It is LESS than ONE HALF the capacity of a 4.7GB DVD.
Paying $30 for 5GB of data is unarmed robbery.
**Devils Advocate*** To keep up with your DVD analogy, imagine a hypothetical Blu-Ray movie with a retail price of $25-$30. There's something around 8GB of data on most Blu-Rays (I think, certainly more than 5GB). $30 for 5GB of data sounds reasonable then if compared against retail Blu-Rays. Especially considering the convenience of having it wirelessly streamed to a mobile device, meaning that you don't even have to put on pants and got to Best Buy. ***/Devils Advocate***
You and I, and probably most slashdotters, agree that 2GB is a pitiful amount of data. We would all probably agree that 5GB for $30 is steep. Unfortunately, we are not representative of the target Verizon iPhone market. Most users don't know enough to have a sense of how valuable data is. Is a GB worth $1? $10?.$15? There's no consensus, and people are willing to pay quite a bit to get the data they want. Mobile carriers will naturally take advantage of that.
But there's nothing nefarious about it. They just want to make sure that they have control over what devices are accessing their network is all. They are very open about that when they ask you to sign the service agreement.
Phosphate fertilizers carry with them a lot of heavy metals (cadmium is mentioned in the first article) that gets picked up by the plant. These are ingested or inhaled as the plant is consumed.
What I didn't know until just now as I read up on this (mostly to back up my previous post) is that the preferred method of generating phosphorus for small volumes of fertilizer is from urine. This seems totally safe, at least from the heavy metals perspective. For large/industrial scale uses the only way to collect sufficient amounts of phosphorous is by mining it. This mined phosphorous ore is where the problem lies, because it's likely mined along with those heavy metals that cause long term health problems in people.
For small scale growers, urine phosphorous is just fine. But industrial scale phosphorous fertilizer can be a problem. Obviously, the scope of the problem depends on how much fertilized plant you inhale. It's one of the reasons cigarette smoke is so bad for you.
If these fertilizers are so toxic, then why are they being used on edible plants?
I'll close my response by saying that this is a very, very good question.
To be fair, the capabilities of an elite group like the US Navy Seals are probably a lot greater than the capabilities of the moderately trained "sniper"s that will be available for cargo ship security.
Also remember that in that incident the life raft was being towed by a destroyer to keep it stable in rough seas. The life raft and shooting platform (the fan tail of the ship) had little to no relative movement. Shooting from a ship to pirate skiff being tossed around in the sea is significantly more difficult.
Look it up on wikipedia, it's kind of hard to explain what it is without explaining the underlying statistics. Basically it allows you to compare group means.
It is a useful and important test to run, but is hardly sophisticated. It is literally one of the first things they teach you in an introductory statistics class in social sciences. The allegation is that a lot more analysis was required on the data than comparing group averages.
I stopped being able to receive software updates for my G1 about a year after I got it. While I was still under contract.
It is perfectly reasonable to expect software support for a device during a typical lifecycle for such a device. The time frame of a 'typical' lifecycle is certainly open to interpretation, but mobile manufacturers have interpreted it as far too short.
I think some of those people tend to be isolated fairly easily, and their negative impact can be mitigated. It's easy enough to make up a high profile but meaningless job to place the CEO's cousin. It is unfortunate when the behavior comes from someone who you can't isolate, either because you need their technical expertise or because they're threatening you with an EEO complaint.
There are ways of fitting terrible employees into an organization. Specifically by really placing them outside but attached to the organization.
- the HR "professional" that decided against providing proper drone training for handling highly sensitive documents
As a professional responsible for training and development programs, I have to take offence at that one. There is nothing indicating this was an issue with lack of training. In my experience one of the things the government is very good at is distributing trainings on how to handle sensitive materials. However one thing that many employees are bad at is learning things that don't immediately impact their day to day existence.
If dimwits or super egotistical self described savants can't be bothered to pay attention to trainings or take their content seriously, you can't blame HR.
That was exactly my concern. My question when I read the article was if "searching my phone" meant looking at just the data physically stored on my phone or looking at all the data my phone has access to. This wasn't really clarified in the article.
The case in question focused on evidence that police collected by looking through a suspects stored text messages. So a responsible and limited application of this ruling would be to just limit such searches to data immediately available on the phone. But I suspect that police will not really respect the distinction.
As a resident of MA, I will say that though I completely support the concept of banning texting while driving, the current law is useless. Even local cops urged the State government to slow down and think, because now they are obligated to enforce an unenforceable law.
"Texting" is illegal. But other phone functions like talking, dialing, or using GPS Nav applications are still legally ok. This makes it functionally impossible to enforce.
how do you feel about the woman further down trying to connect with her kid, or the doctor trying to manage prescriptions, or the 10 quiet business people just trying to check their email. You fucked up their connections as well.
Not to mention anyone else not on the train but still in range of the signal. Running one of those things on a bus or subway is like setting up a big mobile bubble of "fuck you" for everyone in the city.
As gratifying as it might be to dickishly and anonymously kill their signal, the grown up thing to do would be to simply ask the person to pipe down. If the GP is so socially backwards that he can't even manage that, I humbly suggest that he does not belong on public transportation.
When I bought it, it had the OtherOS feather AND I could do all the online stuff...not now
When I bought it, it had backwards comparability for almost all PS2 games...not now
Those features were removed by system updates that you had to explicitly agree to download and install.
I will grant that it is shady of Sony to require those system updates to run new media, but this was not a "bait and switch". Nothing was taken, nothing was stolen. Users explicitly agreed to the updates. If a user wanted to keep OtherOS, they should not have accepted the update.
I understand that this is an unpopular position here on slashdot, and I will likely be modded down because of it. But it is worth the reality check. The real concern ought to be that Sony is not offering media that is playable on the non-updated systems, and is therefore violating an unspoken agreement with their customers that they will offer content for their console for a reasonable period. That agreement was never formalized.
Again, it is shady. It makes Sony untrustworthy. But they didn't "steal" anything from anybody. They offered an update, and most users accepted it.
We need to be debating the issue of when private business "censorship" becomes equivalent to actual government censorship *now*, not when it's too late.
To what end? Would we ever come to a conclusion that private businesses have no right to be selective in their product offerings? Would we ever decide that Amazon is required to offer any book regardless of its content? I don't think so. A
My undergrad maintained an office that existed solely to proofread papers and offer suggestions on the writing. It was mainly a work study thing, but advanced students could volunteer a certain amount of time in exchange for class credit.
I think it really depends on the mentality of the institution, the professor, and the requirements of the assignment. From my own experience it seems hard to think that getting some feedback on the quality of written work is cheating (unless of course writing skill is a component of the assignment).
I made it out of College with a 2.4something. Obviously, Grad school was out of the question so I went into the working world. A few years later I went back to school. On paper my program required an undergrad GPA of 3.0, but I had some nice recommendations and had networked with the department chair.
In Grad school though I have been keeping a 3.9 without any real effort. Maybe there's something unique about my undergrad and grad schools, or maybe I'm more focused as an adult than I was in college, but I'm finding Grad school to be a cakewalk compared to undergrad. Higher level content to be sure, but high marks are thrown around like beads on Mardi Gras.
It's not any better. The argument is that rich people don't dump their money back into the economy like poor people do. They hold onto it, usually through investments that add some value to the economy, but sometimes by simply accumulating wealth. That wealth, which is just sitting there, could be injected back into the economy.
And hey, I'm not claiming that this is reasonable justification to tax the rich. I'm not sure how I really feel about it personally, and I am certainly not an expert. But I have heard this argument used, and on the surface it makes some sense.
I realized that when I initially said poor weather conditions I was referring to snow. I live in the US Northeast, so that's where my experience with crappy weather comes from. Trucks and SUV's definitely have an advantage in terms of weight and clearance in those kinds of conditions. Also in a lot of rural or off-street conditions an SUV's larger wheelbase is really helpful.
None of that is useful in a congested are alike Paris of course. My point was that the characteristics of a given vehicle can be more good or bad depending on where the vehicle is being operated. I'm just trying to point out situations where an SUV's characteristics are a benefit.
Vehicles have all sorts of different operating characteristics, it is operators that make the vehicle safe or unsafe. Some might say that my Jeep Cherokee lacks stopping power (for serious, my stock brakes were hilariously awful) and is prone to rollovers. I would say that small compact cars lack sufficient visibility and become hazards in poor weather conditions (snow covered hills for example).
Vehicle safety by class really comes down to the operator and to local conditions.
Why is taxing the "rich" always the answer? Do rich people not buy stuff?
Not at the same rates that poor people do. Rich people keep vast amounts of wealth locked away in their personal savings/investments. Poor people spend just about everything that they make.
At least, that is the big argument I've heard for taxing the 'rich'. I'm no economist, so I have no idea what other factors are relevant.
But you can compare population wide statistics that include both day to day running emissions and an expected number of worst case emission events. Think of it like you would think of actuarial tables.
If the damage caused by day to day emissions from SUV's (call it SUV1) plus SUV spill events (SUV2) is greater than day to day emissions of EV's (EV1) plus EV spill events (EV2), {IF SUV1+SUV2 > EV1+EV2} then the EV's make sense from an environment protection perspective. Unless/until we've actually crunched the numbers to estimate these values then we can't reliably say that either is better.
He reminded me a lot of Tom Berenger's character in Platoon.
He was certainly an antagonist in the story and did some things that were presented as distasteful, but he wasn't truly a villain. As you say, he was just a hard man doing what was required to do his job and to survive in a harsh environment. He clearly had some kind of consistent moral compass, but it was focused more on getting his men paid and home alive than protecting the natives.
I was kind of rooting for him too. I was a little disappointed when he just went blind with rage and started trying to kill everything in sight. His final murderous rampage seemed out of character.
In a fair trial he would have had a defense if he had simply refused to follow an order he viewed as unlawful. He might have even had a defense against leaking information about ongoing unlawful activity. But not everything he leaked related to unlawful activity.
Manning was pissed off because he was demoted and one of his co-workers called him gay. He leaked a shit-ton of documents in an act of revenge. His defense that he was serving some kind of greater good went out the window when he leaked a whole bunch of other stuff that had no business being public.
Slashdot Mirror
It is LESS than ONE HALF the capacity of a 4.7GB DVD.
Paying $30 for 5GB of data is unarmed robbery.
**Devils Advocate*** To keep up with your DVD analogy, imagine a hypothetical Blu-Ray movie with a retail price of $25-$30. There's something around 8GB of data on most Blu-Rays (I think, certainly more than 5GB). $30 for 5GB of data sounds reasonable then if compared against retail Blu-Rays. Especially considering the convenience of having it wirelessly streamed to a mobile device, meaning that you don't even have to put on pants and got to Best Buy. ***/Devils Advocate***
You and I, and probably most slashdotters, agree that 2GB is a pitiful amount of data. We would all probably agree that 5GB for $30 is steep. Unfortunately, we are not representative of the target Verizon iPhone market. Most users don't know enough to have a sense of how valuable data is. Is a GB worth $1? $10? .$15? There's no consensus, and people are willing to pay quite a bit to get the data they want. Mobile carriers will naturally take advantage of that.
Verizon doesn't use SIM cards in general.
But there's nothing nefarious about it. They just want to make sure that they have control over what devices are accessing their network is all. They are very open about that when they ask you to sign the service agreement.
Here's one. And two.
Phosphate fertilizers carry with them a lot of heavy metals (cadmium is mentioned in the first article) that gets picked up by the plant. These are ingested or inhaled as the plant is consumed.
What I didn't know until just now as I read up on this (mostly to back up my previous post) is that the preferred method of generating phosphorus for small volumes of fertilizer is from urine. This seems totally safe, at least from the heavy metals perspective. For large/industrial scale uses the only way to collect sufficient amounts of phosphorous is by mining it. This mined phosphorous ore is where the problem lies, because it's likely mined along with those heavy metals that cause long term health problems in people.
For small scale growers, urine phosphorous is just fine. But industrial scale phosphorous fertilizer can be a problem. Obviously, the scope of the problem depends on how much fertilized plant you inhale. It's one of the reasons cigarette smoke is so bad for you.
If these fertilizers are so toxic, then why are they being used on edible plants?
I'll close my response by saying that this is a very, very good question.
Phosphate fertilizers sure do. Like the kinds of fertilizers used on industrial scales.
To be fair, the capabilities of an elite group like the US Navy Seals are probably a lot greater than the capabilities of the moderately trained "sniper"s that will be available for cargo ship security.
Also remember that in that incident the life raft was being towed by a destroyer to keep it stable in rough seas. The life raft and shooting platform (the fan tail of the ship) had little to no relative movement. Shooting from a ship to pirate skiff being tossed around in the sea is significantly more difficult.
Look it up on wikipedia, it's kind of hard to explain what it is without explaining the underlying statistics. Basically it allows you to compare group means.
It is a useful and important test to run, but is hardly sophisticated. It is literally one of the first things they teach you in an introductory statistics class in social sciences. The allegation is that a lot more analysis was required on the data than comparing group averages.
I stopped being able to receive software updates for my G1 about a year after I got it. While I was still under contract.
It is perfectly reasonable to expect software support for a device during a typical lifecycle for such a device. The time frame of a 'typical' lifecycle is certainly open to interpretation, but mobile manufacturers have interpreted it as far too short.
I wish I had a mod point for you.
I think some of those people tend to be isolated fairly easily, and their negative impact can be mitigated. It's easy enough to make up a high profile but meaningless job to place the CEO's cousin. It is unfortunate when the behavior comes from someone who you can't isolate, either because you need their technical expertise or because they're threatening you with an EEO complaint.
There are ways of fitting terrible employees into an organization. Specifically by really placing them outside but attached to the organization.
- the HR "professional" that decided against providing proper drone training for handling highly sensitive documents
As a professional responsible for training and development programs, I have to take offence at that one. There is nothing indicating this was an issue with lack of training. In my experience one of the things the government is very good at is distributing trainings on how to handle sensitive materials. However one thing that many employees are bad at is learning things that don't immediately impact their day to day existence.
If dimwits or super egotistical self described savants can't be bothered to pay attention to trainings or take their content seriously, you can't blame HR.
That was exactly my concern. My question when I read the article was if "searching my phone" meant looking at just the data physically stored on my phone or looking at all the data my phone has access to. This wasn't really clarified in the article.
The case in question focused on evidence that police collected by looking through a suspects stored text messages. So a responsible and limited application of this ruling would be to just limit such searches to data immediately available on the phone. But I suspect that police will not really respect the distinction.
As a resident of MA, I will say that though I completely support the concept of banning texting while driving, the current law is useless. Even local cops urged the State government to slow down and think, because now they are obligated to enforce an unenforceable law.
"Texting" is illegal. But other phone functions like talking, dialing, or using GPS Nav applications are still legally ok. This makes it functionally impossible to enforce.
how do you feel about the woman further down trying to connect with her kid, or the doctor trying to manage prescriptions, or the 10 quiet business people just trying to check their email. You fucked up their connections as well.
Not to mention anyone else not on the train but still in range of the signal. Running one of those things on a bus or subway is like setting up a big mobile bubble of "fuck you" for everyone in the city.
As gratifying as it might be to dickishly and anonymously kill their signal, the grown up thing to do would be to simply ask the person to pipe down. If the GP is so socially backwards that he can't even manage that, I humbly suggest that he does not belong on public transportation.
When I bought it, it had the OtherOS feather AND I could do all the online stuff...not now
When I bought it, it had backwards comparability for almost all PS2 games...not now
Those features were removed by system updates that you had to explicitly agree to download and install.
I will grant that it is shady of Sony to require those system updates to run new media, but this was not a "bait and switch". Nothing was taken, nothing was stolen. Users explicitly agreed to the updates. If a user wanted to keep OtherOS, they should not have accepted the update.
I understand that this is an unpopular position here on slashdot, and I will likely be modded down because of it. But it is worth the reality check. The real concern ought to be that Sony is not offering media that is playable on the non-updated systems, and is therefore violating an unspoken agreement with their customers that they will offer content for their console for a reasonable period. That agreement was never formalized.
Again, it is shady. It makes Sony untrustworthy. But they didn't "steal" anything from anybody. They offered an update, and most users accepted it.
No, I am Michael Kristopeit!
We need to be debating the issue of when private business "censorship" becomes equivalent to actual government censorship *now*, not when it's too late.
To what end? Would we ever come to a conclusion that private businesses have no right to be selective in their product offerings? Would we ever decide that Amazon is required to offer any book regardless of its content? I don't think so. A
My undergrad maintained an office that existed solely to proofread papers and offer suggestions on the writing. It was mainly a work study thing, but advanced students could volunteer a certain amount of time in exchange for class credit.
I think it really depends on the mentality of the institution, the professor, and the requirements of the assignment. From my own experience it seems hard to think that getting some feedback on the quality of written work is cheating (unless of course writing skill is a component of the assignment).
I made it out of College with a 2.4something. Obviously, Grad school was out of the question so I went into the working world. A few years later I went back to school. On paper my program required an undergrad GPA of 3.0, but I had some nice recommendations and had networked with the department chair.
In Grad school though I have been keeping a 3.9 without any real effort. Maybe there's something unique about my undergrad and grad schools, or maybe I'm more focused as an adult than I was in college, but I'm finding Grad school to be a cakewalk compared to undergrad. Higher level content to be sure, but high marks are thrown around like beads on Mardi Gras.
It's not any better. The argument is that rich people don't dump their money back into the economy like poor people do. They hold onto it, usually through investments that add some value to the economy, but sometimes by simply accumulating wealth. That wealth, which is just sitting there, could be injected back into the economy.
And hey, I'm not claiming that this is reasonable justification to tax the rich. I'm not sure how I really feel about it personally, and I am certainly not an expert. But I have heard this argument used, and on the surface it makes some sense.
I realized that when I initially said poor weather conditions I was referring to snow. I live in the US Northeast, so that's where my experience with crappy weather comes from. Trucks and SUV's definitely have an advantage in terms of weight and clearance in those kinds of conditions. Also in a lot of rural or off-street conditions an SUV's larger wheelbase is really helpful.
None of that is useful in a congested are alike Paris of course. My point was that the characteristics of a given vehicle can be more good or bad depending on where the vehicle is being operated. I'm just trying to point out situations where an SUV's characteristics are a benefit.
Vehicles have all sorts of different operating characteristics, it is operators that make the vehicle safe or unsafe. Some might say that my Jeep Cherokee lacks stopping power (for serious, my stock brakes were hilariously awful) and is prone to rollovers. I would say that small compact cars lack sufficient visibility and become hazards in poor weather conditions (snow covered hills for example).
Vehicle safety by class really comes down to the operator and to local conditions.
Why is taxing the "rich" always the answer? Do rich people not buy stuff?
Not at the same rates that poor people do. Rich people keep vast amounts of wealth locked away in their personal savings/investments. Poor people spend just about everything that they make.
At least, that is the big argument I've heard for taxing the 'rich'. I'm no economist, so I have no idea what other factors are relevant.
But you can compare population wide statistics that include both day to day running emissions and an expected number of worst case emission events. Think of it like you would think of actuarial tables.
If the damage caused by day to day emissions from SUV's (call it SUV1) plus SUV spill events (SUV2) is greater than day to day emissions of EV's (EV1) plus EV spill events (EV2), {IF SUV1+SUV2 > EV1+EV2} then the EV's make sense from an environment protection perspective. Unless/until we've actually crunched the numbers to estimate these values then we can't reliably say that either is better.
He reminded me a lot of Tom Berenger's character in Platoon.
He was certainly an antagonist in the story and did some things that were presented as distasteful, but he wasn't truly a villain. As you say, he was just a hard man doing what was required to do his job and to survive in a harsh environment. He clearly had some kind of consistent moral compass, but it was focused more on getting his men paid and home alive than protecting the natives.
I was kind of rooting for him too. I was a little disappointed when he just went blind with rage and started trying to kill everything in sight. His final murderous rampage seemed out of character.
In a fair trial he would have had a defense if he had simply refused to follow an order he viewed as unlawful. He might have even had a defense against leaking information about ongoing unlawful activity. But not everything he leaked related to unlawful activity.
Manning was pissed off because he was demoted and one of his co-workers called him gay. He leaked a shit-ton of documents in an act of revenge. His defense that he was serving some kind of greater good went out the window when he leaked a whole bunch of other stuff that had no business being public.