I think there's a potential market in the west for this thing. At the very least, its a PDF reader with a 7" screen for $35. At that price I don't really care how well it can compute, I would just use it to display my PDFs.
Could not agree more. $35 for this would be incredible, at this price point it is even more attractive than simple e-readers. Like any other tablet this is perfect for portable internet browsing. But at this cheap price I would be more comfortable taking it into the kitchen to read recipes or out to the garage to review car repair walkthroughs, those are things I would not do with a $600 iPad.
Though one point I wasn't exactly clear on in the article was the subsidy that India would provide to students purchasing this. I wonder if their claimed $35 cost already includes a hypothetical subsidy.
The sports salary caps are imposed by their leagues in an effort to ensure a level playing field between the teams (pun most certainly intended). These are not imposed by Government.
Shouldn't organizations like the NFL or any company be able to determine their own payscales themselves? Without interference from outsiders? What business does an appointed official have to set pay rates for businesses. When those organizations come to the Government for bailouts then yes, I would imagine they should be expected to cede some control of how they manage their expenses. But why should otherwise stable and lawful organizations submit to that kind of Government control?
You can say whatever you want, but that doesn't make it your business.
While I appreciate your point about the gap between having the right to speak our minds and having the authority to weight in on certain subjects, perhaps this is not the right venue to express that.
After all, this is the Internet. More specifically, this is slashdot. The purpose of this site is to provide a meeting ground for nerds to read nerdy news and get into nerdy discussions about them. If a CEO wants to go into a congressional hearing and make that point to a senator, I would probably agree with them. Here on the internet, that point loses a little bit of merit.
Re:No successful terrorist attacks since 9/11?
on
Top Secret America
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Both of these were most definitely terrorist acts, but not the sexy kind of foreign terror that gives us excuses to send troops around the world. These incidents were just plain old homegrown domestic terror. The difficult truth is that most anti-terror activity must be done on foreign soil or at points of entry. Once and individual is inside the country, it becomes nearly impossible to stop them.
Or the dude who actually managed to smuggle explosive underwear onto an aircraft, but only managed to toast his own bits.
I think the GP should consider how s/he defines a "successful attack". 9/11 was successful and also happened to be catastrophic in terms of damage and loss of life. The times square bomber was also successful. Less murder and mayhem, but still very rattling to our sense of safety and security in one of our iconic cities. Though most terrorist acts are directed at people and infrastructure, ultimately they target our psyches.
If the work currently being done had previously been classified, then yes. Had the GP been the author of the sentence I'm sure he could have found a better way to say that, but as an FTFY revision to the summary I think it works.
From what I read of the story, several of the programs discussed are no longer (or never were) classified. However work continues on those projects.
I've noticed this especially when it comes to discussion of politically charged topics. This site is a really awesome forum for technical discussions and disagreements. As soon as we get started on healthcare or foreign wars, the inappropriate Mods come out in force.
But it would be difficult to make in impact on piracy with coming close to completely defeating it. As it stands now I can just go to pirate bay and find that any game I want to play has already been pirated by one of the big pirates. The pirated version will come with detailed instructions on how to install and run it. Casual pirates don't need to put a lot of effort into playing these games. It's the dedicated pirates that make it easy/possible for the rest of us.
Personally I think microtransactions are little more than a method of milking more money for the same content. But I think they will continue to catch on. I make a point not to buy additional content, because as a consumer I am not ok with this. I'll pay $60 for a new game, but I'm not going to pay another $15 in 6 weeks to play additional missions that were probably already ready at the time of release. But alas, I am just a small drop in a very big bucket.
Yeah, but MMO's kind of inherently fit that model. Players enter into an MMO expecting the game will grown and change with the needs of the community. As the community grows larger, and develops specific interests in certain gameplay aspects, it is fitting that the developer continue to develop the game to meet that need.
Other games don't necessarily lend themselves to this. As a consumer, I can say that I am nervous that I will wind up paying more money for incremental delivery of content that should have shipped at release.
If every game maker shoots for blockbuster games, the vast majority of them will fail and the companies will fold. This could lead to a "mediocrity vacuum" where there are no decent developers putting out games that are simply ok. This is bad for the industry, and bad for consumers.
To translate this to your example it would be as if every kid on the playground is aspiring to play in the NBA, and the ones that fail quit basketball altogether.
While this dude sounded really condescending in his statement, I think his point is valid. Not everyone can be top dog. Not every game can be Game of the Year. There is a market for lesser games.
Not to mention popping this sucker into a smartphone would allow another large degree of mobile computing.
Yeah, that was the thought that popped into my head. It would be cool to wirelessly and effortlessly connect my super-powered smartphone to a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. With all the computing power being crammed into smartphones, that would be a really awesome way to set up home and office workstations. I'm not talking about running Crysis, but for web surfing and document editing this would be a cool application.
People only fear nuclear waste because it is concentrated in a very dense area.
This is a point that I think a lot of environmental activists miss entirely. The highly concentrated nature of nuclear waste is a benefit to nuclear power, no? I have trouble seeing how people do not see this as inherently better than the current distributed CO2 spewing systems. It's not like we're going to run out of places to safely store nuclear waste, but we are in a position where we are very rapidly poisoning the atmosphere of the entire planet.
That is a great idea in theory, but it assumes that all the batteries in use have been well maintained. I tend to maintain my cars pretty well, OTOH I have no idea how well the previous battery user(s) treated their battery. There would need to be standards in place that dictate the maintenance and replacement schedules for these batteries, and IMO those standards ought to be administered by an impartial organization that is not the Manufacturer or the Service Station. A problem with this is that the organizations responsible for making the decisions about whether a battery needs to be replaced are the same organizations that are financially motivated to keep old batteries in service as long as possible.
Of course, these are the same issues that people I have with exchanges for Propane Tanks, and those seem to run fine.
The fact is that there are many nasty people that troll the internet for kicks. It stands to reason that many of those people also play WoW and hang out on the Blizzard boards.
"reasons" does not inherently imply legitimate. If that is what you meant, you should have said that. In fact it is incredibly ironic that while your posts are riddled with spelling and grammatical garbage, you are implying that this other person is lacking a high school education.
B) Blizzards gas crap for moderators.
What does this even mean? I can't even deduce what you were trying say.
zomg srsly lrn 2 spl?
C) If they had enough moderators, then there wouldn't be a problem on the forums.
Clearly this is false. Slashdot has about 2 million user ID's, most of us moderate on a semi-regular basis. Yet still garbage like this has been up for hours and has not been modded to oblivion. The problem on internet forums isn't moderators, it's human asshats.
No, that's completely ridiculous. Do some google on unenforceable contracts if you want to know why.
I have to agree with GP. Reasonable people read contracts before they sign them. Reasonable people clarify terms that are unclear or poorly defined. Reasonable people research companies they are entering into agreements with. People signing contracts in Hollywood know what it means when they agree to net instead of gross. It certainly sucks that this is how the industry treats its workers, but this is just how contracts work. They serve to define and enforce agreements between parties. Letting one party change the contract just because they later think its unfair is ridiculous.
If IQ is an arbitrary then why does it correlate positively with so many desirable outcomes?
I suggest you read that article more closely. All of the items listed suggest that IQ is moderately to strongly correlated with performance, but almost all of them couch that by saying the correlations are weak, or that there are other influencing factors. Correlations with other tests, such as SAT/ACT, are thought to be in part due to the similarities in the tests themselves. Similar and identical items, and similar formats provide a kind of practice effect for people that routinely take these kinds of tests (namely the kinds of people that enjoy a western style education system).
The point is that IQ along as a single measure is not a reliable indicator if success. Highly correlated to be sure, but as is oft stated here, correlation != causation. IQ is also correlated with parents income level and level of education, we would never claim that a persons IQ caused their parents to go to school and make money.
You could have IQ tests with not a single mathematical or logical question in it, asking questions about botany and duck hunting and all kinds of different things. In the end the test would measure the same thing and have the same results,
I don't mean to be rude, but that is factually incorrect. Full Scale IQ scores are the product of scales that evaluate Verbal and Non-Verbal working memory. Both of these scales are informed by more specific sub-scales below them. Think of it like a pyramid with IQ sitting at the top; you cannot arrive at an IQ score without assessing the many different types of intelligence. The Mathematical and logical questions are not interchangeable, both of these types (and others) are required to arrive at anything like a reliable IQ score.
asking questions about botany and duck hunting and all kinds of different things. In the end the test would measure the same thing and have the same results,
I know I already quoted this bit but I want to hit on it again. One of the classic criticism of any form of standardized testing are the biases of the test writers. If I know nothing about duck hunting, and you give me an IQ test that consists largely of questions about duck hunting, I am going to score very low. This will not be a valid measure of my IQ. This is why determining an accurate IQ score is so difficult.
If IQ is an arbitrary...
Sorry, I just want to clarify my statement. Intelligence is not arbitrary. Intelligence is something that is inherently difficult to define and measure, but is very real. The numeric score that we assign to intelligence is arbitrary.
My post is long winded so I'll boil it down for anyone just skimming. Intelligence is likely a reliable indicator of real world success. IQ scores are often unreliable and incomplete assessments of all the different components of Intelligence. Thus IQ scores on their own are not a reliable indicator of success.
That's big money in a road project!
I say take it out of the kick-backs, bribes and union-mandated funny business. There wouldn't necessarily be any increased cost to the tax-payer if the will existed.
If we did that, the roads would never get built. That just how America works!
If I hadn't already posted, I would have modded you insightful. Learning a language involves understanding the culture, the customs, the slang, and so forth. There are probably plenty of Chinese that could teach grammatically correct English exactly as it is written in a textbook, unfortunately that is just not the style of English that most English speakers actually speak.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there's a potential market in the west for this thing. At the very least, its a PDF reader with a 7" screen for $35. At that price I don't really care how well it can compute, I would just use it to display my PDFs.
Could not agree more. $35 for this would be incredible, at this price point it is even more attractive than simple e-readers. Like any other tablet this is perfect for portable internet browsing. But at this cheap price I would be more comfortable taking it into the kitchen to read recipes or out to the garage to review car repair walkthroughs, those are things I would not do with a $600 iPad.
Though one point I wasn't exactly clear on in the article was the subsidy that India would provide to students purchasing this. I wonder if their claimed $35 cost already includes a hypothetical subsidy.
The sports salary caps are imposed by their leagues in an effort to ensure a level playing field between the teams (pun most certainly intended). These are not imposed by Government.
Shouldn't organizations like the NFL or any company be able to determine their own payscales themselves? Without interference from outsiders? What business does an appointed official have to set pay rates for businesses. When those organizations come to the Government for bailouts then yes, I would imagine they should be expected to cede some control of how they manage their expenses. But why should otherwise stable and lawful organizations submit to that kind of Government control?
You can say whatever you want, but that doesn't make it your business.
While I appreciate your point about the gap between having the right to speak our minds and having the authority to weight in on certain subjects, perhaps this is not the right venue to express that.
After all, this is the Internet. More specifically, this is slashdot. The purpose of this site is to provide a meeting ground for nerds to read nerdy news and get into nerdy discussions about them. If a CEO wants to go into a congressional hearing and make that point to a senator, I would probably agree with them. Here on the internet, that point loses a little bit of merit.
Both of these were most definitely terrorist acts, but not the sexy kind of foreign terror that gives us excuses to send troops around the world. These incidents were just plain old homegrown domestic terror. The difficult truth is that most anti-terror activity must be done on foreign soil or at points of entry. Once and individual is inside the country, it becomes nearly impossible to stop them.
Or the dude who actually managed to smuggle explosive underwear onto an aircraft, but only managed to toast his own bits.
I think the GP should consider how s/he defines a "successful attack". 9/11 was successful and also happened to be catastrophic in terms of damage and loss of life. The times square bomber was also successful. Less murder and mayhem, but still very rattling to our sense of safety and security in one of our iconic cities. Though most terrorist acts are directed at people and infrastructure, ultimately they target our psyches.
Really, do you think that is correct?
If the work currently being done had previously been classified, then yes. Had the GP been the author of the sentence I'm sure he could have found a better way to say that, but as an FTFY revision to the summary I think it works.
From what I read of the story, several of the programs discussed are no longer (or never were) classified. However work continues on those projects.
It's impossible to forsee all possible consequences of anything. If that's your criteria for doing something, don't bother getting up in the morning.
Except you can't know that staying in bed is the safest option. Which only reinforces your point...
...requiring foresight of all possible consequences is a ridiculous way to make decisions.
I'd imagine with all that empty space in a CRT monitor, integrating a cell phone would be no challenge at all.
Carrying that cell phone would be no fun at all.
Won't work. We've got to dust off and nuke it from orbit.
It's the only way to be sure.
I've noticed this especially when it comes to discussion of politically charged topics. This site is a really awesome forum for technical discussions and disagreements. As soon as we get started on healthcare or foreign wars, the inappropriate Mods come out in force.
But it would be difficult to make in impact on piracy with coming close to completely defeating it. As it stands now I can just go to pirate bay and find that any game I want to play has already been pirated by one of the big pirates. The pirated version will come with detailed instructions on how to install and run it. Casual pirates don't need to put a lot of effort into playing these games. It's the dedicated pirates that make it easy/possible for the rest of us.
Personally I think microtransactions are little more than a method of milking more money for the same content. But I think they will continue to catch on. I make a point not to buy additional content, because as a consumer I am not ok with this. I'll pay $60 for a new game, but I'm not going to pay another $15 in 6 weeks to play additional missions that were probably already ready at the time of release. But alas, I am just a small drop in a very big bucket.
Yeah, but MMO's kind of inherently fit that model. Players enter into an MMO expecting the game will grown and change with the needs of the community. As the community grows larger, and develops specific interests in certain gameplay aspects, it is fitting that the developer continue to develop the game to meet that need.
Other games don't necessarily lend themselves to this. As a consumer, I can say that I am nervous that I will wind up paying more money for incremental delivery of content that should have shipped at release.
reckon they're lap dogs of the military who simply want $WEAPON and don't really understand the science,
Right, its DARPA. The D stands for Defense. In the US, Defense is a political term for Military. That is exactly who they are.
I'd like to play devils advocate for a moment...
If every game maker shoots for blockbuster games, the vast majority of them will fail and the companies will fold. This could lead to a "mediocrity vacuum" where there are no decent developers putting out games that are simply ok. This is bad for the industry, and bad for consumers.
To translate this to your example it would be as if every kid on the playground is aspiring to play in the NBA, and the ones that fail quit basketball altogether.
While this dude sounded really condescending in his statement, I think his point is valid. Not everyone can be top dog. Not every game can be Game of the Year. There is a market for lesser games.
Not to mention popping this sucker into a smartphone would allow another large degree of mobile computing.
Yeah, that was the thought that popped into my head. It would be cool to wirelessly and effortlessly connect my super-powered smartphone to a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. With all the computing power being crammed into smartphones, that would be a really awesome way to set up home and office workstations. I'm not talking about running Crysis, but for web surfing and document editing this would be a cool application.
People only fear nuclear waste because it is concentrated in a very dense area.
This is a point that I think a lot of environmental activists miss entirely. The highly concentrated nature of nuclear waste is a benefit to nuclear power, no? I have trouble seeing how people do not see this as inherently better than the current distributed CO2 spewing systems. It's not like we're going to run out of places to safely store nuclear waste, but we are in a position where we are very rapidly poisoning the atmosphere of the entire planet.
That is a great idea in theory, but it assumes that all the batteries in use have been well maintained. I tend to maintain my cars pretty well, OTOH I have no idea how well the previous battery user(s) treated their battery. There would need to be standards in place that dictate the maintenance and replacement schedules for these batteries, and IMO those standards ought to be administered by an impartial organization that is not the Manufacturer or the Service Station. A problem with this is that the organizations responsible for making the decisions about whether a battery needs to be replaced are the same organizations that are financially motivated to keep old batteries in service as long as possible.
Of course, these are the same issues that people I have with exchanges for Propane Tanks, and those seem to run fine.
The fact is that there are many nasty people that troll the internet for kicks. It stands to reason that many of those people also play WoW and hang out on the Blizzard boards.
"reasons" does not inherently imply legitimate. If that is what you meant, you should have said that. In fact it is incredibly ironic that while your posts are riddled with spelling and grammatical garbage, you are implying that this other person is lacking a high school education.
B) Blizzards gas crap for moderators.
What does this even mean? I can't even deduce what you were trying say.
zomg srsly lrn 2 spl?
C) If they had enough moderators, then there wouldn't be a problem on the forums.
Clearly this is false. Slashdot has about 2 million user ID's, most of us moderate on a semi-regular basis. Yet still garbage like this has been up for hours and has not been modded to oblivion. The problem on internet forums isn't moderators, it's human asshats.
No, that's completely ridiculous. Do some google on unenforceable contracts if you want to know why.
I have to agree with GP. Reasonable people read contracts before they sign them. Reasonable people clarify terms that are unclear or poorly defined. Reasonable people research companies they are entering into agreements with. People signing contracts in Hollywood know what it means when they agree to net instead of gross. It certainly sucks that this is how the industry treats its workers, but this is just how contracts work. They serve to define and enforce agreements between parties. Letting one party change the contract just because they later think its unfair is ridiculous.
Ha! Thank you for calling me on that. That was an error on my part.
"Resistance is useless"? USELESS? Get out.
Who let him in in the first place?
If IQ is an arbitrary then why does it correlate positively with so many desirable outcomes?
I suggest you read that article more closely. All of the items listed suggest that IQ is moderately to strongly correlated with performance, but almost all of them couch that by saying the correlations are weak, or that there are other influencing factors. Correlations with other tests, such as SAT/ACT, are thought to be in part due to the similarities in the tests themselves. Similar and identical items, and similar formats provide a kind of practice effect for people that routinely take these kinds of tests (namely the kinds of people that enjoy a western style education system).
The point is that IQ along as a single measure is not a reliable indicator if success. Highly correlated to be sure, but as is oft stated here, correlation != causation. IQ is also correlated with parents income level and level of education, we would never claim that a persons IQ caused their parents to go to school and make money.
You could have IQ tests with not a single mathematical or logical question in it, asking questions about botany and duck hunting and all kinds of different things. In the end the test would measure the same thing and have the same results,
I don't mean to be rude, but that is factually incorrect. Full Scale IQ scores are the product of scales that evaluate Verbal and Non-Verbal working memory. Both of these scales are informed by more specific sub-scales below them. Think of it like a pyramid with IQ sitting at the top; you cannot arrive at an IQ score without assessing the many different types of intelligence. The Mathematical and logical questions are not interchangeable, both of these types (and others) are required to arrive at anything like a reliable IQ score.
asking questions about botany and duck hunting and all kinds of different things. In the end the test would measure the same thing and have the same results,
I know I already quoted this bit but I want to hit on it again. One of the classic criticism of any form of standardized testing are the biases of the test writers. If I know nothing about duck hunting, and you give me an IQ test that consists largely of questions about duck hunting, I am going to score very low. This will not be a valid measure of my IQ. This is why determining an accurate IQ score is so difficult.
If IQ is an arbitrary...
Sorry, I just want to clarify my statement. Intelligence is not arbitrary. Intelligence is something that is inherently difficult to define and measure, but is very real. The numeric score that we assign to intelligence is arbitrary.
My post is long winded so I'll boil it down for anyone just skimming. Intelligence is likely a reliable indicator of real world success. IQ scores are often unreliable and incomplete assessments of all the different components of Intelligence. Thus IQ scores on their own are not a reliable indicator of success.
That's big money in a road project! I say take it out of the kick-backs, bribes and union-mandated funny business. There wouldn't necessarily be any increased cost to the tax-payer if the will existed.
If we did that, the roads would never get built. That just how America works!
If I hadn't already posted, I would have modded you insightful. Learning a language involves understanding the culture, the customs, the slang, and so forth. There are probably plenty of Chinese that could teach grammatically correct English exactly as it is written in a textbook, unfortunately that is just not the style of English that most English speakers actually speak.