Fine, but could you please switch to a unit of measure that scales linearly? 50MPG to 75MPG does *NOT* represent a 50% increase in fuel efficiency. Not even close to it.
Yes, exactly. The CAFE ratings aren't meant to tell you what your personal MPG is going to be, they are meant to tell you how cars of a specific model year compare to each other. If you do 10% better in one car, you'll probably also do 10% better in the other one.
That may be so, but miles per gallon is a misleading measurement on which to base the "10% better" calculation. 30MPG to 33MPG is *not* 10% better efficiency. In fact, the two are so close that it's within the margin of error for most of us, and can easily be outweighed by simply getting a bad dice roll with the traffic lights.
If they switched to a burn rate measurement, like L/100km (that the rest of the world uses), or even Gal./100mi, then you actually could do the math in your head for how much more or less efficient the vehicle is. MPG isn't a linear scale, but L/100km is. As a result, the higher the MPG, the less actual benefit you get: 50MPG to 75MPG isn't even close to a 50% improvement in fuel efficiency (it's actually only about 25%), and the disparity between reality and perception only gets worse as you get higher.
Universities have a way of normalizing that without needing to actively discriminate though: if you don't understand the language in which classes are taught, you are not likely to succeed and ultimately graduate.
Simply because the engineers already have all the tools, desks, materials, computers that they need to develop the the products means they don't need a big non-labor budget.
It depends on the industry though. I have no idea what the numbers are where I work, but I would be *very* worried if we weren't spending large amounts of money on engineering hardware. I would not be surprised for the engineering budget to be in the billions, but I work for a telco (and not in the US) so it makes sense for us to be spending money on system upgrades and maintenance of the existing infrastructure.
... We are spending more on marketing though. Of that I have no doubt.
Except your analogy is total nonsense. Modern operating systems do in fact benefit from having a decent discrete GPU. Performance improves in ways you might not even expect.
Nope. They benefit from having 3D acceleration, yes, but the integrated graphics on modern Intel chips is a discrete core. It just happens to be on the same die as the CPU. My laptop's CPU is clocked at 1.2GHz dual core, with two extra cores for the video clocked at 300-500MHz. Those cores are dedicated to the video only, and it's *plenty* fast enough for normal use on the operating system, with all of the blingy effects. Switching to a discrete graphics card won't make any difference at all, because the video cores are physically separated from the CPU cores, and have a completely different execution pipeline so wouldn't be able to run OS calls anyway.
Intel's integrated video is enough to run most games these days. I game on that laptop and while the graphics aren't as fast as my desktop's 6970, they're plenty adequate for gaming on the go... and I'm not just talking about ancient games here, either: it's good enough for Civ5 in WINE, and also for stuff like Torchlight II, which it'll run at max on the laptop's 1366x768 screen. You won't be playing the latest Call of Duty at maximum settings on a dual 1920x1080 display with Intel's integrated graphics, but then again, the people who want to do that won't be bothering with integrated graphics to begin with, will they? A significant portion of Steam's userbase are using Intel integrated graphics these days....
On a side note, I wonder how much work would be needed to get current cards rendering 4k Surround/Eyefinity.
Buy the monitors and cables, and hook them up? My 6970 has 2 DisplayPort outputs, each of which can support up to 4 monitors with the correct cable/splitter. 4K would only take two monitors on each, and the 2-way splitters are fairly easy to get your hands on. I don't even need the splitters, as I also have 2 DVI outputs on the card, so I can drive two monitors with DP, and two with DVI (and I have never seen a monitor that supports DP and doesn't support DVI).
The card can easily handle that resolution, as long as I turn the anti-aliasing down. I can leave everything else on max, and just set the AA to 2X or off (which I usually do anyway). Just that there isn't a lot of point with most games: the UI isn't designed to be split across multiple physical displays. This is why, even though I have multiple monitors connected, I play in windowed mode on a single 24" 1920x1080 display, and keep browser/chat/everything else on the other display, rather than bothering with eyefinity.
A defense weapon needs to be reliable enough to shoot multiple times because one shot is often not enough to end a threat.
Being ex-military, I firmly believe that most civilians are simply not capable of handling them properly due to the complete lack of regulation surrounding certification of proficiency, and the lack of penalties for failing to maintain a weapon in a safe condition. That said, I'll ignore the whole debate about whether a firearm can ever be considered a defensive weapon, and concede your point.
Do you really think that a weapon that's essentially untraceable and which would leave no forensic footprint with which it can be identified uniquely (such as striations on a normal weapon) would ever be used in a defensive capacity? Use it once, and then stick it in a microwave and it's gone. While you could stick a steel weapon into a blast furnace and have the same effect, there's several orders of magnitude difference in the accessibility here.
It's not the easiest way to make a gun. It's not the best way to make a gun. It's not the simplest way to make a gun. It's not the cheapest way to make a gun.
The gun won't be the strongest, most accurate, safest.. nothing.
All perfectly valid points...
The problem is that a 3-D printed gun is completely unremarkable.
And there you have it. You should have ended with that sentence, not begun with it. It only needs to fire once to serve its purpose.
By the standards of pretty much every other country in the G20 (including Russia), Obama is a conservative. He only appears a liberal when compared against your own right-wing.
You do realize that Hamas and the Palestinians are two separate entities right? The only reason that Hamas has any support in the region at all is because they're the only ones providing supplies and keeping the schools open due to the Israeli blockade. Almost everything they have is smuggled in by Hamas. All anybody wants in the area is to be allowed to live in peace, and Israel is, by far, the single biggest impediment to that.
If Israel were to, you know, allow medical supplies and construction supplies into the area, stop bulldozing Palestinian neighbourhoods to build Israeli ones, and allow them to conduct trade as a legitimate entity, then they would find that support for Hamas would evapourate. The land is very fertile farmland, and they could easily keep their own economy going without Hamas if it weren't for Israel's interference: they can't import the supplies and equipment they need to do it, and even if they could, they can't export the finished product. Israel has created Hamas, and they're the only ones who bear responsibility for its continued power.
I note you're not counting the number of people impacted by the trade embargoes that Israel has imposed on the strip...
There's more to the death toll than the simple number of people actually killed by Israeli bullets/rockets. And since you're good at pulling up statistics... how many Israelis died versus how many Palestinians? Since 1987, just over 1500 Israelis, of whom 142 were under the age of 18. Since 1987, a little under 8000 Palestinians, of whom 1620 were minors. In 2008-2009 alone, the Israelis killed more Palestinians than Israelis have died in the entire 25-year period. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_conflict#Fatalities_1948.E2.80.932011
That means that Israel has killed more Palestinian children than Hamas has killed Israelis, total. And that's just by guns, not by the economic impact that Israel is having on the region with their embargoes and blockades. I don't care how much out of their way they're going to minimize civilian contracts, they still fail at the balanced response.
There is no fixed term to your service, there is no penalty for terminating the service (you just pay back what you borrowed, no extra $100 "convenience" fee), and there's no automatic renewal. I haven't read all of the fine print, but if they're anything like my own cell phone company (which also has a no contract option), you can pay off the balance owing for the phone at any time, too.
You're being pedantic and deliberately obtuse, when you know full well that they are not offering a term contract.
There's a reason for this: in the Windows world, change is mostly for the worse. Sure there are some important steps forward and changes for the better in amongst it, but it always seems like those are eclipsed by dumb decisions and change for the sake of change
People said that about the change from Windows 2000's version of Explorer to Windows XP's implementation. They also said it about the introduction of Aero with Vista, and its changes in Win7. All of those were incremental steps forward (and yes, I do think Windows 7's version of Aero is a *huge* improvement over Windows XP's version of Explorer... Win7 is, unfortunately, probably going to be the pinnacle of productivity under Windows).
That's not to say that Windows 8's UI isn't an *enormous* leap backwards (hell, I think Windows 3.1 was better at enabling multitasking than Windows 8 is), but it does mean that sometimes people bitch for the sake of bitching, and not with any real basis for what they're saying.
(and the obligatory shill part of the post... I use E17 when I'm given a choice... while the learning curve can be steep for some, and while it can look dated to people who don't realize how extensible it is, it will allow you to build your own desktop to match your own workflow, which is a *huge* advantage that most other DE's don't have. XFCE will also do the same job, but I don't find it's as responsive)
Israel does a pretty good job of generating anti-Israel sentiment on its own, really... at least among anybody who's actually seen the numbers for the death toll in their war in Gaza...
That doesn't mean anti-semitism or anti-jew sentiment (there is a difference between the two), but it does mean that the state of Israel isn't exactly a good neighbour....
Canada, actually... most credit cards being issued here have RFID and Chip/PIN together. You have to ask them to send you one without RFID... they won't send you one without Chip/PIN because they're in the process of upgrading bank machines to require it. We've had Chip/PIN longer than Europe.
Canada... we had Chip/PIN before Europe did. I know this, because I had a Chip/PIN card last time I travelled in Europe, and nobody knew what it was.:)
I may need to call my bank and see if I can get that disabled on my cards. I don't use it, don't want it, and seeing this, I trust it even less than I ever have. I'd prefer it didn't even respond to the NFC terminals.
It was a 5 minute phone call for me, when I wanted my Visa to send me a new card without RFID. They sent me the card, and added a flag on my account to not automatically "upgrade" me to RFID ever again.
I've got a hot news story for you - everyone person you hand your credit card to is able to access your card number, name, and expiration date!
With the advent of chip/pin cards, I can't remember the last time I actually had to hand my credit card to somebody in order to complete a transaction. It was many years and multiple cards ago.
the same can't be said for RFID cards: they can be read with a suitably powerful antenna from 50 feet away.
The credit card industry is staffed by morons that wouldn't know security from their own asshole. Really, it's that simple.
Yes and no... a few years ago when I got my first RFID card from Mastercard, I had to threaten to cancel the card if they didn't send me one without it. Two years later, when I got one from Visa, it was a 5 minute phone call and the new card (minus RFID) was in my inbox 3 days later.
That says it all, I think. And TFA says that I was right, and I will be quite smug all day about it.;) (and will continue to insist on having cards without the RFID).
The number itself is probably pulled out of thin air, and probably has no bearing on reality. But people do usually pay higher taxes than they realize they're paying in some ways. Lower in others.
For example, income tax is bracketed in most of the world. That is to say that the first X dollars isn't taxed, the next Y dollars are taxed at A%, the next Z dollars are taxed at B%, and so forth. People think that if they make $80,000/year they're going to be taxed at 35%, where it actually works out to about 20% net taxes. That's where they're taxed lower than they think they should be. (and it's true... for my taxes this year, my napkin calculation said I'd be owing a small amount, but when I actually did my taxes, I was owed a refund before I'd even bothered with deductions). Then you have things like property taxes, which most people don't take into account when they figure their tax rate. If you own a property that's well beyond the value you should be owning for your pay rate, it can take a disproportionate chunk from your pay.
Where people are taxed more than they realize are things like sales taxes and duties on products like gas or alcohol. In this part of the world, for example, about 60% of the price of gas is tax. In Europe, it's closer to 80%. Alcohol, about 50% of the price is tax here. If you do a lot of driving, you will be paying a disproportionately higher tax rate than the simple income tax calculation. Similarly, sales taxes increase the tax rate on people who spend money... though around here unprepared food doesn't have sales tax on it. Then there's import duties on products from countries without free trade agreements, services taxes on certain kinds of service industries, etc....
So it is possible that, on an income of $250,000/year, you could be paying 60% of it in taxes, but you would have to be spending a *lot* of money unwisely. It would take a lot of effort to reach that kind of tax rate, but I can see how it's doable.
Does 64 bits really mean that every program is twice as big as it needs to be? Every time I hear about an innovation that requires things to be bigger, I question the necessity.
Nope. Doesn't mean that at all.
Maintaining backwards compatibility with 32-bit means that you have to compile it twice, and include both sets of binaries. Actual compiled code that doesn't bother with backwards compatibility isn't significantly larger than 32-bit code.
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Fine, but could you please switch to a unit of measure that scales linearly? 50MPG to 75MPG does *NOT* represent a 50% increase in fuel efficiency. Not even close to it.
Yes, exactly. The CAFE ratings aren't meant to tell you what your personal MPG is going to be, they are meant to tell you how cars of a specific model year compare to each other. If you do 10% better in one car, you'll probably also do 10% better in the other one.
That may be so, but miles per gallon is a misleading measurement on which to base the "10% better" calculation. 30MPG to 33MPG is *not* 10% better efficiency. In fact, the two are so close that it's within the margin of error for most of us, and can easily be outweighed by simply getting a bad dice roll with the traffic lights.
If they switched to a burn rate measurement, like L/100km (that the rest of the world uses), or even Gal./100mi, then you actually could do the math in your head for how much more or less efficient the vehicle is. MPG isn't a linear scale, but L/100km is. As a result, the higher the MPG, the less actual benefit you get: 50MPG to 75MPG isn't even close to a 50% improvement in fuel efficiency (it's actually only about 25%), and the disparity between reality and perception only gets worse as you get higher.
Universities have a way of normalizing that without needing to actively discriminate though: if you don't understand the language in which classes are taught, you are not likely to succeed and ultimately graduate.
Good luck effecting that...
Simply because the engineers already have all the tools, desks, materials, computers that they need to develop the the products means they don't need a big non-labor budget.
It depends on the industry though. I have no idea what the numbers are where I work, but I would be *very* worried if we weren't spending large amounts of money on engineering hardware. I would not be surprised for the engineering budget to be in the billions, but I work for a telco (and not in the US) so it makes sense for us to be spending money on system upgrades and maintenance of the existing infrastructure.
... We are spending more on marketing though. Of that I have no doubt.
Except your analogy is total nonsense. Modern operating systems do in fact benefit from having a decent discrete GPU. Performance improves in ways you might not even expect.
Nope. They benefit from having 3D acceleration, yes, but the integrated graphics on modern Intel chips is a discrete core. It just happens to be on the same die as the CPU. My laptop's CPU is clocked at 1.2GHz dual core, with two extra cores for the video clocked at 300-500MHz. Those cores are dedicated to the video only, and it's *plenty* fast enough for normal use on the operating system, with all of the blingy effects. Switching to a discrete graphics card won't make any difference at all, because the video cores are physically separated from the CPU cores, and have a completely different execution pipeline so wouldn't be able to run OS calls anyway.
Intel's integrated video is enough to run most games these days. I game on that laptop and while the graphics aren't as fast as my desktop's 6970, they're plenty adequate for gaming on the go... and I'm not just talking about ancient games here, either: it's good enough for Civ5 in WINE, and also for stuff like Torchlight II, which it'll run at max on the laptop's 1366x768 screen. You won't be playing the latest Call of Duty at maximum settings on a dual 1920x1080 display with Intel's integrated graphics, but then again, the people who want to do that won't be bothering with integrated graphics to begin with, will they? A significant portion of Steam's userbase are using Intel integrated graphics these days....
On a side note, I wonder how much work would be needed to get current cards rendering 4k Surround/Eyefinity.
Buy the monitors and cables, and hook them up? My 6970 has 2 DisplayPort outputs, each of which can support up to 4 monitors with the correct cable/splitter. 4K would only take two monitors on each, and the 2-way splitters are fairly easy to get your hands on. I don't even need the splitters, as I also have 2 DVI outputs on the card, so I can drive two monitors with DP, and two with DVI (and I have never seen a monitor that supports DP and doesn't support DVI).
The card can easily handle that resolution, as long as I turn the anti-aliasing down. I can leave everything else on max, and just set the AA to 2X or off (which I usually do anyway). Just that there isn't a lot of point with most games: the UI isn't designed to be split across multiple physical displays. This is why, even though I have multiple monitors connected, I play in windowed mode on a single 24" 1920x1080 display, and keep browser/chat/everything else on the other display, rather than bothering with eyefinity.
A defense weapon needs to be reliable enough to shoot multiple times because one shot is often not enough to end a threat.
Being ex-military, I firmly believe that most civilians are simply not capable of handling them properly due to the complete lack of regulation surrounding certification of proficiency, and the lack of penalties for failing to maintain a weapon in a safe condition. That said, I'll ignore the whole debate about whether a firearm can ever be considered a defensive weapon, and concede your point.
Do you really think that a weapon that's essentially untraceable and which would leave no forensic footprint with which it can be identified uniquely (such as striations on a normal weapon) would ever be used in a defensive capacity? Use it once, and then stick it in a microwave and it's gone. While you could stick a steel weapon into a blast furnace and have the same effect, there's several orders of magnitude difference in the accessibility here.
It's not the easiest way to make a gun. It's not the best way to make a gun. It's not the simplest way to make a gun. It's not the cheapest way to make a gun.
The gun won't be the strongest, most accurate, safest.. nothing.
All perfectly valid points...
The problem is that a 3-D printed gun is completely unremarkable.
And there you have it. You should have ended with that sentence, not begun with it. It only needs to fire once to serve its purpose.
By the standards of pretty much every other country in the G20 (including Russia), Obama is a conservative. He only appears a liberal when compared against your own right-wing.
You do realize that Hamas and the Palestinians are two separate entities right? The only reason that Hamas has any support in the region at all is because they're the only ones providing supplies and keeping the schools open due to the Israeli blockade. Almost everything they have is smuggled in by Hamas. All anybody wants in the area is to be allowed to live in peace, and Israel is, by far, the single biggest impediment to that.
If Israel were to, you know, allow medical supplies and construction supplies into the area, stop bulldozing Palestinian neighbourhoods to build Israeli ones, and allow them to conduct trade as a legitimate entity, then they would find that support for Hamas would evapourate. The land is very fertile farmland, and they could easily keep their own economy going without Hamas if it weren't for Israel's interference: they can't import the supplies and equipment they need to do it, and even if they could, they can't export the finished product. Israel has created Hamas, and they're the only ones who bear responsibility for its continued power.
I note you're not counting the number of people impacted by the trade embargoes that Israel has imposed on the strip...
There's more to the death toll than the simple number of people actually killed by Israeli bullets/rockets. And since you're good at pulling up statistics... how many Israelis died versus how many Palestinians? Since 1987, just over 1500 Israelis, of whom 142 were under the age of 18. Since 1987, a little under 8000 Palestinians, of whom 1620 were minors. In 2008-2009 alone, the Israelis killed more Palestinians than Israelis have died in the entire 25-year period. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_conflict#Fatalities_1948.E2.80.932011
That means that Israel has killed more Palestinian children than Hamas has killed Israelis, total. And that's just by guns, not by the economic impact that Israel is having on the region with their embargoes and blockades. I don't care how much out of their way they're going to minimize civilian contracts, they still fail at the balanced response.
There is no fixed term to your service, there is no penalty for terminating the service (you just pay back what you borrowed, no extra $100 "convenience" fee), and there's no automatic renewal. I haven't read all of the fine print, but if they're anything like my own cell phone company (which also has a no contract option), you can pay off the balance owing for the phone at any time, too.
You're being pedantic and deliberately obtuse, when you know full well that they are not offering a term contract.
There's a reason for this: in the Windows world, change is mostly for the worse. Sure there are some important steps forward and changes for the better in amongst it, but it always seems like those are eclipsed by dumb decisions and change for the sake of change
People said that about the change from Windows 2000's version of Explorer to Windows XP's implementation. They also said it about the introduction of Aero with Vista, and its changes in Win7. All of those were incremental steps forward (and yes, I do think Windows 7's version of Aero is a *huge* improvement over Windows XP's version of Explorer... Win7 is, unfortunately, probably going to be the pinnacle of productivity under Windows).
That's not to say that Windows 8's UI isn't an *enormous* leap backwards (hell, I think Windows 3.1 was better at enabling multitasking than Windows 8 is), but it does mean that sometimes people bitch for the sake of bitching, and not with any real basis for what they're saying.
(and the obligatory shill part of the post... I use E17 when I'm given a choice... while the learning curve can be steep for some, and while it can look dated to people who don't realize how extensible it is, it will allow you to build your own desktop to match your own workflow, which is a *huge* advantage that most other DE's don't have. XFCE will also do the same job, but I don't find it's as responsive)
Israel does a pretty good job of generating anti-Israel sentiment on its own, really... at least among anybody who's actually seen the numbers for the death toll in their war in Gaza...
That doesn't mean anti-semitism or anti-jew sentiment (there is a difference between the two), but it does mean that the state of Israel isn't exactly a good neighbour....
Canada, actually... most credit cards being issued here have RFID and Chip/PIN together. You have to ask them to send you one without RFID... they won't send you one without Chip/PIN because they're in the process of upgrading bank machines to require it. We've had Chip/PIN longer than Europe.
Canada... we had Chip/PIN before Europe did. I know this, because I had a Chip/PIN card last time I travelled in Europe, and nobody knew what it was. :)
I may need to call my bank and see if I can get that disabled on my cards. I don't use it, don't want it, and seeing this, I trust it even less than I ever have. I'd prefer it didn't even respond to the NFC terminals.
It was a 5 minute phone call for me, when I wanted my Visa to send me a new card without RFID. They sent me the card, and added a flag on my account to not automatically "upgrade" me to RFID ever again.
I've got a hot news story for you - everyone person you hand your credit card to is able to access your card number, name, and expiration date!
With the advent of chip/pin cards, I can't remember the last time I actually had to hand my credit card to somebody in order to complete a transaction. It was many years and multiple cards ago.
the same can't be said for RFID cards: they can be read with a suitably powerful antenna from 50 feet away.
The credit card industry is staffed by morons that wouldn't know security from their own asshole. Really, it's that simple.
Yes and no... a few years ago when I got my first RFID card from Mastercard, I had to threaten to cancel the card if they didn't send me one without it. Two years later, when I got one from Visa, it was a 5 minute phone call and the new card (minus RFID) was in my inbox 3 days later.
That says it all, I think. And TFA says that I was right, and I will be quite smug all day about it. ;) (and will continue to insist on having cards without the RFID).
The number itself is probably pulled out of thin air, and probably has no bearing on reality. But people do usually pay higher taxes than they realize they're paying in some ways. Lower in others.
For example, income tax is bracketed in most of the world. That is to say that the first X dollars isn't taxed, the next Y dollars are taxed at A%, the next Z dollars are taxed at B%, and so forth. People think that if they make $80,000/year they're going to be taxed at 35%, where it actually works out to about 20% net taxes. That's where they're taxed lower than they think they should be. (and it's true... for my taxes this year, my napkin calculation said I'd be owing a small amount, but when I actually did my taxes, I was owed a refund before I'd even bothered with deductions). Then you have things like property taxes, which most people don't take into account when they figure their tax rate. If you own a property that's well beyond the value you should be owning for your pay rate, it can take a disproportionate chunk from your pay.
Where people are taxed more than they realize are things like sales taxes and duties on products like gas or alcohol. In this part of the world, for example, about 60% of the price of gas is tax. In Europe, it's closer to 80%. Alcohol, about 50% of the price is tax here. If you do a lot of driving, you will be paying a disproportionately higher tax rate than the simple income tax calculation. Similarly, sales taxes increase the tax rate on people who spend money... though around here unprepared food doesn't have sales tax on it. Then there's import duties on products from countries without free trade agreements, services taxes on certain kinds of service industries, etc....
So it is possible that, on an income of $250,000/year, you could be paying 60% of it in taxes, but you would have to be spending a *lot* of money unwisely. It would take a lot of effort to reach that kind of tax rate, but I can see how it's doable.
they drive more wrecklessly while using them
If they were driving wrecklessly, there wouldn't be a problem. Perhaps you meant recklessly?
Does 64 bits really mean that every program is twice as big as it needs to be? Every time I hear about an innovation that requires things to be bigger, I question the necessity.
Nope. Doesn't mean that at all.
Maintaining backwards compatibility with 32-bit means that you have to compile it twice, and include both sets of binaries. Actual compiled code that doesn't bother with backwards compatibility isn't significantly larger than 32-bit code.
The Simpsons jumped the shark shortly after Saturday Night Live did, in the mid 90's....
You do realize that the overwhelming majority of terrorists that have actually hit G8 (or hell, G20) countries have been white Chritians, right?