I can put CyanogenMod on my Android handset. I can load ROMs based on carrier firmware that has CIQ removed.
Thanks to Open Source Software, I have this choice.
Agreed... but you represent maybe a couple percent of total Android users in regard to your ability and will to do that. My son tells me that Android runs great on his first gen iPhone... so I guess Android provides the same benefit to similarly-minded Apple users. The remaining ones are stuck with a "Automatically Send / Don't Send" radio button. What do the other 98% of Android device owners have?
I've found it useful as an example for people who don't understand why we need free/open software....
You might want to re-think that after reading the article, including its updates. Ironically, the (closed, walled garden) Apple version appears to send only diagnostic data that could be conceivably used for legitimate troubleshooting of dropped calls and the like whereas the (free, open) Android version is more akin to a rootkit, complete with backdoor and key logger.
Meh, tell that to my old iphone. It took 20-30 seconds to display text after I typed it. You can imagine what scrolling around webpages felt like. The thing was painful.:(
iPhone 3G on iOS 4.0? Been there and it was painful. I missed calls because of the crappy performance. Web pages would take 3 forevers to load... Still, once they did, they scrolled flawlessly in the "you're moving a page with your finger" sense. No choppy animation or pixel by pixel jumping of the page contents. Score one for using the device's GPU to do your UI rendering, huh?
Have you RTFA? The battery drains completely in six hours. That's pretty freaking frequent.
Read the article and have the phone. I've not experienced a six hour drain. Nor has my wife. Nor have three coworkers and two friends. Still, I have no doubt that it happens... just not to the majority of users. For those who do experience it, yeah, six hours probably sucks... but I'm far from being convinced that temporarily having the normal battery life of a 4G Android phone while Apple looks into it is the injustice some are making it out to be.
Come back and make your RIM comparison when half the iPhones in the world stop working for three days straight.
I'll be glad to once iCloud goes down. Which it will, eventually. And it will be hilarious.
I fear this day... I'm not sure how I'll operate when everything on my phone operates as it always has except for my unused.me email account and photo synchronization.
Had this been an issues with a new blackberry, you know they would be crucified. The media loves to let apple getaway with stuff like this all the time, but any mistakemade by RIM and it means the end of the company. If this is a software bug, why are we waiting weeks for a fix? Because apple knows they can do as they please, and these devices will still fly off the shelves faster then they can build them.
Because it's nothing more than a minor inconvenience for a small number of users? Great, your battery drains before the day's over. So what? Charge your phone more frequently for a couple of weeks while Apple looks into the issue. Come back and make your RIM comparison when half the iPhones in the world stop working for three days straight.
It is completely inexcusable for Google to botch up a high-profile app release like this. Google has thousands of engineers, PMs, and testers, and they can't release an app for Gmail, one of their flagship user-facing products?
Inexcusable? Maybe....but not at all unexpected. Anyone who's attempted to make use of the Google Voice iOS app over the last ~year that it's been available would think that an app that errors-out at launch is the next evolutionary step. It's had at least three updates but none of them have addressed abysmal performance, hangs, lock-ups, and false "call failed" error messages that were present and widely experienced from the very start.
Remember that not every non-spam email originates from a perfectly-configured self-hosted SMTP server. Many organizations outsource their email, spam filtering, compliance filtering, notice / statement delivery, etc. While it's easy to posit that the IT departments in such organizations have a duty to maintain reverse DNS records for all their partners' servers, don't fall into the trap of thinking that every organization has a fully-staffed, knowledgeable IT department... or an IT department at all.
The most interesting part of the article for consideration with SSDs is that SMART is going to be near useless for them. Since most failures are random occurrences in electronics which SMART isn't good at detecting, we may need better technology for detecting SSD failures.
Have you ever seen SMART perform in a useful way on a mechanical disk? At work and at home, I've gone through a crap-ton of hard disks in the last decade or so that SMART's been prevalent and never have I seen SMART flag a drive as problematic before I already knew I had a serious problem. More often than not, I've had systems slow to a crawl due to massive numbers of read errors and sector reallocations while the drive firmware actively lied to me about the drive's condition. Only looking at the raw SMART stats and watching the counters increase wildly reveals the truth.
Have IT staff ever ridiculed you for asking questions about Linux?
Yes. They seem to be from the MS School of thought. You remember those people...everything must run MS and if it doesn't, it sucks. The guys who run Ultimate editions of everything even though they don't need it, and brag about having a beta version of Office. Well now they work in IT.
Yeah, it's because the IT staffs are inept and brainless, not because IT training, culture, and best practices center around what actually works in business where most of these oppressed students will spend 50 years of their adult lives. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of clueless losers in IT who don't even know what Linux is, but if you're looking at entering any non-tech field and think your college Linux experimentation and personal rebellion against Microsoft's evil empire will offer you any advantage in the business world, you're in for disappointment.
... Think of apps in memory as a cache. You don't normally go through caches manually cleaning them out.
I, and many truly high-end users do not. "Power Users", however, absolutely live to clean caches and temp files, scan their registries, and defragment their geometry-obscured hard drives. You can bet they're aching to save the 25 milliseconds it takes the OS to choose which cached app to dump before loading the newly-opened one, even if they waste 10 seconds manually killing a task each time.
According to several sources were four helicopters, two of these Chinooks. Perhaps it was these two that it shook the windows
Exactly... It would seem likely that Chinooks were sent in only after a delay and after the Pakistani authorities knew something was amiss. By that time, the raw power and performance of the Chinooks would be far more desirable than stealth. The stealth-modified helicopters almost certainly perform more poorly than unmodified versions of the same aircraft.
Boy, have I been there... That phone was almost entirely unusable on iOS 4.0. I actually missed calls because it wouldn't respond to my touches fast enough to answer. It was incredibly frustrating to deal with crap like that and the keyboard literally hanging for 15 or 20 seconds with one key highlighted. It improved with 4.1 and 4.2 but it's still ridiculous. Thing is, it's not just CPU horsepower or memory at work. Those make it more noticeable on the 3G, but since upgrading to an iPhone 4, I still notice tons of latency. Sure, apps load like lightning compared to the 3G, but stuff that should always be instantly responsive like navigation bar buttons, scrollviews, and the keyboard simply aren't. Latency is a far bigger issue on an iPhone 4 running iOS 4.3.x than it was on an iPhone 3G running OS 2.x. (its release OS version)
For some of the channel information, like the guide, you have a tradeoff between bandwidth and latency. Sure, you can stream the guide with almost 0 latency, but that means using a lot of BW to be able to send all the channel guides all the time. You have less available BW for channels, which means having to use more carrier freqs which means more money on hardware to send those signals (and possibly repeaters...). So, cable operators send the guide with a "reasonable" BW. The problem gets worse the more channels you have, since the channel guide has to be sent on all carriers.
Interesting... If only we could develop some kind of cheap technology capable of storing this 50 - 100K of infrequently-changing guide information so we wouldn't have to wait every single time we wanted to look at it. Even if this theoretical technology lost the information every time power was removed, it would still be a massive improvement over what we have now.
Historically Microsoft's biggest problem is they feel Windows is the solution to every problem, which has started to not work so well...
II agree to a point, but I think an even larger problem for Microsoft is that they wholeheartedly believe the Windows brand has value. One has to wonder why they'd think that the typical customer's experience with "Windows" would impart goodwill and loyalty to the architecturally and visually unrelated Windows Phone when they decided to name it that. I doubt they would have been on track to take a meaningful share of the smartphone market in any case, but I can't help but believe their sales would be better had they just dropped the "Windows" BS and called it something else. For that matter, they might do well to drop the Microsoft name altogether for consumer products and market them under a subsidiary.
At the same time, Microsoft is a huge company which must cater to the interests of businesses which insist on using IE6.
I love this statement. I can't tell you how big my smile is right now. I work in corporate IT and I can give you some insight on this. You see, Microsoft's business customers don't give a damn about using IE6. What they care about is not having to re-write or re-purchase software every couple of years when it's been implemented at great expense. They also don't like being forced into an OS upgrade just to run a newer browser. Remember that insanely-long stretch where XP was supported, got browser updates, and retained meaningful compatibility with new releases of other Microsoft software, particularly corporate IT freebies such as management tools? Yeah, those of us who bought the Windows 2000 spiel got dumped in something like 18 months. Plan the project, buy PCs, roll out Windows 2000 and by the time you're done, it's a XP world according to Microsoft. Expect a service pack for your three year old OS? Are you crazy? Want to upgrade the "integrated" browser after 18 months? No way! Expect new management tools to run on your 18 month old machine? Screw you! Even now that it's largely a XP and 7 world, many customers don't want to spend the money to upgrade software that, had Microsoft not been trying to embrace and extend the browser, should have survived a simple browser upgrade without issue.
Bury the whole damn thing in concrete, and be done with it. This crisis would have been resolved two weeks ago if TEPCO wasn't more interested in repairing and reusing the reactor than the public safety.
Really? You actually believe that's what they're trying to do? Again, Really? Even if you think that at least trying to stabilize the situation by cooling the fuel is the wrong choice, just how would you approach burying four (or six) multi-story buildings in concrete in an area with no infrastructure? Given that starting the process would require you to give up on cooling, how could you even mix and place that much concrete before the cores completely melted, likely blowing-open their pressure vessels and containment like popcorn kernels? If you found a way, how comfortable are you that concrete, which would be wet (not merely uncured) for weeks or months in that amount, would contain everything as the cores melted?
[Sumarized: Some prominent democrats have said hateful of bigoted things too...]
Why wait for the supposed Republican incidents when Democrats keep proving they are the party of hate?
No doubt, however you segment society, be it by political party, social group, race, gender, sexual orientation, or feelings about anchovies on pizza, you'll find that any group you can define will include some number of hate-mongers or bigots. Absolutely, those people exist in the democratic party too. I wouldn't say that I support democratic candidates in general, but when I look at the party's record for hateful rhetoric, I see democrats who have exclusionary and bigoted opinions. Certainly, I see it in the behavior and actions of many. When I look at the republican party, I see candidates actively campaigning on those stances. I see them stirring anger by convincing their base that they are oppressed essentially because people with dissenting views, lifestyles, or orientations are allowed to walk among us. They campaign on fear of people who are different and instead of it being just a few politicians on the fringe, it's nearly across the board. The fringe is outright scary.
Even if that isn't right, it still seems to me like the correct control for the experiment, if they want to say it's the radiation that's causing the bone loss, would be to have the control group wearing deactivated phones, not having them wearing no phone at all.
I read about this when I was growing up. My family had an outdated (even then) encyclopedia that I would regularly flip through in fascination. If I remember correctly, what you're describing is is called "science".
[Blah, dems are doing a lot of unrelated but bad stuff, blah]... I rather remember seeing someone remark 1.5 years ago-- when Dems controlled a full 2 branches of the gov't by an overwhelming amount-- that it was "the republican's fault" that Obama couldnt fulfill some promise or other (think it was closing gitmo). Never mind that republicans had no power to block anything at that point.
No, it was Obama's fault for being naive enough to think the Republicans were capable of negotiating and making compromises to serve the interests of the American people as a whole. In batting his head against the wall for two years trying to work with them, he wasted time, what some might have called a mandate, and ultimately, the opportunity to get anything meaningful done not only during that period, but for his entire presidency. Listen, both parties suck. They both cater to the extreme because mobs of raving mad lunatics make the news and frankly, screaming tends to get you heard. Both are happy to take a shit on our freedoms at every opportunity and neither regards us as anything but a mass of easily-manipulated dimwits good only for our votes. Pork and back-room deals that sacrifice the good of the country for the benefit of one legislator's district (or his pockets) abound in both parties. However, nobody caters to the rich at the expense of the lower and middle classes like the republicans. They are experts at stoking the fire within their base on issues that are ultimately not consequential to our country. They draw voters out of every crack and crevice with bigotry and holier-than-thou God hates fags and brown people rhetoric while they meticulously disassemble the checks and balances that make it possible for those they court to succeed.
... In the best case scenario, everyone gets the same percent increase, and the cost of goods increases likewise, and thus everything is identical. However, the way they actually do it, the rich get several times the percentage increase that the non-rich do, and as a result, although the non-rich technically have more money, their expenses grow faster than their income and they are actually worse off.
Sir, I think you've just described inflation... and how it's being used to somewhat mask the siphoning of wealth from the lower and middle class to the super-rich. It's the reason that even with "good" professional jobs, my wife and I both have to work just to afford a modest home in a neighborhood with a decent school system and relatively few Camaros rusting into front lawns... all while, managing to save very little for retirement. As robotics and various forms of automation have made manufacturing far more efficient, somehow families have gone from needing not one bread earner per household, but two. That's kept families afloat for a while, but even it's not enough and the decline is accelerating.
Agreed. Awesome hardware and functionality for the price. My only gripe is that I've been so spoiled by the responsiveness of my Apple products that I can't fully enjoy my Nook Color for its comfortable to hold size and elegant package. At 800MHz w/ 512MB RAM it's plenty snappy when actually executing stuff. It's doing exotic things like scrolling a web page that make it feel like watching a hand-cranked silent film. Seriously, Google, give up on your software rendering fetish already. I know you're trying to support a wide range of hardware and hardware classes, but rendering a browser page to a layer on even the cheapest mobile GPU would eliminate this user experience train wreck completely. A nice bonus is that the main CPU might then have enough free cycles to respond to the user's screen touches in a timely manner, further increasing perceived performance.
Eh, after thinking about that for a minute, it's clear that I confused the reactors' electrical output ratings with their heat production. That's why I'm some unremarkable company's IT department instead of an engineer. Still, though the numbers I used are wrong, the point remains that heat output would have dropped by nearly an order of magnitude within the first several hours after shutdown. That the reactors received proper cooling during this initial and massively-sloped part of the drop-off curve likely made the difference between region-changing catastrophe and the "mere" serious incident we're talking about now.
Remember that the initial events in Japan were not worst case. Three of the six reactors were in shut down mode in advance of the earthquake and the other three shut down correctly before the tsunami. The situation would have been quickly critical if the reactors could not be shut down before major damage occurred (surely feasible if unlikely).
While I agree with the essence of thought, my nature drives me to reinforce a point that you probably get but didn't specifically mention. Reactors can be shut down instantaneously or at least near enough that it's practically instantaneous. When you scam the control rods, you've stopped the primary fission reaction immediately. At Fukushima, the operating reactors not only shutdown immediately, but they got an hour of two of full-scale proper cooling before the tsunami hit. Thereafter, they got another several hours of cooling from battery power. While that may not seem significant, given that we're still worried about their cooling status two weeks later, this likely saw them drop from the 7% output seen at the instant of shutdown to something substantially more manageable like.7%. If we consider the highest output reactor among the four considered to have been the most problematic, we're looking at dropping from 784MW output to 54MW in a second, then to 5.4MW in the course of several hours. There's been a lot of talk about what went wrong, but little about this very critical bit that went right. Had there been no cooling immediately after shutdown, the situation would be very, very different right now.
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I can put CyanogenMod on my Android handset. I can load ROMs based on carrier firmware that has CIQ removed.
Thanks to Open Source Software, I have this choice.
Agreed... but you represent maybe a couple percent of total Android users in regard to your ability and will to do that. My son tells me that Android runs great on his first gen iPhone... so I guess Android provides the same benefit to similarly-minded Apple users. The remaining ones are stuck with a "Automatically Send / Don't Send" radio button. What do the other 98% of Android device owners have?
I've found it useful as an example for people who don't understand why we need free/open software. ...
You might want to re-think that after reading the article, including its updates. Ironically, the (closed, walled garden) Apple version appears to send only diagnostic data that could be conceivably used for legitimate troubleshooting of dropped calls and the like whereas the (free, open) Android version is more akin to a rootkit, complete with backdoor and key logger.
Uhhhg... When did moderation start taking effect immediately? Maybe posting on my moderated comment will undo my horrific error.
Meh, tell that to my old iphone. It took 20-30 seconds to display text after I typed it. You can imagine what scrolling around webpages felt like. The thing was painful. :(
iPhone 3G on iOS 4.0? Been there and it was painful. I missed calls because of the crappy performance. Web pages would take 3 forevers to load... Still, once they did, they scrolled flawlessly in the "you're moving a page with your finger" sense. No choppy animation or pixel by pixel jumping of the page contents. Score one for using the device's GPU to do your UI rendering, huh?
Have you RTFA? The battery drains completely in six hours. That's pretty freaking frequent.
Read the article and have the phone. I've not experienced a six hour drain. Nor has my wife. Nor have three coworkers and two friends. Still, I have no doubt that it happens... just not to the majority of users. For those who do experience it, yeah, six hours probably sucks... but I'm far from being convinced that temporarily having the normal battery life of a 4G Android phone while Apple looks into it is the injustice some are making it out to be.
Come back and make your RIM comparison when half the iPhones in the world stop working for three days straight.
I'll be glad to once iCloud goes down. Which it will, eventually. And it will be hilarious.
I fear this day... I'm not sure how I'll operate when everything on my phone operates as it always has except for my unused .me email account and photo synchronization.
The antenna problems with the iPhone 4 were obfuscated and blamed on the user at first, too.
And then they went away about the time the media stopped covering it... and without any hardware changes. Hmmm....
Had this been an issues with a new blackberry, you know they would be crucified. The media loves to let apple getaway with stuff like this all the time, but any mistakemade by RIM and it means the end of the company. If this is a software bug, why are we waiting weeks for a fix? Because apple knows they can do as they please, and these devices will still fly off the shelves faster then they can build them.
Because it's nothing more than a minor inconvenience for a small number of users? Great, your battery drains before the day's over. So what? Charge your phone more frequently for a couple of weeks while Apple looks into the issue. Come back and make your RIM comparison when half the iPhones in the world stop working for three days straight.
It is completely inexcusable for Google to botch up a high-profile app release like this. Google has thousands of engineers, PMs, and testers, and they can't release an app for Gmail, one of their flagship user-facing products?
Inexcusable? Maybe. ...but not at all unexpected. Anyone who's attempted to make use of the Google Voice iOS app over the last ~year that it's been available would think that an app that errors-out at launch is the next evolutionary step. It's had at least three updates but none of them have addressed abysmal performance, hangs, lock-ups, and false "call failed" error messages that were present and widely experienced from the very start.
Remember that not every non-spam email originates from a perfectly-configured self-hosted SMTP server. Many organizations outsource their email, spam filtering, compliance filtering, notice / statement delivery, etc. While it's easy to posit that the IT departments in such organizations have a duty to maintain reverse DNS records for all their partners' servers, don't fall into the trap of thinking that every organization has a fully-staffed, knowledgeable IT department... or an IT department at all.
The most interesting part of the article for consideration with SSDs is that SMART is going to be near useless for them. Since most failures are random occurrences in electronics which SMART isn't good at detecting, we may need better technology for detecting SSD failures.
Have you ever seen SMART perform in a useful way on a mechanical disk? At work and at home, I've gone through a crap-ton of hard disks in the last decade or so that SMART's been prevalent and never have I seen SMART flag a drive as problematic before I already knew I had a serious problem. More often than not, I've had systems slow to a crawl due to massive numbers of read errors and sector reallocations while the drive firmware actively lied to me about the drive's condition. Only looking at the raw SMART stats and watching the counters increase wildly reveals the truth.
Have IT staff ever ridiculed you for asking questions about Linux?
Yes. They seem to be from the MS School of thought. You remember those people...everything must run MS and if it doesn't, it sucks. The guys who run Ultimate editions of everything even though they don't need it, and brag about having a beta version of Office. Well now they work in IT.
Yeah, it's because the IT staffs are inept and brainless, not because IT training, culture, and best practices center around what actually works in business where most of these oppressed students will spend 50 years of their adult lives. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of clueless losers in IT who don't even know what Linux is, but if you're looking at entering any non-tech field and think your college Linux experimentation and personal rebellion against Microsoft's evil empire will offer you any advantage in the business world, you're in for disappointment.
... Think of apps in memory as a cache. You don't normally go through caches manually cleaning them out.
I, and many truly high-end users do not. "Power Users", however, absolutely live to clean caches and temp files, scan their registries, and defragment their geometry-obscured hard drives. You can bet they're aching to save the 25 milliseconds it takes the OS to choose which cached app to dump before loading the newly-opened one, even if they waste 10 seconds manually killing a task each time.
According to several sources were four helicopters, two of these Chinooks. Perhaps it was these two that it shook the windows
Exactly... It would seem likely that Chinooks were sent in only after a delay and after the Pakistani authorities knew something was amiss. By that time, the raw power and performance of the Chinooks would be far more desirable than stealth. The stealth-modified helicopters almost certainly perform more poorly than unmodified versions of the same aircraft.
Boy, have I been there... That phone was almost entirely unusable on iOS 4.0. I actually missed calls because it wouldn't respond to my touches fast enough to answer. It was incredibly frustrating to deal with crap like that and the keyboard literally hanging for 15 or 20 seconds with one key highlighted. It improved with 4.1 and 4.2 but it's still ridiculous. Thing is, it's not just CPU horsepower or memory at work. Those make it more noticeable on the 3G, but since upgrading to an iPhone 4, I still notice tons of latency. Sure, apps load like lightning compared to the 3G, but stuff that should always be instantly responsive like navigation bar buttons, scrollviews, and the keyboard simply aren't. Latency is a far bigger issue on an iPhone 4 running iOS 4.3.x than it was on an iPhone 3G running OS 2.x. (its release OS version)
For some of the channel information, like the guide, you have a tradeoff between bandwidth and latency. Sure, you can stream the guide with almost 0 latency, but that means using a lot of BW to be able to send all the channel guides all the time. You have less available BW for channels, which means having to use more carrier freqs which means more money on hardware to send those signals (and possibly repeaters...). So, cable operators send the guide with a "reasonable" BW. The problem gets worse the more channels you have, since the channel guide has to be sent on all carriers.
Interesting... If only we could develop some kind of cheap technology capable of storing this 50 - 100K of infrequently-changing guide information so we wouldn't have to wait every single time we wanted to look at it. Even if this theoretical technology lost the information every time power was removed, it would still be a massive improvement over what we have now.
Historically Microsoft's biggest problem is they feel Windows is the solution to every problem, which has started to not work so well...
II agree to a point, but I think an even larger problem for Microsoft is that they wholeheartedly believe the Windows brand has value. One has to wonder why they'd think that the typical customer's experience with "Windows" would impart goodwill and loyalty to the architecturally and visually unrelated Windows Phone when they decided to name it that. I doubt they would have been on track to take a meaningful share of the smartphone market in any case, but I can't help but believe their sales would be better had they just dropped the "Windows" BS and called it something else. For that matter, they might do well to drop the Microsoft name altogether for consumer products and market them under a subsidiary.
At the same time, Microsoft is a huge company which must cater to the interests of businesses which insist on using IE6.
I love this statement. I can't tell you how big my smile is right now. I work in corporate IT and I can give you some insight on this. You see, Microsoft's business customers don't give a damn about using IE6. What they care about is not having to re-write or re-purchase software every couple of years when it's been implemented at great expense. They also don't like being forced into an OS upgrade just to run a newer browser. Remember that insanely-long stretch where XP was supported, got browser updates, and retained meaningful compatibility with new releases of other Microsoft software, particularly corporate IT freebies such as management tools? Yeah, those of us who bought the Windows 2000 spiel got dumped in something like 18 months. Plan the project, buy PCs, roll out Windows 2000 and by the time you're done, it's a XP world according to Microsoft. Expect a service pack for your three year old OS? Are you crazy? Want to upgrade the "integrated" browser after 18 months? No way! Expect new management tools to run on your 18 month old machine? Screw you! Even now that it's largely a XP and 7 world, many customers don't want to spend the money to upgrade software that, had Microsoft not been trying to embrace and extend the browser, should have survived a simple browser upgrade without issue.
Bury the whole damn thing in concrete, and be done with it. This crisis would have been resolved two weeks ago if TEPCO wasn't more interested in repairing and reusing the reactor than the public safety.
Really? You actually believe that's what they're trying to do? Again, Really? Even if you think that at least trying to stabilize the situation by cooling the fuel is the wrong choice, just how would you approach burying four (or six) multi-story buildings in concrete in an area with no infrastructure? Given that starting the process would require you to give up on cooling, how could you even mix and place that much concrete before the cores completely melted, likely blowing-open their pressure vessels and containment like popcorn kernels? If you found a way, how comfortable are you that concrete, which would be wet (not merely uncured) for weeks or months in that amount, would contain everything as the cores melted?
Hello!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Democrats!
[Sumarized: Some prominent democrats have said hateful of bigoted things too...]
Why wait for the supposed Republican incidents when Democrats keep proving they are the party of hate?
No doubt, however you segment society, be it by political party, social group, race, gender, sexual orientation, or feelings about anchovies on pizza, you'll find that any group you can define will include some number of hate-mongers or bigots. Absolutely, those people exist in the democratic party too. I wouldn't say that I support democratic candidates in general, but when I look at the party's record for hateful rhetoric, I see democrats who have exclusionary and bigoted opinions. Certainly, I see it in the behavior and actions of many. When I look at the republican party, I see candidates actively campaigning on those stances. I see them stirring anger by convincing their base that they are oppressed essentially because people with dissenting views, lifestyles, or orientations are allowed to walk among us. They campaign on fear of people who are different and instead of it being just a few politicians on the fringe, it's nearly across the board. The fringe is outright scary.
Even if that isn't right, it still seems to me like the correct control for the experiment, if they want to say it's the radiation that's causing the bone loss, would be to have the control group wearing deactivated phones, not having them wearing no phone at all.
I read about this when I was growing up. My family had an outdated (even then) encyclopedia that I would regularly flip through in fascination. If I remember correctly, what you're describing is is called "science".
[Blah, dems are doing a lot of unrelated but bad stuff, blah] ... I rather remember seeing someone remark 1.5 years ago-- when Dems controlled a full 2 branches of the gov't by an overwhelming amount-- that it was "the republican's fault" that Obama couldnt fulfill some promise or other (think it was closing gitmo). Never mind that republicans had no power to block anything at that point.
No, it was Obama's fault for being naive enough to think the Republicans were capable of negotiating and making compromises to serve the interests of the American people as a whole. In batting his head against the wall for two years trying to work with them, he wasted time, what some might have called a mandate, and ultimately, the opportunity to get anything meaningful done not only during that period, but for his entire presidency. Listen, both parties suck. They both cater to the extreme because mobs of raving mad lunatics make the news and frankly, screaming tends to get you heard. Both are happy to take a shit on our freedoms at every opportunity and neither regards us as anything but a mass of easily-manipulated dimwits good only for our votes. Pork and back-room deals that sacrifice the good of the country for the benefit of one legislator's district (or his pockets) abound in both parties. However, nobody caters to the rich at the expense of the lower and middle classes like the republicans. They are experts at stoking the fire within their base on issues that are ultimately not consequential to our country. They draw voters out of every crack and crevice with bigotry and holier-than-thou God hates fags and brown people rhetoric while they meticulously disassemble the checks and balances that make it possible for those they court to succeed.
To be fair, they want everyone to get richer.
... In the best case scenario, everyone gets the same percent increase, and the cost of goods increases likewise, and thus everything is identical. However, the way they actually do it, the rich get several times the percentage increase that the non-rich do, and as a result, although the non-rich technically have more money, their expenses grow faster than their income and they are actually worse off.
Sir, I think you've just described inflation... and how it's being used to somewhat mask the siphoning of wealth from the lower and middle class to the super-rich. It's the reason that even with "good" professional jobs, my wife and I both have to work just to afford a modest home in a neighborhood with a decent school system and relatively few Camaros rusting into front lawns... all while, managing to save very little for retirement. As robotics and various forms of automation have made manufacturing far more efficient, somehow families have gone from needing not one bread earner per household, but two. That's kept families afloat for a while, but even it's not enough and the decline is accelerating.
Agreed. Awesome hardware and functionality for the price. My only gripe is that I've been so spoiled by the responsiveness of my Apple products that I can't fully enjoy my Nook Color for its comfortable to hold size and elegant package. At 800MHz w/ 512MB RAM it's plenty snappy when actually executing stuff. It's doing exotic things like scrolling a web page that make it feel like watching a hand-cranked silent film. Seriously, Google, give up on your software rendering fetish already. I know you're trying to support a wide range of hardware and hardware classes, but rendering a browser page to a layer on even the cheapest mobile GPU would eliminate this user experience train wreck completely. A nice bonus is that the main CPU might then have enough free cycles to respond to the user's screen touches in a timely manner, further increasing perceived performance.
Eh, after thinking about that for a minute, it's clear that I confused the reactors' electrical output ratings with their heat production. That's why I'm some unremarkable company's IT department instead of an engineer. Still, though the numbers I used are wrong, the point remains that heat output would have dropped by nearly an order of magnitude within the first several hours after shutdown. That the reactors received proper cooling during this initial and massively-sloped part of the drop-off curve likely made the difference between region-changing catastrophe and the "mere" serious incident we're talking about now.
Remember that the initial events in Japan were not worst case. Three of the six reactors were in shut down mode in advance of the earthquake and the other three shut down correctly before the tsunami. The situation would have been quickly critical if the reactors could not be shut down before major damage occurred (surely feasible if unlikely).
While I agree with the essence of thought, my nature drives me to reinforce a point that you probably get but didn't specifically mention. Reactors can be shut down instantaneously or at least near enough that it's practically instantaneous. When you scam the control rods, you've stopped the primary fission reaction immediately. At Fukushima, the operating reactors not only shutdown immediately, but they got an hour of two of full-scale proper cooling before the tsunami hit. Thereafter, they got another several hours of cooling from battery power. While that may not seem significant, given that we're still worried about their cooling status two weeks later, this likely saw them drop from the 7% output seen at the instant of shutdown to something substantially more manageable like .7%. If we consider the highest output reactor among the four considered to have been the most problematic, we're looking at dropping from 784MW output to 54MW in a second, then to 5.4MW in the course of several hours. There's been a lot of talk about what went wrong, but little about this very critical bit that went right. Had there been no cooling immediately after shutdown, the situation would be very, very different right now.