Whenever you find yourself saying, "Bureaucrats are so stupid. This catastrophe has such an obvious solution, why aren't people doing it the way I tell them to?" you really need to stop and think - "... Maybe there's some angle to this that I'm missing?"
The fact is, we tried your idea with SARS - it didn't help much, and the cost from reduced trade was in the tens of billions of dollars. The present danger just doesn't warrant that kind of drastic action. Moreover, visas don't mean shit - the only people who have taken the disease to other countries are medical personnel from those countries. Citizens who don't need visas.
Also: whenever you find yourself saying, "This catastrophe has an obvious solution, if only political correctness wasn't getting in the way." It's time to stop and reconsider where you're getting your information. This has nothing to do with political correctness. If someone is telling you that it does, what they're trying to do is take advantage of the situation to push their own agenda.
The iPhone was junk when it was released. There was nothing about the device itself that was really new, nothing that it could do which you couldn't do as well or better on another phone, it couldn't run any kind of non-Apple software (and still can't run anything which isn't expressly approved by Apple), and it cost six hundred dollars with contract.
What turned the iPhone into something important was not the revolutionary device, the device was not revolutionary, it was the widespread belief that this was something important. In other words, marketing. It was the belief that made sales and created the customer base, it was the belief that brought all those developers, and it was belief that made people put up with the idea of a completely closed ecosystem - the idea that it was okay to buy something which wouldn't really belong to you even after your purchase. Again, not a revolutionary idea, but something that Apple's extraordinary marketing power could make happen. That was the new thing, the game changer.
This is missing the intent. The prize was given to Obama, not to influence him but to influence the people around him. It was basically an endorsement of his campaign promises, a statement: "People elsewhere in the world like what this guy is saying, or at least it's a big improvement. You, as a country, could stand to move in this direction."
Maybe they underestimated just how partisan politics are here, but instead of encouraging people to support Obama's stated goals (e.g.: closing Guantanamo - a big campaign promise) it just caused them to deride the prize and, to some extent, the opinions of the rest of the world. Just look at how people talk about the UN. China went the same way: for many years they talked about how they were being slighted because no Chinese person in China had ever won a Nobel prize. Then when Liu Xiaobo won it in 2010 they turned against the prize altogether, dismissing it as unimportant.
Tablet focused design is why Flash isn't as ubiquitous as it once was and why javascript has gotten (slightly) less annoying. It is certainly not the reason why Yahoo is shuttering is web directory.
Yes, you are wrong. Back in 2007 AMD started releasing developer documentation and support for the development of open source drivers. This is the "Radeon" driver that you may see in repositories, and it's pretty good at this point. I don't know if 3D is fully supported, but for desktop stuff it's stable. That's in contrast to the Nouveau open source driver for Nvidia cards, which is reverse engineered.
What you may be thinking of are the closed source drivers for Linux: Nvidia's closed Linux driver is better than AMD's. AMD's used to be notoriously bad, but it's gotten better over time. To my knowledge it's still not as good as Nvidia's, but they're both usable at this point.
It was just a matter of setting efficiency standards, if they just banned incandescents then we'd be stuck with some equally inefficient option. By setting fairly rigorous standards they keep the focus on the important part without dictating how that goal should be met. The fact that this precludes one particular outdated technology is a feature of that technology, not the legislation.
If you want to invent a futuristic super-efficient incandescent bulb then you're welcome to do so. The fact that you can't isn't because the man is holding you down, it's because incandescent bulbs are horrible.
customers choose graphics card first, then a screen that works with that card
I don't think that's true, a monitor will outlast a video card by years and years. The difference between G-sync and Adaptive Sync is that if people start buying monitors with Adaptive Sync Nvidia will start supporting them. Everybody wins. (except Nvidia's bean counters)
we got screwed by the government forcing them on us
Like most complaints about the government that I see on Slashdot, this never happened. They set energy efficiency standards for lightbulbs, that's it. Some companies decided to meet those requirements with CFLs, some with LEDs, some with high efficiency incandescents.
Also, CFLs aren't new, they've been around for decades. This wasn't a matter of needing further development time, this was a matter of poor quality. Probably not the conspiracy that the article is speculating about, but who knows.
$350k for a cancer researcher? Crap, that's far more than I'd expect. I actually RTFA thinking that I'd tell you off for making up a ridiculous number, but that is indeed what it says.
I shouldn't complain, better that it goes to someone doing something useful than yet another financial stooge, but it's still a big number.
Yeah, this isn't so much encouraging news for net neutrality as it is a discouraging illustration of our willingness to censor. Though, as I recall, a large number of the breast complaints were form letters sent by a single organization.
In some countries this wouldn't fly, but the US has pretty weak anti-trust laws and Microsoft is not in a dominant position in the tablet market anyway.
There's no blanket prohibition against giving away your product to achieve marketshare (in the US) - this is the Gillette model, after all.
How about a British prince then? They're basically just celebrities.
I think the point he was making, a well-trodden point, is that wealthy / famous people have more privileges, including legal privileges, than normals. From the bizarre amount of attention this has gotten you'd think this was new and shocking ("What?! Pornography?! On the internet?!?!") as opposed to an everyday occurrence.
It's certainly a valid point, and it's important to keep bringing it up when something like this happens, but it isn't exactly new or insightful. I don't know why he did the stupid karma disclaimer.
That's a reasonable point, Russell Edwards doesn't matter to this story. Though it's easy to guess why he was mentioned - he likely wants a little fame / notoriety / credit for his part in this. A journalist can get further by stroking egos than not.
That's likely true - just throw in whatever facts you know in order to flesh out the story a little. I wonder a bit about the interview though which would lead to that question.
...businessman Russell Edwards, 48, bought the shawl...
Why do they throw his age in there? Why does it matter? Is that in any possible way related to the story? I'm not calling out this story in particular, I see this all the time. I'd like to know the motivation behind the trend.
"Scarce" is accurate - the drug is derived from genetically modified tobacco plants of which there are only a very limited number. Obviously they're working on producing more, but the plants don't grow overnight.
Are you seriously trying to imply that the only reason to address an ebola outbreak is to score popularity points? Or are you saying that your personal bias is so strong that if Obama's name is on it, it must be bad? Even when it's as no-brain obvious as this?
Reporter: "Thousands of people are dying from a massive outbreak of a terrible disease."
Reporter: "Libya's health infrastructure has been completely overwhelmed. A number of hospitals, including their largest, have been closed and quarantined."
Obama: "Yeah, we should do something about that."
Mr D from 63: "Oh ho! Look who's jumping on the bandwagon!"
There were skilled slaves too, that's not the why it's believed that the pyramids were built by free labor. There are two reasons that I know of: first, there is some writing on the side of one of the pyramids talking about their construction and, in particular, what the workers were fed. This was considerably more generous (more meat) than slaves would have received. The second reason is that tens of thousands of people worked on the pyramids and is just isn't possible to manage that many slaves when your most advanced weapon is a bronze sword (the chariot wasn't introduced to Egypt until after pyramids were no longer being constructed).
The X-15 was a manned rocket-propelled aircraft that hit mach 6.7 in 1964. If you ever see it in the National Air and Space Museum it's not nearly as big as you'd think - smaller than most fighter aircraft. Comparing it to a Saturn V is a huge exaggeration. If they're using RAM jets in missiles it's all about range and not about speed.
I don't know anything about the specifications of the missiles that the military currently uses. I do know that a rocket has a vastly higher thrust to weight ratio than even the most idealized SCRAM jet - if current missiles are slow then it's not because they're incapable of going faster. I expect it has more to do with turning radius and the fact that cruise missiles are supposed to stay very close to the ground / sea to minimize their chances of detection.
The only thing that hypersonic cruise missiles offer over conventional rocket-propelled missiles is fuel efficiency, i.e.: additional range. The ballistic ones would at least be cheaper than their rocket-based counterparts... Would the cruise missiles be cheaper? I don't know, probably not.
Let's be clear what we're talking about here: hypersonic missiles are just missiles that use a SCRAM jet instead of a rocket. That's it. Despite the fancy name, they're slower than rocket-propelled missiles. The advantage is that a rocket is entirely self contained while a SCRAM jet pulls part of its fuel from the oxygen in the atmosphere - this makes it more fuel efficient.
No one else is willing to blow that much money on their military. Missiles are the cheap counter to giant expensive ships.
However, it's not accurate to say that hypersonic missiles are the only weapons that can take down carriers. In fact, this has nothing to do with anti-ship weapons - these are ballistic missiles. The argument against them is first that they make a nuclear first strike easier and second that they don't offer any sort of non-military functionality. Hypersonic airliners, for example, are probably a pipe dream, but even if they are realized any technological overlap between an airliner and a missile would be extremely small.
I have not, much appreciated. This whole thread has been edifying - all I'd previously heard of for open source video editing was Avidemux, which no one's even mentioned here. Seems that options are much broader than I'd realized.
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever you find yourself saying, "Bureaucrats are so stupid. This catastrophe has such an obvious solution, why aren't people doing it the way I tell them to?" you really need to stop and think - "... Maybe there's some angle to this that I'm missing?"
The fact is, we tried your idea with SARS - it didn't help much, and the cost from reduced trade was in the tens of billions of dollars. The present danger just doesn't warrant that kind of drastic action. Moreover, visas don't mean shit - the only people who have taken the disease to other countries are medical personnel from those countries. Citizens who don't need visas.
Also: whenever you find yourself saying, "This catastrophe has an obvious solution, if only political correctness wasn't getting in the way." It's time to stop and reconsider where you're getting your information. This has nothing to do with political correctness. If someone is telling you that it does, what they're trying to do is take advantage of the situation to push their own agenda.
The iPhone was junk when it was released. There was nothing about the device itself that was really new, nothing that it could do which you couldn't do as well or better on another phone, it couldn't run any kind of non-Apple software (and still can't run anything which isn't expressly approved by Apple), and it cost six hundred dollars with contract.
What turned the iPhone into something important was not the revolutionary device, the device was not revolutionary, it was the widespread belief that this was something important. In other words, marketing. It was the belief that made sales and created the customer base, it was the belief that brought all those developers, and it was belief that made people put up with the idea of a completely closed ecosystem - the idea that it was okay to buy something which wouldn't really belong to you even after your purchase. Again, not a revolutionary idea, but something that Apple's extraordinary marketing power could make happen. That was the new thing, the game changer.
disappointed they didn't influence Obama
This is missing the intent. The prize was given to Obama, not to influence him but to influence the people around him. It was basically an endorsement of his campaign promises, a statement: "People elsewhere in the world like what this guy is saying, or at least it's a big improvement. You, as a country, could stand to move in this direction."
Maybe they underestimated just how partisan politics are here, but instead of encouraging people to support Obama's stated goals (e.g.: closing Guantanamo - a big campaign promise) it just caused them to deride the prize and, to some extent, the opinions of the rest of the world. Just look at how people talk about the UN. China went the same way: for many years they talked about how they were being slighted because no Chinese person in China had ever won a Nobel prize. Then when Liu Xiaobo won it in 2010 they turned against the prize altogether, dismissing it as unimportant.
Tablet focused design is why Flash isn't as ubiquitous as it once was and why javascript has gotten (slightly) less annoying. It is certainly not the reason why Yahoo is shuttering is web directory.
Yes, you are wrong. Back in 2007 AMD started releasing developer documentation and support for the development of open source drivers. This is the "Radeon" driver that you may see in repositories, and it's pretty good at this point. I don't know if 3D is fully supported, but for desktop stuff it's stable. That's in contrast to the Nouveau open source driver for Nvidia cards, which is reverse engineered.
What you may be thinking of are the closed source drivers for Linux: Nvidia's closed Linux driver is better than AMD's. AMD's used to be notoriously bad, but it's gotten better over time. To my knowledge it's still not as good as Nvidia's, but they're both usable at this point.
It was just a matter of setting efficiency standards, if they just banned incandescents then we'd be stuck with some equally inefficient option. By setting fairly rigorous standards they keep the focus on the important part without dictating how that goal should be met. The fact that this precludes one particular outdated technology is a feature of that technology, not the legislation.
If you want to invent a futuristic super-efficient incandescent bulb then you're welcome to do so. The fact that you can't isn't because the man is holding you down, it's because incandescent bulbs are horrible.
customers choose graphics card first, then a screen that works with that card
I don't think that's true, a monitor will outlast a video card by years and years. The difference between G-sync and Adaptive Sync is that if people start buying monitors with Adaptive Sync Nvidia will start supporting them. Everybody wins. (except Nvidia's bean counters)
we got screwed by the government forcing them on us
Like most complaints about the government that I see on Slashdot, this never happened. They set energy efficiency standards for lightbulbs, that's it. Some companies decided to meet those requirements with CFLs, some with LEDs, some with high efficiency incandescents.
Also, CFLs aren't new, they've been around for decades. This wasn't a matter of needing further development time, this was a matter of poor quality. Probably not the conspiracy that the article is speculating about, but who knows.
Not according to the article that the GP linked. Do you have some more authoritative source?
$350k for a cancer researcher? Crap, that's far more than I'd expect. I actually RTFA thinking that I'd tell you off for making up a ridiculous number, but that is indeed what it says.
I shouldn't complain, better that it goes to someone doing something useful than yet another financial stooge, but it's still a big number.
But why would you want to? The interface is completely different.
Yeah, this isn't so much encouraging news for net neutrality as it is a discouraging illustration of our willingness to censor. Though, as I recall, a large number of the breast complaints were form letters sent by a single organization.
In some countries this wouldn't fly, but the US has pretty weak anti-trust laws and Microsoft is not in a dominant position in the tablet market anyway.
There's no blanket prohibition against giving away your product to achieve marketshare (in the US) - this is the Gillette model, after all.
How about a British prince then? They're basically just celebrities.
I think the point he was making, a well-trodden point, is that wealthy / famous people have more privileges, including legal privileges, than normals. From the bizarre amount of attention this has gotten you'd think this was new and shocking ("What?! Pornography?! On the internet?!?!") as opposed to an everyday occurrence.
It's certainly a valid point, and it's important to keep bringing it up when something like this happens, but it isn't exactly new or insightful. I don't know why he did the stupid karma disclaimer.
That's a reasonable point, Russell Edwards doesn't matter to this story. Though it's easy to guess why he was mentioned - he likely wants a little fame / notoriety / credit for his part in this. A journalist can get further by stroking egos than not.
That's likely true - just throw in whatever facts you know in order to flesh out the story a little. I wonder a bit about the interview though which would lead to that question.
...businessman Russell Edwards, 48, bought the shawl...
Why do they throw his age in there? Why does it matter? Is that in any possible way related to the story? I'm not calling out this story in particular, I see this all the time. I'd like to know the motivation behind the trend.
"Scarce" is accurate - the drug is derived from genetically modified tobacco plants of which there are only a very limited number. Obviously they're working on producing more, but the plants don't grow overnight.
Are you seriously trying to imply that the only reason to address an ebola outbreak is to score popularity points? Or are you saying that your personal bias is so strong that if Obama's name is on it, it must be bad? Even when it's as no-brain obvious as this?
Reporter: "Thousands of people are dying from a massive outbreak of a terrible disease."
Reporter: "Libya's health infrastructure has been completely overwhelmed. A number of hospitals, including their largest, have been closed and quarantined."
Obama: "Yeah, we should do something about that."
Mr D from 63: "Oh ho! Look who's jumping on the bandwagon!"
There were skilled slaves too, that's not the why it's believed that the pyramids were built by free labor. There are two reasons that I know of: first, there is some writing on the side of one of the pyramids talking about their construction and, in particular, what the workers were fed. This was considerably more generous (more meat) than slaves would have received. The second reason is that tens of thousands of people worked on the pyramids and is just isn't possible to manage that many slaves when your most advanced weapon is a bronze sword (the chariot wasn't introduced to Egypt until after pyramids were no longer being constructed).
The X-15 was a manned rocket-propelled aircraft that hit mach 6.7 in 1964. If you ever see it in the National Air and Space Museum it's not nearly as big as you'd think - smaller than most fighter aircraft. Comparing it to a Saturn V is a huge exaggeration. If they're using RAM jets in missiles it's all about range and not about speed.
I don't know anything about the specifications of the missiles that the military currently uses. I do know that a rocket has a vastly higher thrust to weight ratio than even the most idealized SCRAM jet - if current missiles are slow then it's not because they're incapable of going faster. I expect it has more to do with turning radius and the fact that cruise missiles are supposed to stay very close to the ground / sea to minimize their chances of detection.
The only thing that hypersonic cruise missiles offer over conventional rocket-propelled missiles is fuel efficiency, i.e.: additional range. The ballistic ones would at least be cheaper than their rocket-based counterparts... Would the cruise missiles be cheaper? I don't know, probably not.
Let's be clear what we're talking about here: hypersonic missiles are just missiles that use a SCRAM jet instead of a rocket. That's it. Despite the fancy name, they're slower than rocket-propelled missiles. The advantage is that a rocket is entirely self contained while a SCRAM jet pulls part of its fuel from the oxygen in the atmosphere - this makes it more fuel efficient.
No one else is willing to blow that much money on their military. Missiles are the cheap counter to giant expensive ships.
However, it's not accurate to say that hypersonic missiles are the only weapons that can take down carriers. In fact, this has nothing to do with anti-ship weapons - these are ballistic missiles. The argument against them is first that they make a nuclear first strike easier and second that they don't offer any sort of non-military functionality. Hypersonic airliners, for example, are probably a pipe dream, but even if they are realized any technological overlap between an airliner and a missile would be extremely small.
I have not, much appreciated. This whole thread has been edifying - all I'd previously heard of for open source video editing was Avidemux, which no one's even mentioned here. Seems that options are much broader than I'd realized.