I agree with both of you. And the reason Apple is I think in trouble is because Steve Jobs isn't going to be there anymore. A large part, I think, of Apple's turnaround is that Jobs is one hell of a charismatic guy. Even as someone who doesn't care for Apple products (the desktop OS interface sucks, and the idiotic design compromises of the mp3 players - like paying $200 for something that I have to throw away rather than replace the battery - are too much for me), I WANT to like them because they've managed to make their products the epitome of geek-cool.
But now that the Cult of the Black Turtleneck has lost its preacher, I suspect Apple will start making the same mistakes it made before. It wouldn't shock me if the iPad 6 ran some proprietary OS that was not backwards compatible and will force you to buy all new apps. Kind of like they did with the II/Mac switchover. I remember being royally pissed when they abandoned the II family mere months after telling people that the IIgs was the future of computing, and would be supported with tons of software. That all evaporated as Apple threw all its energies behind the freaking Mac, which at the time didn't even have a color screen and so was a large step backward for anyone that wanted to do more than desktop publishing.
the tl;dr version is that while Apple makes a boatload of money right now selling to the niche market, they're likely to repeat history and forget to keep cultivating that market, which will allow Android-based tablets to shoot past them in marketshare. And while you're right that the guy selling to 20% marketshare at high markup is still going to make a lot of money, you do have to have a certain percentage of the marketshare to pull that off - losing that critical mass of customers is what almost killed them before Jobs came back.
Well, by the time the PC was gaining serious marketshare, the II family was pretty much done. There were still a few diehards championing the IIgs as the best computer ever built, and saying it would never be improved upon (I remember my high school geometry teacher was one of them. We all thought he was nuts). The Pressarios were competing with Macs, not IIs, and by that point, the question wasn't IBM-clone, but Intel clone. Any Intel machine would run what any other Intel machine would run (dependent of course on system specs). And IBM wasn't the only one making Intel machines. My first Intel was a 486 SX/20 built by a local shop that even at their outrageously jacked prices compared to do-it-yourself, was cheaper than the comparable Mac SE/30. And it had a color screen that was 5 inches bigger.
Kinda history repeating itself isn't it. The Apple II had no rival at launch either - yet another system eventually overtook its sales and Apple has never gained the dominant marketshare in the PC market since.
I think that's what's going to happen with the iPad. Like the II, it's a great piece of kit. It does things no other device at launch did (just like the II, which unlike all the other home computers out there consisted of more than switches and blinky lights). But, like the Apple II, it now has competition, and also like the Apple II, that competition is a lot more open than Apple is. Cheap PC clones is what helped shoot PCs to the forefront. Who's going to buy a $1300+ Apple when they can get a Presario for under a grand? And since Android can be licensed on lots of different devices, unlike iOS, I think the same thing's going to end up happening here. Eventually only the hardcore Apple fanclub is going to keep buying iPads, because Android tablets will (can) do what they do just as well for less money.
What mistake? Handwriting recognition at the time sucked. Hell, it still sucks. Tablets were emphasizing writing stuff rather than typing stuff.
Note the iPad uses a touch-screen keyboard, not handwriting. I don't really see an inconsistency with what Jobs said then and what Apple is building now - and that's coming from a guy who is anything but an Apple fan.
Well, considering they want to build the actual restaurant on the moon, I'd say they'll get the pizza there in however long it takes to cook pizza at the atmospheric pressure of their dome.
FTA: "While working as a substitute teacher at an âoealternative high schoolâ in Ohio in 2008, Clements-Jeffrey purchased a laptop from one of the students for $60. "
She knew. "Alternative high school" is a euphemism for "holding tank for budding felons." It's where they send all the kids who are too disruptive and out of control for regular school, but who don't quite cross the line far enough to get expelled.
She buys something that should be several hundred bucks for the price of a tank of gas, from a kid who is in a school where they send kids who are too criminalistic to remain in the regular school system. She either knew, strongly suspected, or is entirely too stupid to be a teacher. And we won't even go in to the stupidity of storing and sending naked photos of yourself with a laptop that used to belong to your student, who might have put some sort of snoop software on there for just this purpose.
All that said, whether the naked pictures were of the actual thief, or of the person who got possession of the stolen property, they led the original owner to the stolen property. Fair game, as far as I'm concerned. Don't like it? Don't buy laptops for 60 bucks assuming it's all on the up and up.
Simplicity has nothing to do with it. Nerds like to see what they can get a machine to do that wasn't necessarily thought of by the machine's designers.
I remember in high school programming a GUI, Doom, Tetris, and Pong on my TI-85. It would have been a hell of a lot simpler to get a Gameboy. But that would have missed the point.
Redstone seems to have been mainly thought up in order to run minecart systems. It's a pretty good bet that Notch never thought of making a color printer with it. The fun is in making Redstone do stuff it wasn't necessarily designed to do.
So I don't see what sort of value the telco would gain by causing idle tcp connections to disconnect faster.
Well, if they're evil enough, they could gain the value of making you dissatisfied with your phone.
"This piece'a shit! The battery life sucks and the connection is slow as crap. I'm'a go out and buy a Bionic the minute it comes out."... And with me, if that's their strategy, it worked. -sigh-
I note the article doesn't say what kind of employees she has. Lots of SL "business people" have "employees" who get paid maybe 500L per hour (if they're high-paid) to do whatever work they're supposed to do. That's the equivalent of around 2 bucks an hour, and they most certainly do not get benefits. Saying "I have 80 employees!" sounds a lot more impressive than "I found 80 idiots willing to do a lot of work for me for significantly less than I'd have to pay if I outsourced to Pakistan." Hell when I was exploring around on SL I saw people "camping" for something like 20L per hour because they didn't want to buy any of the in-game currency. They didn't realize that you spend more than 20L per hour for the electricity to run your computer, and so they were actually losing money by wasting time with the camping crap. And this was a very popular activity, with many thousands of people doing it. With such a vast resource of dumb people who can't do basic math, it's not hard to get 80 employees without spending any money.
As far as having virtual land holdings worth millions - she doesn't own anything. She rents server space, and then re-rents it to other people. Linden Labs could pull the plug on her tomorrow and then she'd "own" precisely nothing. They've done it before - in fact it was a lawsuit over them doing that that made me go look at SL in the first place to see what the hell the fuss was about that could make people sue in RL over a virtual chat system.
They're going to be commodity devices *very* soon, and that's going to really eat into that lucrative revenue stream that Apple is enjoying so much right now. Most people aren't going to be willing to keep paying for the logo, and they'll be back to their old almost-pushing-10% marketshare.
If people were smart, maybe. But you and I both know that there are people out there who would buy a $100 clay brick if it was painted white and had an Apple logo on it.
After all, people are still buying the damn thing after the Cult of Jobs tried to convince us that the iPhone's antenna problem was due to users holding it the way everyone holds a phone, but did not fit in with Apple's vision of how you should hold a phone. And people obviously bought it, because they keep buying iPhones.
That's not particularly unique to Apple fanboys either - GM made rolling piles of crap throughout the 70's 80's and 90's, and there are still people who swear up and down that they will never own a non-GM car.
Brand loyalty oftentimes trumps rational examination of choices to determine which is best. Now that Apple has brand loyalty, it's likely that even if you have a direct clone of an iPhone that's $100 cheaper, those loyal fans will still buy the Apple product.
Let's say that I'm completely clueless as to how schools operate. Let's say all schools are like those dumb movies where the heroic teacher comes in and whips a bunch of hoodlums into shape while "Stand By Me" plays on the music track.
So a kid refuses to leave the class. You call the police, have him hauled away, expel him, and issue a trespass notice.
How many kids out of the entire school's population are going to refuse to leave the classroom? Let's be generous and say 25. You expel 25 kids, and you've taken care of the problem.
In short, you're going to end up with a lot of stupid arrests, a lot of lawsuits ( why yes, I will sue anyone who arrests my kid for farting, and no I'm not overly litigious ) and a lot of anger directed at schools and cops, and all because the district was too damn stupid to expel the real serial troublemakers while dealing normal discipline to kids doing normal kid misbehavior.
There are a lot of people having fun with unlikely hypotheticals in this thread. What if the kid pulls a knife. What if he holds the teacher hostage. What if he refuses to leave the classroom when told.
Well. ..What if? Sometimes shit happens and you deal with it. When it's statistical outlier shit that happens, you don't staff accordingly unless you're talking about something ultra-critical like guarding the President. You don't stick a police station in a school because some time down the road a kid MIGHT refuse to leave a classroom, just as you don't stick a fire station and a hospital in the school because an airplane MIGHT crash into the playground.
When the kids go beyond what the school is equipped to handle, you call the cops, and they come and handle the situation.
When the kids do normal kid crap like sassing teachers and being late to class, you don't get Officer Hardass to walk down the hall and slap cuffs on them.
This should be really obvious. That it is not, I think, demonstrates why our education system is so screwed up right now.
Exactly. The real trouble is going to come when zero tolerance policies and cops mix. When I was in school (and it's still happening to day, a couple decades later) they had a 0-tolerance policy about fighting. If you got in a fight, you got suspended. Even if you got attacked, and stood there letting the guy punch you, and didn't throw a punch back, you got suspended.
Carry that forward to a school-police situation, and I can see you being booked on disorderly conduct, if not battery charges.
The whole idea is absurd.
As for taking away schools' ability to discipline our kids, that's bull. We've removed their ability to paddle them. That's pretty much it. They can still suspend, expel, detain, and in many other ways punish the troublemakers.
It's the *schools* that have failed in the discipline department, by applying these ridiculous zero-tolerance policies that are guaranteed to only be a punishment to the innocent victims, while granting a free 3-day vacation to the little shits that start the problem in the first place.
The answer lies not in sending the Brute Squad into the schools, but in schools being intelligent with their discipline. Habitual troublemakers are easy to spot. So quit giving them 20 thousand detentions and suspensions, and start expelling them. And, of course, get rid of the zero tolerance policies, which are really just an excuse for school administrators to not have to do any thinking when dealing with students.
You're making the assumption that the civilizations sharing information are including a map to them. Kind of a big assumption to make. If you find out tomorrow that the Zrrkyns of Zarkonia have hot women and beer oceans, how are you going to use that to invade them if they don't tell you where they are?
What if? Either they're telling the truth and you learn something, or they're lying and you never know because it's pretty impractical to travel possibly hundreds of light years away to verify the claims.
Well, you did say it was flushing money down the toilet, which was a pretty unfounded claim considering you spouted it on an invention that was funded by DARPA.
The whole POINT of DARPA is to throw money at projects that aren't likely to succeed right away, because if DARPA doesn't do it, no one will and it will never get done.
The internet never would have happened if DARPA hadn't flushed money down the toilet for it, because when the internet/arpanet was first being assembled, no one saw any sort of profitability in large networks of computers - and in fact when the idea first started being looked at in 1968 no one saw profitability in consumer computers at all.
Have you read any of Timothy Ferris' books? In several (The Mind's Sky is the one I remember specifically, but he said it in others) he proposes that an inter/intragalactic network of computers is probably going to be set up by someone (or possibly already has been set up, and we just haven't been contacted by it yet) which would be a data repository for information on other civilizations. That way you don't have to spend eleventy jillion years traveling somewhere to learn about it.
And they never think of the consequences if they do manage somehow to make a success of it.
If you have a country on an oil rig, and you somehow manage to make it worth something, it'll topple to the first country larger-than-an-oil-rig that decides it's valuable. Hell, Luxembourg could invade and have a completed takeover within hours.
And if you put up too much of a fight, a single missile or C4 on the platform's legs and your country disappears in a puff of smoke and steam.
Me too. In fact, to get to subliminal territory you need to run the flash about twice as fast as is possible on NTSC, or about 1 frame out of a 60-frame second./did some experimenting on this in college.// there's a way to do it with interlacing, but then you don't get a complete image
Yeah. Yesterday. Admittedly I'm cheating since my job requires that I be at accident scenes, and so I see them a whole lot more than the average guy, but every life flight chopper around here is a Bell 407.
In your rush to call me a liar, did you even bother to note that I clearly differentiated between actions that are themselves a danger to others and actions that are indirectly a danger? Like producing tainted meat is a direct danger, while producing a copy machine, or any other "device" with "security issues", is not.
Nope, I didn't notice that. And having re-read your post, I still didn't notice that, because you didn't differentiate anything.
But, given that you *meant* to differentiate, if you're acknowledging that there's a difference, what exactly was your point?
To a point, but with rare earths it's hard for production efficiency to go up too far. It's not like gold, where you find a seam and just follow it. It's more like separating out the black grains of sand from a mostly yellow-sand beach.
Well, there's also the bit that if it starts going into cars, demand will go up, and so it will be more expensive.
That said, it'll be part of the price of the new car, so you won't notice as much. If you're dropping $30,000 on a car, you won't notice an extra 3 or 4 grand on the loan for the first 10 years of fuel all that much.
If this ever came to fruition, it would wreck hell on the roads until we re-organized the tax system to collect infrastructure taxes off of something other than gasoline.
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I agree with both of you. And the reason Apple is I think in trouble is because Steve Jobs isn't going to be there anymore. A large part, I think, of Apple's turnaround is that Jobs is one hell of a charismatic guy. Even as someone who doesn't care for Apple products (the desktop OS interface sucks, and the idiotic design compromises of the mp3 players - like paying $200 for something that I have to throw away rather than replace the battery - are too much for me), I WANT to like them because they've managed to make their products the epitome of geek-cool.
But now that the Cult of the Black Turtleneck has lost its preacher, I suspect Apple will start making the same mistakes it made before. It wouldn't shock me if the iPad 6 ran some proprietary OS that was not backwards compatible and will force you to buy all new apps. Kind of like they did with the II/Mac switchover. I remember being royally pissed when they abandoned the II family mere months after telling people that the IIgs was the future of computing, and would be supported with tons of software. That all evaporated as Apple threw all its energies behind the freaking Mac, which at the time didn't even have a color screen and so was a large step backward for anyone that wanted to do more than desktop publishing.
the tl;dr version is that while Apple makes a boatload of money right now selling to the niche market, they're likely to repeat history and forget to keep cultivating that market, which will allow Android-based tablets to shoot past them in marketshare. And while you're right that the guy selling to 20% marketshare at high markup is still going to make a lot of money, you do have to have a certain percentage of the marketshare to pull that off - losing that critical mass of customers is what almost killed them before Jobs came back.
Well, by the time the PC was gaining serious marketshare, the II family was pretty much done. There were still a few diehards championing the IIgs as the best computer ever built, and saying it would never be improved upon (I remember my high school geometry teacher was one of them. We all thought he was nuts). The Pressarios were competing with Macs, not IIs, and by that point, the question wasn't IBM-clone, but Intel clone. Any Intel machine would run what any other Intel machine would run (dependent of course on system specs). And IBM wasn't the only one making Intel machines. My first Intel was a 486 SX/20 built by a local shop that even at their outrageously jacked prices compared to do-it-yourself, was cheaper than the comparable Mac SE/30. And it had a color screen that was 5 inches bigger.
Kinda history repeating itself isn't it. The Apple II had no rival at launch either - yet another system eventually overtook its sales and Apple has never gained the dominant marketshare in the PC market since.
I think that's what's going to happen with the iPad. Like the II, it's a great piece of kit. It does things no other device at launch did (just like the II, which unlike all the other home computers out there consisted of more than switches and blinky lights). But, like the Apple II, it now has competition, and also like the Apple II, that competition is a lot more open than Apple is. Cheap PC clones is what helped shoot PCs to the forefront. Who's going to buy a $1300+ Apple when they can get a Presario for under a grand? And since Android can be licensed on lots of different devices, unlike iOS, I think the same thing's going to end up happening here. Eventually only the hardcore Apple fanclub is going to keep buying iPads, because Android tablets will (can) do what they do just as well for less money.
What mistake? Handwriting recognition at the time sucked. Hell, it still sucks. Tablets were emphasizing writing stuff rather than typing stuff.
Note the iPad uses a touch-screen keyboard, not handwriting. I don't really see an inconsistency with what Jobs said then and what Apple is building now - and that's coming from a guy who is anything but an Apple fan.
Well, considering they want to build the actual restaurant on the moon, I'd say they'll get the pizza there in however long it takes to cook pizza at the atmospheric pressure of their dome.
FTA: "While working as a substitute teacher at an âoealternative high schoolâ in Ohio in 2008, Clements-Jeffrey purchased a laptop from one of the students for $60. "
She knew. "Alternative high school" is a euphemism for "holding tank for budding felons." It's where they send all the kids who are too disruptive and out of control for regular school, but who don't quite cross the line far enough to get expelled.
She buys something that should be several hundred bucks for the price of a tank of gas, from a kid who is in a school where they send kids who are too criminalistic to remain in the regular school system. She either knew, strongly suspected, or is entirely too stupid to be a teacher. And we won't even go in to the stupidity of storing and sending naked photos of yourself with a laptop that used to belong to your student, who might have put some sort of snoop software on there for just this purpose.
All that said, whether the naked pictures were of the actual thief, or of the person who got possession of the stolen property, they led the original owner to the stolen property. Fair game, as far as I'm concerned. Don't like it? Don't buy laptops for 60 bucks assuming it's all on the up and up.
Simplicity has nothing to do with it. Nerds like to see what they can get a machine to do that wasn't necessarily thought of by the machine's designers.
I remember in high school programming a GUI, Doom, Tetris, and Pong on my TI-85. It would have been a hell of a lot simpler to get a Gameboy. But that would have missed the point.
Redstone seems to have been mainly thought up in order to run minecart systems. It's a pretty good bet that Notch never thought of making a color printer with it. The fun is in making Redstone do stuff it wasn't necessarily designed to do.
So I don't see what sort of value the telco would gain by causing idle tcp connections to disconnect faster.
Well, if they're evil enough, they could gain the value of making you dissatisfied with your phone.
"This piece'a shit! The battery life sucks and the connection is slow as crap. I'm'a go out and buy a Bionic the minute it comes out." ... And with me, if that's their strategy, it worked. -sigh-
I note the article doesn't say what kind of employees she has. Lots of SL "business people" have "employees" who get paid maybe 500L per hour (if they're high-paid) to do whatever work they're supposed to do. That's the equivalent of around 2 bucks an hour, and they most certainly do not get benefits. Saying "I have 80 employees!" sounds a lot more impressive than "I found 80 idiots willing to do a lot of work for me for significantly less than I'd have to pay if I outsourced to Pakistan." Hell when I was exploring around on SL I saw people "camping" for something like 20L per hour because they didn't want to buy any of the in-game currency. They didn't realize that you spend more than 20L per hour for the electricity to run your computer, and so they were actually losing money by wasting time with the camping crap. And this was a very popular activity, with many thousands of people doing it. With such a vast resource of dumb people who can't do basic math, it's not hard to get 80 employees without spending any money.
As far as having virtual land holdings worth millions - she doesn't own anything. She rents server space, and then re-rents it to other people. Linden Labs could pull the plug on her tomorrow and then she'd "own" precisely nothing. They've done it before - in fact it was a lawsuit over them doing that that made me go look at SL in the first place to see what the hell the fuss was about that could make people sue in RL over a virtual chat system.
They're going to be commodity devices *very* soon, and that's going to really eat into that lucrative revenue stream that Apple is enjoying so much right now. Most people aren't going to be willing to keep paying for the logo, and they'll be back to their old almost-pushing-10% marketshare.
If people were smart, maybe. But you and I both know that there are people out there who would buy a $100 clay brick if it was painted white and had an Apple logo on it.
After all, people are still buying the damn thing after the Cult of Jobs tried to convince us that the iPhone's antenna problem was due to users holding it the way everyone holds a phone, but did not fit in with Apple's vision of how you should hold a phone. And people obviously bought it, because they keep buying iPhones.
That's not particularly unique to Apple fanboys either - GM made rolling piles of crap throughout the 70's 80's and 90's, and there are still people who swear up and down that they will never own a non-GM car.
Brand loyalty oftentimes trumps rational examination of choices to determine which is best. Now that Apple has brand loyalty, it's likely that even if you have a direct clone of an iPhone that's $100 cheaper, those loyal fans will still buy the Apple product.
Let's say that I'm completely clueless as to how schools operate. Let's say all schools are like those dumb movies where the heroic teacher comes in and whips a bunch of hoodlums into shape while "Stand By Me" plays on the music track.
So a kid refuses to leave the class. You call the police, have him hauled away, expel him, and issue a trespass notice.
How many kids out of the entire school's population are going to refuse to leave the classroom? Let's be generous and say 25. You expel 25 kids, and you've taken care of the problem.
Meanwhile, if instead you decide to get the cops in the school handling your discipline for you, you end up with kids being arrested for doodling on their desk ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/05/desk-doodling-arrest-alex_n_450859.html ), and kids getting arrested for farting and turning off computers ( http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2008/nov/21/report-martin-county-student-arrested-passing-gas-/ ), and 3rd graders getting arrested for fistfights ( http://gothamist.com/2011/04/02/third_grader_who_was_arrested_by_po.php )
In short, you're going to end up with a lot of stupid arrests, a lot of lawsuits ( why yes, I will sue anyone who arrests my kid for farting, and no I'm not overly litigious ) and a lot of anger directed at schools and cops, and all because the district was too damn stupid to expel the real serial troublemakers while dealing normal discipline to kids doing normal kid misbehavior.
There are a lot of people having fun with unlikely hypotheticals in this thread. What if the kid pulls a knife. What if he holds the teacher hostage. What if he refuses to leave the classroom when told.
Well. . .What if? Sometimes shit happens and you deal with it. When it's statistical outlier shit that happens, you don't staff accordingly unless you're talking about something ultra-critical like guarding the President. You don't stick a police station in a school because some time down the road a kid MIGHT refuse to leave a classroom, just as you don't stick a fire station and a hospital in the school because an airplane MIGHT crash into the playground.
When the kids go beyond what the school is equipped to handle, you call the cops, and they come and handle the situation.
When the kids do normal kid crap like sassing teachers and being late to class, you don't get Officer Hardass to walk down the hall and slap cuffs on them.
This should be really obvious. That it is not, I think, demonstrates why our education system is so screwed up right now.
Now what? Expel the little jerk's ass. Issue a trespass notice, and call the cops if he tries to come back to the property.
That's a very, very long way away from posting cops at the school and arresting kids for sassing the teacher.
Funny how that never worked when my folks justifiably complained that I was suspended for being attacked.
Exactly. The real trouble is going to come when zero tolerance policies and cops mix. When I was in school (and it's still happening to day, a couple decades later) they had a 0-tolerance policy about fighting. If you got in a fight, you got suspended. Even if you got attacked, and stood there letting the guy punch you, and didn't throw a punch back, you got suspended.
Carry that forward to a school-police situation, and I can see you being booked on disorderly conduct, if not battery charges.
The whole idea is absurd.
As for taking away schools' ability to discipline our kids, that's bull. We've removed their ability to paddle them. That's pretty much it. They can still suspend, expel, detain, and in many other ways punish the troublemakers.
It's the *schools* that have failed in the discipline department, by applying these ridiculous zero-tolerance policies that are guaranteed to only be a punishment to the innocent victims, while granting a free 3-day vacation to the little shits that start the problem in the first place.
The answer lies not in sending the Brute Squad into the schools, but in schools being intelligent with their discipline. Habitual troublemakers are easy to spot. So quit giving them 20 thousand detentions and suspensions, and start expelling them. And, of course, get rid of the zero tolerance policies, which are really just an excuse for school administrators to not have to do any thinking when dealing with students.
You're making the assumption that the civilizations sharing information are including a map to them. Kind of a big assumption to make. If you find out tomorrow that the Zrrkyns of Zarkonia have hot women and beer oceans, how are you going to use that to invade them if they don't tell you where they are?
What if? Either they're telling the truth and you learn something, or they're lying and you never know because it's pretty impractical to travel possibly hundreds of light years away to verify the claims.
Well, you did say it was flushing money down the toilet, which was a pretty unfounded claim considering you spouted it on an invention that was funded by DARPA.
The whole POINT of DARPA is to throw money at projects that aren't likely to succeed right away, because if DARPA doesn't do it, no one will and it will never get done.
The internet never would have happened if DARPA hadn't flushed money down the toilet for it, because when the internet/arpanet was first being assembled, no one saw any sort of profitability in large networks of computers - and in fact when the idea first started being looked at in 1968 no one saw profitability in consumer computers at all.
Have you read any of Timothy Ferris' books? In several (The Mind's Sky is the one I remember specifically, but he said it in others) he proposes that an inter/intragalactic network of computers is probably going to be set up by someone (or possibly already has been set up, and we just haven't been contacted by it yet) which would be a data repository for information on other civilizations. That way you don't have to spend eleventy jillion years traveling somewhere to learn about it.
In other words, pretty much what you said.
And they never think of the consequences if they do manage somehow to make a success of it.
If you have a country on an oil rig, and you somehow manage to make it worth something, it'll topple to the first country larger-than-an-oil-rig that decides it's valuable. Hell, Luxembourg could invade and have a completed takeover within hours.
And if you put up too much of a fight, a single missile or C4 on the platform's legs and your country disappears in a puff of smoke and steam.
Me too. In fact, to get to subliminal territory you need to run the flash about twice as fast as is possible on NTSC, or about 1 frame out of a 60-frame second. /did some experimenting on this in college. // there's a way to do it with interlacing, but then you don't get a complete image
Yeah. Yesterday. Admittedly I'm cheating since my job requires that I be at accident scenes, and so I see them a whole lot more than the average guy, but every life flight chopper around here is a Bell 407.
In your rush to call me a liar, did you even bother to note that I clearly differentiated between actions that are themselves a danger to others and actions that are indirectly a danger? Like producing tainted meat is a direct danger, while producing a copy machine, or any other "device" with "security issues", is not.
Nope, I didn't notice that. And having re-read your post, I still didn't notice that, because you didn't differentiate anything.
But, given that you *meant* to differentiate, if you're acknowledging that there's a difference, what exactly was your point?
To a point, but with rare earths it's hard for production efficiency to go up too far. It's not like gold, where you find a seam and just follow it. It's more like separating out the black grains of sand from a mostly yellow-sand beach.
Well, there's also the bit that if it starts going into cars, demand will go up, and so it will be more expensive.
That said, it'll be part of the price of the new car, so you won't notice as much. If you're dropping $30,000 on a car, you won't notice an extra 3 or 4 grand on the loan for the first 10 years of fuel all that much.
If this ever came to fruition, it would wreck hell on the roads until we re-organized the tax system to collect infrastructure taxes off of something other than gasoline.