This means that people are buying Huawei flagships and other Android phones which have more features, both hardware and software.
After 10 years of Apple phones you still don't get that people don't buy phones just because they have the longest feature list? There have ALWAYS been phones that had more and sometimes better features than the iPhone and yet the iPhone continues to be the best selling phone on the market most of the time. Obviously there is more to it than features. How those features are implemented, what people are accustomed to, ecosystem lock in, and much more all matter.
The Chinese makers are starting to get ahead of them, and even though Apple is has stashed away more usable spending money than the GDP of a lot of countries, they better start doubling down, otherwise they may end up like Sony... strong brand, but more of a relic of the past than something bringing stuff new and cool.
More likely Apple just buys their way into a new market. I'm sure they would not prefer that but they could buy both General Motors and Ford for cash if they felt the need.
As for Sony, they are hardly a relic of the past. Odds are very good that smartphone in your pocket has a Sony camera in it. They aren't quite as prominent in consumer electronics as they once were but that doesn't mean they've faded into oblivion. Many people are shocked to learn Sony is a conglomerate with businesses that go far beyond consumer electronics. Sony Financial (banking, insurance, etc) accounts for half their earnings. They also are a major player in the entertainment industry. The also are in medical, photography, videography, semiconductors, and lots of other industries in their electronics. Their stock price has been rising steadily for the last 8 years and they are actually doing quite well lately.
Apple needs revolution in design
No they do not. What they need is a new hit product that can generate tens of billions in revenue. That's not a function of design - it's a function of actually investing in products for a new market. Unfortunately those sorts of opportunities don't come along very often or they involve a LOT of risk. It's why I've never bought Apple stock. If they falter on the iPhone for some reason the whole thing comes crashing down because they have no diversification. If the Playstation disappeared tomorrow, it would hurt Sony but it wouldn't kill the company. And Apple isn't taking risks like Tesla or Amazon despite being far better financed. To get big revenues you have to tackle big problems and it's been a while since Apple has done that. They historically have come out with roughly one big product per decade and their last one was the iPad back in 2010 or maybe the Apple Watch (which now gets more revenue than the iPod ever did even at its peak). Apple is just at a point where they need to invest aggressively in new products and it's not clear they are doing that.
Unlikely. Dementia is defined as a loss of cognitive functioning.
I'm well aware of that. And it's quite possible he has experienced some loss of cognitive functioning. I'm not saying he's deep in the grip of Alzheimers or anything like that. 8.8 percent of adults over 65 have some amount dementia so it would hardly be shocking if he's in the early stages. He does and and has done so many "crazy" things that it's pretty hard to judge with any hope of accuracy because we don't have the data even though he's been a public figure for a long time.
But there is little evidence that Trump is getting worse.
You don't know the man even close to well enough to judge that. Nobody reading this comment does including myself. Your guess is as good as mine but my only point is that you cannot simply dismiss it out of hand because you don't have the information to do that. Odds are that he doesn't have it but the odds that he does are too large to dismiss casually.
Dementia certainly not. But Narcissism? Definitely. Histrionic even maybe.
Don't be so quick to dismiss the possibility. I'm not a doctor and evidently neither are you. It's entirely plausible that he is suffering from some amount of dementia and we simply don't have the data or expertise to confirm or deny it conclusively. It certainly would explain at least some amount of his behavior and he's certainly of the age were that is a significant concern. Yes he plainly is a narcissist but that doesn't explain everything about him or his erratic behavior. And you don't need the "maybe" about histrionic. I think that is almost a given.
Right now, he's acting like a child in the terrible twos that doesn't get the toy he wants and holds his breath 'til he gets what he wants.
Yes he is, though he's hardly the only republican to do that. Since 1990 there have been I think 5 government shutdowns and literally every one of them has been republicans throwing a hissy fit over something rather than working out a deal like adults.
Most of our organs were grown in a neutral buoyant environment, which has a lot of the same effects of being in 0g.
Some but not all. There are two very important differences. Objects in neutral buoyancy still experience the effects of gravity on their mass. This affects fluids and tissues significantly. The second is that friction and drag is still in play in neutral buoyancy due to the fluid medium. We already know that microgravity has a measurable effect on muscle growth and structure and the heart is a muscle.
The idea of growing organs in microgravity is an interesting one but there are a lot of potential reasons why it might not work. It seems unlikely that microgravity would provide all benefits with no problems.
In general, Apple's form over function has been the cause of a number of big issues. At least in the Jobs era, he would not let something ship unless he personally checked it out that things were decent.
Well that wasn't always true and Jobs opinion of "decent" wasn't infallible. But you are right that they seem to have trouble keeping focused without someone at the top playing red-light/green-light. The Mac line seems to have been relegated to the garage and isn't seeing much love these days. The iPad has proven to be nothing more than a supersized iPhone without the ability to make calls - unfortunate since it could be so much more with the right software and a decent stylus (the current ones suck).
IMHO, they don't seem to be selling as many devices, so they are jacking up the price
It's not a matter of opinion whether or not they are selling more/less. Their unit volume sales have been flat to modestly rising for the last three years. They aren't losing sales so much as they aren't growing them. Not shocking since the market is getting near saturated, at least where Apple has a solid presence. So to keep revenue increasing in the absence of a new shiny product that isn't an iPhone/iPad/Mac they have been increasing prices. I think they may have reached the limit of their ability to do that. This will be a problem for their stock price if they cannot continue to grow revenue.
So I think we are seeing a combination of prices getting too high as well as a generation of iPhones that wasn't a big enough improvement over the previous year models.
How much will it cost to launch the needed starter cell culture into space, presumably have someone up their manning it (even if mostly automated), return it from space...etc.
Forget that. Think about how much the research costs would be. This isn't something you can test on the ground - you have to actually do your research in zero-G. And something like this will take a loooooong time to figure out so it's going to be ludicrously expensive to do the R&D. Production would probably be a modest sum by comparison presuming they can automate it to a useful degree.
Everyone I know in Michigan where I grew up pays a higher percent of their income for housing than anyone I know in California where I live now.
That is factually untrue. Plus I very much doubt you have any idea what percent of your friends/family's income they spend on housing - it's just not the sort of thing people share. People in Michigan spend on substantially less both in total dollars and as a percent of income. There are other data sources too and they ALL show California near or at the top of the most expensive states to live in no matter if you are talking in total dollars or percent of income.
The salaries more than make up for it.
The salaries demonstrably do NOT make up the difference.
Yeah, UWB. Too bad if you start using UWB, you have to stop using all other kinds of radio, though.
So A) it's not a solution because it's potentially incompatible and B) it's not a solution because wireless spectrum remains a finite public good no matter how you utilize the spectrum. UWB might make the limited spectrum go further but it doesn't solve the core problem of interference due to unregulated overuse.
So an organ that evolved to grow and work in a 1G environment will be grown in a 0G environment? Methinks there might be some consequences to that. If they can pull it off that would be amazing but that sounds like quite a challenge. It's not immediately clear to me how 0G removes the need for scaffolding entirely. Would it not just change the type of scaffolding needed rather than removing the need entirely? Could be an improvement of course - I'm not bashing the idea - just trying to think it through. Fluids and other chemicals behave differently in the absence of gravity and I'd be shocked if that wasn't a big technical hurdle.
Assuming the technology is workable though the real problem will be funding the research. Researching this will require spending some pretty serious time in orbit and despite the best efforts of SpaceX and others that remains pretty darn expensive and will remain so for some time to come.
The fact that you agree that Scott Adams should be labeled a nazi, is symptomatic of this very problem.
At no point did I say he should be labeled a nazi. I said that he shouldn't be surprised that he was labeled one. If you defend Nazis anywhere beyond defending their constitutional right to free speech you should darn well expect to be considered to be one. Might not be fair but it's reality. Adams tried to defend WHAT they said when he should have stopped at defending their right to say it.
You completely diminish the true nature of how bad they were by throwing this label around over your political opposites.
If you fail to condemn Nazis and white supremacists then you de-facto are condoning them. There is no middle ground here and you are picking a side either way. Siding with Nazis isn't far removed from being one. Most conservatives/republicans clearly are NOT white supremacists but there are far too many who are. They are not "fine people" and trying to spin or nuance such statements is to support them. To defend the protesters beyond their constitutional rights is to side with them. Even the ACLU would (and has) defended their free speech rights but defending what they say is much different than defending their right to say it. Adams (and Trump) failed to recognize this difference.
If we are really serious about combating fake news, then why shouldn't Google have to delist the biased and misleading blacklist, in favor of other more accurate reviews?
A reasonable question. So how do we do this in something approximating real time with good accuracy? It's easy to say we should do it but HOW is a lot more complicated with a lot of sticky censorship and free speech and freedom of the press and civil rights issues. Even for private companies. How does one decide what constitutes good versus bad information without having editorial control like a newspaper? And how do you do this in an automated way? There is too much out there for Google (or any company) to have people reviewing all content.
I note that Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) complained that doing an image search of him came up with a photoshopped image of his head on a Nazi uniform in the top row.
Adams publicly defended Trump's defense of white supremacists. That's how you get labeled a nazi and a white surpremicist. If he didn't like this then he shouldn't have publicly defended Trump's indefensible comments about them being "fine people". He's been a public figure long enough that he should know how this would play out.
It seems perfectly reasonable that people should start pushing back against Google's search manipulation, and the "right to be forgotten" seems to be a good first step.
I think the right to be forgotten stuff is a very blunt instrument that doesn't really get at the core problems.
Only housing is 400% more expensive. Gas is about 20% more. Most other things are about the same. Fresh produce is cheaper.
Housing is by far most people's biggest cost so that's not a minor thing. Let's get some better data Cost of housing in San Francisco is about 7X that of the US average and California overall is about 3X that of the US average. Median house price in California is around $500K and in the Bay Area it is over a million. Groceries are more expensive on average in CA, albeit modestly so. Gas and transportation in CA are 40-70% more expensive. Gas prices in the Bay area as I type this are around $3.40/gal versus around $2.10/gal in the midwest. That is ~60% more expensive for those counting at home.
So the tl;dr version is that CA has substantially and provably more expensive cost of living than most of the country. Not saying that is a good or bad thing, but it is a fact. If Silicon Valley or Manhattan is where you need to be to get where you want to go then do what you need to do. But there is a price tag attached to that.
When I moved to Silicon Valley, I lived in my van for two years.
I'm going to stop you right there. Obviously you didn't have a wife, children, and were young enough to find that a palatable option. (or if you had any of the above you had a VERY unusual wife) That sort of thing is fine when you are young, single, and have limited responsibilities and social obligations outside of work. If you are all about the job and in a position to do that then good on you but few people can or will live that sort of lifestyle and expecting others to do it is unrealistic.
Then I got a private office, and slept on a roll-up mat.
Yeah there are damn few employers who would be ok with you sleeping in the office. Maybe that sort of thing is normal at some companies where you are but that is not normal in general. Certainly not outside silicon valley.
Why is keeping illegal border crossings open more important to Democrats than American's jobs? Really makes you wonder...
Because this idiotic wall would do nothing to prevent them. It's a wasteful and hateful bit of bigotry and xenophobia. Ironic too in a country filled almost entirely with immigrants and their decendants. If Trump and the republicans gave a shit about US jobs he would and should cave on this immediately but he's willing to burn down the house to build a monument to his racism.
say we make it permanent and fire all furloughed workers. We might actually be able to balance the budge,
All government salaries combined account for around $200 billion. We could literally fire every single federal employee and we still wouldn't have even covered half the federal deficit ($779 billion last year).
Efforts at web of trust mostly do not work for non-technical users which accounts for the majority of them. Without some central authority controlling things, it requires too much overhead and technical proficiency and cost to reliably build and maintain for a well performing decentralized system, especially at large scale. With a central authority controlling things you have the situation we have now with conflicts of interest on the part of the controlling authority. To date nobody seems to have come up with a workable solution to this problem palatable to the General Public.
Ideally it comes with a scoring system, and you can assign weights to users yourself.
"Ideally"? That doesn't sound ideal at all - it sounds like a huge pain in the ass time sink with some serious social baggage as well. Do you seriously think the General Public is going to want to bother with something like that? Scoring friends sounds like a great way to lose friends and colleagues. You know there is a reason people don't generally rank order their friends like Sheldon Cooper right?
Well, that's why I'm asking if anyone is trying it right now. I've never seen anyone attempt to do this with social networking in a way designed to benefit the users.
That's because there is no money in it when done in ways that accrue benefits to users as a primary motivation. Your motivations are commendable but it's hard to see a viable path to make it work in the real world. I would certainly like to see that change of course.
“Blue Moon” is an expression not tied to a calendar month.
Yes we are all aware of that.
Other than being a generali expression describing any rare event, it is applied to a second full moon in any month.
You seem to have missed the point. It is a special name for a full moon that occurs regularly. The fact that it isn't tied to a particular month on a calendar doesn't mean it doesn't happen regularly or that it doesn't have a special name or that it isn't well known in popular culture.
For a network that was originally designed to be redundant and robust in case of nuclear war, there are large parts of the internet that have remarkably fragile connections to the rest of the internet. More than a few countries have poor to no redundancy in cabling to the outside world. Cut one cable and entire country goes offline. Mostly an economic issue obviously but still kind of alarming.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (X) Mailing lists and other legitimate uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (X) Users will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (X) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (X) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians (X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Rule number one is that someone using a VPN probably has a reason for that.
True but it isn't necessarily anything nefarious. For example I don't like being tracked by advertising companies. The reason to use one doesn't have to be anything greater than valuing privacy.
Especially when it's free.
Yeah if something is "free" the first thing you should be questioning is why. Nothing is truly free. Nothing. These services aren't provided because someone is being generous so it if is free you need to understand their motivations.
Rule number two is that there is no such thing as security on the internet.
Not true at all. Security is always a relative state and as such there is reasonable security possible. Security becomes more difficult against focused, experienced, and/or well financed attackers but even then it's possible. Perfect security against all conceivable threats is impossible but that's like saying we shouldn't lock our doors because someone might own a battering ram. Security is always relative to the circumstances and likely threats one might face.
60F is not winter coat weather anywhere. I've gone swimming at the beach in temperatures colder than that. If someone really thinks they need a winter coat for 60F weather then they need to see a doctor. If it was 60F here tomorrow I'd be going out sans jacket.
In all seriousness though, I'm not a fan of the serious cold either. Last night it was -20C (-4F) where I live and that's cold enough that I wasn't about to go out and stand around in the cold to try to get a good photo. Pity because the sky conditions were great. I did try getting a photo from an open window but the heat from inside messed up the air too much to get good focus.
But was January's full moon ever commonly called a wolf moon, or is this all just a relatively recent popularization to help fill the endless news cycle?
You could have gotten that question answered on google in less time than it took to type that post. No it is nothing recent.
I would have loved to photograph it but the temperature was a balmy -20C (-4F) last night and I'm not about to stand outside in that sort of temperature trying to keep my gear and myself from being killed by the laws of thermodynamics. Pity because the night was super clear and the air still because of the cold weather.
For most of our lives the only full moon to be specially named in popular culture was the 'harvest moon' of September
Really? You never heard of a "Blue Moon"? Just because YOU never heard of the other moons doesn't mean nobody else has. strawberry moon hunters moon The list goes on for every special moon if you bother to look. Also I'm guessing you never grew up around 4-H or FFA clubs. You likely would have heard of at least some of them if you had any meaningful relationship to agriculture.
But with electric cars...what do the politicians do about people with solar panels ( they are pushing that too you know)? I mean, if they generate their own electricity for the most part...there is lost tax revenue too.
They can require a meter on the panels even if they don't actually draw from the grid or get a bill from the power company. Electric code would be relatively easy to change and now would be the time to implement it. Doing that is MUCH easier than trying to track down every car and track its mileage. Just make sure every car is assigned to the meter for the owner's primary address.
Slashdot Mirror
This means that people are buying Huawei flagships and other Android phones which have more features, both hardware and software.
After 10 years of Apple phones you still don't get that people don't buy phones just because they have the longest feature list? There have ALWAYS been phones that had more and sometimes better features than the iPhone and yet the iPhone continues to be the best selling phone on the market most of the time. Obviously there is more to it than features. How those features are implemented, what people are accustomed to, ecosystem lock in, and much more all matter.
The Chinese makers are starting to get ahead of them, and even though Apple is has stashed away more usable spending money than the GDP of a lot of countries, they better start doubling down, otherwise they may end up like Sony... strong brand, but more of a relic of the past than something bringing stuff new and cool.
More likely Apple just buys their way into a new market. I'm sure they would not prefer that but they could buy both General Motors and Ford for cash if they felt the need.
As for Sony, they are hardly a relic of the past. Odds are very good that smartphone in your pocket has a Sony camera in it. They aren't quite as prominent in consumer electronics as they once were but that doesn't mean they've faded into oblivion. Many people are shocked to learn Sony is a conglomerate with businesses that go far beyond consumer electronics. Sony Financial (banking, insurance, etc) accounts for half their earnings. They also are a major player in the entertainment industry. The also are in medical, photography, videography, semiconductors, and lots of other industries in their electronics. Their stock price has been rising steadily for the last 8 years and they are actually doing quite well lately.
Apple needs revolution in design
No they do not. What they need is a new hit product that can generate tens of billions in revenue. That's not a function of design - it's a function of actually investing in products for a new market. Unfortunately those sorts of opportunities don't come along very often or they involve a LOT of risk. It's why I've never bought Apple stock. If they falter on the iPhone for some reason the whole thing comes crashing down because they have no diversification. If the Playstation disappeared tomorrow, it would hurt Sony but it wouldn't kill the company. And Apple isn't taking risks like Tesla or Amazon despite being far better financed. To get big revenues you have to tackle big problems and it's been a while since Apple has done that. They historically have come out with roughly one big product per decade and their last one was the iPad back in 2010 or maybe the Apple Watch (which now gets more revenue than the iPod ever did even at its peak). Apple is just at a point where they need to invest aggressively in new products and it's not clear they are doing that.
Unlikely. Dementia is defined as a loss of cognitive functioning.
I'm well aware of that. And it's quite possible he has experienced some loss of cognitive functioning. I'm not saying he's deep in the grip of Alzheimers or anything like that. 8.8 percent of adults over 65 have some amount dementia so it would hardly be shocking if he's in the early stages. He does and and has done so many "crazy" things that it's pretty hard to judge with any hope of accuracy because we don't have the data even though he's been a public figure for a long time.
But there is little evidence that Trump is getting worse.
You don't know the man even close to well enough to judge that. Nobody reading this comment does including myself. Your guess is as good as mine but my only point is that you cannot simply dismiss it out of hand because you don't have the information to do that. Odds are that he doesn't have it but the odds that he does are too large to dismiss casually.
Dementia certainly not. But Narcissism? Definitely. Histrionic even maybe.
Don't be so quick to dismiss the possibility. I'm not a doctor and evidently neither are you. It's entirely plausible that he is suffering from some amount of dementia and we simply don't have the data or expertise to confirm or deny it conclusively. It certainly would explain at least some amount of his behavior and he's certainly of the age were that is a significant concern. Yes he plainly is a narcissist but that doesn't explain everything about him or his erratic behavior. And you don't need the "maybe" about histrionic. I think that is almost a given.
Right now, he's acting like a child in the terrible twos that doesn't get the toy he wants and holds his breath 'til he gets what he wants.
Yes he is, though he's hardly the only republican to do that. Since 1990 there have been I think 5 government shutdowns and literally every one of them has been republicans throwing a hissy fit over something rather than working out a deal like adults.
Most of our organs were grown in a neutral buoyant environment, which has a lot of the same effects of being in 0g.
Some but not all. There are two very important differences. Objects in neutral buoyancy still experience the effects of gravity on their mass. This affects fluids and tissues significantly. The second is that friction and drag is still in play in neutral buoyancy due to the fluid medium. We already know that microgravity has a measurable effect on muscle growth and structure and the heart is a muscle.
The idea of growing organs in microgravity is an interesting one but there are a lot of potential reasons why it might not work. It seems unlikely that microgravity would provide all benefits with no problems.
In general, Apple's form over function has been the cause of a number of big issues. At least in the Jobs era, he would not let something ship unless he personally checked it out that things were decent.
Well that wasn't always true and Jobs opinion of "decent" wasn't infallible. But you are right that they seem to have trouble keeping focused without someone at the top playing red-light/green-light. The Mac line seems to have been relegated to the garage and isn't seeing much love these days. The iPad has proven to be nothing more than a supersized iPhone without the ability to make calls - unfortunate since it could be so much more with the right software and a decent stylus (the current ones suck).
IMHO, they don't seem to be selling as many devices, so they are jacking up the price
It's not a matter of opinion whether or not they are selling more/less. Their unit volume sales have been flat to modestly rising for the last three years. They aren't losing sales so much as they aren't growing them. Not shocking since the market is getting near saturated, at least where Apple has a solid presence. So to keep revenue increasing in the absence of a new shiny product that isn't an iPhone/iPad/Mac they have been increasing prices. I think they may have reached the limit of their ability to do that. This will be a problem for their stock price if they cannot continue to grow revenue.
So I think we are seeing a combination of prices getting too high as well as a generation of iPhones that wasn't a big enough improvement over the previous year models.
How much will it cost to launch the needed starter cell culture into space, presumably have someone up their manning it (even if mostly automated), return it from space...etc.
Forget that. Think about how much the research costs would be. This isn't something you can test on the ground - you have to actually do your research in zero-G. And something like this will take a loooooong time to figure out so it's going to be ludicrously expensive to do the R&D. Production would probably be a modest sum by comparison presuming they can automate it to a useful degree.
Everyone I know in Michigan where I grew up pays a higher percent of their income for housing than anyone I know in California where I live now.
That is factually untrue. Plus I very much doubt you have any idea what percent of your friends/family's income they spend on housing - it's just not the sort of thing people share. People in Michigan spend on substantially less both in total dollars and as a percent of income. There are other data sources too and they ALL show California near or at the top of the most expensive states to live in no matter if you are talking in total dollars or percent of income.
The salaries more than make up for it.
The salaries demonstrably do NOT make up the difference.
Yeah, UWB. Too bad if you start using UWB, you have to stop using all other kinds of radio, though.
So A) it's not a solution because it's potentially incompatible and B) it's not a solution because wireless spectrum remains a finite public good no matter how you utilize the spectrum. UWB might make the limited spectrum go further but it doesn't solve the core problem of interference due to unregulated overuse.
So an organ that evolved to grow and work in a 1G environment will be grown in a 0G environment? Methinks there might be some consequences to that. If they can pull it off that would be amazing but that sounds like quite a challenge. It's not immediately clear to me how 0G removes the need for scaffolding entirely. Would it not just change the type of scaffolding needed rather than removing the need entirely? Could be an improvement of course - I'm not bashing the idea - just trying to think it through. Fluids and other chemicals behave differently in the absence of gravity and I'd be shocked if that wasn't a big technical hurdle.
Assuming the technology is workable though the real problem will be funding the research. Researching this will require spending some pretty serious time in orbit and despite the best efforts of SpaceX and others that remains pretty darn expensive and will remain so for some time to come.
The fact that you agree that Scott Adams should be labeled a nazi, is symptomatic of this very problem.
At no point did I say he should be labeled a nazi. I said that he shouldn't be surprised that he was labeled one. If you defend Nazis anywhere beyond defending their constitutional right to free speech you should darn well expect to be considered to be one. Might not be fair but it's reality. Adams tried to defend WHAT they said when he should have stopped at defending their right to say it.
You completely diminish the true nature of how bad they were by throwing this label around over your political opposites.
If you fail to condemn Nazis and white supremacists then you de-facto are condoning them. There is no middle ground here and you are picking a side either way. Siding with Nazis isn't far removed from being one. Most conservatives/republicans clearly are NOT white supremacists but there are far too many who are. They are not "fine people" and trying to spin or nuance such statements is to support them. To defend the protesters beyond their constitutional rights is to side with them. Even the ACLU would (and has) defended their free speech rights but defending what they say is much different than defending their right to say it. Adams (and Trump) failed to recognize this difference.
I love how they were able to auction off thin air.
You have a better solution to the tragedy of the commons?
If we are really serious about combating fake news, then why shouldn't Google have to delist the biased and misleading blacklist, in favor of other more accurate reviews?
A reasonable question. So how do we do this in something approximating real time with good accuracy? It's easy to say we should do it but HOW is a lot more complicated with a lot of sticky censorship and free speech and freedom of the press and civil rights issues. Even for private companies. How does one decide what constitutes good versus bad information without having editorial control like a newspaper? And how do you do this in an automated way? There is too much out there for Google (or any company) to have people reviewing all content.
I note that Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) complained that doing an image search of him came up with a photoshopped image of his head on a Nazi uniform in the top row.
Adams publicly defended Trump's defense of white supremacists. That's how you get labeled a nazi and a white surpremicist. If he didn't like this then he shouldn't have publicly defended Trump's indefensible comments about them being "fine people". He's been a public figure long enough that he should know how this would play out.
It seems perfectly reasonable that people should start pushing back against Google's search manipulation, and the "right to be forgotten" seems to be a good first step.
I think the right to be forgotten stuff is a very blunt instrument that doesn't really get at the core problems.
Only housing is 400% more expensive. Gas is about 20% more. Most other things are about the same. Fresh produce is cheaper.
Housing is by far most people's biggest cost so that's not a minor thing. Let's get some better data Cost of housing in San Francisco is about 7X that of the US average and California overall is about 3X that of the US average. Median house price in California is around $500K and in the Bay Area it is over a million. Groceries are more expensive on average in CA, albeit modestly so. Gas and transportation in CA are 40-70% more expensive. Gas prices in the Bay area as I type this are around $3.40/gal versus around $2.10/gal in the midwest. That is ~60% more expensive for those counting at home.
So the tl;dr version is that CA has substantially and provably more expensive cost of living than most of the country. Not saying that is a good or bad thing, but it is a fact. If Silicon Valley or Manhattan is where you need to be to get where you want to go then do what you need to do. But there is a price tag attached to that.
When I moved to Silicon Valley, I lived in my van for two years.
I'm going to stop you right there. Obviously you didn't have a wife, children, and were young enough to find that a palatable option. (or if you had any of the above you had a VERY unusual wife) That sort of thing is fine when you are young, single, and have limited responsibilities and social obligations outside of work. If you are all about the job and in a position to do that then good on you but few people can or will live that sort of lifestyle and expecting others to do it is unrealistic.
Then I got a private office, and slept on a roll-up mat.
Yeah there are damn few employers who would be ok with you sleeping in the office. Maybe that sort of thing is normal at some companies where you are but that is not normal in general. Certainly not outside silicon valley.
Why is keeping illegal border crossings open more important to Democrats than American's jobs? Really makes you wonder...
Because this idiotic wall would do nothing to prevent them. It's a wasteful and hateful bit of bigotry and xenophobia. Ironic too in a country filled almost entirely with immigrants and their decendants. If Trump and the republicans gave a shit about US jobs he would and should cave on this immediately but he's willing to burn down the house to build a monument to his racism.
say we make it permanent and fire all furloughed workers. We might actually be able to balance the budge,
All government salaries combined account for around $200 billion. We could literally fire every single federal employee and we still wouldn't have even covered half the federal deficit ($779 billion last year).
Who's with me on this....
Nobody with a brain in their skull.
No, that is exactly what a web of trust is for.
Efforts at web of trust mostly do not work for non-technical users which accounts for the majority of them. Without some central authority controlling things, it requires too much overhead and technical proficiency and cost to reliably build and maintain for a well performing decentralized system, especially at large scale. With a central authority controlling things you have the situation we have now with conflicts of interest on the part of the controlling authority. To date nobody seems to have come up with a workable solution to this problem palatable to the General Public.
Ideally it comes with a scoring system, and you can assign weights to users yourself.
"Ideally"? That doesn't sound ideal at all - it sounds like a huge pain in the ass time sink with some serious social baggage as well. Do you seriously think the General Public is going to want to bother with something like that? Scoring friends sounds like a great way to lose friends and colleagues. You know there is a reason people don't generally rank order their friends like Sheldon Cooper right?
Well, that's why I'm asking if anyone is trying it right now. I've never seen anyone attempt to do this with social networking in a way designed to benefit the users.
That's because there is no money in it when done in ways that accrue benefits to users as a primary motivation. Your motivations are commendable but it's hard to see a viable path to make it work in the real world. I would certainly like to see that change of course.
“Blue Moon” is an expression not tied to a calendar month.
Yes we are all aware of that.
Other than being a generali expression describing any rare event, it is applied to a second full moon in any month.
You seem to have missed the point. It is a special name for a full moon that occurs regularly. The fact that it isn't tied to a particular month on a calendar doesn't mean it doesn't happen regularly or that it doesn't have a special name or that it isn't well known in popular culture.
For a network that was originally designed to be redundant and robust in case of nuclear war, there are large parts of the internet that have remarkably fragile connections to the rest of the internet. More than a few countries have poor to no redundancy in cabling to the outside world. Cut one cable and entire country goes offline. Mostly an economic issue obviously but still kind of alarming.
Does anyone have a messaging system with a web of trust system? That would solve the spam problem too, but without arbitrary limits.
Your post advocates a
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Rule number one is that someone using a VPN probably has a reason for that.
True but it isn't necessarily anything nefarious. For example I don't like being tracked by advertising companies. The reason to use one doesn't have to be anything greater than valuing privacy.
Especially when it's free.
Yeah if something is "free" the first thing you should be questioning is why. Nothing is truly free. Nothing. These services aren't provided because someone is being generous so it if is free you need to understand their motivations.
Rule number two is that there is no such thing as security on the internet.
Not true at all. Security is always a relative state and as such there is reasonable security possible. Security becomes more difficult against focused, experienced, and/or well financed attackers but even then it's possible. Perfect security against all conceivable threats is impossible but that's like saying we shouldn't lock our doors because someone might own a battering ram. Security is always relative to the circumstances and likely threats one might face.
Down here 60 is winter coat weather lol.
60F is not winter coat weather anywhere. I've gone swimming at the beach in temperatures colder than that. If someone really thinks they need a winter coat for 60F weather then they need to see a doctor. If it was 60F here tomorrow I'd be going out sans jacket.
In all seriousness though, I'm not a fan of the serious cold either. Last night it was -20C (-4F) where I live and that's cold enough that I wasn't about to go out and stand around in the cold to try to get a good photo. Pity because the sky conditions were great. I did try getting a photo from an open window but the heat from inside messed up the air too much to get good focus.
But was January's full moon ever commonly called a wolf moon, or is this all just a relatively recent popularization to help fill the endless news cycle?
You could have gotten that question answered on google in less time than it took to type that post. No it is nothing recent.
I would have loved to photograph it but the temperature was a balmy -20C (-4F) last night and I'm not about to stand outside in that sort of temperature trying to keep my gear and myself from being killed by the laws of thermodynamics. Pity because the night was super clear and the air still because of the cold weather.
For most of our lives the only full moon to be specially named in popular culture was the 'harvest moon' of September
Really? You never heard of a "Blue Moon"? Just because YOU never heard of the other moons doesn't mean nobody else has.
strawberry moon
hunters moon
The list goes on for every special moon if you bother to look. Also I'm guessing you never grew up around 4-H or FFA clubs. You likely would have heard of at least some of them if you had any meaningful relationship to agriculture.
But with electric cars...what do the politicians do about people with solar panels ( they are pushing that too you know)? I mean, if they generate their own electricity for the most part...there is lost tax revenue too.
They can require a meter on the panels even if they don't actually draw from the grid or get a bill from the power company. Electric code would be relatively easy to change and now would be the time to implement it. Doing that is MUCH easier than trying to track down every car and track its mileage. Just make sure every car is assigned to the meter for the owner's primary address.