There is a lack of some types of apps, but it's not as if the entire app store has no merit. Most of the content of all of the app stores is trivial. It's possible that the overwhelming majority is like that. But there are definitely exceptions to that, and some of them are available on WebOS. Here are a few examples:
- X-Plane (flight simulator series with several forms of it)
- Need for Speed
- Epocrates (Medical reference program)
- TimeTracker (project-coordinated time tracking by GPS location and/or SSID)
- Graphing Calculator
There are also several good fitness tracking apps, some apps for geocaching, and some reasonably good sudoku and crossword apps. I couldn't tell you how good the chess apps are, as I'm not very good at the game.
I haven't seen any stand-alone GPS navigation apps, though it wouldn't be hard to put one together, I think. Google Maps does not (yet) have turn-by-turn, though Sprint's Navigation app is fairly decent and well-integrated (though requires a data connection).
Is that the spinning rainbow disc that was used in a Family Guy episode? It appeared, and all discussion of the topic at hand stopped, and Peter said that they just had to wait until it went away before they could do anything else.
I've never seen it on a real Mac, but I've not spent a lot of time on one, either.
No, the number I posted was what I intended. The annual rates of divorce -- the amount of the population that gets divorced every year -- declined from 0.47% to 0.37%. You're thinking of the total proportion that has been divorced. The numbers are completely different.
Teen pregnancy rates dropped from 1990 to 2005 to the lowest level in decades. Drug abuse rates have actually been decreasing on a gentle slope. Divorce rates have declined from 0.47% of the population in 1991 to 0.37% in 2004.
I know China has more. They're around 100 strategic warheads, maybe a little more, which is not nearly enough to glass California. Create problems with agriculture and drop the populations of some big cities by a significant amount? Sure. But glass it? Not really.
But it's not just California that has to worry. They do have a few missiles with ranges well over 10,000km. That puts many more cities in reach.
My last chem class was in 1992, and nuclear chemistry was a very small part of it. The Island of Stability was mentioned, but not delved into with any great depth.
The article also mentions shells of protons and neutrons in the nucleus helping to determine stability, something which I don't recall learning in chem. Is that an error in explanation, or something that gets discussed when you get a dedicated nuclear chemistry class? Our nuclear chem sections only involved a chapter or two, and largely dealt with the byproducts of decay.
China's arsenal isn't large enough to blow the US to oblivion. Only Russia really has that. China has enough to act as an effective deterrent (that happens somewhere between five and 25 warheads, depending on delivery capability and ease of defense of those warheads), as do India, France, Britain, and Israel.
North Korea is moving in that direction, but because of its significant conventional forces (1.2 million active plus 3.5 million to 4.7 million reserves out of 24 million population), it has a deterrence factor even without nuclear arms. North Korea is in effect one giant military base.
It's not that they don't know necessarily anything about their districts (though it can happen), but think about jobs that you may have held where you started and knew the basics of the job that you were about to do, but there were underlying factors at that particular workplace that affected how the job was done. Cash flow (equivalent to taxes, fees, and spending in government), social strata, interactions with other locales... You might have learned a little about these things by reading up on the company's financial pages or talked with people who worked there. There can be a lot of complexities that can't be known until you've been around for a while.
You can get some truly incompetent people running who really don't know anything about their districts and which are blatant attempts at power (Hillary Clinton for senator from New York, and the attempt to run Alan Keyes for senator from Illinois), but most candidates do have an idea of what their district is about. They just don't know everything about it.
Pretty much. One of the complaints about the wiretaps (among other programs) is that the FISA court, which has only denied warrants in the past a handful of times, was not consulted even after the fact, and there is a reasonably long period of time in which to get a retroactive warrant. The Bush administration said they felt that they could not trust the FISA court to not talk about it, although any judge nominated to the court undergoes an extremely thorough background check and AFAIK no leak has ever been traced to a FISA judge. More likely, they knew that the FISA court, accepting though it is of Executive Branch decisions, was probably going to be unhappy with these programs.
The general consensus is that Congress is doing an abysmal job, with an overall approval rating somewhere in the mid-teens. However, when people are asked about how their specific representatives are doing, the approval rating is usually at least in the mid-40s, and often well above the 50% mark. Essentially, the common view is, "Everyone in Congress is an idiot except the ones I voted for."
I happen to agree that most of Congress don't deserve to be there, but there are some that do. I'd like to see them all leave at the same time and start over, but I don't want term limits. We voted on those in California to deal with the stupid political shenanigans that were going on, and things got worse -- far, far worse. I voted for them myself, sold on the idea that bringing in fresh blood on a regular basis would keep the corruption level down. I'd happily see the term limits overturned now, because I have realized that with the stupid political shenanigans came the realization on the part of legislators that they were probably going to have to work with the guy on the other side of the aisle for the next 20-40 years, and so making friends even on contentious issues would be a good idea.
Term-limited legislators also don't have the time to learn the complexities of their districts. One's district might be relatively simple if it consists of a bunch of forest land and a few small towns, but those encompassing agricultural zones or crossing through cities with multi-ethnic neighborhoods may have far more complex issues to learn, and with only six years available in the Assembly and eight years in the Senate, there just isn't time to learn the subtleties, or to carry forward the knowledge that they do gain to help shape legislation a decade or two or three in the future.
According to ARIN, AS666 is assigned to CSTA-CISCO-AS (US Army Combat Systems Test Activity). It doesn't appear to be in current use, but it wouldn't take long to activate it. Still, attaching its assignment directly to this bill would seem to indicate a high degree of precognition, since it was assigned just shy of 30 years ago.
I find it amusing that Cisco's name appears in the registration name as well. Seems fitting.
I work at a sizable county government in California, and while our timekeeping systems aren't nearly as fancy as to require millions of dollars of investment, they do have to provide an accounting of what people work on. A good portion of the staff are able to have one- or two-line timesheets, as the work they do comes out of one bucket. Others, like me, may have anywhere from 10 to 30 lines a week as we work on different projects or tickets and have to bill the time appropriately.
However, neither of the two systems (one for employees, one for contractors) tracks when people actually arrive and depart. There are mechanisms to enter that data, but it's done by the staff member, not by the badge-reading system. From a technical perspective, I could show up at 10, take a two-hour lunch, then leave at 2, and say that I arrived at 7am, worked my normal shift with a one-hour lunch, and went home at 5. It's only my work ethic (and to a much smaller extent the fact that I would get caught quickly by my boss) that keeps me from doing it.
We negotiate treaties with non-enemies regularly, holding treaties with the UK, Canada, and Mexico. It isn't always meant to solve disputes, but in some cases to head them off before they can become a problem.
I'm not comparing anything. You took issue with the idea that scientists have some mechanism to get their message out to the media. "PR" is, after all, short for public relations, and despite the negative connotation that has been attached to the concept, it's not always evil, anti-environment corporations that use the term. Greenpeace Canada has three "Media and Public Relations Officers."
Your narrow definition of the term does not mean that the rest of us have to hold to it.
You're attacking him, and yet, if anything, he implied that he might even agree with your view. And yet you completely missed his point.
First of all, yes, scientists do have PR departments. They're often called "media relations" or something of the sort, and most universities and independent research organizations have them. They're involved in publicizing the results of research, because the appearance of an article in what to many people is an obscure publication may otherwise go largely unnoticed. Many people have heard of Nature and Science, but how many people know about Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences? Aside from the relative obscurity of these publications, they can be fairly expensive* for most people. Some publicity is helpful to those who do publish in those journals.
Secondly, I would ask you what you do. Are you a climatologist? If so, your dismissive attitude towards his quite valid concern about access to the data is one of the things that has made many people dismissive of the science. If not, then your opinions on the subject would, by your words, be essentially worthless. I suspect that you fall into the latter case, since you were not aware of the publicity assistance that is available for many scientists. On that basis, why should we trust your opinion on the validity of the science?
* Nature and Science run $199 and $146, respectively, for one-year subscriptions. JAS is available only to members of the American Meteorological Society, and then runs $200 for the average person ($60 for Associate Membership plus $140 for the subscription for 2010 issues, access to 2008 and 2009 journals extra).
It will be inconvenient, both for the user and for the bank. Many people do not have their systems set to boot off of the optical drive by default, so the bank would be expected by the user to provide technical support for that change. In addition, users are not going to happily accept the idea that they have to stop their music, save their work in various applications, and close down their browsing sessions to reboot (a process which for many people is not a short experience) just to check their bank balance.
I don't know that he can last too much longer. Even the poor are starting to turn against him. His attempt a couple of years ago to amend the constitution to allow him to run for president forever turned out to be an embarrassing failure, though he handled it with as much dignity as he has anything else. Oil revenues have declined as output has slowed, in part because much of Venezuela's oil is heavy and difficult to extract, and the expertise to do so was largely provided by foreign companies. When he nationalized the oil industry there, many of those experts told him to go pound sand when he asked for assistance. The electricity grid has declined in reliability as well, and the money just isn't there to fix it (courtesy of the declining oil production).
That Venezuela provides discounted or free oil to certain other nations does not help the fiscal line, nor does the refusal (or perhaps political inability) to charge market rates for petroleum products at home, which results in gasoline that costs a tenth of what it does elsewhere in the world, something that Venezuelans see basically as their right as an oil-producing nation.
He's also warned of "defensive actions" against Colombia (a nation that is not even close to being able to stage a successful attack on a country like Venezuela) on a couple of occasions, and has modernized the military. It would not surprise me at all to see them fighting in the next few years, though, and I will laugh if Venezuela's modern but inexperienced army gets their heads handed to them by the lesser-equipped but far more combat-experienced Colombian army.
Then again, I said that he couldn't possible last a few years ago when the troubles began. A fragmented opposition that can't get a basic unified message together combined with further limited opportunities to get the message out and Chavez's persistent presence on TV for hours on end mean that Chavez will continue to hold the edge for some time to come.
I can't say that I never use ketchup. I will occasionally (such as at ball games) get a hot dog and cover it in pretty much everything available (ketchup, mustard, relish, onions, jalapenos, etc.). But I think the small bottle of ketchup in my refrigerator was probably purchased a couple of years ago, and is not even half-empty yet.
BTW, my favorite addition to a steak is a nice piece of brie added to the center of the steak. Much better than A1.
Except that both types of sugar are poison. Yep, that granulated, bleached sugar you put in your coffe is poison. Nature didn't intend for your body to endure sugar spikes like that. Poison, poison, poison.
The dose makes the poison. Caffeine has some beneficial properties in low doses, whereas a few grams can be lethal. Humankind in its wanderings has come across a wide variety of foods. We didn't eat corn at one point, either, but that doesn't make it inherently unhealthy. Honey is not something that is essential, and to most people, it's not worth the danger to gather it in the wild.
Honey, incidentally, is 38% fructose, 31% glucose, and 1% sucrose. The ratio of fructose to glucose in honey is 55:45 -- the same as the ratio of the HFCS used in soft drinks.
Whole Foods does stock products with HFCS in them, just not as many as most stores. Their only hard and fast rules are no trans-fats, and no artificial colors.
BTW, I know a couple of people who shop fairly religiously at Whole Foods. They clued me in to the nickname of "Whole Paycheck" not long ago. They eat healthier, but they both admit that they pay substantially more for the ability to do so.
I rarely put a sauce of any sort on my steaks, and I primarily use either Best Foods mayo (preferably with olive oil, as I find it just a little bit tastier than the already tasty normal mayo) or various spicy mustard types on hot dogs, sandwiches, and burgers, and neither of those condiments have HFCS in them (Best Foods specifically lists "sugar" as an ingredient, not HFCS). I find that ketchup and BBQ sauces often mask the much better natural flavors of the meat. There are times when a good BBQ sauce is appropriate, and it enhances the flavor of the meat, but all too often I see people using the food as a carrier of sauce, instead of using the sauce as a subtle addition to the food.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a lack of some types of apps, but it's not as if the entire app store has no merit. Most of the content of all of the app stores is trivial. It's possible that the overwhelming majority is like that. But there are definitely exceptions to that, and some of them are available on WebOS. Here are a few examples:
- X-Plane (flight simulator series with several forms of it)
- Need for Speed
- Epocrates (Medical reference program)
- TimeTracker (project-coordinated time tracking by GPS location and/or SSID)
- Graphing Calculator
There are also several good fitness tracking apps, some apps for geocaching, and some reasonably good sudoku and crossword apps. I couldn't tell you how good the chess apps are, as I'm not very good at the game.
I haven't seen any stand-alone GPS navigation apps, though it wouldn't be hard to put one together, I think. Google Maps does not (yet) have turn-by-turn, though Sprint's Navigation app is fairly decent and well-integrated (though requires a data connection).
Is that the spinning rainbow disc that was used in a Family Guy episode? It appeared, and all discussion of the topic at hand stopped, and Peter said that they just had to wait until it went away before they could do anything else.
I've never seen it on a real Mac, but I've not spent a lot of time on one, either.
No, the number I posted was what I intended. The annual rates of divorce -- the amount of the population that gets divorced every year -- declined from 0.47% to 0.37%. You're thinking of the total proportion that has been divorced. The numbers are completely different.
Teen pregnancy rates dropped from 1990 to 2005 to the lowest level in decades. Drug abuse rates have actually been decreasing on a gentle slope. Divorce rates have declined from 0.47% of the population in 1991 to 0.37% in 2004.
How's that war on actual facts going?
I know China has more. They're around 100 strategic warheads, maybe a little more, which is not nearly enough to glass California. Create problems with agriculture and drop the populations of some big cities by a significant amount? Sure. But glass it? Not really.
But it's not just California that has to worry. They do have a few missiles with ranges well over 10,000km. That puts many more cities in reach.
My last chem class was in 1992, and nuclear chemistry was a very small part of it. The Island of Stability was mentioned, but not delved into with any great depth.
The article also mentions shells of protons and neutrons in the nucleus helping to determine stability, something which I don't recall learning in chem. Is that an error in explanation, or something that gets discussed when you get a dedicated nuclear chemistry class? Our nuclear chem sections only involved a chapter or two, and largely dealt with the byproducts of decay.
China's arsenal isn't large enough to blow the US to oblivion. Only Russia really has that. China has enough to act as an effective deterrent (that happens somewhere between five and 25 warheads, depending on delivery capability and ease of defense of those warheads), as do India, France, Britain, and Israel.
North Korea is moving in that direction, but because of its significant conventional forces (1.2 million active plus 3.5 million to 4.7 million reserves out of 24 million population), it has a deterrence factor even without nuclear arms. North Korea is in effect one giant military base.
It's not that they don't know necessarily anything about their districts (though it can happen), but think about jobs that you may have held where you started and knew the basics of the job that you were about to do, but there were underlying factors at that particular workplace that affected how the job was done. Cash flow (equivalent to taxes, fees, and spending in government), social strata, interactions with other locales... You might have learned a little about these things by reading up on the company's financial pages or talked with people who worked there. There can be a lot of complexities that can't be known until you've been around for a while.
You can get some truly incompetent people running who really don't know anything about their districts and which are blatant attempts at power (Hillary Clinton for senator from New York, and the attempt to run Alan Keyes for senator from Illinois), but most candidates do have an idea of what their district is about. They just don't know everything about it.
Pretty much. One of the complaints about the wiretaps (among other programs) is that the FISA court, which has only denied warrants in the past a handful of times, was not consulted even after the fact, and there is a reasonably long period of time in which to get a retroactive warrant. The Bush administration said they felt that they could not trust the FISA court to not talk about it, although any judge nominated to the court undergoes an extremely thorough background check and AFAIK no leak has ever been traced to a FISA judge. More likely, they knew that the FISA court, accepting though it is of Executive Branch decisions, was probably going to be unhappy with these programs.
The general consensus is that Congress is doing an abysmal job, with an overall approval rating somewhere in the mid-teens. However, when people are asked about how their specific representatives are doing, the approval rating is usually at least in the mid-40s, and often well above the 50% mark. Essentially, the common view is, "Everyone in Congress is an idiot except the ones I voted for."
I happen to agree that most of Congress don't deserve to be there, but there are some that do. I'd like to see them all leave at the same time and start over, but I don't want term limits. We voted on those in California to deal with the stupid political shenanigans that were going on, and things got worse -- far, far worse. I voted for them myself, sold on the idea that bringing in fresh blood on a regular basis would keep the corruption level down. I'd happily see the term limits overturned now, because I have realized that with the stupid political shenanigans came the realization on the part of legislators that they were probably going to have to work with the guy on the other side of the aisle for the next 20-40 years, and so making friends even on contentious issues would be a good idea.
Term-limited legislators also don't have the time to learn the complexities of their districts. One's district might be relatively simple if it consists of a bunch of forest land and a few small towns, but those encompassing agricultural zones or crossing through cities with multi-ethnic neighborhoods may have far more complex issues to learn, and with only six years available in the Assembly and eight years in the Senate, there just isn't time to learn the subtleties, or to carry forward the knowledge that they do gain to help shape legislation a decade or two or three in the future.
According to ARIN, AS666 is assigned to CSTA-CISCO-AS (US Army Combat Systems Test Activity). It doesn't appear to be in current use, but it wouldn't take long to activate it. Still, attaching its assignment directly to this bill would seem to indicate a high degree of precognition, since it was assigned just shy of 30 years ago.
I find it amusing that Cisco's name appears in the registration name as well. Seems fitting.
The suit was dismissed by the judge because the named defendant could not be served with papers.
I wasn't discussing the loss, just how our particular systems work.
I work at a sizable county government in California, and while our timekeeping systems aren't nearly as fancy as to require millions of dollars of investment, they do have to provide an accounting of what people work on. A good portion of the staff are able to have one- or two-line timesheets, as the work they do comes out of one bucket. Others, like me, may have anywhere from 10 to 30 lines a week as we work on different projects or tickets and have to bill the time appropriately.
However, neither of the two systems (one for employees, one for contractors) tracks when people actually arrive and depart. There are mechanisms to enter that data, but it's done by the staff member, not by the badge-reading system. From a technical perspective, I could show up at 10, take a two-hour lunch, then leave at 2, and say that I arrived at 7am, worked my normal shift with a one-hour lunch, and went home at 5. It's only my work ethic (and to a much smaller extent the fact that I would get caught quickly by my boss) that keeps me from doing it.
1.We aren't enemies anymore. Right?
We negotiate treaties with non-enemies regularly, holding treaties with the UK, Canada, and Mexico. It isn't always meant to solve disputes, but in some cases to head them off before they can become a problem.
I'm not comparing anything. You took issue with the idea that scientists have some mechanism to get their message out to the media. "PR" is, after all, short for public relations, and despite the negative connotation that has been attached to the concept, it's not always evil, anti-environment corporations that use the term. Greenpeace Canada has three "Media and Public Relations Officers."
Your narrow definition of the term does not mean that the rest of us have to hold to it.
You're attacking him, and yet, if anything, he implied that he might even agree with your view. And yet you completely missed his point.
First of all, yes, scientists do have PR departments. They're often called "media relations" or something of the sort, and most universities and independent research organizations have them. They're involved in publicizing the results of research, because the appearance of an article in what to many people is an obscure publication may otherwise go largely unnoticed. Many people have heard of Nature and Science, but how many people know about Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences? Aside from the relative obscurity of these publications, they can be fairly expensive* for most people. Some publicity is helpful to those who do publish in those journals.
Secondly, I would ask you what you do. Are you a climatologist? If so, your dismissive attitude towards his quite valid concern about access to the data is one of the things that has made many people dismissive of the science. If not, then your opinions on the subject would, by your words, be essentially worthless. I suspect that you fall into the latter case, since you were not aware of the publicity assistance that is available for many scientists. On that basis, why should we trust your opinion on the validity of the science?
* Nature and Science run $199 and $146, respectively, for one-year subscriptions. JAS is available only to members of the American Meteorological Society, and then runs $200 for the average person ($60 for Associate Membership plus $140 for the subscription for 2010 issues, access to 2008 and 2009 journals extra).
It will be inconvenient, both for the user and for the bank. Many people do not have their systems set to boot off of the optical drive by default, so the bank would be expected by the user to provide technical support for that change. In addition, users are not going to happily accept the idea that they have to stop their music, save their work in various applications, and close down their browsing sessions to reboot (a process which for many people is not a short experience) just to check their bank balance.
I don't know that he can last too much longer. Even the poor are starting to turn against him. His attempt a couple of years ago to amend the constitution to allow him to run for president forever turned out to be an embarrassing failure, though he handled it with as much dignity as he has anything else. Oil revenues have declined as output has slowed, in part because much of Venezuela's oil is heavy and difficult to extract, and the expertise to do so was largely provided by foreign companies. When he nationalized the oil industry there, many of those experts told him to go pound sand when he asked for assistance. The electricity grid has declined in reliability as well, and the money just isn't there to fix it (courtesy of the declining oil production).
That Venezuela provides discounted or free oil to certain other nations does not help the fiscal line, nor does the refusal (or perhaps political inability) to charge market rates for petroleum products at home, which results in gasoline that costs a tenth of what it does elsewhere in the world, something that Venezuelans see basically as their right as an oil-producing nation.
He's also warned of "defensive actions" against Colombia (a nation that is not even close to being able to stage a successful attack on a country like Venezuela) on a couple of occasions, and has modernized the military. It would not surprise me at all to see them fighting in the next few years, though, and I will laugh if Venezuela's modern but inexperienced army gets their heads handed to them by the lesser-equipped but far more combat-experienced Colombian army.
Then again, I said that he couldn't possible last a few years ago when the troubles began. A fragmented opposition that can't get a basic unified message together combined with further limited opportunities to get the message out and Chavez's persistent presence on TV for hours on end mean that Chavez will continue to hold the edge for some time to come.
Probably. :) It's just not something I think about when I go to the store.
I can't say that I never use ketchup. I will occasionally (such as at ball games) get a hot dog and cover it in pretty much everything available (ketchup, mustard, relish, onions, jalapenos, etc.). But I think the small bottle of ketchup in my refrigerator was probably purchased a couple of years ago, and is not even half-empty yet.
BTW, my favorite addition to a steak is a nice piece of brie added to the center of the steak. Much better than A1.
Except that both types of sugar are poison. Yep, that granulated, bleached sugar you put in your coffe is poison. Nature didn't intend for your body to endure sugar spikes like that. Poison, poison, poison.
The dose makes the poison. Caffeine has some beneficial properties in low doses, whereas a few grams can be lethal. Humankind in its wanderings has come across a wide variety of foods. We didn't eat corn at one point, either, but that doesn't make it inherently unhealthy. Honey is not something that is essential, and to most people, it's not worth the danger to gather it in the wild.
Honey, incidentally, is 38% fructose, 31% glucose, and 1% sucrose. The ratio of fructose to glucose in honey is 55:45 -- the same as the ratio of the HFCS used in soft drinks.
Whole Foods does stock products with HFCS in them, just not as many as most stores. Their only hard and fast rules are no trans-fats, and no artificial colors.
BTW, I know a couple of people who shop fairly religiously at Whole Foods. They clued me in to the nickname of "Whole Paycheck" not long ago. They eat healthier, but they both admit that they pay substantially more for the ability to do so.
I rarely put a sauce of any sort on my steaks, and I primarily use either Best Foods mayo (preferably with olive oil, as I find it just a little bit tastier than the already tasty normal mayo) or various spicy mustard types on hot dogs, sandwiches, and burgers, and neither of those condiments have HFCS in them (Best Foods specifically lists "sugar" as an ingredient, not HFCS). I find that ketchup and BBQ sauces often mask the much better natural flavors of the meat. There are times when a good BBQ sauce is appropriate, and it enhances the flavor of the meat, but all too often I see people using the food as a carrier of sauce, instead of using the sauce as a subtle addition to the food.