...for a competitive industry. Take a micro-economics course and they'll tell you all about it. In a very competitive industry in the long run no one makes large profits because they all get competed away.
While the movie industry isn't perfectly competitive, it sure isn't anything resembling a monopoly. (despite the MPAA cartel on distribution, that's a different kettle of fish than the studios...) It doesn't really surprise me that a lot of studios are having trouble making money because they have little sustainable competitive advantage. Sure they make money (in the short run) on some hit films, but that isn't a sustainable revenue stream in most cases. Even the most successful movies revenue streams (theater + video + merchandising) taper off over time. So they have to keep inventing new movies to make money which means the industry is very competitive. It's very hard to make money in a very competitive industry.
Some of the Star D^HTrek movies The Addams Family Charlie's Angles Mission Impossible The Fugitive Some of the Saturday Night Live skits (ok just 1-2) Dragnet The Untouchables
saying "monopolize a marketplace" is a bit redudant...
Apple has a "monopoly" on Apple Computers, but not in the legal/antitrust meaning of the word, like MS.
Good point but that is a marketplace, albeit not in the sense it usually is used. I think my pedantic point stands. Reductionist to the point of absurdity, but true.
What MS got in trouble for was monpolizing a marketplace. They used relativly shady business practices to get to a monopoly position in the PC industry, and then continued to use those practicies to maintain a monopoly.
I feel compelled to point out that saying "monopolize a marketplace" is a bit redudant (what else does a company monopolize?) and not what got MS into trouble. (That's a bit pedantic I realize and I apologize in advance for pointing that out as I have. I don't mean to be insulting)
Specifically MS got in trouble over the practice of predatory bundling. Bundling is a common business practice used daily by a wide variety of businesses. Think of it as the practice of creating a combo platter at a resturant. They put together a few separate food items and sell them to you for less money than the whole. This entices some price sensitive customers who might not have one of the products individually to purchase the bundle. Increases revenue for the company and increases value to the customer. Everyone is happy. Normal, common, legal and even good.
The problem is that it is illegal to bundle in some cases (in the US) if a company is a monopoly. This is because for a monopoly one major purpose of bundling is to leverage into new markets. Everyone needs an operating system on their computer and most folks use Windows. MS had/has a monopoly in operating systems. They did not have a monopoly on web browsers and competed with Netscape. Suddenly MS bundles their browser with the OS (without increasing the price accordingly or offering an alternative OS without a browser for less) and most rational consumers decided that it was better to not pay for a browser. Netscapes revenues dried up quickly afterwards. As a monopolist MS used predatory bundling to enter and dominate a market. This practice is clearly illegal under US law and MS was subsequently convicted in federal court. Interestingly had Netscape bundled an operating system with their browser (say their own version of linux) that would have been perfectly legal because Netscape was not a monopoly.
There is nothing wrong (legally speaking) with MS having a monopoly and acting to maintain that monopoly. But being a monopoly does restrict them from certain business (predatory bundling being one) which tend to hurt consumer choice. I don't like MS as a company any more than most folks here but their monopoly power isn't by itself illegal, nor should it be. Monopolies aren't inherently bad, just dangerous and need to be controlled in certain ways.
It's like a thinkpad, only cheaper, custom configured, and a hell of a lot easier to install linux on.
Cheaper both in cost and in quality. I happen to be typing on a Thinkpad T30 with Ultranav (both the trackpoint and pad). Most of the folks I work with have Dell laptops of one form or another, usually Inspiron 8200s, so I get to work on them regularly. The Thinkpads have a notably higher build quality. Less plasticy feel, superior layout, and of course nobody does keyboards better than IBM. IBM's ultrabay is slick, and there are just a bunch of little touches, like the keyboard light, that make it very nice to use. Don't get me wrong, the Dell machines are fine and great on cost/performance. But they just aren't as nice to use.
Oh, and you can get a Thinkpad custom configured too. Slightly different options and Dell's process is a tad slicker & more flexible but functionally both companies can do the custom configuration thing. And thinkpads ain't so bad to install linux on. Most laptops are a bit of a pain but it's not horrible anymore. (usually anyway)
I've been slightly annoyed by this behavior, though you can work around it pretty easily. Mozilla to the last tab you were in so I just usually open a new tab (hit Ctrl-T) and then do the link. An annoying extra step I'll concur but I think if that is the only thing holding you back work around it. Mozilla has too much OSS goodness to let something so small ruin it for you.:-)
Mozilla is fast. It just is. I really don't quite comprehend what is going on with the systems of the people who are complaining about Mozilla's speed. I suspect many of them haven't even really tried it recently. I've been using Mozilla daily on a variety of machines and a variety of operating systems without any speed problems at all for well over a year now. Hell, even my wife doesn't complain and she's much less tolerant of computer problems than I am.
In the last 3 years I've spent copious time on 1Ghz Athlon (Mandrake Linux & Win2000), a 300Mhz Thinkpad 700 (Win2000), and an SGI Octane SSE (250Mhz). Only the athlon would be considered even moderately fast by today's standards. All have adequate amounts of RAM (256M+) but are otherwise unremarkable. Mozilla was/is my daily browser on each of them. And it is fast. Faster than IE 5.5 & 6 and faster than Netscape 4.7. And certainly more than fast enough for daily use. Never mattered what OS I used, at least after about version 0.92. It has and continues to work great.
Except in cases where folks are stuck with a very old machine I don't know what they are complaining about. (Mozilla does take some resources so it's a *bit* much for a P90 with 64M of RAM) Opera has a lighter footprint and no question is a bit faster and if it suits one's needs that's great. But mozilla doesn't have a speed problem that I can see on anything vaguely resembling modern hardware.
Having a cellphone ring where people generally expect quiet is just rude. Not worthy of lawmaking. Just rude, especially in theaters. But the problem can be easily solved by the management of those establishments. Cell phone rings in innapproriate place, management asks the rude person to leave. They are perfectly within their rights to do so as long as they make it clear that this will happen in advance.
Using them while driving is a bigger problem which actually might be worthy of a law since it is actually dangerous and irresponsible on the same level as drunken driving.
That said I've never quite understood why people think talking on the phone is rude in a resturant unless it is one of those places where the conversation is relatively quiet. I mean the main reason I know most people go to the resturant is to socialize and they might be rude to their guests by talking on the phone but if I'm sitting at another table, what do I care unless they are somehow interfering with my meal? Maybe I'm just not bothered by that particular instance much.
I've seen a number of posts talking about how people get calls (and shockingly, answer them) in classes. There is an easy solution for this. If I were the teacher, there would be an immediate quiz. Not just any quiz, one that most of the class would be likely to fail. And I would tell the whole class right at the beginning of the semester that there would be one of these nasty quizzes everytime I heard a cell phone ring. (if I was feeling especially evil I'd take the results into account *after* any curving was done to grades) And then I'd just let peer pressure do its thing. Somehow I think folks would get the hint.
4) All part of training to make Americans bigger. Bigger food=bigger people, right? We'll be able to take over the world once all Americans are 11 feet tall, and everyone else averages 5'11".
More like 11 feet wide and unable to squeeze through the front door more likely...
Droid: "We only have small, large and extra large"
I don't eat at fast food places often I've had this conversation way too often at pizza and fast food joints. It's the most retarded thing I've ever heard. If I say I want a medium, that means I want the middle sized whatever it is. (Never mind the incredible lack of logic in having three sizes and not calling the middle sized one medium...) But no, these morons can't deal with that.
And yes if I saw "Large" on my receipt without any explanation after ordering a medium I'd yell at them. And they would deserve it for having such a stupid setup. I don't care about their marketing problems. Not my concern. If you are going to have a stupid sales setup, expect the fallout.
But then for any particular scale N, the word "tactics" becomes just a pseudonym for "the strategy of N-1, the scale one smaller that the one I'm paying attention to." Which is tactic and which is strategy depends on what level of depth the speaker is talking about.
In an overly reductionist sort of way, yes. But the difference isn't a matter of "depth" but rather one of function. Tactics are the detailed plans that make an strategy work. One can concentrate on tactics just as much strategy, (this is the old "seeing the forest from the trees" problem) but ultimately you need both. At some levels stragegy can become tactics and vice-versa depending on what level you are looking at a problem from.
There is a trite (but true) old saying that amateurs study tactics while professionals study strategy. Think of it in a programming context. What makes a good programmer is not simply having memorized each of the commands, but having an overall framework in which to utilize them. Knowing some C++ is useless unless you also understand the concepts behind object-oriented programming. However knowing all the concepts is useless without some method (pun unintended) to implement them.
What I would really like to see is a RTS (and shouldn't these games be called Real Time Tactics, the scale is a bit small to really be called "strategy" in the military sense) of WWII's Pacific theater...
The difference between strategy and tactics has little to do with scale. They are very different concepts.
Strategy is a game plan. It's how you intend to accomplish some goal. (i.e. I plan to use airstrikes to cripple my opponent's tanks before sending in the ground troops) Strategy doesn't necessarily imply that it is military either. Business has strategy. Sports have strategy. Strategy is just an approach to a problem.
Tactics on the other hand are the actual methods used to carry out a strategy. (i.e. The F-15's fly X route through the mountains dropping their bombs in Y location) Tactics are the details. The precise method by which you carry out each part of the overall strategy.
Strategy and Tactics go hand in hand but scale really isn't what defines them. They are separate parts of a solution process. Calling the games RTS games is fine and correct, even though every game has strategy to some degree. Even kill-everything games like Quake have strategy, just not especially deep ones most of the time.
OK, someone explain the popularity of this book to me. I'm serious. I read it a few years back and while it was a vaguely entertaining and had a few interesting ideas it didn't strike me as this masterpiece it keeps getting made out to be. To me it seemed to crib a lot from William Gibson with a slightly more polished feel. I do like some of Stephenson's work but Snow Crash just never impressed me much. What am I missing?
No major reason to switch? Hah! Here's just a few reasons why I use Mozilla instead of IE.
Tabbed Browsing. Don't know how I lived without it.
Fine grained cookie blocking/control
Image (read ad) blocking
Free as in beer and speech
Cross platform. Some folks use more than Windows ya know?
Popup blocking. 'Nuff said.
Skinnable. Don't like the look? Change it.
Security. Lack of integration with other MS products is a good thing.
Fast. In my experience Mozilla (Gecko) is faster than IE most of the time on Windows. And rarely is is slower. Plus did I mention it's cross-platform?
And that's just off the top of my head. While any one might not be enough all of them together are pretty compelling.
I thought the review wasn't especially well done and there was some functionality the reviewer obviously didn't explore thoroughly. (tabbed browsing comes to mind) I can't for the life of me figure out what he means by IE being more "polished". He rightly points out that installing plugins is more of a pain than it should be but most of the rest of navigator is no worse than IE from a "polish" standpoint. Not that I can see anyway. I suppose there is some wiggle room for personal preferences but the differences aren't huge.
I don't mean to be flamed for this (although I know I will be), but USA is a democracy right?
*pedantic mode on* No. The USA is not and never has been a democracy. The USA is a republic. Huge difference.
From Websters republic - a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officcers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law.
*pedantic mode off*
We elect the officials and they create the laws. While they are ultimately answerable to us in the form of elections, they do not have to do everything we tell them to. In practice things work out pretty well generally. But it isn't a perfect system and only fools pretend it is.
There is plenty of room in the system (for better or worse) for our government to do things that aren't necessarily in the interests, perceived or real, of the populace at large. Sometimes that's good, often it isn't. In this case, the FCC has a history of catering to the interests of a small group of people. Hence I (like others) am dubious that they will suddenly decide to do the Right Thing, or even the popular thing. Overall, the US government is pretty good. I'd say one of the best even. But parts of it are very broken and no one is contradicting themselves by pointing out where.
OK, I clicked all your links while running Mozilla 1.0.
Still waiting for the popups to appear...
Still waiting...
Tap, Tap, Tap, Tap
Ahh, screw it. I've got better things to do that wait for a popup window that will never come.
Seriously I never see popup, popunder or any other kind of windows I don't request under Mozilla. I have each of the following items unchecked:
Open unrequested windows
Open a link in a new window
Move or resize existing windows
Raise or lower windows
Change status bar text.
The rest I leave as is because they are useful. I also have cookies and images blocked from most anyone who is likely to be ad related, including doubleclick and the like. Certain less offensive sites don't get blocked. (slashdot for one) I also block cookies from any site I do not have a direct business relationship or account with. (I can always unblock them later if I need to) End result is that I have a fast and largely annoyance free web experience.
A singularity is a feature of a graph. Now, I'm as rational-reductionist as the next geek, but reducing all of human progress to a graph reduces reductionism to the riduclous!
You have obviously never had to give a presentation to upper management. They are a peculiar species, unable to understand words. They can only be communicated to in a very limiting fashion via colored 3d graphs and charts. Unfortunately most of the important information is lost in the translation...
I guess I wasn't clear. All I meant was that you need more than a pocket calculator. (though that's getting less true all the time) Hence I said a "reasonable" amount of computing power. Of course when I was working on problems like this, a 386 was still a fairly fast computer.
Ugh. I feel old now. I'm gonna go eat some bran or something...
You're right in that we (so far) cannot solve (in the sense of a mathematical proof) a 3 body problem using nice neat equations like we can for 2 body problems. However it is possible to calculate a trajectory and has been for some time. Takes a reasonably large amount of computing horsepower and a good idea of the initial conditions but a useful approximation can be calculated. Not an elegant or exact method but does work.
You're right that there is some good stuff on TV, but I think that misses the point the original poster was making. I technically have a TV, but not cable so it's almost the same thing as far as I'm concerned. (HHOS) I think he was trying to say that if you miss a few episodes of the Simpsons, it will be ok.
My wife made a good point about this a while back. If I spend an hour or an evening watching TV, I can almost never remember what I did with that day. However if I work on the house, read something (even slashdot), workout, or go to a nice resturant, I remember it much more vividly. I'm not wonderful for watching very little TV, but I do get a heck of a lot more done. I think my life is more full when TV is an activity I choose rather than the default. YMMV.
Besides, when I watch I have a hard time turning it off, even if there is nothing on. Channel surfing is addictive.
You're mistaking the population of Boston city proper (which is close to your quoted figure) with the size of the Boston metropolitan area. The metro area, which is the effective size of the city since Boston proper is landwise fairly small, is around 3 million as of 1990. Boston has been trying to correct at least some of their traffic problems with the big dig.
For comparison London has around 7 million people in the city proper and around 12 million in the metro area. Definitely more crowded, but then so is England overall so this should not be especially surprising.
Paying to have thousands upon thousands of miles of road remarked with new signs would be prohibitively expensive.
Pul-leeze. "Prohibitively expensive"? The US is the richest country in the world. Going by GNP there isn't even a close second. There is very little question the US could afford to do it. Would it be expensive? Sure. But it could easily be done. The only reason we don't is because we have a bunch of troglodytes running who (correctly) realize that even though converting to SI has advantages, the current system actually does work fine. Don't get me wrong, I'd love for the US to go metric but it isn't going to happen anytime soon. There is no compelling polital need or will to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
...for a competitive industry. Take a micro-economics course and they'll tell you all about it. In a very competitive industry in the long run no one makes large profits because they all get competed away.
While the movie industry isn't perfectly competitive, it sure isn't anything resembling a monopoly. (despite the MPAA cartel on distribution, that's a different kettle of fish than the studios...) It doesn't really surprise me that a lot of studios are having trouble making money because they have little sustainable competitive advantage. Sure they make money (in the short run) on some hit films, but that isn't a sustainable revenue stream in most cases. Even the most successful movies revenue streams (theater + video + merchandising) taper off over time. So they have to keep inventing new movies to make money which means the industry is very competitive. It's very hard to make money in a very competitive industry.
I can burn my genes on the stove for free. Heck I can burn my jeans too while I'm at it.
Some of the Star D^HTrek movies
The Addams Family
Charlie's Angles
Mission Impossible
The Fugitive
Some of the Saturday Night Live skits (ok just 1-2)
Dragnet
The Untouchables
saying "monopolize a marketplace" is a bit redudant...
Apple has a "monopoly" on Apple Computers, but not in the legal/antitrust meaning of the word, like MS.
Good point but that is a marketplace, albeit not in the sense it usually is used. I think my pedantic point stands. Reductionist to the point of absurdity, but true.
What MS got in trouble for was monpolizing a marketplace. They used relativly shady business practices to get to a monopoly position in the PC industry, and then continued to use those practicies to maintain a monopoly.
I feel compelled to point out that saying "monopolize a marketplace" is a bit redudant (what else does a company monopolize?) and not what got MS into trouble. (That's a bit pedantic I realize and I apologize in advance for pointing that out as I have. I don't mean to be insulting)
Specifically MS got in trouble over the practice of predatory bundling. Bundling is a common business practice used daily by a wide variety of businesses. Think of it as the practice of creating a combo platter at a resturant. They put together a few separate food items and sell them to you for less money than the whole. This entices some price sensitive customers who might not have one of the products individually to purchase the bundle. Increases revenue for the company and increases value to the customer. Everyone is happy. Normal, common, legal and even good.
The problem is that it is illegal to bundle in some cases (in the US) if a company is a monopoly. This is because for a monopoly one major purpose of bundling is to leverage into new markets. Everyone needs an operating system on their computer and most folks use Windows. MS had/has a monopoly in operating systems. They did not have a monopoly on web browsers and competed with Netscape. Suddenly MS bundles their browser with the OS (without increasing the price accordingly or offering an alternative OS without a browser for less) and most rational consumers decided that it was better to not pay for a browser. Netscapes revenues dried up quickly afterwards. As a monopolist MS used predatory bundling to enter and dominate a market. This practice is clearly illegal under US law and MS was subsequently convicted in federal court. Interestingly had Netscape bundled an operating system with their browser (say their own version of linux) that would have been perfectly legal because Netscape was not a monopoly.
There is nothing wrong (legally speaking) with MS having a monopoly and acting to maintain that monopoly. But being a monopoly does restrict them from certain business (predatory bundling being one) which tend to hurt consumer choice. I don't like MS as a company any more than most folks here but their monopoly power isn't by itself illegal, nor should it be. Monopolies aren't inherently bad, just dangerous and need to be controlled in certain ways.
It's like a thinkpad, only cheaper, custom configured, and a hell of a lot easier to install linux on.
Cheaper both in cost and in quality. I happen to be typing on a Thinkpad T30 with Ultranav (both the trackpoint and pad). Most of the folks I work with have Dell laptops of one form or another, usually Inspiron 8200s, so I get to work on them regularly. The Thinkpads have a notably higher build quality. Less plasticy feel, superior layout, and of course nobody does keyboards better than IBM. IBM's ultrabay is slick, and there are just a bunch of little touches, like the keyboard light, that make it very nice to use. Don't get me wrong, the Dell machines are fine and great on cost/performance. But they just aren't as nice to use.
Oh, and you can get a Thinkpad custom configured too. Slightly different options and Dell's process is a tad slicker & more flexible but functionally both companies can do the custom configuration thing. And thinkpads ain't so bad to install linux on. Most laptops are a bit of a pain but it's not horrible anymore. (usually anyway)
I've been slightly annoyed by this behavior, though you can work around it pretty easily. Mozilla to the last tab you were in so I just usually open a new tab (hit Ctrl-T) and then do the link. An annoying extra step I'll concur but I think if that is the only thing holding you back work around it. Mozilla has too much OSS goodness to let something so small ruin it for you. :-)
Mozilla is fast. It just is. I really don't quite comprehend what is going on with the systems of the people who are complaining about Mozilla's speed. I suspect many of them haven't even really tried it recently. I've been using Mozilla daily on a variety of machines and a variety of operating systems without any speed problems at all for well over a year now. Hell, even my wife doesn't complain and she's much less tolerant of computer problems than I am.
In the last 3 years I've spent copious time on 1Ghz Athlon (Mandrake Linux & Win2000), a 300Mhz Thinkpad 700 (Win2000), and an SGI Octane SSE (250Mhz). Only the athlon would be considered even moderately fast by today's standards. All have adequate amounts of RAM (256M+) but are otherwise unremarkable. Mozilla was/is my daily browser on each of them. And it is fast. Faster than IE 5.5 & 6 and faster than Netscape 4.7. And certainly more than fast enough for daily use. Never mattered what OS I used, at least after about version 0.92. It has and continues to work great.
Except in cases where folks are stuck with a very old machine I don't know what they are complaining about. (Mozilla does take some resources so it's a *bit* much for a P90 with 64M of RAM) Opera has a lighter footprint and no question is a bit faster and if it suits one's needs that's great. But mozilla doesn't have a speed problem that I can see on anything vaguely resembling modern hardware.
Having a cellphone ring where people generally expect quiet is just rude. Not worthy of lawmaking. Just rude, especially in theaters. But the problem can be easily solved by the management of those establishments. Cell phone rings in innapproriate place, management asks the rude person to leave. They are perfectly within their rights to do so as long as they make it clear that this will happen in advance.
Using them while driving is a bigger problem which actually might be worthy of a law since it is actually dangerous and irresponsible on the same level as drunken driving.
That said I've never quite understood why people think talking on the phone is rude in a resturant unless it is one of those places where the conversation is relatively quiet. I mean the main reason I know most people go to the resturant is to socialize and they might be rude to their guests by talking on the phone but if I'm sitting at another table, what do I care unless they are somehow interfering with my meal? Maybe I'm just not bothered by that particular instance much.
I've seen a number of posts talking about how people get calls (and shockingly, answer them) in classes. There is an easy solution for this. If I were the teacher, there would be an immediate quiz. Not just any quiz, one that most of the class would be likely to fail. And I would tell the whole class right at the beginning of the semester that there would be one of these nasty quizzes everytime I heard a cell phone ring. (if I was feeling especially evil I'd take the results into account *after* any curving was done to grades) And then I'd just let peer pressure do its thing. Somehow I think folks would get the hint.
Who cares if the tape can fast forward. I want the car to "fast forward". 0-60mph in, oh, 4 seconds or so will do just fine.
4) All part of training to make Americans bigger. Bigger food=bigger people, right? We'll be able to take over the world once all Americans are 11 feet tall, and everyone else averages 5'11".
More like 11 feet wide and unable to squeeze through the front door more likely...
Me: "I'd like a medium coke"
Droid: "We only have small, large and extra large"
I don't eat at fast food places often I've had this conversation way too often at pizza and fast food joints. It's the most retarded thing I've ever heard. If I say I want a medium, that means I want the middle sized whatever it is. (Never mind the incredible lack of logic in having three sizes and not calling the middle sized one medium...) But no, these morons can't deal with that.
And yes if I saw "Large" on my receipt without any explanation after ordering a medium I'd yell at them. And they would deserve it for having such a stupid setup. I don't care about their marketing problems. Not my concern. If you are going to have a stupid sales setup, expect the fallout.
But then for any particular scale N, the word "tactics" becomes just a pseudonym for "the strategy of N-1, the scale one smaller that the one I'm paying attention to." Which is tactic and which is strategy depends on what level of depth the speaker is talking about.
In an overly reductionist sort of way, yes. But the difference isn't a matter of "depth" but rather one of function. Tactics are the detailed plans that make an strategy work. One can concentrate on tactics just as much strategy, (this is the old "seeing the forest from the trees" problem) but ultimately you need both. At some levels stragegy can become tactics and vice-versa depending on what level you are looking at a problem from.
There is a trite (but true) old saying that amateurs study tactics while professionals study strategy. Think of it in a programming context. What makes a good programmer is not simply having memorized each of the commands, but having an overall framework in which to utilize them. Knowing some C++ is useless unless you also understand the concepts behind object-oriented programming. However knowing all the concepts is useless without some method (pun unintended) to implement them.
What I would really like to see is a RTS (and shouldn't these games be called Real Time Tactics, the scale is a bit small to really be called "strategy" in the military sense) of WWII's Pacific theater...
The difference between strategy and tactics has little to do with scale. They are very different concepts.
Strategy is a game plan. It's how you intend to accomplish some goal. (i.e. I plan to use airstrikes to cripple my opponent's tanks before sending in the ground troops) Strategy doesn't necessarily imply that it is military either. Business has strategy. Sports have strategy. Strategy is just an approach to a problem.
Tactics on the other hand are the actual methods used to carry out a strategy. (i.e. The F-15's fly X route through the mountains dropping their bombs in Y location) Tactics are the details. The precise method by which you carry out each part of the overall strategy.
Strategy and Tactics go hand in hand but scale really isn't what defines them. They are separate parts of a solution process. Calling the games RTS games is fine and correct, even though every game has strategy to some degree. Even kill-everything games like Quake have strategy, just not especially deep ones most of the time.
OK, someone explain the popularity of this book to me. I'm serious. I read it a few years back and while it was a vaguely entertaining and had a few interesting ideas it didn't strike me as this masterpiece it keeps getting made out to be. To me it seemed to crib a lot from William Gibson with a slightly more polished feel. I do like some of Stephenson's work but Snow Crash just never impressed me much. What am I missing?
- Tabbed Browsing. Don't know how I lived without it.
- Fine grained cookie blocking/control
- Image (read ad) blocking
- Free as in beer and speech
- Cross platform. Some folks use more than Windows ya know?
- Popup blocking. 'Nuff said.
- Skinnable. Don't like the look? Change it.
- Security. Lack of integration with other MS products is a good thing.
- Fast. In my experience Mozilla (Gecko) is faster than IE most of the time on Windows. And rarely is is slower. Plus did I mention it's cross-platform?
And that's just off the top of my head. While any one might not be enough all of them together are pretty compelling.I thought the review wasn't especially well done and there was some functionality the reviewer obviously didn't explore thoroughly. (tabbed browsing comes to mind) I can't for the life of me figure out what he means by IE being more "polished". He rightly points out that installing plugins is more of a pain than it should be but most of the rest of navigator is no worse than IE from a "polish" standpoint. Not that I can see anyway. I suppose there is some wiggle room for personal preferences but the differences aren't huge.
I don't mean to be flamed for this (although I know I will be), but USA is a democracy right?
*pedantic mode on*
No. The USA is not and never has been a democracy. The USA is a republic. Huge difference.
From Websters
republic - a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officcers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law.
*pedantic mode off*
We elect the officials and they create the laws. While they are ultimately answerable to us in the form of elections, they do not have to do everything we tell them to. In practice things work out pretty well generally. But it isn't a perfect system and only fools pretend it is.
There is plenty of room in the system (for better or worse) for our government to do things that aren't necessarily in the interests, perceived or real, of the populace at large. Sometimes that's good, often it isn't. In this case, the FCC has a history of catering to the interests of a small group of people. Hence I (like others) am dubious that they will suddenly decide to do the Right Thing, or even the popular thing. Overall, the US government is pretty good. I'd say one of the best even. But parts of it are very broken and no one is contradicting themselves by pointing out where.
Still waiting for the popups to appear...
Still waiting...
Tap, Tap, Tap, Tap
Ahh, screw it. I've got better things to do that wait for a popup window that will never come.
Seriously I never see popup, popunder or any other kind of windows I don't request under Mozilla. I have each of the following items unchecked:
- Open unrequested windows
- Open a link in a new window
- Move or resize existing windows
- Raise or lower windows
- Change status bar text.
The rest I leave as is because they are useful. I also have cookies and images blocked from most anyone who is likely to be ad related, including doubleclick and the like. Certain less offensive sites don't get blocked. (slashdot for one) I also block cookies from any site I do not have a direct business relationship or account with. (I can always unblock them later if I need to) End result is that I have a fast and largely annoyance free web experience.A singularity is a feature of a graph. Now, I'm as rational-reductionist as the next geek, but reducing all of human progress to a graph reduces reductionism to the riduclous!
You have obviously never had to give a presentation to upper management. They are a peculiar species, unable to understand words. They can only be communicated to in a very limiting fashion via colored 3d graphs and charts. Unfortunately most of the important information is lost in the translation...
I guess I wasn't clear. All I meant was that you need more than a pocket calculator. (though that's getting less true all the time) Hence I said a "reasonable" amount of computing power. Of course when I was working on problems like this, a 386 was still a fairly fast computer.
Ugh. I feel old now. I'm gonna go eat some bran or something...
You're right in that we (so far) cannot solve (in the sense of a mathematical proof) a 3 body problem using nice neat equations like we can for 2 body problems. However it is possible to calculate a trajectory and has been for some time. Takes a reasonably large amount of computing horsepower and a good idea of the initial conditions but a useful approximation can be calculated. Not an elegant or exact method but does work.
HHOS? YMMV? What the fuck do all those acronyms mean?
HHOS
YMMV
You're right that there is some good stuff on TV, but I think that misses the point the original poster was making. I technically have a TV, but not cable so it's almost the same thing as far as I'm concerned. (HHOS) I think he was trying to say that if you miss a few episodes of the Simpsons, it will be ok.
My wife made a good point about this a while back. If I spend an hour or an evening watching TV, I can almost never remember what I did with that day. However if I work on the house, read something (even slashdot), workout, or go to a nice resturant, I remember it much more vividly. I'm not wonderful for watching very little TV, but I do get a heck of a lot more done. I think my life is more full when TV is an activity I choose rather than the default. YMMV.
Besides, when I watch I have a hard time turning it off, even if there is nothing on. Channel surfing is addictive.
You're mistaking the population of Boston city proper (which is close to your quoted figure) with the size of the Boston metropolitan area. The metro area, which is the effective size of the city since Boston proper is landwise fairly small, is around 3 million as of 1990. Boston has been trying to correct at least some of their traffic problems with the big dig.
For comparison London has around 7 million people in the city proper and around 12 million in the metro area. Definitely more crowded, but then so is England overall so this should not be especially surprising.
Paying to have thousands upon thousands of miles of road remarked with new signs would be prohibitively expensive.
Pul-leeze. "Prohibitively expensive"? The US is the richest country in the world. Going by GNP there isn't even a close second. There is very little question the US could afford to do it. Would it be expensive? Sure. But it could easily be done. The only reason we don't is because we have a bunch of troglodytes running who (correctly) realize that even though converting to SI has advantages, the current system actually does work fine. Don't get me wrong, I'd love for the US to go metric but it isn't going to happen anytime soon. There is no compelling polital need or will to do so.