This could've been a nice proposition a few years ago but I think Motorola beat them to the punch with the G. Unless you really, really want MeeGo/Sailfish (or you value a 8mp camera that much), the G is just a better proposition. Better screen (720p), Gorilla Glass 3, quad-core, plus vanilla Android which is pretty great, all for less than half this phone's price. The only unclear thing is whether "4G" means LTE or not, because that's probably one of the biggest things missing in the Moto G.
On the other hand, it means the market for mid-range smartphones is getting more and more interesting!
And an engine shattering on impact wouldn't ignite the gas inside? I doubt the engine block would shatter, though, but it'd possibly fracture or get pierced, which is sufficient to cause a catastrophic failure and a high likelihood of fire.
Are you serious? By that token large swathes of astrophysics, geology, biology and more are also "unverifiable". I'll disregard the "proved" point since science isn't about proving things.
Look, it's not because you can't run an experiment in a lab that you can't verify a theory. There is a colossal body of work around the study of genetics and the relationships between species (including extinct ones thanks to paleontology). If you think that all of this work isn't enough verification, then you probably don't think anything science has ever done is verified, either. The truth of the matter is that evolution is one of the most verified theories we've ever conceived and the only reason it's still disputed to this day is because it contradicts a book of parables written thousands of years ago.
I fully agree with this, but, realistically, promoting solar is a more effective way around it. There's a lot of bad noise around nuclear thanks to ancient plants and incidents like Fukushima... You probably won't be able to convince people to move away from coal/oil toward nuclear when the general trend (hello Germany!) is to do the very opposite.
At least with solar, people seem open to the idea. Nuclear just gets people freaking out about green goop and shit. It's infuriating, but it's what it is and we have to make do with it. If India or China manage to construct efficient nuclear plants and use them massively, the general opinion might turn around, but other than that... I have doubts, even though I fully think nuclear would be the ideal baseline power generation.
Just a note, though: nuclear is compact, but solar is easily integrated into cities, which makes it very economical in terms of space too.
Because every single traditional power source is also heavily subsidized. It's only fair. Plus, we should be encouraging solar over other sources for a host of reasons, namely environment impact and better grid resistance to failures.
Solar would have a hard time fighting against cheaper resources because of the large initial cost, and without market demand there wouldn't be much innovation. Many of its advantages aren't reflected in monetary terms, and others take years to kick in.
Actually, that's not true. According to the Android FAQ, you can use the source to create whatever you want. You cannot use the trademark, but you can use Android itself (through AOSP) to run on your hardware. This is why there are so many Android OEMs in China and such; they get to use the software for free and the only restriction is not showing the logo and not using the name.
The main reason why many OEMs don't do this, usually, is that it also precludes them from using Google Play services like Music and the store itself (which, frankly, is fair game; these are Google services maintained by Google, as such you're expected to pay them for that). There is however one extremely high profile example of an OEM doing just that: Amazon. The Kindle Fire does not use Google Play nor the Android branding and as such does not need to pay Google anything for it. The only possible cost is patent licensing (which would be there regardless).
"Most"? On what planet are you living there? Most people wouldn't recognize Firefox even with the About page opened in front of their eyes. They need to do constant marketing so they stay visible to the population outside of Slashdot comments sections (which aren't the people targeted by these ads). If they don't do ads, they'll just fade away, guaranteed.
You might not like the reality of such things, but it's how the world works. Without marketing, they'd lose out on partnerships, on funding opportunities, they'd get less visible to outsiders who might not think about it and install that Chrome thing they saw on TV instead, etc. It's important for them to stick around and stay visible, and marketing's the only way to do it.
I'd be curious to compare the political stance before and after Harper's rise to power. To me the difference is quite stark and I feel like things went very much American when he arrived. Anti-environment, anti-science, pro-oil, pro-business, anti-social policies, etc. Heck, we've had more debates on abortion, the capital sentence and other such social issues since he came around than we've had in the decades before.
Meanwhile France's French is using more and more English words peppered throughout, or worse, "englishified" words (a word with -ing slapped to it). It's quite weird considering how the French don't particularly like the English.
The biggest one possible would be 40,000 km in circumference (give or take a few kms) and would probably have numerous design issues, what with pesky plate tectonics and relativity and such getting in the way.
That's until it's built and then we decide to use Saturn's ring as a basis for the next one, obviously.
I hope you realize most malware these days uses exploits... You know, bugs which were not planned for and thus can mean the circumvention of the entire security system. Your solution is no less vulnerable to a simple bug which, until it gets squashed, could let a malicious application through the net. Despite sandboxing, multiple security layers, countless detection algorithms and heuristics, malware still manages to go through, so I doubt the solution is as easy as what you're claiming.
Bell curves can work in academic settings (grading exams and homework) and often represent large-scale populations well, but they have no purpose in management. If you're only hiring the best (which is what all the companies you ask will claim), how can you have a bell curve? That's entirely ignoring the fact that any statistical method using a population size of five is utterly meaningless.
Why the needlessly stringent power draw? You can get passively cooled discrete GPUs or low-noise active cooling which would give you a major bump in performance. APUs won't be able to do 4K for a loooong time for anything but video.
I largely agree with this. My sole concern is the possibility of people abusing whatever drug it is they're using and ending up in the hospital. That's a net cost to society, both in medical fees and in their inability to do anything for a while, and it's putting their own lives at risk.
I know that recreational drugs don't necessarily mean you're going to go on this slippery slope and end up drugged to hell, but it's a possibility and it needs to be kept in mind. I'd be much more supportive of preventative measures such as educating people on the subject and offering support than hunting them down, though.
This reminds me of Vertu's mobile phones like the Ti. Absurdly expensive (around $11k), running Android with a light skin, with an ancient dual-core and 1GB of RAM, just 64GB of flash memory, a tiny battery, an 8MP camera and a ridiculously dated 480x800 3.7" screen. The only reason to buy one is the unusual materials and the "concierge" service. It's basically a phone for people with a lot of money and little taste or knowledge.
There really seems to be a market for this sort of thing, that's the worst of it.
Flight sims and driving sims aren't graphics showpieces anymore and haven't for a while. Shooters are usually where it's at, and games like Crysis 3 or Battlefield 4 can put very high end cards to their paces, especially at >1080p resolutions. Crysis 3 ran on a 360 with a sub-720p resolution and a lot of settings notched down... You can see the difference very easily between PC and consoles.
That's a terrible idea. Few people will be willing to pay to enter a store, which would instantly kill a significant proportion of their audience. This would make their stores look and feel empty, further driving home the idea that "bookstores are dying". They'd get reduced to a core audience (which would've stuck around regardless of this entry fee) which would be largely unsustainable for most bookstores.
I don't claim to know the solution, but gating your store is perhaps the worst possible way around it. Can you imagine Blockbuster charging for when you come inside?
This. The greatest example, I find, is with recommendations: try as they might, Amazon's recommendations are still very often inaccurate, backwards-looking (I already bought this thing, I don't want a hundred suggestions of other things exactly like it!) and very sensitive to trends. Your local bookstore, however, might have someone who knows just what you usually like and comes up with a few new books every so often when you pass by. They know you personally, they know your preferences and they actually read the stuff they sell. It's a more personal and customized experience which a blank, faceless website just cannot match.
Yes, it does mean bookstores need to do more work to encourage and nurture a certain feel of community, actually talking with customers and engaging with them, but... That's a good thing. We need more of that and fewer standardized, giant corporation-driven stores.
Actually, the ironic bit is that the two consoles to get the closest to "winning" the living room in any form (the PS2 and the Wii) were both among the least connected consoles of their generation (the Xbox was a lot more connected than the PS2, for instance, and same thing for the Wii vs PS3/360), thus making their manufacturer unable to really leverage that win to control anything.
It's making $2B from Android in revenue, most of which is profit, but that doesn't necessarily imply that the mobile division is profitable. All it says is that that $2B, taken in isolation (so without the losses other parts of the division might have), is almost pure profit. I'm not saying the mobile division isn't profitable (I honestly don't know), but the summary doesn't pretend to say either way.
And fundamental science has narrower applicability? Sorry but the point is only reinforced by what you've just said. A bullet only serves to wound or kill. A scientific breakthrough could revolutionize the world.
I was modded down the last time I talked about this, so let me be even clearer: if you buy a Titan for gaming, you're either stupid or have a lot of money to waste. The sole reason Titan is at the price it is is because it has the full double-precision speed, similar to Quadro cards which retail for many thousands of dollars (well, that and the fact NVIDIA had zero competition at such a high range for the better part of a year). They're effectively semi-pro cards for number crunching. NVIDIA thinks that this is enough to warrant the price and to be honest I'd probably take one over a Quadro (which can run up to something like $5,000!).
But again, for gaming, it's entirely unnecessary. Heck, it's extremely likely that the 780Ti, which should be revealed in a few days, will basically be a Titan with higher clocks, slower double-precision operations (whereas the 780 has a few cores less) and less VRAM.
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This could've been a nice proposition a few years ago but I think Motorola beat them to the punch with the G. Unless you really, really want MeeGo/Sailfish (or you value a 8mp camera that much), the G is just a better proposition. Better screen (720p), Gorilla Glass 3, quad-core, plus vanilla Android which is pretty great, all for less than half this phone's price. The only unclear thing is whether "4G" means LTE or not, because that's probably one of the biggest things missing in the Moto G.
On the other hand, it means the market for mid-range smartphones is getting more and more interesting!
And an engine shattering on impact wouldn't ignite the gas inside? I doubt the engine block would shatter, though, but it'd possibly fracture or get pierced, which is sufficient to cause a catastrophic failure and a high likelihood of fire.
Are you serious? By that token large swathes of astrophysics, geology, biology and more are also "unverifiable". I'll disregard the "proved" point since science isn't about proving things.
Look, it's not because you can't run an experiment in a lab that you can't verify a theory. There is a colossal body of work around the study of genetics and the relationships between species (including extinct ones thanks to paleontology). If you think that all of this work isn't enough verification, then you probably don't think anything science has ever done is verified, either. The truth of the matter is that evolution is one of the most verified theories we've ever conceived and the only reason it's still disputed to this day is because it contradicts a book of parables written thousands of years ago.
I fully agree with this, but, realistically, promoting solar is a more effective way around it. There's a lot of bad noise around nuclear thanks to ancient plants and incidents like Fukushima... You probably won't be able to convince people to move away from coal/oil toward nuclear when the general trend (hello Germany!) is to do the very opposite.
At least with solar, people seem open to the idea. Nuclear just gets people freaking out about green goop and shit. It's infuriating, but it's what it is and we have to make do with it. If India or China manage to construct efficient nuclear plants and use them massively, the general opinion might turn around, but other than that... I have doubts, even though I fully think nuclear would be the ideal baseline power generation.
Just a note, though: nuclear is compact, but solar is easily integrated into cities, which makes it very economical in terms of space too.
Because every single traditional power source is also heavily subsidized. It's only fair. Plus, we should be encouraging solar over other sources for a host of reasons, namely environment impact and better grid resistance to failures.
Solar would have a hard time fighting against cheaper resources because of the large initial cost, and without market demand there wouldn't be much innovation. Many of its advantages aren't reflected in monetary terms, and others take years to kick in.
Actually, that's not true. According to the Android FAQ, you can use the source to create whatever you want. You cannot use the trademark, but you can use Android itself (through AOSP) to run on your hardware. This is why there are so many Android OEMs in China and such; they get to use the software for free and the only restriction is not showing the logo and not using the name.
The main reason why many OEMs don't do this, usually, is that it also precludes them from using Google Play services like Music and the store itself (which, frankly, is fair game; these are Google services maintained by Google, as such you're expected to pay them for that). There is however one extremely high profile example of an OEM doing just that: Amazon. The Kindle Fire does not use Google Play nor the Android branding and as such does not need to pay Google anything for it. The only possible cost is patent licensing (which would be there regardless).
"Most"? On what planet are you living there? Most people wouldn't recognize Firefox even with the About page opened in front of their eyes. They need to do constant marketing so they stay visible to the population outside of Slashdot comments sections (which aren't the people targeted by these ads). If they don't do ads, they'll just fade away, guaranteed.
You might not like the reality of such things, but it's how the world works. Without marketing, they'd lose out on partnerships, on funding opportunities, they'd get less visible to outsiders who might not think about it and install that Chrome thing they saw on TV instead, etc. It's important for them to stick around and stay visible, and marketing's the only way to do it.
I'd be curious to compare the political stance before and after Harper's rise to power. To me the difference is quite stark and I feel like things went very much American when he arrived. Anti-environment, anti-science, pro-oil, pro-business, anti-social policies, etc. Heck, we've had more debates on abortion, the capital sentence and other such social issues since he came around than we've had in the decades before.
Meanwhile France's French is using more and more English words peppered throughout, or worse, "englishified" words (a word with -ing slapped to it). It's quite weird considering how the French don't particularly like the English.
I wouldn't trust US hardware, Chinese hardware, Russian hardware, European hardware, Australian/NZ hardware.... Where does that leave us really?
That President Obama liked — so much he wanted to print it in every school.
The biggest one possible would be 40,000 km in circumference (give or take a few kms) and would probably have numerous design issues, what with pesky plate tectonics and relativity and such getting in the way.
That's until it's built and then we decide to use Saturn's ring as a basis for the next one, obviously.
I hope you realize most malware these days uses exploits... You know, bugs which were not planned for and thus can mean the circumvention of the entire security system. Your solution is no less vulnerable to a simple bug which, until it gets squashed, could let a malicious application through the net. Despite sandboxing, multiple security layers, countless detection algorithms and heuristics, malware still manages to go through, so I doubt the solution is as easy as what you're claiming.
Bell curves can work in academic settings (grading exams and homework) and often represent large-scale populations well, but they have no purpose in management. If you're only hiring the best (which is what all the companies you ask will claim), how can you have a bell curve? That's entirely ignoring the fact that any statistical method using a population size of five is utterly meaningless.
Why the needlessly stringent power draw? You can get passively cooled discrete GPUs or low-noise active cooling which would give you a major bump in performance. APUs won't be able to do 4K for a loooong time for anything but video.
I largely agree with this. My sole concern is the possibility of people abusing whatever drug it is they're using and ending up in the hospital. That's a net cost to society, both in medical fees and in their inability to do anything for a while, and it's putting their own lives at risk.
I know that recreational drugs don't necessarily mean you're going to go on this slippery slope and end up drugged to hell, but it's a possibility and it needs to be kept in mind. I'd be much more supportive of preventative measures such as educating people on the subject and offering support than hunting them down, though.
This reminds me of Vertu's mobile phones like the Ti. Absurdly expensive (around $11k), running Android with a light skin, with an ancient dual-core and 1GB of RAM, just 64GB of flash memory, a tiny battery, an 8MP camera and a ridiculously dated 480x800 3.7" screen. The only reason to buy one is the unusual materials and the "concierge" service. It's basically a phone for people with a lot of money and little taste or knowledge.
There really seems to be a market for this sort of thing, that's the worst of it.
Flight sims and driving sims aren't graphics showpieces anymore and haven't for a while. Shooters are usually where it's at, and games like Crysis 3 or Battlefield 4 can put very high end cards to their paces, especially at >1080p resolutions. Crysis 3 ran on a 360 with a sub-720p resolution and a lot of settings notched down... You can see the difference very easily between PC and consoles.
That's a terrible idea. Few people will be willing to pay to enter a store, which would instantly kill a significant proportion of their audience. This would make their stores look and feel empty, further driving home the idea that "bookstores are dying". They'd get reduced to a core audience (which would've stuck around regardless of this entry fee) which would be largely unsustainable for most bookstores.
I don't claim to know the solution, but gating your store is perhaps the worst possible way around it. Can you imagine Blockbuster charging for when you come inside?
This. The greatest example, I find, is with recommendations: try as they might, Amazon's recommendations are still very often inaccurate, backwards-looking (I already bought this thing, I don't want a hundred suggestions of other things exactly like it!) and very sensitive to trends. Your local bookstore, however, might have someone who knows just what you usually like and comes up with a few new books every so often when you pass by. They know you personally, they know your preferences and they actually read the stuff they sell. It's a more personal and customized experience which a blank, faceless website just cannot match.
Yes, it does mean bookstores need to do more work to encourage and nurture a certain feel of community, actually talking with customers and engaging with them, but... That's a good thing. We need more of that and fewer standardized, giant corporation-driven stores.
Actually, the ironic bit is that the two consoles to get the closest to "winning" the living room in any form (the PS2 and the Wii) were both among the least connected consoles of their generation (the Xbox was a lot more connected than the PS2, for instance, and same thing for the Wii vs PS3/360), thus making their manufacturer unable to really leverage that win to control anything.
It's making $2B from Android in revenue, most of which is profit, but that doesn't necessarily imply that the mobile division is profitable. All it says is that that $2B, taken in isolation (so without the losses other parts of the division might have), is almost pure profit. I'm not saying the mobile division isn't profitable (I honestly don't know), but the summary doesn't pretend to say either way.
And fundamental science has narrower applicability? Sorry but the point is only reinforced by what you've just said. A bullet only serves to wound or kill. A scientific breakthrough could revolutionize the world.
I was modded down the last time I talked about this, so let me be even clearer: if you buy a Titan for gaming, you're either stupid or have a lot of money to waste. The sole reason Titan is at the price it is is because it has the full double-precision speed, similar to Quadro cards which retail for many thousands of dollars (well, that and the fact NVIDIA had zero competition at such a high range for the better part of a year). They're effectively semi-pro cards for number crunching. NVIDIA thinks that this is enough to warrant the price and to be honest I'd probably take one over a Quadro (which can run up to something like $5,000!).
But again, for gaming, it's entirely unnecessary. Heck, it's extremely likely that the 780Ti, which should be revealed in a few days, will basically be a Titan with higher clocks, slower double-precision operations (whereas the 780 has a few cores less) and less VRAM.
A 10 year old supernova would likely spell our doom, actually...