Why is it necessary to send people to war zones to report on events? Aren't there soldiers in those war zones? Aren't there civilians? Granted, not every person who happens to be in a war zone is going to have strong English writing skills, but the idea that only a credentialed reporter with a degree in English Lit. can write an article about the current state of affairs is complete bullshit.
Wait... I was wrong. There's a HUGE difference in ease-of-use.
Believe it or not, those two extra steps make a huge difference for some users. My step-mom, for example, has a hard time making playlists in iTunes and syncing them with her iPod. I can't even imaging how much time I'd spend on the phone if she tried to buy songs from Amazon.
Hell, CA is more than broke right now....yet, they won't do anything to fix it. They won't cut wasteful programs, entitlements....they won't close the border and get rid of illegals (which overload the public school, welfare and health systems).
Maybe because that wouldn't actually help. You could completely eliminate all public schools, police, unemployment, jails, etc, and it still wouldn't compensate for the fact that most of the budget either goes to
Things that the legislature can't cut without a 2/3rds supermajority because they were enacted by ballot initiatives or;
Paying the interest on bonds that were issued by ballot initiatives (and this is actually where most of the money goes)
Oh, and taxes can't be raised without a supermajority either, because of yet another stupid ballot initiative.
So, Mr. Libertarian, how do you propose to fix this without raising taxes or defaulting on loan payments?
If a gang in an area wants a particular candidate in power (because, say, he/she is easy on their brand of crime)
What if the gang wants a particular candidate in power because he's/she's hard on their brand of crime, and that makes it easier for them to maintain their cartel?
What's wrong with his units? The sun delivers energy at the rate of 1000 J/sec/m^2 at the earth's surface! 1 square meter of ground receives about 1kW of power (at noon). This is well-known to anyone who has done any work at all with photovoltaics.
What? Clouds don't exist between cities? How is pointing out the limitations of the Sport Pilot License a strawman argument? Or are you just assuming that people have infinite time to wait out the weather when taking long trips (ie when not commuting)? In some parts of the country during some parts of the year, having an IFR rating significantly boosts the utility of your certificate.
Well, if they made the traction motors electric, they could call it a Neighborhood Electric Vehicle, and avoid most of those pesky safety requirements that most street-legal cars have to meet.
First of all, it's a Sport Pilot license that allows you to fly Light Sport Aircraft (which are not certified aircraft, by the way--the FAA only certifies that they are not certified aircraft).
Secondly, as others have pointed out, whether you talk to a controller is exclusively determined by what type of airspace you are in, though your license and ratings may preclude you from flying in certain types (Class A, for example exists only at altitudes for which you need an IFR rating, and large Class Bs are often (on a case-by-case basis) off-limits to holders of Student Pilot licenses.
And finally, the purpose of the LSA category and Sport Pilot License is to reduce to cost of flying--which the vehicle in the article doesn't do. I can buy, today, (if I had the money) a number of other LSAs from manufacturers with longer track records for roughly $100k less than I might be able to buy this vehicle some years from now. You could rent a pretty nice car more than 1000 times before you made up that difference. Even then, you're never going to come out ahead after you pay for insurance--which costs more, insuring a $100k airplane, that is virtually guaranteed never to get into a fender-bender with a car plus a $20k car that drives on public streets; or insuring a $200k vehicle that drives on public streets?
I think it's actually a little more subtle than that:
The content providers gave cable companies "exclusive" licenses to display their content on TVs, which in this context means "we won't give anyone else a license to display our content on TVs in your coverage area." So, yes, Hulu doesn't have a license to display on TVs, but the reason that matters is that the cable companies are pressuring the content companies to pressure Hulu to takes steps to prevent its feed from working on people's TVs. Because the cable companies are worried that people might just cancel their cable subscriptions. It doesn't really make sense that the content companies would want to block Hulu from Boxee all on their own--they own Hulu, so they get all of the ad revenue, instead of sharing it with the local distributors.
Frankly, this just makes me hate the cable monopoly a little more.
Why aren't the record companies suing Best Buy et. al. for setting the retail prices too high? After all, when I choose to not buy (and not copyright-infringe) due to the too-high prices, isn't that a lost sale? Shouldn't we treat all lost sales the same way, whether they come from copyright infringement or high prices?
[/troll]
Look, the idea that piracy is going to go away once legal music is available on iTMS is idiotic. First of all, every consumer is going to value songs differently. Heck, any particular consumer isn't even going to perceive the same value for all songs. So, to maximize revenue, you need to engage in price discrimination. And one of the consequences is that some songs are going to need to be free before they are purchased. (and downloading infringed songs is not free because there is a risk that you might be sued) Record companies are angry because the excess profit that usually goes along with having a monopoly is being turned into a regular profit that goes along with competing in the market.
Secondly, many infringing downloads lead to later sales. (ref the previous stories on/. that downloaders are also some of the biggest buyers) Apparently, the people who make these infringing downloads somehow get utility from buying the CD after already having the MP3s. Maybe you and I view the world differently, but I view that as not being a lost sale.
Finally, and this is really part of the first point, elementary economic theory holds that people will only buy your product if they are able. If I have zero dollars and infringe on your copyright, you haven't lost a sale because I couldn't have bought it anyway. Obviously, this is different from a tangible good because, if I were to steal a tangible, you wouldn't be able to sell it to the next guy that comes along who is able to buy it. Now you may feel that it is wrong for me to get something for free in this instance, (it's your old chimp tit-for-tat instinct) but you have not lost money.
I'm not saying that copyright infringement is a good thing. Nor am I advocating that people do it. Copyright infringement may increase or decrease the revenue of artists and record companies, but you need to recognize that the argument that 1 download = 1 lost sale is complete bullshit.
IANAL, but that's only for works created after a certain date, when new(er) copyright laws were enacted. That's why, for example, wikipedia is able to basically take entire articles verbatim from the 1911 (I think) edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Why does it matter whether the modulated electronic signal is rendered as text on the screen or speech through the speaker (or for that matter as braille)? In the future, am I going to need to negotiate with the Author's Guild if I want to read an ebook in a different typeface? What if I want to turn my Kindle sideways and read my book in a landscape aspect ratio? Will I need another license for that as well?
1: how much extra will a roadable airplane cost compared to a normal one?
The people who want to build the aircraft mentioned in TFA plan to sell it for about $200k. A used, but very serviceable, two seat "regular" airplane can be bought for around $20k to $30k and a four-place for about $40k to $50k. So, the roadable airplane seems to cost between 4x and 10x as much as a normal one. And, if having a new airplane is important to you, you could spend $120k for a brand new Cessna Skycatcher, which comes from a company with an established track record of building reliable airplanes--and doing it profitably, which means that spare parts will continue to be available for many decades that well-maintained airplanes last.
For the price of a new roadable airplane, you could buy a used normal plane and have enough left over for a few luxury cars (or a whole fleet of Civics/Fits/Corollas/Yarii) to park at your most frequent destinations. Consider also that a normal airplane, because it doesn't need to make so many compromises, will be better at being an airplane than this roadable plane will. And the same goes for the normal car being a car.
But California's under the mistaken belief that NOx emissions are the source of their smog problems, except in a VOC rich environment (basically any environment with a heavy percentage of gasoline cars,) smog is [b]reduced[/b] but NOx emissions, especially those from diesels.
But, they don't seem to quite get that, and public perception is that diesels are dirty, so...
Well, the EPA disagrees with you on the point of NOx and VOC. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding your post? Also, the public perception of diesels not entirely undeserved. Diesel engines (at least those not equipped with a particulate trap) emit a lot of soot, which is no better for your lungs than NOx+VOC smog.
Without living in Los Angeles, it's pretty hard to appreciate how much the pollution controls on cars and truck matter. In other areas of the country, the various pollutant can disperse downwind, but that doesn't happen in LA because the wind comes from the West and there are mountains to the East. The result is that everything just accumulates until it get dumped over by Riverside, on the east end of the basin. A quick google of the California Air Resources Board with turn up some scary movies from about 50 years ago that show LA looking like Beijing.
Re:It's an AdWords arbitrage site. It should fail.
on
Stuck In Google's Doghouse
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Actually, as far as I'm aware, you have it precisely backwards. If it's truly an arbitrage site, it should succeed, by definition, until the arbitrage opportunity runs out.
It seems to me that by increasing the minimum bid (mentioned in the grandparent), Google did cause the arbitrage opportunity to run out. So in fact, this link farm should no longer succeed.
The market worked. What exactly is the problem here?
The cost of maintaining tracks, switches, overheads, etc., helped kill the streetcar. It's all over and above the expense of maintaining the road.
That's because the cost of repairing damage caused to the road by heavy buses is largely invisible on municipal budgets. To wit: when streetcar tracks need repair, the cost appears on the streetcar budget; but when potholes (caused primarily by heavy vehicles like buses and trucks) need repair, the cost is absorbed by the "street maintenance" budget. Car-driving voters usually like politicians who spend money for pothole repairs. Streetcar operators, having been primarily private companies, also would not have had the same access to a municipality's General Fund as the DOT.
There was no simple or economical way to re-route lines or add new ones.
I hear this a lot in discussions of public transit, but I think it's a complete non-issue for two reasons.
First, ask yourself this: Would you prefer to use public transit with a route system that required you to find and learn a new route and schedule every few months or one that let you find a useful route once and rely on it for years? I recently had to ride the bus while my car was in the shop, and finding a time-effective route and schedule was a major PITA (even using the online route-planner).
Second: How often do you see bus routes change in actual practice? I don't ride the bus regularly in LA, but it seems like Metro hasn't changed the bus routes for decades.
If changing the routes is inconvenient to the riders and the operating agency doesn't change them anyway, then why does it matter whether the routes can be changed?
First, those federally mandated tire pressure systems can be disabled by the user. They are mandatory for the auto manufacturer to install, not for the customer to use. AFAIK, there's no law that prevents a customer from yanking them, putting in standard valve stems, and ignoring the warning on your dashboard.
Ah but, interestingly, it is illegal in some jurisdictions for someone else disable them for you. Or for them to help you to disable the system yourself. And not everyone likes to drive around with a warning light illuminated.
I'm afraid I must disagree. In my view, the problem with your argument is that you assume a free and efficient energy market. But this is not the case! We, as a country, spend a tremendous amount of our wealth defending our (energy) interests in the middle east. These costs are largely invisible to the energy consumer, which distorts the market. We can help offset these externalities by providing incentives to those who are willing to invest in other sources of energy.
Actually, for "highly regarded" journals, the author does *not* pay for the article to be published (as you state in step 5). Rather, the journal's revenue comes from subscribers (typically university libraries). In the past (and present), only so-called "vanity journals" require that the author pay the cost of publication. Papers have usually only been published in a vanity journal when they were not accepted at a more reputable one, though this is starting to change. The resistance against moving to open access journals is partly due to a fear that authors *will* have to pay for the publication of articles in highly regarded journals.
Probably not, but it might not give bad results for short periods of time. The resolution required to detect landscape/portrait changes is much lower than is required to perform INS functions without significant integration errors. And, on top of that, you'd also need a way to figure out which way the accelerometer axes are pointing in real space.
Another possible complication is that you only need a two-axis accelerometer for landscape/portrait detection--so it's quite possible that the iPhone only has a two-axis unit. Maybe an iPhone expert knows the answer?
But it would be a nifty application.
There was an Alpha workstations on the Compaq web site that was advertised as having two AGP slots. I assume that it just had two AGP buses (like you said). That was like three or four years ago (or maybe more, since it's 2006 already). Anyway, it was one of the last Alpha workstation models that was produced.
IANAL. I only read the abstract of TFA, which is not the legaly meaningful part. With that in mind, it seems that the patent only covers a transmission with an integrated electric motor that happens to use a planetary gear (or differential). Does anyone know if 1) Toyota's synergy drive has an integrated tranny/electric motor and 2)said transmission uses a planetary gear?
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it necessary to send people to war zones to report on events? Aren't there soldiers in those war zones? Aren't there civilians? Granted, not every person who happens to be in a war zone is going to have strong English writing skills, but the idea that only a credentialed reporter with a degree in English Lit. can write an article about the current state of affairs is complete bullshit.
Believe it or not, those two extra steps make a huge difference for some users. My step-mom, for example, has a hard time making playlists in iTunes and syncing them with her iPod. I can't even imaging how much time I'd spend on the phone if she tried to buy songs from Amazon.
Maybe because that wouldn't actually help. You could completely eliminate all public schools, police, unemployment, jails, etc, and it still wouldn't compensate for the fact that most of the budget either goes to
Oh, and taxes can't be raised without a supermajority either, because of yet another stupid ballot initiative. So, Mr. Libertarian, how do you propose to fix this without raising taxes or defaulting on loan payments?
What if the gang wants a particular candidate in power because he's/she's hard on their brand of crime, and that makes it easier for them to maintain their cartel?
What's wrong with his units? The sun delivers energy at the rate of 1000 J/sec/m^2 at the earth's surface! 1 square meter of ground receives about 1kW of power (at noon). This is well-known to anyone who has done any work at all with photovoltaics.
What? Clouds don't exist between cities? How is pointing out the limitations of the Sport Pilot License a strawman argument? Or are you just assuming that people have infinite time to wait out the weather when taking long trips (ie when not commuting)? In some parts of the country during some parts of the year, having an IFR rating significantly boosts the utility of your certificate.
Well, if they made the traction motors electric, they could call it a Neighborhood Electric Vehicle, and avoid most of those pesky safety requirements that most street-legal cars have to meet.
First of all, it's a Sport Pilot license that allows you to fly Light Sport Aircraft (which are not certified aircraft, by the way--the FAA only certifies that they are not certified aircraft).
Secondly, as others have pointed out, whether you talk to a controller is exclusively determined by what type of airspace you are in, though your license and ratings may preclude you from flying in certain types (Class A, for example exists only at altitudes for which you need an IFR rating, and large Class Bs are often (on a case-by-case basis) off-limits to holders of Student Pilot licenses.
And finally, the purpose of the LSA category and Sport Pilot License is to reduce to cost of flying--which the vehicle in the article doesn't do. I can buy, today, (if I had the money) a number of other LSAs from manufacturers with longer track records for roughly $100k less than I might be able to buy this vehicle some years from now. You could rent a pretty nice car more than 1000 times before you made up that difference. Even then, you're never going to come out ahead after you pay for insurance--which costs more, insuring a $100k airplane, that is virtually guaranteed never to get into a fender-bender with a car plus a $20k car that drives on public streets; or insuring a $200k vehicle that drives on public streets?
I think it's actually a little more subtle than that:
The content providers gave cable companies "exclusive" licenses to display their content on TVs, which in this context means "we won't give anyone else a license to display our content on TVs in your coverage area." So, yes, Hulu doesn't have a license to display on TVs, but the reason that matters is that the cable companies are pressuring the content companies to pressure Hulu to takes steps to prevent its feed from working on people's TVs. Because the cable companies are worried that people might just cancel their cable subscriptions. It doesn't really make sense that the content companies would want to block Hulu from Boxee all on their own--they own Hulu, so they get all of the ad revenue, instead of sharing it with the local distributors.
Frankly, this just makes me hate the cable monopoly a little more.
Why aren't the record companies suing Best Buy et. al. for setting the retail prices too high? After all, when I choose to not buy (and not copyright-infringe) due to the too-high prices, isn't that a lost sale? Shouldn't we treat all lost sales the same way, whether they come from copyright infringement or high prices?
[/troll]
Look, the idea that piracy is going to go away once legal music is available on iTMS is idiotic. First of all, every consumer is going to value songs differently. Heck, any particular consumer isn't even going to perceive the same value for all songs. So, to maximize revenue, you need to engage in price discrimination. And one of the consequences is that some songs are going to need to be free before they are purchased. (and downloading infringed songs is not free because there is a risk that you might be sued) Record companies are angry because the excess profit that usually goes along with having a monopoly is being turned into a regular profit that goes along with competing in the market.
Secondly, many infringing downloads lead to later sales. (ref the previous stories on /. that downloaders are also some of the biggest buyers) Apparently, the people who make these infringing downloads somehow get utility from buying the CD after already having the MP3s. Maybe you and I view the world differently, but I view that as not being a lost sale.
Finally, and this is really part of the first point, elementary economic theory holds that people will only buy your product if they are able. If I have zero dollars and infringe on your copyright, you haven't lost a sale because I couldn't have bought it anyway. Obviously, this is different from a tangible good because, if I were to steal a tangible, you wouldn't be able to sell it to the next guy that comes along who is able to buy it. Now you may feel that it is wrong for me to get something for free in this instance, (it's your old chimp tit-for-tat instinct) but you have not lost money.
I'm not saying that copyright infringement is a good thing. Nor am I advocating that people do it. Copyright infringement may increase or decrease the revenue of artists and record companies, but you need to recognize that the argument that 1 download = 1 lost sale is complete bullshit.
IANAL, but that's only for works created after a certain date, when new(er) copyright laws were enacted. That's why, for example, wikipedia is able to basically take entire articles verbatim from the 1911 (I think) edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Why does it matter whether the modulated electronic signal is rendered as text on the screen or speech through the speaker (or for that matter as braille)? In the future, am I going to need to negotiate with the Author's Guild if I want to read an ebook in a different typeface? What if I want to turn my Kindle sideways and read my book in a landscape aspect ratio? Will I need another license for that as well?
The people who want to build the aircraft mentioned in TFA plan to sell it for about $200k. A used, but very serviceable, two seat "regular" airplane can be bought for around $20k to $30k and a four-place for about $40k to $50k. So, the roadable airplane seems to cost between 4x and 10x as much as a normal one. And, if having a new airplane is important to you, you could spend $120k for a brand new Cessna Skycatcher, which comes from a company with an established track record of building reliable airplanes--and doing it profitably, which means that spare parts will continue to be available for many decades that well-maintained airplanes last.
For the price of a new roadable airplane, you could buy a used normal plane and have enough left over for a few luxury cars (or a whole fleet of Civics/Fits/Corollas/Yarii) to park at your most frequent destinations. Consider also that a normal airplane, because it doesn't need to make so many compromises, will be better at being an airplane than this roadable plane will. And the same goes for the normal car being a car.
But California's under the mistaken belief that NOx emissions are the source of their smog problems, except in a VOC rich environment (basically any environment with a heavy percentage of gasoline cars,) smog is [b]reduced[/b] but NOx emissions, especially those from diesels.
But, they don't seem to quite get that, and public perception is that diesels are dirty, so...
Well, the EPA disagrees with you on the point of NOx and VOC. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding your post? Also, the public perception of diesels not entirely undeserved. Diesel engines (at least those not equipped with a particulate trap) emit a lot of soot, which is no better for your lungs than NOx+VOC smog.
Without living in Los Angeles, it's pretty hard to appreciate how much the pollution controls on cars and truck matter. In other areas of the country, the various pollutant can disperse downwind, but that doesn't happen in LA because the wind comes from the West and there are mountains to the East. The result is that everything just accumulates until it get dumped over by Riverside, on the east end of the basin. A quick google of the California Air Resources Board with turn up some scary movies from about 50 years ago that show LA looking like Beijing.
Actually, as far as I'm aware, you have it precisely backwards. If it's truly an arbitrage site, it should succeed, by definition, until the arbitrage opportunity runs out.
It seems to me that by increasing the minimum bid (mentioned in the grandparent), Google did cause the arbitrage opportunity to run out. So in fact, this link farm should no longer succeed. The market worked. What exactly is the problem here?
The cost of maintaining tracks, switches, overheads, etc., helped kill the streetcar. It's all over and above the expense of maintaining the road.
That's because the cost of repairing damage caused to the road by heavy buses is largely invisible on municipal budgets. To wit: when streetcar tracks need repair, the cost appears on the streetcar budget; but when potholes (caused primarily by heavy vehicles like buses and trucks) need repair, the cost is absorbed by the "street maintenance" budget. Car-driving voters usually like politicians who spend money for pothole repairs. Streetcar operators, having been primarily private companies, also would not have had the same access to a municipality's General Fund as the DOT.
There was no simple or economical way to re-route lines or add new ones.
I hear this a lot in discussions of public transit, but I think it's a complete non-issue for two reasons.
If changing the routes is inconvenient to the riders and the operating agency doesn't change them anyway, then why does it matter whether the routes can be changed?
First, those federally mandated tire pressure systems can be disabled by the user. They are mandatory for the auto manufacturer to install, not for the customer to use. AFAIK, there's no law that prevents a customer from yanking them, putting in standard valve stems, and ignoring the warning on your dashboard.
Ah but, interestingly, it is illegal in some jurisdictions for someone else disable them for you. Or for them to help you to disable the system yourself. And not everyone likes to drive around with a warning light illuminated.
I'm afraid I must disagree. In my view, the problem with your argument is that you assume a free and efficient energy market. But this is not the case! We, as a country, spend a tremendous amount of our wealth defending our (energy) interests in the middle east. These costs are largely invisible to the energy consumer, which distorts the market. We can help offset these externalities by providing incentives to those who are willing to invest in other sources of energy.
Actually, for "highly regarded" journals, the author does *not* pay for the article to be published (as you state in step 5). Rather, the journal's revenue comes from subscribers (typically university libraries). In the past (and present), only so-called "vanity journals" require that the author pay the cost of publication. Papers have usually only been published in a vanity journal when they were not accepted at a more reputable one, though this is starting to change. The resistance against moving to open access journals is partly due to a fear that authors *will* have to pay for the publication of articles in highly regarded journals.
Probably not, but it might not give bad results for short periods of time. The resolution required to detect landscape/portrait changes is much lower than is required to perform INS functions without significant integration errors. And, on top of that, you'd also need a way to figure out which way the accelerometer axes are pointing in real space. Another possible complication is that you only need a two-axis accelerometer for landscape/portrait detection--so it's quite possible that the iPhone only has a two-axis unit. Maybe an iPhone expert knows the answer? But it would be a nifty application.
"These people made the bomb."
No, they Set up us the bomb.
There was an Alpha workstations on the Compaq web site that was advertised as having two AGP slots. I assume that it just had two AGP buses (like you said). That was like three or four years ago (or maybe more, since it's 2006 already). Anyway, it was one of the last Alpha workstation models that was produced.
IANAL. I only read the abstract of TFA, which is not the legaly meaningful part. With that in mind, it seems that the patent only covers a transmission with an integrated electric motor that happens to use a planetary gear (or differential). Does anyone know if 1) Toyota's synergy drive has an integrated tranny/electric motor and 2)said transmission uses a planetary gear?
No, Xen only runs on x86 CPUs. That isn't a limitation specific to NetBSD/Xen, it's a limitation of Xen.