His decision not to use the Shift key is a protestation against the lack of upward mobility in today's society. Those of us in the lower cases have no hope of joining the capitals; the capitalist Shift key merely offers the hollow promise that we may someday rise to the top.
So, yeah; the Shift key is clearly a capitalist conspiracy.
Why limit it to software patents? Our country did so well at the beginning (in part) because we completely ignored the old world's patents. Patents exist to hinder competitors, and are slowing down our progress.
Yes, we did better because we were able to ignore the "old world patents". Meaning, patents were bad when we weren't the ones that held them. I'm not sure that's really a good argument for getting rid of patents as it doesn't really speak to whether patents help or hinder innovation; it only shows that any nation not at the top of the patent pyramid has a vested interest in ignoring them.
Not saying I disagree with the premise that patents can actually hinder innovation, I just don't think your example provides any support for your claim. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Would I have paid less for the same TV w/o 3D if it were available? Absolutely.
The thing is, it really doesn't cost anything for them to add 3D. If you already have a panel capable of 120Hz+ then the only thing you need to add for active-shutter 3D is a timing signal to the glasses. It's not so much them shoving it down our throats, as it is the fact that for that style of 3D there just really isn't any additional cost - it's just one more minor feature, liking throwing in Hulu streaming or something.
Consumers will flock to 3DTVs when there is basically nothing else on the market: otherwise, it just doesn't provide enough benefit to justify the added cost. This happened with HD too; did the TV makers really expect it to be different this time?
I agree that 3DTV uptake will basically be increasing only as people's current sets wear out and they buy new ones, I really don't see it being a driver of sales. That said, at least for the active-shutter type of 3D it really doesn't add any cost to include it in the TV - it is basically just a timing signal to tell the (over-priced) glasses when to switch.
That said, I don't think the manufacturers really expected it to push sales. They hoped it would help, and they didn't really have much else to advertise to try to attract new buyers (new! now 0.01 inches thinner than last year! Now including streaming app w in addition to x, y, and z!), so they have been talking it up as the big new feature. Tech/consumer electronics sites have been playing along, for pretty much the same reason - something to talk about and drive views. Not too much fun to only be able to say, "well, this year's models continue the trend of sacrificing picture quality for tiny and meaningless reductions in thickness as manufacturers abandon full-array LED backlighting in favor of more cost-effective edge lighting."
The only games I play are on XBox360. I might be interested in that game/simulation. If I needed to buy some fancy control devices, so be it. But having my nice big TV and all it would make the flight simulation pretty nice. And doing the the Live networking would be kinda fun too where you could join groups of flyers and such... interacting with them and all.
Not long ago, I saw my brother doing the flight sim thing on his PC. It was impressive enough, but not impressive enough for me to want to buy and set up a Windows PC... game system? Okay. But my stuff is Linux. I'm comfortable there... got some Apple stuff collecting dust but otherwise all Linux. A free game isn't enough to pull me back to Windows at home.
It is a flight simulator. Doesn't exactly match up with the gameplay demographic of consoles, though it does sound like there will be some arcadey options. Oh, and there is the fact that high-quality simulators are often CPU-bound, so they would have to make serious compromises to make it playable on a console. Not that this has stopped any other game companies from designing down to that level, and it is too early to really have an idea of how advanced the simulator element is, but that could be a real problem.
Personally I like the idea of a flight sim, but so far the ones I've tried have all been pretty boring. While one can theoretically use them for actual flight training (if you get the extra-special dongle that doesn't do anything but cost you an enormous amount), to me the fun part is doing stupid shit that would get you killed in real life. PC sims like Flight Gear and X-Plane do a decent enough job of simulating routine flight dynamics, but as soon as you start doing anything remotely stupid (or fun) they just fall apart. And they don't even have the decency to show pieces of your plane flying apart when you hit things:( I'll probably give MS Flight a try, since it is free, but I'll likely stick with Il-2 for my flight sim cravings; the flight model might not have quite the same fidelity, but it rewards stupidity with bits and pieces flying off - and then there's the fact that you can blow shit up when you're tired of just flying.
He's just being politically incorrect. He shouldn't have said "control the customer", because it sounds bad. But believe me, there are ways to do it.
You have no idea the jedi tricks these people can pull on you, and you don't even notice and fall right into their trap. How do you think "social engineering" works?
Let me teach you a little bit:
B is the caller, let's say a bank. C is the customer ("victim" if you want a politically incorrect term).
B: Hello? C: Good day sir, is this John Doe? B: Yes, who's this? --"yes" #1 C: This is X from Bank Y, do you have a minute? -- it's more than a minute, but if i say "a minute" i'm more likely to get your attention B: Um...okay? --didn't say yes, try again C: Excuse me? I can't hear you? B: Yes, I have a minute --- "yes" #2 C: Oh very good. Just a minute, I'll check the computer...ohh it's slow today, it's one of those days, how is your day? -- fake slow day to get him into small talk B: I'm doing fine C: Oh it's so good to hear you're having a good day, it's been crazy here! --show him how good he is, and how bad you are, so he'll feel sorry for you B: Oh i see, yes, it's been good --great, you got him on a positive mood! C: OK, here we are.. let me check, are you John F. Doe, yes? - ask with yes, not "right". you want him to say "yes", not "right B: Right -- try again C: Excuse me? I can't hear you B: Yes, I'm John F. Doe C: Oh ok, and your address is 123 Fake St.? B: Yes. --good C: And your date of birth is 12/23/55? B: Yes ---ooh man, we're on a roll! C: Oh OK, everything sounds right. So, let me tell you about the deal we got for you: because you've been a great customer to us, we're offering a new *whatever* blah blah blah
then you explain how much he's gaining from this "deal", why he wants it, etc.
Why did i make such an emphasis on getting a YES answer? Because ultimately you're going to ask him if he wants, say, a new credit card. You want him to say "yes", not "right", "uh-huh", "OK". You need a "yes". So you ask him a lot of questions that will get him saying "yes", so he's more willing to say "yes" later on.
THAT's how it works. THAT's what "controlling" a customer is. When you get a call from some sales person you say "I'm not interested" and hang up right away. The moment you let them speak, they get into your head. They have all sorts of tricks to get even the most "uninterested" person in buying things they don't want or need. This has been true for decades. They have teams of psychologysts to understand people, and millions of hours of conversations to learn from.
Lol, sounds like a "customer service" idealized script (though you mixed up B and C). Now the reality:
C: "Good day sir, is this John Doe?" B: "This is him, what's this call about?" C: "We are offering a special deal for our best custo..." B: "No thanks, I'm not interested." *click*
Try your BS tricks of trying to get me to repeat my answer or not answer my question and I'll just hang up sooner.
No way in hell I would confirm all that information on a cold call anyway, and no way I would stay on the line that long for an unsolicited call in any case. But then, I've long since lost any feeling that I need to be polite to marketeers - I don't waste time being overtly rude or insulting to the poor souls staffing the call center, but I do end the call quickly so they can move on to the next victim.
It accelerates faster than a Porsche 911 and has other luxury features. Ergo it's a rich person's toy. That said, given the performance, the prices seem competitive, even ignoring fuel costs. From a cursory glance at the Porsche website, a new 911 costs around $80k in the U.S. with an estimated range of ~300 miles. Had to use fuel economy estimates for previous years since 2011 is an entirely new platform and the corporate site doesn't publish fuel economy numbers. My issue with the all-electrics is battery replacement. Figure you're plunking down at least $10k at the end of that 8 year warranty to replace your battery.
Fueleconomy.gov is your friend. Looks like a 2012 Porsche Carrera gets about 18/25 to 19/27 (22 combined) depending on options, for an average range of about 350 miles (400+ on the highway).
I just know somewhere in the process of the multi-billion dollar drone development project someone must have said, "You know. I think a self-destruct mechanism might be a good thing to add."
Of course, I can also imagine someone saying, "Yeah, they'll never even see it. It's stealth."
That's the beauty of what Iran did, though - the drone still thought it knew where it was and was flying back home, so no reason to self-destruct. Shows that drone designers shouldn't be relying on GPS alone to determine position - they should probably be relying on inertial tracking periodically updated by (or checked against) GPS, not simply relying on external signals being authentic.
What even a modest carrier can do in the near term caught the Chinese by surprise in early 2005,when they watched in horror as Indian and Japanese carriers conducted post-tsunami relief operations. Thus, in reconceptualizing the PLAN carrier, China’s two potential role models—and competitors—are not the United States and the former Soviet Union but rather India and Japan. [Andrew S. Erickson and Andrew R.Wilson, "China's aircraft carrier dilemma," Naval War College Review, Autumn 2006, Vol. 59, No. 4, p. 36.]
Would that this were true -- it would be nice to see countries build military weapons platforms to compete with each other to provide the best humanitarian assistance possible. [/pollyanna] However. . ..
Humanitarian relief is actually pretty similar to what they might be doing in war. Basically, logistically supporting a group of people far from other support. In peacetime this is residents cut off from national infrastructure by disasters, in war time it is combat troops on foreign/remote soil. Certainly not the only thing carriers are used for in war time, but definitely a part (especially for helicopter and amphibious carriers).
Pretty sure Taiwan might have a thing or two to say, also.
Interesting, when the Korean War ended, Americans forced hundreds of thousands Chinese prisoners to go to Taiwan instead of PRC, so that Americans can save their faces. I'm sure that the Chinese Korean War veterans in Taiwan complained about being separated from their wives, parents, and children for 30 to 40 years. American prisoners, on the other hand, were lucky as they returned to their own families immediately.
In addition, the Chinese prisoners received far worse treatments in American prison camps than what American prisoners received in Chinese prison camps.
Sort of goes without saying, but... citation(s) needed. Although reviewing your comment history, it looks pretty clear that any citations you came up with would likely be straight out of the PRC propaganda machine.
But how does it rank in terms of manufacturing output per capita, and what is the trend? Germany easily has us beat in exports, and they have a fraction of our population. A 5th of the global output isn't that high considering we're the 4th largest by population (IIRC), and 2 of the 3 larger ones probably don't rank very highly in manufacturing output.
Actually 3rd largest by population, at approximately 4.5% of the world (China represents about 20%). So producing 20% of the world's manufactured goods with 4.5% of the population would seem to indicate that, per capita, we are doing pretty well - but no, I don't know what the trend looks like. And yes, I'm fairly sure that a good portion of American manufactured goods probably include parts manufactured in China (along with dozens of other places), so just because we manufacture the most by value doesn't really mean we do so completely independently of other nations.
The point isn't whether they used (or could use) aircraft carriers to invade Tibet, the point is that they invaded Tibet. Responding to the claim that China is not "an offensive country", not utility in relation to Tibet specifically.
Anyone who has been paying attention knows that the likely use of aircraft carriers would be to enforce their claims in places like the South China Sea, where there have been numerous recent confrontations with the Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam. You know, the same use the U.S. puts its carriers to - projecting force in order to coerce other nations into doing what they want/preventing other nations from doing what they don't.
1- People will confuse 720 for 720p and think that's the only resolution it goes to.
2- The next one after the 720 would have to be 1080 or 1440. Those are awkward names.
3- They should do like everyone else and call it "Xbox X". Or adopt the animal naming meme and call them something like "Xbox Rhino", "Xbox Elephant" and "Xbox Landwhale".
I don't know, the Xbox 360 name came out after Nintendo had been calling their upcoming console the Revolution for quite a while. Given Nintendo is planning on calling their next console the WiiU, I'm betting on Xbox Unlimited or Xbox Ultra.
Don't need to load the level or even the games code. Just need to stream the video. The next xbox could follow the Onlive model and be a dumb client.
Awesome. Then, assuming I have 60 ms lag to the server, every action will have effective 120 ms lag as an image is sent (60 ms), I respond (instantly, of course), and my response is then sent back over the wire (another 60 ms).
Count me out. Lag in MP games is bad enough; I'm not going to put up with input lag in single-player games.
You need to load the amount that will fit into memory. While the player is playing, you can start downloading the rest onto semi-permanent storage. Most games are pretty linear like that. there's only a handful of options for what the next segment will be and you can easily download all of them in the time it takes to play them.
That might work well for single-player games where you are following a pretty linear narrative, but would not work at all for multiplayer games where you switch maps every few minutes. For BF3, the expansion that just came out clocked in at about 4 GB (on PC), and it included only 4 levels. I can't imagine that levels will be shrinking. Until we start seeing serious improvements in broadband speeds, it just isn't practical to stream a high-end game like that. Pre-load, sure; but it really wouldn't work to download in the background while you are trying to play an online game.
Personally I don't get the hate for blu-ray, and I sure don't mind physical media (though it really would be nice if they would quit requiring you to actually have the media in the drive to play - hopefully we will see that particular aspect of current-gen consoles disappear).
Also, at the moment the fastest broadband connection I am able to get would max out at 18 mbps, and no one appears to be in any hurry to offer faster speeds. Streaming is great and has its uses, and I'm sure we will continue to see movement this direction; but we just aren't to the point where it would make sense to abandon physical media.
What if the protests are considering it to be a civil war? Then does the Geneva Convention kick in?
The Geneva Conventions only concern uniformed armies of sovereign nations in conflict. Basically, donning a uniform (and therefore identifying yourself as an active participant in the conflict) grants you certain protections above and beyond what a non-uniformed (often referred to as "unlawful", although the term does not actually appear in the conventions) combatant might expect. The Geneva Conventions don't really come into play in any domestic altercations, they only govern conflicts between sovereign nations that are signatories to the conventions. The closest the Conventions get is basically stating that anyone not covered as a non-combatant or lawful combatant is subject to the domestic laws of the sovereign nation that captured them.
Stay away from the NASCAR version. It only works for programs stuck in loops.
That's why I prefer the P2P versions, like Rally. Even with the F1 version Europeans seem partial to, no matter how fancy the execution gets you are still just running through a loop and end up back in the same place you started.
The test was actually much simpler than any real-world application might be. Each puzzle was really only one or two (or a few) shredded pages, with various degrees of shredding and various bits of writing. It is a first step, but nowhere near what you would be dealing with in any real-world situation where hundreds or thousands of pages of shredded documents would be mixed together.
I participated (a bit) with the UCSD team that basically made a crowd-sourced jigsaw puzzle to do it - at last check they were in the top 5, but I don't think they got the last puzzle (yet). This approach seems reasonable for the relatively simple puzzles of the challenge, but it really wouldn't scale very well - requires a lot of labor.
It sounds like the winning team had a much better (and more scaleable) strategy, where an algorithm scores all of the pieces for fit in a particular place and then allows the user(s) to choose the best piece from a few high-scoring ones. While I still don't think this would work very well in a real-world scenario, obviously it would work better than depending on massive crowd sourcing.
Agreed. This is just going to have phone companies aggressively rolling out fiber. They've already lost their landline customers for good. Cable's not convinced people aren't going back to TV. In the meantime, the telephone companies can steal them all back. Personally, I'm in a decent sized city that doesn't have DSL at my address. Why? I have no idea. Here's hoping for fiber or VDSL in the next couple years.
I've got choices of either DSL or cable, so lucky in that way. I can even (maybe? changes day to day) get u-verse through AT&T with a max speed of 12 down and 1.5 up. That's... okay, but the sad thing is there is absolutely no plan to upgrade any further. AT&T and Comcast have no interest in spending money to actually upgrade the infrastructure that would allow a true improvement in speed. They say it is too expensive to lay new cable.
Meanwhile a wireless provider will be laying fiber literally across the street to provision a new microcell nearby, which they will be leasing to other wireless carriers (they are putting up 12 or 14 around town which should vastly improve wireless service). If AT&T (or one of the other telecoms) had any shred of forward-thinking, they would be all over plans like this, offering to split trenching costs and lay their own fiber along side the wireless provider - fiber is cheap, they should be jumping at any chance to get it into the ground at a reduced cost in established areas. As it is, I will be sitting on my 40-year-old twisted pair connection knowing that there is a brand-spanking-new high-capacity fiber optic line passing just a few feet from my house that no one has any interest in selling me access to (except through an extremely overpriced cellular data plan, of course). Basically this project should be reducing the "last mile" issue to the "last 500 feet" issue for the entire town, but instead will result in improved wireless service that will make them even less likely to invest in actual infrastructure upgrades in the future.
You will if your job requires it, and you want to keep your job. Last time I was on a full time salary, we didn't get any overtime pay, yet I believe the company billed their customers for all hours worked. I just chalked it up to paying for vacation and sick days, because the salaries were fairly generous.
Same experience working in consulting. Salaried employees, in general, could not expect to be paid overtime even though their time was being billed out to the client. I was fortunate and worked for a company that had some interest in retaining employees, so they paid overtime to junior staff. Straight overtime, but it was better than nothing (which is what most other companies offered). Once you were to the point of managing some of your own projects, no more overtime pay - it was assumed that you were then responsible for scheduling your own work. Of course, it was also understood that at that point you had to worry about maintaining the profit multiplier on your projects, which meant scheduling as much time as possible for your underlings (high profit multiplier), less time for yourself (medium profit multiplier) and as little time as possible for your bosses (low or in some cases negative profit multiplier). But that's what happens when billing rates start high and go up slowly while pay rates start low and go up quickly; when I was hired my standard rate was something like $105/hr while I was getting paid the equivalent of $25/hr; the senior VP in our office would be billed out at about $180/hr, but that was a pretty significant negative multiplier given his billable goal and actual pay.
"If recycling made sense, companies would be paying me for the time I spend recycling. Since they don't, it clearly doesn't make sense."
We had this discussion 30 years ago in Europe and it showed that having to pay for your waste by the kilo made enthusiastic recyclers, you just have to raise the price enough.
So in a sense you get paid if you recycle as much as you can.
I have no problem paying by weight as long as the cost reflects the actual cost of disposal. Places I have seen this done, the per-pound disposal costs are way out of whack with what the city (or waste hauler) pays the landfill for disposal. Landfill disposal fees are generally in the vicinity of $25-$50 per ton around here, which allows the landfill to operate at a profit. The pay-per-pound rates I have heard of are an order of magnitude more. Yes, it costs something to transport the waste to the landfill - but we're talking pennies per pound, if that. Jacking up the price out of all proportion with the actual cost for the method you are discouraging just serves to hide the actual cost of the method you are promoting.
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If only his keyboard had a shift key.
His decision not to use the Shift key is a protestation against the lack of upward mobility in today's society. Those of us in the lower cases have no hope of joining the capitals; the capitalist Shift key merely offers the hollow promise that we may someday rise to the top.
So, yeah; the Shift key is clearly a capitalist conspiracy.
Why limit it to software patents? Our country did so well at the beginning (in part) because we completely ignored the old world's patents. Patents exist to hinder competitors, and are slowing down our progress.
Yes, we did better because we were able to ignore the "old world patents". Meaning, patents were bad when we weren't the ones that held them. I'm not sure that's really a good argument for getting rid of patents as it doesn't really speak to whether patents help or hinder innovation; it only shows that any nation not at the top of the patent pyramid has a vested interest in ignoring them.
Not saying I disagree with the premise that patents can actually hinder innovation, I just don't think your example provides any support for your claim. Quite the opposite, in fact.
More of same.
Would I have paid less for the same TV w/o 3D if it were available? Absolutely.
The thing is, it really doesn't cost anything for them to add 3D. If you already have a panel capable of 120Hz+ then the only thing you need to add for active-shutter 3D is a timing signal to the glasses. It's not so much them shoving it down our throats, as it is the fact that for that style of 3D there just really isn't any additional cost - it's just one more minor feature, liking throwing in Hulu streaming or something.
Consumers will flock to 3DTVs when there is basically nothing else on the market: otherwise, it just doesn't provide enough benefit to justify the added cost. This happened with HD too; did the TV makers really expect it to be different this time?
I agree that 3DTV uptake will basically be increasing only as people's current sets wear out and they buy new ones, I really don't see it being a driver of sales. That said, at least for the active-shutter type of 3D it really doesn't add any cost to include it in the TV - it is basically just a timing signal to tell the (over-priced) glasses when to switch.
That said, I don't think the manufacturers really expected it to push sales. They hoped it would help, and they didn't really have much else to advertise to try to attract new buyers (new! now 0.01 inches thinner than last year! Now including streaming app w in addition to x, y, and z!), so they have been talking it up as the big new feature. Tech/consumer electronics sites have been playing along, for pretty much the same reason - something to talk about and drive views. Not too much fun to only be able to say, "well, this year's models continue the trend of sacrificing picture quality for tiny and meaningless reductions in thickness as manufacturers abandon full-array LED backlighting in favor of more cost-effective edge lighting."
The only games I play are on XBox360. I might be interested in that game/simulation. If I needed to buy some fancy control devices, so be it. But having my nice big TV and all it would make the flight simulation pretty nice. And doing the the Live networking would be kinda fun too where you could join groups of flyers and such... interacting with them and all.
Not long ago, I saw my brother doing the flight sim thing on his PC. It was impressive enough, but not impressive enough for me to want to buy and set up a Windows PC... game system? Okay. But my stuff is Linux. I'm comfortable there... got some Apple stuff collecting dust but otherwise all Linux. A free game isn't enough to pull me back to Windows at home.
It is a flight simulator. Doesn't exactly match up with the gameplay demographic of consoles, though it does sound like there will be some arcadey options. Oh, and there is the fact that high-quality simulators are often CPU-bound, so they would have to make serious compromises to make it playable on a console. Not that this has stopped any other game companies from designing down to that level, and it is too early to really have an idea of how advanced the simulator element is, but that could be a real problem.
Personally I like the idea of a flight sim, but so far the ones I've tried have all been pretty boring. While one can theoretically use them for actual flight training (if you get the extra-special dongle that doesn't do anything but cost you an enormous amount), to me the fun part is doing stupid shit that would get you killed in real life. PC sims like Flight Gear and X-Plane do a decent enough job of simulating routine flight dynamics, but as soon as you start doing anything remotely stupid (or fun) they just fall apart. And they don't even have the decency to show pieces of your plane flying apart when you hit things :( I'll probably give MS Flight a try, since it is free, but I'll likely stick with Il-2 for my flight sim cravings; the flight model might not have quite the same fidelity, but it rewards stupidity with bits and pieces flying off - and then there's the fact that you can blow shit up when you're tired of just flying.
You don't know shit.
He's just being politically incorrect. He shouldn't have said "control the customer", because it sounds bad. But believe me, there are ways to do it.
You have no idea the jedi tricks these people can pull on you, and you don't even notice and fall right into their trap. How do you think "social engineering" works?
Let me teach you a little bit:
B is the caller, let's say a bank. C is the customer ("victim" if you want a politically incorrect term).
B: Hello?
C: Good day sir, is this John Doe?
B: Yes, who's this? --"yes" #1
C: This is X from Bank Y, do you have a minute? -- it's more than a minute, but if i say "a minute" i'm more likely to get your attention
B: Um...okay? --didn't say yes, try again
C: Excuse me? I can't hear you?
B: Yes, I have a minute --- "yes" #2
C: Oh very good. Just a minute, I'll check the computer...ohh it's slow today, it's one of those days, how is your day? -- fake slow day to get him into small talk
B: I'm doing fine
C: Oh it's so good to hear you're having a good day, it's been crazy here! --show him how good he is, and how bad you are, so he'll feel sorry for you
B: Oh i see, yes, it's been good --great, you got him on a positive mood!
C: OK, here we are.. let me check, are you John F. Doe, yes? - ask with yes, not "right". you want him to say "yes", not "right
B: Right -- try again
C: Excuse me? I can't hear you
B: Yes, I'm John F. Doe
C: Oh ok, and your address is 123 Fake St.?
B: Yes. --good
C: And your date of birth is 12/23/55?
B: Yes ---ooh man, we're on a roll!
C: Oh OK, everything sounds right. So, let me tell you about the deal we got for you: because you've been a great customer to us, we're offering a new *whatever* blah blah blah
then you explain how much he's gaining from this "deal", why he wants it, etc.
Why did i make such an emphasis on getting a YES answer? Because ultimately you're going to ask him if he wants, say, a new credit card. You want him to say "yes", not "right", "uh-huh", "OK". You need a "yes". So you ask him a lot of questions that will get him saying "yes", so he's more willing to say "yes" later on.
THAT's how it works. THAT's what "controlling" a customer is. When you get a call from some sales person you say "I'm not interested" and hang up right away. The moment you let them speak, they get into your head. They have all sorts of tricks to get even the most "uninterested" person in buying things they don't want or need. This has been true for decades. They have teams of psychologysts to understand people, and millions of hours of conversations to learn from.
Lol, sounds like a "customer service" idealized script (though you mixed up B and C). Now the reality:
C: "Good day sir, is this John Doe?"
B: "This is him, what's this call about?"
C: "We are offering a special deal for our best custo..."
B: "No thanks, I'm not interested." *click*
Try your BS tricks of trying to get me to repeat my answer or not answer my question and I'll just hang up sooner.
No way in hell I would confirm all that information on a cold call anyway, and no way I would stay on the line that long for an unsolicited call in any case. But then, I've long since lost any feeling that I need to be polite to marketeers - I don't waste time being overtly rude or insulting to the poor souls staffing the call center, but I do end the call quickly so they can move on to the next victim.
It accelerates faster than a Porsche 911 and has other luxury features. Ergo it's a rich person's toy. That said, given the performance, the prices seem competitive, even ignoring fuel costs. From a cursory glance at the Porsche website, a new 911 costs around $80k in the U.S. with an estimated range of ~300 miles. Had to use fuel economy estimates for previous years since 2011 is an entirely new platform and the corporate site doesn't publish fuel economy numbers. My issue with the all-electrics is battery replacement. Figure you're plunking down at least $10k at the end of that 8 year warranty to replace your battery.
Fueleconomy.gov is your friend. Looks like a 2012 Porsche Carrera gets about 18/25 to 19/27 (22 combined) depending on options, for an average range of about 350 miles (400+ on the highway).
The film, due December 14, 2012, is subtitled "An Unexpected Journey"
Odd, so was the book.
No, the book is subtitled, "There and Back Again, A Hobbit's Journey (or maybe Tale)". The first chapter is titled, "An Unexpected Party," though.
I just know somewhere in the process of the multi-billion dollar drone development project someone must have said, "You know. I think a self-destruct mechanism might be a good thing to add."
Of course, I can also imagine someone saying, "Yeah, they'll never even see it. It's stealth."
That's the beauty of what Iran did, though - the drone still thought it knew where it was and was flying back home, so no reason to self-destruct. Shows that drone designers shouldn't be relying on GPS alone to determine position - they should probably be relying on inertial tracking periodically updated by (or checked against) GPS, not simply relying on external signals being authentic.
What even a modest carrier can do in the near term caught the Chinese by surprise in early 2005,when they watched in horror as Indian and Japanese carriers conducted post-tsunami relief operations. Thus, in reconceptualizing the PLAN carrier, China’s two potential role models—and competitors—are not the United States and the former Soviet Union but rather India and Japan. [Andrew S. Erickson and Andrew R.Wilson, "China's aircraft carrier dilemma," Naval War College Review, Autumn 2006, Vol. 59, No. 4, p. 36.]
Would that this were true -- it would be nice to see countries build military weapons platforms to compete with each other to provide the best humanitarian assistance possible. [/pollyanna] However. . . .
Humanitarian relief is actually pretty similar to what they might be doing in war. Basically, logistically supporting a group of people far from other support. In peacetime this is residents cut off from national infrastructure by disasters, in war time it is combat troops on foreign/remote soil. Certainly not the only thing carriers are used for in war time, but definitely a part (especially for helicopter and amphibious carriers).
Pretty sure Taiwan might have a thing or two to say, also.
Interesting, when the Korean War ended, Americans forced hundreds of thousands Chinese prisoners to go to Taiwan instead of PRC, so that Americans can save their faces. I'm sure that the Chinese Korean War veterans in Taiwan complained about being separated from their wives, parents, and children for 30 to 40 years. American prisoners, on the other hand, were lucky as they returned to their own families immediately.
In addition, the Chinese prisoners received far worse treatments in American prison camps than what American prisoners received in Chinese prison camps.
Sort of goes without saying, but... citation(s) needed. Although reviewing your comment history, it looks pretty clear that any citations you came up with would likely be straight out of the PRC propaganda machine.
But how does it rank in terms of manufacturing output per capita, and what is the trend? Germany easily has us beat in exports, and they have a fraction of our population. A 5th of the global output isn't that high considering we're the 4th largest by population (IIRC), and 2 of the 3 larger ones probably don't rank very highly in manufacturing output.
Actually 3rd largest by population, at approximately 4.5% of the world (China represents about 20%). So producing 20% of the world's manufactured goods with 4.5% of the population would seem to indicate that, per capita, we are doing pretty well - but no, I don't know what the trend looks like. And yes, I'm fairly sure that a good portion of American manufactured goods probably include parts manufactured in China (along with dozens of other places), so just because we manufacture the most by value doesn't really mean we do so completely independently of other nations.
You mean land locked Tibet?
The point isn't whether they used (or could use) aircraft carriers to invade Tibet, the point is that they invaded Tibet. Responding to the claim that China is not "an offensive country", not utility in relation to Tibet specifically.
Anyone who has been paying attention knows that the likely use of aircraft carriers would be to enforce their claims in places like the South China Sea, where there have been numerous recent confrontations with the Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam. You know, the same use the U.S. puts its carriers to - projecting force in order to coerce other nations into doing what they want/preventing other nations from doing what they don't.
For two reasons:
1- People will confuse 720 for 720p and think that's the only resolution it goes to.
2- The next one after the 720 would have to be 1080 or 1440. Those are awkward names.
3- They should do like everyone else and call it "Xbox X". Or adopt the animal naming meme and call them something like "Xbox Rhino", "Xbox Elephant" and "Xbox Landwhale".
I don't know, the Xbox 360 name came out after Nintendo had been calling their upcoming console the Revolution for quite a while. Given Nintendo is planning on calling their next console the WiiU, I'm betting on Xbox Unlimited or Xbox Ultra.
Don't need to load the level or even the games code. Just need to stream the video. The next xbox could follow the Onlive model and be a dumb client.
Awesome. Then, assuming I have 60 ms lag to the server, every action will have effective 120 ms lag as an image is sent (60 ms), I respond (instantly, of course), and my response is then sent back over the wire (another 60 ms).
Count me out. Lag in MP games is bad enough; I'm not going to put up with input lag in single-player games.
So, basically, it's Mass Effect's elevators again, but with 30 minute rides this time.
Elevators are so 20th century. The next Mass Effect will just offer the feature of real-time interstellar navigation. After all, realism is King.
You need to load the amount that will fit into memory. While the player is playing, you can start downloading the rest onto semi-permanent storage. Most games are pretty linear like that. there's only a handful of options for what the next segment will be and you can easily download all of them in the time it takes to play them.
That might work well for single-player games where you are following a pretty linear narrative, but would not work at all for multiplayer games where you switch maps every few minutes. For BF3, the expansion that just came out clocked in at about 4 GB (on PC), and it included only 4 levels. I can't imagine that levels will be shrinking. Until we start seeing serious improvements in broadband speeds, it just isn't practical to stream a high-end game like that. Pre-load, sure; but it really wouldn't work to download in the background while you are trying to play an online game.
Personally I don't get the hate for blu-ray, and I sure don't mind physical media (though it really would be nice if they would quit requiring you to actually have the media in the drive to play - hopefully we will see that particular aspect of current-gen consoles disappear).
Also, at the moment the fastest broadband connection I am able to get would max out at 18 mbps, and no one appears to be in any hurry to offer faster speeds. Streaming is great and has its uses, and I'm sure we will continue to see movement this direction; but we just aren't to the point where it would make sense to abandon physical media.
What if the protests are considering it to be a civil war? Then does the Geneva Convention kick in?
The Geneva Conventions only concern uniformed armies of sovereign nations in conflict. Basically, donning a uniform (and therefore identifying yourself as an active participant in the conflict) grants you certain protections above and beyond what a non-uniformed (often referred to as "unlawful", although the term does not actually appear in the conventions) combatant might expect. The Geneva Conventions don't really come into play in any domestic altercations, they only govern conflicts between sovereign nations that are signatories to the conventions. The closest the Conventions get is basically stating that anyone not covered as a non-combatant or lawful combatant is subject to the domestic laws of the sovereign nation that captured them.
Stay away from the NASCAR version. It only works for programs stuck in loops.
That's why I prefer the P2P versions, like Rally. Even with the F1 version Europeans seem partial to, no matter how fancy the execution gets you are still just running through a loop and end up back in the same place you started.
The test was actually much simpler than any real-world application might be. Each puzzle was really only one or two (or a few) shredded pages, with various degrees of shredding and various bits of writing. It is a first step, but nowhere near what you would be dealing with in any real-world situation where hundreds or thousands of pages of shredded documents would be mixed together.
I participated (a bit) with the UCSD team that basically made a crowd-sourced jigsaw puzzle to do it - at last check they were in the top 5, but I don't think they got the last puzzle (yet). This approach seems reasonable for the relatively simple puzzles of the challenge, but it really wouldn't scale very well - requires a lot of labor.
It sounds like the winning team had a much better (and more scaleable) strategy, where an algorithm scores all of the pieces for fit in a particular place and then allows the user(s) to choose the best piece from a few high-scoring ones. While I still don't think this would work very well in a real-world scenario, obviously it would work better than depending on massive crowd sourcing.
Agreed. This is just going to have phone companies aggressively rolling out fiber. They've already lost their landline customers for good. Cable's not convinced people aren't going back to TV. In the meantime, the telephone companies can steal them all back. Personally, I'm in a decent sized city that doesn't have DSL at my address. Why? I have no idea. Here's hoping for fiber or VDSL in the next couple years.
I've got choices of either DSL or cable, so lucky in that way. I can even (maybe? changes day to day) get u-verse through AT&T with a max speed of 12 down and 1.5 up. That's... okay, but the sad thing is there is absolutely no plan to upgrade any further. AT&T and Comcast have no interest in spending money to actually upgrade the infrastructure that would allow a true improvement in speed. They say it is too expensive to lay new cable.
Meanwhile a wireless provider will be laying fiber literally across the street to provision a new microcell nearby, which they will be leasing to other wireless carriers (they are putting up 12 or 14 around town which should vastly improve wireless service). If AT&T (or one of the other telecoms) had any shred of forward-thinking, they would be all over plans like this, offering to split trenching costs and lay their own fiber along side the wireless provider - fiber is cheap, they should be jumping at any chance to get it into the ground at a reduced cost in established areas. As it is, I will be sitting on my 40-year-old twisted pair connection knowing that there is a brand-spanking-new high-capacity fiber optic line passing just a few feet from my house that no one has any interest in selling me access to (except through an extremely overpriced cellular data plan, of course). Basically this project should be reducing the "last mile" issue to the "last 500 feet" issue for the entire town, but instead will result in improved wireless service that will make them even less likely to invest in actual infrastructure upgrades in the future.
..who will work overtime, if it's not paid?
You will if your job requires it, and you want to keep your job. Last time I was on a full time salary, we didn't get any overtime pay, yet I believe the company billed their customers for all hours worked. I just chalked it up to paying for vacation and sick days, because the salaries were fairly generous.
Same experience working in consulting. Salaried employees, in general, could not expect to be paid overtime even though their time was being billed out to the client. I was fortunate and worked for a company that had some interest in retaining employees, so they paid overtime to junior staff. Straight overtime, but it was better than nothing (which is what most other companies offered). Once you were to the point of managing some of your own projects, no more overtime pay - it was assumed that you were then responsible for scheduling your own work. Of course, it was also understood that at that point you had to worry about maintaining the profit multiplier on your projects, which meant scheduling as much time as possible for your underlings (high profit multiplier), less time for yourself (medium profit multiplier) and as little time as possible for your bosses (low or in some cases negative profit multiplier). But that's what happens when billing rates start high and go up slowly while pay rates start low and go up quickly; when I was hired my standard rate was something like $105/hr while I was getting paid the equivalent of $25/hr; the senior VP in our office would be billed out at about $180/hr, but that was a pretty significant negative multiplier given his billable goal and actual pay.
First they took our jobs, now they are taking our TV sets!
"If recycling made sense, companies would be paying me for the time I spend recycling. Since they don't, it clearly doesn't make sense."
We had this discussion 30 years ago in Europe and it showed that having to pay for your waste by the kilo made enthusiastic recyclers, you just have to raise the price enough.
So in a sense you get paid if you recycle as much as you can.
I have no problem paying by weight as long as the cost reflects the actual cost of disposal. Places I have seen this done, the per-pound disposal costs are way out of whack with what the city (or waste hauler) pays the landfill for disposal. Landfill disposal fees are generally in the vicinity of $25-$50 per ton around here, which allows the landfill to operate at a profit. The pay-per-pound rates I have heard of are an order of magnitude more. Yes, it costs something to transport the waste to the landfill - but we're talking pennies per pound, if that. Jacking up the price out of all proportion with the actual cost for the method you are discouraging just serves to hide the actual cost of the method you are promoting.