What's the big problem anyway? How many Google Glass wearers can cam a 2 hour movie with Google Glass and keep it steady enough? Just thinking about it makes me wince. And watching the resulting cam would probably make normal people ill.
And how much business does the **AA really lose to cams of their movies? How big a market is that?
Software can remove the jiggle. It is only a question of time until these devices have sufficient resolution and a wide enough view that you only have to keep your head pointed in approximately the right direction.
Gov't fiat money is also backed by the people's confidence the gov't can acquire gold and goods to back that paper. In fact, many gov'ts reserve some amount of gold for that purpose, on top of their proven ability to pull in tax revenue that can be used to acquire goods.
So gov't fiat currencies are intrisically different from cryptocurrencies. What large institution with big financial resources is overtly willing to stand up for the value of cryptocurrency?
A rough rolling average (to flatten out the highs and troughs) shows flattish revenues over the last decade and a half. That is a terrible revenue picture, because flat in absolute dollars means we are sunk unless we take an axe to spending, oh, starting back in circa 2000.
Obviously we need to get both our revenues and spending back near the long term trends we were seeing at the close of the 20th century. It looks like the tax cuts you love put us on a decsively lower revenue trend.
As a percentage of GDP, we are below the long term average, even if we focus our eyes on the last three decades. So there is room to raise taxes. No, that will not solve the whole problem. But no good will come from pretending we do not have a revenue problem, when we do.
These things vary by school district, especially when it comes to special needs. The public schools are usually legally required to provide service, but whether they do a good jobvaries greatly. The private schools have a free hand to abuse children with difficulties and label them lazy (my wife, who used to tutor HS math on the side, has seen such cases). (Not saying private all or usually do that, but there is no legal redress if they choose to do so.) My local public school district had an excellent reputation on this score, a close friend of mine was tremendously pleased with the assistance to his son, though I am unsure how they fared after recent budget cuts.
When I see the costs compared, they never compare in-room education costs of private to public school. The few times I have been able to deduce those numbers from the presentation, public is cheaper than private. Private is only cheaper when you have elementary schools staffed by retired teachers volunteering for the church (yes, I've seen it, and those numbers get counted for why private schools are cheaper). The non-union private schools often pay better than the unionized public schools, and thus cost more to run.
Yes, looking through advertised prices I came to a similar conclusion. There are often good nominal prices for a church run K-4 or K-6, because, as your suggest, a smart parent with a HS diploma is enough of an expert with a few hints from a volunteer retired teacher. But the prices rapidly after elementary school because random well-meaning parents are not necessary good enough when the topics start getting a little bit hard. Private schools climb very rapidly on price after 6th grade. The cheaper ones may be slightly less expensive than what the taxpayer pays for public, but the difference is not large. A lot of private schools are much more expensive overall.
Private schools do not necessarily pay more to the teachers. Some do, but the majority pay less. The teachers have the benefit of avoiding the certification rigamarole and have a bit more moral authority to deal with behavior problems, so some good teachers are willing to make do with less pay.
I didn't really mean that they just simply dump-luck stumbled into their current position - I'm just sort of amazed that the prior smartphones sucked so badly. They are lucky that Microsoft, RIM, Nokia, and the others didn't get their act together before they had a chance to swoop in and do it right.
Yup. There were Windows CE phone back in 2000 that suggested potential strategies to crush Palm and enter/build a premium phone market. Given their experience with the iPod, it is not a surprise that Apple put a good phone together -- hats off to Ives and Jobs that the iPhone was better than good. What is amazing is how long a number of seemingly competent tech companies sat on their hands.
Apple doesn't need to make shitty free phones, but they also can't let their market share slip to Blackberry levels, lest they lose developers. Right now developers still target Apple first, and they probably need to keep it that way. If the ad-supported model ever becomes wildly profitable, then Apple should probably worry - but for now, people who penny-pinch on their phone probably aren't going to buy many apps.
Agreed.
How Microsoft crushed its competition in the 80s and 90s was Bill Gates was savvy enough to make sure his platform was, relatively speaking, attractive to the bulk of developers (by means of good tools, network effects, hook or by crook). Apple has accomplished the equivalent position with iOS and its mobile devices; Apple has the majority of customers that will happily pay real money for good applications in its hip pocket. That may change. But as you suggest, competing for the cheapest customers is not autmoatically a win. Apple has to fight for the turf where the developers make good money -- that is what is important.
It is difficult to predict the day that fighting tooth and claw for the retail customer is necessary. It is not today. It may be tomorrow, or it may be never. TFA does not give us insight into that question.
At peak flow, the Sacramento river might fill in bay over the course of weeks, not days. The typical flow would still do nothing for the hygiene of the entire southern half of the bay, which would be a stinking stagnant cesspool for 11 months out of the year. (And runoff from residential areas is more polluted than is commonly understood.)
The water portion of the SF Bay was once twice the size it is right now. The reason those pieces of commercial (and residential) real estate are vulnerable is they are built on areas that once were 6 inches underwater at hide tide. They are not underwater every single day because dirt was shipped in.
They shipped in four feet of dirt to create the problem. How about we solve the problem with four more feet of dirt?
As for the barrage, the ecological costs would be enormous. A few merely massive pumping stations is not going to prevent the bay water from becoming a smelly cess pool polluted by agricultural runoff and much worse from the residential areas. It is a fun idea for civil engineers, but we are wealthy enough here to employ less tricky solution that will be more reliable.
I think you are on the money. Apple enticed people to like their flavor of DRM with the iTunes store and the App store, so that the typical consumer felt like Apple was doing them a favor. MS decided to nickel and dime their legitimate users with overt cruft layered right on top of what was already there -- this felt like a pure negative.
Unless you are asking for evidence to be thrown out or a conviction to be thrown out, you have always had approximately nonexistence rights for redress when it comes 4th Amendment violations. That is not news.
To get a criminal conviction, you need, roughly speaking, to convince the jury that 98%-99% of the credible evidence is on your side, and your need a district attorney to agree to be involved in the first place. Is it so unreasonable for those situations where 95% or 75% or even just 51% of the credible evidence is on my side, that I go to a civil court? The law says I am allowed. It is not obviously wrong to go to a civil trial on cases that do not rise to being clearly criminal. (Heck, the law says I can have a lousy case, but I am morally okay if I think I can squeak in at "51%" and the jury is likely to side with me.)
Your points make sense, but a consumer device is a consumer device, and it does not need to apologize for it. Just like the VCR, DVD players, and Palm Pilot in their respective heydays. As for the price point, a decent computer for creating content is one-fourth of the price it was when I was a kid, and dropping.
Congress could very easily put a stop to this. Congress does not want to. The majority and minority leadership in both houses know what is going on -- this stuff is not news to them. The laws are working as intended. What they all fear is explaining their own position to the American people. Our Congresscritters are going to keep their mouth shut and let the heat fall on the president.
The comparison with Star Trek is apt. The last time I went back and saw the three original seasons, in my 20s, I found that 1/3rd were a tolerable kind of terrible, 1/3rd were okay, and 1/3rd were great. Star Trek exceeded expectations of many viewers, in the context of the times, and for that it earned a lot of affection.
I am a fan of the modern Doctor Who series, which is usually pretty good IMHO, even if not always. When I watched some of the old Doctor Who episodes, I am reminded of ST:TOS in terms of the writing quality. I do not doubt there are many many excellent old Doctor Who episodes. Whether it is worth watching 20 episodes in order to find 3 gems is a question everyone has to answer for themselves.
To an outside observer, it simply seems like a lame would-be superhero saving the day by just boasting about it. This is actually repeated twice during the first three episodes.
I would call that a genre convention.
To an outside observer who has not yet tuned in to the emotional tone, it would be "obvious" that Batman could cut the crime of Gotham City substantially by getting over himself, investing in a sniper rifle, and using it appropriately. Likewise Superman could make the world a better place simply by separating a few skulls from their cervical vertebrae with the effort of a pinky finger (in fact, given his strength, it must take quite a lot of mental effort to not be accidentally killing people all the time). At a simplistic level, this logic is unambiguously correct. But it would drift the tales towards the kinds of stories the authors have no interest in telling.
Doctor Who employing a Gallifreyean transphasic forcefield generator in his belt buckle for the purpose of absorbing a few pointless volleys of laser fire before entering the dialogue stage of the scene would get old pretty fast. I have actually seen Doctor Who do the moral equivalent, but used more than once per season and it just becomes dull -- it is only fun if it can catch the audience by surprise in some respect.
Every sci fi and fantasy genre work is lame until the viewers tune themselves in. Hard science fiction (.e.g 2001: A Space Odyssey, Minority Report) is not substantially different than soft science fiction (e.g. Star Wars, Doctor Who) in this respect.
It is opt in except when it isn't. A corporate entity can damage a non-consenting individual. Pollution would be the obvious example, but there are others.
Limited liability corporations are by their very nature subsidies for the wealthy on the assumption that such entities tend to serve the common weal more than often enough. To use the language of Ayn Rand, they exist because of an intrinsically Collectivist moral argument that presumes running roughshod over individual rights can be justified by a plausible appeal to the greater good. I am not advocating for abolition, but we should recognize that a nominally fair playing field between fictional persons and human persons is not going to be genuinely level. Therefore laws that disfavor corporations can easily be more conducive to a true free market than what we have.
Helicopters are appropriate to the traditional roles of a destroyer, and lack the effective range of fixed wing craft. So there nothing peculiar about this.
Next generation drones might genuinely muddy the waters, however...
The USN should ditch 5 of its behemoth supercarriers tomorrow, and go with 10 of these. With next generation drones, we would have more capability for less cost.
Presumably because of its mission, it is classified as a "destroyer". Traditionally, a destroyers job is to have good speed and range, and be able to manhandle smaller craft and deal with submarines. If it is anti-submarine and anti-smaller craft in armaments, then the designation makes sense. If it is primarily a helicopter pad, then it may completely lack the capital firepower to deal with similar sized or larger hostile vessels.
Remember that in a (possible future) slowly escalating conflict with China or North Korea, Japan fears predations on its shipping from submarines. This ship gives Japan the capability to hunt submarines in a wide zone, far from its land bases.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the big problem anyway? How many Google Glass wearers can cam a 2 hour movie with Google Glass and keep it steady enough? Just thinking about it makes me wince. And watching the resulting cam would probably make normal people ill.
And how much business does the **AA really lose to cams of their movies? How big a market is that?
Software can remove the jiggle. It is only a question of time until these devices have sufficient resolution and a wide enough view that you only have to keep your head pointed in approximately the right direction.
Gov't fiat money is also backed by the people's confidence the gov't can acquire gold and goods to back that paper. In fact, many gov'ts reserve some amount of gold for that purpose, on top of their proven ability to pull in tax revenue that can be used to acquire goods.
So gov't fiat currencies are intrisically different from cryptocurrencies. What large institution with big financial resources is overtly willing to stand up for the value of cryptocurrency?
I can't watch the video. After the ad played for 63 seconds, I am done.
Your charts show a definite revenue problem.
A rough rolling average (to flatten out the highs and troughs) shows flattish revenues over the last decade and a half. That is a terrible revenue picture, because flat in absolute dollars means we are sunk unless we take an axe to spending, oh, starting back in circa 2000.
Obviously we need to get both our revenues and spending back near the long term trends we were seeing at the close of the 20th century. It looks like the tax cuts you love put us on a decsively lower revenue trend.
As a percentage of GDP, we are below the long term average, even if we focus our eyes on the last three decades. So there is room to raise taxes. No, that will not solve the whole problem. But no good will come from pretending we do not have a revenue problem, when we do.
These things vary by school district, especially when it comes to special needs. The public schools are usually legally required to provide service, but whether they do a good jobvaries greatly. The private schools have a free hand to abuse children with difficulties and label them lazy (my wife, who used to tutor HS math on the side, has seen such cases). (Not saying private all or usually do that, but there is no legal redress if they choose to do so.) My local public school district had an excellent reputation on this score, a close friend of mine was tremendously pleased with the assistance to his son, though I am unsure how they fared after recent budget cuts.
Ah! A s-t-a-r fighter! Thought it would help with rodents, I did.
When I see the costs compared, they never compare in-room education costs of private to public school. The few times I have been able to deduce those numbers from the presentation, public is cheaper than private. Private is only cheaper when you have elementary schools staffed by retired teachers volunteering for the church (yes, I've seen it, and those numbers get counted for why private schools are cheaper). The non-union private schools often pay better than the unionized public schools, and thus cost more to run.
Yes, looking through advertised prices I came to a similar conclusion. There are often good nominal prices for a church run K-4 or K-6, because, as your suggest, a smart parent with a HS diploma is enough of an expert with a few hints from a volunteer retired teacher. But the prices rapidly after elementary school because random well-meaning parents are not necessary good enough when the topics start getting a little bit hard. Private schools climb very rapidly on price after 6th grade. The cheaper ones may be slightly less expensive than what the taxpayer pays for public, but the difference is not large. A lot of private schools are much more expensive overall.
Private schools do not necessarily pay more to the teachers. Some do, but the majority pay less. The teachers have the benefit of avoiding the certification rigamarole and have a bit more moral authority to deal with behavior problems, so some good teachers are willing to make do with less pay.
I didn't really mean that they just simply dump-luck stumbled into their current position - I'm just sort of amazed that the prior smartphones sucked so badly. They are lucky that Microsoft, RIM, Nokia, and the others didn't get their act together before they had a chance to swoop in and do it right.
Yup. There were Windows CE phone back in 2000 that suggested potential strategies to crush Palm and enter/build a premium phone market. Given their experience with the iPod, it is not a surprise that Apple put a good phone together -- hats off to Ives and Jobs that the iPhone was better than good. What is amazing is how long a number of seemingly competent tech companies sat on their hands.
Apple doesn't need to make shitty free phones, but they also can't let their market share slip to Blackberry levels, lest they lose developers. Right now developers still target Apple first, and they probably need to keep it that way. If the ad-supported model ever becomes wildly profitable, then Apple should probably worry - but for now, people who penny-pinch on their phone probably aren't going to buy many apps.
Agreed.
How Microsoft crushed its competition in the 80s and 90s was Bill Gates was savvy enough to make sure his platform was, relatively speaking, attractive to the bulk of developers (by means of good tools, network effects, hook or by crook). Apple has accomplished the equivalent position with iOS and its mobile devices; Apple has the majority of customers that will happily pay real money for good applications in its hip pocket. That may change. But as you suggest, competing for the cheapest customers is not autmoatically a win. Apple has to fight for the turf where the developers make good money -- that is what is important.
It is difficult to predict the day that fighting tooth and claw for the retail customer is necessary. It is not today. It may be tomorrow, or it may be never. TFA does not give us insight into that question.
At peak flow, the Sacramento river might fill in bay over the course of weeks, not days. The typical flow would still do nothing for the hygiene of the entire southern half of the bay, which would be a stinking stagnant cesspool for 11 months out of the year. (And runoff from residential areas is more polluted than is commonly understood.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
Or add four feet of dirt.
The water portion of the SF Bay was once twice the size it is right now. The reason those pieces of commercial (and residential) real estate are vulnerable is they are built on areas that once were 6 inches underwater at hide tide. They are not underwater every single day because dirt was shipped in.
They shipped in four feet of dirt to create the problem. How about we solve the problem with four more feet of dirt?
As for the barrage, the ecological costs would be enormous. A few merely massive pumping stations is not going to prevent the bay water from becoming a smelly cess pool polluted by agricultural runoff and much worse from the residential areas. It is a fun idea for civil engineers, but we are wealthy enough here to employ less tricky solution that will be more reliable.
I think you are on the money. Apple enticed people to like their flavor of DRM with the iTunes store and the App store, so that the typical consumer felt like Apple was doing them a favor. MS decided to nickel and dime their legitimate users with overt cruft layered right on top of what was already there -- this felt like a pure negative.
Unless you are asking for evidence to be thrown out or a conviction to be thrown out, you have always had approximately nonexistence rights for redress when it comes 4th Amendment violations. That is not news.
To get a criminal conviction, you need, roughly speaking, to convince the jury that 98%-99% of the credible evidence is on your side, and your need a district attorney to agree to be involved in the first place. Is it so unreasonable for those situations where 95% or 75% or even just 51% of the credible evidence is on my side, that I go to a civil court? The law says I am allowed. It is not obviously wrong to go to a civil trial on cases that do not rise to being clearly criminal. (Heck, the law says I can have a lousy case, but I am morally okay if I think I can squeak in at "51%" and the jury is likely to side with me.)
Your points make sense, but a consumer device is a consumer device, and it does not need to apologize for it. Just like the VCR, DVD players, and Palm Pilot in their respective heydays. As for the price point, a decent computer for creating content is one-fourth of the price it was when I was a kid, and dropping.
"do up" "fix up" "make up" All three could be innocent. All three could be nefarious.
Congress could very easily put a stop to this. Congress does not want to. The majority and minority leadership in both houses know what is going on -- this stuff is not news to them. The laws are working as intended. What they all fear is explaining their own position to the American people. Our Congresscritters are going to keep their mouth shut and let the heat fall on the president.
The comparison with Star Trek is apt. The last time I went back and saw the three original seasons, in my 20s, I found that 1/3rd were a tolerable kind of terrible, 1/3rd were okay, and 1/3rd were great. Star Trek exceeded expectations of many viewers, in the context of the times, and for that it earned a lot of affection.
I am a fan of the modern Doctor Who series, which is usually pretty good IMHO, even if not always. When I watched some of the old Doctor Who episodes, I am reminded of ST:TOS in terms of the writing quality. I do not doubt there are many many excellent old Doctor Who episodes. Whether it is worth watching 20 episodes in order to find 3 gems is a question everyone has to answer for themselves.
To an outside observer, it simply seems like a lame would-be superhero saving the day by just boasting about it. This is actually repeated twice during the first three episodes.
I would call that a genre convention.
To an outside observer who has not yet tuned in to the emotional tone, it would be "obvious" that Batman could cut the crime of Gotham City substantially by getting over himself, investing in a sniper rifle, and using it appropriately. Likewise Superman could make the world a better place simply by separating a few skulls from their cervical vertebrae with the effort of a pinky finger (in fact, given his strength, it must take quite a lot of mental effort to not be accidentally killing people all the time). At a simplistic level, this logic is unambiguously correct. But it would drift the tales towards the kinds of stories the authors have no interest in telling.
Doctor Who employing a Gallifreyean transphasic forcefield generator in his belt buckle for the purpose of absorbing a few pointless volleys of laser fire before entering the dialogue stage of the scene would get old pretty fast. I have actually seen Doctor Who do the moral equivalent, but used more than once per season and it just becomes dull -- it is only fun if it can catch the audience by surprise in some respect.
Every sci fi and fantasy genre work is lame until the viewers tune themselves in. Hard science fiction (.e.g 2001: A Space Odyssey, Minority Report) is not substantially different than soft science fiction (e.g. Star Wars, Doctor Who) in this respect.
It is opt in except when it isn't. A corporate entity can damage a non-consenting individual. Pollution would be the obvious example, but there are others.
Limited liability corporations are by their very nature subsidies for the wealthy on the assumption that such entities tend to serve the common weal more than often enough. To use the language of Ayn Rand, they exist because of an intrinsically Collectivist moral argument that presumes running roughshod over individual rights can be justified by a plausible appeal to the greater good. I am not advocating for abolition, but we should recognize that a nominally fair playing field between fictional persons and human persons is not going to be genuinely level. Therefore laws that disfavor corporations can easily be more conducive to a true free market than what we have.
Helicopters are appropriate to the traditional roles of a destroyer, and lack the effective range of fixed wing craft. So there nothing peculiar about this.
Next generation drones might genuinely muddy the waters, however...
The USN should ditch 5 of its behemoth supercarriers tomorrow, and go with 10 of these. With next generation drones, we would have more capability for less cost.
Presumably because of its mission, it is classified as a "destroyer". Traditionally, a destroyers job is to have good speed and range, and be able to manhandle smaller craft and deal with submarines. If it is anti-submarine and anti-smaller craft in armaments, then the designation makes sense. If it is primarily a helicopter pad, then it may completely lack the capital firepower to deal with similar sized or larger hostile vessels.
Remember that in a (possible future) slowly escalating conflict with China or North Korea, Japan fears predations on its shipping from submarines. This ship gives Japan the capability to hunt submarines in a wide zone, far from its land bases.