It's not quite as simple as the picture you're drawing. The $2/incandescent vs $50/LED is a fixed cost today. The $70 / $15 is not a fixed cost, likely based on a naïve multiplication of today's prices, and probably not based on extrapolating today's energy prices on a curve projected from what we have seen the energy market do in the past.
The problem is that future electric rates are not guaranteed to lie on any line or curve we predict today. As the cost of fossil fuels fluctuate due to market forces, the electricity consumed might treble in price over the life of the bulb, meaning that incandescent bulb may cost you $150, while the LED costs you $33. Alternately, someone could pop in a wind turbine on every corner holding the prices at a lower rate, meaning the incandescent may only cost you $50, while the LED operating costs drop to $10. Even if energy prices were to fluctuate perfectly randomly, the payoff of saving money on LED operation is much higher than the payoff on saving money on incandescent operation. Given our history with energy combined with the fact that renewable, safe, and clean energy sources are still scarce in the marketplace, I'm betting that the energy costs are going to result in a higher payoff for LEDs.
And all of these projections ignore the cost to change the bulb. It generally doesn't matter much to home consumers because a desk lamp bulb is easy to replace, but what about the light on a pole, a ceiling light over a stairway, a garage door opener that vibrates the filament, or some fancy chandelier that will take a couple of hours to disassemble and reassemble? An LED's increased lifetime can save you from those replacement costs ten times over.
(Alternately, any existing fixtures with ordinary incandescent dimmers probably won't work with LEDs, and would have to be rewired at considerable expense, so you have to consider that as well. Plus, the cost of electronic technology generally comes down rapidly over time, so a $50 LED today might cost only $25 next year.)
But the point is this: if you don't have the money to pay for an LED today, what makes you think you'll have the money to pay your electric bill tomorrow?
I think Starfleet should be suing the contractor for not putting in seatbelts. I mean, really, it's common sense. If your inertial dampeners aren't 100% effective, and let some of those tiny shudders through when you take a few shots from a Romulan ship, you'd think the captain would like to stay in his chair for more than 60 minutes or so.
How much of the unwillingness to cut the robots loose is due to their inferiority to humans at this task, and how much is due to human distaste for the idea of automated hunter-killer robots is not entirely clear.
I believe the only reason the Pentagon isn't deploying armies of fully autonomous hunter-killer robots is the unavailability of the same. Consider that they've deployed land mines which have no Identify Friend or Foe capabilities whatsoever. If they thought they could fight a no-risk-to-US-soldier-lives war, I think they'd simply drop a trillion dollars worth of hardware into the middle of the Conflict-of-the-Month without hesitation.
The thing is that wars are fought with weapons, but the weapons by themselves do not "win" the wars. Look at Germany and Japan. Those wars were won by first conquering the lands with weapons, but then completely conquering the central governing authority, who still had enough authority to surrender. Afghanistan was lost by the Soviets even though they could invade the lands, but because they could not find a head to decapitate the opposition. Same thing is happening to the US in the various middle eastern conflicts, mostly because to "win" they'd have to first occupy the lands, then remove/kill thousands of leaders of a decentralized religion (theocracide?) instead of just a secular government or the head of a centralized religion. And even if the mullahs who disapprove of their jihadist brothers wouldn't be sad to see them head to Paradise ahead of schedule, they're certainly not going to sit quietly by while invading infidel forces decide which of their brothers should live.
So they now understand traditional warfare doesn't work there. I think their strategy now is something like "keep them bombed into the stone age in order to minimize their retaliation capability" as if that's a winning long-term strategy.
I think traditional warfare would work in North Korea, where the leader has set himself up as a surrogate deity. Take him down, wipe out his heirs, remove the military generals, and start trucking in tremendous amounts of food to accompany the modernization of their infrastructure. It might work in Libya; but only if they could quickly surgically remove the Ghadaffi loyalists, keeping the rest of the country intact, and get out quickly and completely before the jihadists have the chance to whip up their patented anti-American furor. That might go a long way toward showing the rest of the world that they're capable of leaving after resolving a conflict. It would probably mean leaving Libya's oil and other resources up to some crazy bad people, but as we've seen elsewhere that will happen regardless.
Any polls, really. They all impact people to some degree. Too many people are afraid of voting for the person they agree with if they think there's little chance they'll win, and for whatever reason, people only want to vote for a winner. I'd love to see those people simply excluded from voting, personally, but that won't happen either.
It seems like it would be a lot more accurate if people would be able to form their own opinions, rather than being handed the group zeitgeist. But then we'd have the same questions about "who quoted who" on the TV News: do you only get to see Jack Johnson lying, and John Jackson kissing babies? Do you watch only Faux News or the Colbert Report?
Nothing's perfect, or even close. So let's move to better educating people, in hopes that they will be able to better form their own opinions. Of course, the uneducated often think they have a right to choose stupidity for themselves and their children, but really, would they even notice ?:-)
OMG, I see it right now: fruit made of plastic made of fruit, marketed as "100% fruit!"
See it? You can buy them in the grocery store today! They're called "fruit roll-ups" and are about the most disgusting substance ever alleged to be "food". And I think you can get them in "fun" fruit shapes to meet your other requirement.
I wonder if you'll be so glib when one of your loved ones dies.
The answer is "yes, I was." In my case, humor was a coping mechanism.
And no, there is no way to know how any one person will react to a loss. As far as I'm concerned, humor is a lot more healthy than people who drink alcohol until they die, endlessly weep in a darkened bedroom, or start sleeping with strangers (all things I've seen grieving people do.)
If I wanted to become anonymous, though, all I would need to do is leave my cellphone at home and only use cash.
It'll take a lot more than that, I'm afraid.
There was a kind of cheesy show on cable a few months back on "dropping off the grid". Some guy (not a security expert but he played one on TV) showed some of the steps the writers thought you'd need to take to make it harder to find you. Cash, pay phones, name changing, picking an appropriately sized city (not so big that they have 2,000 cameras per square mile, and not so small that everyone knows everyone else,) a new menial job as a night janitor, avoiding surveillance cameras, etc. It was mildly interesting in that it was all the same kinds of stuff privacy advocates on Slashdot have been saying for the last decade. I found it was more interesting to see how much work it would actually take to put all those pieces together.
No way to know if it made a difference to any of the viewers, of course. But I imagine it opened a few eyes to some of the various machinery of the modern surveillance state.
Don't you remember PleaseRobMe.com from a year or so ago? It published a list of addresses of people who were tweeting or foursquaring that they weren't at home. It was written to point out this exact same flaw in people who like to post about places they are and places they aren't.
Well, that or just stick it in a VM. Since running Windows (especially) in a VM I don't care any more about that sort of thing. (Every now and then I just delete it and restore from a cleanish one to be on the safe side.)
Then you're not paranoid enough. How do you know creepy isn't sending a packet to a creepy server somewhere, so he can do a reverse geolocate on your IP address? Creepy is already performing that exact function with IP addresses from twitter postings, so you know he certainly could.
What, you bricked the router? Fat chance of connecting back to Kansas by fibre now you fool. You better hope the great oz has more than brains, hearts and courage behind that curtain.
Why, anybody can have a router. That's a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that surfs the net or clicks on links in their mother's basement has a router. Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they design networks with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing you haven't got: a CCNP.
Microsoft and Dell simply rebrand Logitech mice... yes... How you like dem apples.....
I don't like them, because those are road-apples. Wake up and smell them.
Microsoft and Dell sell their own mice, made to their own specs. They're not selling rebranded Logitech gear. This kind of nonsense comes out all the time by people who have no idea what they're talking about, and gets read and regurgitated by people often enough that these rumors get accepted as true by the extremely gullible, or by people who can't tell the difference between a factory and a design. Disassemble a few, or many, and compare them. They're not the same, even if they may share a few common internal components.
Abandoning Qt? That's really what you think is driving the nail in the coffin of Nokia? Go reread the Burning Platform memo. Some meaningless choice between a third rate OS or a fourth rate OS isn't going to make a difference, because those really aren't the sales differentiator that geeks seem to wish they were. It's now about cheap imports flooding their market. It's about a hundred factories in Shenzhen province each spitting a hundred thousand units a day out for about five hundred thousand dollars, and shipping them around the globe overnight.
The measurements for their coffin were taken when they didn't advance Symbian when they had the chance. Technically, they could have built the iPhone long before Apple did. But they didn't. They made tiny incremental "improvements" to a ho-hum platform, and then along came Steve Jobs and *pow*. That was the end. Now it's just a matter of waiting for the doctor to pull the plug.
And if you are an investor, what he's saying to you is that he's going to waste your money re-inventing the wheel...building things from scratch.
This. This is the crux of the argument.
We recently evaluated a software package that has a custom XML driven GUI, and a custom ORM. Their package was originally developed in the time before Microsoft released WPF and LINQ. Their architects and developers are really smart people: they saw these gaps in what Microsoft was offering at the time, and wrote layers to do exactly what they needed. Their architecture is solid. Their design and execution are solid. And we won't be buying their package.
Why not? Because they have no plans to replace their custom layers with Microsoft's technology. Everything we would do with this product we would have to struggle with funky vendor-provided tools that do almost-but-not-quite the same things that the supported Microsoft tools do. They won't be updating their not-quite-Blend tool the way Microsoft will be updating Blend. I can't go out and hire a graphics designer who has experience with their not-quite-Blend tool, but I can hire a hundred who just went to school and learned Blend.
So if this guy is really that stuck on his own staff's ability, fine, he can do that, but he's cutting himself out of a very large market.
The chip runs at a speed of six hertz-on the order of a million times slower than a modern desktop machine-and can only process information in eight-bit chunks at most, compared to 128 bits for modern computer processors.
Maybe the article was written in 1984, back when 6MHz IBM PC-ATs roamed the earth, and the Technology Review editors just recovered it from the amber it had been fossilized in.
Seriously, I say lets take all the fines for traffic violations, and rather than give them to the police or govt....let's pool it and redistribute it BACK to the citizens at EOY that haven't committed any infractions, as a type of reward.
Why stop with traffic violations? The profit motive is just as corrupting for other crimes. ALL fines should be paid back out to the public, or simply destroyed increasing the value of our dollars.
Rather than fines, how about serving time behind bars for whatever the offense is? We are all given a finite amount of it, so it's mostly fair from an equality point of view. Perversely, the richer you are the more valuable you may perceive your own time to be worth, so you'd have a stronger incentive not to commit a minor offense. And it gives the court system exactly zero financial incentive.
Or go the other route: what if an offense increased your tax rate? Less incentive to the cops, because they don't directly receive the benefits. But imagine telling Warren Buffet that his taxes go from 35% to 36% because he was speeding, and that could be a five million dollar fine! Of course, my brother in law's fine would be about $0.52, so he wouldn't care at all...
You could probably make a case for them being con-artists by their very existence.:-) "Your honor, the defendant claims to be a ghostbuster." "That's good enough for me, the court finds for the plaintiff."
And I absolutely agree with you. Removing the word "scammer" from the summary diminishes the value of the word "scammer".
I leave my floor fan on all night in the hallway. Sometimes, I wake up thinking I am hearing garbled voices or screams. When I turn the fan off, it disappears
First, clean the fan cage and fan blades, front and back, using an antiseptic cleaner. Soil buildup can put the fan out of balance, which causes vibrations and occasional noise, and just brushing off the fan without wiping it clean can put large amounts of particulate dust and microbes into the air. I also recommend lubricating the motor shaft bushings and any pivot joints with a quick shot of WD-40, or light machine oil if you have some. Finally, I find that the pivot points those fans oscillate on tend to be made with really low quality engineering, with a brass wear sleeve only if you spent lots of money. Turn off the oscillator if you're just trying to circulate air down a hall at night.
You also might be hearing beat frequencies being generated by two fans running simultaneously, but at slightly different rotational speeds. It could be something that's only audible when the furnace fan kicks in to "high" speed, which is why you wouldn't hear it all the time.
Me, I'm not a believer; but I'm always amazed by how much power religious types insist on ascribing to their assorted devils, spooks and spirits.
They need to. If you don't portray a really scary threat, why would anyone spend anything defending against that threat? Consider these two sentences:
Say your prayers before bed.
If you don't say your prayers before bed, Grampa up in heaven will be sad because the devil will send an imp with a pitchfork to stab him in the neck.
One is slightly more compelling to a seven year old kid.
For a more realistic example, consider Faux News talking about terra'rists because their buddies want to sell these really expensive whole body scanners to the airlines.
Talking head #1: "We need to spend $365 million dollars on full body scanner systems for airports." Talking head #2: "That's a lot of tax money."
Then one week later, some liar on Faux News claims that a guy wearing a clay model pancake on his butt that "could have been made from a real plastic explosive" makes it through security. OMG, we're all going to die, its the Islamists, bin Laden, 9/11 all over again!
Two weeks later: Talking head #1: "We need to spend $365 million dollars on anti-butt-pancake-explosive scanner systems for airports." Talking head #2: "Yes, please save us from the butt-pancake-explosive-bomber-terrorists!"
See how that works? Invoke the name of the bogeyman, and the cowards listen. Get enough cowards together, and we call the results "Congress".
Science doesn't preclude wishing or fantasy. You can search for ET scientifically. SETI might be considered "out there" by people who don't believe they are wisely spending their time, but they're not going to say that SETI isn't doing real science - they're just doing "probably useless" real science.
And this might change due to other science. What if the SETI@home crowd were told that they were consuming so much electricity that PGE was going to build a new nuclear reactor just to power their project? They might rationally evaluate the situation and decide it's no longer worth it.
For now, the SETI volunteers all seem to be happy to donate their money to power the search. That might be because they don't understand that the client is costing them perhaps $12.00 per day in additional electrical costs (idle CPUs and GPUs don't consume nearly as much energy as active processors.) Or maybe they do know, but feel the research is important enough to warrant the investment.
It's assumed, though it is perhaps neither provable nor even true, that such "agencies" are knowingly lying about what they are doing, and thus not actually providing the service being described. As an analogy, take a fake exterminator who just walks around your house spraying compressed air here and there. When the infestation remains you do have a case even if they "seemed" to treat the problem. Claiming you engaged in "commerce" does not free you of legal liability- if you advertised a service, that service must actually be performed.
And that's precisely why it can not be considered a scam. As a (gullible) customer, you would be unable to prove that they weren't effective at ridding your house of ghosts, because to refute their claim you would have to prove said failure-to-deghost in a courtroom: i.e. you would have to provide legal evidence of the existence of the ghost that the scammer didn't get rid of.
Instead, if you have a contract with one of these agencies and you both agree that to get rid of the ghosts you will hire them to "chant 13 anti-ghost verses for 69 minutes in the parlor, wave burning lemon grass up and down the stairwell for 7 minutes, and apply powdered dried spider legs to the doorways", and the guy shows up drunk, mumbles for half an hour in the garage, burns some sawdust in the foyer, and spritzes talcum powder on the rug, then you have a breach of contract, a bona fide scammer, and the basis for a suit.
If your Catholics are saying Ghost they're doing it wrong, my Catholics say Spirit
Potato, po-taah-to. "Holy Ghost" and "Holy Spirit" mean exactly the same thing, and neither is wrong. It just sounds like the priests changed the wording in order to avoid the negative connotations associated with the ghosthunter-type of ghosts, probably because their followers couldn't keep the distinction separate.
Interestingly, lots of companies have made their main communication line (E-mail) and quite a few documents run via Google. My own company will be doing this as well. This will not end well.
There is a significant difference between a company using Google mail and Google docs versus one basing their service on Amazon's API. With Google, you give them a bale of money ($50/user/year) and they are contractually obligated to provide you with service. If service breaks, Google engineers fix it in accordance with the contractually specified Service Level Agreements. With Amazon's API, access to customer lending information is a feature Amazon provided for free, and were equally free to revoke at their whim. (Nowhere in TFA or on Lendle's website does it say Amazon broke any contract.)
Guess which one is riskier to base a business on?
Welcome to the cloud. Hope you brought your rain gear. And a lawyer.
I haven't built one yet, but I want to. The open source software offerings in this space just keep getting better all the time; toolchains to invoke gocr, etc., and now someone's even running a service to OCR the pages for you, as long as it's OK for them keep a copy in the Internet Archive.
The claims are that you can scan a novel in 20 minutes or less. It might take you quite a few nights and weekends to get through 9000 books at that pace, but if you never start you'll never finish.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why we use computers for algorithms. Neat idea though.
See, that's what you get with interpretive dance.
A compiled dance would be much more efficient.
We have confirmation the FBI is not a serious organization...
"No, ma'am. We at the FBI do not have a sense of humor we're aware of."
It's not quite as simple as the picture you're drawing. The $2/incandescent vs $50/LED is a fixed cost today. The $70 / $15 is not a fixed cost, likely based on a naïve multiplication of today's prices, and probably not based on extrapolating today's energy prices on a curve projected from what we have seen the energy market do in the past.
The problem is that future electric rates are not guaranteed to lie on any line or curve we predict today. As the cost of fossil fuels fluctuate due to market forces, the electricity consumed might treble in price over the life of the bulb, meaning that incandescent bulb may cost you $150, while the LED costs you $33. Alternately, someone could pop in a wind turbine on every corner holding the prices at a lower rate, meaning the incandescent may only cost you $50, while the LED operating costs drop to $10. Even if energy prices were to fluctuate perfectly randomly, the payoff of saving money on LED operation is much higher than the payoff on saving money on incandescent operation. Given our history with energy combined with the fact that renewable, safe, and clean energy sources are still scarce in the marketplace, I'm betting that the energy costs are going to result in a higher payoff for LEDs.
And all of these projections ignore the cost to change the bulb. It generally doesn't matter much to home consumers because a desk lamp bulb is easy to replace, but what about the light on a pole, a ceiling light over a stairway, a garage door opener that vibrates the filament, or some fancy chandelier that will take a couple of hours to disassemble and reassemble? An LED's increased lifetime can save you from those replacement costs ten times over.
(Alternately, any existing fixtures with ordinary incandescent dimmers probably won't work with LEDs, and would have to be rewired at considerable expense, so you have to consider that as well. Plus, the cost of electronic technology generally comes down rapidly over time, so a $50 LED today might cost only $25 next year.)
But the point is this: if you don't have the money to pay for an LED today, what makes you think you'll have the money to pay your electric bill tomorrow?
I think Starfleet should be suing the contractor for not putting in seatbelts. I mean, really, it's common sense. If your inertial dampeners aren't 100% effective, and let some of those tiny shudders through when you take a few shots from a Romulan ship, you'd think the captain would like to stay in his chair for more than 60 minutes or so.
How much of the unwillingness to cut the robots loose is due to their inferiority to humans at this task, and how much is due to human distaste for the idea of automated hunter-killer robots is not entirely clear.
I believe the only reason the Pentagon isn't deploying armies of fully autonomous hunter-killer robots is the unavailability of the same. Consider that they've deployed land mines which have no Identify Friend or Foe capabilities whatsoever. If they thought they could fight a no-risk-to-US-soldier-lives war, I think they'd simply drop a trillion dollars worth of hardware into the middle of the Conflict-of-the-Month without hesitation.
The thing is that wars are fought with weapons, but the weapons by themselves do not "win" the wars. Look at Germany and Japan. Those wars were won by first conquering the lands with weapons, but then completely conquering the central governing authority, who still had enough authority to surrender. Afghanistan was lost by the Soviets even though they could invade the lands, but because they could not find a head to decapitate the opposition. Same thing is happening to the US in the various middle eastern conflicts, mostly because to "win" they'd have to first occupy the lands, then remove/kill thousands of leaders of a decentralized religion (theocracide?) instead of just a secular government or the head of a centralized religion. And even if the mullahs who disapprove of their jihadist brothers wouldn't be sad to see them head to Paradise ahead of schedule, they're certainly not going to sit quietly by while invading infidel forces decide which of their brothers should live.
So they now understand traditional warfare doesn't work there. I think their strategy now is something like "keep them bombed into the stone age in order to minimize their retaliation capability" as if that's a winning long-term strategy.
I think traditional warfare would work in North Korea, where the leader has set himself up as a surrogate deity. Take him down, wipe out his heirs, remove the military generals, and start trucking in tremendous amounts of food to accompany the modernization of their infrastructure. It might work in Libya; but only if they could quickly surgically remove the Ghadaffi loyalists, keeping the rest of the country intact, and get out quickly and completely before the jihadists have the chance to whip up their patented anti-American furor. That might go a long way toward showing the rest of the world that they're capable of leaving after resolving a conflict. It would probably mean leaving Libya's oil and other resources up to some crazy bad people, but as we've seen elsewhere that will happen regardless.
Any polls, really. They all impact people to some degree. Too many people are afraid of voting for the person they agree with if they think there's little chance they'll win, and for whatever reason, people only want to vote for a winner. I'd love to see those people simply excluded from voting, personally, but that won't happen either.
It seems like it would be a lot more accurate if people would be able to form their own opinions, rather than being handed the group zeitgeist. But then we'd have the same questions about "who quoted who" on the TV News: do you only get to see Jack Johnson lying, and John Jackson kissing babies? Do you watch only Faux News or the Colbert Report?
Nothing's perfect, or even close. So let's move to better educating people, in hopes that they will be able to better form their own opinions. Of course, the uneducated often think they have a right to choose stupidity for themselves and their children, but really, would they even notice ? :-)
OMG, I see it right now: fruit made of plastic made of fruit, marketed as "100% fruit!"
See it? You can buy them in the grocery store today! They're called "fruit roll-ups" and are about the most disgusting substance ever alleged to be "food". And I think you can get them in "fun" fruit shapes to meet your other requirement.
I wonder if you'll be so glib when one of your loved ones dies.
The answer is "yes, I was." In my case, humor was a coping mechanism.
And no, there is no way to know how any one person will react to a loss. As far as I'm concerned, humor is a lot more healthy than people who drink alcohol until they die, endlessly weep in a darkened bedroom, or start sleeping with strangers (all things I've seen grieving people do.)
>
If I wanted to become anonymous, though, all I would need to do is leave my cellphone at home and only use cash.
It'll take a lot more than that, I'm afraid.
There was a kind of cheesy show on cable a few months back on "dropping off the grid". Some guy (not a security expert but he played one on TV) showed some of the steps the writers thought you'd need to take to make it harder to find you. Cash, pay phones, name changing, picking an appropriately sized city (not so big that they have 2,000 cameras per square mile, and not so small that everyone knows everyone else,) a new menial job as a night janitor, avoiding surveillance cameras, etc. It was mildly interesting in that it was all the same kinds of stuff privacy advocates on Slashdot have been saying for the last decade. I found it was more interesting to see how much work it would actually take to put all those pieces together.
No way to know if it made a difference to any of the viewers, of course. But I imagine it opened a few eyes to some of the various machinery of the modern surveillance state.
Don't you remember PleaseRobMe.com from a year or so ago? It published a list of addresses of people who were tweeting or foursquaring that they weren't at home. It was written to point out this exact same flaw in people who like to post about places they are and places they aren't.
Well, that or just stick it in a VM. Since running Windows (especially) in a VM I don't care any more about that sort of thing. (Every now and then I just delete it and restore from a cleanish one to be on the safe side.)
Then you're not paranoid enough. How do you know creepy isn't sending a packet to a creepy server somewhere, so he can do a reverse geolocate on your IP address? Creepy is already performing that exact function with IP addresses from twitter postings, so you know he certainly could.
And that's the whole point of creepy.
What, you bricked the router? Fat chance of connecting back to Kansas by fibre now you fool. You better hope the great oz has more than brains, hearts and courage behind that curtain.
Why, anybody can have a router. That's a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that surfs the net or clicks on links in their mother's basement has a router. Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they design networks with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing you haven't got: a CCNP.
Microsoft and Dell simply rebrand Logitech mice... yes... How you like dem apples.....
I don't like them, because those are road-apples. Wake up and smell them.
Microsoft and Dell sell their own mice, made to their own specs. They're not selling rebranded Logitech gear. This kind of nonsense comes out all the time by people who have no idea what they're talking about, and gets read and regurgitated by people often enough that these rumors get accepted as true by the extremely gullible, or by people who can't tell the difference between a factory and a design. Disassemble a few, or many, and compare them. They're not the same, even if they may share a few common internal components.
Abandoning Qt? That's really what you think is driving the nail in the coffin of Nokia? Go reread the Burning Platform memo. Some meaningless choice between a third rate OS or a fourth rate OS isn't going to make a difference, because those really aren't the sales differentiator that geeks seem to wish they were. It's now about cheap imports flooding their market. It's about a hundred factories in Shenzhen province each spitting a hundred thousand units a day out for about five hundred thousand dollars, and shipping them around the globe overnight.
The measurements for their coffin were taken when they didn't advance Symbian when they had the chance. Technically, they could have built the iPhone long before Apple did. But they didn't. They made tiny incremental "improvements" to a ho-hum platform, and then along came Steve Jobs and *pow*. That was the end. Now it's just a matter of waiting for the doctor to pull the plug.
And if you are an investor, what he's saying to you is that he's going to waste your money re-inventing the wheel...building things from scratch.
This. This is the crux of the argument.
We recently evaluated a software package that has a custom XML driven GUI, and a custom ORM. Their package was originally developed in the time before Microsoft released WPF and LINQ. Their architects and developers are really smart people: they saw these gaps in what Microsoft was offering at the time, and wrote layers to do exactly what they needed. Their architecture is solid. Their design and execution are solid. And we won't be buying their package.
Why not? Because they have no plans to replace their custom layers with Microsoft's technology. Everything we would do with this product we would have to struggle with funky vendor-provided tools that do almost-but-not-quite the same things that the supported Microsoft tools do. They won't be updating their not-quite-Blend tool the way Microsoft will be updating Blend. I can't go out and hire a graphics designer who has experience with their not-quite-Blend tool, but I can hire a hundred who just went to school and learned Blend.
So if this guy is really that stuck on his own staff's ability, fine, he can do that, but he's cutting himself out of a very large market.
FTA:
The chip runs at a speed of six hertz-on the order of a million times slower than a modern desktop machine-and can only process information in eight-bit chunks at most, compared to 128 bits for modern computer processors.
Maybe the article was written in 1984, back when 6MHz IBM PC-ATs roamed the earth, and the Technology Review editors just recovered it from the amber it had been fossilized in.
Seriously, I say lets take all the fines for traffic violations, and rather than give them to the police or govt....let's pool it and redistribute it BACK to the citizens at EOY that haven't committed any infractions, as a type of reward.
Why stop with traffic violations? The profit motive is just as corrupting for other crimes. ALL fines should be paid back out to the public, or simply destroyed increasing the value of our dollars.
Rather than fines, how about serving time behind bars for whatever the offense is? We are all given a finite amount of it, so it's mostly fair from an equality point of view. Perversely, the richer you are the more valuable you may perceive your own time to be worth, so you'd have a stronger incentive not to commit a minor offense. And it gives the court system exactly zero financial incentive.
Or go the other route: what if an offense increased your tax rate? Less incentive to the cops, because they don't directly receive the benefits. But imagine telling Warren Buffet that his taxes go from 35% to 36% because he was speeding, and that could be a five million dollar fine! Of course, my brother in law's fine would be about $0.52, so he wouldn't care at all...
You could probably make a case for them being con-artists by their very existence. :-) "Your honor, the defendant claims to be a ghostbuster." "That's good enough for me, the court finds for the plaintiff."
And I absolutely agree with you. Removing the word "scammer" from the summary diminishes the value of the word "scammer".
I leave my floor fan on all night in the hallway. Sometimes, I wake up thinking I am hearing garbled voices or screams. When I turn the fan off, it disappears
First, clean the fan cage and fan blades, front and back, using an antiseptic cleaner. Soil buildup can put the fan out of balance, which causes vibrations and occasional noise, and just brushing off the fan without wiping it clean can put large amounts of particulate dust and microbes into the air. I also recommend lubricating the motor shaft bushings and any pivot joints with a quick shot of WD-40, or light machine oil if you have some. Finally, I find that the pivot points those fans oscillate on tend to be made with really low quality engineering, with a brass wear sleeve only if you spent lots of money. Turn off the oscillator if you're just trying to circulate air down a hall at night.
You also might be hearing beat frequencies being generated by two fans running simultaneously, but at slightly different rotational speeds. It could be something that's only audible when the furnace fan kicks in to "high" speed, which is why you wouldn't hear it all the time.
Me, I'm not a believer; but I'm always amazed by how much power religious types insist on ascribing to their assorted devils, spooks and spirits.
They need to. If you don't portray a really scary threat, why would anyone spend anything defending against that threat? Consider these two sentences:
One is slightly more compelling to a seven year old kid.
For a more realistic example, consider Faux News talking about terra'rists because their buddies want to sell these really expensive whole body scanners to the airlines.
Talking head #1: "We need to spend $365 million dollars on full body scanner systems for airports."
Talking head #2: "That's a lot of tax money."
Then one week later, some liar on Faux News claims that a guy wearing a clay model pancake on his butt that "could have been made from a real plastic explosive" makes it through security. OMG, we're all going to die, its the Islamists, bin Laden, 9/11 all over again!
Two weeks later:
Talking head #1: "We need to spend $365 million dollars on anti-butt-pancake-explosive scanner systems for airports."
Talking head #2: "Yes, please save us from the butt-pancake-explosive-bomber-terrorists!"
See how that works? Invoke the name of the bogeyman, and the cowards listen. Get enough cowards together, and we call the results "Congress".
Science doesn't preclude wishing or fantasy. You can search for ET scientifically. SETI might be considered "out there" by people who don't believe they are wisely spending their time, but they're not going to say that SETI isn't doing real science - they're just doing "probably useless" real science.
And this might change due to other science. What if the SETI@home crowd were told that they were consuming so much electricity that PGE was going to build a new nuclear reactor just to power their project? They might rationally evaluate the situation and decide it's no longer worth it.
For now, the SETI volunteers all seem to be happy to donate their money to power the search. That might be because they don't understand that the client is costing them perhaps $12.00 per day in additional electrical costs (idle CPUs and GPUs don't consume nearly as much energy as active processors.) Or maybe they do know, but feel the research is important enough to warrant the investment.
It's assumed, though it is perhaps neither provable nor even true, that such "agencies" are knowingly lying about what they are doing, and thus not actually providing the service being described. As an analogy, take a fake exterminator who just walks around your house spraying compressed air here and there. When the infestation remains you do have a case even if they "seemed" to treat the problem. Claiming you engaged in "commerce" does not free you of legal liability- if you advertised a service, that service must actually be performed.
And that's precisely why it can not be considered a scam. As a (gullible) customer, you would be unable to prove that they weren't effective at ridding your house of ghosts, because to refute their claim you would have to prove said failure-to-deghost in a courtroom: i.e. you would have to provide legal evidence of the existence of the ghost that the scammer didn't get rid of.
Instead, if you have a contract with one of these agencies and you both agree that to get rid of the ghosts you will hire them to "chant 13 anti-ghost verses for 69 minutes in the parlor, wave burning lemon grass up and down the stairwell for 7 minutes, and apply powdered dried spider legs to the doorways", and the guy shows up drunk, mumbles for half an hour in the garage, burns some sawdust in the foyer, and spritzes talcum powder on the rug, then you have a breach of contract, a bona fide scammer, and the basis for a suit.
It's Holy Spirit. Holy Ghost is from Old English gast, "spirit"
If your Catholics are saying Ghost they're doing it wrong, my Catholics say Spirit
Potato, po-taah-to. "Holy Ghost" and "Holy Spirit" mean exactly the same thing, and neither is wrong. It just sounds like the priests changed the wording in order to avoid the negative connotations associated with the ghosthunter-type of ghosts, probably because their followers couldn't keep the distinction separate.
Interestingly, lots of companies have made their main communication line (E-mail) and quite a few documents run via Google. My own company will be doing this as well. This will not end well.
There is a significant difference between a company using Google mail and Google docs versus one basing their service on Amazon's API. With Google, you give them a bale of money ($50/user/year) and they are contractually obligated to provide you with service. If service breaks, Google engineers fix it in accordance with the contractually specified Service Level Agreements. With Amazon's API, access to customer lending information is a feature Amazon provided for free, and were equally free to revoke at their whim. (Nowhere in TFA or on Lendle's website does it say Amazon broke any contract.)
Guess which one is riskier to base a business on?
Welcome to the cloud. Hope you brought your rain gear. And a lawyer.
Anyone have an easy way to convert an existing paper library to a useful elibrary?
http://www.diybookscanner.org/
I haven't built one yet, but I want to. The open source software offerings in this space just keep getting better all the time; toolchains to invoke gocr, etc., and now someone's even running a service to OCR the pages for you, as long as it's OK for them keep a copy in the Internet Archive.
The claims are that you can scan a novel in 20 minutes or less. It might take you quite a few nights and weekends to get through 9000 books at that pace, but if you never start you'll never finish.