If this turns out to have any truth to it, it raises two questions in my mind:
1. Why? What's the link between this bacteria and weight gain? 2. What can we do? Is it possible to safely eliminate just this one bacteria via a vaccine or antibiotic?
Assuming this is true we probably acquired this bacteria hundreds of thousands of years ago because it helped us to build up fat reserves while we were still hunter-gatherers. There is nothing harmful about this bacteria it has been a useful symbiont that has been a key component in human survival for thousands of years, what is harmful is our modern lifestyle. What can we do about it? Exercising more and putting a stop to recreational eating would be a good start for most people. Knowing my fellow modern humans, pigging out on antibiotics will probably be the preferred solution because it's easier than getting on the exercise bike and sweating.
Because it's not really Apple or Samsung that are suffering. It's us. The consumers who are literally paying for the benefit of stagnation and lack of choice.
Apple and Samsung like the weather in Hell just fine.
Stagnation? Like before the iPhone came out and a smart phone meant a blackberry or a nokia candy bar with wml support? When android was still a blackberry knock-off and RIM sued samsung over the BlackJack, their blackberry knock-off?
He has a point, the iPhone may have changed things radically but all we have today, other than iOS, is a plethora of Android phones. Android may be different enough from iOS to make for long and bitter court battles over (alleged) copycatting but Android is still very close in concept to iOS, too close to be truly different and innovative. Google just followed the general formula created by Apple with iOS while (unsuccessfully) trying to stay different enough to avoid lawsuits. And worse yet we are heading for an Android monoculture where the only serious competitor is iOS. The only other player on the smartphone OS market doing anything really radically different and innovative is Microsoft with it's Windows Phone.... irony abounds.
Really? It seems I have to queue up even for the most popular downloads for tens of minutes or even hours and then they take hours to download.
the quality is often crap
You're doing it wrong. There are often many different things available, all at different qualities.
Right, and stuff is mislabeled, has TV station logos in the corners, texts and crap overlaid,... the list goes on. As it happened with GoT the first things to show up just after the HBO premier were low quality rips with many of them being sub-texted in French, Spanish, Russian. I'm sure that if you wait long enough the HD rip that you want eventually shows up, I was not prepared to wait. As it was I finally found an un-texted low quality rip and watched it before the international GoT premier.
and pirated stuff is riddled with malware.
Why are you on Slashdot? This shit isn't even a problem if you know what you're doing.
First, allow me to complement you on the tone of that statement, you did a good job of sounding like a condescending asshole. But, your character flaws notwithstanding, your're probably right. If you are prepared to filter your downloads through a malware/root-kit detection suite with all the associated hassle that's your business. I'm not willing to spend the time you obviously lavish on your pirating since I do this only pirate occasionally, I actually have a life and don't spend large portions of my spare time downloading terabytes upon terabytes of crap that I never watch or listen to. Thus legal downloads won't cost me a fortune anyway.
Americans are not the only ones. I generally try to pay for stuff that I feel is worth watching, listening to or running. Pirating takes too long, the quality is often crap, and pirated stuff is riddled with malware. That cartoon is basically the story of what happened when I tried to pay for the privilege of watching Season 2, except most of these services that cartoon character tried are "... unfortunately unable to finalize the transaction due to geographical restrictions" even when the stuff I want is available. The only other ways to get to watch GoT Season 2 was a 3 month minimum package subscription featuring a legion of channels that I never watch or.... put up with the 12 hour delay and pirate GoT after exhausting all legal alternatives except overpriced cable subscriptions.
She doesn't play games. She's in college - tons of texting.
In that case it's probably texting, voice calls and Facebooking/Tweeting/etc. in no particular order. People associate phone calls with battery drain but for some reason it doesn't seem to occur to them that using the net work connection drains the battery. A lot of people also keep GPS and Bluetooth switched on for no particular reason and then complain about low battery life. Switching those on and off on an as-needed basis increased the battery life of my old iPhone 3GS very noticeably.
No more shafts leading directly to the core, please.
They already fixed that on the Endor variant (they just had a lousy slow contractor building it).
My vote is that they add an exterminator or two to the crew. I hear the first Death Star had quite a pest problem in it's garbage compactors.
What none of you realise is that we are about to witness yet another round of trials and tests of the new death star concept demonstrator, the USS Apophis. They only made it look like an Asteroid to fool the Chinese. This has been common knowledge among UFOlogists for years now.
If I were Apple, I would push out a patch today that scraps Apple Maps and replaces it with Google. Apple is a company that makes its money selling hardware with a proprietary OS, not homegrowing competitive and complex applications. They stretched themselves outside their realm of competency, and this is a good time to fix it.
Honestly, I don't get why they didn't support or help Google from the start. I would have thought that if they wanted to develop, they could have more easily come up with a frontend to several MS Office replacements and avoid all the BS with Office 365.
Because allegedly Google wanted Apple to wallpaper the new iOS mapping app with the Google logo and integrate one of Google's social networking systems as a preconditions for allowing Apple to pay for the privilege of integrating new Google Maps features with iOS. How much of that is true I don't know but if even only half of it is true I would have said no too. Mind you, I would definitely have tried to find a better replacement maps provider than TomTom, like, say... Garmin or even Microsoft/Nokia. The Nokia maps are basic but accurate and so are Garmin's and you can fix things like satellite view. Features like transit directions take longer. I tried using a TomTom device for a few weeks in the UK this summer and TomTom quite frankly just sucks...
I was wondering what happened to the rainforests. As a kid I was always hearing how we're cutting down the rainforests and they'd all be gone in XX years. We're still losing them:(
What happens to the rain forests? In the short term sad things will happen to the rain forests. In the long term (read: a thousand years or more) nothing remarkable will happen. Even if we keep going the way we are doing today and believe the free market pundits when they tell us it's OK to gingerly go on cutting forests down, polluting, rapaciously depleting resources, driving entire species to extinction and modifying the climate, civilization will eventually collapse, human populations will be drastically reduced and bumped back to the 17th or 18th century if we are lucky. If we are unlucky human kind might become extinct but I find that unlikely since we humans are a pest species that is rather hard to eradicate, not quite as tough as rats or cockroaches but we are still relatively tough. I think that a genetic bottleneck like the one that followed the Toba catastrophe is a more likely worst case scenario and I emphasize worst case. When humans go away or get knocked back into the neolithic the planet's ecosystems will recover, the rain forests will grow back although as more time passes you would find those new forests increasingly unfamiliar since all manner of new species will evolve to replace the ones we killed off.
Hotair.com aka mouthpiece of the most delusional of fringe republicans.
They're simply quoting the Fordham institute's study, of course. But when you have no facts to fall back on, I guess accusing everyone else of being "delusional" is the best you can do.
So a group of fringe republicans are quoting a study by a done conservative think tank, I suppose the fact that both of these parties despise anything that they feel smells of 'government', 'collectivism' and generally anything that runs contrary to the teachings of Ayn Rand, also ensured the complete impartiality and fairness of this study. If these guys are anything like most of the 'conservative think tank' types that show up in panel discussions on Fox News this study is not worth the paper it is printed on.
There's an interesting battlefield trend over the decades where if they can see you, you're pretty much dead.
Try the last century or so, the British learned the lesson about what happens when you loose air superiority and show your ass in open country the hard way at the battle of Cambrai in 1917, entire battalions and even regimental sized units were badly torn up by German attack aircraft during the British retreat. Mind you, on this same occasion, the Germans them selves learned a few painful things about the massed use of armor from the British who them selves learned that Tanks can be knocked out by aircraft and that anti aircraft guns with their flat trajectories and high muzzle velocity are good for shooting at more things than aircraft. One has to give the Taliban and the rest of these Middle Eastern guerrilla forces credit for being very, very good at not showing their ass in open country and when they do they usually distribute their forces to the point where airstrikes boils down to the USAF hosing off a $100.000 PGM to kill 6 guys carrying a $150 Khyber Pass AK47 copy and maybe 30 bucks worth of grenades and ammo each.
Makes you want to do something funny like boot up OS/2 or put up a fake boot up sequence resulting in massive crashes unless it is you booting your computer.
Bonus points if you activate the web cam and record the person's reaction.
Why so elaborate? Just show the Goatse picture... It should yield some interesting photographs.
Re:Did Zuckerberg ever have to get past HR?
on
Just Say No To College
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Yep. If you drop out with your cash-cow already moo-ving (sorry, had too)... You are taking a huge risk, and just as likely to end up on the street or in your parents basement.
A college degree isn't a surefire way to become rich, or even get a job, but it does improve your odds of at least getting a decent paycheck. The world cannot support everyone being a billionaire entrepreneur - and for those who don't have the ideas, or just get them too late, college is a good way to increase the odds of a decent 'consolation prize' to not being a billionaire entrepreneur.
My guess is that the people promoting this want one thing: cheap, desperate labor, which these dropouts would become, when the majority of them fail to be successful.
A college degree isn't a sure fire way to get rich but it is rather difficult to get rich in the tech industry without people that have a college degree or some other form of higher education. I am really tired of people trash talking college education and then pointing at a selection of cherry-picked individuals like Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, Dell, Jobs etc. as if they somehow constitute conclusive proof of the fact that we can disband our Universities. Now it may very well be that you don't need to be college educated to found a start-up that grows into a multi billion dollar high-tech megacorp but I wonder how far any of these people would have gotten without people that have a college degree? Does Dell rely upon self-educated people to design and manufacture components for their computers? Does Microsoft / Apple software get written by people who learned to program from "Teach your self in 7 days" guides (Ok, sometimes I wonder about those last two but but I happen to know what kind of people work for these two companies and trust me they are mostly educated pros). I think that the likes of Gates, Zuckerberg, Dell, Jobs were just as lucky as they were 'mega talented visionary dropouts' and that applies particularly to the first two. I will give Michael Dell credit for having an natural talent and feel for logistics, and Jobs, whatever else you may think of him, had an uncanny nose for products with great potential (the whole iPod/Phone/Pad line) as well as companies with great potential, like Pixar for example. People thought Jobs was nuts when he bought Pixar.
It does make sense, she preached the virtue of complete and utter selfishness and so would have been in favour of not sharing anything at all, at least not without charging a fee in which case it is in your selfish interest to share. Stripping inventors of any right to the product of their mind, thus making their ideas fee for anybody to use without having to compensate the inventor, is from her perspective collectivism which is a socialist idea and socialism she despised.
One question to ask would be the types of features that one would expect in these flexible phones in the near-term. Would they start out as having similar capabilities as current smartphones in the market, or would they be more "bread-and-butter" phones that will only see incorporation of additional capabilities in the long term?
Of greater interest to me is the possibility of flexible laptops and tablets. The reason why we have things like smartphones is because we can easily carry them around (e.g. in our pocket) and still have sufficient computational for day-to-day use. But if we can get flexible tablets/laptops to work, I think that'd be very useful in terms of packing greater amounts of computational power per (folded) surface area.
I am having a hard time seeing an all bendy and all over paper thin iPhone or Galaxy killer that can handle 3D games and the like. The mockups and prototypes I have seen are usually a thin and bendy screen a few millimeters thick made from a rubbery material and attached to a brick containing the electronics, kind of like the ones depicted in TFA (none of whom come close my definition of 'razor-thin' by the way), one of the coolest mockups I have seen was a small brick with a paper thin pull out screen.
It's widely believed that Google search results are produced entirely by computer algorithms...
This is only believed by people who haven't thought about it very hard.
At an abstract level, it makes no sense to think that computer code can be optimized to perform a task without any human intervention. The reason is simple: the task we want the code to perform is always something that a human cares about. So, somehow we need a human to instruct the computer about the goals. This can take the form of a programmer meticulously coding the entire thing, with a particular human-relevant code in mind. Or it can involve non-programmers providing feedback about how well the software is doing at its stated goal (depending on context, these people may be testers, evaluators, users, taggers, etc.).
More specifically, in the case of AI-software, a typical procedure is to have a store of 'pre-tagged' training examples. These are example of problem, with associated 'correct' answers. The training data is used to optimize the AI algorithm: the software can tweak its behavior in order to maximize accuracy of output on the training examples, with the hope that this will then generalize to general use. For something like web-search, where the goal is to make a human end-user happy with the quality and relevance of the results, of course you need humans to assess the quality of the algorithmic results. This is the only way to keep the results relevant. (For search results, this is a continual and iterative process, since the web constantly changes, people are trying to game the system, etc.)
Thus, it's probably better to think of these raters as providing input for evaluating and refining the search algorithms; rather than thinking of them as people who get to uniquely decide the rank of pages. Obviously they will have an influence on the rank of the pages they rate, but overall they are evaluating a rather tiny fraction of the web-pages in the Google database. Thus, when you perform an arbitrary web-search, chances are the results you are seeing are purely algorithmic (none of the listed results were manually rated/adjusted by anyone).
So... basically, you are saying that it will be a while until Google's systems become self aware and decide to exterminate humanity?
My parents have a trs80 and a running apple ][ bought in 1977 and some punchcard programs with fortran watfor (what for?:) ) on it in the garage for play and giggles; so I do know about and appreciate the history of computing. But seriously, the title of this topic is "1976 Polaroids of an Apple-1 Resurface". Seriously. Sad. Seriously sad.
Your parents, right so that is how young you are. You should ask them why this stuff is important enough to them that they don't scrap it. Why do we keep old cars around and expend more money on restoring them than they are worth? To you computers seem to be something you take for granted a mundane item like a toaster.... which is fair enough if you are not a computer geek. If you are not a car geek I can see how you would be puzzled over people who think it is a sin to crush a 1950s Chevrolet concept car or one of only 51 model 1948 Tucker Sedans ever made to turn them into beer cars or sewer lids. To me these pictures are interesting, because I can remember when there were no PCs. I used to have to laboriously type essays on a IBM 'golfball' typewriter (you should try it, the keys are so stiff you literally have to 'punch' them with your fingers). Getting a computer, being able to make changes and correct mistakes and then print out a new copy was a huge labor saving. Then there were games, first 2D an then Doom, nobody had seen anything like it.... Now, before you get off my lawn, please remind me why are you here taking the piss out of old-timers over our nostalgia when you could be doing something more important like refight the Google-Samsung vs. Apple flamewar for the umpteenth time or convincing politicians that music wants to be free.
I mean...photos of one [famous] American company's early products? What has Slashdot become? Geez! Is this still news for nerds, stuff that matters? I guess I should post photos of earlier Motorola products, then claim space on Slashdot, right?
In terms of the history of personal computing the Apple-1 and 2 are somewhat important. The same goes for the Motorola DynaTAC and MicroTAC series. If you are too young to appreciate the things that helped create the modern high-tech industry you take for granted you can always do something you perceive as being more important like going some place else to refight the Samsung-Google vs. Apple flame war for the umpteenth time and leave us old-timers to indulge in enjoyable recollection of times gone by.
Coal had fallen out of favour as one of those 'we're not going to eliminate it over night' kind of things. And then china decided it liked being able to power factories and TVs.
Actually what happened was that our corporate overlords decided that cheap Chinese labor was the way of the future so they dismantled our manufacturing industry and moved it to China. This caused a massive increase in demand for electricity in China so that they could build cheap TVs, mobile phones, laptops and other gadgets for us to buy with the top notch salaries we were all earning in the new 'service economy'. In order to keep their prices low and margins high the Chinese went for the cheapest most abundant fuel they could find, unfortunately that also happened to be the dirtiest most polluting one. Of course none of that is our fault, we just buy Chinese TVs, mobile phones, laptops and re-elect the puppets our corporate overlords finance with the money they earned exporting our manufacturing industry to China.... and besides, it's not as if the climate is changing or anything.
Of course, I'm also going to blame the laws, but I'm so tired of people acting as if the people directly abusing the system can't be blamed.
There is a lot of hypocrisy around this sort of issue.
If companies use the law to minimise taxes paid, stretching the definitions to limit and going way beyond the spirit of the law then it's the lawmakers at fault.
If a benefit claimant uses the law to increase the benefits he recieves, , claiming for everything possible but never making a false statement, it's the claimants fault.
Google is not the only company to do this. The bozos that caused the mortgage crash also did this and still do. It is also a fact that while they can afford to pay an army of tax code weasels to 'minimize their taxes', John Q Public and a whole lot of smaller businesses can't afford to do that. The net result is that when bunch of commercial entities (in this case banks) that do billions of dollars worth of business but contribute 0.01% of that back to society in taxes (assuming their weasels are about as good as Google's), wreck the economy it is John Q Public and those small businesses that ends up paying the bill. I'll give you that Google is not likely to cause a mortgage crash but they can damn well contribute more that %0.0074 of their Biliion dollar profits back into the common coffers of the nation they made those profits from. The answer to your question is: No there is nothing illegal in what Gogole is doing, however there is also such a thing as legal but immoral call it hypocrisy if you want (and yes I know that corporations have no morality but I still fail to see why they should not be roasted on a spit at every possible opportunity for not paying taxes and along with the politicians responsible for the loopholes they use).
Stalingrad and Leningrad are not in Germany. They suffered such grievous casualties because they basically used peasants in human wave attacks against German armor and infantry. They basically had more bodies than the Germans had bullets and once winter set in the Germans could not resupply.
The Soviet forces suffered heavy losses due to Stalin's purges of the Red Army. Prior to the purges the Red Army was one of the most progressive armies in the world. The Soviet Union put tanks based on Walter Christie's designs into production when the US Army turned him down and they were flying monoplane fighters with a retractable landing gear that could have given Bendix Trophy race planes a run for their money when the USAAC was still convinced biplanes were the way of the future. The Germans and the British often get the credit for inventing modern mechanised warfare, the Germans in particular get a lot of brownie points for their blitzkrieg tactics but it is all to often forgotten that these blitzkrieg tactics were developed in cooperation with Soviet military thinkers in the Soviet Union during the Weimar Republic. The idea that Soviet tactics consisted mainly of human wave attacks is a myth just like it is a myth that Polish lancers charged German panzers. Human wave attacks were employed by the Soviet army in 1941-42 but commanders like Zhukov put a stop to it pretty quickly. This was incidentally the same Zhukov who won a model blitzkrieg victory over a force of 75.000 japanese troops at Nomonhan in 1939 destroying an entire IJA devision and gutting the Kwantung Army's air forces in the process. A whole year's worth of production by Nakajima was consumed simply to make good Japanese fighter losses against the Soviets at Nomonhan. I seem to remember it took the Allies a while to replicate this achievement.
I have heard about 2/3 rate, not 90% rate. There is little room to independently separate propaganda exaggeration from actual facts.
Make no mistake, Israelis armed forces are doubtless some of the best on earth but in their propaganda the Israelis do have a tendency to make them selves look even better than they actually are. Also, from what I have seen the Palestinian rocket fire is sparse and inaccurate. How does this system perform when a small target area is being saturated with dozens or hundreds of accurate projectiles inside of a narrow timeframe?
Especially with governments who have traditionally viewed keeping this kind of know-how a matter of national security.
And what government would that be?
Did you want a list? The governments of: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Happy?
Not really, Space X is a US company with it's headquarters and launch sites in the USA, those countries can regulate all they want without affecting Elon Musk and Space X in any way. The only regulations Space X has to worry about are Uncle Sams's, and possibly the eventuality that the Pan Galactic Transport Authority might slam Space X with a fine for launching space trash into their hyperspace bypass.
Not everyone needs a $600 smartphone, and it's an oversight on Apple's part.
No, not really, high end devices is where the high profit margins are. Apple has never been seriously interested in scraping the bottom of the budget market.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, does anyone even remember the Chromebox?
Huh?
If this turns out to have any truth to it, it raises two questions in my mind:
1. Why? What's the link between this bacteria and weight gain?
2. What can we do? Is it possible to safely eliminate just this one bacteria via a vaccine or antibiotic?
Assuming this is true we probably acquired this bacteria hundreds of thousands of years ago because it helped us to build up fat reserves while we were still hunter-gatherers. There is nothing harmful about this bacteria it has been a useful symbiont that has been a key component in human survival for thousands of years, what is harmful is our modern lifestyle. What can we do about it? Exercising more and putting a stop to recreational eating would be a good start for most people. Knowing my fellow modern humans, pigging out on antibiotics will probably be the preferred solution because it's easier than getting on the exercise bike and sweating.
Because it's not really Apple or Samsung that are suffering. It's us. The consumers who are literally paying for the benefit of stagnation and lack of choice.
Apple and Samsung like the weather in Hell just fine.
Stagnation? Like before the iPhone came out and a smart phone meant a blackberry or a nokia candy bar with wml support? When android was still a blackberry knock-off and RIM sued samsung over the BlackJack, their blackberry knock-off?
He has a point, the iPhone may have changed things radically but all we have today, other than iOS, is a plethora of Android phones. Android may be different enough from iOS to make for long and bitter court battles over (alleged) copycatting but Android is still very close in concept to iOS, too close to be truly different and innovative. Google just followed the general formula created by Apple with iOS while (unsuccessfully) trying to stay different enough to avoid lawsuits. And worse yet we are heading for an Android monoculture where the only serious competitor is iOS. The only other player on the smartphone OS market doing anything really radically different and innovative is Microsoft with it's Windows Phone.... irony abounds.
Pirating takes too long
You're doing it wrong.
Really? It seems I have to queue up even for the most popular downloads for tens of minutes or even hours and then they take hours to download.
the quality is often crap
You're doing it wrong. There are often many different things available, all at different qualities.
Right, and stuff is mislabeled, has TV station logos in the corners, texts and crap overlaid, ... the list goes on. As it happened with GoT the first things to show up just after the HBO premier were low quality rips with many of them being sub-texted in French, Spanish, Russian. I'm sure that if you wait long enough the HD rip that you want eventually shows up, I was not prepared to wait. As it was I finally found an un-texted low quality rip and watched it before the international GoT premier.
and pirated stuff is riddled with malware.
Why are you on Slashdot? This shit isn't even a problem if you know what you're doing.
First, allow me to complement you on the tone of that statement, you did a good job of sounding like a condescending asshole. But, your character flaws notwithstanding, your're probably right. If you are prepared to filter your downloads through a malware/root-kit detection suite with all the associated hassle that's your business. I'm not willing to spend the time you obviously lavish on your pirating since I do this only pirate occasionally, I actually have a life and don't spend large portions of my spare time downloading terabytes upon terabytes of crap that I never watch or listen to. Thus legal downloads won't cost me a fortune anyway.
Americans have a similar situation.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
Americans are not the only ones. I generally try to pay for stuff that I feel is worth watching, listening to or running. Pirating takes too long, the quality is often crap, and pirated stuff is riddled with malware. That cartoon is basically the story of what happened when I tried to pay for the privilege of watching Season 2, except most of these services that cartoon character tried are "... unfortunately unable to finalize the transaction due to geographical restrictions" even when the stuff I want is available. The only other ways to get to watch GoT Season 2 was a 3 month minimum package subscription featuring a legion of channels that I never watch or.... put up with the 12 hour delay and pirate GoT after exhausting all legal alternatives except overpriced cable subscriptions.
She doesn't play games. She's in college - tons of texting.
In that case it's probably texting, voice calls and Facebooking/Tweeting/etc. in no particular order. People associate phone calls with battery drain but for some reason it doesn't seem to occur to them that using the net work connection drains the battery. A lot of people also keep GPS and Bluetooth switched on for no particular reason and then complain about low battery life. Switching those on and off on an as-needed basis increased the battery life of my old iPhone 3GS very noticeably.
No more shafts leading directly to the core, please.
They already fixed that on the Endor variant (they just had a lousy slow contractor building it).
My vote is that they add an exterminator or two to the crew. I hear the first Death Star had quite a pest problem in it's garbage compactors.
What none of you realise is that we are about to witness yet another round of trials and tests of the new death star concept demonstrator, the USS Apophis. They only made it look like an Asteroid to fool the Chinese. This has been common knowledge among UFOlogists for years now.
If I were Apple, I would push out a patch today that scraps Apple Maps and replaces it with Google. Apple is a company that makes its money selling hardware with a proprietary OS, not homegrowing competitive and complex applications. They stretched themselves outside their realm of competency, and this is a good time to fix it.
Honestly, I don't get why they didn't support or help Google from the start. I would have thought that if they wanted to develop, they could have more easily come up with a frontend to several MS Office replacements and avoid all the BS with Office 365.
Because allegedly Google wanted Apple to wallpaper the new iOS mapping app with the Google logo and integrate one of Google's social networking systems as a preconditions for allowing Apple to pay for the privilege of integrating new Google Maps features with iOS. How much of that is true I don't know but if even only half of it is true I would have said no too. Mind you, I would definitely have tried to find a better replacement maps provider than TomTom, like, say... Garmin or even Microsoft/Nokia. The Nokia maps are basic but accurate and so are Garmin's and you can fix things like satellite view. Features like transit directions take longer. I tried using a TomTom device for a few weeks in the UK this summer and TomTom quite frankly just sucks...
I was wondering what happened to the rainforests. As a kid I was always hearing how we're cutting down the rainforests and they'd all be gone in XX years. We're still losing them :(
What happens to the rain forests? In the short term sad things will happen to the rain forests. In the long term (read: a thousand years or more) nothing remarkable will happen. Even if we keep going the way we are doing today and believe the free market pundits when they tell us it's OK to gingerly go on cutting forests down, polluting, rapaciously depleting resources, driving entire species to extinction and modifying the climate, civilization will eventually collapse, human populations will be drastically reduced and bumped back to the 17th or 18th century if we are lucky. If we are unlucky human kind might become extinct but I find that unlikely since we humans are a pest species that is rather hard to eradicate, not quite as tough as rats or cockroaches but we are still relatively tough. I think that a genetic bottleneck like the one that followed the Toba catastrophe is a more likely worst case scenario and I emphasize worst case. When humans go away or get knocked back into the neolithic the planet's ecosystems will recover, the rain forests will grow back although as more time passes you would find those new forests increasingly unfamiliar since all manner of new species will evolve to replace the ones we killed off.
all other years being private schooled.
Attending a private school does not mean you're wealthy. There are plenty of private schools full of children from low and middle class families.
Oh yeah, from all walks of life. For instance, in Chicago, almost 40% of public school teachers send their kids to private schools. What it comes down to is they're just trying to get a decent education for their children.
Hotair.com aka mouthpiece of the most delusional of fringe republicans.
They're simply quoting the Fordham institute's study, of course. But when you have no facts to fall back on, I guess accusing everyone else of being "delusional" is the best you can do.
So a group of fringe republicans are quoting a study by a done conservative think tank, I suppose the fact that both of these parties despise anything that they feel smells of 'government', 'collectivism' and generally anything that runs contrary to the teachings of Ayn Rand, also ensured the complete impartiality and fairness of this study. If these guys are anything like most of the 'conservative think tank' types that show up in panel discussions on Fox News this study is not worth the paper it is printed on.
There's an interesting battlefield trend over the decades where if they can see you, you're pretty much dead.
Try the last century or so, the British learned the lesson about what happens when you loose air superiority and show your ass in open country the hard way at the battle of Cambrai in 1917, entire battalions and even regimental sized units were badly torn up by German attack aircraft during the British retreat. Mind you, on this same occasion, the Germans them selves learned a few painful things about the massed use of armor from the British who them selves learned that Tanks can be knocked out by aircraft and that anti aircraft guns with their flat trajectories and high muzzle velocity are good for shooting at more things than aircraft. One has to give the Taliban and the rest of these Middle Eastern guerrilla forces credit for being very, very good at not showing their ass in open country and when they do they usually distribute their forces to the point where airstrikes boils down to the USAF hosing off a $100.000 PGM to kill 6 guys carrying a $150 Khyber Pass AK47 copy and maybe 30 bucks worth of grenades and ammo each.
Makes you want to do something funny like boot up OS/2 or put up a fake boot up sequence resulting in massive crashes unless it is you booting your computer.
Bonus points if you activate the web cam and record the person's reaction.
Why so elaborate? Just show the Goatse picture... It should yield some interesting photographs.
Yep. If you drop out with your cash-cow already moo-ving (sorry, had too)... You are taking a huge risk, and just as likely to end up on the street or in your parents basement.
A college degree isn't a surefire way to become rich, or even get a job, but it does improve your odds of at least getting a decent paycheck. The world cannot support everyone being a billionaire entrepreneur - and for those who don't have the ideas, or just get them too late, college is a good way to increase the odds of a decent 'consolation prize' to not being a billionaire entrepreneur.
My guess is that the people promoting this want one thing: cheap, desperate labor, which these dropouts would become, when the majority of them fail to be successful.
A college degree isn't a sure fire way to get rich but it is rather difficult to get rich in the tech industry without people that have a college degree or some other form of higher education. I am really tired of people trash talking college education and then pointing at a selection of cherry-picked individuals like Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, Dell, Jobs etc. as if they somehow constitute conclusive proof of the fact that we can disband our Universities. Now it may very well be that you don't need to be college educated to found a start-up that grows into a multi billion dollar high-tech megacorp but I wonder how far any of these people would have gotten without people that have a college degree? Does Dell rely upon self-educated people to design and manufacture components for their computers? Does Microsoft / Apple software get written by people who learned to program from "Teach your self in 7 days" guides (Ok, sometimes I wonder about those last two but but I happen to know what kind of people work for these two companies and trust me they are mostly educated pros). I think that the likes of Gates, Zuckerberg, Dell, Jobs were just as lucky as they were 'mega talented visionary dropouts' and that applies particularly to the first two. I will give Michael Dell credit for having an natural talent and feel for logistics, and Jobs, whatever else you may think of him, had an uncanny nose for products with great potential (the whole iPod/Phone/Pad line) as well as companies with great potential, like Pixar for example. People thought Jobs was nuts when he bought Pixar.
Plenty of Ayn Rands fans in the valley. I have yet to meet the first one in favor of the patent system.
Am I missing something ?
There has been some confusion about her teachings on that subject among her disciples. The great prophetess her self is reported to have commented:
"Patents and copyrights are the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man's right to the product of his mind."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_perspectives_on_intellectual_property#Ayn_Rand.27s_views
It does make sense, she preached the virtue of complete and utter selfishness and so would have been in favour of not sharing anything at all, at least not without charging a fee in which case it is in your selfish interest to share. Stripping inventors of any right to the product of their mind, thus making their ideas fee for anybody to use without having to compensate the inventor, is from her perspective collectivism which is a socialist idea and socialism she despised.
One question to ask would be the types of features that one would expect in these flexible phones in the near-term. Would they start out as having similar capabilities as current smartphones in the market, or would they be more "bread-and-butter" phones that will only see incorporation of additional capabilities in the long term?
Of greater interest to me is the possibility of flexible laptops and tablets. The reason why we have things like smartphones is because we can easily carry them around (e.g. in our pocket) and still have sufficient computational for day-to-day use. But if we can get flexible tablets/laptops to work, I think that'd be very useful in terms of packing greater amounts of computational power per (folded) surface area.
I am having a hard time seeing an all bendy and all over paper thin iPhone or Galaxy killer that can handle 3D games and the like. The mockups and prototypes I have seen are usually a thin and bendy screen a few millimeters thick made from a rubbery material and attached to a brick containing the electronics, kind of like the ones depicted in TFA (none of whom come close my definition of 'razor-thin' by the way), one of the coolest mockups I have seen was a small brick with a paper thin pull out screen.
This is only believed by people who haven't thought about it very hard.
At an abstract level, it makes no sense to think that computer code can be optimized to perform a task without any human intervention. The reason is simple: the task we want the code to perform is always something that a human cares about. So, somehow we need a human to instruct the computer about the goals. This can take the form of a programmer meticulously coding the entire thing, with a particular human-relevant code in mind. Or it can involve non-programmers providing feedback about how well the software is doing at its stated goal (depending on context, these people may be testers, evaluators, users, taggers, etc.).
More specifically, in the case of AI-software, a typical procedure is to have a store of 'pre-tagged' training examples. These are example of problem, with associated 'correct' answers. The training data is used to optimize the AI algorithm: the software can tweak its behavior in order to maximize accuracy of output on the training examples, with the hope that this will then generalize to general use. For something like web-search, where the goal is to make a human end-user happy with the quality and relevance of the results, of course you need humans to assess the quality of the algorithmic results. This is the only way to keep the results relevant. (For search results, this is a continual and iterative process, since the web constantly changes, people are trying to game the system, etc.)
Thus, it's probably better to think of these raters as providing input for evaluating and refining the search algorithms; rather than thinking of them as people who get to uniquely decide the rank of pages. Obviously they will have an influence on the rank of the pages they rate, but overall they are evaluating a rather tiny fraction of the web-pages in the Google database. Thus, when you perform an arbitrary web-search, chances are the results you are seeing are purely algorithmic (none of the listed results were manually rated/adjusted by anyone).
So... basically, you are saying that it will be a while until Google's systems become self aware and decide to exterminate humanity?
My parents have a trs80 and a running apple ][ bought in 1977 and some punchcard programs with fortran watfor (what for? :) ) on it in the garage for play and giggles; so I do know about and appreciate the history of computing. But seriously, the title of this topic is "1976 Polaroids of an Apple-1 Resurface". Seriously. Sad. Seriously sad.
Your parents, right so that is how young you are. You should ask them why this stuff is important enough to them that they don't scrap it. Why do we keep old cars around and expend more money on restoring them than they are worth? To you computers seem to be something you take for granted a mundane item like a toaster.... which is fair enough if you are not a computer geek. If you are not a car geek I can see how you would be puzzled over people who think it is a sin to crush a 1950s Chevrolet concept car or one of only 51 model 1948 Tucker Sedans ever made to turn them into beer cars or sewer lids. To me these pictures are interesting, because I can remember when there were no PCs. I used to have to laboriously type essays on a IBM 'golfball' typewriter (you should try it, the keys are so stiff you literally have to 'punch' them with your fingers). Getting a computer, being able to make changes and correct mistakes and then print out a new copy was a huge labor saving. Then there were games, first 2D an then Doom, nobody had seen anything like it.... Now, before you get off my lawn, please remind me why are you here taking the piss out of old-timers over our nostalgia when you could be doing something more important like refight the Google-Samsung vs. Apple flamewar for the umpteenth time or convincing politicians that music wants to be free.
I mean...photos of one [famous] American company's early products? What has Slashdot become? Geez! Is this still news for nerds, stuff that matters? I guess I should post photos of earlier Motorola products, then claim space on Slashdot, right?
In terms of the history of personal computing the Apple-1 and 2 are somewhat important. The same goes for the Motorola DynaTAC and MicroTAC series. If you are too young to appreciate the things that helped create the modern high-tech industry you take for granted you can always do something you perceive as being more important like going some place else to refight the Samsung-Google vs. Apple flame war for the umpteenth time and leave us old-timers to indulge in enjoyable recollection of times gone by.
Coal had fallen out of favour as one of those 'we're not going to eliminate it over night' kind of things. And then china decided it liked being able to power factories and TVs.
Actually what happened was that our corporate overlords decided that cheap Chinese labor was the way of the future so they dismantled our manufacturing industry and moved it to China. This caused a massive increase in demand for electricity in China so that they could build cheap TVs, mobile phones, laptops and other gadgets for us to buy with the top notch salaries we were all earning in the new 'service economy'. In order to keep their prices low and margins high the Chinese went for the cheapest most abundant fuel they could find, unfortunately that also happened to be the dirtiest most polluting one. Of course none of that is our fault, we just buy Chinese TVs, mobile phones, laptops and re-elect the puppets our corporate overlords finance with the money they earned exporting our manufacturing industry to China .... and besides, it's not as if the climate is changing or anything.
There is a lot of hypocrisy around this sort of issue.
If companies use the law to minimise taxes paid, stretching the definitions to limit and going way beyond the spirit of the law then it's the lawmakers at fault.
If a benefit claimant uses the law to increase the benefits he recieves, , claiming for everything possible but never making a false statement, it's the claimants fault.
Google is not the only company to do this. The bozos that caused the mortgage crash also did this and still do. It is also a fact that while they can afford to pay an army of tax code weasels to 'minimize their taxes', John Q Public and a whole lot of smaller businesses can't afford to do that. The net result is that when bunch of commercial entities (in this case banks) that do billions of dollars worth of business but contribute 0.01% of that back to society in taxes (assuming their weasels are about as good as Google's), wreck the economy it is John Q Public and those small businesses that ends up paying the bill. I'll give you that Google is not likely to cause a mortgage crash but they can damn well contribute more that %0.0074 of their Biliion dollar profits back into the common coffers of the nation they made those profits from. The answer to your question is: No there is nothing illegal in what Gogole is doing, however there is also such a thing as legal but immoral call it hypocrisy if you want (and yes I know that corporations have no morality but I still fail to see why they should not be roasted on a spit at every possible opportunity for not paying taxes and along with the politicians responsible for the loopholes they use).
Stalingrad and Leningrad are not in Germany. They suffered such grievous casualties because they basically used peasants in human wave attacks against German armor and infantry. They basically had more bodies than the Germans had bullets and once winter set in the Germans could not resupply.
The Soviet forces suffered heavy losses due to Stalin's purges of the Red Army. Prior to the purges the Red Army was one of the most progressive armies in the world. The Soviet Union put tanks based on Walter Christie's designs into production when the US Army turned him down and they were flying monoplane fighters with a retractable landing gear that could have given Bendix Trophy race planes a run for their money when the USAAC was still convinced biplanes were the way of the future. The Germans and the British often get the credit for inventing modern mechanised warfare, the Germans in particular get a lot of brownie points for their blitzkrieg tactics but it is all to often forgotten that these blitzkrieg tactics were developed in cooperation with Soviet military thinkers in the Soviet Union during the Weimar Republic. The idea that Soviet tactics consisted mainly of human wave attacks is a myth just like it is a myth that Polish lancers charged German panzers. Human wave attacks were employed by the Soviet army in 1941-42 but commanders like Zhukov put a stop to it pretty quickly. This was incidentally the same Zhukov who won a model blitzkrieg victory over a force of 75.000 japanese troops at Nomonhan in 1939 destroying an entire IJA devision and gutting the Kwantung Army's air forces in the process. A whole year's worth of production by Nakajima was consumed simply to make good Japanese fighter losses against the Soviets at Nomonhan. I seem to remember it took the Allies a while to replicate this achievement.
I have heard about 2/3 rate, not 90% rate. There is little room to independently separate propaganda exaggeration from actual facts.
Make no mistake, Israelis armed forces are doubtless some of the best on earth but in their propaganda the Israelis do have a tendency to make them selves look even better than they actually are. Also, from what I have seen the Palestinian rocket fire is sparse and inaccurate. How does this system perform when a small target area is being saturated with dozens or hundreds of accurate projectiles inside of a narrow timeframe?
Especially with governments who have traditionally viewed keeping this kind of know-how a matter of national security.
And what government would that be?
Did you want a list? The governments of: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Happy?
Not really, Space X is a US company with it's headquarters and launch sites in the USA, those countries can regulate all they want without affecting Elon Musk and Space X in any way. The only regulations Space X has to worry about are Uncle Sams's, and possibly the eventuality that the Pan Galactic Transport Authority might slam Space X with a fine for launching space trash into their hyperspace bypass.
... news at eleven.
Not everyone needs a $600 smartphone, and it's an oversight on Apple's part.
No, not really, high end devices is where the high profit margins are. Apple has never been seriously interested in scraping the bottom of the budget market.