Don't think it's too likely in the near future though. They now have the S4 Play Edition so I'm not sure that Samsung will be ditching andoid any time soon. I think they could make a go at it but without the Play ecosystem they'd basically be back to square one and be back with BlackBerry and Windows Phone for apps.
What? that Samsung will end it's symbiotic relationship with Google and turn it into an antagonistic one by becoming a Google rival? Isn't that what Google did to Apple? They abandoned their symbiotic relationship with Apple and used Eric Schmidt's position as an Apple board member to become a competitor in the Mobile market. Why shouldn't Samsung take that lesson to heart, realise that to a large extent Android's success is the same thing as the success of Samsung products and leverage that position to hijack Android. If they are really are the driving force behind Android profits then they can simply fork Android, they can easily set up their own rival to the Play ecosystem and marginalise who'd be stuck with a fragmented landscape of struggling Android device manufacturers.
The irony is that VLC was pulled from the iTunes store last time not by evil Sith lord apprentices at Apple, not at the behest of a evil DRM purveyor, nor was it pulled due to threats by the RIAA or MPAA, it was removed at the insistence of a VLC developer because he felt that the GNU general public license conflicted with the iTunes App Store license. Apple was apparently not bothered by this until this guy raised a stink about perceived GPL violations, so just this once the evil corporate weasels seem to be blameless. Perhaps this sorry saga also explains the license changes?
A stillsuit in the middle of the ocean would be idiotic. Why capture a thimbleful of salty, oily sweat when there is an unlimited supply of seawater around you? Even if it is more saline, there's actually enough of it to be of use. Aside from hand cranked purifiers, there are solar powered, and gravity powered units. There are probably even wind and wave powered. I saw a unit on a science show back in the 1970s that looked like an inner tube with a clear plastic cone attached to it. You inflated it, set it afloat, and the sun did all the work. Heck, a properly designed life raft can be its own desalinator.
Firstly who says you can't purify seawater with a still suit? You could engineer it to absorb water through the outer surface which is what fish do although that would make it more of a 'fish-suit'. Secondly a still-suit/fish-suit would have a whole lot more surface area from which to generate energy than a solar panel suspended on the outside of your boat which is easily damaged or lost, you take a still-suit/fish-suit with you wherever you go and you could use excess energy to power other stuff such as a built in emergency beacon. As for inflatable solar stills, I have talked to people who actually tried to use them and the general consensus was that when they work you get briny water and not a lot of it either. Plus the moment your boat starts to rock or the waves get too big you are shit out of luck. I'm not saying regular purifiers don't work (some of the powered ones probably do work acceptably well) but a wearable water purifier would be pretty convenient especially if you your ship sinks and you don't make it to the lifeboat. Keep in mind that sailors in the North Atlantic have been issued with survival suits for years now that prolong your life expectancy in freezing arctic water from minutes to hours or even days and fitting them with a built in purifier is a pretty natural upgrade. Thirdly we are talking about semi science fiction tech here, not religion. Don't take this too seriously
Are you fucking kidding me? Somebody develops a stillsuit and you think of Waterworld? This site isn't what it used to be.
Are you sure about that? Waterworld was a saltwater world, as in: water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. People have died of thirst in the middle of a the earth's oceans for lack of energy efficient water purification equipment so effectively you would have a pretty good use case for a stillsuit in Waterworld. Perhaps not quite as much as you would have on Arrakis but a stillsuit could nevertheless come in handy as emergency equipment since sweat is easier to recycle than seawater due to it being less saline (9PPT vs 35PPT) meaning that filters would probably last longer. A stillsuit would be even more useful if the material the stillsuit was made of also functioned as a big wearable solar cell to power the purifier since, according to several survival gurus on the various science channels, hand powered water purifiers actually cause you to lose more water than you gain by using such a device. Wearing the purifier and getting free energy by wearing it would be pretty neat.
Virtualbox is GPLed free software. Oracle owns the domain and trademark, so they could force everyone to change the name, and they could use FUD to scare people off. But they cannot kill it. It would be like their efforts to kill MySQL and OpenOffice. Those projects were set back some, and renamed, but they live on.
I sure as hell hope so I have over a dozen VirtualBox VMs that I use for development and I am in no mood to migrate.
All I can see is yet another smartphone. Nothing in that video made me want to run out and buy one of these things. These smartphones are way more powerful than I need them to be which has resulted in ridiculous prices.
I've always believed that one should not ever brandish a firearm in a confrontation unless they're prepared to use it to cause harm.
Warning shot? No. If you think you can fire a warning shot and "scare someone away," then you've still got other less-lethal methods of handling the situation. (And if nothing else, it wastes ammunition.)
Drawing a firearm is the very last resort. And once you've drawn that weapon weapon, always fire at the person you are in confrontation with (with intent to, you know, actually hit them) -- not in random directions.
(The reason: If you don't intend to shoot the person, don't be waving a gun around. It isn't safe. A gun is not a threat, nor is it a scare tactic. It's a goddamn killing machine. Either use it properly and swiftly, or leave it alone.)
Centuries ago one of the Tokugawa Shoguns commented that if a Samurai had to draw his sword to resolve a situation he had done something wrong somewhere along the way. What he meant by that is that a samurai sword much like a Police officer's gun is a symbol of authority as much as anything else and that if words and the authority of rank/position were not enough to resolve a situation the next step is to subtly signal that using your sword/gun is an option if you are forced to. You see Police officers do this all the time if they feel a situation is escalating. First they try talking in a calm conciliatory voice, if the subject gets more violent they will often point their left arm towards the subject warn them and possibly eventually put their right hand on their weapon, the weapon is only drawn and lethal force is only used as last resort. Cops are trained pretty relentlessly not to draw their weapon unless the situation is about to spiral completely out of control and they will try to use non lethal methods like pepperspray/mace or physical force in preference to drawing their sidearm if it is at all possible. You don't default to shoving a gun in people's face which is a very common rookie mistake and one you'd expect from poorly trained hobby-cops like neighborhood watch people. Any neighborhood watch that is allowed to carry guns should be subjected to the exact same training as police, and treated as a kind of 'police reserve' equivalent of the armed forces reserves.
I dont understand the problems that people have with it. I spent an hours learning it, I kept an open mind and ended up really liking it.
That said - 90% of what I do requires a shell so maybe Im missing something....
No, there is nothing you are missing I don't get the upheaval over Gnome 3 either. Some people just can't stand anything changing and there is a certain small subset that group that likes to kill time by searching for crap to get angry over and make a lot of noise about it. The rest of the Gnome 2 traditionalists have simply realised that there is a growing collection of (how many is it now?) Gnome 2 forks out there and they are only a yum/apt-get away. Mate for example is now at version 1.6 and there is a Linux Mint LiveDVD that comes preinstalled with it.
So, how did bugging the EU office in DC ward of terrorists? Do you flip open the "good citizen manual" and invoke the next boogeyman on the list to explain that one away?
That's pretty much business as usual, spying like that has been going on for centuries and the US is not doing anytying especially unusual. While embasies are theoretically off limits they do get penetrated and the US has bugged embassies before, even those of it's allies. Most embasies have a faraday cage in the cellar where sensitive discussions get held and most offices get swept for bugs regularly. Even mildly sensitive phonecalls do not get made anywhere near a window and anything down to mundane items like laser printers and photocopiers are either imported from a secure source or if they are bought locally they are examined back to front to make sure they haven't been interfered with. That is to say if the country in question takes it's security seriously. Personally, if I was the EU, I would not trust Windows or Apple PC's nor would I trust Blackberry, Windows Phone, iOS and Android devices, except Linux/Android devices made by trusted European manufacturers and preloaded with a OS'es whose entire source code had been vetted line for line. If you are conducting sensitive negotiations you assume you are being watched, that every conversation is possibly bugged, that opposition's people are trying to bribe/blackmail your staff, that every transmission is intercepted and when you sweep for bugs you bring in your own people from Berlin, London, Paris, Washington or in this case from Bruxelles and you never ever use local specialists for anything you don't want the opposing party to know.
Except for, you know, the public. The general public had no idea how ridiculous the surveillance was. I think everyone assumed there was some surveillance going on... but capturing everything? Really? At the tune of 80 billion a year? That money could go towards curing cancer or heart disease and they'd save a lot more lives than they ever will preventing the occasional terrorist attack, and it's doubtful they've actually prevented anything give that in most cases the perpetrators couldn't even find weapons or explosives without the undercover FBI agents offering to sell them the stuff.
It's also telling the as soon as a government starts complaining about what the US is doing, their own surveillance programs are revealed. The US is clearly involved in a heavy game of public distraction. The medias pretty much dropped this story, likely at their request, and can conveniently cover what all the other countries are doing. It's staggering that these actions are being presented in any way that is even remotely considered acceptable. All of this is completely unconstitutional, government officials including the president (past and present) should be facing prison time.
Come on, the NSA have just about complete access to the internet backbone, they were building datacenters and not even hiding it. There has been a wikipedia article on the one in Utah since 2011 and you could follow it's progress on Google maps courtesy of the NSA it self. Your tax dollars at work. What did everybody think the NSA is doing with facilities like this? It's not hard, 1+1=2, massive datacenter + complete access to internet backbone = massive SIGINT operation.
The silliest premise is that some blogger knows more about the issues with different chip fabs than Apple does. For that blogger to say Apple made a mistake, before we've seen any results from the deal? Stupid. Simply click bait.
Gnome 3.x is quite good these days, except one needs to install the extension to get sane ALT-TAB behavior. These days I prefer Gnome 3.x over anything else.
Ditto, I also install the 'Click Fix' extension that allows you to start a new window by clicking on it in the activity bar instead the default behaviour of bringing the last used window into focus. I also had to fire up tweak tool (or was it dconf-editor?) to enable logging off. It's amazing how much drama some people have managed to conjure up over Gnome 3. Those who don't like it don't have to use it.
Real adblock that stops unnecessary downloads makes more performance difference at this point, than any sort of rendering engine chances. It has the nice side effect of limiting how much tracking of you goes on too.
You mean like the size of the SSD and the RAM makes more of a difference in the long term usability of your laptop than whether it has an 1,7 or 1,8 GHz Core i5 CPU? That still does not stop people from trying to wring a 40% discount out of the fact that the thing 'only' has the 1,7 GHz CPU when you try to sell it.
Tapping geothermal energy cools the planet's core. If it cools too much, it will solidify, and stop moving. That will rob the planet of its magnetic field, which in turn will allow solar winds to blow our atmosphere right out into the void of space, and asphyxiate us all.
Just sayin'.
Haha, very funny. The fact that we will be siphoning a tiny amount of energy off the planet's core still soes not make geothermal a resource you can use without regard for the consequences. Most geothermal plants today tap superheated water from deposits deep in the ground. Tapping them is the same as tapping any aquifer. You can overdo it like the Americans are doing when they grow crops, fill private swimming pools and water lawns in bone dry desert regions with water from aquifers laid down during the last ice age. Aquifers that are being drained at a far higher rate than they are being replenished.
Um, not really, Apple needs Samsung, Samsung doesn't need apple. Samsung is one few companies that can keep the demand apple has for chips in its phones. Going from company size, Samsung is much larger and worth a lot more considering they make so many products where as Apple 95-98% of their profits are from 2 product's
Samsung's electronics division is a mini corporation within the Samsung empire that cares more about what Apple is doing than what most of the rest of the Samsung empire is doing. At the moment Samsung is making a bundle off of every iPhone, iPad and iPod sold by Apple on top of what they are making from their own like of tablets and smartphones and that has to count as a pretty nice win-win situation. I can't imagine that the bean counters at Samsung are happy at the prospect of a major smartphone and tablet computer manufacturer who commands 20% of the smartphone market and 40% of the tablet computer market (and the lucrative high end segments of those markets at that), will in future be spending money that previously flowed into Samsung 's coffers with Samsung's competitors.
resemble != photocopy... the US obsession with spying on absolutely everybody including their own citizenry is starting to cause the NSA/CIA/etc. to make the Soviet KGB and the East German Stasi look like amateurs by comparison and that is quite an achievement. There were places you could get away from the KGB/Stasi without divorcing yourself from modern industrialised society. There is effectively no place on the planet where the US can't spy on you except perhaps if you move to the Amazon, the Siberian tundra, the Rocky Mountains or the Australian outback, build a little hut and abstain from using any electronic communication devices.
Tabarrok seems to tacitly assume that innovation can be regulated via legislation. It seems to me that this non-proven, basic assumption has been proven wrong more than once, e.g. during the few years preceding the internet bubble of the '90s. The tip of the curve, then and there, lay completely to the left. ( Where IMHO it should be, but I am trying to separate facts from discussion from personal opinion here. )
Where in the world do you get that idea from?
From TFA, as in these lines:
So, we’ve constructed the patent system: people have a 17 year exclusive right to such public goods. That is, we’ve made them excludable by law
I am not necessarily of the "school that believes that patent protection is always bad". I am of the school that believes that patent protection is, sometimes, a necessary evil, and bad at all other times.
For the benefit of those who did not read TFA: What he is saying is that patent protection can boost innovation but if that protection is too great the patents get used as a weapon to bash competitors with the result that there is a net drop in innovation. Furthermore he is arguing that we have passed well beyond the point where patent protection is a demotivating influence on innovation so in that sense you actually agree with him. One only has to look at his curve to see this:
In that graph, if you move too far to the left and you have no patent protection at all which stifles innovation, move too far to the right and have excessive patent protection also stifles innovation, stay somewhere in the middle and patent protection will actually boost innovation above the two extremes. You seem to be mostly arguing for the greatest innovation being achieved at a point that is very close to the left hand extreme. I'm not saying he is right in every detail but the basic idea of applying the Laffer tax revenue curve to innovation seems sound. Too much red tape around patents is just as detrimental to innovation as overtaxation is to state revenue. Likewise too little patent protection is just as likely to stifle innovation as excessive tax cuts are likely to screw up state finances.
As regards the legal system he eventually suggests that it may not be the patent system that is at fault so much as the legal system it self: Knowledge is a public good and thus in a pure free market we think that too little of it will be produced. Too strong a protection and again too little will be produced.
These are the sorts of thorny questions that we instituted government to deal with for us. Hands up everyone who thinks that our current politicians are going to get this necessary balance right? Quite: it might be that it’s not so much the patent system which is not fit for purpose as the legislative.
Basically he is hypothesising here that we can move ourselves further to the left on his Tabarrok curve mostly (though presumably not exclusively) by legal reform rather than patent reform. I am no lawyer but it seems pretty obvious to me that fixing the legal system such that patent trolling by two bit law firms in East Texas and general patent warfare by major corporations were made significantly harder than it currently is, might be a good idea. In fact the whole issue of anti-competitive and SLAPP lawsuits and the power they give people with lots of money to spend to extort less wealthy people/organisations/companies is something that needs urgent fixing.
I know some European expatriates who are totally disinterested in going back. I can't really say whether the US or France/Germany are worse, but I can say it's not simple and clear-cut. It depends on what matters to you.
I know a number of American expats in Europe who have no interest in going back so I suppose it evens out.
Yes, all free... unless your opinions on the history of WWII differ from the "official version". Or if you are muslim, and want to wear observant clothing. Or if you have a reason to defend yourself. Etc.
I'm not quite sure whether you are trying to argue that these countries are as free as the USA or that they are less free because some of them discriminate against observant moslems. Just keep in mind that while European conservatives have made picking on observant moslems their new favourite hobby, things are not that different int the USA now are they? If you are an observant moslem in the USA and you want to build a mosque in a place that offends Christian fundamentalists you get jumped on by the right wing press... or... if you show yourself in public wearing at T-shirt with the word 'Intifada' on it (which is a pretty generic word that covers more than 'rising up against Israeli occupation') you get your name dragged through the mud in the entire right wing press and lose your job. If you are a Sikh you risk getting your head blown off by a basket case with a gun who mistakes you for an "Islamist Mooolsem". If you are a Gay person in the USA (and a number of European countries for that matter) you are refused the right to marry because your sexual orientation is offensive to Christian fundamentalists. In the USA freedom of speech is for everybody except people with a 'librul bias' (according to Fox News). The list goes on... and on.... Either way, both the contention that The USA is somehow more free or that it is less free than the countries in that list is pretty debatable. All of those countries offer their citizens strong assurances of practical liberties, but they also have their own share of reactionary bigots of all denominations.
Since these planes won't suffer from metal fatigue like planes made out of aluminum, that means that they'll last longer?
Metal aircraft don't necessarily have to suffer so badly from metal fatigue that they have to be replaced inside of 15-20 years. Fatigue depends on usage patterns and there are 747 still flying after 30 years of regular use and with good maintenance should be able to last at least the better part of another decade. USAF engineering studies project that their B-52 fleet would not reach the fatigue limits of it's wing structure until the 2040s but keep in mind these B-52s do not get flow as hard as the 747. The B-52s that are now in service left the factory in the mid 1960s. An American airforce veteran I met a few years ago told me that there are actually cases of the third generation of soldiers from a military family flying B-52s. Dunno if that's true but theoretically it sure could be. Just about the only criticism you can throw at the B-52 is that it could do with an upgrade to more modern fuel efficient engines which Boeing estimated would increase it's already impressive loiter capability by 46%.
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Don't think it's too likely in the near future though. They now have the S4 Play Edition so I'm not sure that Samsung will be ditching andoid any time soon. I think they could make a go at it but without the Play ecosystem they'd basically be back to square one and be back with BlackBerry and Windows Phone for apps.
What? that Samsung will end it's symbiotic relationship with Google and turn it into an antagonistic one by becoming a Google rival? Isn't that what Google did to Apple? They abandoned their symbiotic relationship with Apple and used Eric Schmidt's position as an Apple board member to become a competitor in the Mobile market. Why shouldn't Samsung take that lesson to heart, realise that to a large extent Android's success is the same thing as the success of Samsung products and leverage that position to hijack Android. If they are really are the driving force behind Android profits then they can simply fork Android, they can easily set up their own rival to the Play ecosystem and marginalise who'd be stuck with a fragmented landscape of struggling Android device manufacturers.
how long before HBO asks apple to take it down?
The irony is that VLC was pulled from the iTunes store last time not by evil Sith lord apprentices at Apple, not at the behest of a evil DRM purveyor, nor was it pulled due to threats by the RIAA or MPAA, it was removed at the insistence of a VLC developer because he felt that the GNU general public license conflicted with the iTunes App Store license. Apple was apparently not bothered by this until this guy raised a stink about perceived GPL violations, so just this once the evil corporate weasels seem to be blameless. Perhaps this sorry saga also explains the license changes?
A stillsuit in the middle of the ocean would be idiotic. Why capture a thimbleful of salty, oily sweat when there is an unlimited supply of seawater around you? Even if it is more saline, there's actually enough of it to be of use. Aside from hand cranked purifiers, there are solar powered, and gravity powered units. There are probably even wind and wave powered. I saw a unit on a science show back in the 1970s that looked like an inner tube with a clear plastic cone attached to it. You inflated it, set it afloat, and the sun did all the work. Heck, a properly designed life raft can be its own desalinator.
Firstly who says you can't purify seawater with a still suit? You could engineer it to absorb water through the outer surface which is what fish do although that would make it more of a 'fish-suit'. Secondly a still-suit/fish-suit would have a whole lot more surface area from which to generate energy than a solar panel suspended on the outside of your boat which is easily damaged or lost, you take a still-suit/fish-suit with you wherever you go and you could use excess energy to power other stuff such as a built in emergency beacon. As for inflatable solar stills, I have talked to people who actually tried to use them and the general consensus was that when they work you get briny water and not a lot of it either. Plus the moment your boat starts to rock or the waves get too big you are shit out of luck. I'm not saying regular purifiers don't work (some of the powered ones probably do work acceptably well) but a wearable water purifier would be pretty convenient especially if you your ship sinks and you don't make it to the lifeboat. Keep in mind that sailors in the North Atlantic have been issued with survival suits for years now that prolong your life expectancy in freezing arctic water from minutes to hours or even days and fitting them with a built in purifier is a pretty natural upgrade. Thirdly we are talking about semi science fiction tech here, not religion. Don't take this too seriously
Are you fucking kidding me? Somebody develops a stillsuit and you think of Waterworld? This site isn't what it used to be.
Are you sure about that? Waterworld was a saltwater world, as in: water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. People have died of thirst in the middle of a the earth's oceans for lack of energy efficient water purification equipment so effectively you would have a pretty good use case for a stillsuit in Waterworld. Perhaps not quite as much as you would have on Arrakis but a stillsuit could nevertheless come in handy as emergency equipment since sweat is easier to recycle than seawater due to it being less saline (9PPT vs 35PPT) meaning that filters would probably last longer. A stillsuit would be even more useful if the material the stillsuit was made of also functioned as a big wearable solar cell to power the purifier since, according to several survival gurus on the various science channels, hand powered water purifiers actually cause you to lose more water than you gain by using such a device. Wearing the purifier and getting free energy by wearing it would be pretty neat.
For now.
Virtualbox is GPLed free software. Oracle owns the domain and trademark, so they could force everyone to change the name, and they could use FUD to scare people off. But they cannot kill it. It would be like their efforts to kill MySQL and OpenOffice. Those projects were set back some, and renamed, but they live on.
I sure as hell hope so I have over a dozen VirtualBox VMs that I use for development and I am in no mood to migrate.
All I can see is yet another smartphone. Nothing in that video made me want to run out and buy one of these things. These smartphones are way more powerful than I need them to be which has resulted in ridiculous prices.
I've always believed that one should not ever brandish a firearm in a confrontation unless they're prepared to use it to cause harm.
Warning shot? No. If you think you can fire a warning shot and "scare someone away," then you've still got other less-lethal methods of handling the situation. (And if nothing else, it wastes ammunition.)
Drawing a firearm is the very last resort. And once you've drawn that weapon weapon, always fire at the person you are in confrontation with (with intent to, you know, actually hit them) -- not in random directions.
(The reason: If you don't intend to shoot the person, don't be waving a gun around. It isn't safe. A gun is not a threat, nor is it a scare tactic. It's a goddamn killing machine. Either use it properly and swiftly, or leave it alone.)
Centuries ago one of the Tokugawa Shoguns commented that if a Samurai had to draw his sword to resolve a situation he had done something wrong somewhere along the way. What he meant by that is that a samurai sword much like a Police officer's gun is a symbol of authority as much as anything else and that if words and the authority of rank/position were not enough to resolve a situation the next step is to subtly signal that using your sword/gun is an option if you are forced to. You see Police officers do this all the time if they feel a situation is escalating. First they try talking in a calm conciliatory voice, if the subject gets more violent they will often point their left arm towards the subject warn them and possibly eventually put their right hand on their weapon, the weapon is only drawn and lethal force is only used as last resort. Cops are trained pretty relentlessly not to draw their weapon unless the situation is about to spiral completely out of control and they will try to use non lethal methods like pepperspray/mace or physical force in preference to drawing their sidearm if it is at all possible. You don't default to shoving a gun in people's face which is a very common rookie mistake and one you'd expect from poorly trained hobby-cops like neighborhood watch people. Any neighborhood watch that is allowed to carry guns should be subjected to the exact same training as police, and treated as a kind of 'police reserve' equivalent of the armed forces reserves.
I dont understand the problems that people have with it. I spent an hours learning it, I kept an open mind and ended up really liking it.
That said - 90% of what I do requires a shell so maybe Im missing something....
No, there is nothing you are missing I don't get the upheaval over Gnome 3 either. Some people just can't stand anything changing and there is a certain small subset that group that likes to kill time by searching for crap to get angry over and make a lot of noise about it. The rest of the Gnome 2 traditionalists have simply realised that there is a growing collection of (how many is it now?) Gnome 2 forks out there and they are only a yum/apt-get away. Mate for example is now at version 1.6 and there is a Linux Mint LiveDVD that comes preinstalled with it.
Does this sound like boasting to anyone else? It's like a more modern version of having the press watch an explosion of their latest bomb.
It sounds like obscurity really is the only security.
So, how did bugging the EU office in DC ward of terrorists? Do you flip open the "good citizen manual" and invoke the next boogeyman on the list to explain that one away?
That's pretty much business as usual, spying like that has been going on for centuries and the US is not doing anytying especially unusual. While embasies are theoretically off limits they do get penetrated and the US has bugged embassies before, even those of it's allies. Most embasies have a faraday cage in the cellar where sensitive discussions get held and most offices get swept for bugs regularly. Even mildly sensitive phonecalls do not get made anywhere near a window and anything down to mundane items like laser printers and photocopiers are either imported from a secure source or if they are bought locally they are examined back to front to make sure they haven't been interfered with. That is to say if the country in question takes it's security seriously. Personally, if I was the EU, I would not trust Windows or Apple PC's nor would I trust Blackberry, Windows Phone, iOS and Android devices, except Linux/Android devices made by trusted European manufacturers and preloaded with a OS'es whose entire source code had been vetted line for line. If you are conducting sensitive negotiations you assume you are being watched, that every conversation is possibly bugged, that opposition's people are trying to bribe/blackmail your staff, that every transmission is intercepted and when you sweep for bugs you bring in your own people from Berlin, London, Paris, Washington or in this case from Bruxelles and you never ever use local specialists for anything you don't want the opposing party to know.
Except for, you know, the public. The general public had no idea how ridiculous the surveillance was. I think everyone assumed there was some surveillance going on... but capturing everything? Really? At the tune of 80 billion a year? That money could go towards curing cancer or heart disease and they'd save a lot more lives than they ever will preventing the occasional terrorist attack, and it's doubtful they've actually prevented anything give that in most cases the perpetrators couldn't even find weapons or explosives without the undercover FBI agents offering to sell them the stuff.
It's also telling the as soon as a government starts complaining about what the US is doing, their own surveillance programs are revealed. The US is clearly involved in a heavy game of public distraction. The medias pretty much dropped this story, likely at their request, and can conveniently cover what all the other countries are doing. It's staggering that these actions are being presented in any way that is even remotely considered acceptable. All of this is completely unconstitutional, government officials including the president (past and present) should be facing prison time.
Come on, the NSA have just about complete access to the internet backbone, they were building datacenters and not even hiding it. There has been a wikipedia article on the one in Utah since 2011 and you could follow it's progress on Google maps courtesy of the NSA it self. Your tax dollars at work. What did everybody think the NSA is doing with facilities like this? It's not hard, 1+1=2, massive datacenter + complete access to internet backbone = massive SIGINT operation.
The silliest premise is that some blogger knows more about the issues with different chip fabs than Apple does. For that blogger to say Apple made a mistake, before we've seen any results from the deal? Stupid. Simply click bait.
Yes, click-bait, and we both fell for it ....
has been handpicked!!
Wonder what he's getting under the table for his "selfless sacrifice"?
The NSA will be removing the surveillance devices in his bedroom and the toiletbowl camera in his bathroom.
(obviously)
Then why the hell are you using goto statements?
Gnome 3.x is quite good these days, except one needs to install the extension to get sane ALT-TAB behavior.
These days I prefer Gnome 3.x over anything else.
Ditto, I also install the 'Click Fix' extension that allows you to start a new window by clicking on it in the activity bar instead the default behaviour of bringing the last used window into focus. I also had to fire up tweak tool (or was it dconf-editor?) to enable logging off. It's amazing how much drama some people have managed to conjure up over Gnome 3. Those who don't like it don't have to use it.
Real adblock that stops unnecessary downloads makes more performance difference at this point, than any sort of rendering engine chances. It has the nice side effect of limiting how much tracking of you goes on too.
You mean like the size of the SSD and the RAM makes more of a difference in the long term usability of your laptop than whether it has an 1,7 or 1,8 GHz Core i5 CPU? That still does not stop people from trying to wring a 40% discount out of the fact that the thing 'only' has the 1,7 GHz CPU when you try to sell it.
Tapping geothermal energy cools the planet's core. If it cools too much, it will solidify, and stop moving. That will rob the planet of its magnetic field, which in turn will allow solar winds to blow our atmosphere right out into the void of space, and asphyxiate us all.
Just sayin'.
Haha, very funny. The fact that we will be siphoning a tiny amount of energy off the planet's core still soes not make geothermal a resource you can use without regard for the consequences. Most geothermal plants today tap superheated water from deposits deep in the ground. Tapping them is the same as tapping any aquifer. You can overdo it like the Americans are doing when they grow crops, fill private swimming pools and water lawns in bone dry desert regions with water from aquifers laid down during the last ice age. Aquifers that are being drained at a far higher rate than they are being replenished.
Um, not really, Apple needs Samsung, Samsung doesn't need apple. Samsung is one few companies that can keep the demand apple has for chips in its phones. Going from company size, Samsung is much larger and worth a lot more considering they make so many products where as Apple 95-98% of their profits are from 2 product's
Samsung's electronics division is a mini corporation within the Samsung empire that cares more about what Apple is doing than what most of the rest of the Samsung empire is doing. At the moment Samsung is making a bundle off of every iPhone, iPad and iPod sold by Apple on top of what they are making from their own like of tablets and smartphones and that has to count as a pretty nice win-win situation. I can't imagine that the bean counters at Samsung are happy at the prospect of a major smartphone and tablet computer manufacturer who commands 20% of the smartphone market and 40% of the tablet computer market (and the lucrative high end segments of those markets at that), will in future be spending money that previously flowed into Samsung 's coffers with Samsung's competitors.
The only reasonable explanation for someone believing that the US resembles the USSR is nearly total ignorance of Soviet history.
The Soviet Story (2008)
A Portrait of Stalin: Secret Police
Katyn massacre
resemble != photocopy ... the US obsession with spying on absolutely everybody including their own citizenry is starting to cause the NSA/CIA/etc. to make the Soviet KGB and the East German Stasi look like amateurs by comparison and that is quite an achievement. There were places you could get away from the KGB/Stasi without divorcing yourself from modern industrialised society. There is effectively no place on the planet where the US can't spy on you except perhaps if you move to the Amazon, the Siberian tundra, the Rocky Mountains or the Australian outback, build a little hut and abstain from using any electronic communication devices.
When in doubt, copy nature.
Tabarrok seems to tacitly assume that innovation can be regulated via legislation. It seems to me that this non-proven, basic assumption has been proven wrong more than once, e.g. during the few years preceding the internet bubble of the '90s. The tip of the curve, then and there, lay completely to the left. ( Where IMHO it should be, but I am trying to separate facts from discussion from personal opinion here. )
Where in the world do you get that idea from?
From TFA, as in these lines:
So, we’ve constructed the patent system: people have a 17 year exclusive right to such public goods. That is, we’ve made them excludable by law
I am not necessarily of the "school that believes that patent protection is always bad". I am of the school that believes that patent protection is, sometimes, a necessary evil, and bad at all other times.
For the benefit of those who did not read TFA: What he is saying is that patent protection can boost innovation but if that protection is too great the patents get used as a weapon to bash competitors with the result that there is a net drop in innovation. Furthermore he is arguing that we have passed well beyond the point where patent protection is a demotivating influence on innovation so in that sense you actually agree with him. One only has to look at his curve to see this:
http://b-i.forbesimg.com/timworstall/files/2013/06/tabarrokcurve.png
In that graph, if you move too far to the left and you have no patent protection at all which stifles innovation, move too far to the right and have excessive patent protection also stifles innovation, stay somewhere in the middle and patent protection will actually boost innovation above the two extremes. You seem to be mostly arguing for the greatest innovation being achieved at a point that is very close to the left hand extreme. I'm not saying he is right in every detail but the basic idea of applying the Laffer tax revenue curve to innovation seems sound. Too much red tape around patents is just as detrimental to innovation as overtaxation is to state revenue. Likewise too little patent protection is just as likely to stifle innovation as excessive tax cuts are likely to screw up state finances.
As regards the legal system he eventually suggests that it may not be the patent system that is at fault so much as the legal system it self:
Knowledge is a public good and thus in a pure free market we think that too little of it will be produced. Too strong a protection and again too little will be produced.
These are the sorts of thorny questions that we instituted government to deal with for us. Hands up everyone who thinks that our current politicians are going to get this necessary balance right? Quite: it might be that it’s not so much the patent system which is not fit for purpose as the legislative.
Basically he is hypothesising here that we can move ourselves further to the left on his Tabarrok curve mostly (though presumably not exclusively) by legal reform rather than patent reform. I am no lawyer but it seems pretty obvious to me that fixing the legal system such that patent trolling by two bit law firms in East Texas and general patent warfare by major corporations were made significantly harder than it currently is, might be a good idea. In fact the whole issue of anti-competitive and SLAPP lawsuits and the power they give people with lots of money to spend to extort less wealthy people/organisations/companies is something that needs urgent fixing.
The rest of you can burn in Hell if you want, but in THIS house, we stick to Father Steve's teachings.
The zookeeper says: Please don't feed the trolls.
I know some European expatriates who are totally disinterested in going back. I can't really say whether the US or France/Germany are worse, but I can say it's not simple and clear-cut. It depends on what matters to you.
I know a number of American expats in Europe who have no interest in going back so I suppose it evens out.
Err.. Netherlands? Switzerland? Norway? Finland? Iceland? Sweden? Denmark? Germany? France? Portugal? Slovenia? Ireland? Australia? New Zealand? Canada?
Yes, all free ... unless your opinions on the history of WWII differ from the "official version". Or if you are muslim, and want to wear observant clothing. Or if you have a reason to defend yourself. Etc.
I'm not quite sure whether you are trying to argue that these countries are as free as the USA or that they are less free because some of them discriminate against observant moslems. Just keep in mind that while European conservatives have made picking on observant moslems their new favourite hobby, things are not that different int the USA now are they? If you are an observant moslem in the USA and you want to build a mosque in a place that offends Christian fundamentalists you get jumped on by the right wing press... or... if you show yourself in public wearing at T-shirt with the word 'Intifada' on it (which is a pretty generic word that covers more than 'rising up against Israeli occupation') you get your name dragged through the mud in the entire right wing press and lose your job. If you are a Sikh you risk getting your head blown off by a basket case with a gun who mistakes you for an "Islamist Mooolsem". If you are a Gay person in the USA (and a number of European countries for that matter) you are refused the right to marry because your sexual orientation is offensive to Christian fundamentalists. In the USA freedom of speech is for everybody except people with a 'librul bias' (according to Fox News). The list goes on... and on.... Either way, both the contention that The USA is somehow more free or that it is less free than the countries in that list is pretty debatable. All of those countries offer their citizens strong assurances of practical liberties, but they also have their own share of reactionary bigots of all denominations.
These planes will still be flying in the 2030s.
Since these planes won't suffer from metal fatigue like planes made out of aluminum, that means that they'll last longer?
Metal aircraft don't necessarily have to suffer so badly from metal fatigue that they have to be replaced inside of 15-20 years. Fatigue depends on usage patterns and there are 747 still flying after 30 years of regular use and with good maintenance should be able to last at least the better part of another decade. USAF engineering studies project that their B-52 fleet would not reach the fatigue limits of it's wing structure until the 2040s but keep in mind these B-52s do not get flow as hard as the 747. The B-52s that are now in service left the factory in the mid 1960s. An American airforce veteran I met a few years ago told me that there are actually cases of the third generation of soldiers from a military family flying B-52s. Dunno if that's true but theoretically it sure could be. Just about the only criticism you can throw at the B-52 is that it could do with an upgrade to more modern fuel efficient engines which Boeing estimated would increase it's already impressive loiter capability by 46%.