Eh? They aren't "criminalizing drugs", they're just applying the normal regulatory process to commercial mass producers. This is what they're supposed to do.
It's perfectly fine to mix such drinks yourself, or have the bartender mix them for you...
What I find really scary is the stories I've seen of grade-school kids being required to submit their report as a powerpoint presentation....
(sorry, no link, but I'm not kidding)
Sooo, presumably the downside is greatly reduced quality and increased annoyance. Almost certainly there will be a large number of viewers without the glasses, or who strongly dislike wearing them (for instance, glasses wearers whose glasses are incompatible with the distributed 3d glasses); for these people, the effect is a fuzzy almost unwatchable program.
Given that in the vast majority of cases, 3d is essentially a tacky gimmick with little real benefit, what on earth are they thinking?!
...if you look at the comments, you'll notice that everybody pretty much thinks the small startup is full of shit, and google did nothing wrong (whether they copied the idea from this startup -- and the "evidence" for that seems pretty dubious -- or not).
Which means that if I copy your music, and you don't get played on radio, you don't get a cent from it. Celine Dion does though. Which IMO is completely bizarre and a perversion of how things should be. If somebody's going to get paid I'd rather it be the right person.
If there were any justice, Celine Dion would be required to pay us every time her "music" is played on the radio!
Not that mere money could undo the damage of course...
One of the biggest problems I've had with the Nintendo systems is that you either have to carry around a ton of cartridges in order to play, or you have to be happy with one/two, and if you finish them or grow bored, you're SoL.
On pre-DS systems I used to have the same complaint, but really, the cartridges for the DS are so small that I can carry 5-6 of them without even noticing (though I usually never end up playing more than 1 or 2).
Sarah Palin is an excellent example of a nitwit politician who knows how to play the hot button issues. She is smarter than most people give her credit for.
If Sarah Palin is both a nitwit, and smarter then most people, then is she not of above average intelligence and therefore as qualified as anyone (and apparently more qualified then most) to have an opine? Just asking --it's rhetorical --and intentionally side steps Palin's actual value or lack thereof.
He didn't say Palin is "smarter than most people", he said she's "smarter than most people give her credit for".
In other words, if most people think Palin is a complete moron, with the intelligence of a particularly dim bacterium, but she's actually as smart as a special-needs fruit-fly, then although she may be really stupid, she's still smarter than people think she is.
Given most people's low opinion of Palin's intelligence, this wouldn't be surprising...
The old SATA standard was more than sufficient for the hard disk's max sustained transfer rate, so only burst performance (when everything is presumably coming from the disk's RAM cache) changed with the new SATA. So "SATA 6GB" is working fine, but this disk is just too slow to take advantage of its speed increase.
With USB on the other hand, USB 2 is simply far too slow to handle even the drive's sustained transfer rate, whereas USB 3 is fast enough to handle it.
So the moral seems to be: USB 2 sucks for disks, USB 3 is better and probably sufficient for a typical hard drive, and SATA's still probably better than either (it's not really possible to tell from this article, since the sustained transfer rates are limited by the drive, and they curiously omitted the burst rates for USB).
I'm skeptical that this is going to do anything but highlight the shortfalls of the system; it being both the oldest and the slowest architecture on the market.
Actually the DSi has a fair bit more processor power (and memory I believe) than the DS, but few devs have taken advantage of it (for many games it's not really necessary, and obviously at this point the original DS still has a lot more market share).
According to TFA they did about $20M in sales before going belly-up. I don't know if that's wholesale or retail, but it must represent approx 500K-1M units, which doesn't seem too shabby.
It seems to have been priced in the range of $250 - $350 (I've seen different numbers in different places), so around 50k – 100k units.
If Nintendo decides that it wants to improve upon its current device in a manner that will not change Peter Smith's current DSi in any way that isn't psychological, I have a hard time seeing a problem.
I've noticed that many gamers seem to feel "cheated" if they buy something and the manufacturer subsequently releases an improved product -- even if it's only slightly improved, and even if it's a fair bit later. I think it's silly, but as far as I can tell, they feel that the manufacturer "owes" it to them to preserve their pride in owning the latest and greatest. Or something.
Slashdot should have omitted the silly moaning by the blogger though, and just posted the interesting info.
an animatronic dinosaur briefly sold from 2007 to 2008, which disappeared fairly abruptly at the end of 2008, apparently due to some corporate shenanigans/infighting
Hmm, so its failure had nothing to do with the fact that very few people actually want an animatronic dinosaur?
[If the price were extremely low, it might manage a bunch of sales via the "what the hell" route, but the Pleo seems to have been a lot too expensive for that, and it's not exactly a stable business strategy in any case.]
I'll bet they're only measuring "fuel usage" too -- the environmental cost of making the SUV, and delivering/selling it, and building/maintaining the vast road/parking/etc infrastructure to drive it on, and eventually disposing of it, is probably far, far, far higher than anything related to the dog.
I'm sorry I don't know enough about the private internal functioning of my bank, etc., to know whether they have discarded all pre-internet infrastructure or not -- because obviously all this stuff worked fine before widespread adoption of the internet (not so long ago). Given that large financial institutions tend to be very conservative and very slow, I do have my doubts though.
now that cars are a major part of the fabric of our everyday lives, it would be substantially more painful to give them up completely now.
This is only true in places where the physical infrastructure was designed or substantially altered to suit cars -- e.g., new-style suburbs or spread-out rural areas. Many places which developed in an earlier era, or have a more enlightened attitude towards planning, would cope pretty well. [A much bigger problem would be the lack of delivery trucks!] The USA would take a disproportionately large hit because it's engaged in pro-car planning so furiously.
So, the question is: has the underlying fabric of mainstream society changed since pre-internet days, to such a great extent that society would fall apart without the internet? I'd say no way.
The internet is very convenient, and very popular, but it simply hasn't been available to the larger public for very long. The majority of pre-internet infrastructure is still around, and the majority of people still know how to use it (e.g., libraries, bookstores, newspapers, yellow-pages, maps, "record" stores, etc). These "pre-internet" institutions and habits may be ailing these days, and the writing may be on the wall, but I don't think many of them have actually died off yet.
I suspect if the internet disappeared, the first few weeks would simply be very annoying, people would gripe and grumble furiously for a while, get lost more often (no google maps), and the economy would take a hit, but it wouldn't take so long for people to get over it.
Give society another 50 years, and the result might be a lot more dire, but I think the feeling of dependence on the internet is illusory. For most people, it's still just a convenience, and there still exist alternative systems to take over, however creaky they may feel in comparison.
There is an argument that the continued existence of a healthy ecosystem
What's "healthy" about a large number of small book stores with limited selection?
Taken together, all the small (and of course, not all independent bookstores are small...) bookstores likely end up having a larger selection than the apparently-large-but-actually-kind-of-monotonous-and-generic selection of big chain bookstores. Moreover, because there's a lot more individual taste used in choosing books, there's better support for non-mainstream material; I imagine that's what the GP was referring to.
And why do you need bookstores and publishers at all if there are electronic reading devices?
I guess you're just trolling a bit, but like many people, I like bookstores, and am willing to pay more when buying a book in a nice environment. Amazon's nice too, in its own way, but... not the same.
Remember back when there was a kind of meme that said "in the future, we won't need to prepare food, we'll just eat food pills!"?
It turns out that starting probably next year some time, you get the best of both worlds. We'll have netbooks and net tablets that pack displays equal to e-paper in sunlight, and with brilliant color.
That page says almost nothing about what they're actually doing... Does the "pixelqi" address any problems except the reflection-in-sunlight/backlight problem?
The grandparent's complaint was as much about the annoyingly obvious artifacts of LCD color displays when viewing detailed high-contrast material (like text) at close-distance with relatively low-resolution, as it was about backlighting vs. reflective displays.
Hopefully what someone else mentioned in another thread on this story is correct: really this is just Amazon's way of making some quick cash off of U.S. tourists and expatriates while shaking out any bugs in their expanded network, in preparation for the launch of a new unit with proper handling of other languages.
Plus people are worried that 600x800 is too small for the kanji characters
A typical bunko (A6 sized) page has around 16 rows of about 40 characters, which would allow characters of about 20x20 pixels. With judicious anti-aliasing and a well-designed font, that should be easily readable (it certainly is on computer displays, although I don't have any real experience with e-paper...).
It's not going to be anywhere near as pretty as a printed book, but then that's always true with the kindle.
[Of course one can also hope that the next model has a higher resolution, but it seems very unlikely to be anything but an incremental improvement.]
"Hey, MS sent me marketing crap, let's have a party!" is a great excuse to dress your dogs up in sweaters, because they're the only friends you'll ever have.
Hoooooooooooooold on.
Cats? Fish? Star wars figurines?!
Friends are practically oozing out of the knotty-pine paneling!
In a lot of ways, I think that this is a better use of the prize; not to recognize achievements after the fact, but to encourage and foster new achievements that might not have happened without the award.
Exactly! While it's nice to give rewards for a good job done the past, it's far better to actually help advance the cause of peace.
It would have been far "safer" for the committee to choose some worthy nominee from the past, and I'm sure they're well aware that they run the risk of diluting what influence they have, if they make such choices poorly. They're basically risking their reputation in order to make the world a better place, and I think that's commendable.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh? They aren't "criminalizing drugs", they're just applying the normal regulatory process to commercial mass producers. This is what they're supposed to do.
It's perfectly fine to mix such drinks yourself, or have the bartender mix them for you...
What I find really scary is the stories I've seen of grade-school kids being required to submit their report as a powerpoint presentation....
(sorry, no link, but I'm not kidding)
Sooo, presumably the downside is greatly reduced quality and increased annoyance. Almost certainly there will be a large number of viewers without the glasses, or who strongly dislike wearing them (for instance, glasses wearers whose glasses are incompatible with the distributed 3d glasses); for these people, the effect is a fuzzy almost unwatchable program.
Given that in the vast majority of cases, 3d is essentially a tacky gimmick with little real benefit, what on earth are they thinking?!
...if you look at the comments, you'll notice that everybody pretty much thinks the small startup is full of shit, and google did nothing wrong (whether they copied the idea from this startup -- and the "evidence" for that seems pretty dubious -- or not).
Which means that if I copy your music, and you don't get played on radio, you don't get a cent from it. Celine Dion does though. Which IMO is completely bizarre and a perversion of how things should be. If somebody's going to get paid I'd rather it be the right person.
If there were any justice, Celine Dion would be required to pay us every time her "music" is played on the radio!
Not that mere money could undo the damage of course...
One of the biggest problems I've had with the Nintendo systems is that you either have to carry around a ton of cartridges in order to play, or you have to be happy with one/two, and if you finish them or grow bored, you're SoL.
On pre-DS systems I used to have the same complaint, but really, the cartridges for the DS are so small that I can carry 5-6 of them without even noticing (though I usually never end up playing more than 1 or 2).
The idea of free 3G is kinda cool though....
If Sarah Palin is both a nitwit, and smarter then most people, then is she not of above average intelligence and therefore as qualified as anyone (and apparently more qualified then most) to have an opine? Just asking --it's rhetorical --and intentionally side steps Palin's actual value or lack thereof.
He didn't say Palin is "smarter than most people", he said she's "smarter than most people give her credit for".
In other words, if most people think Palin is a complete moron, with the intelligence of a particularly dim bacterium, but she's actually as smart as a special-needs fruit-fly, then although she may be really stupid, she's still smarter than people think she is.
Given most people's low opinion of Palin's intelligence, this wouldn't be surprising...
This all sounds like exactly what you'd expect.
The old SATA standard was more than sufficient for the hard disk's max sustained transfer rate, so only burst performance (when everything is presumably coming from the disk's RAM cache) changed with the new SATA. So "SATA 6GB" is working fine, but this disk is just too slow to take advantage of its speed increase.
With USB on the other hand, USB 2 is simply far too slow to handle even the drive's sustained transfer rate, whereas USB 3 is fast enough to handle it.
So the moral seems to be: USB 2 sucks for disks, USB 3 is better and probably sufficient for a typical hard drive, and SATA's still probably better than either (it's not really possible to tell from this article, since the sustained transfer rates are limited by the drive, and they curiously omitted the burst rates for USB).
I'm skeptical that this is going to do anything but highlight the shortfalls of the system; it being both the oldest and the slowest architecture on the market.
Actually the DSi has a fair bit more processor power (and memory I believe) than the DS, but few devs have taken advantage of it (for many games it's not really necessary, and obviously at this point the original DS still has a lot more market share).
According to TFA they did about $20M in sales before going belly-up. I don't know if that's wholesale or retail, but it must represent approx 500K-1M units, which doesn't seem too shabby.
It seems to have been priced in the range of $250 - $350 (I've seen different numbers in different places), so around 50k – 100k units.
If Nintendo decides that it wants to improve upon its current device in a manner that will not change Peter Smith's current DSi in any way that isn't psychological, I have a hard time seeing a problem.
I've noticed that many gamers seem to feel "cheated" if they buy something and the manufacturer subsequently releases an improved product -- even if it's only slightly improved, and even if it's a fair bit later. I think it's silly, but as far as I can tell, they feel that the manufacturer "owes" it to them to preserve their pride in owning the latest and greatest. Or something.
Slashdot should have omitted the silly moaning by the blogger though, and just posted the interesting info.
an animatronic dinosaur briefly sold from 2007 to 2008, which disappeared fairly abruptly at the end of 2008, apparently due to some corporate shenanigans/infighting
Hmm, so its failure had nothing to do with the fact that very few people actually want an animatronic dinosaur?
[If the price were extremely low, it might manage a bunch of sales via the "what the hell" route, but the Pleo seems to have been a lot too expensive for that, and it's not exactly a stable business strategy in any case.]
I'll bet they're only measuring "fuel usage" too -- the environmental cost of making the SUV, and delivering/selling it, and building/maintaining the vast road/parking/etc infrastructure to drive it on, and eventually disposing of it, is probably far, far, far higher than anything related to the dog.
I'm sorry I don't know enough about the private internal functioning of my bank, etc., to know whether they have discarded all pre-internet infrastructure or not -- because obviously all this stuff worked fine before widespread adoption of the internet (not so long ago). Given that large financial institutions tend to be very conservative and very slow, I do have my doubts though.
now that cars are a major part of the fabric of our everyday lives, it would be substantially more painful to give them up completely now.
This is only true in places where the physical infrastructure was designed or substantially altered to suit cars -- e.g., new-style suburbs or spread-out rural areas. Many places which developed in an earlier era, or have a more enlightened attitude towards planning, would cope pretty well. [A much bigger problem would be the lack of delivery trucks!] The USA would take a disproportionately large hit because it's engaged in pro-car planning so furiously.
So, the question is: has the underlying fabric of mainstream society changed since pre-internet days, to such a great extent that society would fall apart without the internet? I'd say no way.
The internet is very convenient, and very popular, but it simply hasn't been available to the larger public for very long. The majority of pre-internet infrastructure is still around, and the majority of people still know how to use it (e.g., libraries, bookstores, newspapers, yellow-pages, maps, "record" stores, etc). These "pre-internet" institutions and habits may be ailing these days, and the writing may be on the wall, but I don't think many of them have actually died off yet.
I suspect if the internet disappeared, the first few weeks would simply be very annoying, people would gripe and grumble furiously for a while, get lost more often (no google maps), and the economy would take a hit, but it wouldn't take so long for people to get over it.
Give society another 50 years, and the result might be a lot more dire, but I think the feeling of dependence on the internet is illusory. For most people, it's still just a convenience, and there still exist alternative systems to take over, however creaky they may feel in comparison.
A thesis "defense" is an event where one defends one's thesis, not the document itself.
There is an argument that the continued existence of a healthy ecosystem
What's "healthy" about a large number of small book stores with limited selection?
Taken together, all the small (and of course, not all independent bookstores are small...) bookstores likely end up having a larger selection than the apparently-large-but-actually-kind-of-monotonous-and-generic selection of big chain bookstores. Moreover, because there's a lot more individual taste used in choosing books, there's better support for non-mainstream material; I imagine that's what the GP was referring to.
And why do you need bookstores and publishers at all if there are electronic reading devices?
I guess you're just trolling a bit, but like many people, I like bookstores, and am willing to pay more when buying a book in a nice environment. Amazon's nice too, in its own way, but ... not the same.
Remember back when there was a kind of meme that said "in the future, we won't need to prepare food, we'll just eat food pills!"?
It turns out that starting probably next year some time, you get the best of both worlds. We'll have netbooks and net tablets that pack displays equal to e-paper in sunlight, and with brilliant color.
That page says almost nothing about what they're actually doing... Does the "pixelqi" address any problems except the reflection-in-sunlight/backlight problem?
The grandparent's complaint was as much about the annoyingly obvious artifacts of LCD color displays when viewing detailed high-contrast material (like text) at close-distance with relatively low-resolution, as it was about backlighting vs. reflective displays.
A typical bunko (A6 sized) page has around 16 rows of about 40 characters
Er, that should be: around 16 columns of about 40 characters each...
Hopefully what someone else mentioned in another thread on this story is correct: really this is just Amazon's way of making some quick cash off of U.S. tourists and expatriates while shaking out any bugs in their expanded network, in preparation for the launch of a new unit with proper handling of other languages.
Plus people are worried that 600x800 is too small for the kanji characters
A typical bunko (A6 sized) page has around 16 rows of about 40 characters, which would allow characters of about 20x20 pixels. With judicious anti-aliasing and a well-designed font, that should be easily readable (it certainly is on computer displays, although I don't have any real experience with e-paper...).
It's not going to be anywhere near as pretty as a printed book, but then that's always true with the kindle.
[Of course one can also hope that the next model has a higher resolution, but it seems very unlikely to be anything but an incremental improvement.]
Note that this "international edition" still has the same gimped fonts as the "U.S. edition", which basically only contains latin characters.
This seems very silly, given that the kindle actually seems perfectly capable of using a default font with much larger coverage: someone released a patch that changes the default kindle font to be Google's wide-coverage (e.g. including CJK characters) "DroidSansFallback" font! (the page I linked to contains two patches, for two different fonts). It would have almost trivial for Amazon to do something similar (and they could have done a better job).
I don't know what Amazon is thinking, but this is a pretty pathetic attempt at an "international" kindle.
It could have been worse. They could have included copies of Windows for the guests, too.
What, Windows 7: This Sucks I'm Not Your Friend Anymore edition??
"Hey, MS sent me marketing crap, let's have a party!" is a great excuse to dress your dogs up in sweaters, because they're the only friends you'll ever have.
Hoooooooooooooold on.
Cats? Fish? Star wars figurines?!
Friends are practically oozing out of the knotty-pine paneling!
In a lot of ways, I think that this is a better use of the prize; not to recognize achievements after the fact, but to encourage and foster new achievements that might not have happened without the award.
Exactly! While it's nice to give rewards for a good job done the past, it's far better to actually help advance the cause of peace.
It would have been far "safer" for the committee to choose some worthy nominee from the past, and I'm sure they're well aware that they run the risk of diluting what influence they have, if they make such choices poorly. They're basically risking their reputation in order to make the world a better place, and I think that's commendable.
I'm somewhat confused. The ruling was in 2006? Why are we hearing about this now?
It seems obvious: the original ruling was in 2006, the appeals-court ruling is recent.