It sounds like the spin doctors have taken over. The body blows have been landed and now they're just trying to bob and weave. No matter what they do I still can't help but see Dr. Strangelove in their corner calling the shots. Curiouser and curiouser.
I dunno and I don't think they do. My guess, based on retail management types I've known, is that they were just trying to come up with something that would fit in the space and seem innovative. Personally I don't see why they just don't turn them into lube & brake shops.
Science Daily has a piece on recent findings that suggest we throughput much more information than we're consciously aware of.
the brain processes and understands visusal input that we may never consciously perceive....Sanguinetti showed study participants a series of black silhouettes, some of which contained meaningful, real-world objects hidden in the white spaces on the outsides...."The specific question was, 'Does the brain process those hidden shapes to the level of meaning, even when the subject doesn't consciously see them?"
The answer, Sanguinetti's data indicates, is yes....Study participants' brainwaves indicated that even if a person never consciously recognized the shapes on the outside of the image, their brains still processed those shapes to the level of understanding their meaning....
"There's a brain signature for meaningful processing," Sanguinetti said. A peak in the averaged brainwaves called N400 indicates that the brain has recognized an object and associated it with a particular meaning.
So it's not just that AI can't process all that we can in the variety of ways we can. It's also that our brains are processing a bunch of stuff we're not consciously aware of.
In February 2013, IBM announced that Watson software system's first commercial application would be for utilization management decisions in lung cancer treatment at Memorial Sloanâ"Kettering Cancer Center in conjunction with health insurance company WellPoint.[12] IBM Watsonâ(TM)s business chief Manoj Saxena says that 90% of nurses in the field who use Watson now follow its guidance.
Watson is an artificially intelligent computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language,[2] developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's Thomas J. Watson.
It's surprising the number of people outside of IT who think it was named after Dr. Watson from the Sherlock Holmes books. "Elementary my dear Dr. Watson." Apparently AI still hasn't made it past let alone through what we take as elementary.
But you need demand. Just because your bricks and mortar are in place in small centers it doesn't mean the demand is there. Still though if you've got the assets paid for and in place it's probably worth the try.
Money is any object or record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a given socio-economic context or country.[1][2][3] The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, occasionally in the past, a standard of deferred payment.[4][5] Any kind of object or secure verifiable record that fulfills these functions can be considered money.
Money is historically an emergent market phenomenon establishing a commodity money, but nearly all contemporary money systems are based on fiat money.[4] Fiat money, like any check or note of debt, is without intrinsic use value as a physical commodity. It derives its value by being declared by a government to be legal tender; that is, it must be accepted as a form of payment within the boundaries of the country, for "all debts, public and private"[citation needed]. Such laws in practice cause fiat money to acquire the value of any of the goods and services that it may be traded for within the nation that issues it.
The money supply of a country consists of currency (banknotes and coins) and bank money (the balance held in checking accounts and savings accounts). Bank money, which consists only of records (mostly computerized in modern banking), forms by far the largest part of the money supply in developed nations.
Money acts as a standard measure and common denomination of trade. It is thus a basis for quoting and bargaining of prices. It is necessary for developing efficient accounting systems. But its most important usage is as a method for comparing the values of dissimilar objects.
Wikipedia
Bitcoin may be money in nearly every sense of the word but it lacks stability to act as a standard measure and common denomination of trade. Just as money in unstable countries lack the same attributes. It's a medium of speculation and not being tied to a stable market place perhaps overseen by a stable government it will likely never be more than a means of speculation.
I was thinking generally more along the lines of progressive taxation and wealth distribution. Tax in Norwaysuggests wealth distribution is dealt with by way of progressive taxation. While I don't have any numbers on hand and I'm too lazy to round some up, I'll go out on a limb, and suggest the taxation systems in Scandinavian countries is much more progressive than in the U.S.A.
The relatively high tax level is a result of the large Norwegian welfare state. Most of the tax revenue is spent on public services such as health services, the operation of hospitals, education and transportation.
I am a devout fan of capitalism. It is the best system ever devised for making self-interest serve the wider interest.
The argument can be made that capitalism widens the divide between rich and poor. The old question remains whether unbridled capitalism and philanthropy can better address the world's woes, or, would a more socialist political structure like those seen in Scandinavian countries better address and more quickly narrow the divide.
And I'm not feelin' up to par
It increases my paranoia
Like lookin' at my mirror and seein' a police car
But I'm not givin' in an inch to fear
'cause I promised myself this year
I feel like I owe it to someone
I bet a lot of/.ers are mentally running through some of their past posts right about now. Where did I leave that tinfoil?
Conspicuous consumption is the spending of money on and the acquiring of luxury goods and services to publicly display economic power â" either the buyerâ(TM)s income or the buyerâ(TM)s accumulated wealth. Sociologically, to the conspicuous consumer, such a public display of discretionary economic power is a means either of attaining or of maintaining a given social status.
Moreover, invidious consumption, a more specialized sociologic term, denotes the deliberate conspicuous consumption of goods and services intended to provoke the envy of other people, as a means of displaying the buyerâ(TM)s superior socio-economic status.
I've been trying for some time to come up with reasons to disagree with what you've posted. I readily admit I'm not doing all that well. I've one hypothesis and that is that democratic states with all the freedoms such states entail will generally win out over less democratic states because freedom of speech and assembly among other fundamental rights inherently provide efficiencies that less democratic states lack. This idea doesn't necessarily apply to special cases like China today which is playing catchup by stealing our methods, or, even necessarily to contemporary Russia which is selling off it's natural resources without provisions for the future. It does hold over the long run, but then as Keynes pointed out, over the long run we're all dead.
This is obviously an NSA plot to lay the groundwork to propagate false beliefs in terrorist activity to validate their ongoing domestic surveillance programs.
It's all so darkly twisted and Kafkaesque. As a non American looking in I can't imagine that in a 100 years some history student reading his text book will ever know how twistedly, wickedly funny and scary and sad it all is.
CERN scientists suggested they might create miniature black holes whilst looking for the Higgs Boson particle. There was some concern of the hypothetical danger creation of such black holes might pose. Now are we positing the first black holes of the universe fed off just such Quantum foam stuff?
Gamesmanship is the use of dubious (although not technically illegal) methods to win or gain a serious advantage in a game or sport. It has been described as "Pushing the rules to the limit without getting caught, using whatever dubious methods possible to achieve the desired end" (Lumpkin, Stoll and Beller, 1994:92). It may be inferred that the term derives from the idea of playing for the game (i.e., to win at any cost) as opposed to sportsmanship, which derives from the idea of playing for sport. The term originates from Stephen Potter's humorous 1947 book, The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship (or the Art of Winning Games without Actually Cheating).
This smacks of cold war gamesmanship. I've known a few spooks and what they had in common was a deep seated sense of gamesmanship.
It's interesting to watch China spin a hybrid culture starting from a central planning state like that implemented by Mao and branching out into an economic powerhouse. America started from a clean slate and basically wrote and implemented a new state from the ground up using ideas from people like J.S. Mill and John Locke. China seems to be taking a more tentative and perhaps a more organic approach of melding business enterprise while maintaining a central planning government. It should be interesting to watch the economic imperatives rub shoulders with the rear guard of the politburo over the next couple of decades when a strong middle class evolves.
Caffeine and nicotine got me through all nighters cramming for exams but quitting smoking was one of the hardest things I've ever done. It took me 9 years of trying and failing to quit to finally kick the habit. I think I just got too embarrassed to once again claim to be quitting. I don't know the neuroscience but caffeine and nicotine are powerful stimulants. I might go for E-cigs if there's no bad health side effects.
A little OT but what's happening with 1st editions of collectibles. I once had close to 3K volumes and collected 1st editions, mostly early 20th c. authors. With ebooks are hardcopy 1st editions becoming a better investment? I miss having a room walled by books. It has a special ambiance.
Look at all the resources something like Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation has and the momentum Myspace had. If you go with the hypothesis the big guys never loose because they have all the resources this flies in the face of that idea. Contingency and intangibles still play a part. Big organizations that can't react fast to changing markets are vulnerable in other ways compared to small, fast to react start ups. It's good to see talent and innovation can still come out on top.
LADEE will end its mission by crashing into the Moon.
Will the crash site be chosen in some hope of finding ice on the moon? Finding ice on the moon is crucial to a moon base isn't it? There's been no mention whether searching for signs of ice is part of LADEE's mission.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like the spin doctors have taken over. The body blows have been landed and now they're just trying to bob and weave. No matter what they do I still can't help but see Dr. Strangelove in their corner calling the shots. Curiouser and curiouser.
I dunno and I don't think they do. My guess, based on retail management types I've known, is that they were just trying to come up with something that would fit in the space and seem innovative. Personally I don't see why they just don't turn them into lube & brake shops.
Science Daily has a piece on recent findings that suggest we throughput much more information than we're consciously aware of.
the brain processes and understands visusal input that we may never consciously perceive. ...Sanguinetti showed study participants a series of black silhouettes, some of which contained meaningful, real-world objects hidden in the white spaces on the outsides. ..."The specific question was, 'Does the brain process those hidden shapes to the level of meaning, even when the subject doesn't consciously see them?" ...Study participants' brainwaves indicated that even if a person never consciously recognized the shapes on the outside of the image, their brains still processed those shapes to the level of understanding their meaning. ...
The answer, Sanguinetti's data indicates, is yes.
"There's a brain signature for meaningful processing," Sanguinetti said. A peak in the averaged brainwaves called N400 indicates that the brain has recognized an object and associated it with a particular meaning.
So it's not just that AI can't process all that we can in the variety of ways we can. It's also that our brains are processing a bunch of stuff we're not consciously aware of.
In February 2013, IBM announced that Watson software system's first commercial application would be for utilization management decisions in lung cancer treatment at Memorial Sloanâ"Kettering Cancer Center in conjunction with health insurance company WellPoint.[12] IBM Watsonâ(TM)s business chief Manoj Saxena says that 90% of nurses in the field who use Watson now follow its guidance.
Watson is an artificially intelligent computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language,[2] developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's Thomas J. Watson.
It's surprising the number of people outside of IT who think it was named after Dr. Watson from the Sherlock Holmes books. "Elementary my dear Dr. Watson." Apparently AI still hasn't made it past let alone through what we take as elementary.
But you need demand. Just because your bricks and mortar are in place in small centers it doesn't mean the demand is there. Still though if you've got the assets paid for and in place it's probably worth the try.
Money is any object or record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a given socio-economic context or country.[1][2][3] The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, occasionally in the past, a standard of deferred payment.[4][5] Any kind of object or secure verifiable record that fulfills these functions can be considered money.
Money is historically an emergent market phenomenon establishing a commodity money, but nearly all contemporary money systems are based on fiat money.[4] Fiat money, like any check or note of debt, is without intrinsic use value as a physical commodity. It derives its value by being declared by a government to be legal tender; that is, it must be accepted as a form of payment within the boundaries of the country, for "all debts, public and private"[citation needed]. Such laws in practice cause fiat money to acquire the value of any of the goods and services that it may be traded for within the nation that issues it.
The money supply of a country consists of currency (banknotes and coins) and bank money (the balance held in checking accounts and savings accounts). Bank money, which consists only of records (mostly computerized in modern banking), forms by far the largest part of the money supply in developed nations.
Money acts as a standard measure and common denomination of trade. It is thus a basis for quoting and bargaining of prices. It is necessary for developing efficient accounting systems. But its most important usage is as a method for comparing the values of dissimilar objects.
Wikipedia
Bitcoin may be money in nearly every sense of the word but it lacks stability to act as a standard measure and common denomination of trade. Just as money in unstable countries lack the same attributes. It's a medium of speculation and not being tied to a stable market place perhaps overseen by a stable government it will likely never be more than a means of speculation.
'National guardsmen, some of whom had assault rifles, were positioned around outlets of [Daka] ...
FIRE! Sale
The relatively high tax level is a result of the large Norwegian welfare state. Most of the tax revenue is spent on public services such as health services, the operation of hospitals, education and transportation.
Wikipedia
A real people person ;)
As old as graffiti as new as twitter. Ubiquitous, indomitable, insatiable.
I am a devout fan of capitalism. It is the best system ever devised for making self-interest serve the wider interest.
The argument can be made that capitalism widens the divide between rich and poor. The old question remains whether unbridled capitalism and philanthropy can better address the world's woes, or, would a more socialist political structure like those seen in Scandinavian countries better address and more quickly narrow the divide.
Whatever your complaints about your job, at least debugging your code doesn't involve stepping through assembly on a pencil and paper virtual machine.
That was how I wrote my first published game back in the 80's. I have no complaints.
Do you think the pencil and paper mechanics made any qualitative difference, good or bad, to the overall learning process?
And I'm not feelin' up to par
It increases my paranoia
Like lookin' at my mirror and seein' a police car
But I'm not givin' in an inch to fear
'cause I promised myself this year
I feel like I owe it to someone
I bet a lot of /.ers are mentally running through some of their past posts right about now. Where did I leave that tinfoil?
Conspicuous consumption is the spending of money on and the acquiring of luxury goods and services to publicly display economic power â" either the buyerâ(TM)s income or the buyerâ(TM)s accumulated wealth. Sociologically, to the conspicuous consumer, such a public display of discretionary economic power is a means either of attaining or of maintaining a given social status.
Moreover, invidious consumption, a more specialized sociologic term, denotes the deliberate conspicuous consumption of goods and services intended to provoke the envy of other people, as a means of displaying the buyerâ(TM)s superior socio-economic status.
Nothing new.
I've been trying for some time to come up with reasons to disagree with what you've posted. I readily admit I'm not doing all that well. I've one hypothesis and that is that democratic states with all the freedoms such states entail will generally win out over less democratic states because freedom of speech and assembly among other fundamental rights inherently provide efficiencies that less democratic states lack. This idea doesn't necessarily apply to special cases like China today which is playing catchup by stealing our methods, or, even necessarily to contemporary Russia which is selling off it's natural resources without provisions for the future. It does hold over the long run, but then as Keynes pointed out, over the long run we're all dead.
This is obviously an NSA plot to lay the groundwork to propagate false beliefs in terrorist activity to validate their ongoing domestic surveillance programs.
'Leave Your Grenades at Home'
It's all so darkly twisted and Kafkaesque. As a non American looking in I can't imagine that in a 100 years some history student reading his text book will ever know how twistedly, wickedly funny and scary and sad it all is.
CERN scientists suggested they might create miniature black holes whilst looking for the Higgs Boson particle. There was some concern of the hypothetical danger creation of such black holes might pose. Now are we positing the first black holes of the universe fed off just such Quantum foam stuff?
Gamesmanship is the use of dubious (although not technically illegal) methods to win or gain a serious advantage in a game or sport. It has been described as "Pushing the rules to the limit without getting caught, using whatever dubious methods possible to achieve the desired end" (Lumpkin, Stoll and Beller, 1994:92). It may be inferred that the term derives from the idea of playing for the game (i.e., to win at any cost) as opposed to sportsmanship, which derives from the idea of playing for sport. The term originates from Stephen Potter's humorous 1947 book, The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship (or the Art of Winning Games without Actually Cheating).
This smacks of cold war gamesmanship. I've known a few spooks and what they had in common was a deep seated sense of gamesmanship.
It's interesting to watch China spin a hybrid culture starting from a central planning state like that implemented by Mao and branching out into an economic powerhouse. America started from a clean slate and basically wrote and implemented a new state from the ground up using ideas from people like J.S. Mill and John Locke. China seems to be taking a more tentative and perhaps a more organic approach of melding business enterprise while maintaining a central planning government. It should be interesting to watch the economic imperatives rub shoulders with the rear guard of the politburo over the next couple of decades when a strong middle class evolves.
Caffeine and nicotine got me through all nighters cramming for exams but quitting smoking was one of the hardest things I've ever done. It took me 9 years of trying and failing to quit to finally kick the habit. I think I just got too embarrassed to once again claim to be quitting. I don't know the neuroscience but caffeine and nicotine are powerful stimulants. I might go for E-cigs if there's no bad health side effects.
A little OT but what's happening with 1st editions of collectibles. I once had close to 3K volumes and collected 1st editions, mostly early 20th c. authors. With ebooks are hardcopy 1st editions becoming a better investment? I miss having a room walled by books. It has a special ambiance.
Look at all the resources something like Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation has and the momentum Myspace had. If you go with the hypothesis the big guys never loose because they have all the resources this flies in the face of that idea. Contingency and intangibles still play a part. Big organizations that can't react fast to changing markets are vulnerable in other ways compared to small, fast to react start ups. It's good to see talent and innovation can still come out on top.
It's actually a marker laid down by the Vogon construction fleet for the up coming Hyper Space Express Route.
LADEE will end its mission by crashing into the Moon.
Will the crash site be chosen in some hope of finding ice on the moon? Finding ice on the moon is crucial to a moon base isn't it? There's been no mention whether searching for signs of ice is part of LADEE's mission.