And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a demonstration of what we science nerds like to call 'simple science for senators". The amazing thing about it is that you can actually get billions of dollars in funding using this simplified approach when brilliantly researched and written scientific papers fail miserably. Go figure!?!?
And yet, people stated that "it would be soooo expensive" to add proper tracking to planes.
It is. As a manufacturer you have to machete your way through a jungle of red tape, get all manner of safety assessments etc. to even be allowed to install the ADSC-B/C equipment on the aircraft. This is very time consuming and expensive, which is one reason why all aircraft avionics and generally anything that goes into an aircraft is by definition obscenely expensive to buy (right down to LCD screens and coffee makers) and why old airliner designs get reworked (it's a smaller bureaucratic workload to get a new variant of an existing design flying than a totally new design). If this seems like dumb bureaucracy keep in mind that aircraft have been lost to crappy installation of retrofitted electronics (a good example being Swissair Flight 111). To install the equipment your airline has to ground the aircraft for at least a week (installation costs and lost revenue). Depending on the type of aircraft you operate and its age there may not even have been provision for the ADSC-B/C equipment which means airframe modifications and more downtime (yet more lost revenue and expenses) followed by more certifications and inspections. On top of that different ATC areas sometimes require you to have different equipment. Even simple stuff like software upgrades only happen at a glacial pace so if you think that fixing a simple software bug on an airliner is as simple as downloading an install package from the support section of the Boeing/Airbus website, uploading it to your USB stick, plugging it into a USB socket in the dashboard of your Boeing 777 airliner and selecting "Update firmware" on the FMS screen you have another thing coming. Airliners are one of the safest modes of transportation but that comes at a cost in time and money.
Just to be clear here: the devastation is all due to the tsunami, not to the reactor failure. Foreign media seem to often forget or ignore that the disaster was the earthquake and tsunami. That's what killed almost 20k people dead and destroyed the homes of many hundreds of thousands of people.
It seems to me that the root of the Fukushima disaster was the decision to build a nuclear power plant in a place where there was even the remotest chance of Tsunami damage. The government of a country whose history is littered with Tsunami disasters should have known better. The design basis for tsunamis at Fukushima was 5.7 meters, it should have been: "Don't build a nuclear plant within 20-30km of the coast and even then put it on high ground" and keep in mind that this restriction does not account for earthquakes although the Fukushima plant survived a magnitude 7.7 quake rather well so at least in that regard it was better designed..
Wearable devices will not be massively popular unless they will be as simple to use as headphones.
Maybe you are different but I don't carry headphones either and frankly I think headphones are a huge PITA. Headphones require all kinds of annoying cable wrangling or if wireless all kinds of unreliable setups that you are constantly dicking around with. Useful? Yes. Simple? Not so much.
I carry precisely 3 items 99% of the time - phone, wallet and keys - and I'd do away with any of them if I had a reasonable way to do so. I don't mind carrying a fitness tracker if I'm actually doing exercise but otherwise the phone should serve that purpose. I don't want to wear a special purpose device unless I'm doing something rather specific. I don't wear a watch except on rare occasions because they serve little purpose these days (clocks are everywhere) and are annoying to wear if you don't have to.
Generally I agree with you and I can see your point with corded headphones but cordless (Bluetooth) ones work fine for me. I used to go through a ton of corded headphones. Usually they'd wear out due to metal fatigue just above the plug to save money. For years I used to shorten the chord and solder it back to the plug like a true penny pinching geek. Then I finally gave up and spent an obscene amount of money on a set of Sennheiser MM 550-X Bluetooth headphones. So far they have, well.... just worked. I also have a couple of sets of Sennheiser MM200 earplugs phones, also Bluetooth. Same story here, they just work. The first set finally wore out after three years of daily use so I bought a second one on sale since this model is out of production now. The only complaint I have so far is that the audio quality suffers a bit because of the Bluetooth link but not so much that I'd forgo the comfort of being wireless.
Speaking of special purpose devices, what I'd really like for safety reasons is a __proper__ HUD for my car. There are after market ones but most of the suck, a HUD should be standard equipment in every car.
I don't care, this is a good idea. I installed a dash cam in my car. It's just a HD webcam hooked up to a board computer that runs a C++ daemon using the OpenCV libraries but I have already captured some rather spectacular footage. Including a car that had gone off the road in icy conditions, there was a light post which the car had sheared off it's mounting resting on the car's roof (I arrived at the scene post facto). A couple of days ago I captured another bit off scary footage when I had to drive onto the shoulder of the road to avoid a frontal collision with a guy who decided it was a good idea to overhaul three other cars on blind turn in the road. If this keeps up I'll set up a YouTube channel and a website that uses the footage as a library of examples for student drivers of how not to drive.
They can include a dash cam and side view cameras as well along with an interface that allows me to copy filmed material to an SD card or something... That would have saved me twice from getting stuck with being 50 percent at fault (both times the other driver ignored a red light).
I like the way you single out North Americans, as if they indeed are somehow more corrupt than Europeans or Africans or South Americans or Asians or Australians.....
Anybody who claims that has never been to Russia. There are other countries in Europe where corruption is rife but from talking with people who have done business there, Russia is like the wild west (along with Belarus and the Ukraine). One guy I talked to called Russia a "kleptocracy". Take a look at this map of perceived corruption around the world: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi... High index is clean, a low one is corrupt. As you can see much of Eastern Europe (i.e. ex Warsaw pact) is at least two steps up from Russia. And the USA is perceived as being about as corrupt as Western Europe (i.e. W-Europe more or less as it is defied by Eurovoc).
If Google was, say, a public utility then I'd back you up. But they're not. Filtering or selectively promoting things is entirely within their scope. Their rights don't change because they're popular.
However, if they're publicly viewed as abusing those rights, they very well may become much less popular.
So it's OK to abuse monopolies in any way you want just as long as you don't use them to extort money from people? If there was real competition on the search market, if there were 5-10 different search providers that all more or less equally divided the market between them I'd be perfectly inclined to agree with you because then you could choose a provider that wasn't run by a bunch of reactionary morons. The whole problem is precisely that Google is a private company that has acquired the same position as a and role as public utility by virtue of their monopoly on internet searches. They have a stranglehold on what has become the primary communications platform of the 21st century and thus there are severe limitations on the political filters they are allowed to apply to their search result. We are bloody lucky Google is run by a couple of intellectuals who have for the most part not abused their position and made the concious choice not to push their political agenda with the same unrelenting and ruthless political partisanship as Fox News does. Both conservatives and liberals have benefited from that. Would you rather have the gatekeeper of internet search controlled and run by the likes of Rupert Murdoch or the Koch brothers?
What good is the first amendment if private entities providing essential information services to the public can effective bypass the right for people to be heard?
I fail to see the relevance. No wait - I do. If they're enforcing free speech, that means they can't regulate what a person (or corporation) can say. Or selectively not say of their own volition. Does Freedom of Speech imply that we force people/corporations to say things that they choose not to? Regardless of their motivations? If I run a web-site and there's an article somewhere that says, "China censors nothing!", do I have to provide a link to it despite the fact that I personally think it's biased?
I suspect that it depends on what your market share is, i.e. whether you are a "gatekeeper" or not. If you are just some two bit website that's one of a thousand others then the answer is that you can present whatever point of view you want and ignore others. If, however, you are Google, you handle 95% of all internet searches and you don't agree with, say the US Republican party's point of view so you start purging all links from your search results that represent a Republican point of view that you don't agree with then the game situations is a bit different and should be forced to be more neutral than you would like to be for the public good. I generally can't stand radical Republicans but I'll fight for their right to be heard, I don't have much use for communism either but I also think Commies have a right to be heard. This judge would seem to disagree with that which is IMHO quite amazing.
Not really, because Apple still takes a 30% cut if you buy the subscription as an in-app purchase. This is more about getting a constant stream of money ($10/month) rather than a one-time (or every two or three years) payment of $50 or whatever.
Let's just take a look at this deal. I just bought a 356 subscription and according to the in-app purchasing wizard in the Office 365 suite on my iPad the subscription is $156 per annum. For that you are getting:
Word, Excel, Powerpoint and change.
License to install on up to 5 PCs/Macs
Use on mobile devices.
20 GB of additional OneDrive storage.
Skype world minutes (60 of them per mensem)
Which sounds like a pretty OK deal to me considering the volume of product I'm getting. As far as I can tell there are no temporal usage restrictions on the PC/Mac licenses in this this sub, according to the office 365 community forums multiple users can log into the same account and edit the same document. If that is true than this subscription will cover my office needs, my parents's, my sister's and her husband's and we can split the costs. As for corporate profits.... If Apple is taking 30% then Microsoft is getting $109,8 / 12 = $9,15 per month and they still have to deduct costs and taxes. Mind you, being a corporation, MS, like Apple, Google, IBM and the rest of that ilk probably enjoy considerably lower tax rates than what Joe Six-pack has to contend with. However, MS does have to pay developers, maintain their cloud service data-centers and pay the system administrators of their cloud service department out of that and pay for marketing and other such crap. I'm sure MS makes tons of money off of this stuff but it's not like the profit meter at Microsoft HQ goes Chi-chinggggg! and increments by $9,15 every time they sell an office subscription to an iPad followed by a spontaneous chorus of manic laughter from every MS manager in the known universe over how they are ripping off their customers.
If you're doing professional document editing in a browser, you're insane.
The portability, sharing and collaboration of Gdocs is light years ahead of the others. Nobody I know gives a rats ass about "professional" editing.
You have evidently never done a Bachelor's or Master's Thesis. If you had you'd be familiar with a group of people that places much importance on "professional" editing. Granted, scientists use TEX rather than an office suite but the 'professional' editing of scientific reports, thesis and papers is almost considered as important as the content and there are some very good and obvious reasons for that.
The iPhone UI was rather good, and was Apple's last showing of what it did really well.
A fact that is only emphasised by the fact that Google redesigned their phones and the Android UI from aping BlackBerry to aping the iPhone and it's OS. I'm not sure the iPhone and it's UI is the last time Apple will demonstrate how it does UI and design very well but it is the latest.
What's the difference between a hunter with a drone and a factory fishing vessel with spotter planes? Is it scale? money? Both models are using airborne technology to assist in the gathering of food. If we are going to ban aerial observation, than it should be for all applications and uses of it regardless of how monied the operator is.
Actually using spotter planes for fishing (tuna for example) is forbidden in many places.
This pervasive mentality (shooting wolves from a helicopter) and now this new drone thing is what gives hunters a bad name.
Damn right. Even a high powered rifle with no other technology is a ridiculously one sided advantage when hunting. There are several perfectly practical reasons to go hunting that have nothing to do with entertainment. (food, pests, protection, environment) They even have the gall to call hunting a "sport" and euphemise their bloodlust by calling their kills "harvesting" as if it was no different than planting corn. I'm not quite sure how it is a "sport" if the other team doesn't know they are playing.
I don't have a problem with allowing hunting for practical reasons but most hunters I know (and I know lots of them) are pretty disingenuous about their motives for killing harmless animals. 99% of the time it is for no purpose other then their own amusement. I find that sort of mentality rather disturbing.
Sorry, your biased opinion of hunting aside, it is called harvesting because left to their own devices, and with no other predators available, many hunted species would populate to the point of being unable to feed and then slowly dying of starvation killing off most, if not all, of entire herds. Hunting seasons are used to cull these herds of excess population and provide food and "sport" to humans.
Here's a thought. How about re-introducing natural predators like say... wolves rather than shooting them from helecopters? Not that I'm against hunting but wolves in particular have been demonized far beyond all sense.
Well said! There is a big difference between holding a phone vertically at eye hight (=most probably taking a picture) and the diagonal position used to crush candy or communicate via text or do other stuff. I think it is a sign on the wall that 99% of the criticism is about taking pictures and only 1% about things like distraction and so forth. It is all about consent and not knowing if someone is (not) taking a picture. And even if the wearer is not actively engaged in taking pictures, remote access tools might be able to take over. There is a reason I got the webcam taped off on my laptop... I just simply fail to see why a webcam strapped to a face is a nice idea.
It's not only about taking pictures and video without consent, it is about the device doing it being connected to the immense data collection machine that is Google, with capabilities to aggregate and correlate, track and face-recognize.
So in a couple of years when the technology is embedded in lapel pins or other subtle wearables, and they are "always on", what do we do, ban jewelry and clothing accessories? This is like horse owners complaining about them new fangled motorized carriages because they are loud, dangerous and the money all goes to Detroit. Its just humans being humans.
Yeah, yeah yeah, cast everybody who wants some privacy as an ignorant Luddite... It's a cheap shot on your part and he still has a point. Plenty of people are going to be creeped out by Google Glass and the fact that it violates a deeply entrenched social norm probably going to be the greatest adoption hurdle that this device will encounter. It may be that your prediction is correct and that in future nobody will mind having their image beamed to Google's data-centres by an army of Glassholes but I rather doubt it. The more pervasive and especially the more in-your-face the surveillance society gets the more it will piss people off. I'm already beginning to warm up to the idea of following the example of a group of (Dutch IIRC) vigilantes I read about recently who sneak around at night and shoot out CCTV and speeding camera lenses using air guns loaded with glue filled paint-balls.
I am kind of surprised to see that the majority of posts are railing against this phone, mostly over the display resolution being so high. I'm thinking most people never made it past the summary. On top of what the summary lists, it has 3 gigabytes of ram, 32 gigabytes of internal storage, micro SD that can handle 128 gigabyte cards, 5 megapixel front facing camera, 50 (sorta) megapixel rear camera, 3000mAh removable battery. Rapid charging technology - going from 0 to 75% charge on a 3000mAh battery is pretty sweet.
At a $599 retail price point? That's pretty remarkable. The only thing the article does not discuss in the graphics chip set but I'm willing to bet it's nothing to sneeze at.
There were no pictures of the thing in the TFA and no easily visible links so in case anybody wants to know what the thing looks like:
Right or wrong, the reason a large site like Facebook stays large as most people dont want to have to go different places to do what amounts to the same thing.
Would you rather go to 10 friends house each week for 30 minutes each, or everyone hang out at one for the afternoon? Most people would not choose all the running around.
Here's my pet theory at the moment: Facebook stays big because it got a 'critical mass' user base very early and is keeping it through lack of inter-operability with other social networks. If that description sounds a bit like the Microsoft's PC operating system monopoly of yesteryear, that's because it is. This phenomenon also goes by another name: 'vendor lock'. People on Facebook don't have much choice other than to stay on Facebook if they want to enjoy the full spectrum options for interacting with their friends electronically because a huge percentage of 'everybody' is on Facebook and you cannot interact with Google+ users from Facebook so they get left out. If you somehow could force Facebook to be fully interoperable with other social networking sites such that a Google+ user could interact without restrictions with a Facebook user, they could post things to each others timeline, a Facebook user could prune a Google+ users Farmville carrot patches, they could prick and poke each other (or what ever else it is that social media drones spend their time doing) you could soon sit back in an armchair and see Facebook deflate as people defect to a social media site with a better UI, specialist communities more interesting to each individual, etc.....
1. Why are cockpit voices recorded only in the black box? If other data from a plane is constantly being sent for maintenance purposes, while in flight, why do planes not also not relay cockpit voices to some storage system, for just such a situation? CCTV keeps footage for a few hours or a few days, why is this kind of valuable data not also routinely stored?
Streaming material from an aircraft to ground stations would only work reliably over a satellite link which I understand from talking to airline people is expensive but then nowadays they are offering internet on transatlantic flights so it can't be that expenisive. Things like installing CCTV are technically possible but for all manner of reasons including things like: safety assessments, corporate bureaucracy and the fact that aircraft can't be grounded long enough for equipment to be installed for profit reasons (down time, obscene prices of aircraft electronics and other spares) the upgrading of commercial airliners tends to move at a glacial pace. Just for example, there are variants of some Boeing airliner (777 iirc) flying around the world with a bug in their FANS equipment that causes a faulty log-off. This is not a critical issue but it is just bloody annoying for flight control staff around the world. This could be fixed with a simple software update but getting that patch certified, getting an airline bean counter to shell out the money and finally catching the aircraft on the ground long enough to have the patch installed takes a loooooooooooooooooooooooong time.
Of course we don't know that it was suicide. It could just have been an unusually unreasonable highjacker who didn't understand that the 777-200 had shorter range than for example Wikipedia lists because it wasn't fully fueled for the relatively short flight to Beijing.
That's what I was thinking too. This happened to an Ethiopian Airlines flight that was hijacked back in 1996. The hijackers ignored the captains warning that his aircraft's fuel load was insufficient to get them to Australia where the hijackers wanted to go and eventually he was forced to ditch the aircraft in the sea off the Comoros Islands, due to fuel starvation. He would have probably stood a good chance of pulling off a near textbook belly-landing if one of the hijackers hadn't started wrestling with him for the controls seconds before the aircraft touched down on the water which caused one of the engines to touch the water too soon so the machine broke up. Some 125 out of 175 passengers and crew were killed but more would have died if the co-pilot hadn't kept the hijackers off the captains back for most of the landing. It was a pretty impressive feat of airmanship considering the circumstances.
We have been able to clone several species already. That's not the problem. The problem is that you need a surrogate mother for the embryo and the closest we have is the African elephant, which separated from the mammoth a long time ago. From TFA it seems they are already working on cross-species clones but they are still a long way off.
That may seem like a victory but it's really just scratching the surface. Once you have cloned a mammoth what then? To establish a viable population you need genetic diversity, a minimum founder population of 50-100 individuals that should preferably be as distantly related as possible. The up side of a project like this is that if we can solve the problem do cloning a mammoth it we can start harvesting the DNA of many individuals of species like tigers and rhinos that are about to be become extinct thanks hedonistic nouveau rich assholes with more money than sense who keep poachers and exotic pet traders in business. Then, at a later date when Gene Roddenberry's vision has come true and mankind has grown up (not holding my breath) we will be able to recreate viable populations.
If mammoths were wiped out by climate change, then resurrecting the species in a modern climate would be bringing it into an environment that it was not evolved to handle.
Not only does that seem rather pointless, but it also strikes me as arguably sounding like animal cruelty. I'd suggest that the scientific discoveries we might make by doing this may be heavily outweighed by the ethical considerations involved.
This matter really feels one of those times when scientists should be reminding themselves that just because we *CAN* do something does not necessarily mean that we *SHOULD*.
Mammoths survived until at least 2500 years ago on Wrangel island where that particular population was probably wiped out by modern humans so at least the habitat question is a non issue.
If Google didn't want children to use their devices, why are they approving apps specifically targeted at children? This is a money-grab from Google, pure and simple.
How does that saying go again? Never ascribe malice to that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.
It's well-established by now that one of the most significant factors in destroying the lives of the unskilled and semi-skilled workers across the country has been the influx of similar immigrants from around the world. Legal versus illegal, its immaterial. The invisible hand doesn't give a damn whether they hold a green card or not and giving legal status to the illegals won't suddenly drive wages up because their mere presence in the economy provides at least implicit price competition.
Here's how you enact a sensible immigration policy. You crack down on the employers of illegals such that no one will hire them. You then offer a contingent amnesty to the illegals that allows them to come forward and face no charges if they leave the country of their own volition, and you even let them keep all of the money and property they've earned if they self-deport. Then, you only allow immigrants with provable skills to immigrate as singles or with their immediate family if they're married with children. None of this "let's bring the whole extended family" over. Grandma, the aunts and uncles and cousins have no business piggybacking on that green card. That's just a recipe for waking up one day and finding a large ethnic enclave in an American city (oh wait, that's precisely what's happened in many areas because of this, silly me).
Obligatory: http://content.time.com/time/c... Not that your suggestions are terribly unreasonable but you are kind of taking an axe (or chainsaw) to the USA's "Nation of immigrants" founding epic.
Slashdot Mirror
Oxygen, it's in the air...
fine vaporized particles of metal...
*poof*
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a demonstration of what we science nerds like to call 'simple science for senators". The amazing thing about it is that you can actually get billions of dollars in funding using this simplified approach when brilliantly researched and written scientific papers fail miserably. Go figure!?!?
And yet, people stated that "it would be soooo expensive" to add proper tracking to planes.
It is. As a manufacturer you have to machete your way through a jungle of red tape, get all manner of safety assessments etc. to even be allowed to install the ADSC-B/C equipment on the aircraft. This is very time consuming and expensive, which is one reason why all aircraft avionics and generally anything that goes into an aircraft is by definition obscenely expensive to buy (right down to LCD screens and coffee makers) and why old airliner designs get reworked (it's a smaller bureaucratic workload to get a new variant of an existing design flying than a totally new design). If this seems like dumb bureaucracy keep in mind that aircraft have been lost to crappy installation of retrofitted electronics (a good example being Swissair Flight 111). To install the equipment your airline has to ground the aircraft for at least a week (installation costs and lost revenue). Depending on the type of aircraft you operate and its age there may not even have been provision for the ADSC-B/C equipment which means airframe modifications and more downtime (yet more lost revenue and expenses) followed by more certifications and inspections. On top of that different ATC areas sometimes require you to have different equipment. Even simple stuff like software upgrades only happen at a glacial pace so if you think that fixing a simple software bug on an airliner is as simple as downloading an install package from the support section of the Boeing/Airbus website, uploading it to your USB stick, plugging it into a USB socket in the dashboard of your Boeing 777 airliner and selecting "Update firmware" on the FMS screen you have another thing coming. Airliners are one of the safest modes of transportation but that comes at a cost in time and money.
> a new division that aims to 'merge biology, engineering, and computer science to harness the power of natural systems for national security
In other words, Dick Cheney needs an android body urgently.
Is that a good idea? He was dangerous enough with a shotgun, he will be a walking disaster when he can shoot laser beams form his eyes.
Just to be clear here: the devastation is all due to the tsunami, not to the reactor failure. Foreign media seem to often forget or ignore that the disaster was the earthquake and tsunami. That's what killed almost 20k people dead and destroyed the homes of many hundreds of thousands of people.
It seems to me that the root of the Fukushima disaster was the decision to build a nuclear power plant in a place where there was even the remotest chance of Tsunami damage. The government of a country whose history is littered with Tsunami disasters should have known better. The design basis for tsunamis at Fukushima was 5.7 meters, it should have been: "Don't build a nuclear plant within 20-30km of the coast and even then put it on high ground" and keep in mind that this restriction does not account for earthquakes although the Fukushima plant survived a magnitude 7.7 quake rather well so at least in that regard it was better designed..
Wearable devices will not be massively popular unless they will be as simple to use as headphones.
Maybe you are different but I don't carry headphones either and frankly I think headphones are a huge PITA. Headphones require all kinds of annoying cable wrangling or if wireless all kinds of unreliable setups that you are constantly dicking around with. Useful? Yes. Simple? Not so much.
I carry precisely 3 items 99% of the time - phone, wallet and keys - and I'd do away with any of them if I had a reasonable way to do so. I don't mind carrying a fitness tracker if I'm actually doing exercise but otherwise the phone should serve that purpose. I don't want to wear a special purpose device unless I'm doing something rather specific. I don't wear a watch except on rare occasions because they serve little purpose these days (clocks are everywhere) and are annoying to wear if you don't have to.
Generally I agree with you and I can see your point with corded headphones but cordless (Bluetooth) ones work fine for me. I used to go through a ton of corded headphones. Usually they'd wear out due to metal fatigue just above the plug to save money. For years I used to shorten the chord and solder it back to the plug like a true penny pinching geek. Then I finally gave up and spent an obscene amount of money on a set of Sennheiser MM 550-X Bluetooth headphones. So far they have, well .... just worked. I also have a couple of sets of Sennheiser MM200 earplugs phones, also Bluetooth. Same story here, they just work. The first set finally wore out after three years of daily use so I bought a second one on sale since this model is out of production now. The only complaint I have so far is that the audio quality suffers a bit because of the Bluetooth link but not so much that I'd forgo the comfort of being wireless.
Speaking of special purpose devices, what I'd really like for safety reasons is a __proper__ HUD for my car. There are after market ones but most of the suck, a HUD should be standard equipment in every car.
It's April 1st. You're not fooling anyone.
I don't care, this is a good idea. I installed a dash cam in my car. It's just a HD webcam hooked up to a board computer that runs a C++ daemon using the OpenCV libraries but I have already captured some rather spectacular footage. Including a car that had gone off the road in icy conditions, there was a light post which the car had sheared off it's mounting resting on the car's roof (I arrived at the scene post facto). A couple of days ago I captured another bit off scary footage when I had to drive onto the shoulder of the road to avoid a frontal collision with a guy who decided it was a good idea to overhaul three other cars on blind turn in the road. If this keeps up I'll set up a YouTube channel and a website that uses the footage as a library of examples for student drivers of how not to drive.
They can include a dash cam and side view cameras as well along with an interface that allows me to copy filmed material to an SD card or something... That would have saved me twice from getting stuck with being 50 percent at fault (both times the other driver ignored a red light).
I like the way you single out North Americans, as if they indeed are somehow more corrupt than Europeans or Africans or South Americans or Asians or Australians.....
Anybody who claims that has never been to Russia. There are other countries in Europe where corruption is rife but from talking with people who have done business there, Russia is like the wild west (along with Belarus and the Ukraine). One guy I talked to called Russia a "kleptocracy". Take a look at this map of perceived corruption around the world:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
High index is clean, a low one is corrupt. As you can see much of Eastern Europe (i.e. ex Warsaw pact) is at least two steps up from Russia. And the USA is perceived as being about as corrupt as Western Europe (i.e. W-Europe more or less as it is defied by Eurovoc).
So scenario A It's true and we're all fucked and can't do anything about it. Thus we're arguing over..nothing.
Science: If we can't change it, well, fuck it.
Fox New: If it hurts big coal and oil, try to convince everybody it doesn't exist.
If Google was, say, a public utility then I'd back you up. But they're not. Filtering or selectively promoting things is entirely within their scope. Their rights don't change because they're popular.
However, if they're publicly viewed as abusing those rights, they very well may become much less popular.
So it's OK to abuse monopolies in any way you want just as long as you don't use them to extort money from people? If there was real competition on the search market, if there were 5-10 different search providers that all more or less equally divided the market between them I'd be perfectly inclined to agree with you because then you could choose a provider that wasn't run by a bunch of reactionary morons. The whole problem is precisely that Google is a private company that has acquired the same position as a and role as public utility by virtue of their monopoly on internet searches. They have a stranglehold on what has become the primary communications platform of the 21st century and thus there are severe limitations on the political filters they are allowed to apply to their search result. We are bloody lucky Google is run by a couple of intellectuals who have for the most part not abused their position and made the concious choice not to push their political agenda with the same unrelenting and ruthless political partisanship as Fox News does. Both conservatives and liberals have benefited from that. Would you rather have the gatekeeper of internet search controlled and run by the likes of Rupert Murdoch or the Koch brothers?
What good is the first amendment if private entities providing essential information services to the public can effective bypass the right for people to be heard?
I fail to see the relevance. No wait - I do. If they're enforcing free speech, that means they can't regulate what a person (or corporation) can say. Or selectively not say of their own volition. Does Freedom of Speech imply that we force people/corporations to say things that they choose not to? Regardless of their motivations? If I run a web-site and there's an article somewhere that says, "China censors nothing!", do I have to provide a link to it despite the fact that I personally think it's biased?
I suspect that it depends on what your market share is, i.e. whether you are a "gatekeeper" or not. If you are just some two bit website that's one of a thousand others then the answer is that you can present whatever point of view you want and ignore others. If, however, you are Google, you handle 95% of all internet searches and you don't agree with, say the US Republican party's point of view so you start purging all links from your search results that represent a Republican point of view that you don't agree with then the game situations is a bit different and should be forced to be more neutral than you would like to be for the public good. I generally can't stand radical Republicans but I'll fight for their right to be heard, I don't have much use for communism either but I also think Commies have a right to be heard. This judge would seem to disagree with that which is IMHO quite amazing.
Not really, because Apple still takes a 30% cut if you buy the subscription as an in-app purchase. This is more about getting a constant stream of money ($10/month) rather than a one-time (or every two or three years) payment of $50 or whatever.
Let's just take a look at this deal. I just bought a 356 subscription and according to the in-app purchasing wizard in the Office 365 suite on my iPad the subscription is $156 per annum. For that you are getting:
Which sounds like a pretty OK deal to me considering the volume of product I'm getting. As far as I can tell there are no temporal usage restrictions on the PC/Mac licenses in this this sub, according to the office 365 community forums multiple users can log into the same account and edit the same document. If that is true than this subscription will cover my office needs, my parents's, my sister's and her husband's and we can split the costs. As for corporate profits.... If Apple is taking 30% then Microsoft is getting $109,8 / 12 = $9,15 per month and they still have to deduct costs and taxes. Mind you, being a corporation, MS, like Apple, Google, IBM and the rest of that ilk probably enjoy considerably lower tax rates than what Joe Six-pack has to contend with. However, MS does have to pay developers, maintain their cloud service data-centers and pay the system administrators of their cloud service department out of that and pay for marketing and other such crap. I'm sure MS makes tons of money off of this stuff but it's not like the profit meter at Microsoft HQ goes Chi-chinggggg! and increments by $9,15 every time they sell an office subscription to an iPad followed by a spontaneous chorus of manic laughter from every MS manager in the known universe over how they are ripping off their customers.
If you're doing professional document editing in a browser, you're insane.
The portability, sharing and collaboration of Gdocs is light years ahead of the others. Nobody I know gives a rats ass about "professional" editing.
You have evidently never done a Bachelor's or Master's Thesis. If you had you'd be familiar with a group of people that places much importance on "professional" editing. Granted, scientists use TEX rather than an office suite but the 'professional' editing of scientific reports, thesis and papers is almost considered as important as the content and there are some very good and obvious reasons for that.
The iPhone UI was rather good, and was Apple's last showing of what it did really well.
A fact that is only emphasised by the fact that Google redesigned their phones and the Android UI from aping BlackBerry to aping the iPhone and it's OS. I'm not sure the iPhone and it's UI is the last time Apple will demonstrate how it does UI and design very well but it is the latest.
What's the difference between a hunter with a drone and a factory fishing vessel with spotter planes? Is it scale? money? Both models are using airborne technology to assist in the gathering of food. If we are going to ban aerial observation, than it should be for all applications and uses of it regardless of how monied the operator is.
Actually using spotter planes for fishing (tuna for example) is forbidden in many places.
This pervasive mentality (shooting wolves from a helicopter) and now this new drone thing is what gives hunters a bad name.
Damn right. Even a high powered rifle with no other technology is a ridiculously one sided advantage when hunting. There are several perfectly practical reasons to go hunting that have nothing to do with entertainment. (food, pests, protection, environment) They even have the gall to call hunting a "sport" and euphemise their bloodlust by calling their kills "harvesting" as if it was no different than planting corn. I'm not quite sure how it is a "sport" if the other team doesn't know they are playing.
I don't have a problem with allowing hunting for practical reasons but most hunters I know (and I know lots of them) are pretty disingenuous about their motives for killing harmless animals. 99% of the time it is for no purpose other then their own amusement. I find that sort of mentality rather disturbing.
Sorry, your biased opinion of hunting aside, it is called harvesting because left to their own devices, and with no other predators available, many hunted species would populate to the point of being unable to feed and then slowly dying of starvation killing off most, if not all, of entire herds. Hunting seasons are used to cull these herds of excess population and provide food and "sport" to humans.
Here's a thought. How about re-introducing natural predators like say ... wolves rather than shooting them from helecopters? Not that I'm against hunting but wolves in particular have been demonized far beyond all sense.
Well said!
There is a big difference between holding a phone vertically at eye hight (=most probably taking a picture) and the diagonal position used to crush candy or communicate via text or do other stuff.
I think it is a sign on the wall that 99% of the criticism is about taking pictures and only 1% about things like distraction and so forth. It is all about consent and not knowing if someone is (not) taking a picture. And even if the wearer is not actively engaged in taking pictures, remote access tools might be able to take over. There is a reason I got the webcam taped off on my laptop...
I just simply fail to see why a webcam strapped to a face is a nice idea.
It's not only about taking pictures and video without consent, it is about the device doing it being connected to the immense data collection machine that is Google, with capabilities to aggregate and correlate, track and face-recognize.
So in a couple of years when the technology is embedded in lapel pins or other subtle wearables, and they are "always on", what do we do, ban jewelry and clothing accessories? This is like horse owners complaining about them new fangled motorized carriages because they are loud, dangerous and the money all goes to Detroit. Its just humans being humans.
Yeah, yeah yeah, cast everybody who wants some privacy as an ignorant Luddite ... It's a cheap shot on your part and he still has a point. Plenty of people are going to be creeped out by Google Glass and the fact that it violates a deeply entrenched social norm probably going to be the greatest adoption hurdle that this device will encounter. It may be that your prediction is correct and that in future nobody will mind having their image beamed to Google's data-centres by an army of Glassholes but I rather doubt it. The more pervasive and especially the more in-your-face the surveillance society gets the more it will piss people off. I'm already beginning to warm up to the idea of following the example of a group of (Dutch IIRC) vigilantes I read about recently who sneak around at night and shoot out CCTV and speeding camera lenses using air guns loaded with glue filled paint-balls.
I am kind of surprised to see that the majority of posts are railing against this phone, mostly over the display resolution being so high. I'm thinking most people never made it past the summary. On top of what the summary lists, it has 3 gigabytes of ram, 32 gigabytes of internal storage, micro SD that can handle 128 gigabyte cards, 5 megapixel front facing camera, 50 (sorta) megapixel rear camera, 3000mAh removable battery. Rapid charging technology - going from 0 to 75% charge on a 3000mAh battery is pretty sweet.
At a $599 retail price point? That's pretty remarkable. The only thing the article does not discuss in the graphics chip set but I'm willing to bet it's nothing to sneeze at.
There were no pictures of the thing in the TFA and no easily visible links so in case anybody wants to know what the thing looks like:
http://en.oppo.com/products/fi...
It's a nice minimalistic design. Dunno why I'd want a 2560 x 1440 pixel resolution in a phone that size but I'd still consider buying one too.
Right or wrong, the reason a large site like Facebook stays large as most people dont want to have to go different places to do what amounts to the same thing.
Would you rather go to 10 friends house each week for 30 minutes each, or everyone hang out at one for the afternoon? Most people would not choose all the running around.
Here's my pet theory at the moment: Facebook stays big because it got a 'critical mass' user base very early and is keeping it through lack of inter-operability with other social networks. If that description sounds a bit like the Microsoft's PC operating system monopoly of yesteryear, that's because it is. This phenomenon also goes by another name: 'vendor lock'. People on Facebook don't have much choice other than to stay on Facebook if they want to enjoy the full spectrum options for interacting with their friends electronically because a huge percentage of 'everybody' is on Facebook and you cannot interact with Google+ users from Facebook so they get left out. If you somehow could force Facebook to be fully interoperable with other social networking sites such that a Google+ user could interact without restrictions with a Facebook user, they could post things to each others timeline, a Facebook user could prune a Google+ users Farmville carrot patches, they could prick and poke each other (or what ever else it is that social media drones spend their time doing) you could soon sit back in an armchair and see Facebook deflate as people defect to a social media site with a better UI, specialist communities more interesting to each individual, etc.....
1. Why are cockpit voices recorded only in the black box? If other data from a plane is constantly being sent for maintenance purposes, while in flight, why do planes not also not relay cockpit voices to some storage system, for just such a situation? CCTV keeps footage for a few hours or a few days, why is this kind of valuable data not also routinely stored?
Streaming material from an aircraft to ground stations would only work reliably over a satellite link which I understand from talking to airline people is expensive but then nowadays they are offering internet on transatlantic flights so it can't be that expenisive. Things like installing CCTV are technically possible but for all manner of reasons including things like: safety assessments, corporate bureaucracy and the fact that aircraft can't be grounded long enough for equipment to be installed for profit reasons (down time, obscene prices of aircraft electronics and other spares) the upgrading of commercial airliners tends to move at a glacial pace. Just for example, there are variants of some Boeing airliner (777 iirc) flying around the world with a bug in their FANS equipment that causes a faulty log-off. This is not a critical issue but it is just bloody annoying for flight control staff around the world. This could be fixed with a simple software update but getting that patch certified, getting an airline bean counter to shell out the money and finally catching the aircraft on the ground long enough to have the patch installed takes a loooooooooooooooooooooooong time.
Of course we don't know that it was suicide. It could just have been an unusually unreasonable highjacker who didn't understand that the 777-200 had shorter range than for example Wikipedia lists because it wasn't fully fueled for the relatively short flight to Beijing.
That's what I was thinking too. This happened to an Ethiopian Airlines flight that was hijacked back in 1996. The hijackers ignored the captains warning that his aircraft's fuel load was insufficient to get them to Australia where the hijackers wanted to go and eventually he was forced to ditch the aircraft in the sea off the Comoros Islands, due to fuel starvation. He would have probably stood a good chance of pulling off a near textbook belly-landing if one of the hijackers hadn't started wrestling with him for the controls seconds before the aircraft touched down on the water which caused one of the engines to touch the water too soon so the machine broke up. Some 125 out of 175 passengers and crew were killed but more would have died if the co-pilot hadn't kept the hijackers off the captains back for most of the landing. It was a pretty impressive feat of airmanship considering the circumstances.
We have been able to clone several species already. That's not the problem. The problem is that you need a surrogate mother for the embryo and the closest we have is the African elephant, which separated from the mammoth a long time ago. From TFA it seems they are already working on cross-species clones but they are still a long way off.
That may seem like a victory but it's really just scratching the surface. Once you have cloned a mammoth what then? To establish a viable population you need genetic diversity, a minimum founder population of 50-100 individuals that should preferably be as distantly related as possible. The up side of a project like this is that if we can solve the problem do cloning a mammoth it we can start harvesting the DNA of many individuals of species like tigers and rhinos that are about to be become extinct thanks hedonistic nouveau rich assholes with more money than sense who keep poachers and exotic pet traders in business. Then, at a later date when Gene Roddenberry's vision has come true and mankind has grown up (not holding my breath) we will be able to recreate viable populations.
If mammoths were wiped out by climate change, then resurrecting the species in a modern climate would be bringing it into an environment that it was not evolved to handle.
Not only does that seem rather pointless, but it also strikes me as arguably sounding like animal cruelty. I'd suggest that the scientific discoveries we might make by doing this may be heavily outweighed by the ethical considerations involved.
This matter really feels one of those times when scientists should be reminding themselves that just because we *CAN* do something does not necessarily mean that we *SHOULD*.
Mammoths survived until at least 2500 years ago on Wrangel island where that particular population was probably wiped out by modern humans so at least the habitat question is a non issue.
If Google didn't want children to use their devices, why are they approving apps specifically targeted at children? This is a money-grab from Google, pure and simple.
How does that saying go again? Never ascribe malice to that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.
It's well-established by now that one of the most significant factors in destroying the lives of the unskilled and semi-skilled workers across the country has been the influx of similar immigrants from around the world. Legal versus illegal, its immaterial. The invisible hand doesn't give a damn whether they hold a green card or not and giving legal status to the illegals won't suddenly drive wages up because their mere presence in the economy provides at least implicit price competition.
Here's how you enact a sensible immigration policy. You crack down on the employers of illegals such that no one will hire them. You then offer a contingent amnesty to the illegals that allows them to come forward and face no charges if they leave the country of their own volition, and you even let them keep all of the money and property they've earned if they self-deport. Then, you only allow immigrants with provable skills to immigrate as singles or with their immediate family if they're married with children. None of this "let's bring the whole extended family" over. Grandma, the aunts and uncles and cousins have no business piggybacking on that green card. That's just a recipe for waking up one day and finding a large ethnic enclave in an American city (oh wait, that's precisely what's happened in many areas because of this, silly me).
Obligatory: http://content.time.com/time/c...
Not that your suggestions are terribly unreasonable but you are kind of taking an axe (or chainsaw) to the USA's "Nation of immigrants" founding epic.