As you are no doubt well aware, the Constitution and Federal law are not the only sources of law in the country. Just because the police don't have a Constitutional obligation to protect the public, it doesn't mean they don't have a legal or moral duty to do so full-stop. Most police forces are not Federal agencies, they are State level, and local State laws are the ones that can (or not) define their duties.
Is a second generation i3 better or worse than a first generation i5? What about the 22nm i3s? Better than the 45nm i5 from 2009? Better than the 32nm i5 from 2010?
I honestly don't know. Some companies have a penchant for using older processors in their cheaper computers or laptops, so it's not always a straight comparison.
Depends on the game, doesn't it. I recently downloaded World Of Goo on my Android device with a touch screen. I had previously played it on my Windows device, with a mouse. Both were perfectly good gaming experiences. I've seen a copy of it on the Wii (presumably using the Wiimote), and presumably that works well enough too.
If I was Intel right now I would see the profits apple is making and attempt to standardize the PC space and prevent bargain basement PC chaos from occurring. When one looks at steam hardware surveys one see's most people have very little clue about their computers and tend to buy the cheapest shit.
People don't buy cheap PCs because they don't know about PC hardware. They buy cheap PCs because they don't have a lot of money.
Currently, a cheap PC is about £150. An Xbox 360 is about £160. If you want to kill off "bargain basement PCs", you're talking about making PCs considerably more expensive than consoles. That'll save the PC gaming market how again?
How many games are PC exclusive? Quite a few. How many games are console exclusive? Quite a few. How many "triple A" games are exclusively anything? Almost none. Triple A games are almost always cross-platform, because they're very expensive to make and they want to sell them to as many people as possible. There are a few "console exclusives" where Sony, MS or Nintendo use their licensing to "encourage" developers to stick with their platform, but that's nothing to do with piracy.
Some examples? Battlefield and Call of Duty- PC and console. Assassin's Creed- PC and console. World of Warcraft? PC only. New Mario Super Mario? Wii and DS only.
The ease of pirating android apps will push many big name developers away.
That sounds like FUD of a tall order. How are Android programmes any easier to pirate than Windows programmes? Are you going to claim that the PC pushes big developers away?
What is a story about a famous software engineer getting accused of murder (sort of), going crazy and going on an international run from the police, doing on Slashdot? Is it either of interest to Nerds, or News?
My Kindle Fire Android tablet takes about the same amount of time to boot up from "off" as my Asus netbook running Ubuntu. The time difference would be even less if I put the GRUB menu on a shorter timer (I keep the timer at a sensible length because I use it frequently- but that's not exactly a standard use case for most people). Both have links to their respective email programmes (Thunderbird on the netbook, whatever the default is with the Kindle) right there on the first screen you come to. Both also have not dissimilar battery life (6.5 hours for the netbook, maybe 7-8 for the Kindle?). They were also about the same price new, give or take 10%, I think.
So the comparison isn't exactly a clear "win" for the tablet in any comparison I care about. And the fact that the netbook gives me far greater freedom in terms of what I install on it, and has a proper keyboard, things definitely tip "netbook-wards" for me.
Do I periodically wish there were massive games like Civ 5? Sure, but they'll get there eventually. In the meanwhile, I can no longer be bothered to sit at a desk (and develop carpal tunnel) to play a video game.
No, they won't. I sincerely doubt we're going to see proper games on tablets any time soon. Proper games need input other than a touch screen. Proper games need a screen larger than 7". Proper games need hardware that isn't optimised for power consumption and battery life. And proper games will struggle to use all the little tricks, such as cloud processing in the Kindle Silk browser, that tablets use to make the experience bearable.
One day we might see tablets with hardcore, power-hungry CPU/GPU, and it's true that you could plug your tablet into a big monitor, keyboard, mouse, joystick, etc. But all you're doing there is desperately trying to recreate the desktop PC experience.
The comparisons that matter are dollars, watts and performance benchmarking. If the processors are a similar price, similar power consumption, but one is a much better performance, you have a winner. Same goes for the other variations.
That one of the competitors is made of magic pixey dust is neither here nor there to the consumer. If Intel have achieved a victory by using a more advanced technology, then more power to them; it's hardly "cheating" the comparison.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but ARM may only take $1 a chip, but they're only the designer. The manufacturer must be taking a cut too- including a cut big enough to cover the manufacturing costs.
Intel are vertically integrated, so their prices include the full cost of designing and making chips. To get a comparable cost, you'd need to add the costs together for ARM and, say, Qualcomm.
Not that I'm saying your point is wrong; I've no idea what the figures are.
Probably wise. But Honda may well have said that simply because they haven't tested and certified it for higher blends. A "may contain traces of nuts" style disclaimer, so that if it turns out to be bad for the engine you can't complain to them about it.
As the Toyota spokesperson said in TFS, they want to do a lot more testing before they're willing to accept high-blend ethanol as being safe in their vehicles (and so covered by their warranty). Or to put it another way, they just don't know at the moment.
The problem is that adding ethanol to gasoline is pointless. Unless you grow corn or represent a corn-growing state in congress, that is. I can't imagine there are any benefits to ethanol fuel that aren't offset by the added requirements on the engine to deal with it.
If your car is designed with ethanol blends in mind (as a lot of modern cars are), then there is no extra demand on the engine. Those design changes usually just mean using different materials for the parts to resist corrosion.
The alleged benefit of ethanol is that it is carbon neutral (or a lot closer to it than fossil fuels anyway). 15% of car fuel being carbon neutral is better than 0% (although, as you rightly point out, not as good as 100%; that's maths, that). That's more or less then entire argument for it. Assuming you're not just going to say "screw carbon neutral!", the only argument against it is if you have a better, more efficient, carbon neutral fuel.
Ethanol's appeal over hydrogen or bio-LPG is that it can run (as a mix) in the same engines as pure petrol, making it compatible with existing cars. Bio-diesel has the same thing going for it, but has more or less the same arguments against.
In petrol stations I use, all the types of fuel have separate hoses lined up next to each other at each pump. You pick the hose for your type of fuel, and squeeze the trigger. That's different hoses for diesel, standard unleaded petrol, high octane petrol, leaded petrol (where still available). Presumably this would be the same setup for "high ethanol" and "low ethanol" fuel. Our stations are self service, but I'm assuming the technology is more or less the same the world over.
So at a full-service station, you're relying on the attendant picking up the correct hose. Or alternatively, picking up the shared hose and pressing the correct trigger. You rely on him listening to the driver's instructions to use the correct fuel.
How is this any different between the existing 3 or 4 fuel types, and adding one or two more variants to the line-up?
If it wasn't Steamworks, it would be SecureROM, Origin, Games for Windows Live or some other DRM scheme. Steamworks DRM isn't as good as DRM free, but it sucks less than virtually every other DRM scheme out there.
So it may be a punch in the gut, but at least it isn't a knee in the crotch? What a sales pitch!
Just to be clear, he wasn't just saying "a scientist who is a Christian". Lamar Smith is a member of the sect called "Christian Science", which is an anti-science movement. Among other things, they believe that researching into disease is one of the main CAUSES of disease- that the way to reduce disease is to reduce the number of doctors and medical researchers in the world. They teach their members to avoid medicine and surgery at all cost, and to rely instead on the power of prayer and psychic healers to cure illness.
Lamar Smith isn't one of these by accident of birth; he wrote for the church newspaper, and is married to a "practitioner". His religious beliefs are directly related to his ability to do his job. If your job involves figuring out the national strategy for funding scientific research, and you believe that scientific researchers are the cause of all the world's ills, you may just have a small conflict of interest.
I wonder where the national support is. They're basically doing the job of the Library of Congress, the British Library etc., in terms of being a record keeper of published material. You'd think those organisations (and there must be dozens and dozens of them throughout the world; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit) could each chip in a few thousand dollars a year, wouldn't you?
It's been like this for a very long time. I remember playing with Lego when I was a kid- I had a box set with a big picture of a spaceship on the front. There were instructions for how to make the spaceship in the picture, as well as pictures of about 5 other spaceship designs with no instructions. You could make the one with the instructions, of you could try to make one of the non-instruction pictures, or you could go nuts and use the spaceshipy style blocks to make any futuristic structure you like.
Same went for some "submarine" themed sets, some "pirate ship" themed sets, etc. etc.
But it's all relative, as your proper Netbooks are cheaper too. You can't get a decent Netbook in the UK for less than £200. I expect sub-$200 Netbooks are common enough in the US.
Better than killing a product and keeping the source private. At least by open sourcing, they allow users who are dedicated to it (either emotionally or for real technical reasons) to keep it going themselves, and perhaps even improve on it. Which is sort of the point of FOSS in the first place, right?
Asus Transformers cost £470, they are not going to be a replacement for a Netbook in my world. That's about twice what I'd want to pay for a Netbook.
The Netbook niche is "so cheap that I don't mind throwing it in my rucksack and using it in public without fear of it being stolen/broken/lost". More than £400 is way too much for that niche.
Fair enough, nobody said they'd be paid minimum wage. But let's do some maths:
There are 250,000 public schools in the USA. Minimum wage is $7.25 * 8 hour day * 5 working days * 52 weeks = $15000 (we'll assume they're paid holidays, or they'll starve). Lets assume that it'll be only one guard per school, that's $15k * 250k = $3,770,000,000 ($3.7 billion, just in wages). I don't know much about employment in the USA, but I'll assume an extra 10% cost to the employer in benefits and tax and whatnot, so $4.147 billion. I'll assume the cost of the gun/uniform/equipment is negligible. About $100 billion a year is spent on schools, so you're already looking at adding 4% to the cost of America's schools in a way that doesn't improve education one tiny jot.
So if you think the salary is going to be a good one, for a job that involves less work than the average Mall Cop, and in fact will 99.9% involve sitting and doing nothing for the entire career, you're probably fantasising. It's also probably fair to say that 1 guard per school isn't going to work in some big schools, and that 1 guard with a standard handgun is of limited effectiveness if the school is surprise attacked by a heavily armed psycho in any case. If it became common, you'd bet that the one lone guard will be the first target of any psycho.
Slashdot Mirror
As you are no doubt well aware, the Constitution and Federal law are not the only sources of law in the country. Just because the police don't have a Constitutional obligation to protect the public, it doesn't mean they don't have a legal or moral duty to do so full-stop. Most police forces are not Federal agencies, they are State level, and local State laws are the ones that can (or not) define their duties.
Is a second generation i3 better or worse than a first generation i5? What about the 22nm i3s? Better than the 45nm i5 from 2009? Better than the 32nm i5 from 2010?
I honestly don't know. Some companies have a penchant for using older processors in their cheaper computers or laptops, so it's not always a straight comparison.
Depends on the game, doesn't it. I recently downloaded World Of Goo on my Android device with a touch screen. I had previously played it on my Windows device, with a mouse. Both were perfectly good gaming experiences. I've seen a copy of it on the Wii (presumably using the Wiimote), and presumably that works well enough too.
If I was Intel right now I would see the profits apple is making and attempt to standardize the PC space and prevent bargain basement PC chaos from occurring. When one looks at steam hardware surveys one see's most people have very little clue about their computers and tend to buy the cheapest shit.
People don't buy cheap PCs because they don't know about PC hardware. They buy cheap PCs because they don't have a lot of money.
Currently, a cheap PC is about £150. An Xbox 360 is about £160. If you want to kill off "bargain basement PCs", you're talking about making PCs considerably more expensive than consoles. That'll save the PC gaming market how again?
How many games are PC exclusive? Quite a few. How many games are console exclusive? Quite a few. How many "triple A" games are exclusively anything? Almost none. Triple A games are almost always cross-platform, because they're very expensive to make and they want to sell them to as many people as possible. There are a few "console exclusives" where Sony, MS or Nintendo use their licensing to "encourage" developers to stick with their platform, but that's nothing to do with piracy.
Some examples? Battlefield and Call of Duty- PC and console. Assassin's Creed- PC and console. World of Warcraft? PC only. New Mario Super Mario? Wii and DS only.
The ease of pirating android apps will push many big name developers away.
That sounds like FUD of a tall order. How are Android programmes any easier to pirate than Windows programmes? Are you going to claim that the PC pushes big developers away?
What is a story about a famous software engineer getting accused of murder (sort of), going crazy and going on an international run from the police, doing on Slashdot? Is it either of interest to Nerds, or News?
Or do you just want pictures of Spiderman?
Just use Wifi. I'm going to bet that the $99 tablet from TFA doesn't have a 3G connection on it for that money.
Why would you pay a monthly contract for a tablet? Just buy it outright (at $99, as per TFA) like you would any other computer.
Not that I'm trying to sell you a tablet. I think they're a bit of a nonsense too.
My Kindle Fire Android tablet takes about the same amount of time to boot up from "off" as my Asus netbook running Ubuntu. The time difference would be even less if I put the GRUB menu on a shorter timer (I keep the timer at a sensible length because I use it frequently- but that's not exactly a standard use case for most people). Both have links to their respective email programmes (Thunderbird on the netbook, whatever the default is with the Kindle) right there on the first screen you come to. Both also have not dissimilar battery life (6.5 hours for the netbook, maybe 7-8 for the Kindle?). They were also about the same price new, give or take 10%, I think.
So the comparison isn't exactly a clear "win" for the tablet in any comparison I care about. And the fact that the netbook gives me far greater freedom in terms of what I install on it, and has a proper keyboard, things definitely tip "netbook-wards" for me.
Do I periodically wish there were massive games like Civ 5? Sure, but they'll get there eventually. In the meanwhile, I can no longer be bothered to sit at a desk (and develop carpal tunnel) to play a video game.
No, they won't. I sincerely doubt we're going to see proper games on tablets any time soon. Proper games need input other than a touch screen. Proper games need a screen larger than 7". Proper games need hardware that isn't optimised for power consumption and battery life. And proper games will struggle to use all the little tricks, such as cloud processing in the Kindle Silk browser, that tablets use to make the experience bearable.
One day we might see tablets with hardcore, power-hungry CPU/GPU, and it's true that you could plug your tablet into a big monitor, keyboard, mouse, joystick, etc. But all you're doing there is desperately trying to recreate the desktop PC experience.
The comparisons that matter are dollars, watts and performance benchmarking. If the processors are a similar price, similar power consumption, but one is a much better performance, you have a winner. Same goes for the other variations.
That one of the competitors is made of magic pixey dust is neither here nor there to the consumer. If Intel have achieved a victory by using a more advanced technology, then more power to them; it's hardly "cheating" the comparison.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but ARM may only take $1 a chip, but they're only the designer. The manufacturer must be taking a cut too- including a cut big enough to cover the manufacturing costs.
Intel are vertically integrated, so their prices include the full cost of designing and making chips. To get a comparable cost, you'd need to add the costs together for ARM and, say, Qualcomm.
Not that I'm saying your point is wrong; I've no idea what the figures are.
Probably wise. But Honda may well have said that simply because they haven't tested and certified it for higher blends. A "may contain traces of nuts" style disclaimer, so that if it turns out to be bad for the engine you can't complain to them about it.
As the Toyota spokesperson said in TFS, they want to do a lot more testing before they're willing to accept high-blend ethanol as being safe in their vehicles (and so covered by their warranty). Or to put it another way, they just don't know at the moment.
The problem is that adding ethanol to gasoline is pointless. Unless you grow corn or represent a corn-growing state in congress, that is. I can't imagine there are any benefits to ethanol fuel that aren't offset by the added requirements on the engine to deal with it.
If your car is designed with ethanol blends in mind (as a lot of modern cars are), then there is no extra demand on the engine. Those design changes usually just mean using different materials for the parts to resist corrosion.
The alleged benefit of ethanol is that it is carbon neutral (or a lot closer to it than fossil fuels anyway). 15% of car fuel being carbon neutral is better than 0% (although, as you rightly point out, not as good as 100%; that's maths, that). That's more or less then entire argument for it. Assuming you're not just going to say "screw carbon neutral!", the only argument against it is if you have a better, more efficient, carbon neutral fuel.
Ethanol's appeal over hydrogen or bio-LPG is that it can run (as a mix) in the same engines as pure petrol, making it compatible with existing cars. Bio-diesel has the same thing going for it, but has more or less the same arguments against.
In petrol stations I use, all the types of fuel have separate hoses lined up next to each other at each pump. You pick the hose for your type of fuel, and squeeze the trigger. That's different hoses for diesel, standard unleaded petrol, high octane petrol, leaded petrol (where still available). Presumably this would be the same setup for "high ethanol" and "low ethanol" fuel. Our stations are self service, but I'm assuming the technology is more or less the same the world over.
So at a full-service station, you're relying on the attendant picking up the correct hose. Or alternatively, picking up the shared hose and pressing the correct trigger. You rely on him listening to the driver's instructions to use the correct fuel.
How is this any different between the existing 3 or 4 fuel types, and adding one or two more variants to the line-up?
If it wasn't Steamworks, it would be SecureROM, Origin, Games for Windows Live or some other DRM scheme. Steamworks DRM isn't as good as DRM free, but it sucks less than virtually every other DRM scheme out there.
So it may be a punch in the gut, but at least it isn't a knee in the crotch? What a sales pitch!
Just to be clear, he wasn't just saying "a scientist who is a Christian". Lamar Smith is a member of the sect called "Christian Science", which is an anti-science movement. Among other things, they believe that researching into disease is one of the main CAUSES of disease- that the way to reduce disease is to reduce the number of doctors and medical researchers in the world. They teach their members to avoid medicine and surgery at all cost, and to rely instead on the power of prayer and psychic healers to cure illness.
Lamar Smith isn't one of these by accident of birth; he wrote for the church newspaper, and is married to a "practitioner". His religious beliefs are directly related to his ability to do his job. If your job involves figuring out the national strategy for funding scientific research, and you believe that scientific researchers are the cause of all the world's ills, you may just have a small conflict of interest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamar_S._Smith
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science
I wonder where the national support is. They're basically doing the job of the Library of Congress, the British Library etc., in terms of being a record keeper of published material. You'd think those organisations (and there must be dozens and dozens of them throughout the world; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit) could each chip in a few thousand dollars a year, wouldn't you?
Only where they can't get out of it:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20197710
It's been like this for a very long time. I remember playing with Lego when I was a kid- I had a box set with a big picture of a spaceship on the front. There were instructions for how to make the spaceship in the picture, as well as pictures of about 5 other spaceship designs with no instructions. You could make the one with the instructions, of you could try to make one of the non-instruction pictures, or you could go nuts and use the spaceshipy style blocks to make any futuristic structure you like.
Same went for some "submarine" themed sets, some "pirate ship" themed sets, etc. etc.
Not really newsworthy, is it?
America always gets things cheaper:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=asus+transformer&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Aasus+transformer
But it's all relative, as your proper Netbooks are cheaper too. You can't get a decent Netbook in the UK for less than £200. I expect sub-$200 Netbooks are common enough in the US.
Better than killing a product and keeping the source private. At least by open sourcing, they allow users who are dedicated to it (either emotionally or for real technical reasons) to keep it going themselves, and perhaps even improve on it. Which is sort of the point of FOSS in the first place, right?
Asus Transformers cost £470, they are not going to be a replacement for a Netbook in my world. That's about twice what I'd want to pay for a Netbook.
The Netbook niche is "so cheap that I don't mind throwing it in my rucksack and using it in public without fear of it being stolen/broken/lost". More than £400 is way too much for that niche.
no one suggests armed guards be paid minimum wage
Fair enough, nobody said they'd be paid minimum wage. But let's do some maths:
There are 250,000 public schools in the USA.
Minimum wage is $7.25 * 8 hour day * 5 working days * 52 weeks = $15000 (we'll assume they're paid holidays, or they'll starve).
Lets assume that it'll be only one guard per school, that's $15k * 250k = $3,770,000,000 ($3.7 billion, just in wages).
I don't know much about employment in the USA, but I'll assume an extra 10% cost to the employer in benefits and tax and whatnot, so $4.147 billion. I'll assume the cost of the gun/uniform/equipment is negligible.
About $100 billion a year is spent on schools, so you're already looking at adding 4% to the cost of America's schools in a way that doesn't improve education one tiny jot.
So if you think the salary is going to be a good one, for a job that involves less work than the average Mall Cop, and in fact will 99.9% involve sitting and doing nothing for the entire career, you're probably fantasising. It's also probably fair to say that 1 guard per school isn't going to work in some big schools, and that 1 guard with a standard handgun is of limited effectiveness if the school is surprise attacked by a heavily armed psycho in any case. If it became common, you'd bet that the one lone guard will be the first target of any psycho.