More government intervention, because consumers ARE STUPID. Plug all your stupid wall warts into a power strip, when you get done charging, turn off the power strip. Idiots...now another stupid regulation.
So I should waste my time monitoring devices that were designed poorly in the first place? THAT is stupid. If we need a regulation to get companies to design products that aren't needlessly wasteful then so be it. Fixing market failures is actually a good use of government.
they have been materials that only allow the movement of N-type, or negative, electrons. In order to create an electronic device, however, you need semiconductor material that allows the movement of both negative electrons and positive charges known as "holes."
Captain pedantic here. Electron holes are not positive charges. They are the absence of an electron in a lattice where one could exist. This "hole" can be treated for convenience and practicality like a positively charged particle but that isn't technically the same thing.
Where outside of China are you going to find the components and the equipment to repair any of these electronics, anyway?
Umm, you can buy things from China. If you need proof of this please visit your local Walmart.
Everything's microsoldered to a circuit board the size of a credit card, and the tiniest slip of your all-too-human hands and you've ruined a trace on a different circuit.
The practicality of actually doing a repair or modification is not relevant to whether or not one should have the right to attempt the repair or modification. Those are separate issues.
Why is it that so much malware and online crime comes from Russia?
You could ask the same question about any large country including the United States. Russia in particular has a bit of the wild west going on and I think the authorities there might turn a blind eye if it negatively impacts rival countries.
The country simply refuses to police themselves, even when things are obviously illegal.
You mean like how in the US we have police straight up murdering black people without repercussions? Or how the NSA blatantly violates the constitution? Or how we imprison people in Cuba indefinitely without any trial? Yeah, Russia has some problems but it's not like our poop lacks odor...
I'd support sanctioning Putin directly to prevent him from entering the EU.
Umm, are you aware that Russia supplies much of the EU with huge amounts of oil and gas that cannot be gotten elsewhere quickly? All Putin has to do is shut off a key pipeline or two (which he has done a few times) and it gets awfully cold really fast in some parts of the EU. Furthermore actions like what you suggest are frankly kind of a juvenile response. Putin might be behind all of it (he isn't) but keeping the head of state of Russia arbitrarily out would accomplish very little and would actually do more harm than good in all likelihood.
Cutting Russia off from the internet to the best of our ability is really the only way to stop the excessive crime from that country.
Prestigious investment banks don't get fined $5 billion for ripping off their customers.
Sure they do. You may not admire them and I get that, but Goldman Sachs is very well respected in many circles and has been for a very long time. GS is as prestigious an investment bank as exists. The fact that they are two timing scumbags who would sell their own mother up the river strangely does not seem to affect their status much.
It's no different than the folks here who dislike Apple or Google. They are still well regarded companies even though you can easily make an argument that their behavior has been less than honorable at times. Some like them and some don't and both side have a valid point.
What the fuck does a bank know about VR, AR, and tech trends?
Plenty in all likelihood. First of this is Goldman Sachs which is decidedly NOT a bank in the sense you are implying. Investment banking involves a lot more than just taking deposits and paying interest. Goldman Sachs is arguably the best investment banking firm out there. The people working at GS are VERY smart and clued in and while they might lie to you to make a buck (like here in all probability), they aren't dumb and for the most part they do know what they are talking about. GS has tech guys and analysts that are better than most of the people who read slashdot. I know a few personally and they are anything but clueless.
Now here is the thing. You have to ask WHY they are spouting off seeming nonsense. Remember that investment banking is basically the business of selling financial instruments. So odds are they are trying to convince someone to buy something by using overly rosy claims about the future prospects of the industry. VR will absolutely not be a $90B industry. There simply aren't enough use cases. It will be a useful niche but not much more. Augmented Reality might one day be but that day is a fair ways off unless you use a very broad definition of AR.
They're eons behind on tech.. probably still running COBOL servers.
You're saying the banks are behind on tech when you don't even know what the banks do or how they operate. You are regurgitating some old tripe about how they have old servers running and implying that is somehow representative of their tech prowess. Yes some banks have some very old (and very reliable) code running. That isn't the majority of their IT infrastructure nor does it follow that because of a bit of old code that they are behind on tech. They're actually pretty darn tech savvy and they have to be to compete these days. If you are going to critique banks (and there is plenty to critique) then at least get yourself clued in so you don't sound ignorant.
To be fair, the decision of when to make the final throw in a game is based on reading the clock before the throw while for most of the game there's nothing particularly interesting happening when the clock runs out.
Those earlier decisions matter just as much as the ones at the end. The fact that they are to some degree contingent decisions does not change the fact that early decisions have just as much impact as later ones. A basket scored 20 seconds into the game counts just the same as one scored at the end of the game.
The exact instant the clock is started generally has no bearing on win/loss or even goal/no goal.
The exact instance the clock is started has a VERY direct bearing on when it stops and as such it can have a bearing on the outcome in a close game.
Doesn't always work. My freshman/sophomore year of HS our 215 won state both years and only lost 1 match each year. In both cases he lost by his opponent scoring quick then stalling out the rest of the match without the official calling it.
You're missing the point. He didn't put enough points up so his opponent won. Whether or not the official called stalling is irrelevant. You can't depend on him doing that. You CAN depend on what you do and nothing else. Stalling in wrestling is almost entirely subjective so you cannot depend on it being called ever. Not for you or against you. It simply means your 215 didn't do enough to get the job done. Watch the wrestlers from the University of Iowa sometime, particularly Brent Metcalf. You will NEVER hear them say they were robbed even if they were. They will simply say they didn't do enough to get the job done and the responsibility is theirs and theirs alone.
Our coach would simply send me out to take the forfeit at 215 and use our guy to wrestle the other 215 in the heavyweight slot. I got enough wins to letter but they didn't count them because I didn't actually wrestle the matches. I got robbed.
Taking a forfeit is meaningless. It isn't a win because there wasn't an opponent. Unless you got your hand raised because you beat an actual wrestler then why should that count for anything? If you weren't good enough to crack the starting line up and all you did was take forfeits then you weren't robbed of anything because you didn't actually earn anything.
The stacked errors should have impacted both teams equally (generally speaking) since it was a "constant" factor (same human performing the same error)
In theory you should be right provided there is a large enough sample size. In reality it is VERY unlikely that it would work out equally balanced at the end of the game. It's not going to be a perfect bell curve with both sides equal. I used to do a lot of statistical simulation and real world outcomes very rarely match perfectly with models.
I would put cash money on a bet that if you added up the over and under on the clock stoppages you wouldn't come out to zero at the end of the game. In fact I would be surprised if you weren't off by a fairly significant amount, probably well over a second. I would guess that it would tend to skew late because the guy running the clock has to react to the whistle being blown and can't start the clock until certain actions occur. I could be wrong but I doubt it.
If you don't want to the outcome of the game to be determined by referees and shot clocks, then you need to put enough points on board so that there's no doubt that you've won.
I coach a wrestling team and that is more or less exactly what I tell my team. If you don't put enough points on the board then you risk having the referee decided the match in a way not favorable to you. If that happens you have no one to blame but yourself. We insist on accountability and no whining. If it doesn't go our way we own it and figure out how to make sure we do better next time. If a bad call is made it is my job as the coach to try to get things set right but at the end of the day the goal is to leave no doubt as to the outcome even in the fact of bad calls.
In the NFL the coaches can call for a video review of the spot but not the measurement.
Only the NFL and maybe a few big Division 1 conferences have the resources to make that feasible. And most of the time it doesn't really matter much to be honest. But the technology exists to make it very exact - they elect not to use it for practical an economic reasons.
It's kind of a silly discussion because the clock is started and stopped by humans throughout the game. So even if an error was made here by some fraction of a second, there have to be numerous other errors throughout the rest of the game which aren't being considered with equal scrutiny. So yeah a timing error probably did cost one team the game but unless you go back across the entire game you'll never know which team got screwed by the timer.
It's like in football where the referee rather arbitrarily places the ball but then they measure it to the inch to see if they got a first down. The problem is with the spot, not with the measurement.
I don't have kids and I'm married. Have been for a long time. The decision to be married has nothing to do with whether or not you want kids. My wife and I have been together for almost 20 years and we go back another 10 before that. Our decision to get married had nothing to do with children at all.
Therefore, there is no reason to get married, and risk losing half of what I own whenever I decide I want to move on to a different woman.
So A) you've apparently never heard of a pre-nuptial agreement and B) you are apparently a selfish little boy who thinks that women exist merely to service your desires.
Yes, I say, grow a pair....women don't respect you if you don't assert yourself, show confidence, and show that you know (or at least project that you know) what you want in life.
You don't date much I'm guessing or if you do you probably get dumped a lot for being an ass. Son, let me let you in on a little secret. If you get married you aren't doing it for you. You do it because someone else matters so much to you that you are willing to make huge adjustments to your life to care for them and your spouse is doing the same. There is enormous satisfaction to be found in taking care of others, whether that be a spouse or a child. When you are in a relationship your opinion isn't the only one that matters. It doesn't mean your opinion doesn't matter but sometimes it does mean you'll need to put away your toys and do something for someone else. A real relationship requires both people to make some accommodations the the needs and desires of the other person. Given the self indulgent nonsense you are spouting it's probably a good thing that you aren't married. You certainly wouldn't remain married for long.
Geez, do you ask permission to change the radio station too?
You'll recognize offerings like WinRisk and SkiFree,
Umm, we will? I substantially predate Windows 3.1 and I never heard of those applications. Maybe they were a big thing in some circles but certainly nothing most of us would recognize.
First let me say that I block everything that I can, to the point of ignoring a lot of content on the net.
So what? Lots of people don't even know that is possible.
That's...not how HTML works. The user asked for the data, and they're gonna get it, hard.
First off, don't even begin to pretend that webpages these days consist of merely HTML. Second, there is absolutely NO reason why the web page serving up the data cannot ask if the person requesting wants stuff from these third parties and to explain who and what these third parties are. That is technologically trivial. The reason they don't is because they are acting in bad faith and trying to hide their shady activities.
tl/dr: it is absolutely your fault for getting raped.
So my grandmother is at fault for "getting raped" because she didn't have the technical chops to defend herself? Wow... just wow. That is a perfect example of the sort of idiotic blame-the-victim attitude that forced governments to step in. Relatively few people are the sort of uber-nerd who reads slashdot for fun. Privacy rules by necessity must be a sort of lowest common denominator thing.
Nuclear power: 500MW is considered a "small/compact" nuclear plant, costing about $1.5 billion with a footprint of a few acres with a lifetime of approx. 40 years.
A nuke plant will cost far more than what you are claiming. Costs currently are running between $5000-8000/KW. And that is just to build it - you didn't consider operating costs at all which are far more substantial for a nuke plant than a solar one. The waste disposal alone is a huge cost that doesn't exist with solar.
Why the hell are people investing in solar? The economics make absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Really? You can't figure this out? Solar has no failure modes that can render a location uninhabitable. Solar has no serious fuel waste disposal problem. Solar has no weapon proliferation risk. Solar is insurable by private companies rather than nation states. Solar doesn't require getting fuel from elsewhere. Frankly solar has quite a lot to recommend it over nuclear in many (though not all) cases. Nuclear has its advantages but let's not pretend that it doesn't have some very substantial drawbacks.
If Morocco is just across from Spain, why would Spain pay for the energy (i.e. cost of production, plus payoff of initial outlay, plus transportation, plus the company profits) rather than just build their own?
A good question and the answers are mostly fairly straightforward. In no particular order here is a non-exhaustive list of reasons why they might decide not to build their own. Not all of these might be the case here but all are possible. 1) If they build there own it might result in overcapacity which would make the economics not work 2) Spain isn't in great financial shape so the financing might be a problem 3) Exchange rate risk. Currently the Euro is relatively strong versus the Morrocan Dirham. This means that 1 Euro can buy relatively more KWh. 4) Cost of land might be significantly higher in Spain. Spain has about 5/7 the land area with about 4/3 the population. 5) Politics (need I say more?) 6) NIMBY
I think the whole advertising situation will get better once the tech bubble bursts.
You seem curiously convinced that A) we are in a bubble and B) that advertising will go away or "get better". You can't really know A for certain by definition because bubbles generally can only be identified in retrospect and B will never ever happen. It's unclear what "get better" means to you but I'm pretty sure whatever it is won't happen.
My prediction is that eventually the industry will fall apart as companies realise the ponzi nature of current advertising prices, and that much of this expenditure is not converting in to sales.
I think you don't understand the advertising business. You think that companies are naively throwing money at advertising because they don't know any better. While there are some out there where that is true for the most part buyers of advertising understand very well the relationship between advertising dollars spent and the returns they get. It's not at all hard to get a pretty solid idea of the correlation between ad spend and revenue.
At the moment, for people in the USA and Europe, NK is just an annoying abstract threat. Nobody wants to go start anything there because they could probably take out Seoul and parts of Japan quite easily, so it is better to just monitor the situation and leave them alone.
The main reason they get left alone is because of China. China protects NK even when they get completely out of pocket for reasons that are only vaguely comprehensible to us. Honestly if China wasn't involved I think NK would have been curb stomped by either the US or one of their neighbors some time ago. China props up the NK regime apparently primarily because they don't want to deal with the humanitarian crisis that would follow if the regime toppled. They also apparently don't want a unified and modern Korea with a border on China for strategic reasons.
Having said that, the guy sounds like a complete crackpot, so maybe he is just bored.
North Korea is on their third generation of crackpot absolute dictator. Hell, technically the Korean War never actually ended. There was an armistice but never an actual peace treaty.
Of the stories on the front page the only ones I wouldn't consider "news for nerds" would be the sexual misconduct case and the Jeep gearshift story.
Believe it or not there are other types of engineers here besides folks who program for a living. The jeep gearshift story is about an engineering/design screwup and personally I find it quite interesting. Judging by the number of comments so did others. That sort of story definitely fits slashdot and would have before Dice took over. Furthermore the motto of Slashdot is "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." Nerds come in many forms and I certainly am one but not of the IT variety. Stuff that Matters extends beyond IT.
I agree however that the stories seem to be more focused lately so that is a good thing in my opinion. Of course the number of comments is still WAY down from 10 years ago. Used to be that slashdot attracted a fairly elite technical crowd. That hasn't been the case for a few years now for the most part. I still find it interesting but not like I once did.
I log that shit cause those users are hitting my servers... why is it wrong for me to use that however data however I like?
Because you didn't ask the user. Did the user explicitly consent for you to track them? User tracking should be opt-in not opt-out.
IMO, if anyone should be dinged here, it's those sites that are embedding the trackers without notifying the user that they'll be sending the users browser off to umteen different external sites.
While I agree that doesn't absolve Facebook from their own responsibility.
Browsers can also be configured to aid with this. For example, the option "Block third-party cookies and site data", aka "from originating website only". I believe that used to be available for images as well.
Which is FAR too crude of a filter to be actually useful. Sometimes third party cookies are helpful. Most of the time they are not. A crude filter like that cannot determine the difference.
Users also have multiple options to control what the computer they own does online. For general browsing, solutions vary from browser plugins (AdBlock and friends), Proxy based solutions, hosts file modifications, local DNS server, firewalls, etc.
Really? You seriously think my grandmother is going to understand how to modify a host file? Privacy isn't something that should only be available to the technologically proficient.
Yes they do and in general the popular press is REALLY bad at science reporting. I've had a few direct interactions with science reporters for our local paper and holy cow they were a bunch of idiots. They mostly have NO training in the scientific method, their knowledge of technology and science is severely lacking, and they ask incredibly stupid questions and misunderstand the answers. Worse they often come in with an agenda about what they are going to report about and will twist any facts you give them to suit their narrative. The only exceptions I've run into is if you get one of the reporters for a big paper like the New York Times or (obviously) one of the actual science journals. But that's rare. Local TV news are the worst of them all. Bunch of borderline retarded talking heads them...
I used to work at a tech center where we had all sorts of cool machines. Lasers, rapid prototyping, CAE, engine dynos, virtual reality, etc. Very cool stuff and visually interesting too. So they wanted to take pictures which is great. One of these idiots points at the wall where he sees a bunch of blinking lights and asks what that machine does because he thinks it would be a cool picture. We gently mentioned that, ahem... our air conditioning control panel was about the least interesting thing in the building. The guy didn't even have the brains to act embarrassed.
Careful there. Some economists can very accurately be called scientists because they use the scientific method and economics is quite properly categorized as a social science. These economists establish hypothesis, build models, conduct experiments against these models, etc. That IS science. The fact that it relates to human interactions does not change that fact, nor does the fact that some of their research involves difficult to analyze phenomena. Now there are also economists whose work has little or nothing to do with the scientific method but you shouldn't paint with too broad of a brush.
Better to have parapsychologists than economists. At least the parapsychologists have a little bit of rigor in their discipline.
I'm guessing you don't actually know any real economists.
If those websites are so valueless, then why bother installing AdBlock in the first place?
If someone is going to offer something for free I'd be an idiot to not take advantage of it. However if it isn't something I'm willing to actually pay for then it obviously wasn't very important to me and I shouldn't mourn it disappearing. If a company wants to base their business model on ad revenue then I'm not going to cry for them if that doesn't work out well. Their bad business model is not my problem. If your customers are actively seeking to block your revenue source then you might consider the sustainability of your business.
You're evaluating whether this site is of value to you so you can choose whether to pay them money. In which case, a non-obnoxious ad seems kind of like a reasonable compromise.
Ads are not required for me to evaluate a product. If anything they detract from the product. I'm certainly not willing to allow an ad network to track me under any circumstances aside from them contacting me directly and paying me what I consider a reasonable (read very large) sum in cash to follow my activities across the web.
I do, as the person consuming that content.
What is valuable to you does not mean it is valuable to me. They don't deserve compensation unless they are providing me actual value. The mere fact that they put it out there doesn't mean they deserve a single penny from me unless *I* find it valuable. There are some content makers that provide content I find worth paying.
I want services like Google to exist.
There are versions of most things Google offers that are available without ad support. My consumption of ads is not required for the continued existence of these services.
Slashdot Mirror
More government intervention, because consumers ARE STUPID. Plug all your stupid wall warts into a power strip, when you get done charging, turn off the power strip. Idiots...now another stupid regulation.
So I should waste my time monitoring devices that were designed poorly in the first place? THAT is stupid. If we need a regulation to get companies to design products that aren't needlessly wasteful then so be it. Fixing market failures is actually a good use of government.
they have been materials that only allow the movement of N-type, or negative, electrons. In order to create an electronic device, however, you need semiconductor material that allows the movement of both negative electrons and positive charges known as "holes."
Captain pedantic here. Electron holes are not positive charges. They are the absence of an electron in a lattice where one could exist. This "hole" can be treated for convenience and practicality like a positively charged particle but that isn't technically the same thing.
Where outside of China are you going to find the components and the equipment to repair any of these electronics, anyway?
Umm, you can buy things from China. If you need proof of this please visit your local Walmart.
Everything's microsoldered to a circuit board the size of a credit card, and the tiniest slip of your all-too-human hands and you've ruined a trace on a different circuit.
The practicality of actually doing a repair or modification is not relevant to whether or not one should have the right to attempt the repair or modification. Those are separate issues.
Why is it that so much malware and online crime comes from Russia?
You could ask the same question about any large country including the United States. Russia in particular has a bit of the wild west going on and I think the authorities there might turn a blind eye if it negatively impacts rival countries.
The country simply refuses to police themselves, even when things are obviously illegal.
You mean like how in the US we have police straight up murdering black people without repercussions? Or how the NSA blatantly violates the constitution? Or how we imprison people in Cuba indefinitely without any trial? Yeah, Russia has some problems but it's not like our poop lacks odor...
I'd support sanctioning Putin directly to prevent him from entering the EU.
Umm, are you aware that Russia supplies much of the EU with huge amounts of oil and gas that cannot be gotten elsewhere quickly? All Putin has to do is shut off a key pipeline or two (which he has done a few times) and it gets awfully cold really fast in some parts of the EU. Furthermore actions like what you suggest are frankly kind of a juvenile response. Putin might be behind all of it (he isn't) but keeping the head of state of Russia arbitrarily out would accomplish very little and would actually do more harm than good in all likelihood.
Cutting Russia off from the internet to the best of our ability is really the only way to stop the excessive crime from that country.
No it really wouldn't.
Prestigious investment banks don't get fined $5 billion for ripping off their customers.
Sure they do. You may not admire them and I get that, but Goldman Sachs is very well respected in many circles and has been for a very long time. GS is as prestigious an investment bank as exists. The fact that they are two timing scumbags who would sell their own mother up the river strangely does not seem to affect their status much.
It's no different than the folks here who dislike Apple or Google. They are still well regarded companies even though you can easily make an argument that their behavior has been less than honorable at times. Some like them and some don't and both side have a valid point.
What the fuck does a bank know about VR, AR, and tech trends?
Plenty in all likelihood. First of this is Goldman Sachs which is decidedly NOT a bank in the sense you are implying. Investment banking involves a lot more than just taking deposits and paying interest. Goldman Sachs is arguably the best investment banking firm out there. The people working at GS are VERY smart and clued in and while they might lie to you to make a buck (like here in all probability), they aren't dumb and for the most part they do know what they are talking about. GS has tech guys and analysts that are better than most of the people who read slashdot. I know a few personally and they are anything but clueless.
Now here is the thing. You have to ask WHY they are spouting off seeming nonsense. Remember that investment banking is basically the business of selling financial instruments. So odds are they are trying to convince someone to buy something by using overly rosy claims about the future prospects of the industry. VR will absolutely not be a $90B industry. There simply aren't enough use cases. It will be a useful niche but not much more. Augmented Reality might one day be but that day is a fair ways off unless you use a very broad definition of AR.
They're eons behind on tech.. probably still running COBOL servers.
You're saying the banks are behind on tech when you don't even know what the banks do or how they operate. You are regurgitating some old tripe about how they have old servers running and implying that is somehow representative of their tech prowess. Yes some banks have some very old (and very reliable) code running. That isn't the majority of their IT infrastructure nor does it follow that because of a bit of old code that they are behind on tech. They're actually pretty darn tech savvy and they have to be to compete these days. If you are going to critique banks (and there is plenty to critique) then at least get yourself clued in so you don't sound ignorant.
To be fair, the decision of when to make the final throw in a game is based on reading the clock before the throw while for most of the game there's nothing particularly interesting happening when the clock runs out.
Those earlier decisions matter just as much as the ones at the end. The fact that they are to some degree contingent decisions does not change the fact that early decisions have just as much impact as later ones. A basket scored 20 seconds into the game counts just the same as one scored at the end of the game.
The exact instant the clock is started generally has no bearing on win/loss or even goal/no goal.
The exact instance the clock is started has a VERY direct bearing on when it stops and as such it can have a bearing on the outcome in a close game.
Doesn't always work. My freshman/sophomore year of HS our 215 won state both years and only lost 1 match each year. In both cases he lost by his opponent scoring quick then stalling out the rest of the match without the official calling it.
You're missing the point. He didn't put enough points up so his opponent won. Whether or not the official called stalling is irrelevant. You can't depend on him doing that. You CAN depend on what you do and nothing else. Stalling in wrestling is almost entirely subjective so you cannot depend on it being called ever. Not for you or against you. It simply means your 215 didn't do enough to get the job done. Watch the wrestlers from the University of Iowa sometime, particularly Brent Metcalf. You will NEVER hear them say they were robbed even if they were. They will simply say they didn't do enough to get the job done and the responsibility is theirs and theirs alone.
Our coach would simply send me out to take the forfeit at 215 and use our guy to wrestle the other 215 in the heavyweight slot. I got enough wins to letter but they didn't count them because I didn't actually wrestle the matches. I got robbed.
Taking a forfeit is meaningless. It isn't a win because there wasn't an opponent. Unless you got your hand raised because you beat an actual wrestler then why should that count for anything? If you weren't good enough to crack the starting line up and all you did was take forfeits then you weren't robbed of anything because you didn't actually earn anything.
The stacked errors should have impacted both teams equally (generally speaking) since it was a "constant" factor (same human performing the same error)
In theory you should be right provided there is a large enough sample size. In reality it is VERY unlikely that it would work out equally balanced at the end of the game. It's not going to be a perfect bell curve with both sides equal. I used to do a lot of statistical simulation and real world outcomes very rarely match perfectly with models.
I would put cash money on a bet that if you added up the over and under on the clock stoppages you wouldn't come out to zero at the end of the game. In fact I would be surprised if you weren't off by a fairly significant amount, probably well over a second. I would guess that it would tend to skew late because the guy running the clock has to react to the whistle being blown and can't start the clock until certain actions occur. I could be wrong but I doubt it.
If you don't want to the outcome of the game to be determined by referees and shot clocks, then you need to put enough points on board so that there's no doubt that you've won.
I coach a wrestling team and that is more or less exactly what I tell my team. If you don't put enough points on the board then you risk having the referee decided the match in a way not favorable to you. If that happens you have no one to blame but yourself. We insist on accountability and no whining. If it doesn't go our way we own it and figure out how to make sure we do better next time. If a bad call is made it is my job as the coach to try to get things set right but at the end of the day the goal is to leave no doubt as to the outcome even in the fact of bad calls.
In the NFL the coaches can call for a video review of the spot but not the measurement.
Only the NFL and maybe a few big Division 1 conferences have the resources to make that feasible. And most of the time it doesn't really matter much to be honest. But the technology exists to make it very exact - they elect not to use it for practical an economic reasons.
It's kind of a silly discussion because the clock is started and stopped by humans throughout the game. So even if an error was made here by some fraction of a second, there have to be numerous other errors throughout the rest of the game which aren't being considered with equal scrutiny. So yeah a timing error probably did cost one team the game but unless you go back across the entire game you'll never know which team got screwed by the timer.
It's like in football where the referee rather arbitrarily places the ball but then they measure it to the inch to see if they got a first down. The problem is with the spot, not with the measurement.
No, I"m not...I do NOT want kids.
I don't have kids and I'm married. Have been for a long time. The decision to be married has nothing to do with whether or not you want kids. My wife and I have been together for almost 20 years and we go back another 10 before that. Our decision to get married had nothing to do with children at all.
Therefore, there is no reason to get married, and risk losing half of what I own whenever I decide I want to move on to a different woman.
So A) you've apparently never heard of a pre-nuptial agreement and B) you are apparently a selfish little boy who thinks that women exist merely to service your desires.
Yes, I say, grow a pair....women don't respect you if you don't assert yourself, show confidence, and show that you know (or at least project that you know) what you want in life.
You don't date much I'm guessing or if you do you probably get dumped a lot for being an ass. Son, let me let you in on a little secret. If you get married you aren't doing it for you. You do it because someone else matters so much to you that you are willing to make huge adjustments to your life to care for them and your spouse is doing the same. There is enormous satisfaction to be found in taking care of others, whether that be a spouse or a child. When you are in a relationship your opinion isn't the only one that matters. It doesn't mean your opinion doesn't matter but sometimes it does mean you'll need to put away your toys and do something for someone else. A real relationship requires both people to make some accommodations the the needs and desires of the other person. Given the self indulgent nonsense you are spouting it's probably a good thing that you aren't married. You certainly wouldn't remain married for long.
Geez, do you ask permission to change the radio station too?
Grow up little boy.
You'll recognize offerings like WinRisk and SkiFree,
Umm, we will? I substantially predate Windows 3.1 and I never heard of those applications. Maybe they were a big thing in some circles but certainly nothing most of us would recognize.
You aren't married are you? Anyone who is married is laughing at your naivety right now. (Including me)
First let me say that I block everything that I can, to the point of ignoring a lot of content on the net.
So what? Lots of people don't even know that is possible.
That's...not how HTML works. The user asked for the data, and they're gonna get it, hard.
First off, don't even begin to pretend that webpages these days consist of merely HTML. Second, there is absolutely NO reason why the web page serving up the data cannot ask if the person requesting wants stuff from these third parties and to explain who and what these third parties are. That is technologically trivial. The reason they don't is because they are acting in bad faith and trying to hide their shady activities.
tl/dr: it is absolutely your fault for getting raped.
So my grandmother is at fault for "getting raped" because she didn't have the technical chops to defend herself? Wow... just wow. That is a perfect example of the sort of idiotic blame-the-victim attitude that forced governments to step in. Relatively few people are the sort of uber-nerd who reads slashdot for fun. Privacy rules by necessity must be a sort of lowest common denominator thing.
Nuclear power: 500MW is considered a "small/compact" nuclear plant, costing about $1.5 billion with a footprint of a few acres with a lifetime of approx. 40 years.
A nuke plant will cost far more than what you are claiming. Costs currently are running between $5000-8000/KW. And that is just to build it - you didn't consider operating costs at all which are far more substantial for a nuke plant than a solar one. The waste disposal alone is a huge cost that doesn't exist with solar.
Why the hell are people investing in solar? The economics make absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Really? You can't figure this out? Solar has no failure modes that can render a location uninhabitable. Solar has no serious fuel waste disposal problem. Solar has no weapon proliferation risk. Solar is insurable by private companies rather than nation states. Solar doesn't require getting fuel from elsewhere. Frankly solar has quite a lot to recommend it over nuclear in many (though not all) cases. Nuclear has its advantages but let's not pretend that it doesn't have some very substantial drawbacks.
If Morocco is just across from Spain, why would Spain pay for the energy (i.e. cost of production, plus payoff of initial outlay, plus transportation, plus the company profits) rather than just build their own?
A good question and the answers are mostly fairly straightforward. In no particular order here is a non-exhaustive list of reasons why they might decide not to build their own. Not all of these might be the case here but all are possible.
1) If they build there own it might result in overcapacity which would make the economics not work
2) Spain isn't in great financial shape so the financing might be a problem
3) Exchange rate risk. Currently the Euro is relatively strong versus the Morrocan Dirham. This means that 1 Euro can buy relatively more KWh.
4) Cost of land might be significantly higher in Spain. Spain has about 5/7 the land area with about 4/3 the population.
5) Politics (need I say more?)
6) NIMBY
I think the whole advertising situation will get better once the tech bubble bursts.
You seem curiously convinced that A) we are in a bubble and B) that advertising will go away or "get better". You can't really know A for certain by definition because bubbles generally can only be identified in retrospect and B will never ever happen. It's unclear what "get better" means to you but I'm pretty sure whatever it is won't happen.
My prediction is that eventually the industry will fall apart as companies realise the ponzi nature of current advertising prices, and that much of this expenditure is not converting in to sales.
I think you don't understand the advertising business. You think that companies are naively throwing money at advertising because they don't know any better. While there are some out there where that is true for the most part buyers of advertising understand very well the relationship between advertising dollars spent and the returns they get. It's not at all hard to get a pretty solid idea of the correlation between ad spend and revenue.
At the moment, for people in the USA and Europe, NK is just an annoying abstract threat. Nobody wants to go start anything there because they could probably take out Seoul and parts of Japan quite easily, so it is better to just monitor the situation and leave them alone.
The main reason they get left alone is because of China. China protects NK even when they get completely out of pocket for reasons that are only vaguely comprehensible to us. Honestly if China wasn't involved I think NK would have been curb stomped by either the US or one of their neighbors some time ago. China props up the NK regime apparently primarily because they don't want to deal with the humanitarian crisis that would follow if the regime toppled. They also apparently don't want a unified and modern Korea with a border on China for strategic reasons.
Having said that, the guy sounds like a complete crackpot, so maybe he is just bored.
North Korea is on their third generation of crackpot absolute dictator. Hell, technically the Korean War never actually ended. There was an armistice but never an actual peace treaty.
Of the stories on the front page the only ones I wouldn't consider "news for nerds" would be the sexual misconduct case and the Jeep gearshift story.
Believe it or not there are other types of engineers here besides folks who program for a living. The jeep gearshift story is about an engineering/design screwup and personally I find it quite interesting. Judging by the number of comments so did others. That sort of story definitely fits slashdot and would have before Dice took over. Furthermore the motto of Slashdot is "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." Nerds come in many forms and I certainly am one but not of the IT variety. Stuff that Matters extends beyond IT.
I agree however that the stories seem to be more focused lately so that is a good thing in my opinion. Of course the number of comments is still WAY down from 10 years ago. Used to be that slashdot attracted a fairly elite technical crowd. That hasn't been the case for a few years now for the most part. I still find it interesting but not like I once did.
I log that shit cause those users are hitting my servers ... why is it wrong for me to use that however data however I like?
Because you didn't ask the user. Did the user explicitly consent for you to track them? User tracking should be opt-in not opt-out.
IMO, if anyone should be dinged here, it's those sites that are embedding the trackers without notifying the user that they'll be sending the users browser off to umteen different external sites.
While I agree that doesn't absolve Facebook from their own responsibility.
Browsers can also be configured to aid with this. For example, the option "Block third-party cookies and site data", aka "from originating website only". I believe that used to be available for images as well.
Which is FAR too crude of a filter to be actually useful. Sometimes third party cookies are helpful. Most of the time they are not. A crude filter like that cannot determine the difference.
Users also have multiple options to control what the computer they own does online. For general browsing, solutions vary from browser plugins (AdBlock and friends), Proxy based solutions, hosts file modifications, local DNS server, firewalls, etc.
Really? You seriously think my grandmother is going to understand how to modify a host file? Privacy isn't something that should only be available to the technologically proficient.
But the press likes disaster stories.
Yes they do and in general the popular press is REALLY bad at science reporting. I've had a few direct interactions with science reporters for our local paper and holy cow they were a bunch of idiots. They mostly have NO training in the scientific method, their knowledge of technology and science is severely lacking, and they ask incredibly stupid questions and misunderstand the answers. Worse they often come in with an agenda about what they are going to report about and will twist any facts you give them to suit their narrative. The only exceptions I've run into is if you get one of the reporters for a big paper like the New York Times or (obviously) one of the actual science journals. But that's rare. Local TV news are the worst of them all. Bunch of borderline retarded talking heads them...
I used to work at a tech center where we had all sorts of cool machines. Lasers, rapid prototyping, CAE, engine dynos, virtual reality, etc. Very cool stuff and visually interesting too. So they wanted to take pictures which is great. One of these idiots points at the wall where he sees a bunch of blinking lights and asks what that machine does because he thinks it would be a cool picture. We gently mentioned that, ahem... our air conditioning control panel was about the least interesting thing in the building. The guy didn't even have the brains to act embarrassed.
Economists are not scientists.
Careful there. Some economists can very accurately be called scientists because they use the scientific method and economics is quite properly categorized as a social science. These economists establish hypothesis, build models, conduct experiments against these models, etc. That IS science. The fact that it relates to human interactions does not change that fact, nor does the fact that some of their research involves difficult to analyze phenomena. Now there are also economists whose work has little or nothing to do with the scientific method but you shouldn't paint with too broad of a brush.
Better to have parapsychologists than economists. At least the parapsychologists have a little bit of rigor in their discipline.
I'm guessing you don't actually know any real economists.
If those websites are so valueless, then why bother installing AdBlock in the first place?
If someone is going to offer something for free I'd be an idiot to not take advantage of it. However if it isn't something I'm willing to actually pay for then it obviously wasn't very important to me and I shouldn't mourn it disappearing. If a company wants to base their business model on ad revenue then I'm not going to cry for them if that doesn't work out well. Their bad business model is not my problem. If your customers are actively seeking to block your revenue source then you might consider the sustainability of your business.
You're evaluating whether this site is of value to you so you can choose whether to pay them money. In which case, a non-obnoxious ad seems kind of like a reasonable compromise.
Ads are not required for me to evaluate a product. If anything they detract from the product. I'm certainly not willing to allow an ad network to track me under any circumstances aside from them contacting me directly and paying me what I consider a reasonable (read very large) sum in cash to follow my activities across the web.
I do, as the person consuming that content.
What is valuable to you does not mean it is valuable to me. They don't deserve compensation unless they are providing me actual value. The mere fact that they put it out there doesn't mean they deserve a single penny from me unless *I* find it valuable. There are some content makers that provide content I find worth paying.
I want services like Google to exist.
There are versions of most things Google offers that are available without ad support. My consumption of ads is not required for the continued existence of these services.