Actually, two guys on my block have CNG Civics as commuter cars (both bought used, they aren't much to look at). CNG cars still get to use the carpool lane in CA, so they save 45+ minutes round trip a day on their commute. There aren't huge numbers of them (a lot more Teslas, honestly!) but enough that in the Bay Area you'll see a couple every day if you drive much... unlike a Veyron.
The cost to run them isn't that much less than a regular Civic (well, I suppose it is when you get to drive 65 and not 15-20 stop and go) and they are less useful for long trips than a full range EV like the Tesla (since most of the trunk is taken up with a tank and CNG stations are limited). But an extra 4-5 hours a week with their family was worth it to them...
It's not that I don't agree with your point that company towns were awful places in general... it's just that it's such an OBVIOUS historical fact to anyone with a remote interest in this story that there really isn't any point in going into the history of it in an article about Facebook. And for those who are not students of remedial history, as you pointed out there are just plain TONS (probably more than 16) of pop culture references to the same.
TFA (and all related articles) seem to be omitting some of the specifics of the crime.
Not true at all.
exactly what game was being played
TFA clearly stated Stud Poker, which is the European equivalent of Vegas' Caribbean Stud. If you haven't heard of it, not their problem.
how the casino detected the cheating
TFA said they caught an employee who confessed, and then they contacted the police who set a trap for the rest of the crew. And they caught the employee by monitoring phone conversations. And they suspicion was raised because they were watching the hands (of COURSE they are watching your hands - and it makes no difference, since in Stud Poker, like Caribbean Stud or even Blackjack, the dealer doesn't make decisions, they play by set rules. And the crime was specifically employees marking cards with infrared ink, with a spotter wearing infrared contacts signaling a player. That's a crapload of details for a random article on the event. CERTAINLY enough that "this story smells suspicious" is just idiotic.
ACs don't RTFA, big surprise I guess. But jeez, I'm surprised how far you'd go to defend that you did...
If you don't think the "people interested in SPEC results on high end PPC vs Xeon workstations" and "people who like new iPhone go faster" are mostly non-overlapping sets, you are apparently in need of some bizness larnin' yourself...
Besides, the implication of the comment was that people are not up in arms about Samsung's trickery, while nothing about the posts indicates that's true (mostly the opposite, in fact), making the Apple accusation pretty much a non-sequiter to the discussion anyway.
Except you specifically claimed they fudged benchmarks "approximately like Samsung did"... so are you saying Samsung didn't fudge benchmarks or you were saying things that were untrue?
But anyway, that was over 10 years ago. Apple's market cap was under $9B and they were a couple bad business decisions from bankruptcy. No one gives a shit what they did on a long dead platform a decade ago, nor does it have any relevancy to their current business model that basically boils down to a $600 bi-annual iPhone subscription, aka "we are only really competing against our last year's model because we have created a complete hardware and software walled garden and bizarrely people love it..."
But it would never be Apple, because Apple really doesn't give a shit about benchmarks other than how much marginally faster it is compared to last year's iDevice...
Hey, I was somewhat agreeing with you... they lost a lot of money 3-4 years ago (like $300-$700M). But they made ~$70-100M in each of the last 2 years.
But these are public companies - "shifting" money around only works with crazy complicated setups with independent subsidiaries, etc - the bottom line still tells the final story in this case (which honestly at this point they probably wish didn't...)
You are clearly passionately pissed off at EA. Honestly, I haven't bought any EA games since Mass Effect 2 (which was luckily still mostly Bioware) and Dragon Age (which disappointed). But their "books" are all public and online, go look at them yourself if you want to.
Not that there is much point replying to AC, but yes, there was a source (link) in the post. Please go ahead and claim she is not a "real" marine. And someone claiming female marines are useless/weak/not real marines and me replying that they are in fact often pretty badass is not an ad hominem argument, it's just: 1) a fact, and 2) a deliberate insult not even approaching his bullshit point. Can't really have an ad hominem argument when the OP is so stupid it's not even a debate.
Are you fucking kidding me? Just because women have not been in infantry does not mean they have not been in the marines, or in combat zones. I have met a few female marines who were stationed in Afghanistan and/or Iraq as medics, helicopter mechanics, etc - and there are others who are pilots, doctors, drivers, comm operators, what have you. Besides, they already said in TFA she was an analyst/programmer. Doesn't mean she didn't go through basic training, and in fact TFA also says she was nominated for "fittest on base".
I'm pretty sure most female marines could kick your ass inside of 10 seconds (one who served with my coworker is actually a top MMA fighter, so it would probably be more like 5 seconds in her case).
but those great things should not be defined by the ordeals overcome to produce them, rather the greatness they already must possess.
I think winning a silver medal in the masters cycling world championships, getting a PhD in Neurosciences from Stanford, and founding several successful startups have pretty much proved she has done exceptional things regardless of any additional challenges she had to overcome.
And please cite examples of where she is *using* an accident for marketing leverage (and some journalist wanting to interview her does not qualify) before making those stupid accusations...
Well, movie opinions are just that - opinions, but I thought it was somewhat tedious, and the characters and plot didn't have near the depth of almost any of the Pixar movies before it (including the sequels). Critics tended to agree. And I didn't say it was crap (unlike "Planes", which was a godawful Disney attempt at extending one of Pixar's more mediocre franchises) , I said it wasn't close to their earlier ones, and I stand by that opinion:)
There is a huge different between "losing creative vision and putting out mindless crap" and "driving the company financially into the ground".
Disney has undoubtedly made some crap over the years - and honestly, Pixar's last few efforts (Cars 2, Brave, Monsters University) haven't been even close to their earlier ones. But they are still making money hand over fist.
Same with EA - poster child of game company losing sight of creativity and pumping out sequels, but unlike LucasArts, they do in fact have clear business goals and are making a ton of money from their mostly mediocre/repetitive offerings.
Great, but one cable does not a reliable global network make. They are going to have to lay several to various endpoint (probably not all even on the Atlantic side) to get the kind of reliability, bandwidth, and global latency they have now. At a couple hundred million each. And as people have said, they will probably be tapped within weeks of going live anyway.
I'm not saying they shouldn't do it for general autonomy and bandwidth reasons, just that it's silly political showmanship to pretend it will be cost effective or do anything to increase privacy.
Ancient telegraph cables are totally irrelevant to this, obviously only modern fiber-optic cables matter. Obviously with enough money anyone can do it.
And it's not "America" (ie. the US government) doing it per se, it's American companies like AT&T, Global Crossing, Level 3, Verizon, etc. based in the US spending the money, and therefore using the US as a hub.
And ironically, it's the (British) GCHQ that has been leading efforts to tap undersea cables. So I guess they may not be at the forefront of laying the, but they are at the forefront of tapping them...
ICANN? Give me a break, that's nothing. Do you even know what ICANN does? Not route traffic, of course.
Fundamentally the reason that the Internet is US-centric is that the US has paid for much of the infrastructure. It's not necessarily about the services either, it's about the routing. If Latin/South America wants to avoid traversing US infrastructure to route their packets to the rest of the world, they will have to build their own backbones and lay their own transoceanic cable. Until they do that it's pretty obvious their data is going to be inspected...
Of course not. We're not talking "day traders" getting up early and making trades from the local coffee shop. If you don't have a multi-billon dollar bankroll to get in the game you don't get to trade $600M in milliseconds on this information. In fact no one just "looks" at this information, that's kind of the POINT to high frequency computer trading.
But how your comment relates to my point that this is an interesting story escapes me, in fact it would seem to support it...
And of course it doesn't have to involve breaking the speed of light. It has to do with the Fed failing to properly enforce a supposedly very complex information lockdown and the information likely being either leaked or pre-loaded on remote servers, resulting in (according to the article) over $600M in trades via high-speed computer trading in the few milliseconds after the information was released - and now the Fed is investigating.
It's both related to technology and possibly involving criminal activity (or at the very lease a failure in information security). Sounds like a relevant story to me...
Alaska can afford them - just get their legislators to attach a $100M Alaskan iRoad improvement project to a bill declaring Jun 23rd National Take Your Pot Bellied Pig To Work Day. Alaskan pork barrel politics as usual...
Totally! We all agree that the FDA is one of the most ridiculous, intrusive examples of a nanny state imaginable.
Signed, - Monsanto, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Philip Morris, Tyson, and 100s of other companies fined for marketing and selling tainted, dangerous, or untested products to consumers
Actually - I think if he had lit a cigarette it would have been almost as bad - especially since it was a deliberate act and not just ignorance/stupidity. Rocket fuel is one of the most flammable things on the planet, and in this case it was tipped with one of the most destructive things on the planet. Smoking is prohibited (and severely punishable) near thermonuclear missiles for good reason:)
I could go through dozens of examples (and many are small, but that's kind of the point of "eye candy"). Here are a bunch more (that did NOT exist on the old one, so definitely "more" eye candy):
- messages - each message animates independently in its own bubble so they "bounce" around (I have no idea WHY they bothered with this...) - weather - the background weather/clouds/etc is animated (this was subtle but kind of cool). But if that's not the definition of added eye candy what the heck is!? - clock - the icon is now actually a real clock, showing the current time with a moving second hand (this would almost be a "feature" if the digital clock at the top of the phone wasn't still much easier to read) - camera - the whole switch from video/camera/pano with swipe and an animation/blur/focus effect. - Safari - now has 3D stacked tabs (which clearly uses the 3D hardware) - app switcher - now has screenshots for every running app, and smooth scrolling through them (in fact, *differential smooth scrolling* for the screenshots and icons) - siri - several small effects... but I think I made my point...
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Actually, two guys on my block have CNG Civics as commuter cars (both bought used, they aren't much to look at). CNG cars still get to use the carpool lane in CA, so they save 45+ minutes round trip a day on their commute. There aren't huge numbers of them (a lot more Teslas, honestly!) but enough that in the Bay Area you'll see a couple every day if you drive much... unlike a Veyron.
The cost to run them isn't that much less than a regular Civic (well, I suppose it is when you get to drive 65 and not 15-20 stop and go) and they are less useful for long trips than a full range EV like the Tesla (since most of the trunk is taken up with a tank and CNG stations are limited). But an extra 4-5 hours a week with their family was worth it to them...
Yep. That's exactly how it works.
It's not that I don't agree with your point that company towns were awful places in general... it's just that it's such an OBVIOUS historical fact to anyone with a remote interest in this story that there really isn't any point in going into the history of it in an article about Facebook. And for those who are not students of remedial history, as you pointed out there are just plain TONS (probably more than 16) of pop culture references to the same.
TFA (and all related articles) seem to be omitting some of the specifics of the crime.
Not true at all.
exactly what game was being played
TFA clearly stated Stud Poker, which is the European equivalent of Vegas' Caribbean Stud. If you haven't heard of it, not their problem.
how the casino detected the cheating
TFA said they caught an employee who confessed, and then they contacted the police who set a trap for the rest of the crew. And they caught the employee by monitoring phone conversations. And they suspicion was raised because they were watching the hands (of COURSE they are watching your hands - and it makes no difference, since in Stud Poker, like Caribbean Stud or even Blackjack, the dealer doesn't make decisions, they play by set rules. And the crime was specifically employees marking cards with infrared ink, with a spotter wearing infrared contacts signaling a player. That's a crapload of details for a random article on the event. CERTAINLY enough that "this story smells suspicious" is just idiotic.
ACs don't RTFA, big surprise I guess. But jeez, I'm surprised how far you'd go to defend that you did...
If you don't think the "people interested in SPEC results on high end PPC vs Xeon workstations" and "people who like new iPhone go faster" are mostly non-overlapping sets, you are apparently in need of some bizness larnin' yourself...
Besides, the implication of the comment was that people are not up in arms about Samsung's trickery, while nothing about the posts indicates that's true (mostly the opposite, in fact), making the Apple accusation pretty much a non-sequiter to the discussion anyway.
Except you specifically claimed they fudged benchmarks "approximately like Samsung did"... so are you saying Samsung didn't fudge benchmarks or you were saying things that were untrue?
But anyway, that was over 10 years ago. Apple's market cap was under $9B and they were a couple bad business decisions from bankruptcy. No one gives a shit what they did on a long dead platform a decade ago, nor does it have any relevancy to their current business model that basically boils down to a $600 bi-annual iPhone subscription, aka "we are only really competing against our last year's model because we have created a complete hardware and software walled garden and bizarrely people love it..."
But it would never be Apple, because Apple really doesn't give a shit about benchmarks other than how much marginally faster it is compared to last year's iDevice...
How about this: RTFA and as usual it answers all of your questions and more...
Hey, I was somewhat agreeing with you... they lost a lot of money 3-4 years ago (like $300-$700M). But they made ~$70-100M in each of the last 2 years.
But these are public companies - "shifting" money around only works with crazy complicated setups with independent subsidiaries, etc - the bottom line still tells the final story in this case (which honestly at this point they probably wish didn't...)
You are clearly passionately pissed off at EA. Honestly, I haven't bought any EA games since Mass Effect 2 (which was luckily still mostly Bioware) and Dragon Age (which disappointed). But their "books" are all public and online, go look at them yourself if you want to.
See, now *that* is an ad hominem. If you are homophobic and slightly deranged, at least (since it really didn't make much sense anyway...)
Not that there is much point replying to AC, but yes, there was a source (link) in the post. Please go ahead and claim she is not a "real" marine. And someone claiming female marines are useless/weak/not real marines and me replying that they are in fact often pretty badass is not an ad hominem argument, it's just: 1) a fact, and 2) a deliberate insult not even approaching his bullshit point. Can't really have an ad hominem argument when the OP is so stupid it's not even a debate.
Are you fucking kidding me? Just because women have not been in infantry does not mean they have not been in the marines, or in combat zones. I have met a few female marines who were stationed in Afghanistan and/or Iraq as medics, helicopter mechanics, etc - and there are others who are pilots, doctors, drivers, comm operators, what have you. Besides, they already said in TFA she was an analyst/programmer. Doesn't mean she didn't go through basic training, and in fact TFA also says she was nominated for "fittest on base".
I'm pretty sure most female marines could kick your ass inside of 10 seconds (one who served with my coworker is actually a top MMA fighter, so it would probably be more like 5 seconds in her case).
but those great things should not be defined by the ordeals overcome to produce them, rather the greatness they already must possess.
I think winning a silver medal in the masters cycling world championships, getting a PhD in Neurosciences from Stanford, and founding several successful startups have pretty much proved she has done exceptional things regardless of any additional challenges she had to overcome.
And please cite examples of where she is *using* an accident for marketing leverage (and some journalist wanting to interview her does not qualify) before making those stupid accusations...
Well, movie opinions are just that - opinions, but I thought it was somewhat tedious, and the characters and plot didn't have near the depth of almost any of the Pixar movies before it (including the sequels). Critics tended to agree. And I didn't say it was crap (unlike "Planes", which was a godawful Disney attempt at extending one of Pixar's more mediocre franchises) , I said it wasn't close to their earlier ones, and I stand by that opinion :)
Uhhhh..actually EA has been bleeding money hand over fist for the past few years
Actually, they have made a decent profit in the last 2 years.
But yeah, lost a buttload the two years before that :)
There is a huge different between "losing creative vision and putting out mindless crap" and "driving the company financially into the ground".
Disney has undoubtedly made some crap over the years - and honestly, Pixar's last few efforts (Cars 2, Brave, Monsters University) haven't been even close to their earlier ones. But they are still making money hand over fist.
Same with EA - poster child of game company losing sight of creativity and pumping out sequels, but unlike LucasArts, they do in fact have clear business goals and are making a ton of money from their mostly mediocre/repetitive offerings.
Great, but one cable does not a reliable global network make. They are going to have to lay several to various endpoint (probably not all even on the Atlantic side) to get the kind of reliability, bandwidth, and global latency they have now. At a couple hundred million each. And as people have said, they will probably be tapped within weeks of going live anyway.
I'm not saying they shouldn't do it for general autonomy and bandwidth reasons, just that it's silly political showmanship to pretend it will be cost effective or do anything to increase privacy.
Ancient telegraph cables are totally irrelevant to this, obviously only modern fiber-optic cables matter. Obviously with enough money anyone can do it.
And it's not "America" (ie. the US government) doing it per se, it's American companies like AT&T, Global Crossing, Level 3, Verizon, etc. based in the US spending the money, and therefore using the US as a hub.
And ironically, it's the (British) GCHQ that has been leading efforts to tap undersea cables. So I guess they may not be at the forefront of laying the, but they are at the forefront of tapping them...
ICANN? Give me a break, that's nothing. Do you even know what ICANN does? Not route traffic, of course.
Fundamentally the reason that the Internet is US-centric is that the US has paid for much of the infrastructure. It's not necessarily about the services either, it's about the routing. If Latin/South America wants to avoid traversing US infrastructure to route their packets to the rest of the world, they will have to build their own backbones and lay their own transoceanic cable. Until they do that it's pretty obvious their data is going to be inspected...
Of course not. We're not talking "day traders" getting up early and making trades from the local coffee shop. If you don't have a multi-billon dollar bankroll to get in the game you don't get to trade $600M in milliseconds on this information. In fact no one just "looks" at this information, that's kind of the POINT to high frequency computer trading.
But how your comment relates to my point that this is an interesting story escapes me, in fact it would seem to support it...
Of course there is a story here.
And of course it doesn't have to involve breaking the speed of light. It has to do with the Fed failing to properly enforce a supposedly very complex information lockdown and the information likely being either leaked or pre-loaded on remote servers, resulting in (according to the article) over $600M in trades via high-speed computer trading in the few milliseconds after the information was released - and now the Fed is investigating.
It's both related to technology and possibly involving criminal activity (or at the very lease a failure in information security). Sounds like a relevant story to me...
Alaska can afford them - just get their legislators to attach a $100M Alaskan iRoad improvement project to a bill declaring Jun 23rd National Take Your Pot Bellied Pig To Work Day. Alaskan pork barrel politics as usual...
Totally! We all agree that the FDA is one of the most ridiculous, intrusive examples of a nanny state imaginable.
Signed,
- Monsanto, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Philip Morris, Tyson, and 100s of other companies fined for marketing and selling tainted, dangerous, or untested products to consumers
Actually - I think if he had lit a cigarette it would have been almost as bad - especially since it was a deliberate act and not just ignorance/stupidity. Rocket fuel is one of the most flammable things on the planet, and in this case it was tipped with one of the most destructive things on the planet. Smoking is prohibited (and severely punishable) near thermonuclear missiles for good reason :)
I could go through dozens of examples (and many are small, but that's kind of the point of "eye candy"). Here are a bunch more (that did NOT exist on the old one, so definitely "more" eye candy):
- messages - each message animates independently in its own bubble so they "bounce" around (I have no idea WHY they bothered with this...)
- weather - the background weather/clouds/etc is animated (this was subtle but kind of cool). But if that's not the definition of added eye candy what the heck is!?
- clock - the icon is now actually a real clock, showing the current time with a moving second hand (this would almost be a "feature" if the digital clock at the top of the phone wasn't still much easier to read)
- camera - the whole switch from video/camera/pano with swipe and an animation/blur/focus effect.
- Safari - now has 3D stacked tabs (which clearly uses the 3D hardware)
- app switcher - now has screenshots for every running app, and smooth scrolling through them (in fact, *differential smooth scrolling* for the screenshots and icons)
- siri - several small effects... but I think I made my point...