I wish he'd be a bit more assertive on gay rights and financial regulation, but given I'm straight and work for a hedge fund, the feeling doesn't have the weight of self interest behind it), but the sole point of complete disagreement is his vision, or lack thereof, for NASA. I've heard the arguments that the "new" NASA will somehow develop all the necessary interplanetary exploration technologies instead of wasting money returning to the moon, but I'm skeptical that we'll develop useful technology without a direct mission requirement that it satisfies. It just seems like yet another step in the long, slow decline of our space program since the Challenger accident.
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Quarters don't, but the profit margin is still fairly slim. Only nickels and pennies actually cost more to make than they are worth.
I think the original source of frustration was that it was unclear whether the iPad would be a tablet Mac, a souped up iPod Touch, or just an oversized iPod Touch that has otherwise similar hardware. If it's a tablet Mac, you expect a more open ecosystem, so the lack of Flash was a disappointment. If it's a souped up iPod Touch, you can't expect anything, but one of the justifications for the "no Flash" rule was limited processing power, so they might have allowed it if processing power was the only concern (but even then, it would be unlikely given the history). But when it became clear that it was basically an oversized iPod Touch with just enough of a hardware upgrade to deal with the larger display, I agree, there was no reason to expect them to allow Flash given the existing precedents.
There's a reason 120 Hz TVs have been pushed lately. That solves the frame rate issue. As for resolution, you shouldn't need to use much more processing power to get 3D from most games; after all, modern graphics are modeled in 3D then flattened. All 3D requires is that you flatten it from two slightly different perspectives; the incremental cost should be small, on the order of 10% or 20%, not enough to require you to drop from 1080p to 720p. One of the few things those extra processors on the PS3 can be used for without requiring a lot of work on the part of the game programmer is "free" stereoscopic 3D.
Yes, that's what I meant.
I think if he tried to claim that Planescape: Torment was not a video game, he'd be laughed out of the room.
I'm also a little bothered by the emphasis on winning. Particularly in single-player RPGs, you are usually trying to complete the main plot of the story. You don't win or lose, you simply end. For instance, in Planescape: Torment, it was extremely hard to "lose" (that is, die permanently before reaching the end of the game). Even if you died, with very rare exceptions you would simply wake up in a morgue or an alleyway as your immortal body knitted itself back together. When you eventually reach the end of the game, there were a dozen ways to "win", some of which were more or less satisfying than others; the primary difference was how much they revealed about the mysterious background of your character, and how much of the "solution" was due to intelligence or brute force.
For games like that, you aren't "winning" any more than watching the end of a movie is "winning". Yes, you made choices that changed the course of the story, but it was about discovery, not victory. So even if you use an overly restrictive definition that precludes "winning" from art, you still haven't prevented all video games from being art.
To be clear, in the "ccc" case, seeing nothing for savings or money market would be correct, since none should exist. Their code created it, but then did nothing with it in the "ccc" case.
I had a similar experience. Technically, a correct assignment could be done in different ways, but it was a limited enough assignment that I'd be hard pressed to identify cheating on a correct assignment. Fortunately, the two people who decided to cheat not only did it wrong, they did it hilariously wrong. The assignment was to create "bank accounts" based on an input string (c for checking, s for savings, m for money market). Each account created got $400 more than the previous (the initial account got $500). Then you ran each of them through three months of accruing interest (only difference between account types was interest rate), printing the value at the end of each month. The instructions were far more explicit than I'm being; output was provided for enough example inputs so checking your work was trivial. The two cheaters interpreted it in a hilariously incorrect fashion: they statically created exactly three accounts, one of each type, then used the input string to determine which ones would earn interest. So a string of "csm", instead of creating three accounts and running them through three months interest would run each static account through a single month's interest, then terminate. "ccc" meant the checking account ran for three months, and you saw nothing at all for the savings or money market.
And of course, they were lazy as hell about the cheating. The only difference in the code was variable names, and they weren't even well disguised; rather than changing them, the other submitter just appended to the original name. A variable named "cash" in one submission became "cashMoney" in another.
Lesson to future cheaters: If you're going to cheat, cheat off someone who isn't a complete moron. In CS1, you can only solve the problem correctly in a few ways; identifying cheating is hard, and you're not likely to get called on it unless your solution is character for character identical. But if you solve it in a uniquely dumb way, you'll get caught, and provide amusement to TAs for quite a while.
The patent office isn't occupied by judges. Lots of lawyers with technical backgrounds, but a judge isn't approving this. A patent lawyer with a background in the relevant field would probably be better at identifying junk science than your average judge.
Hey, IBM is making out like a bandit. A corporation doesn't do things for the public good, they do it for the bottom line. Lose your respect (if you had any left) for Florida's elected officials. Personally, I had none left to lose, but then, I read Carl Hiaasen's column in the Miami Herald, which is a great way to completely disillusion yourself.
IBM? Tracking people deemed troublesome to people in government? Invoking Godwin's Law in 3...2...1...
Yeah, that was one of my original thoughts. IBM really doesn't need this kind of PR. I grew up being told how IBM enabled the Holocaust, and they really don't need to bring that association to mind in a state with a large population of elderly Jews.
That said, there is a big difference between tracking random citizens and essentially creating a preliminary psychological profile of juvenile offenders. By and large, I don't mind taking fingerprints and DNA from people who have been convicted in a court of law. As long as they don't arrest the "high probability offenders" pre-emptively, or use it at trial to prejudice the jury, I'm fine with it.
To be fair, most of the borrowing isn't even financing *our* extravagant lifestyle. We've got a trade deficit of about $750 billion (which is made far worse by China's currency policies, which, not coincidentally, are also providing us with a customer for our debt). With outsourcing, some of that trade deficit is coming back to the U.S. through the corporations engaging in outsourcing; the products produced by U.S. corporations overseas and sold to buyers in other countries don't show on the trade deficit balance sheets, but we're taking a cut of every sale from a Chinese subsidiary to a Parisian shopper. Resolving the China currency issue would not eliminate the deficit, but the effects of the outsourced labor would resolve it for all intents and purposes.
That's all our "extravagant lifestyle" accounts for. Much of the rest is spending on projects that don't directly improve our lifestyle. Our two wars cost $100 billion a year. The cost of maintaining our other overseas bases (effectively removing the burden of defense from the host country) is another cost we pay that doesn't directly benefit us. We're overpaying for health care because we're one of the only countries that doesn't impose cost controls on drugs and medical devices; because of that, we effectively subsidize every other country's health care by massively overpaying for our own. Again, we pay the cost, other countries derive the benefit.
And of course, you're conflating government debt with private debt. As noted, government debt is largely not a product of lifestyle, private debt is. Private debt isn't hereditary, so the unborn aren't responsible. If you believe the foreign expenditures run up by the U.S. government produce worthwhile long term results (arguable, but hear me out), then the unborn are paying for benefits they receive. If you disagree, then yes, it's a waste, but it still has nothing to do with extravagant lifestyles.
That said, U.S. lifestyles are extravagant relatively speaking, and the negative externalities (pollution, cultural "imperialism", for lack of a less inflammatory word) are hard to justify. The solution to the government debt and the extravagant lifestyles could easily be the same thing. Raise the federal gas tax (at least $1 a gallon). Raise the income tax rate at the highest brackets, or create new brackets that target those who are benefiting obscenely from the government's support (e.g. 50% of income over 5 million, 60% over 10 million, 70% over 25 million, 80% over 50 million). A hedge fund manager pulled down over four billion last year (yes, billion with a 'B'). And being primarily capital gains taxes, he likely paid about 15-20% in taxes. If we taxed that to compensate for the fact that that income was only possible due to government aid, then we'd have an extra 2 billion or so in the bank. The top 25 hedge fund managers earned an *average* of a billion dollars a piece, so from 25 people who directly profited from the government bank bailouts, we'd recover 15 billion more than we actually did. Add a moderate VAT (10%) on all goods sold. It's win-win; either the extravagant lifestyles become less extravagant, or the government gets funding to pay down its own debt. People on the low and middle end of the spectrum pay a little more, people at the high end, who benefit the most from government support (after all, even for those who didn't directly benefit from a government bailout, but earn in the multi-million range are earning enough that a society without law and order would lead to them being robbed by small armies at gunpoint).
Tax rates like these aren't growth killers; we had worse under Eisenhower (90-91% on income over $400,000) and the 50s were boom years. And they'd easily enable us to eliminate the federal deficit (and indirectly reduce the trade deficit, since the VAT would reduce spending on frivolous purchases). Hell, if we replaced the existing health care system with a system like Britain's NHS, the reduced cost of health care in the aggregate would free up money to compensate
I'd think the sexual harassment, the "horrid" meals from the cafeterias (no offsite lunch or bring your own food option), the requirement that they buy their own mattresses and bedding, and the lack of bathroom breaks during 12+ hour shifts might counteract the marginal benefit derived from "free" access to cramped dormitories.
Beijing is an exception; it's a tourist capital and the center of power, where wages and prices vastly exceed the rest of the country.
Given that a small lunch in the U.S. would run you around $5 (more in large cities, but you get the idea), we could establish a cost of living conversion (as opposed to a straight currency conversion), of about $1=1 yuan. So they are making about $4.50 an hour in terms of buying power. That's below the *old* minimum wage in the U.S., and the old minimum wage in the U.S. wasn't sufficient to support yourself. Which is of course why they work 15 or 16 hour shifts 6 or 7 days a weak; they're essentially doing two jobs worth of work to get as much buying power as someone working a close to minimum wage job for 40 hours a week has in the U.S.
So no, it's not as bad as the 65 cents/hour would have you believe. But it's still exploitative.
No, they don't do a cost of living adjustment. No newspaper does. Because the lowball wages always look more impressive without adjustment. Not to mention the fact that you'd have to determine what part of the U.S. to compare to. The cost of living difference between New York or San Fran vs. living on the outskirts of a middling to large city in the Midwest is substantial.
It's a good thing you didn't choose Logitech due to ethical concerns. Because according to TFA, they outsource production to the exact same company, KYE Systems.
Companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, Foxconn, Acer, Logitech and Asus also outsource production to KYE Systems.
And it looks like that's just a sample list, not the complete set. The focus on Microsoft is because the article was in a Seattle newspaper, not due to sole complicity by Microsoft.
Depends on your definition of essential. No, most if not all top secret stuff isn't going to be online no matter what, but for anything less critical, there's a risk/reward factor. If you use "enough" security (firewalls and multiple layers of progressively more restricted systems, good encryption and signing, etc.), the benefits derived from being able to share information quickly and easily can outweigh the risks involved. DARPA helped design the internet for a reason; we needed a communications system with enough redundancy to keep going in the face of damage. Why not use it for cases where rapid communication is an imperative?
Mod parent up. This waste of time suit was tossed within a day.
And now we know the secret of how vampires never seem to want for money. It's not prudent investments carried out over an endless unlife combined with their ability to derive nourishment from the blood of unwilling victims rather than paying for food and drink. Nowadays they just get a store clerk to burn them with an ultra low power LED scanner, curse a bit, then sue for enough money to support themselves indefinitely.
War provided the necessary impetus to develop the technologies. The fact that we invest more in research during war doesn't make investing in research bad. Investing in pure research is hard to sell though, so we hide it behind something more impressive. Personally, I'd rather we hid it behind a peaceful space program, rather than hiding it behind bombing people in the stone age back to the pre-Cambrian, but that's me.
For the record, I don't think Constellation was such a great idea either, but at least it provided a goal. I just wish a president would have the courage to call for enough of a NASA budget to not only go to another planet/moon for visit, but to set up a permanent presence. It's not even the whole extinction worry some people seem to have, I just feel that our pioneering drive was responsible for some of the greatest advances, both cultural and economic, in our history (also some of the greatest atrocities, but we'll have to hope there aren't any natives this time around).
I'm not sure why clout should matter. Evaluate the arguments on their merits where possible. I am a fairly strong Obama supporter on most issues (I wish he'd be a bit more assertive on gay rights and financial regulation, but given I'm straight and work for a hedge fund, the feeling doesn't have the weight of self interest behind it), but the sole point of complete disagreement is his vision, or lack thereof, for NASA. I've heard the arguments that the "new" NASA will somehow develop all the necessary interplanetary exploration technologies instead of wasting money returning to the moon, but I'm skeptical that we'll develop useful technology without a direct mission requirement that it satisfies. It just seems like yet another step in the long, slow decline of our space program since the Challenger accident.
You're saying there are no Nordic bodybuilders out there that can act with any credibility?