No seriously, I'd be interested. I'm not a student, so I have no restrictions on what calculator I can use for whatever I like. I have an nSpire because I find nothing else comes close.
Can you find me an Android (since that's what my phone runs) calculator app that is easy to use, can do exact and approximate solving, has a CAS setup (meaning can solve algebraic and linear equations), and has at least reasonable graphing? Because I haven't been able to.
And please don't go and point to the Matlab app. Everyone who doesn't know what they are talking about does a quick search, finds that, and says "Oh it's Matlab it must be good!" It isn't an actual calculator, it is just a remote interface for Matlab, you have to have a computer somewhere running Matlab for it to talk to.
This is why TI keeps selling calculators. They make ones that do the job well, and they also have nice physical keyboards.
Also, with regards to education (where they are used a lot), I don't know that you'd want people using a smartphone. Having a device that by definition has built in instant messaging and Internet makes cheating rather easy.
TI is also popular because they seem to be the only company actually making higher end calculators. While in school is a major place you want those, there are uses out in the real world too.
I have a TI nSpire CX that I got because I kept finding myself needing a calculator aside from my computer, and I wanted something that could do more advanced math, should I need or want it, rather than just a basic one. So it sits on my desk for when it is needed.
I've found nothing that is near as good overall. While there are android calculator apps, all of them seem to be pretty basic. Handycalc is the best I've found but it isn't wonderful. Worse is the problem of interface. Not only are physical keypads nicer in general (I can enter numbers without looking on physical ten-keys) but because of the limited screen space, all the android ones are a pain to operate. Trying to find any functions seems like hunting around in oldschool adventure games, where you are deciphering a foreign logic.
It's not a huge market or anything, but it is there. Aside from education there are people who have a reason to want a calculator, and TI is one of the few high end ones. If you want something with CAS, TI has it and little else does that isn't on a computer. Is it as good as Matlab? Surely not but it is easier to use and I don't have to pull out my laptop for it.
The reason being it is an AV maker releasing it. They have reason to want to say "Oh the built in AV scanner sucks, you should buy ours!" They may be stacking the results.
AV Comparatives puts MS Security Essentials at about 95% in their latest test, not 85%. Bitdefender is 99.2%.
However one reason for that is false positive rate. MS is willing to trade off some detection to keep it low, because users get pissed off and want to get rid of scanners with lots of false positives. MSE had 0 false positives, BitDefender had 10.
None of this is to say getting a better virus scanner isn't a good idea, just take anything from a company selling a product in an area with a grain of salt. AV Comparatives seems to indicate that wile MSE is certainly not one of the best virus scanners, it isn't bad.
The beats are actually producing a lower frequency sound, hence why you can hear it. A band limited system has no problems capturing it.
It turns out that really, digital sampling does the trick. All the arguments people come up with against it come from not understanding how it works, and not understanding how human hearing works.
So yes, if you create an interference pattern between two high frequency waves the results is a lower frequency wave, one that is quite real. As such when it applies to acoustics and sampling, one that will be recorded, if it is within the pass band of the system.
Plate reverb is synthetic reverb. It is done, literally, by making a large metal plate vibrate. These days it is very rarely done as an actual physical thing since it can be simulated very well digitally, and with more flexibility.
However, any time you have a new technology, there are always "purists" who claim that it ruins everything and want to do it the old fashion way, hence there are places with real plate reverb units.
Actual room reverb or ambiance is captured just as function of recording in that space. The micing techniques you use (like what kind of pickup, how close to the musicians and so on) controls the amount. It can also be added later to quite a high degree of realism by taking an impulse of the room and using digital convolution on the audio signal. Still not quite the same as an actual recording in the space for various reasons, but close.
In terms of studios with famous ambiance, East West has one of the better ones out there. They bought the Cello Studios in California and there are some very good sounding rooms there. On account of that, many acts hire out the space to record in. It is also where they record their own samples, of course.
Not necessarily the idea of having a remote profile. That could be nice in some situations, but that it has to download it every time.
One of the things I like about my G500 is that it stores the profile on the mouse itself. You have to have Logitech's driver installed to change the profile (and the mouse has to be associated with that computer) but you can then take the programmed mouse, hook it in to another computer, and it'll retain all its settings.
Very nice way of doing things IMO because it means the mouse is always consistent, even if you are booted off a boot disc or installing a new OS and so on.
I have a Logitech G500 and the config is stored in the mouse firmware itself. If you hook it up to a new system, all your settings and buttons are correct, even with no driver. You have to associate it with a system (which wipes the config in the firmware) to program it, but once programmed it is self contained. Their G700 works the same way.
I haven't encountered a Logitech cloud mouse, but I can't imagine it is mandatory to use that. The G500 and G700 are both current products, as is the M570 I use on my laptop and none of them need to be net connected. If you install the drivers and let them auto-update, they will connect to check periodicly, but they don't have to, and the mouse functions without problem with no drivers as just a HID class device.
The Harmony remotes worked that way when Logitech bought them (they were a separate company, Logitech decided they'd like to own it). It has been that way for a long time.
The reason is for device code updates. As new devices come out the stuff can be added, including by users. Much of their support is something a user has submitted, which is also why sometimes it won't work 100% right. Also some models can have a TV guide on them, but it requires regular updates for that to work (it can only store like 2 weeks of data).
I see no big issue. It isn't like there's some evil conspiracy here to break you remote. Once programmed, you can never hook it up again if you like. Mine hasn't seen their site for like 2 years.
It does the job well, and there was no reason to redevelop the whole backend once they bought the company.
When you get clearance, you give your word not just in a pro-forma sense but a legally binding sense as well not to reveal the information you are given access to. It is a crime to do so, and you have explicitly promised not to.
If the government just decides to write that one off and let people go, well then there's a good chance that others would choose to do it as well. Some people will honor their word, others need a bit more of a reason and if that reason is removed they may not do as they should.
Remember to think of the larger consequences. You might be inclined to say "Ya more information is a good thing!" however is that what you really want? Think of it on a personal level: Would you want someone in the government leaking out all your personal information they have, without consequence?
I can appreciate the need for people to sometimes break their word and trust and reveal secrets in the case of a crime. The most famous recently modern case people like to cite is the Pentagon Papers.
However, for that to be valid, what is released need to be what is relevant, nothing more. You don't just release any and everything you can get your hands on. When you do that, it is tabloid type shit, publishing information just for the sake of it.
So, was everything leaked evidence of a crime? If not then you need to do some thinking. You can't use "evidence of a crime" as justification if it indeed wasn't.
Also you might want to check the laws because you are rather confused: People are not required to come forward and report crimes, by and large. There are cases where they are but for the most part if you see a crime and choose not to report it, that is not illegal.
What you think the law should be has no bearing on what it actually is.
I dunno, I'm having trouble seeing what gap they fill. In terms of low powered units, well we have those already. They often do use ARM CPUs (or MIPS), with other bits integrated on them, and they work fine for consumer shit. When you start to talk higher end, you need bigger systems.
Like if you want a simple little home NAS type of thing, it might ship with a BCM4718 and do just fine. However when you start stepping up to enterprise filers, you need more power. You find NetApps use Intel and AMD CPUs as an example.
There's also the fact that how much do you really save with a cheap processor, especially compared to losing flexibility. So day you have something you want to use for backup control for your tape system. You say ok, simple computer is fine it isn't CPU intensive. Then you add in a FC card, to talk to your library. Then you add in a NIC that has AES acceleration on it, since the CPU can't handle encryption at wire speed. Oh, and then you add in the cost of the tape library. You could easily have a $30,000+ setup, does it matter if you save $300 on the CPU?
Thing is, if you go with just a normal PC, then you can run Windows, Linux, whatever you like and whatever backup client on that you like. Get a little backup "appliance" and you are stuck with whatever they give you.
I just don't see caring. We are upgrading our backup solution at work and the big costs are the LTO-5 drives and tapes (we can keep the same library) and after that to a much lesser extent the FC interface card. The cost of a new server (we are finally ditching our Sparc POS) is very secondary.
While it is a workable hack to support more than 4GB of RAM without expanding the virtual address space, it is a hack. Much better to just g 64-bit and call it good. Hence I imagine that's what you'll see with mobile devices. When they start to need more RAM, they'll shift to 64-bit.
Same shit with desktops and many Intel servers. Intel supported PAE, and Windows implemented it as AWE, with 32-bit chips. Was never very popular though, due to the limitations and performance issues with paging. Now, with actual 64-bit chips, it has gotten much more popular.
Even then there's a good bit of cost in terms of maintaining your equipment and all that jazz. Don't think that fiber is the only cost, you have ongoing costs of all sorts.
However in the event nobody wants to peer, then you have even more costs. That is one reason places like NZ get the short end of the stick is that there isn't much data there, so the big carriers aren't interested in peering. They'll sell them access, but not peer.
In the US you get a lot of items from prime next day because they ship from a warehouse near you. However, sometimes the item isn't at one of those, and has to cross the country. That either takes a bit of time, or costs quite a lot of money if you want it done next day.
Amazon is unwilling to pay the next day air prices, so they will only guarantee second day. Nobody is unhappy if it gets there a day sooner, and they don't get reamed on shipping charges.
If you really believe that all it belies is your extreme ignorance of the world at large. Hypocrisy is common in humans and thus in their governments and the US is not even near the worst. Spend less time bitching, more time enlightening yourself.
He's pulled the kind of shit that people love to hate on varies wall street baddies for, just on a somewhat smaller scale. In 2001 he bought a bunch of stock for a bankrupt company, and said he'd invest 50 million Euro in it. the stock jumped, and he cashed out making a profit, leaving others to hold the bag.
In 2003 he set up a set of shell companies and pretended to have "an artificial intelligence-driven hedge fund delivering an annual return of at least 25%." It was all bullshit of course and the Hong Kong SFC shut him down.
This guy is not some shining example of human goodness, being railroaded by the US government. He's a sleaze who will screw over others to get what he wants.
Now, none of that excuses the US government from acting like jackasses, but let's not pretend like Kim is a good guy. He's not, and I personally think the US government's allegations that he at the very least was turning a deliberate blind eye to copyright infringement on Megaupload. Nobody (except the jackasses in Hollywood) would expect something to be 100% perfect, but Megaupload had many problems, and had an interesting little linking system whereby a DMCA request often resulted in a link going away, not the actual file being taken down.
Regardless, this is the case of the US government acting like thugs to a jerk, not to a great guy. You should be mad at the US for acting as it has, but you shouldn't support Kim as some sort of great person.
He knows he isn't going to do it, because to bring the action against the US he'd have to do it in US court. He tries that, well he'll get arrested. Bullshit or no, the US government wants to go after him and if he's on US soil, that's quite easy. Even if the lose they can make the process drawn out and a huge pain in the ass for him. So there's no way he'd come to the US.
That aside, suing government is problematic. Look up sovereign immunity. In the US, as with many countries, it is still law. So more or less you can't sue the US government unless it waives immunity. Congress has passed laws waiving immunity in a few cases, but generally just negligence/tort related matters. Something like this wouldn't apply.
His lawyers know this for damn sure, so this shit is never going to happen. It is just a PR stunt on his part. Depending on how far they carry the stunt he may do something like sue them in a NZ court, but that'll be dismissed on account of the court not having jurisdiction. It'll never actually be brought in US court, nor would it go anywhere if it were.
We have a Federal Constitutional Republic, that has strong Democratic traditions. Now that might sound like nit picking but it isn't. Due to the way we choose the president, the system is heavily stacked to only have two parties.
So what happens is people don't actually vote for the president, they vote for electors who then vote for the president. This was put in to place because back in the day, it was pretty much the only way to do things what with the massive distances involved, and also due to the desire to give more power to the states.
This alone might not sound like it would favour two parties, however there's another fact you need to know: In order to win an election you must have 270 electoral votes, a majority of the electoral college. Not the most, but a majority.
So what happens if there isn't a majority? Nobody wins, and then the House of Representatives chooses the President, and the Senate chooses the Vice President. It has happened once before in US history, because there was a 4-way race.
So the system is heavily stacked to just two parties. If you have another serious contender they might not be enough to win, but they could be enough to split the EC, which nobody wants.
Now that only affects the presidency, but since that is the most powerful office, it filters down as well, and generally leads to a situation of two dominant parties.
This could be changed, but would require a constitutional amendment. Those are pretty hard. 66% of both houses of congress must pass the amendment, and then 75% of the 50 state legislatures must vote to ratify it. Hence it doesn't happen very often and isn't something that someone can just decide to do.
Just to give you some insight as to why the US system is as it is.
Their shipping rates are competitive with other online companies. You seem to be complaining that they won't both comp you shipping and do it quickly. Well given that I don't know anyone else that does that, it seems reasonable they don't. Amazon just offers lots of options:
1) Free shipping that is slow. They note it can take a number of days. However, you don't have to pay anything extra for it.
2) Per shipment faster paid shipping. They have all the regular options, up to next day. You pay based on size and weight, like with most retailers, and get your shipment in the specified time.
3) Prime. Yo pay a yearly fee to get two day shipping on all items (even pretty large and heavy ones) and have the option to upgrade any item to one day for $4/item. Often even the 2 day items arrive in one day, though they don't guarantee it.
For example at work I'm the Windows support lead, an upper level tech support guy basically. This means I have a domain administrator account, the root account on our UNIX systems, the admin account on our NetApp and so on. In other words: I have full access. There is no system in the building I can't get at everything on it.
This means they have to trust me, they have to trust that I won't go and rifle through shit I shouldn't. Even if you naively believe that people never do anything personal on work systems, there's still all kinds of work related stuff I need to leave alone.
And I do, I respect the need for privacy and understand that my access is not synonymous with permission.
There's a reason we don't replace our keyboards on computers with touch screens, and it isn't because the technology doesn't exist. It is because a keyboard is way better for typing than any touchscreen.
Particularly since the way it work is by probabilities. So a physician goes and inputs all the symptoms a patient reports, perhaps along with a confidence of how likely it is to be real. Watson could then spit out the likely causes, and the probability of each, as well as how to narrow it down. Then with additional tests, they can exclude things and get a re-factored list.
It won't remove the need for a medical professional with good judgement, but it could be a boon for searching through things and presenting possibilities. What's more each new case can be logged, improving its database.
So when someone presents with a rare disease, it would be much easier for a physician to diagnose it, even if they've never heard of it.
If implemented right, it could cut down on misdiagnosis a ton.
The problem is inefficiency. Power drops with the square of distance. That means you need a bigass transmission source to get a small amount of power any distance away, hence why things like FM stations have 5 digit wattage transmitters.
Yes we have been able to transmit power wirelessly for a long time, no it is NOT practical or efficient. If you are enthralled with Tesla, spend some time reading some actual books on him, not just the silly piece by the Oatmeal. He was a fascinating man and worth your time to learn about, but you need to learn about him if you want to go spouting off.
He didn't invent some magic transmission technology we can't replicate, he invented an inefficient transmission technology that we can replicate, but don't, because he was not able to solve the efficiency problems (and it may not be physically possible to).
Apple didn't develop shit. They contacted one of the display manufacturers, I believe LG Displays in this case, and said "We want a display with these specs. If you will make us one and guarantee us exclusivity for a period of time, we will guarantee a large minimum order."
That's all well and good but stop pretending like it was some amazing feat of R&D on Apple's part. They just had a display made for them, same as ever.
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No seriously, I'd be interested. I'm not a student, so I have no restrictions on what calculator I can use for whatever I like. I have an nSpire because I find nothing else comes close.
Can you find me an Android (since that's what my phone runs) calculator app that is easy to use, can do exact and approximate solving, has a CAS setup (meaning can solve algebraic and linear equations), and has at least reasonable graphing? Because I haven't been able to.
And please don't go and point to the Matlab app. Everyone who doesn't know what they are talking about does a quick search, finds that, and says "Oh it's Matlab it must be good!" It isn't an actual calculator, it is just a remote interface for Matlab, you have to have a computer somewhere running Matlab for it to talk to.
This is why TI keeps selling calculators. They make ones that do the job well, and they also have nice physical keyboards.
Also, with regards to education (where they are used a lot), I don't know that you'd want people using a smartphone. Having a device that by definition has built in instant messaging and Internet makes cheating rather easy.
TI is also popular because they seem to be the only company actually making higher end calculators. While in school is a major place you want those, there are uses out in the real world too.
I have a TI nSpire CX that I got because I kept finding myself needing a calculator aside from my computer, and I wanted something that could do more advanced math, should I need or want it, rather than just a basic one. So it sits on my desk for when it is needed.
I've found nothing that is near as good overall. While there are android calculator apps, all of them seem to be pretty basic. Handycalc is the best I've found but it isn't wonderful. Worse is the problem of interface. Not only are physical keypads nicer in general (I can enter numbers without looking on physical ten-keys) but because of the limited screen space, all the android ones are a pain to operate. Trying to find any functions seems like hunting around in oldschool adventure games, where you are deciphering a foreign logic.
It's not a huge market or anything, but it is there. Aside from education there are people who have a reason to want a calculator, and TI is one of the few high end ones. If you want something with CAS, TI has it and little else does that isn't on a computer. Is it as good as Matlab? Surely not but it is easier to use and I don't have to pull out my laptop for it.
The reason being it is an AV maker releasing it. They have reason to want to say "Oh the built in AV scanner sucks, you should buy ours!" They may be stacking the results.
AV Comparatives puts MS Security Essentials at about 95% in their latest test, not 85%. Bitdefender is 99.2%.
However one reason for that is false positive rate. MS is willing to trade off some detection to keep it low, because users get pissed off and want to get rid of scanners with lots of false positives. MSE had 0 false positives, BitDefender had 10.
None of this is to say getting a better virus scanner isn't a good idea, just take anything from a company selling a product in an area with a grain of salt. AV Comparatives seems to indicate that wile MSE is certainly not one of the best virus scanners, it isn't bad.
The beats are actually producing a lower frequency sound, hence why you can hear it. A band limited system has no problems capturing it.
It turns out that really, digital sampling does the trick. All the arguments people come up with against it come from not understanding how it works, and not understanding how human hearing works.
So yes, if you create an interference pattern between two high frequency waves the results is a lower frequency wave, one that is quite real. As such when it applies to acoustics and sampling, one that will be recorded, if it is within the pass band of the system.
Plate reverb is synthetic reverb. It is done, literally, by making a large metal plate vibrate. These days it is very rarely done as an actual physical thing since it can be simulated very well digitally, and with more flexibility.
However, any time you have a new technology, there are always "purists" who claim that it ruins everything and want to do it the old fashion way, hence there are places with real plate reverb units.
Actual room reverb or ambiance is captured just as function of recording in that space. The micing techniques you use (like what kind of pickup, how close to the musicians and so on) controls the amount. It can also be added later to quite a high degree of realism by taking an impulse of the room and using digital convolution on the audio signal. Still not quite the same as an actual recording in the space for various reasons, but close.
In terms of studios with famous ambiance, East West has one of the better ones out there. They bought the Cello Studios in California and there are some very good sounding rooms there. On account of that, many acts hire out the space to record in. It is also where they record their own samples, of course.
Not necessarily the idea of having a remote profile. That could be nice in some situations, but that it has to download it every time.
One of the things I like about my G500 is that it stores the profile on the mouse itself. You have to have Logitech's driver installed to change the profile (and the mouse has to be associated with that computer) but you can then take the programmed mouse, hook it in to another computer, and it'll retain all its settings.
Very nice way of doing things IMO because it means the mouse is always consistent, even if you are booted off a boot disc or installing a new OS and so on.
I have a Logitech G500 and the config is stored in the mouse firmware itself. If you hook it up to a new system, all your settings and buttons are correct, even with no driver. You have to associate it with a system (which wipes the config in the firmware) to program it, but once programmed it is self contained. Their G700 works the same way.
I haven't encountered a Logitech cloud mouse, but I can't imagine it is mandatory to use that. The G500 and G700 are both current products, as is the M570 I use on my laptop and none of them need to be net connected. If you install the drivers and let them auto-update, they will connect to check periodicly, but they don't have to, and the mouse functions without problem with no drivers as just a HID class device.
The Harmony remotes worked that way when Logitech bought them (they were a separate company, Logitech decided they'd like to own it). It has been that way for a long time.
The reason is for device code updates. As new devices come out the stuff can be added, including by users. Much of their support is something a user has submitted, which is also why sometimes it won't work 100% right. Also some models can have a TV guide on them, but it requires regular updates for that to work (it can only store like 2 weeks of data).
I see no big issue. It isn't like there's some evil conspiracy here to break you remote. Once programmed, you can never hook it up again if you like. Mine hasn't seen their site for like 2 years.
It does the job well, and there was no reason to redevelop the whole backend once they bought the company.
When you get clearance, you give your word not just in a pro-forma sense but a legally binding sense as well not to reveal the information you are given access to. It is a crime to do so, and you have explicitly promised not to.
If the government just decides to write that one off and let people go, well then there's a good chance that others would choose to do it as well. Some people will honor their word, others need a bit more of a reason and if that reason is removed they may not do as they should.
Remember to think of the larger consequences. You might be inclined to say "Ya more information is a good thing!" however is that what you really want? Think of it on a personal level: Would you want someone in the government leaking out all your personal information they have, without consequence?
Because if not, then it is indiscriminate.
I can appreciate the need for people to sometimes break their word and trust and reveal secrets in the case of a crime. The most famous recently modern case people like to cite is the Pentagon Papers.
However, for that to be valid, what is released need to be what is relevant, nothing more. You don't just release any and everything you can get your hands on. When you do that, it is tabloid type shit, publishing information just for the sake of it.
So, was everything leaked evidence of a crime? If not then you need to do some thinking. You can't use "evidence of a crime" as justification if it indeed wasn't.
Also you might want to check the laws because you are rather confused: People are not required to come forward and report crimes, by and large. There are cases where they are but for the most part if you see a crime and choose not to report it, that is not illegal.
What you think the law should be has no bearing on what it actually is.
I dunno, I'm having trouble seeing what gap they fill. In terms of low powered units, well we have those already. They often do use ARM CPUs (or MIPS), with other bits integrated on them, and they work fine for consumer shit. When you start to talk higher end, you need bigger systems.
Like if you want a simple little home NAS type of thing, it might ship with a BCM4718 and do just fine. However when you start stepping up to enterprise filers, you need more power. You find NetApps use Intel and AMD CPUs as an example.
There's also the fact that how much do you really save with a cheap processor, especially compared to losing flexibility. So day you have something you want to use for backup control for your tape system. You say ok, simple computer is fine it isn't CPU intensive. Then you add in a FC card, to talk to your library. Then you add in a NIC that has AES acceleration on it, since the CPU can't handle encryption at wire speed. Oh, and then you add in the cost of the tape library. You could easily have a $30,000+ setup, does it matter if you save $300 on the CPU?
Thing is, if you go with just a normal PC, then you can run Windows, Linux, whatever you like and whatever backup client on that you like. Get a little backup "appliance" and you are stuck with whatever they give you.
I just don't see caring. We are upgrading our backup solution at work and the big costs are the LTO-5 drives and tapes (we can keep the same library) and after that to a much lesser extent the FC interface card. The cost of a new server (we are finally ditching our Sparc POS) is very secondary.
While it is a workable hack to support more than 4GB of RAM without expanding the virtual address space, it is a hack. Much better to just g 64-bit and call it good. Hence I imagine that's what you'll see with mobile devices. When they start to need more RAM, they'll shift to 64-bit.
Same shit with desktops and many Intel servers. Intel supported PAE, and Windows implemented it as AWE, with 32-bit chips. Was never very popular though, due to the limitations and performance issues with paging. Now, with actual 64-bit chips, it has gotten much more popular.
Even then there's a good bit of cost in terms of maintaining your equipment and all that jazz. Don't think that fiber is the only cost, you have ongoing costs of all sorts.
However in the event nobody wants to peer, then you have even more costs. That is one reason places like NZ get the short end of the stick is that there isn't much data there, so the big carriers aren't interested in peering. They'll sell them access, but not peer.
In the US you get a lot of items from prime next day because they ship from a warehouse near you. However, sometimes the item isn't at one of those, and has to cross the country. That either takes a bit of time, or costs quite a lot of money if you want it done next day.
Amazon is unwilling to pay the next day air prices, so they will only guarantee second day. Nobody is unhappy if it gets there a day sooner, and they don't get reamed on shipping charges.
"USA! We are the worlds biggest hypocrites!"
If you really believe that all it belies is your extreme ignorance of the world at large. Hypocrisy is common in humans and thus in their governments and the US is not even near the worst. Spend less time bitching, more time enlightening yourself.
He's pulled the kind of shit that people love to hate on varies wall street baddies for, just on a somewhat smaller scale. In 2001 he bought a bunch of stock for a bankrupt company, and said he'd invest 50 million Euro in it. the stock jumped, and he cashed out making a profit, leaving others to hold the bag.
In 2003 he set up a set of shell companies and pretended to have "an artificial intelligence-driven hedge fund delivering an annual return of at least 25%." It was all bullshit of course and the Hong Kong SFC shut him down.
This guy is not some shining example of human goodness, being railroaded by the US government. He's a sleaze who will screw over others to get what he wants.
Now, none of that excuses the US government from acting like jackasses, but let's not pretend like Kim is a good guy. He's not, and I personally think the US government's allegations that he at the very least was turning a deliberate blind eye to copyright infringement on Megaupload. Nobody (except the jackasses in Hollywood) would expect something to be 100% perfect, but Megaupload had many problems, and had an interesting little linking system whereby a DMCA request often resulted in a link going away, not the actual file being taken down.
Regardless, this is the case of the US government acting like thugs to a jerk, not to a great guy. You should be mad at the US for acting as it has, but you shouldn't support Kim as some sort of great person.
He knows he isn't going to do it, because to bring the action against the US he'd have to do it in US court. He tries that, well he'll get arrested. Bullshit or no, the US government wants to go after him and if he's on US soil, that's quite easy. Even if the lose they can make the process drawn out and a huge pain in the ass for him. So there's no way he'd come to the US.
That aside, suing government is problematic. Look up sovereign immunity. In the US, as with many countries, it is still law. So more or less you can't sue the US government unless it waives immunity. Congress has passed laws waiving immunity in a few cases, but generally just negligence/tort related matters. Something like this wouldn't apply.
His lawyers know this for damn sure, so this shit is never going to happen. It is just a PR stunt on his part. Depending on how far they carry the stunt he may do something like sue them in a NZ court, but that'll be dismissed on account of the court not having jurisdiction. It'll never actually be brought in US court, nor would it go anywhere if it were.
We have a Federal Constitutional Republic, that has strong Democratic traditions. Now that might sound like nit picking but it isn't. Due to the way we choose the president, the system is heavily stacked to only have two parties.
So what happens is people don't actually vote for the president, they vote for electors who then vote for the president. This was put in to place because back in the day, it was pretty much the only way to do things what with the massive distances involved, and also due to the desire to give more power to the states.
This alone might not sound like it would favour two parties, however there's another fact you need to know: In order to win an election you must have 270 electoral votes, a majority of the electoral college. Not the most, but a majority.
So what happens if there isn't a majority? Nobody wins, and then the House of Representatives chooses the President, and the Senate chooses the Vice President. It has happened once before in US history, because there was a 4-way race.
So the system is heavily stacked to just two parties. If you have another serious contender they might not be enough to win, but they could be enough to split the EC, which nobody wants.
Now that only affects the presidency, but since that is the most powerful office, it filters down as well, and generally leads to a situation of two dominant parties.
This could be changed, but would require a constitutional amendment. Those are pretty hard. 66% of both houses of congress must pass the amendment, and then 75% of the 50 state legislatures must vote to ratify it. Hence it doesn't happen very often and isn't something that someone can just decide to do.
Just to give you some insight as to why the US system is as it is.
Their shipping rates are competitive with other online companies. You seem to be complaining that they won't both comp you shipping and do it quickly. Well given that I don't know anyone else that does that, it seems reasonable they don't. Amazon just offers lots of options:
1) Free shipping that is slow. They note it can take a number of days. However, you don't have to pay anything extra for it.
2) Per shipment faster paid shipping. They have all the regular options, up to next day. You pay based on size and weight, like with most retailers, and get your shipment in the specified time.
3) Prime. Yo pay a yearly fee to get two day shipping on all items (even pretty large and heavy ones) and have the option to upgrade any item to one day for $4/item. Often even the 2 day items arrive in one day, though they don't guarantee it.
Sounds damn reasonable to me.
They drop off with the CUBE of distance.
For example at work I'm the Windows support lead, an upper level tech support guy basically. This means I have a domain administrator account, the root account on our UNIX systems, the admin account on our NetApp and so on. In other words: I have full access. There is no system in the building I can't get at everything on it.
This means they have to trust me, they have to trust that I won't go and rifle through shit I shouldn't. Even if you naively believe that people never do anything personal on work systems, there's still all kinds of work related stuff I need to leave alone.
And I do, I respect the need for privacy and understand that my access is not synonymous with permission.
There's a reason we don't replace our keyboards on computers with touch screens, and it isn't because the technology doesn't exist. It is because a keyboard is way better for typing than any touchscreen.
Particularly since the way it work is by probabilities. So a physician goes and inputs all the symptoms a patient reports, perhaps along with a confidence of how likely it is to be real. Watson could then spit out the likely causes, and the probability of each, as well as how to narrow it down. Then with additional tests, they can exclude things and get a re-factored list.
It won't remove the need for a medical professional with good judgement, but it could be a boon for searching through things and presenting possibilities. What's more each new case can be logged, improving its database.
So when someone presents with a rare disease, it would be much easier for a physician to diagnose it, even if they've never heard of it.
If implemented right, it could cut down on misdiagnosis a ton.
The problem is inefficiency. Power drops with the square of distance. That means you need a bigass transmission source to get a small amount of power any distance away, hence why things like FM stations have 5 digit wattage transmitters.
Yes we have been able to transmit power wirelessly for a long time, no it is NOT practical or efficient. If you are enthralled with Tesla, spend some time reading some actual books on him, not just the silly piece by the Oatmeal. He was a fascinating man and worth your time to learn about, but you need to learn about him if you want to go spouting off.
He didn't invent some magic transmission technology we can't replicate, he invented an inefficient transmission technology that we can replicate, but don't, because he was not able to solve the efficiency problems (and it may not be physically possible to).
Apple didn't develop shit. They contacted one of the display manufacturers, I believe LG Displays in this case, and said "We want a display with these specs. If you will make us one and guarantee us exclusivity for a period of time, we will guarantee a large minimum order."
That's all well and good but stop pretending like it was some amazing feat of R&D on Apple's part. They just had a display made for them, same as ever.