If I do that, which carrier will give me a lower monthly rate because I don't need them to subsidize the phone? Maybe a little guy, but will Verizon or AT&T do that for me?
Nope. So, if I buy an unlocked phone, I'm basically a sucker, because I'm paying for the phone twice.
Cite? I looked up http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/toppacs.php, and it looks like all the PACs give to both D and R. Of the top 10 in that list, 4 gave mostly to D's, 6 mostly to R's. Is there a different list you meant?
A system like this will be written by a team of programmers, some of them very experienced, backed up by quality assurance folks and thousands of hours of experience.
On the human side, you're only as safe as the least safe driver. Older people with slower reaction times and diminished sight, brand new drivers with only a few weeks of experience behind the wheel, intoxicated drivers, and the whole slew of distracted drivers out there on their cell phones. Stand at an intersection sometime and count the number of drivers using cell phones, it's horrifying.
I believe that people who think computers will never drive better than humans are today's version of people that thought a computer would never beat a grand master at chess. It may take awhile, but it will happen, believe it.
US companies want it both ways, though. They want to sell Windows to the US for one price, and to China for a different (lower) price. Right there, that's fine, but if a guy in China wants to sell his Windows copy to me for slightly more and make a profit on it, it's illegal.
Arbitrage is apparently fine when investors do it, but illegal when the rest of us want to balance out the crazy price differences that exist in the world right now.
The coal power plant is still more efficient than your tiny internal-combustion engine. Even with power losses from lines, etc, the electric car is still more efficient overall. So, that's present state.
For future state, if we had mostly electric cars for commuting, running to the store, etc, we could replace coal plants with wind turbines, for example, and suddenly our cars are green. If all cars are internal combustion engines, we're stuck with using oil, or using up valuable farmland to grow vegetation for bio-gas. Just because electric cars aren't 100% green right now, doesn't mean they're not better than what we have. We have to start somewhere.
That doesn't make sense to me. Let's assume the cable company won't outright gouge you (big assumption, sure). They'll want to keep overall revenues the same. The ESPN family is more expensive per user, so they can break that out into its own package. Every other channel that pays to be put on cable (to get ad revenues) will be cheaper. The people that absolutely must watch live sports will have to pay more, or ESPN will have to get cheaper. People not interested in sports will not have to subsidize ESPN any more just to get a couple of premium channels.
Cable is getting real competition from Over the Air and streaming content. They know they have to offer something compelling to get me to stay. If they can get me the basic channels + all of the science channels that are hard to find on streaming for a reasonable cost, I'll stay. If they can't, then I might leave. OTA is free, and free almost always beats better.
Beautifully said. The businesses also get over-crowded with new (one-time) Groupon customers, and their regular customers suffer. I've never seen a restaurant in Chicago offer a Groupon more than once.
Yes and no. I'm sure Jobs wasn't digging into the accounting paperwork, or corporate tax preparations, etc as much as he was the actual products. He's good at the product side, and I'm sure he knows it. I could be wrong, maybe he micro-manages every part of the business, but I never heard anything like that. Many founders, on the other hand, DO want to be involved in every part of the company, to the point where everything comes to a screeching halt since every little thing needs their sign-off. And then they get replaced by the board/investors, or the company dies.
The thing is, if the article is correct, 90% of people think that games are not worth finishing. So game companies can either cater to the super-gamers who want super-long or super-hard games, or they can tune the games to the 90% of people that don't have the time or energy to battle through these super-games.
Is Wikipedia running out of disk space all of a sudden? Why do topics have to be "notable" to be included? One of the great things about Wikipedia originally was that it wasn't limited to a certain number of pages, so finally there were articles on topics that never could have been included in a paper encyclopedia. Why is it the standard that topics have to prove themselves "notable" or die, given that it angers people that spent time and effort adding information to Wikipedia and often removes topics that people were interested in reading about? In effect, it seems like the Wikipedia organization is working hard to make Wikipedia less useful to many potential users and actively pushing away potential contributors.
From your post it sounds like you have inside knowledge about Wikipedia, so if you can help me understand this, I would greatly appreciate it.
I've never understood why a virtual machine is, in any way, better than an intermediate language that can be compiled to native code for a particular platform.
Garbage collection. GC makes people angry for some reason, but I'm personally happy not having to malloc memory all the time. Also hardware and OS independence. It's nice to just open a file and read and write from it, and not really care what the OS is, or what filesystem it's using, and so forth. Same with inputs and outputs, memory management, thread handling, etc. You could add all of these things to your hypothetical intermediate language, but in the end you'd just be recreating the JVM.
I think the JVM is here to stay. We're moving more and more towards high-level, interpreted languages. Hardware is fast enough, and with things like JIT there's no real performance loss anyway. Why not write on a JVM, which does so much for you?
I heard about this on RadioLab awhile ago - a trash dump full of fragments of old scrolls. I believe it was the "Detective Stories" episode: http://www.radiolab.org/2007/sep/10/
They were saying it would take centuries to match up all of the pieces, because they only had a few people working on it, and so many scraps to go through. My immediate thought was that they should scan them all and put them on the Internet, and some bored 17 year old would write a program in Scala that would run in the cloud and match everything up in a weekend. Sounds like somebody else had the same idea...
Assuming the article is correct, Mr. Vince built his first windmill himself like you said, and then borrowed money from a bank to build more, and now solely owns Ecotricity, worth 10M GBP. He seems like a neat guy, talking about how he absorbs good stuff from other company cultures "like the Borg." His favorite movie is Aliens 2.
Where in the world do you have access to either a well-stocked library, or some way to purchase books, but don't have any way to access the Internet? For a Kindle (current technology) you either need brief wifi access from a coffee shop or McDonalds or someplace, or you pay a little bit more to get ubiquitous 3G data access. I live in Chicago, but I've bought and downloaded books in Europe while on vacation without issue. You don't need to be "tethered" to anything to enjoy your digital books. And that's current technology, which will get replaced by devices and services we haven't dreamed of yet.
If you enjoy carrying around heavy, fragile paper versions of books, then more power to you, but you're on the wrong side of history. Before you know it you'll have to dig around in flea markets to find old paper books. Did you notice how fast VHS tapes disappeared? They technically still work, but they've been so completely replaced by DVDs and BluRay disks that you only see them at yard sales anymore. Paper books are up next.
And more to the point, the rest of the world hasn't caught up with plain ol' Ethernet. Your home network is still a bit faster than what you can realistically get from your broadband supplier, so who cares? If somebody started offering 1 Gig download speeds, I don't think we'd still be happy with Ethernet.
Then wouldn't the price of the service go up some similar amount? It went up 50%
I think they were either underselling it, or the streaming portion has got more expensive since they started it, due to studios and networks trying to get paid more. Streaming is actually a weirdly weak spot for Netflix. Due to the way our content laws work, Sony can demand more money for the same product next year - the rights to stream. In the original model, Netflix could in theory buy DVDs from Walmart and start shipping them to customers, so there was always a constraint on the cost. It's gonna stay weird for awhile.
What really pisses me off about this shit is it is preying on those weakest and least likely to understand they are getting ripped off...old folks. It is the grandma and grandpa out there with landlines, the little old lady that can't read her bill with her coke bottle glasses anyway whom they are screwing over.
The pilots have a federally-issued ID, which they show at security. If the ID is good enough to get them into the cockpit, it should be good enough that they don't have to stand in the lines with the rest of us plebes and get scanned or patted down. The guy that scrubs the toilets doesn't go through the stupid scanners, I really don't understand why pilots do.
And really, if a dude shows up DRESSED in a pilot's uniform, but doesn't have matching ID? I think that dude goes into a back room for more questions.
Slashdot Mirror
If I do that, which carrier will give me a lower monthly rate because I don't need them to subsidize the phone? Maybe a little guy, but will Verizon or AT&T do that for me? Nope. So, if I buy an unlocked phone, I'm basically a sucker, because I'm paying for the phone twice.
Who do you buy your service from? And are you getting a discount because they're not subsidizing your phone?
8 out of the top 10 largest PAC's fund Obama
Cite? I looked up http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/toppacs.php, and it looks like all the PACs give to both D and R. Of the top 10 in that list, 4 gave mostly to D's, 6 mostly to R's. Is there a different list you meant?
A system like this will be written by a team of programmers, some of them very experienced, backed up by quality assurance folks and thousands of hours of experience.
On the human side, you're only as safe as the least safe driver. Older people with slower reaction times and diminished sight, brand new drivers with only a few weeks of experience behind the wheel, intoxicated drivers, and the whole slew of distracted drivers out there on their cell phones. Stand at an intersection sometime and count the number of drivers using cell phones, it's horrifying.
I believe that people who think computers will never drive better than humans are today's version of people that thought a computer would never beat a grand master at chess. It may take awhile, but it will happen, believe it.
US companies want it both ways, though. They want to sell Windows to the US for one price, and to China for a different (lower) price. Right there, that's fine, but if a guy in China wants to sell his Windows copy to me for slightly more and make a profit on it, it's illegal.
Arbitrage is apparently fine when investors do it, but illegal when the rest of us want to balance out the crazy price differences that exist in the world right now.
The coal power plant is still more efficient than your tiny internal-combustion engine. Even with power losses from lines, etc, the electric car is still more efficient overall. So, that's present state.
For future state, if we had mostly electric cars for commuting, running to the store, etc, we could replace coal plants with wind turbines, for example, and suddenly our cars are green. If all cars are internal combustion engines, we're stuck with using oil, or using up valuable farmland to grow vegetation for bio-gas. Just because electric cars aren't 100% green right now, doesn't mean they're not better than what we have. We have to start somewhere.
Cable is getting real competition from Over the Air and streaming content. They know they have to offer something compelling to get me to stay. If they can get me the basic channels + all of the science channels that are hard to find on streaming for a reasonable cost, I'll stay. If they can't, then I might leave. OTA is free, and free almost always beats better.
I'd be shocked if this couldn't be hacked into a CyanogenMod tablet by the end of the month. And today's the 28th.
Beautifully said. The businesses also get over-crowded with new (one-time) Groupon customers, and their regular customers suffer. I've never seen a restaurant in Chicago offer a Groupon more than once.
That's OK, Judge Watson will blaze through that backlog in no time! And we can all get back to watching Jeopardy.
Yes and no. I'm sure Jobs wasn't digging into the accounting paperwork, or corporate tax preparations, etc as much as he was the actual products. He's good at the product side, and I'm sure he knows it. I could be wrong, maybe he micro-manages every part of the business, but I never heard anything like that. Many founders, on the other hand, DO want to be involved in every part of the company, to the point where everything comes to a screeching halt since every little thing needs their sign-off. And then they get replaced by the board/investors, or the company dies.
You can bring matches, though. Go figure.
One book of safety (non-strike anywhere) matches are permitted as carry-on items, but all matches are prohibited in checked baggage
http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/airtravel/prohibited/permitted-prohibited-items.shtm
I literally gave you a slow clap for this. Bravo. Bravo.
The thing is, if the article is correct, 90% of people think that games are not worth finishing. So game companies can either cater to the super-gamers who want super-long or super-hard games, or they can tune the games to the 90% of people that don't have the time or energy to battle through these super-games.
Is Wikipedia running out of disk space all of a sudden? Why do topics have to be "notable" to be included? One of the great things about Wikipedia originally was that it wasn't limited to a certain number of pages, so finally there were articles on topics that never could have been included in a paper encyclopedia. Why is it the standard that topics have to prove themselves "notable" or die, given that it angers people that spent time and effort adding information to Wikipedia and often removes topics that people were interested in reading about? In effect, it seems like the Wikipedia organization is working hard to make Wikipedia less useful to many potential users and actively pushing away potential contributors.
From your post it sounds like you have inside knowledge about Wikipedia, so if you can help me understand this, I would greatly appreciate it.
I've never understood why a virtual machine is, in any way, better than an intermediate language that can be compiled to native code for a particular platform.
Garbage collection. GC makes people angry for some reason, but I'm personally happy not having to malloc memory all the time. Also hardware and OS independence. It's nice to just open a file and read and write from it, and not really care what the OS is, or what filesystem it's using, and so forth. Same with inputs and outputs, memory management, thread handling, etc. You could add all of these things to your hypothetical intermediate language, but in the end you'd just be recreating the JVM.
A fair number of languages besides Java run on the JVM. Others have been "ported" onto the JVM. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_languages
I think the JVM is here to stay. We're moving more and more towards high-level, interpreted languages. Hardware is fast enough, and with things like JIT there's no real performance loss anyway. Why not write on a JVM, which does so much for you?
That is the craziest thread I've read in a long time. Thanks for destroying my morning's productivity! :-)
I heard about this on RadioLab awhile ago - a trash dump full of fragments of old scrolls. I believe it was the "Detective Stories" episode: http://www.radiolab.org/2007/sep/10/
They were saying it would take centuries to match up all of the pieces, because they only had a few people working on it, and so many scraps to go through. My immediate thought was that they should scan them all and put them on the Internet, and some bored 17 year old would write a program in Scala that would run in the cloud and match everything up in a weekend. Sounds like somebody else had the same idea ...
Do you mean Dale Vince?
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/utilities/article5438441.ece
Assuming the article is correct, Mr. Vince built his first windmill himself like you said, and then borrowed money from a bank to build more, and now solely owns Ecotricity, worth 10M GBP. He seems like a neat guy, talking about how he absorbs good stuff from other company cultures "like the Borg." His favorite movie is Aliens 2.
Ha! That would be hilarious.
Or just put a much bigger Chinese flag ... right next to the little US flag. Start up WW3!
Where in the world do you have access to either a well-stocked library, or some way to purchase books, but don't have any way to access the Internet? For a Kindle (current technology) you either need brief wifi access from a coffee shop or McDonalds or someplace, or you pay a little bit more to get ubiquitous 3G data access. I live in Chicago, but I've bought and downloaded books in Europe while on vacation without issue. You don't need to be "tethered" to anything to enjoy your digital books. And that's current technology, which will get replaced by devices and services we haven't dreamed of yet.
If you enjoy carrying around heavy, fragile paper versions of books, then more power to you, but you're on the wrong side of history. Before you know it you'll have to dig around in flea markets to find old paper books. Did you notice how fast VHS tapes disappeared? They technically still work, but they've been so completely replaced by DVDs and BluRay disks that you only see them at yard sales anymore. Paper books are up next.
And more to the point, the rest of the world hasn't caught up with plain ol' Ethernet. Your home network is still a bit faster than what you can realistically get from your broadband supplier, so who cares? If somebody started offering 1 Gig download speeds, I don't think we'd still be happy with Ethernet.
Then wouldn't the price of the service go up some similar amount? It went up 50%
I think they were either underselling it, or the streaming portion has got more expensive since they started it, due to studios and networks trying to get paid more. Streaming is actually a weirdly weak spot for Netflix. Due to the way our content laws work, Sony can demand more money for the same product next year - the rights to stream. In the original model, Netflix could in theory buy DVDs from Walmart and start shipping them to customers, so there was always a constraint on the cost. It's gonna stay weird for awhile.
What really pisses me off about this shit is it is preying on those weakest and least likely to understand they are getting ripped off...old folks. It is the grandma and grandpa out there with landlines, the little old lady that can't read her bill with her coke bottle glasses anyway whom they are screwing over.
Yup. Like the woman who paid $10/month for DECADES for one of those old black rotary phones? http://www.mergermonster.com/?m=2&s=111&id=106
The pilots have a federally-issued ID, which they show at security. If the ID is good enough to get them into the cockpit, it should be good enough that they don't have to stand in the lines with the rest of us plebes and get scanned or patted down. The guy that scrubs the toilets doesn't go through the stupid scanners, I really don't understand why pilots do.
And really, if a dude shows up DRESSED in a pilot's uniform, but doesn't have matching ID? I think that dude goes into a back room for more questions.