And they would have been correct - they will sell more from looks and the Apple fans will not only hold it different or purchase the rubber pads but will sing the praises of having to do so.
As in most cases of this blatant a bias when the ones peddling it act as if it is "fair" I can never make up my mind which is worse - intentional dishonesty or stupidity. I've been here long enough to not really care (this is my second account - I forgot the password from the one in my early college days and the e-mail address is now gone, drop a digit for mt first account), but it's become more blatant/extreme here in the last few years. Nor have I ever been able to decide which way it was. To some extent I find it entertaining to watch the mental gyrations needed to make Apple's iPhone into More Holy than God and its main competitor quickly go into An Evil So Black it Will Suck Your Soul Away (and the rhetoric get thicker the more it eats into the market share).
For the most part the left sees this as a great reason to pretend to go after "big oil" and the right sees this as a great reason to attack the current administration and the regulatory boards that failed to apply regulations. Further each side thinks it is gaining political capitol all while the oil companies are bribing their way to what they want. So they have both the political gains *and* monetary gains. Lastly the regs were ignored so what good will passing more do?
Now, if that state of affairs will continue to occur after the next few months - lets say it takes two months to finally cap (a realistic time period). That means it not only hits landfall but spreads significantly (we will ignore the worst case of it making it around the top of Florida). We have a semi-major hurricane go through that and instead of dumping crude onto Cuba (which nobody here cares about) we have several states worth of coastline plus several miles in with a nice coating of crude oil all over then I think some hard questions are going to be asked. Remember this stuff isn't like the oil you get in a plastic jug at Wal-Mart - it is full of some VERY nasty chemicals.
The different parties are mostly maneuvering to make the other side look bad and the more partisan have already taken up the mantra. No one is looking to fix it, they are both waiting for it to be a real disaster and plan to get the most political capitol out of it they can. I do not think that Obama is going to escape the storm (and I think it is too far gone for blaming Bush to stick outside of the True Believers), I do not know how individual congressmen are going to fare. Further it is hitting at just the right time to be a real election time issue too.
I'll tell you how to make the industry self regulating too - make the company totally financially liable for any damages from an accident and hold the executives and board of directors criminally liable (and force them into a rough federal prison - none of those nicer ones) for the actions. That's not going to happen either, though it should. You can regulate all you want but if they are not enforced (for whatever reason) then they will do no good. Make it cheaper to be responsible and companies will, make it cheaper to bribe and ignore safety and most will. No one in power will do that because there is both too much money involved and most are so intertwined with those companies that they would find themselves in prison too.
My uncle has a VERY large collection of movies he gets from one of those places. For whatever fee it is he pays per month he can get up to 10 a month and then a fee for everyone after that. They are fairly decent quality (cost more for the HD versions). He thinks it is legal since he is paying for it, the website is professional looking, and the cost/access rules are what he expects for a legit company.
Indeed, he was lamenting to me a few weeks ago about not being able to find a blue-ray player that also plays his DIVX's. He commented that as easy as it is to get them off the internet and as fast as they come out he didn't understand why all the players just didn't mostly move to that format. I, once again, explained that it was illegal and few companies are going to be going about making your illegal downloads work easier. He looked blankly at me and said "Oh" - it was about the 50'th time I've tried to explain it. It is amusing that he refuses any of the ones I download for free but will happily pay someone else for the same thing so "He knows he is legal". If something were to happen and he end up ripped off (I suspect that if they are getting ready to be shut down many would be all over some credit fraud) or something happen and him go to court he would be one of the ones perputally confused that such a nice company dd it too him. I suspect that letters would be written to movie studios and no amount of being told "It is *illegal*" will ever sink in to most.
Really, with as many people that *do* use them the MPAA ought to just bite the bullet and enter that market - were it legal I woud most likely pay the fee (I'm not about to give someplace pirating anything credit card or bank account numbers even if I were willing to pay for something I could get for free). My uncle (and those others I know that use these services) still go to the movies just as often, the MPAA is just missing out on the profit he is sending to an operation in another country that may or may not be legal there.
For myself *this* is the type of piracy they ought to go after. I have no sympathy whatsoever for selling copyrighted information that you do not have permission to do.
Re:Oh good! The trolls are out in full force!
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iOS 4 Releases Today
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The so called "smart phones" have become much more (or less depending on how you look at it) that simply a cellphone. Were it simply a phone I doubt there would be much arguing here, but they have are becoming general purpose computing devices. In many cases (both the iPhone and ANdroid sets) the phone gets less attention than the application framework does - they are OK phones but if you primarily want a phone there are MUCH better choices out there.
Would we be arguing about HTML5/Flash on just a cellphone? The openness of a application store? No, that's because we have highly mobile computing devices that just happen to also work as our cellphones. As such yes it is important as to how open.
Apple won on both the iPhone market and iPod market because they noticed people griping about what they couldn't do and went and did it. The iPod is *not* a multi-purpose device - it is primarily a music player that just happens to have some other stuff tacked on. No one is looking at their iPod and saying "Gee, I *really* wish it did this". People were doing that with the older MP3 players. People were also heavily doing that with thier smart phones - all sorts of wanting it to be a general purpose computing platform. Apple understood this and made the first go at it. What Apple isn't seeing is that many people are *still* going "Gee I really wish my smart phone would do this" and they are going to loose because of that (the iPod market is pretty much wrapped up, their vision works VERY well there).
One can argue all day that it isn't fair, and heck maybe you even have something of a point (for some they are phones first and the applications are secondary) - but in the end all it matters is user are frustrated with certain things and when something comes out that satisfies those complaints whilst not breaking their old uses the they get replaced. The Android phones may do it, but there are still complaints there that someone could address so unless those get fixed (and Google is more than capable of doing so) there they will not be the long term winners either. Apple has never and most likely never will understand this. That being said Apple has historically been happy that way and turns a profit so I can't say they are wrong either - people who agree with the Apple way of doing things loves them and are dedicated customers - just do not drink the cool aid and think it is going to do something it is not. Lets face it, the iMac is profitable and many consider all five sold a year to be a HUGE success story - those that like the idea love theirs, one can do a lot worse than that.
So, lets assume what you say is true - is this really a nice business that deserves success? Hard to say.
Obviously if they can do all that is claimed then they "deserve success", though of course that depends on your definition of success. If success means being the richest company in the world showered with personal sex slaves then, no, they really didn't deserve that. If you mean deserve to pay their employees a slightly above average salary for their area and have a slightly above average return for their investors then certainly - I would say they deserve more than that.
Of course that is the crux of the problem that is asked and the one you bring up - they took a cheap system and through software made it perform as well as the high dollar items. They then apparently turned around and charged the similar to the high end items which kinda defeats the whole "cheaper" angle. They do not deserve to do that because they found a nifty way to do something.
Since you are an AC there are already a few posts accusing you of astroturfing, if so then it is a poor attempt. You tell us a story where someone is charging WAY too much for their product and basically failed due to a bad marketing department (marketing isn't just there to hype a product, in a successful business it has a real impact on how profitable things are). If they can take a cheapo drive and through software/firmware make it perform like a high dollar one and then charge me most of what the high dollar one costs - why purchase theirs? They would have to have nearly totally equal guarantees that the enterprise level devices did.
In short getting 95% the benefit at 90% the cost isn't really worth it - that extra percentage in costs is usually worth other intangibles ("Who ever got fired because of purchasing IBM" was an effective marketing tool for a reason even when you got 90% the benefit at 110% the cost), getting 90% at 70% the cost very much is. In the longer run if true then this will make a difference - if they have a patent then selling/licensing it can generate a decent amount of money if done well. But if they follow the pricing model you allude too then it will be a dead end.
Some of those answers are going to depend on what age you are "20 years" isn't that long if you are around 20 - lots of us really old folks around the 40 year old range that gre up playing games (games have been popular and require reflexes and such since way back in 1980 or so)
I picked mine up with pong, went to an atari 2600, a PC, NES, etc and still do today. I spend massive amounts of time at it, more than pretty much anyone does with another sport. I'm a software engineer so I have one of those "thinking jobs" too.
I'm 35, started when I was around 8. People my age have beginnings of knee problems (I do with no few sports - but arthritis tends to run in my family, few on both sides made it past 35 without some and I am no exception). I have a bit of RSI in my wrists and fingers, but that is probably more to do with the typing. I can't figure that 5 more years (it is usually someone around 20 who thinks "20 years from now how broken will I be") will be much different so your are probably safe.
Now, if you are older then it gets to be a harder question. For the most part 20 more years for me (mid 50's) probably isn't going to change much - most people play Tennis, Baseball, and many other sports into their 50's with only needing increased therapy. A little more icing/heat, not quite as aggressive, etc. If non-professional gaming has me extra slowing down in that time frame then it really ought to get a good look from the govt to either ban it or make sure people realize the dangers as it is terribly dangerous. Enough time has elapsed with games being obsessed over to note if it does when someone playes heavy from youth to their 40's. Most people In other sports, except the Olympic/Professional Level competitors, should never see a problem into thier 50's that wasn't simply "aging". In those cases the competitors are well aware of the damage it inflicts on their bodies.
For me what is it going to be like in 30 years is a better question - your early 60's should be where you really start noticing things like that. Maybe you are in your 40's so 20 years is a good length of time to think about, however with such a high user number and obviously something of a techie I doubt it. The likelyhood of being a high numbered poster in your 40 that has been on the net or decades is quite low (though it can happen - I have a low 5 digit account here that I can't access because the e-mail account I registered under no longer exists - can't get my password and I forgot my old one).
Worry more about your heart, arteries, lungs, pancreas, and other parts of your body that tend to wear out. You brain tends to degrade from *not* using it much.
If you download the LOTRO digital payed client right now it includes the Pando client so I would assume the free version does too.
I saw it in a routine checking of processes running and I checked what it was, removed it, and the game runs fine. DDO did also once removed but I didn't care for the game so I quit.
"Incidentally, this is not biblical, it is a justification people make up because their prayers aren't being answered, but it isn't something you will find in scripture. The reason the scriptures give for prayers not being answered is because the person is wicked."
Ever read the Book of Job? I would have to say that one right there invalidates your assertion quite a bit. God killed his entire family, give him majorly bad diseases, and took away all his material belongings. I do not get a nice easy quote there - I get an entire book dedicated to just that idea. Plus that has been part of the judeo/christian belief system for quite a while.
It is quite clear that had he turned from God at any point his life would have remained miserable. The story is entirely about what you claim to be is wrong. The *entire point of that whole book* is that your prayers may not be answered, indeed you may get worse and worse and worse and worse, yet in the end belief will pay off though it may take decades (and may even only occur in the after life).
Further you bring up Moses not being able to enter the promised land - another classic example of someone who *obviously* followed god - even to performing miracles - yet would have failed your "test" and he should have internally concluded that God didn't exists and everything that happened was just luck.
I guess your idea of "modern" is different from mine since you obviously know about these things.
"If you do not consider yourself to be suffering, then you have no use for Buddhism. Why do you care whether you can ease your suffering or not."
Absolutely correct - you just described the latter half of Buddhism to a tee. Once you reach that stage you no longer need as you are fully at peace in the world - otherwise known as Nirvana nor is Buddhism the only method to get there.
Not sure what you think that proves either, since your "In order for this to be true" is precisely what they believe.
Those are only falsifiable because you chose to ignore parts of the beliefs or chose to insert your own definitions so that you could get your way.
"Buddhism: if you follow the eight-fold path, your suffering will end. Extremely testable. If you follow the eight-fold path, and you are still suffering, then man, they led you astray. Tantric yoga: do these exercises and meditations and eventually you will have a kundalini rising (enlightenment). So if you do them, and you don't have a kundalini rising, then you know tantra is worthless (either that or your teacher sucks)."
In this case you insert your own definitions for it - you consider what someone is going through as suffereing, they do not. Both have a pretty much self-fulling circular thought. In both cases fully integrating those ideas into your life means you will not suffer and will gain enlightenment - that is if you can truly master it then living up to you nostrils in pig shit isn't suffering, thus if you suffer - by definition - you are not doing it right. There is nothing there that says if you do then phantomfive will consider you to not suffer, it isn't you who gets to make that call.
There have been enough people around over the years that get close enough to this that I wouldn't argue it hasn't happened, indeed if we want a "proven" religion then Buddhism is one of the better ones.
"The Bible: Those who believe shall be able to do miracles, such as drink poison and not get hurt, or heal the sick (Mark 15:17). So if you follow Christ and you can't do those things, then......yeah, you've just falsified it."
Certainly - and the Bible itself is fairly clear that over a few thousands of years about 5 or so people were able to do that and really only one at anything other than random intervals (and that would be Jesus). The Bible is quite clear that we are all sinners and not really worthy, it is only by the Grace of God that we get anything. Further the Bible is quite clear that all but Jesus (and only because being the son of God he was pretty much perfect) failed there miracles when they tried to show off or otherwise "tempt God" so it isn't like a Wizard in DnD where it is a power you wield.
There are certainly complaints against those ideas - it is awfully convenient that the Buddhist fails if they are suffering and it is also awfully convenient that any "miraculous" thing that happens is because you believe but only happens when a higher power wants it too, not when you do. But that doesn't make them false, it just makes them more or less faith based.
True to some extent, but that is being pedantic. That is ultimately the start down the road that brings us to today.
The strong implication was that the people telling us they were going to bring it to a vote, have a fair and open discussion, and then vote on the measure said they supported those ideas. In the end they did what they promised by the strict letter but not what they intentionally implied - that is that they would support said measures, work to get them implemented, and vote for them. Very very few (I will not say none, though I would guess that the number is so low it might as well have been) voted for the Republicans at that time to write a bill and then vote against it and if passed then work to invalidate it. Sure they never said they would vote for, support, or not vote for bills that then neutered those ideals but that was strongly implied - strongly implied in an intentional way. That is otherwise known as "lying".
And, as I said, that directly brings us to where we are today. Obama is not the person most that voted for him elected, most of the democratic junior senators that turned the majority around are not the people that were elected, and if this election shapes up like it looks neither with the Republicans as they reverse it around again. It's beyond simply being a politician - that has always been something of a semi-shady business and always will be. It is intentional misleading and many political hacks have fought for so many years to have this pedantic way of parsing their chosen groups words that it is accepted as a norm. Pelosi, Reid, Obama, Boehner, McConnel, or almost any of them (there are bound to be a few decent people - I or you may detest their ideas but that is a different argument) are scum. Deficits only matter when it is an attack on the other side, returning favors for money is only bad when the other side does it (I can imagine what Pelosi would be saying if Bush Jr had allowed BP to be exempted from inspections, allowed them to not plug the well because it would be expensive to re drill, and not contain the oil because they want to still reclaim it, and do this for even 10 days let alone over 30 now - neither side is interested in doing more than political posturing).
The last time I had any real hope for our political body was the cited Contract with America and that didn't even make it the first 100 days. With each shift in congress and each new president I keep thinking they can't get worse, but hey these people are brilliant over achievers right?
Depends on the phone - even some "vendor locked" ones can be rooted and vanilla or custom VM's installed. It's not that hard and most people should know someone who is capable of doing it if it really is needed. But even then that is really only applicable for a small group of people. However, so far very little in terms of the API and application development uses anything newer than 1.5 - especially for commercial applications (peoples play programs will differ - there are fart apps that require 2.0+).
"* my android app don't work on x version of android"
Same is true of the iPhone - last I checked Apple hasn't figured out how to back port API's to previous versions of the OS. Assuming if what they say of their newer OS you are going to be in an even *worse* place than what you are making the Android Market out to be.
"* my android app doesn't work on y version of hardware"
Simply not true - Android runs against a VM, even the vendor modified ones run against that VM. If that VM exists on a piece of hardware Android will run. This is a MUCH better situation than the iPhone in terms of porting code - there isn't any. Now, with the amount of phones out there you may find an application needs more processing power - but with older iPhones that happens too. You may find that phone X doesn't have a GPD so your nifty GPS app will not run - again no different from an iPhone. However Android handles that MUCH more efficiently with it's resource lists, it is handled at the App Store or installation level instead of relying on someone telling you not to do it or finding out later.
I will assume what you really mean is point one - my hardware can't be upgraded but you are just saying it differently.
"I have plenty of iPhone apps that were first-generation that still work. That sounds like an unlikely situation in the android world. I also have apps that work on all versions of OS and hardware. I have a few that require specific features (GPS) that don't exist on 1.0 hardware...so obviously don't work on newer devices. I had a few apps (WiFi scanners) that died under OS 3.0 that used to work."
While it may sound unlikely you to, turns out you are just flatly incorrect. The 2.2 VM is fully backward compatible with all previous releases of the API. They just aren't forward compatible. Google has gone to great pains to keep 1.5 stuff running on higher releases, I suppose at some point 1.5 will have to reach an end of life - but then Apple is going to save you from that either (as you state in your post - you have already seen some stuff end of lifed). Not really sure why that is a tough concept - Java, VMware, Python, and many many other VM based systems have been around for many a year and do a pretty dang good job of it.
"It sounds, however, that compatibility across android and handset versions is not only not guaranteed with android, but that the incompatibility is to be expected...according to their chief architect."
Eh? One of the listed strengths of the Android is that it *is* compatible - basically VMware with a linux kernel running Java on a phone (that sounds - and frankly is - not really "efficient" in terms of resource allocation, but it is certainly great in the write once run anywhere model). Write to the VM and it runs anywhere that VM is at, it is basically hardware independent. Nothing really revolutionary there as far as that goes, though few if any other phones do it. If you have worked with VMware then you pretty much know what to expect in terms of dealing with the "hardware" environment.
Now, being an Open Source project any company is perfectly free to modify to their hearts content and release it. In that sense, and from that explanation is where you are probably getting third hand information from (or rather misquotes with erroneous explanations given), is where the FUD comes from about so called "fragmentation" from an actual Android dev - but no, it is not expected any more than we expect to see 15 di
I'm sure they will certainly know to do that. When you create an Android application you tell it your minimum hardware and software requires (and have no choice but to do so) and the Dalvik machine will not let it run if you can't. It has done this from the very beginning - heck the app store will not even let you view software you can't run.
Those were some quick growing pains there - it was there from conception, I bet Apple isn't even *that* responsive.
IMO there are three different answers depending on exactly how you want this answered.
First is - what do you like. In this case you will see a great deal of variation. Indeed, we can see a large portion of people here recommend Macs. You can also see studies where university professors have a higher than industry sales percentage use of macs too, more often than not it really doesn't matter in that setting as the concepts being taught are generally platform independent.
Next answer is costs - this one is decided elsewhere. While obviously Linux has little cost in up front purchasing its total cost of ownership may be different. I do not know how well it supports your hardware or how much retraining of your IT staff it would need. Further I know Microsoft often give colleges a nice enough deal for quite a number of seats that the cost is negligent. Even the small college I went too (East Tennessee State University) had donations from them for software, our IT lab also had a donated 30 seat license from Oracle and students could purchase Visual Studio for around 20 dollars (this was early-mid 90's).
Last answer is what will you see in industry. In this case "science and engineering" isn't really specific enough to give a really great answer. The only thing I can say is my parents have owned a land surveying company since I was one year old. I worked with them from 12 to some time in my twenties. From all the civil engineers we worked with I could count the number of apple machines on one hand and have five fingers left over (that is I never saw one) and an occasional architect would have one (but would still have a windows machine for AutoCad). I would see the occasional Unix workstation but everything was Windows. At this time I do not think AutoCad comes on anything other than Windows and that is the software of choice there. After college I worked for about five years as research staff at Oak Ridge National Labs in the high performance computing division - I do not think you can get more "science" anywhere else. That was mostly Linux and Unix (not just us - but the chemists, physicists, biologists, etc). However there were a handful of macs there, I can immediately think of three people I knew with them out of close to 50 that I regularly worked with but then again those were macbooks they used, their desktops were either windows or linux. I suspect true commercial applications to be little different there - you needed specialized tools and often had to make them yourself. The few bits of Apple hardware (power archetecture at the time) ran Yellow Dog Linux so those do not really fall into the "macitosh" realm either.
So, given that your choice is between Windows and Mac - well I have seen less than 10 macs in a production environment. That is with a little over 10 years in an engineering environment, 5 in a pure scientific world, and around 5 in mixed environment. Then again due to Apples deals they give schools I know of a great deal of people that learned on them, the concepts can be taught on most anything if the platform has the right software. It isn't until you get to a production environment that, well, production, robustness, and flexibility matter. Apples philosophy generally meshes well within a university setting and often doesn't in a work environment. Both Windows and Linux are flexible, Apple products (macs, iPhones, iPads, iPods, anything) need to be in an environment that adapts to them, good if you work/think that way (as the graphic artists do - hence why they still dominate that field), not so much for engineers and usually scientists.
"Because the large corporation is posting billions of dollars in profits because of their drilling?"
So - why does this make it so they should be punished? Would it have been different if they only made a few hundred thousand?
"Because some people are implying that BP engaged in several salvage operations before looking to actually lose the well?"
Now there is one I agree with.
"Because a car accident puts the occupants of your vehicle and the other vehicle at risk, not entire countries, their economies and endangered animals in the surrounding environment?"
Again - so what? Did they do everything within reason to prevent it? Did they do everything within reason to stop it once it happened? In either case (car crash or BG) if the answer is "No" then they are not only fully responsible but should have punitive actions taken against them. If the answer is "yes" then no reason to punish, though you still have to pay for your accidents.
"Because (as the article noted) we're about to let Shell start drilling in the Arctic where the seas are rougher and the location more remote to create delays in response times?"
Again - why do I care? At every moment we learn something new about this disaster we find cutting corners and the govt letting them get away with it. *That* is the issue, have us stop doing that. As far as I can tell the only president that has done more to let them get away with it than Bush Jr has been Obama. At least since Carter each president has let more and more slide.
"I think at this point we could reopen the debate on the effects of a nuclear plant failing compared to an oil line failing. And how much easier and effective it is to drop a cofferdam on a nuclear core than a well miles below the surface of water."
Perfectly agree there too, that would likely change a great deal of the economics of a plug in electric motor for cars too. We have unrealistic fears of nuclear power plants and that could easily solve a great deal of our energy issues along with a large number of environmental ones. The old worry of what to do with the waste is almost totally non-existent now - heck we pay billions in production cost a year now to produce that "waste" as we found uses for it. Indeed, if we had had nuclear plants from the beginning and stored the waste in bunkers the owners of those bunkers would be VERY rich. Nor was the meltdown issue ever as serious as made out, of course some of that also depends on regulations being enforced too.
"Your argument of it being a one time thing that is unprecedented does not sit well with me when we look to expand on the number of wells we have. Precedent has now been set. Either tighten regulations so that your point (a) doesn't happen and point (b) is actually true. Care to prove point (c)?"
You can tighten regulations all you want - if they aren't enforced at our current level then it is a waste of time. Write Obama and tell him your outrage at letting his Oil Cronies off the hook in return for money. Not that I think that will be effective either, votes are the only thing most of them listen too at all from us and as far as I can see they dodged most of the blame for this one. 50 people not voting for him or loose a few tens of millions? Hmm, hard choice.
"When bad things go wrong to corporations making lots and lots of money, then they should be held accountable, girlintraining. Why you rush to BP and the oil industry's rescue, I'll never know."
I do not understand what the amount of money they are making has to do with any of it - it is an oft repeated thing in your post and many others. If they were going broke and did this would it make any difference? Both the ethics (as some other posters point out) and the subsequent punishment shouldn't really be concerned with how much or how big the disaster is with respect to if we do it or not. If they did everything that they were supposed and accidents happen then no reason to punish them because they make a great deal of money - indeed they would then
Probably, but that would be assuming that you were raising cattle to produce energy, not raising them to produce milk/meat and using the by products. The two are totally different metrics.
A bigger question that the article does not even remotely touch is what are the extra energy costs to do this. Sure 10000 cows may produce 1 megawatt of energy but what if it takes and extra 1.5 megawatts to gather and process it? You also have to factor other things that are not included in the simple metric of how much net energy is produced - time needed, labor needed, cost of upkeep, etc. So lets say you get.5 megawatts net power but have to have a 2000 person team and a plant the size of North Dakota to process it - not so good then. Then you have other environmental impacts not really talked about all.
Of course, what I wrote above in terms of sizes is going t be WAY off they were chosen to be illustrative. Many small dairy farms already do this type of thing because in that mode of operation it has proven to be economical. Small on site plants that offset their electricity costs and offset some of the environmental issues with too much waste and its disposal. While that may not be as visible as a single large plant it is still taking that load from the power grid. Further methane is a fairly nasty gas in the atmosphere, its rather unhealthy to breathe, few or no life forms processes it, and it is WAY worse than any carbon emissions - even most that are skeptical of CO2's impact aren't about large amounts of methane. This converts it to CO2 which in this amounts aren't harmful to breath, last I checked plants really like the stuff, and you are getting a VERY significant reduction in greenhouse emissions.
Personally I rather suspect (but have no evidence whatsoever) that it would be difficult to scale up. For it to scale to a large size would require too much driving and work for a farmer (who is in the business of farming, not driving cow patties around) to bother with unless the pay was high. Further unless there was some govt solution (similar to the way most in the US have recycling done through the garbage collection agencies) it would also not be worth the effort monetary wise for a private company (and even if a govt did it, still not but more often than not govt do not really care if something is bleeding money). Small local plants make some amount of sense, small farm sized plants a great deal of sense - but that is why they are available and used today.
That is really a useless metric (not to mention VERY wrong at least on the friendly fire issue).
From Wikipedia we see that the US had 294 deaths - 114 by enemy fire, 145 by accidents, and 35 by friendly fire - not 1/3 by any stretch of the imagination. What you probably saw was that friendly fire constituted 24% of *combat* fatalities. I also assume that you mean the listed SCUD that killed 28 soldiers and was the single largest attack during the whole war, its not told if these were considered "combat fatalities" or not as they were not in combat at the time. However for the sake of argument lets say they were.
That means that of the 86 scud's that Wikipedia lists (maybe more, not sure if that list is inclusive or not) *one* was effective - that means either the Patriots were successful or the SCUD's were even worse than we thought they were. Further it also shows why "1/3" is a useless metric here - casualties were so low that a *single* missile could account for ~20% of the casualties. No system is 100% perfect.
Further even if the sample size was large enough to make 1/3 not just totally worthless the bigger question is *how many did it save*. Given how few they killed (a whopping three civilians - wikipedia doesn't say if soldiers were killed in those attacks) and what they would have done if they had hit their targets (of which well over 50% were quite capable of doing) than I would declare the system quite successful. Especially true give the state of electronics in 1991 and that you were shooting a missile down with another missile. We could have *easily* seen the SCUD missile as responsible for many times the active combat fatalities.
Frankly if a nuclear missile defense system had that type of success it would be worth 100 times what we are paying for the one we are developing now.
It's not the first time this scenario has happened - frankly it feels a great deal like the days of the early Macs.
I recall the first Mac I ever saw - I was in high school and a friend had just purchased one (upgrading his Apple IIe), I do not recall which Mac it was but was the top of the line at the time. All of us oohed an ahhed over it. Indeed, it was one of the slickest things I had ever seen. I wanted one so bad I couldn't stand it but I (even with my parents help) just could not afford one so I settled for a PC (the 486's had just come out and I got one of those - over 3500 for it but the mac topped 5k). The friend with Mac talked about how great it was, look how stylish, how great the graphics were, how responsive the GUI (Whats a GUI says I? I have dos 4 something!) and it was all true.
But then slowly reality set in, though it did take a couple of years. His emulator would play nearly anything he wanted but my hardware progressed in ways Apple didn't see fit with their "vision" so emulation didn't really work. As we both started learning about these things called computers I started being able to do loads of things he couldn't. Prices for my devices quickly fell, his didn't. Access to new devices were quick on mine, not on his. My hardware adapted to my vision, his required him to adapt to Apples.
Apple came along with both the iPod and iPhone and made something people could brag about from all points of the road. They could often say "I can go do this - can you?" and all but the Blackberry users would slink off (and those users didn't care and still more often than not do not - the blackberry is a tool, not an entertainment device). They found the perfect time for their vision to be the best out there. Now time has moved on, heck even in the time since I purchased my Moto Droid it has drastically changed. From an anecdotal point of view my boss with his iPhone has gone from jokingly pointing out all he can do that I can't to seeing a thing or two I regularly do that he can't (along with most of those things I couldn't my phone now does). From a somewhat less anecdotal point if view (but still more anecdotal than not) I simply watch when I sit in a busy terminal in an airport and note what phones people are playing with. A few months back and I was the only Android device - now not so much. Last trip I counted 10 iPhone devices (or rather iPhone like ones - I noticed two that got downgraded to iPod touches when they brought out their blackberrys - I do not know them well enough to tell them apart) and 6 Android ones.
Apple has always self imploded when the market place exceeds their vision. They have almost always been good about filling voids and making niche markets mainstream - they have been bad about fulfilling those needs over a long term period. For those whose wants coincide with their visions Apple is the perfect company - nothing wrong with that. Even today the Mac is the preferred tool for many graphic professionals for this reason (though some of their arguments are a holdover from the past, many are not). But for normal everyday people having the person next to you do something wanted with their device that you can not do makes them want it. Microsoft and the PC won out back then from that and slowly moved away from it due to market dominance. Even then Microsoft can't take the truly draconian stance Apple does (see Vista and few purchasing it).
They (Jobs in particular) have never understood that the stronger they try and control a thing the less control they have over it (yea, I know I'm mostly quoting Star Wars here and comparing him to Vader - yet in this case rightfully so). A company that understands they have to be flexible yet still have their vision will win over them in the long run. Will Google win over them? Hard to say, they are in a similar position to Microsoft in the early 90's. No one phone is going to be the iPhone killer any more than we can point to the Mac killer. It will not be the Motorola Droid, HTC Incredible, or the yet to be announced DFC
Maybe there is a option not listed - Obama lied in order to help him get votes.
I know it's shocking that a career politician that rapidly rose through the ranks of Chicago in one of the the most corrupt districts there would somehow not be totally truthful. After all he talks nice and chanted "Yes we can" over and over and over. I'm certain, absolutely certain, that if you could just get a message through to him he would realize the enormous accident that occurred and go have a nice long talk with his advisers and other appointees (whom he had *no* idea were doing all these bad things) and fix everything right up.
Really, even if you think everything he has done so far is peachy keen and figure the guy is mostly honest - he is still a politician. At best I would say an open source advisory is so down the priority list that it will likely never happen. Lets face it - he promised to nix the "do not ask do not tell" policy regarding gays in the military, that one simply takes him to write out an official statement and it has been over a year (and promised more than once, basically every time that segments polling numbers really start dropping) and still not done.
In his own auto-biography he points out that people will necessarily be disappointed in him as he presents himself as a blank slate and allows people to write whatever they want on it. He isn't a blank slate - the Obama you are looking for only existed in your mind, not in reality. He never went anyway as he didn't exist. Man many many others are slowly coming to realize this, sadly Obama the idealist (whichever one you wanted to see) doesn't really exist, Obama the politician is the only one that does. He will continue to milk the blank slate and hope that the person you once saw will "return" for as long as he can too - that is the nature of a politician. Some groups have learned how to manipulate a politician and treat him as such (assuming they have enough money and or votes), others sit around confused.
But if it makes you feel better - I'll leave this one generic as it is currently the answer given for all of them: Obama has WAY too much to worry with on his plate. What with all these global crises, economic downtime, and the seditious Tea Partiers blocking real reform it is no wonder he hasn't got to yet. Since he inherited such a mess it will most likely take longer than his Presidency to fix it and get on with the real work that America needs and address your issue.
And as long as that boiler plate works with his core group he will run with it too.
"This has been the most vile aspect of the Conservative war on science"
That is an interesting way of looking at it given the posts above you that say that anyone who thinks AGW may not be that strong is a right wing hack.
Sadly this is the issue with the *politicization* of science - many on each side think theirs is the obvious and the other side is waging war on them. Your right, science stands or fails on it own. Conservatives have no war on science - indeed, we find that as the harder core left has made it into office funding for basic space exploration (and no, I do not mean the recent Obama NASA announcement - I personally like the privatization of it and many other conservatives I know do too), energy physics, and a whole host of ideas that have been funded through arguably conservative presidents have been drastically cut in place of research into why carbon emissions are bad, AGW, and other highly politicized topics (and to be fair when Bush took office a similar thing happened there too). Talking about a Conservative war on science is only perpetuating the problem from the other end.
Conservatives have a war on left thought masquerading as science as much of the AGW proponents do. Liberals have a war against conservative thought masquerading as science as many of the Oil Companies produce. In reality we should have a war one *all* of that, one side isn't the lamb here fighting the good fight.
Until we come to that understanding things are going to deteriorate in our scientific knowledge. Not only that but as that pseudo-science becomes more and more prominent it is going to take MUCH more work to root it out. We can already see that with the almost universally agreed upon fallout from the so called "climategate" - that is the CRU data set is flawed and has to be removed from models and redone (we are basically arguing how and why at this point, not if). Conclusions that were considered solid and based on other data is turning out to be entangled with it in a primary matter. It's not the first time, I recall when Jane Goodall's data on Apes was discovered to be simply wrong, that she had either left out major finds or fabricated data because she was afraid how it would make them look to others. So much science at the time was based on what she did that it took years to unravel and no one is sure if it even is now decades later. We know what her motives were and why in that field her name is mud (sadly in the media she is still a major voice), but in this case it is so widespread that many could be truly earnest in thier desire to produce good works but GIGO rules here. In both cases there were plenty of warning signs that *should* have resulted in the problems being outed at the start but a combination of politics, money, fame, and pressure from those needing it to be true silenced it.
Even if their complaints with his conclusions are 100% correct (doubtful - AGW skeptics are taking this to mean AGW is wrong, it doesn't say that. It simply means we are back to not knowing as much as we thought we did - though people claiming the science is still rock solid aren't helping when it obviously isn't) I suspect that this newspaper will loose unless they have something fairly strong that this individual was dishonest. Wrong is not dishonest, at least as far as US law is concerned (I suspect Canada is similar just because most first world countries are) they are going to have to prove to some degree greater than 50% that he knew he was not telling the truth. That's hard to do - if they had said incompetence then they may get away with it, but even then that is hard to show too, but they claimed dishonesty.
I guess I have to look at the sheer number of fart noise, fireplace animations, and other such apps in the 100k+ to see that simple "development" of an application isn't a plus. I would rather have 100 useful applications than 200k fart noises.
The Linux Kernel is fine - as it matures from input from *real* kernel devs (ones that have made Kernels that have 5+ 9's uptime that *also* include performance) chances are the fart application people are going to be left behind in their ability. Frankly if many 2-4 year college students are regular contributors I would find that MUCH more troubling than most being 20+ year veterans of the field. I'm not a kernel dev - at best I can poke here and there - frankly I would be dismayed if I can do much more than the little I do to optimize for a specific field and what I do is so specific as to not be relevant to the global kernel tree.
I'm more than happy that IBM and other similar corporations have given their time to make the kernel something that it actually takes talent, knowledge, and experience to improve upon instead of a first or second semester OS student being able to find holes to fix.
An old post - but I'll still respond (I only rarely check once they move off the front page).
You misunderstand - my.5% error was when I used improper methods. His original estimate was nearly 30% off of my final answer. Nor did he understand what I had done for the one they went with - they had to find another engineer to go over it.
That is if I made what was essentially a trapezoidal solid into a true rectangle I got his numbers. If I calculated the area of the trapezoid I got nearly a 30% difference - the pit as built was *obviously* a trapezoid and thus didn't contain even 100%, let alone the extra volume required by law.
Further I *designed* a freaking containment pit for three 100k+ gallon gas tanks - the same engineering company that signed off on the a fore mentioned pit signed this one.
I do not have any real knowledge of how to design a pit to contain a liquid. Would it hold the pressure? What are the regulations with regard to containment? Does containing freaking *gasoline* have different requirements from water (I would bet so)? For the most part dunno - I have no idea if I followed them. I didn't talk to their engineers or anything either.
What I do know now for certain is that I calculated the volume correctly. I do know that the pit as designed can handle the pressures if filled with a liquid. But the rest (especially given that there are likely questions I do not even know to ask)? I have no idea.
Supposedly an engineer signed off on what I did. Supposedly it was a different engineer than they had used before (who was grossly incompetent - he really should have his license revoked). If said engineer was, well qualified then I have no reservations whatsoever. I fully documented everything and it isn't uncommon for a licensed engineer to have others design/calculate and then simply verify the design. For the most part that type of design isn't really hard as much as it is specialized knowledge that you wouldn't otherwise have.
So, in the end I still do not know how to feel about it. They were lucky in that I understood the math enough to do the right thing even in the parts I were not trained in - at least in all the areas I have since learned. Their handling of it in the past doesn't really make me feel good about it being signed off on - after all a roughly 30% error was too.
Censorship is always hard to define, is telling someone they can't yell "There is a bomb in the park - run for your lives!" censorship? Most will say it is not. Is telling someone it is Illegal to yell " suck!" in the very same park censorship (assuming as in the previous example the content is the issue, not randomly yelling at the top of your lungs)? Most will say yes.
One of the test I try and hold myself to is to reverse the idea - in this case if Microsoft were not allowing Firefox to be run on their OS (we will assume for a moment that they have the same restrictions the iPhone has where refusing distribution is the same as refusing to let it run - that reversal of places is left up to the reader to decide what the general community would think of it). I'm fairly certain it would be "censorship" and an evil corporation pushing its will.
As such, well I personally still do not really know if it is censorship. In the "reversed" case I would probably argue the same thing the Apple supporters are - it is not censorship simply a business decision and they are perfectly within their rights to do so. Though I would call it a deplorable act and it would cause them to get none of my money (and is why I didn't have a smart phone until the Android - none of the other choices passed that test). I do not find it censorship for me to refuse to pay for any of their products either - I find that a business decision on my part.
I've never understood the group that hates Microsoft for its anti-competitive closed source behavior yet love Apple. Apple has pretty much always been MUCH worse with regards to those metrics, it is just that ultimately Microsoft won that battle. Apple is just as bad or worse and no reason to figure they would do better if they had Microsoft's dominance. Indeed - could we imagine using our computers if Microsoft had the control that Apple does of its systems? But then for the people who figure that Apple invented the GUI, smart phones, and tablet computing and all other stole it from them the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field is in such a full swing that one shouldn't be surprised. (note that one can like Apple product and not be in that group - I'm writing from a Windows 7 box and generally consider Microsoft a pox on the land - but this is my main gaming machine and due to support issues it is the system of choice for PC gaming, frankly I do not see how one can get better, just different. I just do not fool myself into thinking that MS allows me to do that because of some grand plan for my best interest)
Re:If you can't handle calculus, science isnt for
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Help Me Get My Math Back?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm a Computer Scientist/Software Engineer (I dropped out of the research end a few years ago - my current job is R&D in the commercial realm so I'm not sure what to call myself), before that I was a land surveyor. My parents owned that business and I started work there when I was 12 (apparently that is legal for your own kids - they payed me minimum wage so at 12 I was the richest kid in school and was happy:)). As a Computing researcher I can't say I did much calculus at all. Most everything was heavily discrete math. Lots and lots and lots and lots of discrete math.
I have, however, used calculus a few times as a land surveyor even though they are less likely than a computing professional too.
We had done a topographic map of a local gas depot's containment pits for their tanks. At the time some new regulations for the pit had passed and (I'm going to botch these numbers - fine details like that were too long ago) they had to go from 105% the volume to 115% the volume and they wanted to know what their current containment was. Most surveyors know very well how to draw topo's and with software how to calculate volumes and such, this was before said tools were widespread. So I basically did an integral to calculate the "area under the curve" with the curve being a close approximation of the contours (which were smooth and a spline was highly accurate). They ended up with ~90% of the volume contained (I know it was around that - I recall a little over 10% spill over). After me redoing my numbers (still in college - who am I to contradict a licensed engineer who designed the thing) I realized the person had simply made the containment pit "square" - that is the side sloped to the bottom at around a 45 degree angle and a several hundred foot long pit dropped about 3 foot from one end to the other. The engineer took the highest point on the burm, the lowest point in the pit, and the dimensions around the outside of the pit and calculated a volume. I had less than a.5% error from his numbers from the one we produced if I used that method.
After calling their head engineer and telling her what we found she went back to the person who originally did that and asked - I was correct. I had also submitted a full accounting of how I came to my conclusion on the area. They asked me to calculate how much more needed cut, I did so, they signed off and built it, and I'm still not sure how that makes me feel. I was a college student and not *remotely* qualified to do that. I figure they had me do it for the same reasons the person screwed up - it was cheap. They payed my parents 50 dollars an hour for me to do that, their staff drew it up, and their engineer signed it. It was good money for me (they gave that financial part of the job to me) and no liability on us - we were clear we were not able to do that or sign off on it and had it in writing. In that sense I'm OK with it, in another I hope the other parts of the system were done better than that was originally. They just lucked out that I could do what they wanted and had enough knowledge to do so
I'm lucky enough to both have had the correct schooling and ability to apply that - since then I've learned a great deal and know I inferred the correct things. Yet, I really shouldn't have been put in that position, but it at least gives me an amusing story I guess. Indeed, as I have aged since then I have become more and more aware of how truly lucky they were that I still know I did a working design. I clearly recall long phone conversations where I kept saying I was still in school and they didn't care.
Then, none of this helps the OP. I do not know the answer to his/her question. Calculus was always a struggle for me due to dyslexia and an insistence on memorizing forms (thats about like demanding an armless person catch a football with their hands). I never once had the issues they stated - I was in graduate level math (graph theory and formal languages/computability) before I made it through calc II. It took
The iPod we had a lackluster group of MP3 players there were selling quite well and an established portable music segment. The iPod blew them out of the water in terms of functionality and dominated. The market was there and people were *trying* to do that already.
In the smartphone category you had a number of players too. They were heavy, clunky, limited software, and insanely expensive for what they did. The iPhone was somewhat more expensive but did so much more in a simple easy to use package. Again there were people already trying to do that and were unhappy with their current offerings. Apple gave them what they wanted.
Now? Really - does it buy me anything over an iPhone or other smart phone? Well a bigger screen but that looses that portability. It isn't going to be with them all the time. What it could truly do - and that is compete with the netbooks - is give traveling business users a way to leave the laptop at home and travel light yet it ignores the features they want.
I won't say they will not sell good, but if they do Apple is going to have to create the environment for them. So far everything you wrote is done 99% as well on the current phones and I do not know of anyone just wishing they had a large screen without the phone capability. I rather suspect that after the newness dies off they just will not be carried around much, the people I know with netbooks basically did the same. Unlike before it wasn't for a lack of the devices ability at fulfilling its role, it was for it not really having much of a role. It wasn't extremely portable so it failed there (just as the iPad does) and it wasn't powerful enough to replace the computer (and the iPad fails here too). It is IMO more or less similar to the early PDA's - just not there yet in one of the major factors (mainly weight/portability or processing power in this case)
That's not to say a rugged easy to use somewhat open tablet doesn't have applications - I just do not see it as a general purpose computing platform yet. For instance, if you are a household that has a decent amount of computer controlled equipment (DVR, game systems, etc) and it has the relevant apps this would be great. Large enough to easy read, portable around the house in a way a netbook or phone would not be, and easily fills those small internet tasks you would like to do but often do not want to go back to a fixed computer to use and laptops are too cumbersome for that level of mobility (phones are too small and tend to be, well phones). I'm not sure if the latter alone is worth the price tag or not for most people, personally I do not think so. However add in other household controls, security system integration, and a number of other apps that may or may not be done and yea, it could very well be. But I think for what most people are talking about a phone really only needs a bit more storage and a bit more processing power to be near perfect and if sold as an e-reader with more it is going to fail too (there is a reason the e-books failed miserably until the Kindle and the so called e-ink).
*shrug* I hope they do well, I plan on getting an Android one when they finally release one that isn't rushed out (I'm too much a geek - I simply want one). I suspect they will do well enough just from the geek segment but I do not see the acceptance they got from the iPhone/iPod until they either drop drastically in price, rise drastically in ability or they somehow get integrated as a household device (what I plan on doing with mine).
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And they would have been correct - they will sell more from looks and the Apple fans will not only hold it different or purchase the rubber pads but will sing the praises of having to do so.
As in most cases of this blatant a bias when the ones peddling it act as if it is "fair" I can never make up my mind which is worse - intentional dishonesty or stupidity. I've been here long enough to not really care (this is my second account - I forgot the password from the one in my early college days and the e-mail address is now gone, drop a digit for mt first account), but it's become more blatant/extreme here in the last few years. Nor have I ever been able to decide which way it was. To some extent I find it entertaining to watch the mental gyrations needed to make Apple's iPhone into More Holy than God and its main competitor quickly go into An Evil So Black it Will Suck Your Soul Away (and the rhetoric get thicker the more it eats into the market share).
That will be tough to happen.
For the most part the left sees this as a great reason to pretend to go after "big oil" and the right sees this as a great reason to attack the current administration and the regulatory boards that failed to apply regulations. Further each side thinks it is gaining political capitol all while the oil companies are bribing their way to what they want. So they have both the political gains *and* monetary gains. Lastly the regs were ignored so what good will passing more do?
Now, if that state of affairs will continue to occur after the next few months - lets say it takes two months to finally cap (a realistic time period). That means it not only hits landfall but spreads significantly (we will ignore the worst case of it making it around the top of Florida). We have a semi-major hurricane go through that and instead of dumping crude onto Cuba (which nobody here cares about) we have several states worth of coastline plus several miles in with a nice coating of crude oil all over then I think some hard questions are going to be asked. Remember this stuff isn't like the oil you get in a plastic jug at Wal-Mart - it is full of some VERY nasty chemicals.
The different parties are mostly maneuvering to make the other side look bad and the more partisan have already taken up the mantra. No one is looking to fix it, they are both waiting for it to be a real disaster and plan to get the most political capitol out of it they can. I do not think that Obama is going to escape the storm (and I think it is too far gone for blaming Bush to stick outside of the True Believers), I do not know how individual congressmen are going to fare. Further it is hitting at just the right time to be a real election time issue too.
I'll tell you how to make the industry self regulating too - make the company totally financially liable for any damages from an accident and hold the executives and board of directors criminally liable (and force them into a rough federal prison - none of those nicer ones) for the actions. That's not going to happen either, though it should. You can regulate all you want but if they are not enforced (for whatever reason) then they will do no good. Make it cheaper to be responsible and companies will, make it cheaper to bribe and ignore safety and most will. No one in power will do that because there is both too much money involved and most are so intertwined with those companies that they would find themselves in prison too.
My uncle has a VERY large collection of movies he gets from one of those places. For whatever fee it is he pays per month he can get up to 10 a month and then a fee for everyone after that. They are fairly decent quality (cost more for the HD versions). He thinks it is legal since he is paying for it, the website is professional looking, and the cost/access rules are what he expects for a legit company.
Indeed, he was lamenting to me a few weeks ago about not being able to find a blue-ray player that also plays his DIVX's. He commented that as easy as it is to get them off the internet and as fast as they come out he didn't understand why all the players just didn't mostly move to that format. I, once again, explained that it was illegal and few companies are going to be going about making your illegal downloads work easier. He looked blankly at me and said "Oh" - it was about the 50'th time I've tried to explain it. It is amusing that he refuses any of the ones I download for free but will happily pay someone else for the same thing so "He knows he is legal". If something were to happen and he end up ripped off (I suspect that if they are getting ready to be shut down many would be all over some credit fraud) or something happen and him go to court he would be one of the ones perputally confused that such a nice company dd it too him. I suspect that letters would be written to movie studios and no amount of being told "It is *illegal*" will ever sink in to most.
Really, with as many people that *do* use them the MPAA ought to just bite the bullet and enter that market - were it legal I woud most likely pay the fee (I'm not about to give someplace pirating anything credit card or bank account numbers even if I were willing to pay for something I could get for free). My uncle (and those others I know that use these services) still go to the movies just as often, the MPAA is just missing out on the profit he is sending to an operation in another country that may or may not be legal there.
For myself *this* is the type of piracy they ought to go after. I have no sympathy whatsoever for selling copyrighted information that you do not have permission to do.
The so called "smart phones" have become much more (or less depending on how you look at it) that simply a cellphone. Were it simply a phone I doubt there would be much arguing here, but they have are becoming general purpose computing devices. In many cases (both the iPhone and ANdroid sets) the phone gets less attention than the application framework does - they are OK phones but if you primarily want a phone there are MUCH better choices out there.
Would we be arguing about HTML5/Flash on just a cellphone? The openness of a application store? No, that's because we have highly mobile computing devices that just happen to also work as our cellphones. As such yes it is important as to how open.
Apple won on both the iPhone market and iPod market because they noticed people griping about what they couldn't do and went and did it. The iPod is *not* a multi-purpose device - it is primarily a music player that just happens to have some other stuff tacked on. No one is looking at their iPod and saying "Gee, I *really* wish it did this". People were doing that with the older MP3 players. People were also heavily doing that with thier smart phones - all sorts of wanting it to be a general purpose computing platform. Apple understood this and made the first go at it. What Apple isn't seeing is that many people are *still* going "Gee I really wish my smart phone would do this" and they are going to loose because of that (the iPod market is pretty much wrapped up, their vision works VERY well there).
One can argue all day that it isn't fair, and heck maybe you even have something of a point (for some they are phones first and the applications are secondary) - but in the end all it matters is user are frustrated with certain things and when something comes out that satisfies those complaints whilst not breaking their old uses the they get replaced. The Android phones may do it, but there are still complaints there that someone could address so unless those get fixed (and Google is more than capable of doing so) there they will not be the long term winners either. Apple has never and most likely never will understand this. That being said Apple has historically been happy that way and turns a profit so I can't say they are wrong either - people who agree with the Apple way of doing things loves them and are dedicated customers - just do not drink the cool aid and think it is going to do something it is not. Lets face it, the iMac is profitable and many consider all five sold a year to be a HUGE success story - those that like the idea love theirs, one can do a lot worse than that.
So, lets assume what you say is true - is this really a nice business that deserves success? Hard to say.
Obviously if they can do all that is claimed then they "deserve success", though of course that depends on your definition of success. If success means being the richest company in the world showered with personal sex slaves then, no, they really didn't deserve that. If you mean deserve to pay their employees a slightly above average salary for their area and have a slightly above average return for their investors then certainly - I would say they deserve more than that.
Of course that is the crux of the problem that is asked and the one you bring up - they took a cheap system and through software made it perform as well as the high dollar items. They then apparently turned around and charged the similar to the high end items which kinda defeats the whole "cheaper" angle. They do not deserve to do that because they found a nifty way to do something.
Since you are an AC there are already a few posts accusing you of astroturfing, if so then it is a poor attempt. You tell us a story where someone is charging WAY too much for their product and basically failed due to a bad marketing department (marketing isn't just there to hype a product, in a successful business it has a real impact on how profitable things are). If they can take a cheapo drive and through software/firmware make it perform like a high dollar one and then charge me most of what the high dollar one costs - why purchase theirs? They would have to have nearly totally equal guarantees that the enterprise level devices did.
In short getting 95% the benefit at 90% the cost isn't really worth it - that extra percentage in costs is usually worth other intangibles ("Who ever got fired because of purchasing IBM" was an effective marketing tool for a reason even when you got 90% the benefit at 110% the cost), getting 90% at 70% the cost very much is. In the longer run if true then this will make a difference - if they have a patent then selling/licensing it can generate a decent amount of money if done well. But if they follow the pricing model you allude too then it will be a dead end.
Some of those answers are going to depend on what age you are "20 years" isn't that long if you are around 20 - lots of us really old folks around the 40 year old range that gre up playing games (games have been popular and require reflexes and such since way back in 1980 or so)
I picked mine up with pong, went to an atari 2600, a PC, NES, etc and still do today. I spend massive amounts of time at it, more than pretty much anyone does with another sport. I'm a software engineer so I have one of those "thinking jobs" too.
I'm 35, started when I was around 8. People my age have beginnings of knee problems (I do with no few sports - but arthritis tends to run in my family, few on both sides made it past 35 without some and I am no exception). I have a bit of RSI in my wrists and fingers, but that is probably more to do with the typing. I can't figure that 5 more years (it is usually someone around 20 who thinks "20 years from now how broken will I be") will be much different so your are probably safe.
Now, if you are older then it gets to be a harder question. For the most part 20 more years for me (mid 50's) probably isn't going to change much - most people play Tennis, Baseball, and many other sports into their 50's with only needing increased therapy. A little more icing/heat, not quite as aggressive, etc. If non-professional gaming has me extra slowing down in that time frame then it really ought to get a good look from the govt to either ban it or make sure people realize the dangers as it is terribly dangerous. Enough time has elapsed with games being obsessed over to note if it does when someone playes heavy from youth to their 40's. Most people In other sports, except the Olympic/Professional Level competitors, should never see a problem into thier 50's that wasn't simply "aging". In those cases the competitors are well aware of the damage it inflicts on their bodies.
For me what is it going to be like in 30 years is a better question - your early 60's should be where you really start noticing things like that. Maybe you are in your 40's so 20 years is a good length of time to think about, however with such a high user number and obviously something of a techie I doubt it. The likelyhood of being a high numbered poster in your 40 that has been on the net or decades is quite low (though it can happen - I have a low 5 digit account here that I can't access because the e-mail account I registered under no longer exists - can't get my password and I forgot my old one).
Worry more about your heart, arteries, lungs, pancreas, and other parts of your body that tend to wear out. You brain tends to degrade from *not* using it much.
If you download the LOTRO digital payed client right now it includes the Pando client so I would assume the free version does too.
I saw it in a routine checking of processes running and I checked what it was, removed it, and the game runs fine. DDO did also once removed but I didn't care for the game so I quit.
"Incidentally, this is not biblical, it is a justification people make up because their prayers aren't being answered, but it isn't something you will find in scripture. The reason the scriptures give for prayers not being answered is because the person is wicked."
Ever read the Book of Job? I would have to say that one right there invalidates your assertion quite a bit. God killed his entire family, give him majorly bad diseases, and took away all his material belongings. I do not get a nice easy quote there - I get an entire book dedicated to just that idea. Plus that has been part of the judeo/christian belief system for quite a while.
It is quite clear that had he turned from God at any point his life would have remained miserable. The story is entirely about what you claim to be is wrong. The *entire point of that whole book* is that your prayers may not be answered, indeed you may get worse and worse and worse and worse, yet in the end belief will pay off though it may take decades (and may even only occur in the after life).
Further you bring up Moses not being able to enter the promised land - another classic example of someone who *obviously* followed god - even to performing miracles - yet would have failed your "test" and he should have internally concluded that God didn't exists and everything that happened was just luck.
I guess your idea of "modern" is different from mine since you obviously know about these things.
"If you do not consider yourself to be suffering, then you have no use for Buddhism. Why do you care whether you can ease your suffering or not."
Absolutely correct - you just described the latter half of Buddhism to a tee. Once you reach that stage you no longer need as you are fully at peace in the world - otherwise known as Nirvana nor is Buddhism the only method to get there.
Not sure what you think that proves either, since your "In order for this to be true" is precisely what they believe.
Those are only falsifiable because you chose to ignore parts of the beliefs or chose to insert your own definitions so that you could get your way.
"Buddhism: if you follow the eight-fold path, your suffering will end. Extremely testable. If you follow the eight-fold path, and you are still suffering, then man, they led you astray.
Tantric yoga: do these exercises and meditations and eventually you will have a kundalini rising (enlightenment). So if you do them, and you don't have a kundalini rising, then you know tantra is worthless (either that or your teacher sucks)."
In this case you insert your own definitions for it - you consider what someone is going through as suffereing, they do not. Both have a pretty much self-fulling circular thought. In both cases fully integrating those ideas into your life means you will not suffer and will gain enlightenment - that is if you can truly master it then living up to you nostrils in pig shit isn't suffering, thus if you suffer - by definition - you are not doing it right. There is nothing there that says if you do then phantomfive will consider you to not suffer, it isn't you who gets to make that call.
There have been enough people around over the years that get close enough to this that I wouldn't argue it hasn't happened, indeed if we want a "proven" religion then Buddhism is one of the better ones.
"The Bible: Those who believe shall be able to do miracles, such as drink poison and not get hurt, or heal the sick (Mark 15:17). So if you follow Christ and you can't do those things, then......yeah, you've just falsified it."
Certainly - and the Bible itself is fairly clear that over a few thousands of years about 5 or so people were able to do that and really only one at anything other than random intervals (and that would be Jesus). The Bible is quite clear that we are all sinners and not really worthy, it is only by the Grace of God that we get anything. Further the Bible is quite clear that all but Jesus (and only because being the son of God he was pretty much perfect) failed there miracles when they tried to show off or otherwise "tempt God" so it isn't like a Wizard in DnD where it is a power you wield.
There are certainly complaints against those ideas - it is awfully convenient that the Buddhist fails if they are suffering and it is also awfully convenient that any "miraculous" thing that happens is because you believe but only happens when a higher power wants it too, not when you do. But that doesn't make them false, it just makes them more or less faith based.
True to some extent, but that is being pedantic. That is ultimately the start down the road that brings us to today.
The strong implication was that the people telling us they were going to bring it to a vote, have a fair and open discussion, and then vote on the measure said they supported those ideas. In the end they did what they promised by the strict letter but not what they intentionally implied - that is that they would support said measures, work to get them implemented, and vote for them. Very very few (I will not say none, though I would guess that the number is so low it might as well have been) voted for the Republicans at that time to write a bill and then vote against it and if passed then work to invalidate it. Sure they never said they would vote for, support, or not vote for bills that then neutered those ideals but that was strongly implied - strongly implied in an intentional way. That is otherwise known as "lying".
And, as I said, that directly brings us to where we are today. Obama is not the person most that voted for him elected, most of the democratic junior senators that turned the majority around are not the people that were elected, and if this election shapes up like it looks neither with the Republicans as they reverse it around again. It's beyond simply being a politician - that has always been something of a semi-shady business and always will be. It is intentional misleading and many political hacks have fought for so many years to have this pedantic way of parsing their chosen groups words that it is accepted as a norm. Pelosi, Reid, Obama, Boehner, McConnel, or almost any of them (there are bound to be a few decent people - I or you may detest their ideas but that is a different argument) are scum. Deficits only matter when it is an attack on the other side, returning favors for money is only bad when the other side does it (I can imagine what Pelosi would be saying if Bush Jr had allowed BP to be exempted from inspections, allowed them to not plug the well because it would be expensive to re drill, and not contain the oil because they want to still reclaim it, and do this for even 10 days let alone over 30 now - neither side is interested in doing more than political posturing).
The last time I had any real hope for our political body was the cited Contract with America and that didn't even make it the first 100 days. With each shift in congress and each new president I keep thinking they can't get worse, but hey these people are brilliant over achievers right?
"* my android device can't be upgraded"
Depends on the phone - even some "vendor locked" ones can be rooted and vanilla or custom VM's installed. It's not that hard and most people should know someone who is capable of doing it if it really is needed. But even then that is really only applicable for a small group of people. However, so far very little in terms of the API and application development uses anything newer than 1.5 - especially for commercial applications (peoples play programs will differ - there are fart apps that require 2.0+).
"* my android app don't work on x version of android"
Same is true of the iPhone - last I checked Apple hasn't figured out how to back port API's to previous versions of the OS. Assuming if what they say of their newer OS you are going to be in an even *worse* place than what you are making the Android Market out to be.
"* my android app doesn't work on y version of hardware"
Simply not true - Android runs against a VM, even the vendor modified ones run against that VM. If that VM exists on a piece of hardware Android will run. This is a MUCH better situation than the iPhone in terms of porting code - there isn't any. Now, with the amount of phones out there you may find an application needs more processing power - but with older iPhones that happens too. You may find that phone X doesn't have a GPD so your nifty GPS app will not run - again no different from an iPhone. However Android handles that MUCH more efficiently with it's resource lists, it is handled at the App Store or installation level instead of relying on someone telling you not to do it or finding out later.
I will assume what you really mean is point one - my hardware can't be upgraded but you are just saying it differently.
"I have plenty of iPhone apps that were first-generation that still work. That sounds like an unlikely situation in the android world. I also have apps that work on all versions of OS and hardware. I have a few that require specific features (GPS) that don't exist on 1.0 hardware...so obviously don't work on newer devices. I had a few apps (WiFi scanners) that died under OS 3.0 that used to work."
While it may sound unlikely you to, turns out you are just flatly incorrect. The 2.2 VM is fully backward compatible with all previous releases of the API. They just aren't forward compatible. Google has gone to great pains to keep 1.5 stuff running on higher releases, I suppose at some point 1.5 will have to reach an end of life - but then Apple is going to save you from that either (as you state in your post - you have already seen some stuff end of lifed). Not really sure why that is a tough concept - Java, VMware, Python, and many many other VM based systems have been around for many a year and do a pretty dang good job of it.
"It sounds, however, that compatibility across android and handset versions is not only not guaranteed with android, but that the incompatibility is to be expected...according to their chief architect."
Eh? One of the listed strengths of the Android is that it *is* compatible - basically VMware with a linux kernel running Java on a phone (that sounds - and frankly is - not really "efficient" in terms of resource allocation, but it is certainly great in the write once run anywhere model). Write to the VM and it runs anywhere that VM is at, it is basically hardware independent. Nothing really revolutionary there as far as that goes, though few if any other phones do it. If you have worked with VMware then you pretty much know what to expect in terms of dealing with the "hardware" environment.
Now, being an Open Source project any company is perfectly free to modify to their hearts content and release it. In that sense, and from that explanation is where you are probably getting third hand information from (or rather misquotes with erroneous explanations given), is where the FUD comes from about so called "fragmentation" from an actual Android dev - but no, it is not expected any more than we expect to see 15 di
I'm sure they will certainly know to do that. When you create an Android application you tell it your minimum hardware and software requires (and have no choice but to do so) and the Dalvik machine will not let it run if you can't. It has done this from the very beginning - heck the app store will not even let you view software you can't run.
Those were some quick growing pains there - it was there from conception, I bet Apple isn't even *that* responsive.
IMO there are three different answers depending on exactly how you want this answered.
First is - what do you like. In this case you will see a great deal of variation. Indeed, we can see a large portion of people here recommend Macs. You can also see studies where university professors have a higher than industry sales percentage use of macs too, more often than not it really doesn't matter in that setting as the concepts being taught are generally platform independent.
Next answer is costs - this one is decided elsewhere. While obviously Linux has little cost in up front purchasing its total cost of ownership may be different. I do not know how well it supports your hardware or how much retraining of your IT staff it would need. Further I know Microsoft often give colleges a nice enough deal for quite a number of seats that the cost is negligent. Even the small college I went too (East Tennessee State University) had donations from them for software, our IT lab also had a donated 30 seat license from Oracle and students could purchase Visual Studio for around 20 dollars (this was early-mid 90's).
Last answer is what will you see in industry. In this case "science and engineering" isn't really specific enough to give a really great answer. The only thing I can say is my parents have owned a land surveying company since I was one year old. I worked with them from 12 to some time in my twenties. From all the civil engineers we worked with I could count the number of apple machines on one hand and have five fingers left over (that is I never saw one) and an occasional architect would have one (but would still have a windows machine for AutoCad). I would see the occasional Unix workstation but everything was Windows. At this time I do not think AutoCad comes on anything other than Windows and that is the software of choice there. After college I worked for about five years as research staff at Oak Ridge National Labs in the high performance computing division - I do not think you can get more "science" anywhere else. That was mostly Linux and Unix (not just us - but the chemists, physicists, biologists, etc). However there were a handful of macs there, I can immediately think of three people I knew with them out of close to 50 that I regularly worked with but then again those were macbooks they used, their desktops were either windows or linux. I suspect true commercial applications to be little different there - you needed specialized tools and often had to make them yourself. The few bits of Apple hardware (power archetecture at the time) ran Yellow Dog Linux so those do not really fall into the "macitosh" realm either.
So, given that your choice is between Windows and Mac - well I have seen less than 10 macs in a production environment. That is with a little over 10 years in an engineering environment, 5 in a pure scientific world, and around 5 in mixed environment. Then again due to Apples deals they give schools I know of a great deal of people that learned on them, the concepts can be taught on most anything if the platform has the right software. It isn't until you get to a production environment that, well, production, robustness, and flexibility matter. Apples philosophy generally meshes well within a university setting and often doesn't in a work environment. Both Windows and Linux are flexible, Apple products (macs, iPhones, iPads, iPods, anything) need to be in an environment that adapts to them, good if you work/think that way (as the graphic artists do - hence why they still dominate that field), not so much for engineers and usually scientists.
"Because the large corporation is posting billions of dollars in profits because of their drilling?"
So - why does this make it so they should be punished? Would it have been different if they only made a few hundred thousand?
"Because some people are implying that BP engaged in several salvage operations before looking to actually lose the well?"
Now there is one I agree with.
"Because a car accident puts the occupants of your vehicle and the other vehicle at risk, not entire countries, their economies and endangered animals in the surrounding environment?"
Again - so what? Did they do everything within reason to prevent it? Did they do everything within reason to stop it once it happened? In either case (car crash or BG) if the answer is "No" then they are not only fully responsible but should have punitive actions taken against them. If the answer is "yes" then no reason to punish, though you still have to pay for your accidents.
"Because (as the article noted) we're about to let Shell start drilling in the Arctic where the seas are rougher and the location more remote to create delays in response times?"
Again - why do I care? At every moment we learn something new about this disaster we find cutting corners and the govt letting them get away with it. *That* is the issue, have us stop doing that. As far as I can tell the only president that has done more to let them get away with it than Bush Jr has been Obama. At least since Carter each president has let more and more slide.
"I think at this point we could reopen the debate on the effects of a nuclear plant failing compared to an oil line failing. And how much easier and effective it is to drop a cofferdam on a nuclear core than a well miles below the surface of water."
Perfectly agree there too, that would likely change a great deal of the economics of a plug in electric motor for cars too. We have unrealistic fears of nuclear power plants and that could easily solve a great deal of our energy issues along with a large number of environmental ones. The old worry of what to do with the waste is almost totally non-existent now - heck we pay billions in production cost a year now to produce that "waste" as we found uses for it. Indeed, if we had had nuclear plants from the beginning and stored the waste in bunkers the owners of those bunkers would be VERY rich. Nor was the meltdown issue ever as serious as made out, of course some of that also depends on regulations being enforced too.
"Your argument of it being a one time thing that is unprecedented does not sit well with me when we look to expand on the number of wells we have. Precedent has now been set. Either tighten regulations so that your point (a) doesn't happen and point (b) is actually true. Care to prove point (c)?"
You can tighten regulations all you want - if they aren't enforced at our current level then it is a waste of time. Write Obama and tell him your outrage at letting his Oil Cronies off the hook in return for money. Not that I think that will be effective either, votes are the only thing most of them listen too at all from us and as far as I can see they dodged most of the blame for this one. 50 people not voting for him or loose a few tens of millions? Hmm, hard choice.
"When bad things go wrong to corporations making lots and lots of money, then they should be held accountable, girlintraining. Why you rush to BP and the oil industry's rescue, I'll never know."
I do not understand what the amount of money they are making has to do with any of it - it is an oft repeated thing in your post and many others. If they were going broke and did this would it make any difference? Both the ethics (as some other posters point out) and the subsequent punishment shouldn't really be concerned with how much or how big the disaster is with respect to if we do it or not. If they did everything that they were supposed and accidents happen then no reason to punish them because they make a great deal of money - indeed they would then
Probably, but that would be assuming that you were raising cattle to produce energy, not raising them to produce milk/meat and using the by products. The two are totally different metrics.
A bigger question that the article does not even remotely touch is what are the extra energy costs to do this. Sure 10000 cows may produce 1 megawatt of energy but what if it takes and extra 1.5 megawatts to gather and process it? You also have to factor other things that are not included in the simple metric of how much net energy is produced - time needed, labor needed, cost of upkeep, etc. So lets say you get .5 megawatts net power but have to have a 2000 person team and a plant the size of North Dakota to process it - not so good then. Then you have other environmental impacts not really talked about all.
Of course, what I wrote above in terms of sizes is going t be WAY off they were chosen to be illustrative. Many small dairy farms already do this type of thing because in that mode of operation it has proven to be economical. Small on site plants that offset their electricity costs and offset some of the environmental issues with too much waste and its disposal. While that may not be as visible as a single large plant it is still taking that load from the power grid. Further methane is a fairly nasty gas in the atmosphere, its rather unhealthy to breathe, few or no life forms processes it, and it is WAY worse than any carbon emissions - even most that are skeptical of CO2's impact aren't about large amounts of methane. This converts it to CO2 which in this amounts aren't harmful to breath, last I checked plants really like the stuff, and you are getting a VERY significant reduction in greenhouse emissions.
Personally I rather suspect (but have no evidence whatsoever) that it would be difficult to scale up. For it to scale to a large size would require too much driving and work for a farmer (who is in the business of farming, not driving cow patties around) to bother with unless the pay was high. Further unless there was some govt solution (similar to the way most in the US have recycling done through the garbage collection agencies) it would also not be worth the effort monetary wise for a private company (and even if a govt did it, still not but more often than not govt do not really care if something is bleeding money). Small local plants make some amount of sense, small farm sized plants a great deal of sense - but that is why they are available and used today.
That is really a useless metric (not to mention VERY wrong at least on the friendly fire issue).
From Wikipedia we see that the US had 294 deaths - 114 by enemy fire, 145 by accidents, and 35 by friendly fire - not 1/3 by any stretch of the imagination. What you probably saw was that friendly fire constituted 24% of *combat* fatalities. I also assume that you mean the listed SCUD that killed 28 soldiers and was the single largest attack during the whole war, its not told if these were considered "combat fatalities" or not as they were not in combat at the time. However for the sake of argument lets say they were.
That means that of the 86 scud's that Wikipedia lists (maybe more, not sure if that list is inclusive or not) *one* was effective - that means either the Patriots were successful or the SCUD's were even worse than we thought they were. Further it also shows why "1/3" is a useless metric here - casualties were so low that a *single* missile could account for ~20% of the casualties. No system is 100% perfect.
Further even if the sample size was large enough to make 1/3 not just totally worthless the bigger question is *how many did it save*. Given how few they killed (a whopping three civilians - wikipedia doesn't say if soldiers were killed in those attacks) and what they would have done if they had hit their targets (of which well over 50% were quite capable of doing) than I would declare the system quite successful. Especially true give the state of electronics in 1991 and that you were shooting a missile down with another missile. We could have *easily* seen the SCUD missile as responsible for many times the active combat fatalities.
Frankly if a nuclear missile defense system had that type of success it would be worth 100 times what we are paying for the one we are developing now.
It's not the first time this scenario has happened - frankly it feels a great deal like the days of the early Macs.
I recall the first Mac I ever saw - I was in high school and a friend had just purchased one (upgrading his Apple IIe), I do not recall which Mac it was but was the top of the line at the time. All of us oohed an ahhed over it. Indeed, it was one of the slickest things I had ever seen. I wanted one so bad I couldn't stand it but I (even with my parents help) just could not afford one so I settled for a PC (the 486's had just come out and I got one of those - over 3500 for it but the mac topped 5k). The friend with Mac talked about how great it was, look how stylish, how great the graphics were, how responsive the GUI (Whats a GUI says I? I have dos 4 something!) and it was all true.
But then slowly reality set in, though it did take a couple of years. His emulator would play nearly anything he wanted but my hardware progressed in ways Apple didn't see fit with their "vision" so emulation didn't really work. As we both started learning about these things called computers I started being able to do loads of things he couldn't. Prices for my devices quickly fell, his didn't. Access to new devices were quick on mine, not on his. My hardware adapted to my vision, his required him to adapt to Apples.
Apple came along with both the iPod and iPhone and made something people could brag about from all points of the road. They could often say "I can go do this - can you?" and all but the Blackberry users would slink off (and those users didn't care and still more often than not do not - the blackberry is a tool, not an entertainment device). They found the perfect time for their vision to be the best out there. Now time has moved on, heck even in the time since I purchased my Moto Droid it has drastically changed. From an anecdotal point of view my boss with his iPhone has gone from jokingly pointing out all he can do that I can't to seeing a thing or two I regularly do that he can't (along with most of those things I couldn't my phone now does). From a somewhat less anecdotal point if view (but still more anecdotal than not) I simply watch when I sit in a busy terminal in an airport and note what phones people are playing with. A few months back and I was the only Android device - now not so much. Last trip I counted 10 iPhone devices (or rather iPhone like ones - I noticed two that got downgraded to iPod touches when they brought out their blackberrys - I do not know them well enough to tell them apart) and 6 Android ones.
Apple has always self imploded when the market place exceeds their vision. They have almost always been good about filling voids and making niche markets mainstream - they have been bad about fulfilling those needs over a long term period. For those whose wants coincide with their visions Apple is the perfect company - nothing wrong with that. Even today the Mac is the preferred tool for many graphic professionals for this reason (though some of their arguments are a holdover from the past, many are not). But for normal everyday people having the person next to you do something wanted with their device that you can not do makes them want it. Microsoft and the PC won out back then from that and slowly moved away from it due to market dominance. Even then Microsoft can't take the truly draconian stance Apple does (see Vista and few purchasing it).
They (Jobs in particular) have never understood that the stronger they try and control a thing the less control they have over it (yea, I know I'm mostly quoting Star Wars here and comparing him to Vader - yet in this case rightfully so). A company that understands they have to be flexible yet still have their vision will win over them in the long run. Will Google win over them? Hard to say, they are in a similar position to Microsoft in the early 90's. No one phone is going to be the iPhone killer any more than we can point to the Mac killer. It will not be the Motorola Droid, HTC Incredible, or the yet to be announced DFC
Maybe there is a option not listed - Obama lied in order to help him get votes.
I know it's shocking that a career politician that rapidly rose through the ranks of Chicago in one of the the most corrupt districts there would somehow not be totally truthful. After all he talks nice and chanted "Yes we can" over and over and over. I'm certain, absolutely certain, that if you could just get a message through to him he would realize the enormous accident that occurred and go have a nice long talk with his advisers and other appointees (whom he had *no* idea were doing all these bad things) and fix everything right up.
Really, even if you think everything he has done so far is peachy keen and figure the guy is mostly honest - he is still a politician. At best I would say an open source advisory is so down the priority list that it will likely never happen. Lets face it - he promised to nix the "do not ask do not tell" policy regarding gays in the military, that one simply takes him to write out an official statement and it has been over a year (and promised more than once, basically every time that segments polling numbers really start dropping) and still not done.
In his own auto-biography he points out that people will necessarily be disappointed in him as he presents himself as a blank slate and allows people to write whatever they want on it. He isn't a blank slate - the Obama you are looking for only existed in your mind, not in reality. He never went anyway as he didn't exist. Man many many others are slowly coming to realize this, sadly Obama the idealist (whichever one you wanted to see) doesn't really exist, Obama the politician is the only one that does. He will continue to milk the blank slate and hope that the person you once saw will "return" for as long as he can too - that is the nature of a politician. Some groups have learned how to manipulate a politician and treat him as such (assuming they have enough money and or votes), others sit around confused.
But if it makes you feel better - I'll leave this one generic as it is currently the answer given for all of them: Obama has WAY too much to worry with on his plate. What with all these global crises, economic downtime, and the seditious Tea Partiers blocking real reform it is no wonder he hasn't got to yet. Since he inherited such a mess it will most likely take longer than his Presidency to fix it and get on with the real work that America needs and address your issue.
And as long as that boiler plate works with his core group he will run with it too.
"This has been the most vile aspect of the Conservative war on science"
That is an interesting way of looking at it given the posts above you that say that anyone who thinks AGW may not be that strong is a right wing hack.
Sadly this is the issue with the *politicization* of science - many on each side think theirs is the obvious and the other side is waging war on them. Your right, science stands or fails on it own. Conservatives have no war on science - indeed, we find that as the harder core left has made it into office funding for basic space exploration (and no, I do not mean the recent Obama NASA announcement - I personally like the privatization of it and many other conservatives I know do too), energy physics, and a whole host of ideas that have been funded through arguably conservative presidents have been drastically cut in place of research into why carbon emissions are bad, AGW, and other highly politicized topics (and to be fair when Bush took office a similar thing happened there too). Talking about a Conservative war on science is only perpetuating the problem from the other end.
Conservatives have a war on left thought masquerading as science as much of the AGW proponents do. Liberals have a war against conservative thought masquerading as science as many of the Oil Companies produce. In reality we should have a war one *all* of that, one side isn't the lamb here fighting the good fight.
Until we come to that understanding things are going to deteriorate in our scientific knowledge. Not only that but as that pseudo-science becomes more and more prominent it is going to take MUCH more work to root it out. We can already see that with the almost universally agreed upon fallout from the so called "climategate" - that is the CRU data set is flawed and has to be removed from models and redone (we are basically arguing how and why at this point, not if). Conclusions that were considered solid and based on other data is turning out to be entangled with it in a primary matter. It's not the first time, I recall when Jane Goodall's data on Apes was discovered to be simply wrong, that she had either left out major finds or fabricated data because she was afraid how it would make them look to others. So much science at the time was based on what she did that it took years to unravel and no one is sure if it even is now decades later. We know what her motives were and why in that field her name is mud (sadly in the media she is still a major voice), but in this case it is so widespread that many could be truly earnest in thier desire to produce good works but GIGO rules here. In both cases there were plenty of warning signs that *should* have resulted in the problems being outed at the start but a combination of politics, money, fame, and pressure from those needing it to be true silenced it.
Even if their complaints with his conclusions are 100% correct (doubtful - AGW skeptics are taking this to mean AGW is wrong, it doesn't say that. It simply means we are back to not knowing as much as we thought we did - though people claiming the science is still rock solid aren't helping when it obviously isn't) I suspect that this newspaper will loose unless they have something fairly strong that this individual was dishonest. Wrong is not dishonest, at least as far as US law is concerned (I suspect Canada is similar just because most first world countries are) they are going to have to prove to some degree greater than 50% that he knew he was not telling the truth. That's hard to do - if they had said incompetence then they may get away with it, but even then that is hard to show too, but they claimed dishonesty.
I guess I have to look at the sheer number of fart noise, fireplace animations, and other such apps in the 100k+ to see that simple "development" of an application isn't a plus. I would rather have 100 useful applications than 200k fart noises.
The Linux Kernel is fine - as it matures from input from *real* kernel devs (ones that have made Kernels that have 5+ 9's uptime that *also* include performance) chances are the fart application people are going to be left behind in their ability. Frankly if many 2-4 year college students are regular contributors I would find that MUCH more troubling than most being 20+ year veterans of the field. I'm not a kernel dev - at best I can poke here and there - frankly I would be dismayed if I can do much more than the little I do to optimize for a specific field and what I do is so specific as to not be relevant to the global kernel tree.
I'm more than happy that IBM and other similar corporations have given their time to make the kernel something that it actually takes talent, knowledge, and experience to improve upon instead of a first or second semester OS student being able to find holes to fix.
An old post - but I'll still respond (I only rarely check once they move off the front page).
You misunderstand - my .5% error was when I used improper methods. His original estimate was nearly 30% off of my final answer. Nor did he understand what I had done for the one they went with - they had to find another engineer to go over it.
That is if I made what was essentially a trapezoidal solid into a true rectangle I got his numbers. If I calculated the area of the trapezoid I got nearly a 30% difference - the pit as built was *obviously* a trapezoid and thus didn't contain even 100%, let alone the extra volume required by law.
Further I *designed* a freaking containment pit for three 100k+ gallon gas tanks - the same engineering company that signed off on the a fore mentioned pit signed this one.
I do not have any real knowledge of how to design a pit to contain a liquid. Would it hold the pressure? What are the regulations with regard to containment? Does containing freaking *gasoline* have different requirements from water (I would bet so)? For the most part dunno - I have no idea if I followed them. I didn't talk to their engineers or anything either.
What I do know now for certain is that I calculated the volume correctly. I do know that the pit as designed can handle the pressures if filled with a liquid. But the rest (especially given that there are likely questions I do not even know to ask)? I have no idea.
Supposedly an engineer signed off on what I did. Supposedly it was a different engineer than they had used before (who was grossly incompetent - he really should have his license revoked). If said engineer was, well qualified then I have no reservations whatsoever. I fully documented everything and it isn't uncommon for a licensed engineer to have others design/calculate and then simply verify the design. For the most part that type of design isn't really hard as much as it is specialized knowledge that you wouldn't otherwise have.
So, in the end I still do not know how to feel about it. They were lucky in that I understood the math enough to do the right thing even in the parts I were not trained in - at least in all the areas I have since learned. Their handling of it in the past doesn't really make me feel good about it being signed off on - after all a roughly 30% error was too.
Censorship is always hard to define, is telling someone they can't yell "There is a bomb in the park - run for your lives!" censorship? Most will say it is not. Is telling someone it is Illegal to yell " suck!" in the very same park censorship (assuming as in the previous example the content is the issue, not randomly yelling at the top of your lungs)? Most will say yes.
One of the test I try and hold myself to is to reverse the idea - in this case if Microsoft were not allowing Firefox to be run on their OS (we will assume for a moment that they have the same restrictions the iPhone has where refusing distribution is the same as refusing to let it run - that reversal of places is left up to the reader to decide what the general community would think of it). I'm fairly certain it would be "censorship" and an evil corporation pushing its will.
As such, well I personally still do not really know if it is censorship. In the "reversed" case I would probably argue the same thing the Apple supporters are - it is not censorship simply a business decision and they are perfectly within their rights to do so. Though I would call it a deplorable act and it would cause them to get none of my money (and is why I didn't have a smart phone until the Android - none of the other choices passed that test). I do not find it censorship for me to refuse to pay for any of their products either - I find that a business decision on my part.
I've never understood the group that hates Microsoft for its anti-competitive closed source behavior yet love Apple. Apple has pretty much always been MUCH worse with regards to those metrics, it is just that ultimately Microsoft won that battle. Apple is just as bad or worse and no reason to figure they would do better if they had Microsoft's dominance. Indeed - could we imagine using our computers if Microsoft had the control that Apple does of its systems? But then for the people who figure that Apple invented the GUI, smart phones, and tablet computing and all other stole it from them the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field is in such a full swing that one shouldn't be surprised. (note that one can like Apple product and not be in that group - I'm writing from a Windows 7 box and generally consider Microsoft a pox on the land - but this is my main gaming machine and due to support issues it is the system of choice for PC gaming, frankly I do not see how one can get better, just different. I just do not fool myself into thinking that MS allows me to do that because of some grand plan for my best interest)
I'm a Computer Scientist/Software Engineer (I dropped out of the research end a few years ago - my current job is R&D in the commercial realm so I'm not sure what to call myself), before that I was a land surveyor. My parents owned that business and I started work there when I was 12 (apparently that is legal for your own kids - they payed me minimum wage so at 12 I was the richest kid in school and was happy :)). As a Computing researcher I can't say I did much calculus at all. Most everything was heavily discrete math. Lots and lots and lots and lots of discrete math.
I have, however, used calculus a few times as a land surveyor even though they are less likely than a computing professional too.
We had done a topographic map of a local gas depot's containment pits for their tanks. At the time some new regulations for the pit had passed and (I'm going to botch these numbers - fine details like that were too long ago) they had to go from 105% the volume to 115% the volume and they wanted to know what their current containment was. Most surveyors know very well how to draw topo's and with software how to calculate volumes and such, this was before said tools were widespread. So I basically did an integral to calculate the "area under the curve" with the curve being a close approximation of the contours (which were smooth and a spline was highly accurate). They ended up with ~90% of the volume contained (I know it was around that - I recall a little over 10% spill over). After me redoing my numbers (still in college - who am I to contradict a licensed engineer who designed the thing) I realized the person had simply made the containment pit "square" - that is the side sloped to the bottom at around a 45 degree angle and a several hundred foot long pit dropped about 3 foot from one end to the other. The engineer took the highest point on the burm, the lowest point in the pit, and the dimensions around the outside of the pit and calculated a volume. I had less than a .5% error from his numbers from the one we produced if I used that method.
After calling their head engineer and telling her what we found she went back to the person who originally did that and asked - I was correct. I had also submitted a full accounting of how I came to my conclusion on the area. They asked me to calculate how much more needed cut, I did so, they signed off and built it, and I'm still not sure how that makes me feel. I was a college student and not *remotely* qualified to do that. I figure they had me do it for the same reasons the person screwed up - it was cheap. They payed my parents 50 dollars an hour for me to do that, their staff drew it up, and their engineer signed it. It was good money for me (they gave that financial part of the job to me) and no liability on us - we were clear we were not able to do that or sign off on it and had it in writing. In that sense I'm OK with it, in another I hope the other parts of the system were done better than that was originally. They just lucked out that I could do what they wanted and had enough knowledge to do so
I'm lucky enough to both have had the correct schooling and ability to apply that - since then I've learned a great deal and know I inferred the correct things. Yet, I really shouldn't have been put in that position, but it at least gives me an amusing story I guess. Indeed, as I have aged since then I have become more and more aware of how truly lucky they were that I still know I did a working design. I clearly recall long phone conversations where I kept saying I was still in school and they didn't care.
Then, none of this helps the OP. I do not know the answer to his/her question. Calculus was always a struggle for me due to dyslexia and an insistence on memorizing forms (thats about like demanding an armless person catch a football with their hands). I never once had the issues they stated - I was in graduate level math (graph theory and formal languages/computability) before I made it through calc II. It took
The problem is - who is clamoring for that?
The iPod we had a lackluster group of MP3 players there were selling quite well and an established portable music segment. The iPod blew them out of the water in terms of functionality and dominated. The market was there and people were *trying* to do that already.
In the smartphone category you had a number of players too. They were heavy, clunky, limited software, and insanely expensive for what they did. The iPhone was somewhat more expensive but did so much more in a simple easy to use package. Again there were people already trying to do that and were unhappy with their current offerings. Apple gave them what they wanted.
Now? Really - does it buy me anything over an iPhone or other smart phone? Well a bigger screen but that looses that portability. It isn't going to be with them all the time. What it could truly do - and that is compete with the netbooks - is give traveling business users a way to leave the laptop at home and travel light yet it ignores the features they want.
I won't say they will not sell good, but if they do Apple is going to have to create the environment for them. So far everything you wrote is done 99% as well on the current phones and I do not know of anyone just wishing they had a large screen without the phone capability. I rather suspect that after the newness dies off they just will not be carried around much, the people I know with netbooks basically did the same. Unlike before it wasn't for a lack of the devices ability at fulfilling its role, it was for it not really having much of a role. It wasn't extremely portable so it failed there (just as the iPad does) and it wasn't powerful enough to replace the computer (and the iPad fails here too). It is IMO more or less similar to the early PDA's - just not there yet in one of the major factors (mainly weight/portability or processing power in this case)
That's not to say a rugged easy to use somewhat open tablet doesn't have applications - I just do not see it as a general purpose computing platform yet. For instance, if you are a household that has a decent amount of computer controlled equipment (DVR, game systems, etc) and it has the relevant apps this would be great. Large enough to easy read, portable around the house in a way a netbook or phone would not be, and easily fills those small internet tasks you would like to do but often do not want to go back to a fixed computer to use and laptops are too cumbersome for that level of mobility (phones are too small and tend to be, well phones). I'm not sure if the latter alone is worth the price tag or not for most people, personally I do not think so. However add in other household controls, security system integration, and a number of other apps that may or may not be done and yea, it could very well be. But I think for what most people are talking about a phone really only needs a bit more storage and a bit more processing power to be near perfect and if sold as an e-reader with more it is going to fail too (there is a reason the e-books failed miserably until the Kindle and the so called e-ink).
*shrug* I hope they do well, I plan on getting an Android one when they finally release one that isn't rushed out (I'm too much a geek - I simply want one). I suspect they will do well enough just from the geek segment but I do not see the acceptance they got from the iPhone/iPod until they either drop drastically in price, rise drastically in ability or they somehow get integrated as a household device (what I plan on doing with mine).