No, the only point of evolution is successful reproduction. It makes no difference how long you survive. If your genes aren't passed to offspring, any evolutionary change you may have had dies with you. Likewise, it makes no difference if you die after producing self-sustaining offspring - your contribution to the gene pool carries on.
Not necessarily. If you have no kids, but help other people's kids based on some criteria, you are inserting that criteria into the evolutionary selection pressure. If you take care of your nieces and nephews, you are promulgating kids who share some of your genes even if you don't reproduce. Even if the kids you care for have no genetic similarity, the fact that you were put into a position to care for them may select kids who are in some way similar to you (ie. probably share some genetic patterns). A strong society will likely raise stronger kids who happen to share a disproportionate number of genes with you.
Do you actually believe this or are you just playing devil's advocate??? The evidence is as clear and compelling as anything we have. Who bother reading ANY science content if you're not going to believe that. When they announce the Higgs boson in the next few years the evidence for THAT is going to be orders of magnitude worse than human-made global warming.
If I were Dropbox, I would say screw Apple - they get the 30% of the app, sure, but 30% of the extra storage users want? No way. What does that have to do with Apple? Why do they deserve that? They aren't buying anything in app, so what is the problem?
Actually, that's the whole point. When an iPhone user is using a Dropbox-enabled app, Apple is bringing that customer to Dropbox. Dropbox users can still go on their own accord to the Dropbox site and add storage without paying Apple anything. But if an app tries to solicit business that bypasses the App Store fees, Apple calls them on it. Either they remove the link or they pay 30%-- pretty simple. It's not some ethical or moral situation, just a business contract.
Why specify "without scaling"? Just say "can display A4 such that it's easy to read." the new iPad has a ridiculous number of pixels and even scaled pages look great. Unless you really need a mm to be a mm, it doesn't make a difference. And if you do, your needs are likely too specialized for the market to prioritize.
It should be noted that all of the wars the US was involved in in recent history were undertaken with international participation, if not broad international support (yes, even in Iraq)
I am not sure I get your argument here. Sounds a lot like "I bullied that guy in high school because all my friends were doing that, too".
The argument is that the US is unlikely to unilaterally invade/nuke another country without warning. It has no active border disputes, no external threats to its existence, no significant internal insurgency, has changed leaders in a relatively orderly fashion regularly for over a century, has a military firmly under civilian control, and tends to seek approval of at least its western allies before military action. Of course, it's also the only nation on the planet to have used nukes in anger, so I would understand your skepticism, but don't pretend there's no difference between the US and North Korea in terms of the likelihood nukes would get used.
Chicken pox vaccine is a live virus vaccine, but it's a weakened form of it. It likely gives some amount of protection for life, but due to relatively low amounts of data they recommend boosters for now. Even so, since your body now forever hosts the weakened virus, it's hoped that later episodes of shingles will also be less severe and prevalent. Hopefully once everyone vaccinates we can eliminate this painful and sometimes disfiguring, debilitating or deadly disease from humanity forever.
Must be nice being a monopoly that scores of companies have no choice but to ship whatever you put out.
It's no coincidence that most businesses are still on XP/Server2003. I do not look forward to the day our firm "upgrades". Microsoft's only competitor is their past selves, and they often still can't compete; the only way they know to upgrade you is to eliminate support contracts for older versions of Windows, not provide any additional value. Paying money without getting value is a big suck for the economy...
In Java you can't make changes to a class structure (methods, parameters, etc) and still use "edit and continue". I assume the situation is even worse in C++. Thus it's more useful in debugging than development.
I was really puzzled about this, so I went to 'investigate' the issue a bit. Turns out Airport is not a router, but a sort of wireless switch (no modem). So this is probably another speed optimization as packets are 96bit smaller and your home network probably isn't filled with more than 4294967296 devices.
The first thing that comes to my mind is how in the hell this is going to work when you want to access the internet in such a configuration. The utility or physical Airport station probably converts this. I don't think Apple is that retarded...
If you investigate further, you'll see it's just the Admin tool that lost support when they rewrote it, and it has nothing to do with the actual Airport device. Just like Final Cut Pro X, I'm sure Apple will re-add features over time.
Of course, there is a correlation between attending church and living longer, so there is science to back up why religion seems to have been a part of every human civilization in history, and why in the absence of religion humans will create one.
I trust Government regulation based on scientific research more than other kids' parents' rumors, religion and pop culture when it comes to my kids health.
Not even in the media. When is the last time you heard about the labor practices that go into making Android handsets? Despite the fact that Apple seems to be the only company willing to try to improve things, and that the Foxconn factory that made Microsoft Xbox parts was the subject of the threatened mass suicide recently, it was all reported as "Apple's supplier". Or environmentalists railing on Apple over their "disposable" culture when Apple's products are some of the most recyclable and their programs some of the best at doing so?
Apple is definitely not getting a free pass lately. If anything, Microsoft's foray into cellphones is getting a free pass, as is Android's attempts at a tablet. They're treated with kid gloves because they're not Apple.
>>>NPR is "government funded" like oil companies are "government funded".
Really? The oil companies get billions-of-dollars in U.S. Treasury checks like NPR and PBS do? Hmmmm. I. Did not. Know that. (Probably because your statement is false.)
Neither receive billions in U.S. Treasury checks. In "total compensation", including tax breaks and indirect funding, NPR receives a greater percentage of its revenue from the Government than the oil industry, but much, much less in total dollars. NPR's total budget last year was about $200M, so it's really an apple-and-oranges comparison, though.
Of course, you're probably thinking NPR includes PBS, PRI, APT, APM, and PRX, or even CPB which it doesn't. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is actually where the Government money goes directly to be redistributed to the other entities, had a budget of around $420M.
So I'm sure they'd very much welcome a Treasury check of billions, but it's not going to happen anytime soon.
As I understand it, the mass, composition, and age of the moon are all wrong for that that theory (which was the prevailing hypothesis when I was young).
I remember having a poster when I was young (in the 70's) that showed how the moon formed by a lopsided Earth wobbling off a big glop of moon and having it slowly cool and spiral outward.
Indeed, for most of gcc's existence I always saw it as a reasonable lowest-common-denominator compiler, not an especially good one. Up until about a decade ago, "cc" almost always beat "gcc" in performance on any given UNIX, but every "cc" was so different (especially if you dared throw C++ into the mix) you had to virtually port your code to each one. gcc was available for everything and had a reasonable percentage of the standard implemented so was where everyone gravitated towards. Since egcs merged back in and linux has gone more mainstream with Android variants it's gotten a lot more attention and is finally a pretty decent compiler.
The guy in that second link doesn't sound very pissed off. And clang definitely has WAY better error messages and analysis/refactoring available to it. As for the codegen, it beat GCC by a wide margin when it first came around, but GCC seems to have surpassed it again in more recent versions.
But the key for any commercial entity is that clang beats the pants off any GPLv2-licensed compiler, and GPLv3-licensed code is pretty much irrelevant to most applications. So GCC is doing a great job for the insulated linux world, and hopefully clang can catch back up to offer the rest of us a better choice.
You know, my grocery store recently increased prices on produce despite the fact that it's easy to take stuff off the shelves and run out the door with it... What does the ease of circumvention have to do with it? Some people will steal if they can get away with it, some will pay their share.
It's important to note that the details that were false all involve Daisey personally witnessing events. He didn't, he just learned about them. So some of the specific examples are dramatizations, but all the basic facts of the horrendous working conditions are true. He just didn't personally talk with the effected workers.
So, yes, This American Life should clarify the story and should admit that they screwed up in claiming that a dramatization was pure fact. But they did, in fact, check out all the basic facts about the working conditions, and everything claimed is based on things that really happened.
Don't try and take this as evidence that the troubles at Foxconn were fabricated or that Apple was unfairly targeted based on fake stories. They were not.
Actually, according to the article, some were. No one ever saw armed guards, for example, yet that was a prominent part of his story. Underage workers were also only rumors. And of the facts that were true, they were not nearly so commonplace that a casual trip would find them-- he had to pull together anecdotes across space and time to make it seem like all this stuff was happening casually and consistently. It wasn't.
From what we know the A5X is pretty much the same as the A5 except it uses 4 PowerVR SGX543 cores instead of 2. Now this 4 core GPU configuration is the same as the PS Vita albeit the Vita uses a 4 core ARM as the CPU and the Vita runs a smaller 960 × 544 qHD screen. Comparatively, the Vita should beat the iPad on gaming given the hardware for intensely graphic games. For Angry Birds, it may not make much of a difference. At the present time, we don't know if Apple tweaked the A5X in other ways to boost game performance.
The "New iPad" also has twice as much RAM as a Vita (1GB vs 512MB), which could make a significant difference to practical gaming capability. As you note, as well, we have no idea what else Apple tweaked in the chip. Combined with the difficulty in an apples-to-apples comparison between two very different devices, it'll be hard to ever know how different the raw specs are. I think it's reasonable to say, though, that the "New iPad" will be excellent for gaming, as will a Vita.
WebKit, LLVM/clang, and yes, they even did a lot for CUPS, and zillions of bugfixes across many products. And if you're an OS wonk, you can even look at the entire MacOS X kernel source code and borrow if you'd like, as well as many of the low-level processes that make MacOS interesting. It's true that many of these were not taken up by other products, but that's hardly Apple's fault.
this is supposedly needed to make the Siri UX good enough for Apple's standards.
As long as Apple have an excuse they'll use it to try and persuade people to upgrade. Siri would have worked on the iPhone 4. Yes, it would have worked better on the 4S but I'd be astonished if the reason it was not on the 3G/3GS/4S was technical and not marketing.
Really? It would honestly astonish you that Siri would require any development, testing, QA, integration, sales, administrative, or other costs? It would be completely free? Or do you not consider paying for engineering talent a "technical" cost? Because otherwise, it makes a lot of sense for Apple to invest money on their profitable products instead of their old ones. Apple already does so much better than Android, Windows Mobile, and others at supporting old hardware with the latest releases that I see little room for complaint. The iPhone 3GS is many years old and yet got iOS 5.1 the day it was released!
I think the core problem with this discussion is that "smart" is such a loaded word. I know I'm pretty savvy with computers, and very clever with algorithms and design. I'm pretty well-read, and I know quite a lot about the world's history and its present situation. I know a lot about how things work, both natural and man-made. However, I have found that I'm a pretty bad judge of character, and can be somewhat gullible when my guard is down. Am I smart? Would Democracy do better or worse having had my participation?
Slashdot Mirror
"The only "point" of evolution is survival."
No, the only point of evolution is successful reproduction. It makes no difference how long you survive. If your genes aren't passed to offspring, any evolutionary change you may have had dies with you. Likewise, it makes no difference if you die after producing self-sustaining offspring - your contribution to the gene pool carries on.
Not necessarily. If you have no kids, but help other people's kids based on some criteria, you are inserting that criteria into the evolutionary selection pressure. If you take care of your nieces and nephews, you are promulgating kids who share some of your genes even if you don't reproduce. Even if the kids you care for have no genetic similarity, the fact that you were put into a position to care for them may select kids who are in some way similar to you (ie. probably share some genetic patterns). A strong society will likely raise stronger kids who happen to share a disproportionate number of genes with you.
Do you actually believe this or are you just playing devil's advocate??? The evidence is as clear and compelling as anything we have. Who bother reading ANY science content if you're not going to believe that. When they announce the Higgs boson in the next few years the evidence for THAT is going to be orders of magnitude worse than human-made global warming.
f you fly, and you crash, you usually die...
Actually, if you fly, and you crash, you die about 25% of the time.
If I were Dropbox, I would say screw Apple - they get the 30% of the app, sure, but 30% of the extra storage users want? No way. What does that have to do with Apple? Why do they deserve that? They aren't buying anything in app, so what is the problem?
Actually, that's the whole point. When an iPhone user is using a Dropbox-enabled app, Apple is bringing that customer to Dropbox. Dropbox users can still go on their own accord to the Dropbox site and add storage without paying Apple anything. But if an app tries to solicit business that bypasses the App Store fees, Apple calls them on it. Either they remove the link or they pay 30%-- pretty simple. It's not some ethical or moral situation, just a business contract.
Why specify "without scaling"? Just say "can display A4 such that it's easy to read." the new iPad has a ridiculous number of pixels and even scaled pages look great. Unless you really need a mm to be a mm, it doesn't make a difference. And if you do, your needs are likely too specialized for the market to prioritize.
No, that article discussed the port to GNU/Linux. *This* article is about the port to Linux.
I am not sure I get your argument here. Sounds a lot like "I bullied that guy in high school because all my friends were doing that, too".
The argument is that the US is unlikely to unilaterally invade/nuke another country without warning. It has no active border disputes, no external threats to its existence, no significant internal insurgency, has changed leaders in a relatively orderly fashion regularly for over a century, has a military firmly under civilian control, and tends to seek approval of at least its western allies before military action. Of course, it's also the only nation on the planet to have used nukes in anger, so I would understand your skepticism, but don't pretend there's no difference between the US and North Korea in terms of the likelihood nukes would get used.
Chicken pox vaccine is a live virus vaccine, but it's a weakened form of it. It likely gives some amount of protection for life, but due to relatively low amounts of data they recommend boosters for now. Even so, since your body now forever hosts the weakened virus, it's hoped that later episodes of shingles will also be less severe and prevalent. Hopefully once everyone vaccinates we can eliminate this painful and sometimes disfiguring, debilitating or deadly disease from humanity forever.
Must be nice being a monopoly that scores of companies have no choice but to ship whatever you put out.
It's no coincidence that most businesses are still on XP/Server2003. I do not look forward to the day our firm "upgrades". Microsoft's only competitor is their past selves, and they often still can't compete; the only way they know to upgrade you is to eliminate support contracts for older versions of Windows, not provide any additional value. Paying money without getting value is a big suck for the economy...
In Java you can't make changes to a class structure (methods, parameters, etc) and still use "edit and continue". I assume the situation is even worse in C++. Thus it's more useful in debugging than development.
I was really puzzled about this, so I went to 'investigate' the issue a bit. Turns out Airport is not a router, but a sort of wireless switch (no modem). So this is probably another speed optimization as packets are 96bit smaller and your home network probably isn't filled with more than 4294967296 devices.
The first thing that comes to my mind is how in the hell this is going to work when you want to access the internet in such a configuration. The utility or physical Airport station probably converts this. I don't think Apple is that retarded...
If you investigate further, you'll see it's just the Admin tool that lost support when they rewrote it, and it has nothing to do with the actual Airport device. Just like Final Cut Pro X, I'm sure Apple will re-add features over time.
Of course, there is a correlation between attending church and living longer, so there is science to back up why religion seems to have been a part of every human civilization in history, and why in the absence of religion humans will create one.
I trust Government regulation based on scientific research more than other kids' parents' rumors, religion and pop culture when it comes to my kids health.
Not even in the media. When is the last time you heard about the labor practices that go into making Android handsets? Despite the fact that Apple seems to be the only company willing to try to improve things, and that the Foxconn factory that made Microsoft Xbox parts was the subject of the threatened mass suicide recently, it was all reported as "Apple's supplier". Or environmentalists railing on Apple over their "disposable" culture when Apple's products are some of the most recyclable and their programs some of the best at doing so?
Apple is definitely not getting a free pass lately. If anything, Microsoft's foray into cellphones is getting a free pass, as is Android's attempts at a tablet. They're treated with kid gloves because they're not Apple.
>>>NPR is "government funded" like oil companies are "government funded".
Really? The oil companies get billions-of-dollars in U.S. Treasury checks like NPR and PBS do? Hmmmm. I. Did not. Know that. (Probably because your statement is false.)
Neither receive billions in U.S. Treasury checks. In "total compensation", including tax breaks and indirect funding, NPR receives a greater percentage of its revenue from the Government than the oil industry, but much, much less in total dollars. NPR's total budget last year was about $200M, so it's really an apple-and-oranges comparison, though.
Of course, you're probably thinking NPR includes PBS, PRI, APT, APM, and PRX, or even CPB which it doesn't. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is actually where the Government money goes directly to be redistributed to the other entities, had a budget of around $420M.
So I'm sure they'd very much welcome a Treasury check of billions, but it's not going to happen anytime soon.
As I understand it, the mass, composition, and age of the moon are all wrong for that that theory (which was the prevailing hypothesis when I was young).
I remember having a poster when I was young (in the 70's) that showed how the moon formed by a lopsided Earth wobbling off a big glop of moon and having it slowly cool and spiral outward.
Indeed, for most of gcc's existence I always saw it as a reasonable lowest-common-denominator compiler, not an especially good one. Up until about a decade ago, "cc" almost always beat "gcc" in performance on any given UNIX, but every "cc" was so different (especially if you dared throw C++ into the mix) you had to virtually port your code to each one. gcc was available for everything and had a reasonable percentage of the standard implemented so was where everyone gravitated towards. Since egcs merged back in and linux has gone more mainstream with Android variants it's gotten a lot more attention and is finally a pretty decent compiler.
The guy in that second link doesn't sound very pissed off. And clang definitely has WAY better error messages and analysis/refactoring available to it. As for the codegen, it beat GCC by a wide margin when it first came around, but GCC seems to have surpassed it again in more recent versions.
But the key for any commercial entity is that clang beats the pants off any GPLv2-licensed compiler, and GPLv3-licensed code is pretty much irrelevant to most applications. So GCC is doing a great job for the insulated linux world, and hopefully clang can catch back up to offer the rest of us a better choice.
You know, my grocery store recently increased prices on produce despite the fact that it's easy to take stuff off the shelves and run out the door with it... What does the ease of circumvention have to do with it? Some people will steal if they can get away with it, some will pay their share.
It's important to note that the details that were false all involve Daisey personally witnessing events. He didn't, he just learned about them. So some of the specific examples are dramatizations, but all the basic facts of the horrendous working conditions are true. He just didn't personally talk with the effected workers.
So, yes, This American Life should clarify the story and should admit that they screwed up in claiming that a dramatization was pure fact. But they did, in fact, check out all the basic facts about the working conditions, and everything claimed is based on things that really happened.
Don't try and take this as evidence that the troubles at Foxconn were fabricated or that Apple was unfairly targeted based on fake stories. They were not.
Actually, according to the article, some were. No one ever saw armed guards, for example, yet that was a prominent part of his story. Underage workers were also only rumors. And of the facts that were true, they were not nearly so commonplace that a casual trip would find them-- he had to pull together anecdotes across space and time to make it seem like all this stuff was happening casually and consistently. It wasn't.
From what we know the A5X is pretty much the same as the A5 except it uses 4 PowerVR SGX543 cores instead of 2. Now this 4 core GPU configuration is the same as the PS Vita albeit the Vita uses a 4 core ARM as the CPU and the Vita runs a smaller 960 × 544 qHD screen. Comparatively, the Vita should beat the iPad on gaming given the hardware for intensely graphic games. For Angry Birds, it may not make much of a difference. At the present time, we don't know if Apple tweaked the A5X in other ways to boost game performance.
The "New iPad" also has twice as much RAM as a Vita (1GB vs 512MB), which could make a significant difference to practical gaming capability. As you note, as well, we have no idea what else Apple tweaked in the chip. Combined with the difficulty in an apples-to-apples comparison between two very different devices, it'll be hard to ever know how different the raw specs are. I think it's reasonable to say, though, that the "New iPad" will be excellent for gaming, as will a Vita.
WebKit, LLVM/clang, and yes, they even did a lot for CUPS, and zillions of bugfixes across many products. And if you're an OS wonk, you can even look at the entire MacOS X kernel source code and borrow if you'd like, as well as many of the low-level processes that make MacOS interesting. It's true that many of these were not taken up by other products, but that's hardly Apple's fault.
Anyone want to bet me a dollar they won't give data back? I'll take the first comer.
I'm dying to know if you typed that in from a WebKit-based browser...
this is supposedly needed to make the Siri UX good enough for Apple's standards.
As long as Apple have an excuse they'll use it to try and persuade people to upgrade. Siri would have worked on the iPhone 4. Yes, it would have worked better on the 4S but I'd be astonished if the reason it was not on the 3G/3GS/4S was technical and not marketing.
Really? It would honestly astonish you that Siri would require any development, testing, QA, integration, sales, administrative, or other costs? It would be completely free? Or do you not consider paying for engineering talent a "technical" cost? Because otherwise, it makes a lot of sense for Apple to invest money on their profitable products instead of their old ones. Apple already does so much better than Android, Windows Mobile, and others at supporting old hardware with the latest releases that I see little room for complaint. The iPhone 3GS is many years old and yet got iOS 5.1 the day it was released!
I think the core problem with this discussion is that "smart" is such a loaded word. I know I'm pretty savvy with computers, and very clever with algorithms and design. I'm pretty well-read, and I know quite a lot about the world's history and its present situation. I know a lot about how things work, both natural and man-made. However, I have found that I'm a pretty bad judge of character, and can be somewhat gullible when my guard is down. Am I smart? Would Democracy do better or worse having had my participation?