Strikes me that either money has devalued much more than we thought or the next new bubble has arrived. There are huge numbers of transaction discounters on line looking for the advertising campaigns that they can suck discounts from. This Groupon thing is a joke, where can I find someone taking a bet against their share price?, I will make a killing if I invest in them. The only thing that ought to make serious money is a product that does something better for less money - everything else is a short term con that the market ought to be morally ashamed of. Conclusion - Groupon shares will destroy more peoples pensions than real crooks like Enron. If you invest in crap like this you deserve to miss the boat and lose your life savings when its unique selling point dies - which wont be long. Mind you if you all insist in buying Apple products with their walled gardens then there will always be a place for operations like Groupon who will find a way of getting round the criminal apple tax
The winter is terrible whatever we do with the clocks so I vote for keeping summer time all year round - because the summer is better for the extra hour of outdoor time in the evening. When you have slaved away for decades in an office you come to realize that this evening time is very valuable, I would even go so far as to say that double summer time GMT+2 would suit us in the UK with so called summer time GMT+1 for the winter. As for suicides and health problems - well stuff em I say, the gene pool could do without wimps who cant cope with the clock shift. I worked 4 on, 4 off, 12 hour shifts in my younger days and it does mess with your health but earning money doesn't always come for free. Fix the rest of capitalism before you get excited about trivial things like DST.
Information theory is interesting stuff. I think that the information content can in some way be measured by what the size of the maximum compressed version of the object is. Things get tricky though when you realize that you could compress a tv signal by transmitting just the script and some instructions on how to re-film it. Worse still the average news broadcast repeats the same sentence at least 10 times, so the text ends up 1/10 the size by trivial compression. So we end up with the unfortunate discovery that all those Exabytes pouring out on television signals are actually representable by less than a floppy discs worth of text a day. Sad isnt it.
Because things have changed in the developed world over the last couple of hundred years since the industrial revolution. Now infant mortality has been conquered, we have enough to eat and a welfare state to look after us when we are old we don't have to have as many children as possible. - Unless that is we belong to a Religion which knows it can just outgrow the opposition in tons of flesh by breeding beyond the replacement rate - though whether this is due to wilful hostility towards unbelievers or just ignorance, or small c conservatism and a 200 year lag in changing social rules to suit the conditions is an open question.
Given that the main reason for environmental destruction and social decay is an expanding population it seems incredible that so many religions instruct their followers to carry on breeding untill they are waist deep in their own shit. Religions are so irresponsible over population growth that they quite clearly represent the greatest actual threat to humanity of any of our political systems.
Whether or not there is a god it will be the churches who bring abut the downfall of mankind.if they carry on with business as usual. Remember all a Religion needs is followers, it has no interest in whether they live healthy fulfilled lives or live like battery hens just so long as they are infected with the meme. I am sure that many church leaders aspire to something better but at the root of the thing it's just membership that counts.
Tosh, the odds of a plane crashing are worse than the likelyhood of winning the lottery without a ticket.
Now don't get me wrong, safety rules often seem daft and beyond the needs of common sense but this is because the rule that you find bizarrely over the top is protecting against a very serious outcome - even if the risk is infinitesimally low.
However we now spend most of our lives in baby romper suits, wrapped up against the possibility that a lightning bolt will hit us. Well sod that, I want to live my life without filling in endless risk assessment forms and riding with stabilizer wheels. Screw the health and safety industry and ignore them.
I hide my electronics and keep it running on take off and landing, the risk of being killed by the airport building collapsing is higher than that of the plane crashing - with or without a cell phone.
And if the plane does crash the odds of surviving because you are not listening to ear-buds are laughably low, certainly no higher than psyching yourself up for the concept of gouging the eyeballs out of anyone who gets in the way of your exit from the burning plane.
Agreed, this is marketing bullshit designed to get Airbus in the news. Apart from the entertainment effect of discussing transparent aluminum it isn't news for nerds its news for sheeple.
It is indeed delightfully amusing to hear that the god of Apple has been nannied in exactly the same way his evil monopolistic company does to the rest of us. ha ha! Take that O grey suited old fart.
Who knows. All I know is that I'm sick of the so called music business churning out the same recycled rubbish measured in its merit by the amount of TV exposure time the so called talent has been able to achieve (See the X-Factor entertainment business). The whole business model depends on the business being able to pay for marketing and exclude the opposition, the price of music is the price of that marketing and the talents don't get much of it and do get disposed off after a couple of years. This has been going on for nearly twenty years now and hardly anything has changed. Personally I would like to see the music business completely bankrupted overnight so that something new could come along and replace it. I lived through the UK Punk era and think it high time we saw something similar to sweep away the tedious complacent rubbish that passes for popular music these days. (Oh of course there are always amazing musicians struggling to make fantastic music but a good two thirds of what makes it, is recycled rubbish).
These things blow up all the time, check out youtube for well explosions. Of course most of the videos are on land as there aren't enough people around at sea to rubberneck video for our entertainment, but they go at sea too.
Seriously its about time someone did. Otherwise you are going to find the barbarian hordes who don't give a toss are going to eat you weaklings for breakfast.
Strangely I don't own any apple products - or a TV for that matter. I don't like monopoly's. I suspect that I am a dying breed but anyway, good luck to you drones.
Welcome to your prison. Wikileaks is naughty and you can watch it being destroyed on news at ten. It doesn't contribute to the economy (so we are told) so they all deserve to die. And someone will make sure that they do. enjoy.
I appreciate the content of all the replies arguing that everything is fine. I still think that the craze for video formats as being discussed over the Flight flash site is damaging to productivity.
Corporate purchases are always at best value. Currently this means displays that you cannot rotate and the cheap 1080p capable 1080 high monitors that are displacing 1200 deep monitors.
Everybody at my work place has dual or even as many as four letterbox monitors hooked up to their PC's. More distressingly managers have a single display attached to a laptop. What is this shrunken view of the world with no depth doing to their psychology?. So we are coping as best we can.
The other thing that has happened is the new office interface, where acres of vertical space is being wasted with persistent icon bars instead of drop down menus. Try transferring information between a Word document and a Powerpoint slide, its painful. I challenge anybody to do this without constant scrolling (not to mention the thousands of hours spent fiddling with Word and Powerpoints propensity to autoformat everything in a way that you did not input - probably the greatest cause of high blood pressure in modern civilisation. I find notepad a useful intermediary - and where do you put that?)
We spend half of our lives kicking Far Eastern manufacturers to improve work place ergonomics with Lean, Just in Time and 5S whilst our own productivity is drowning in useless clutter. On style and video driven shrinking screens where we can no longer see the all the information - its a joke!
I started on text only character displays and the improvements have been fantastic since then. Right now we are in a slump where we have lost the plot.
Just go and ask the stock traders whether they think a single 1080p monitor displays enough history to make them competitive. Or maybe that's why so many people are drawing food stamps rather than contributing to the economy - something has gone seriously wrong and I suggest that your daily grind in front of sub optimal screens is contributing to it.
So things are getting worse, even whilst the number of pixels on the screen are growing. The computer revolution is going backwards because of poor monitors!
We will get past this, right now a trick has been missed. We could have better monitors but consumer video formats are preventing us from achieving greatness;-)
These wide screen monitors might be great for games like flight or for viewing wide screen movies but they sure as hell suck for large spreadsheets and documents. I think that they are part of a plot to destroy western civilization. Its almost impossible to get a monitor more than 1200 pixels high these days.
Au contraire, the Australian Governmint is well on its way to alignment with the regional superpower and expects to remain in charge when China moves in to secure its raw material supplies. Its the only rational explanation for the utterly insane legislation that they have been introducing over recent years. Expect Chinese to be the official second language by year end.
talking of which $88M is a joke of a penalty for an infringer that earned $3M out of its activities. Who can take a society seriously that behaves in this manner, its like Monty Python threatening to stamp on all the bits after they have hacked you to death with a sword. Why is money dealt with in this childish emotional way instead of in an analytic and realistic way? Its not as if the remaining $85M were translated into years in prison for example. What a sad society.
Actually wikipedia has "load shedding" as being the intentional disconnection of areas from the electricity grid because generation capacity is unable to supply the full demand. Nothing to do with dumping excess power. Ironically one of the best backups for a clean energy system using wind solar etc would be gas and oil fired power stations that just fire up to deliver when the clean energy isn't enough or when its not available.
Its sad to see nut-jobs in NASA dreaming about flying bits of the ISS to an asteroid attracting more credence than a perfectly reasonable quest to cut off oil dependency with super high tech clean energy projects. Its obvious that the people of the USA are programmed zombies following the whims of big business - the coal industry in particular. How can a country with such brilliant individuals be so stupid as a whole?
Its all the more depressing when you realize that only the Chinese actually have the disposable income to do space with astronauts these days. Isn't it about time NASA fired all these dreamers and got on with the robotic future?
Who says that the subscription model of purchase is the only one you can get? The last industry that did this was television receivers. Let me ask you a simple question, do you rent your television? If not why not? Because you seem convinced that it is the only way that a mobile phone can be bought. It's morons like you who have fallen into the trap of assuming that everybody else is as stupid as yourself that make it unlikely that we will be able to escape from the absurdly high costs of data plans on smart phones any time soon. The cost of running data over a phone is peanuts as it was for voice but we have all become used to paying a bloody fortune because of the huge subsidy for the phone itself. Perhaps you hadn't noticed the obscene profits being made by mobile carriers, or the bloated cost of the licenses that they pay to the government for airspace. I'm not convinced that you are not a shill for the mobile industry. Who do you work for?
You are dead right that we will cope here in Europe, if it turns out that the Atlantic conveyor turns off because of lack of care by the US, we will be more than happy in Europe to follow astute Chinese leadership in this century rather than the discredited US model. The Chinese are taking it seriously and upgrading their infrastructure to reduce carbon emissions and take advantage of energy saving technology. You have to ask yourself the question: 'Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya punk?" in the words of one of our current icons. This is a global question and has a bearing on the good standing of the USA in the world. What is your risk assessment on this question? Is the risk worth bearing, particularly when the Chinese own the US following the global collapse of capitalist banking? Is it worth taking making some tactical moves to ensure your children can still trade in the world?
Totally agree that this is a non story and a meaningless photo. A wall full 60" plasma screen monitors is not any more an indication of intelligent purpose than a couple of laptops. For the seabed robotic maneuvers involved, each piece of equipment would have been operated by a collocated team. Its highly unlikely that the control center was doing any more than watching over a script of different team actions. If they had any active role in an operation it would have only have been to yell stop to everybody as a result of one of the teams hitting a problem. But of course everything has to look like a Hollywood set these days or it couldn't possibly be any good. Style is apparently more important than substance these days.
If you think writing offensive slogans about the head of a major religion is going to win you friends then you are mistaken. It is morons like you who provide ammunition to our enemies. Being offensive is not funny or clever as you will discover one day when you annoy someone enough for them to do something about it. Hence my suggestion that you are looking for your very own Darwin award.
I'm leaning towards your interpretation that it would be foolish to eliminate Darwinian evolution entirely from human experience and that the fuss about Toyota accelerators is just such foolishness.
However your signature indicates that you want to win a Darwin award yourself.
How can this be, a post which is so internally self contradictory?
Perhaps despite making a legitimate point you are an idiot?
Slashdot Mirror
Strikes me that either money has devalued much more than we thought or the next new bubble has arrived. There are huge numbers of transaction discounters on line looking for the advertising campaigns that they can suck discounts from. This Groupon thing is a joke, where can I find someone taking a bet against their share price?, I will make a killing if I invest in them. The only thing that ought to make serious money is a product that does something better for less money - everything else is a short term con that the market ought to be morally ashamed of. Conclusion - Groupon shares will destroy more peoples pensions than real crooks like Enron. If you invest in crap like this you deserve to miss the boat and lose your life savings when its unique selling point dies - which wont be long. Mind you if you all insist in buying Apple products with their walled gardens then there will always be a place for operations like Groupon who will find a way of getting round the criminal apple tax
The winter is terrible whatever we do with the clocks so I vote for keeping summer time all year round - because the summer is better for the extra hour of outdoor time in the evening. When you have slaved away for decades in an office you come to realize that this evening time is very valuable, I would even go so far as to say that double summer time GMT+2 would suit us in the UK with so called summer time GMT+1 for the winter. As for suicides and health problems - well stuff em I say, the gene pool could do without wimps who cant cope with the clock shift. I worked 4 on, 4 off, 12 hour shifts in my younger days and it does mess with your health but earning money doesn't always come for free. Fix the rest of capitalism before you get excited about trivial things like DST.
Information theory is interesting stuff. I think that the information content can in some way be measured by what the size of the maximum compressed version of the object is. Things get tricky though when you realize that you could compress a tv signal by transmitting just the script and some instructions on how to re-film it. Worse still the average news broadcast repeats the same sentence at least 10 times, so the text ends up 1/10 the size by trivial compression. So we end up with the unfortunate discovery that all those Exabytes pouring out on television signals are actually representable by less than a floppy discs worth of text a day. Sad isnt it.
Because things have changed in the developed world over the last couple of hundred years since the industrial revolution. Now infant mortality has been conquered, we have enough to eat and a welfare state to look after us when we are old we don't have to have as many children as possible. - Unless that is we belong to a Religion which knows it can just outgrow the opposition in tons of flesh by breeding beyond the replacement rate - though whether this is due to wilful hostility towards unbelievers or just ignorance, or small c conservatism and a 200 year lag in changing social rules to suit the conditions is an open question.
Given that the main reason for environmental destruction and social decay is an expanding population it seems incredible that so many religions instruct their followers to carry on breeding untill they are waist deep in their own shit. Religions are so irresponsible over population growth that they quite clearly represent the greatest actual threat to humanity of any of our political systems.
Whether or not there is a god it will be the churches who bring abut the downfall of mankind.if they carry on with business as usual. Remember all a Religion needs is followers, it has no interest in whether they live healthy fulfilled lives or live like battery hens just so long as they are infected with the meme. I am sure that many church leaders aspire to something better but at the root of the thing it's just membership that counts.
Tosh, the odds of a plane crashing are worse than the likelyhood of winning the lottery without a ticket.
Now don't get me wrong, safety rules often seem daft and beyond the needs of common sense but this is because the rule that you find bizarrely over the top is protecting against a very serious outcome - even if the risk is infinitesimally low.
However we now spend most of our lives in baby romper suits, wrapped up against the possibility that a lightning bolt will hit us. Well sod that, I want to live my life without filling in endless risk assessment forms and riding with stabilizer wheels. Screw the health and safety industry and ignore them.
I hide my electronics and keep it running on take off and landing, the risk of being killed by the airport building collapsing is higher than that of the plane crashing - with or without a cell phone.
And if the plane does crash the odds of surviving because you are not listening to ear-buds are laughably low, certainly no higher than psyching yourself up for the concept of gouging the eyeballs out of anyone who gets in the way of your exit from the burning plane.
Stop worrying and get a life!
Agreed, this is marketing bullshit designed to get Airbus in the news. Apart from the entertainment effect of discussing transparent aluminum it isn't news for nerds its news for sheeple.
That will be nice for the rest of us then if it keeps illiterate morons away!
It is indeed delightfully amusing to hear that the god of Apple has been nannied in exactly the same way his evil monopolistic company does to the rest of us. ha ha! Take that O grey suited old fart.
Who knows. All I know is that I'm sick of the so called music business churning out the same recycled rubbish measured in its merit by the amount of TV exposure time the so called talent has been able to achieve (See the X-Factor entertainment business). The whole business model depends on the business being able to pay for marketing and exclude the opposition, the price of music is the price of that marketing and the talents don't get much of it and do get disposed off after a couple of years. This has been going on for nearly twenty years now and hardly anything has changed. Personally I would like to see the music business completely bankrupted overnight so that something new could come along and replace it. I lived through the UK Punk era and think it high time we saw something similar to sweep away the tedious complacent rubbish that passes for popular music these days. (Oh of course there are always amazing musicians struggling to make fantastic music but a good two thirds of what makes it, is recycled rubbish).
These things blow up all the time, check out youtube for well explosions. Of course most of the videos are on land as there aren't enough people around at sea to rubberneck video for our entertainment, but they go at sea too.
Seriously its about time someone did. Otherwise you are going to find the barbarian hordes who don't give a toss are going to eat you weaklings for breakfast.
Strangely I don't own any apple products - or a TV for that matter. I don't like monopoly's. I suspect that I am a dying breed but anyway, good luck to you drones.
Welcome to your prison. Wikileaks is naughty and you can watch it being destroyed on news at ten. It doesn't contribute to the economy (so we are told) so they all deserve to die. And someone will make sure that they do. enjoy.
I appreciate the content of all the replies arguing that everything is fine. I still think that the craze for video formats as being discussed over the Flight flash site is damaging to productivity.
Corporate purchases are always at best value. Currently this means displays that you cannot rotate and the cheap 1080p capable 1080 high monitors that are displacing 1200 deep monitors.
Everybody at my work place has dual or even as many as four letterbox monitors hooked up to their PC's. More distressingly managers have a single display attached to a laptop. What is this shrunken view of the world with no depth doing to their psychology?. So we are coping as best we can.
The other thing that has happened is the new office interface, where acres of vertical space is being wasted with persistent icon bars instead of drop down menus. Try transferring information between a Word document and a Powerpoint slide, its painful. I challenge anybody to do this without constant scrolling (not to mention the thousands of hours spent fiddling with Word and Powerpoints propensity to autoformat everything in a way that you did not input - probably the greatest cause of high blood pressure in modern civilisation. I find notepad a useful intermediary - and where do you put that?)
We spend half of our lives kicking Far Eastern manufacturers to improve work place ergonomics with Lean, Just in Time and 5S whilst our own productivity is drowning in useless clutter. On style and video driven shrinking screens where we can no longer see the all the information - its a joke!
I started on text only character displays and the improvements have been fantastic since then. Right now we are in a slump where we have lost the plot.
Just go and ask the stock traders whether they think a single 1080p monitor displays enough history to make them competitive. Or maybe that's why so many people are drawing food stamps rather than contributing to the economy - something has gone seriously wrong and I suggest that your daily grind in front of sub optimal screens is contributing to it.
So things are getting worse, even whilst the number of pixels on the screen are growing. The computer revolution is going backwards because of poor monitors!
We will get past this, right now a trick has been missed. We could have better monitors but consumer video formats are preventing us from achieving greatness ;-)
These wide screen monitors might be great for games like flight or for viewing wide screen movies but they sure as hell suck for large spreadsheets and documents. I think that they are part of a plot to destroy western civilization. Its almost impossible to get a monitor more than 1200 pixels high these days.
Au contraire, the Australian Governmint is well on its way to alignment with the regional superpower and expects to remain in charge when China moves in to secure its raw material supplies. Its the only rational explanation for the utterly insane legislation that they have been introducing over recent years. Expect Chinese to be the official second language by year end.
talking of which $88M is a joke of a penalty for an infringer that earned $3M out of its activities. Who can take a society seriously that behaves in this manner, its like Monty Python threatening to stamp on all the bits after they have hacked you to death with a sword. Why is money dealt with in this childish emotional way instead of in an analytic and realistic way? Its not as if the remaining $85M were translated into years in prison for example. What a sad society.
Actually wikipedia has "load shedding" as being the intentional disconnection of areas from the electricity grid because generation capacity is unable to supply the full demand. Nothing to do with dumping excess power. Ironically one of the best backups for a clean energy system using wind solar etc would be gas and oil fired power stations that just fire up to deliver when the clean energy isn't enough or when its not available.
Its sad to see nut-jobs in NASA dreaming about flying bits of the ISS to an asteroid attracting more credence than a perfectly reasonable quest to cut off oil dependency with super high tech clean energy projects. Its obvious that the people of the USA are programmed zombies following the whims of big business - the coal industry in particular. How can a country with such brilliant individuals be so stupid as a whole?
Its all the more depressing when you realize that only the Chinese actually have the disposable income to do space with astronauts these days. Isn't it about time NASA fired all these dreamers and got on with the robotic future?
Who says that the subscription model of purchase is the only one you can get? The last industry that did this was television receivers. Let me ask you a simple question, do you rent your television? If not why not? Because you seem convinced that it is the only way that a mobile phone can be bought. It's morons like you who have fallen into the trap of assuming that everybody else is as stupid as yourself that make it unlikely that we will be able to escape from the absurdly high costs of data plans on smart phones any time soon. The cost of running data over a phone is peanuts as it was for voice but we have all become used to paying a bloody fortune because of the huge subsidy for the phone itself. Perhaps you hadn't noticed the obscene profits being made by mobile carriers, or the bloated cost of the licenses that they pay to the government for airspace. I'm not convinced that you are not a shill for the mobile industry. Who do you work for?
You are dead right that we will cope here in Europe, if it turns out that the Atlantic conveyor turns off because of lack of care by the US, we will be more than happy in Europe to follow astute Chinese leadership in this century rather than the discredited US model. The Chinese are taking it seriously and upgrading their infrastructure to reduce carbon emissions and take advantage of energy saving technology. You have to ask yourself the question: 'Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya punk?" in the words of one of our current icons. This is a global question and has a bearing on the good standing of the USA in the world. What is your risk assessment on this question? Is the risk worth bearing, particularly when the Chinese own the US following the global collapse of capitalist banking? Is it worth taking making some tactical moves to ensure your children can still trade in the world?
Totally agree that this is a non story and a meaningless photo. A wall full 60" plasma screen monitors is not any more an indication of intelligent purpose than a couple of laptops. For the seabed robotic maneuvers involved, each piece of equipment would have been operated by a collocated team. Its highly unlikely that the control center was doing any more than watching over a script of different team actions. If they had any active role in an operation it would have only have been to yell stop to everybody as a result of one of the teams hitting a problem. But of course everything has to look like a Hollywood set these days or it couldn't possibly be any good. Style is apparently more important than substance these days.
If you think writing offensive slogans about the head of a major religion is going to win you friends then you are mistaken. It is morons like you who provide ammunition to our enemies. Being offensive is not funny or clever as you will discover one day when you annoy someone enough for them to do something about it. Hence my suggestion that you are looking for your very own Darwin award.
I'm leaning towards your interpretation that it would be foolish to eliminate Darwinian evolution entirely from human experience and that the fuss about Toyota accelerators is just such foolishness.
However your signature indicates that you want to win a Darwin award yourself.
How can this be, a post which is so internally self contradictory?
Perhaps despite making a legitimate point you are an idiot?