I don't understand why people state that Siri requires huge demands on network capacity. Cellular networks are built to handle voice data in real time.
A typical few-second snippet of voice data at full rate (uncompressed) would only take a few tens of kilobytes to transmit at voice-grade compression. And it needn't even be in real time. 4G and even 3G networks are built to handle high multiples of those rates for multiple users simultaneously.
If Siri is consuming massive amounts of network bandwidth, it could only be due to extremely inefficient implementation or extremely high rates of use. So either Apple has made a really crappy technical implementation of sending data or, more likely, delivered a service that's incredibly irresistable to users.
So the networks are supposed to pony up unlimited bandwidth and not charge the highest bandwidth users for the cost of upgrading their networks and acquiring bandwidth to implement it?
Talk about a feeling of entitlement!
The unconscionable thing is what's really happening in the marketplace: lower bandwidth users are subsidizing the costs of network upgrades that are made necessary only to satisfy the desires of the highest-bandwidth users. But it still makes sense from the carriers' perspective: they collect as much revenue as they can by charging whatever the market will bear.
I think Republicans would like religion to be the defining difference between the two parties. They have certainly pulled out all the stops in pandering to know-nothing theocrats, but in fact the great majority of Democrats as well as independents and Republicans profess religion and for the most part the religion they profess is some form of Christianity.
The difference on religion is mainly between Republicans who see nothing wrong with the government promoting their religion and most everybody else who think the government should be restricted from involving itself with religious belief.
To me, the more defining issue is economic. Republicans want an unregulated market and don't tax the rich. Democrats want the government to make everybody play nice and use taxes to help poor people get a leg up.
Independents apparently can't decide or worse can't distinguish between those approaches.
Medical charges without insurance in America are off the charts. This doesn't seem consistent with the idea that health care is something private industry can do efficiently.
You might try to excite the medium with an electron beam, but when the electrons hit the vessel you have the neon in, they'll make x-rays anyway. The trouble is they'll scatter.
This would be neither as directional nor as coherent as a conventional laser because of the lack of those mirrors. Those are properties that follow from having a high quality resonator. It may be (IMO is) impossible to duplicate those properties with x-rays.
Plenty of reasons: Warrant for the owner's arrest. Expired registration. Malfunctioning equipment. Preventing it from entering a close area. Preventing perpetrators from leaving the scene of a crime. Racial profiling^w^w Etc.
Nothing wrong with that. Google grew to be the most popular search engine by understanding and implementing what is most acceptable to users of a search page.
Applying the same sort of rating when ranking results is a logical extension and only makes Google more attractive to users.
A practical quantum computer already exists, as demonstrated in this result. A tiny computer, to be sure, but perfectly adequate for this demonstration. I doubt anyone knows with much certainty in one direction or the other how long it will take to scale up the bit width of these boxen--this being the current major obstacle.
Not really. Quantum computers are only practical in that scientists and engineers have managed, through herculean efforts, have made simple machines that can solve utterly trivial computing problems for which no apparatus whatsoever is necessary or desired.
A practical quantum computer would be a quantum computer suitable for solving practical computing problems on a basis that's competitive with other types of computers.
Maybe engineers will figure out how to make such computers in the next few decades, but maybe not. Meanwhile, the capacity of conventional computers continues to push out ahead.
It can't destroy the ocean. E. coli probably can't even survive in the ocean and even if it could, it would have to compete with every microorganism that's already there for resources. There's a reason why they didn't just find a bacterium in the ocean that could already do this. It's chemically inefficient to produce alcohol as a waste product so few organisms do it and they only compete well in environments where organisms that use their energy more efficiently are otherwise limited.
The real problem with this technology is that it would damage the oceans through over-harvesting of seaweed.
We've come a long way from the days when Henry Ford made it a goal to have every worker on his line be able to buy his product if they wanted it. He others who thought like him helped create a decently-paid working class for the first and maybe the last time in history.
The first thing I'd like to point out is Americans and Europeans no longer have a choice to buy electronics made in their own countries. "Let the market decide" is not realistic when there are no choices any more.
The second is that there's not $100 of labor in any smart phone, so the price difference due to having it made in America is not anywhere near what you pretend it is.
to corporate thinking like this. We need sizeable tariffs on imported manufactured goods. The tariff should be assessed based on the estimated man-hours of labor in the product and set nullify any difference in wage, environmental and working condition standards between the country of origin and your country, e.g. the USA, Germany, Italy, etc. Exceptions could be made for things that can't be manufactured in your country for reasons other than labor costs or if the unemployment rate goes too low.
It's only preferable at a significantly higher level of inflation than we are experiencing now, because it incurs an opportunity cost of everything you might want to spend money on besides Facebook.
If you're going to spend money on something as a hedge against inflation, you need to buy a commodity you can readily sell.
On one hand: what's the reason two guys want to be recognized as a "marriage"? Not children, as they can't have them, and they're just as capable of raising a kid one of them had with a third party as mere friends as a couple -- it can never be "their" kid, at most of one of them.
They want to be married because then they will have ALL of the same rights that married couples have -- an automatic assumption of joint property, survivor benefits, the ability to adopt one another's children, the ability to adopt children as a couple, the right to be treated the same way under tax law (as you noted), a right to make medical decisions on behalf of their spouse in case he or she is unable and many more.
And if they want to adopt one another's kids, they can do that if they're married, providing those kids with a parent in case their physical parent dies. If I was a kid with a gay dad and no mom in sight, I'd darn sure want my dad's partner to have responsibility for me in case dad kicked off.
And that's why they are involved: because of the contract. Otherwise it's all he-said/she-said or in the case of gay marriage he-said/he-said or she-said/she-said.
The problem is that marriage is a religious institution sponsored by our federal government. It's a problem because there are all sorts of legal ties to something religious in nature.
That's not true. Marriage is a social institution that is sponsored by governments and religions. Christianity is only 2000 years old (if that). Marriage goes back to before the dawn of civilization.
In America, state-recognized marriage is sponsored by government and sometimes incidentally involves some religious organization. There's no reason why we should let peoples' religious preference dominate other peoples' choice of whom they want to marry.
Slashdot Mirror
If the ice caps melt, that's a disaster in itself.
Most of the world's people and a large fraction of its arable land are below the flood line.
Worldwide meltoff of glaciers + clearing of Arctic sea ice + longer summers in the high latitudes = climate change.
Your local weather this week = who asked?
I don't understand why people state that Siri requires huge demands on network capacity. Cellular networks are built to handle voice data in real time.
A typical few-second snippet of voice data at full rate (uncompressed) would only take a few tens of kilobytes to transmit at voice-grade compression. And it needn't even be in real time. 4G and even 3G networks are built to handle high multiples of those rates for multiple users simultaneously.
If Siri is consuming massive amounts of network bandwidth, it could only be due to extremely inefficient implementation or extremely high rates of use. So either Apple has made a really crappy technical implementation of sending data or, more likely, delivered a service that's incredibly irresistable to users.
So the networks are supposed to pony up unlimited bandwidth and not charge the highest bandwidth users for the cost of upgrading their networks and acquiring bandwidth to implement it?
Talk about a feeling of entitlement!
The unconscionable thing is what's really happening in the marketplace: lower bandwidth users are subsidizing the costs of network upgrades that are made necessary only to satisfy the desires of the highest-bandwidth users. But it still makes sense from the carriers' perspective: they collect as much revenue as they can by charging whatever the market will bear.
I think Republicans would like religion to be the defining difference between the two parties. They have certainly pulled out all the stops in pandering to know-nothing theocrats, but in fact the great majority of Democrats as well as independents and Republicans profess religion and for the most part the religion they profess is some form of Christianity.
The difference on religion is mainly between Republicans who see nothing wrong with the government promoting their religion and most everybody else who think the government should be restricted from involving itself with religious belief.
To me, the more defining issue is economic. Republicans want an unregulated market and don't tax the rich. Democrats want the government to make everybody play nice and use taxes to help poor people get a leg up.
Independents apparently can't decide or worse can't distinguish between those approaches.
Medical charges without insurance in America are off the charts. This doesn't seem consistent with the idea that health care is something private industry can do efficiently.
If FTL travel were possible, we should have been invaded and colonized millions of years ago.
One species could colonize the whole galaxy in a few thousand years.
Now what would be exciting is a means to get something there in our lifetimes.
You might try to excite the medium with an electron beam, but when the electrons hit the vessel you have the neon in, they'll make x-rays anyway. The trouble is they'll scatter.
This would be neither as directional nor as coherent as a conventional laser because of the lack of those mirrors. Those are properties that follow from having a high quality resonator. It may be (IMO is) impossible to duplicate those properties with x-rays.
Plenty of reasons:
Warrant for the owner's arrest.
Expired registration.
Malfunctioning equipment.
Preventing it from entering a close area.
Preventing perpetrators from leaving the scene of a crime.
Racial profiling^w^w
Etc.
I prefer the word "corruption"
The general rule is if it can be observed from off your property it's fair game. No warrant needed.
File sharing is, of itself, a legal activity protected by the 1st Amendment. If you own or have rights to use the copyright.
Nothing wrong with that. Google grew to be the most popular search engine by understanding and implementing what is most acceptable to users of a search page.
Applying the same sort of rating when ranking results is a logical extension and only makes Google more attractive to users.
Next step: deprecate Flash.
Nobody would use a highly vulnerable communication system to fly an airplane, let alone in a war zone.
A practical quantum computer already exists, as demonstrated in this result. A tiny computer, to be sure, but perfectly adequate for this demonstration. I doubt anyone knows with much certainty in one direction or the other how long it will take to scale up the bit width of these boxen--this being the current major obstacle.
Not really. Quantum computers are only practical in that scientists and engineers have managed, through herculean efforts, have made simple machines that can solve utterly trivial computing problems for which no apparatus whatsoever is necessary or desired.
A practical quantum computer would be a quantum computer suitable for solving practical computing problems on a basis that's competitive with other types of computers.
Maybe engineers will figure out how to make such computers in the next few decades, but maybe not. Meanwhile, the capacity of conventional computers continues to push out ahead.
It can't destroy the ocean. E. coli probably can't even survive in the ocean and even if it could, it would have to compete with every microorganism that's already there for resources. There's a reason why they didn't just find a bacterium in the ocean that could already do this. It's chemically inefficient to produce alcohol as a waste product so few organisms do it and they only compete well in environments where organisms that use their energy more efficiently are otherwise limited.
The real problem with this technology is that it would damage the oceans through over-harvesting of seaweed.
We've come a long way from the days when Henry Ford made it a goal to have every worker on his line be able to buy his product if they wanted it. He others who thought like him helped create a decently-paid working class for the first and maybe the last time in history.
The first thing I'd like to point out is Americans and Europeans no longer have a choice to buy electronics made in their own countries. "Let the market decide" is not realistic when there are no choices any more.
The second is that there's not $100 of labor in any smart phone, so the price difference due to having it made in America is not anywhere near what you pretend it is.
to corporate thinking like this. We need sizeable tariffs on imported manufactured goods. The tariff should be assessed based on the estimated man-hours of labor in the product and set nullify any difference in wage, environmental and working condition standards between the country of origin and your country, e.g. the USA, Germany, Italy, etc. Exceptions could be made for things that can't be manufactured in your country for reasons other than labor costs or if the unemployment rate goes too low.
It's only preferable at a significantly higher level of inflation than we are experiencing now, because it incurs an opportunity cost of everything you might want to spend money on besides Facebook.
If you're going to spend money on something as a hedge against inflation, you need to buy a commodity you can readily sell.
On one hand: what's the reason two guys want to be recognized as a "marriage"? Not children, as they can't have them, and they're just as capable of raising a kid one of them had with a third party as mere friends as a couple -- it can never be "their" kid, at most of one of them.
They want to be married because then they will have ALL of the same rights that married couples have -- an automatic assumption of joint property, survivor benefits, the ability to adopt one another's children, the ability to adopt children as a couple, the right to be treated the same way under tax law (as you noted), a right to make medical decisions on behalf of their spouse in case he or she is unable and many more.
And if they want to adopt one another's kids, they can do that if they're married, providing those kids with a parent in case their physical parent dies. If I was a kid with a gay dad and no mom in sight, I'd darn sure want my dad's partner to have responsibility for me in case dad kicked off.
And that's why they are involved: because of the contract. Otherwise it's all he-said/she-said or in the case of gay marriage he-said/he-said or she-said/she-said.
The problem is that marriage is a religious institution sponsored by our federal government. It's a problem because there are all sorts of legal ties to something religious in nature.
That's not true. Marriage is a social institution that is sponsored by governments and religions. Christianity is only 2000 years old (if that). Marriage goes back to before the dawn of civilization.
In America, state-recognized marriage is sponsored by government and sometimes incidentally involves some religious organization. There's no reason why we should let peoples' religious preference dominate other peoples' choice of whom they want to marry.