It wasn't that crazy, though, since the tariff was on "vegetables", which itself is not a scientific word - so applying a scientific term in the first place wasn't valid. In fact, the original definition of "vegetable" was *all* plants. That would have been a cool Supreme Court ruling...
Reversing the lottery was unfair to the tiny fraction who were selected. Not reversing it would have been unfair to the huge majority (as TFA says, the bug was that only the first 2 of 30 days worth submissions were considered). So, statistically this was by far the better solution to be *fair* to the most people.
Yep! And it goes beyond that. Apple now designs its own custom chip, and so has effectively become a fabless semiconductor company. Why would Apple want to share its proprietary designs with a *competing* company already involved (as either the thief or victim) in several industrial espionage incidents when it can just use a "neutral" (not to mention the largest) contract fab like TSMC?
10mbps is about what most people get on wireless-G (real world throughput) and they don't even really notice. Typical home use involves internet usage and the occasional large file transfer. 10mbps is entirely usable for most people.
I always also thought 650megs for a CD was unusually large at the time. Especially considering that at the time data CDROMs came out we were all still using floppies and the occasional pricey 100meg zip drive you had to carry around because no one else owned one.
The average G throughput is closer to 20Mbps. And 10Mbps is definitely no longer adequate for much home usage, since streaming video is already the highest user of Internet bandwidth in the home, and a significant percentage of home Internet connections these days are faster than 10Mbps. I routinely stream 10Mbps HD VOD rentals while still having enough bandwidth for fast web browsing, music streaming, or even a second HD video stream.
Putting together two things together which already exist isn't an invention, and shouldn't be patentable.
That's completely absurd.
Internal combustion engine + wheels... car! Damn, never should have received any patents, the whole thing was obvious. Same thing with windshield wiper and variable timer. Or is that one ok because the little guy got millions from the automakers eventually...
Almost everything created and patented these days is a combination or modification of something else. That's explicitly clear in patent law to be a major part of the point...
Give me a break. The obvious point was that, surprise, the author (since the OP says "guy", "man", etc several times) and many readers of the article are NOT all professional male tech geeks like majority of the/. audience, so there is nothing wrong inherently wrong or "shill" about Pokemon or MySpace *if* that's what the user it interested in; implying there is would make the same mistake as the author does in her comparisons.
There is absolutely nothing insulting with being described as a mid-20's Asian (Asian-American, from what I can tell, so OP comment implying the author was not from the "United States of America" like him isn't fair, either) female. You're the only one who decided to link any criticism of the author's writing with age, gender, or race. Just because you are an asshole, doesn't mean I would automatically consider the same of anyone else of your phenotype.
Way too harsh to the author... as the saying goes, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
It was a rather poorly written article, but come on, motherboard.tv isn't a "Chinese shill site", just a techie pop culture web site. And IMO writing a profile of a Chinese social media app that may soon have more users than Facebook in China alone is a reasonable topic for their site - unfortunately just poor execution. But try rereading it from the understanding that the author is a mid-20's Asian female blogger of questionable writing ability, and then maybe you can take the article at face value. I agree with your criticisms of the inaccuracy and bias to personal preferences in the article, but definitely not in motivation...
It explains everything in the Wikipedia link shown right in the "More Information" section on the map...
"The earth/ground station on Svalbard is a key site for collecting remote sensing data from polar orbiting satellites, such as those from NOAA, due to its close proximity to the north pole."
But even if it was an easy answer, it was one I didn't know existed, so I'm glad you asked it;)
The problem is that income taxes in practice are not the progressive taxes they were meant to be. Income taxes just hurt the middle class disproportionately - those people with enough money to have to pay them, but not enough money to adequately shelter it. At least with sales taxes (barring the current debate) the wealthy can't weasel their way out of it so easily. Abolishing sales tax will only work once the income tax code is "fixed", and no one has been able to figure out how to do that...
Now from my limited understanding of the economy, it would seem that a sudden disappearance of say 5-10% of income on hundreds of thousands of people in the 50 states could negatively impact our economy.
This is about the same argument that Republicans used to prevent the expiration of tax breaks for people making over $250k a year - they try to make everyone think of it as "raising taxes" even though it was supposed to be a *temporary* break enacted years ago.
Before the Internet became such a huge outlet for retail purchases, the states were collecting taxes on many more sales. The estimate is that CA now collects about $2B a year less than it used to. Sales taxes are a huge source of revenues for states that rely on them - giving everyone a break on those taxes has done wonders for the growth of the Internet economy, but it sure hasn't helped state budgets. I see no reason to give out-of-state Internet retailers this unfair advantage over in-state businesses any longer. Everyone complains about Walmart destroying the local mom-and-pop businesses, but this policy it doing almost as much damage...
Not sure what your point is... Sears charges sales taxes when you buy mail order or online, since they have physical stores in most/all states. They of course wouldn't have to pay sales taxes until states enacted laws requiring mail order companies with physical presence to collect taxes, which was a much more recent thing.
But that's totally irrelevant to this argument. It's not about import duties, it's about sales/use taxes. No one is arguing that CA and NY can't have a sales tax on goods bought by their residents from outside the state, and in fact it has technically been the responsibility of the taxpayer to report it to the state for years.
The issue is with the out-of-state retailer collecting the taxes for the state. The CA law is now extending the definition of a company's presence in the state to include any subsidiaries and affiliates for which they sell online, and Amazon responded by saying they will drop all of their CA affiliates.
Yeah, I think that's because Roku developed the app for them on their box. Same with the XBox - it's not that bad because MS did it for them. Meanwhile the iPad app is complete crap (could they make it any slower?) and the app on my LG Blu-Ray player was basically abandoned (no search, so it's impossible to find anything without doing it through a web browser and adding it to a queue).
Ever wondered why Netflix's streaming catalog still generally sucks, as does their UI on most devices? Their whole business model is based on the idea that the perfect customer likes the service just enough to keep subscribing, but not enough to use it. Unlike a pay-per-view VOD service, with Netflix the more they get their customer to use it, the less profit they make.
Saying, that, I am a Netflix subscriber because I think their streaming service does have enough to justify the price. But they did just lose $2 a month on my sub, since I probably exchanged a physical DVD once every couple months, so I wasn't costing them anything significant there.
True, he has clearly never flown first class. I don't usually either, but the last time I got upgraded it was a 7am flight. I asked for some orange juice, and the attendant asked "how about a mimosa?" I was in fact on my second one before we started taxiing:)
They have regularly consolidated servers in recent years (which I'm sure is an operational pain) and some rumors put the current active subscriber base at around 10,000 a month. That puts the yearly gross revenue in the $1.5M range, which after subtracting staff payroll, maintenence costs, and license fees, likely just isn't enough profit (if any) for a company Sony's size to keep running.
Wow, sounds like CS107 has changed a lot. I think it used to be called something like "Programming Paradigms" - it was basically "a language a week", going through C, C++, FORTRAN, LISP, Prolog, etc (and taught by Parlante at the time, actually). Then again, that was a while ago - CS106 was still taught in Pascal;)
First, this isn't even recent news, it was added *last* year.
Second, this isn't an intro course for CS majors (or even any engineering major, or hell, even a non-engineering major interested in programming). It's basically a really high level intro to computers and "programming principles" for "fuzzies" with an irrational fear of computers (which as you say, is definitely a small group at Stanford).
Though the lecturer (Nick Parlante) is awesome, so it's probably a fun class, and might even get some people interested in taking the real intro to programming class (CS106A).
Wait, you do understand what "beta" means, right? That's why they start many of their projects by invitation only - people are accepting the fact that it's still under development and testing. If you don't want beta quality, don't sign up for a beta.
The judge actually said that given the evidence he was stunned at the jury decision, but my brother just wasn't willing to shell out another $50k+ in lawyer's fees to try an appeal...
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't that crazy, though, since the tariff was on "vegetables", which itself is not a scientific word - so applying a scientific term in the first place wasn't valid. In fact, the original definition of "vegetable" was *all* plants. That would have been a cool Supreme Court ruling...
Reversing the lottery was unfair to the tiny fraction who were selected. Not reversing it would have been unfair to the huge majority (as TFA says, the bug was that only the first 2 of 30 days worth submissions were considered). So, statistically this was by far the better solution to be *fair* to the most people.
Yep! And it goes beyond that. Apple now designs its own custom chip, and so has effectively become a fabless semiconductor company. Why would Apple want to share its proprietary designs with a *competing* company already involved (as either the thief or victim) in several industrial espionage incidents when it can just use a "neutral" (not to mention the largest) contract fab like TSMC?
10mbps is about what most people get on wireless-G (real world throughput) and they don't even really notice. Typical home use involves internet usage and the occasional large file transfer. 10mbps is entirely usable for most people.
I always also thought 650megs for a CD was unusually large at the time. Especially considering that at the time data CDROMs came out we were all still using floppies and the occasional pricey 100meg zip drive you had to carry around because no one else owned one.
The average G throughput is closer to 20Mbps. And 10Mbps is definitely no longer adequate for much home usage, since streaming video is already the highest user of Internet bandwidth in the home, and a significant percentage of home Internet connections these days are faster than 10Mbps. I routinely stream 10Mbps HD VOD rentals while still having enough bandwidth for fast web browsing, music streaming, or even a second HD video stream.
Putting together two things together which already exist isn't an invention, and shouldn't be patentable.
That's completely absurd.
Internal combustion engine + wheels... car! Damn, never should have received any patents, the whole thing was obvious. Same thing with windshield wiper and variable timer. Or is that one ok because the little guy got millions from the automakers eventually...
Almost everything created and patented these days is a combination or modification of something else. That's explicitly clear in patent law to be a major part of the point...
Give me a break. The obvious point was that, surprise, the author (since the OP says "guy", "man", etc several times) and many readers of the article are NOT all professional male tech geeks like majority of the /. audience, so there is nothing wrong inherently wrong or "shill" about Pokemon or MySpace *if* that's what the user it interested in; implying there is would make the same mistake as the author does in her comparisons.
There is absolutely nothing insulting with being described as a mid-20's Asian (Asian-American, from what I can tell, so OP comment implying the author was not from the "United States of America" like him isn't fair, either) female. You're the only one who decided to link any criticism of the author's writing with age, gender, or race. Just because you are an asshole, doesn't mean I would automatically consider the same of anyone else of your phenotype.
Way too harsh to the author... as the saying goes, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
It was a rather poorly written article, but come on, motherboard.tv isn't a "Chinese shill site", just a techie pop culture web site. And IMO writing a profile of a Chinese social media app that may soon have more users than Facebook in China alone is a reasonable topic for their site - unfortunately just poor execution. But try rereading it from the understanding that the author is a mid-20's Asian female blogger of questionable writing ability, and then maybe you can take the article at face value. I agree with your criticisms of the inaccuracy and bias to personal preferences in the article, but definitely not in motivation...
It explains everything in the Wikipedia link shown right in the "More Information" section on the map...
"The earth/ground station on Svalbard is a key site for collecting remote sensing data from polar orbiting satellites, such as those from NOAA, due to its close proximity to the north pole."
But even if it was an easy answer, it was one I didn't know existed, so I'm glad you asked it ;)
After that, they're at the "many" stage....
Actually, after that they're at the "murder" stage...
The problem is that income taxes in practice are not the progressive taxes they were meant to be. Income taxes just hurt the middle class disproportionately - those people with enough money to have to pay them, but not enough money to adequately shelter it. At least with sales taxes (barring the current debate) the wealthy can't weasel their way out of it so easily. Abolishing sales tax will only work once the income tax code is "fixed", and no one has been able to figure out how to do that...
Now from my limited understanding of the economy, it would seem that a sudden disappearance of say 5-10% of income on hundreds of thousands of people in the 50 states could negatively impact our economy.
This is about the same argument that Republicans used to prevent the expiration of tax breaks for people making over $250k a year - they try to make everyone think of it as "raising taxes" even though it was supposed to be a *temporary* break enacted years ago.
Before the Internet became such a huge outlet for retail purchases, the states were collecting taxes on many more sales. The estimate is that CA now collects about $2B a year less than it used to. Sales taxes are a huge source of revenues for states that rely on them - giving everyone a break on those taxes has done wonders for the growth of the Internet economy, but it sure hasn't helped state budgets. I see no reason to give out-of-state Internet retailers this unfair advantage over in-state businesses any longer. Everyone complains about Walmart destroying the local mom-and-pop businesses, but this policy it doing almost as much damage...
Not sure what your point is... Sears charges sales taxes when you buy mail order or online, since they have physical stores in most/all states. They of course wouldn't have to pay sales taxes until states enacted laws requiring mail order companies with physical presence to collect taxes, which was a much more recent thing.
But that's totally irrelevant to this argument. It's not about import duties, it's about sales/use taxes. No one is arguing that CA and NY can't have a sales tax on goods bought by their residents from outside the state, and in fact it has technically been the responsibility of the taxpayer to report it to the state for years.
The issue is with the out-of-state retailer collecting the taxes for the state. The CA law is now extending the definition of a company's presence in the state to include any subsidiaries and affiliates for which they sell online, and Amazon responded by saying they will drop all of their CA affiliates.
Yeah, I think that's because Roku developed the app for them on their box. Same with the XBox - it's not that bad because MS did it for them. Meanwhile the iPad app is complete crap (could they make it any slower?) and the app on my LG Blu-Ray player was basically abandoned (no search, so it's impossible to find anything without doing it through a web browser and adding it to a queue).
Actually, April 19, so almost 3 months ago. Now it's a 916 day countdown clock. Wonder how many days until the next dup...
What, you thought customers mattered? How quaint.
Cynically,
It's not as cynical as you think.
Ever wondered why Netflix's streaming catalog still generally sucks, as does their UI on most devices? Their whole business model is based on the idea that the perfect customer likes the service just enough to keep subscribing, but not enough to use it. Unlike a pay-per-view VOD service, with Netflix the more they get their customer to use it, the less profit they make.
Saying, that, I am a Netflix subscriber because I think their streaming service does have enough to justify the price. But they did just lose $2 a month on my sub, since I probably exchanged a physical DVD once every couple months, so I wasn't costing them anything significant there.
True, he has clearly never flown first class. I don't usually either, but the last time I got upgraded it was a 7am flight. I asked for some orange juice, and the attendant asked "how about a mimosa?" I was in fact on my second one before we started taxiing :)
They have regularly consolidated servers in recent years (which I'm sure is an operational pain) and some rumors put the current active subscriber base at around 10,000 a month. That puts the yearly gross revenue in the $1.5M range, which after subtracting staff payroll, maintenence costs, and license fees, likely just isn't enough profit (if any) for a company Sony's size to keep running.
Wow, sounds like CS107 has changed a lot. I think it used to be called something like "Programming Paradigms" - it was basically "a language a week", going through C, C++, FORTRAN, LISP, Prolog, etc (and taught by Parlante at the time, actually). Then again, that was a while ago - CS106 was still taught in Pascal ;)
The summary is awful.
First, this isn't even recent news, it was added *last* year.
Second, this isn't an intro course for CS majors (or even any engineering major, or hell, even a non-engineering major interested in programming). It's basically a really high level intro to computers and "programming principles" for "fuzzies" with an irrational fear of computers (which as you say, is definitely a small group at Stanford).
Though the lecturer (Nick Parlante) is awesome, so it's probably a fun class, and might even get some people interested in taking the real intro to programming class (CS106A).
It's not a clown slur, it's a Michael Bolton slur. So, as long as your name isn't Michael Bolton, there's nothing to worry about...
Yay, thanks for taking my silly joke about docking and making it sound disgusting and sexist, ass clown.
Nothing like breakup sex...
Wait, you do understand what "beta" means, right? That's why they start many of their projects by invitation only - people are accepting the fact that it's still under development and testing. If you don't want beta quality, don't sign up for a beta.
The judge actually said that given the evidence he was stunned at the jury decision, but my brother just wasn't willing to shell out another $50k+ in lawyer's fees to try an appeal...