1. The iPad has a larger screen than most netbooks, which can be oriented for the type of media at hand. There is a reason why books are tall and narrow. 2. The iPad is about half of the weight of the current lightest netbooks, although Intel should bring parity back by year's end. 3. The iPad can be held in your hand like a book, and doesn't have to be rested on your lap.
It's not really a question of what does more. It's a question of what is easier to use for normal tasks. If you need power and functionality, you probably want a real laptop with real keys and an actual processor behind it. If you want to wander around your morning reading cnet and checking sports scores while making a cup of coffee, the iPad is an easier form function.
A netbook is just a lighter, weaker laptop. Most of the people I know who have one, have gone back to their laptop for daily usage except for times when they'd need to lug it distances. Besides, they woke up laptop manufacturers to the idea that lighter, smaller, and cheaper were desirable, and now 11" real laptops under 5 pounds are plentiful. Tablets are for those times when you don't need a full laptop, but want something you can wander around with in your hand. Even my netbook would get uncomfortably warm if I were to put it on my legs in the bathroom, and reading from a netbook while wandering up the street is just awkward.
Netbook and laptops work while you're sitting. Tablets work while you're standing up or walking around. That's a pretty significant difference.
Having worked in places where the user can't install any applications, change any preferences, or otherwise use a computer as anything other than a terminal to specific company-controlled services, lots of workplace computers are "just a gadget." Entire industries (and swaths of Slashdot readers) are devoted to ensuring the restrictiveness of computers at work.
You do realize that copyright law doesn't actually cover the sharing of information and ideas, but merely the particular expressive form that entails. If people were to have taken all of these stories and put them into their own words, the newspaper wouldn't have a copyright claim because the information contained therein is not copyrightable. But they didn't, they plagerized to some degree or another.
Also, your description of "No Trademarks" quickly wanders back into the "oh, it's a tradmark" territory. You acknowledge the need for consumers to be able to reliably source the origins of the products they buy, and put a non-falsifiable identifier in there which discriminates manufacturers. Except, of course, that the address of a company doesn't really have any meaning in this day and age, as Apple for example has headquarters and manufacturing all over the world. So you have to fall back to some non-falsifiable unique identifier.
For trademarks, I feel like the system needs to give legal costs+ punative damages against tradmark abusers who sue for opportunistic inactive tradmarks. But that overall the trademark system is OK. The patent system is badly, badly underfunded. If patent clerks had enough time to actually investigate patents, we might see a dropoff in false patents being granted. Bringing in a network of secret outside consultants might help. Copyright is getting to be a bit of a mess, but that's mainly due to stupid legislation pushed through by artists groups that don't actually represent the artists. Cut back mandatory damages for small-time personal infringement to something similar to physical theft, modify the DMCA to allow for ANY content protection bypassing so long as it is for things which are within the user's rights, and require the RIAA to sign up each damned artist individually and send each of them a statement every month with the money that they owe that particular artist.
Considering there are about 310,306,840 people in the US, the chance of any one person having been queried by the US government to google in a given year is only one in 72,000. While I'm cautious of government intrusion into private matters, that's hardly 1984.
Yes. They have an adult filter on certain keywords. Enter one of those keywords, and you have to actually hit the enter key. This is pretty clear while you're typing, though, as all entries disappear and "press enter to search" comes up. So it isn't any slower than the traditional way where you have to hit enter for each search.
Do note that you can find the book if you type in "Wisdom of Elizabeth Pisani" without hitting enter, as Elizabeth is the author. So it's more of a keyword search than a content block. That may seem like splitting hairs, but if you just remember certain bits of information, you don't have to hit enter to see potentially sensitive results. I.E. when there are results, you can trust them to be as exhaustive as they would be if you hit enter.
[Dominant concept] [sub concept 1] [sub concept 2] [refining concept 1] [refining concept 2] [additional info 1] [additional info 2]
Start typing. If you don't see what you're looking for, keep typing. Add terms and refinements. Keep going. Running 4 separate searches to find what you're looking for is slow. Seeing how you need to change your query to shape your results in realtime can be helpful.
Considering how long Microsoft has given up on I.E., how stagnant Firefox is, and how much trouble Opera has been as of late, it's nice to see a developer that's actually pushing forward with browser development.
Chrome is all of 2 years old. Recent "bloat" includes plug-ins and a show all downloads page. Keeping their browser synchronized with how their home page handles searching doesn't seem like bloat to me at all.
I don't know. I want those whiz-bang features, if they're actually useful. I want a reason to care about new releases. When Opera released mousegestures, it basically changed the way I interacted with computers. This isn't something like that, but it seems like a handy update that will slightly speed up something that happens dozens of times a day.
Chrome already does search-from-bar and live suggestions. What this does is put live search *results* over the page you're currently looking at. It's a browser extension of how google's.com search page works now. While it isn't a revolutionary feature, as far as I know nobody else has implemented it.
1. "They" apparently weren't twin galaxies, but a competitive DK player that happened to be vacationing in the area, and had heard of the controversy. 2. The mother suggested they wait in the car. After a while, the grandmother came out and had them wait in the garage, and gave them a quarter to play. 3. Supposedly it was all pretty friendly when Steve came home. 4. You may not agree what your parents do, but they are still adults and they have the right to invite people into their home.
The lengths these people go to keep clean boards is rather impressive. On one of Mitchell's passes (Florida, I believe), he paid Nintendo Japan to verify the authenticity and originality of an original DK board. He then kept it in the original sealed container until his attempt. On his attempt, he unwrapped it with a scorekeeper present, inserted it into a clean jamma machine, and played through right there. These people take their authenticity incredibly seriously.
Twin Galaxies also has an interesting writeup on the creative license taken by the movie. Don't forget that the apology letter Weibe received was actually immediately after the FunSpot videotape incident, and not years later as implied by editing.
It's a great movie. It takes the rather dry world of competitive video game playing, and turns it into something eminently watchable. But don't pillory Mitchell for how the filmmakers edited him to seem.
I have been cardjacked recently, my fiancee has been card jacked, and most of our friends have had some degree of card fraud. Anecdotally at least, the problem seems endemic.
And while I agree that security levels cost money and require expensive changes, the security of credit cards was setup to be adequate for single-occurrence swiped transactions. For any sort of stored-on-server permanence, current credit card security is a 1960's solution to a problem that started in 2000. The security of the entire system relies upon the security level of the lowest server in the network. On a very large network, that's going to be a very low threshold.
"Room for improvement" makes it sound like a network that could more efficiently reduce overhead through intelligent optimizations. In this case, we have a system that is operating in an environment that not only it wasn't designed for, but that the designers of the original system couldn't have envisioned.
Really, the question isn't if fraud is endemic. The question is how much money is it worth throwing at the problem, and how much can you inconvenience people before they refuse your service. Oh, and if we can avoid the hackjob vendors selling useless iPhone enabled swipe passes and giving out free trips to CEO's in the interim. Unfortunately, there is a lot of "security" out there that is just a smoke-and-mirrors magic trick to extract money from suckers.
For security, credit cards rely upon... nobody who has ever run your credit card being hacked. For security passports rely upon... nobody who has ever recorded your passport being hacked. This is just not secure! By design, this system can *never* adequately secure people's information, because information alone is not secure enough for a transaction.
Options:
Credit cards pass through a Visa or MC controlled layer. Visa or MC then authorize a new single-merchant / single client code combination, which will work at that merchant but no others. The merchant never sees the original credit card number.
A passport decryption chip, which takes the original passport number, a country request number, and munges it in subtle ways, so that the selected passport number relates the the specific person, but the passport country code is hidden within the resultant displayed passport number.
A 2nd piece of information that by agreement can never be stored, but can be used to permanently authorize a particular merchant. For example, the first time you purchased something from Amazon.com, you'd be required to enter your visa password through a visa-controlled interface. Afterwards, Amazon would be allowed to utilize your credit card. This would include recurring billing.
5, 6, and 7 will exist eventually, but *really* don't exist right now. Creating a semi complex app (like, say, a college information front-end) in Flash would be far easier, cheaper, and with less unexpected problems than doing it in HTML 5.
For most categories, sellers need to offer one or more of the following electronic payment choices: PayPal ProPay Moneybookers Paymate Credit card or debit card processed through the seller's Internet merchant account
So the seller either A: has to have a verified merchant account, B: has to accept ProPay, Moneybookers, or Paymate, all of which suck, or C: have to accept Paypal. This is basically the natural extension of a "Paypal only" policy, but with a few token bad alternatives thrown in so as to placate certain regulators and large businesses.
Credit card companies, when it comes to this sort of thing, are Great to the consumer, and absolutely screw over the vendor. This doesn't sound like a Paypal specific issue to me. Credit cards can chargeback for almost any reason, and do so frequently. This doesn't come from the credit card company, but from the vendor.
It sounds like the payment to the Paypal account was fraudulent and therefore reversed, as happens. Because the vendor withdrew the money from the Paypal account, his account has a negative balance ( 600 payment - 600 withdraw - 600 reversed charge = -600).
Another way of looking at this, is the thief used false pretenses to convince someone to ship a laptop out to them. The vendor thought there was money in the account, and withdrew more than he had. What he has at the end, is an accidentally overdrawn account that he is responsible for, and a stolen laptop that he should go find.
I directly quoted the incoming CEO of BP, as well as cited some of the causes listed in the report.
The point of my post was that BP is very specifically choosing wording and trying to frame the discussion in such a way as to discourage more governmental oversight. This has nothing to do with the engineering of the problem, so much as the larger question of who gets to structure the discourse. BP's specific use of the term "complex causes," as well as their assertion that it's all well understood now and fixes are underway, is primarily to deflect the regulatory oversight that congress briefly talked up in the hopes of an easy midterm election win.
The point of that one post on an internet bulletin board was not to get deeply into the technical explanations for the calamity (though I have read portions of the report, I haven't read the entire thing). But to comment on the way that BP's framing of the discussion around the report has crept into the way that we here were discussing the report. And that the words we were ceeding to BP were inherently designed to bias towards the opinion that "stuff happens [shrug]", thus defeating the discussion of regulatory oversight before it happens.
400 students for a pilot program? That doesn't sound like too much money to prove (or more likely squelch) the theory that more computers = smarter students.
Also, I'd guess these are being provided either free or at-cost by Apple, with partner Hughton Mifflin bearing the brunt of other costs. By the wording of the article, they seem to be the ones having commissioned the study, not the other way around.
As a side note, why is it always that "something is going bad here, so we shouldn't do anything about anything else until that is fixed." I've heard that people are starving, so why send people into space. We're at war with Russia, why do we need a civilian network. This isn't an A or B choice. When the state is broke, you have to find ways to make basic research continue to happen. Maybe the study will prove that, as I suspect, throwing money at technology is less effective than throwing money at smaller class sizes. Maybe it will show that the extra expense is worth it, especially as it can be amortized over several classes. Students cost thousands of dollars per year anyway. Or maybe there will be a little bump, and California will jump in with India's $100 tablet effort.
Or maybe we need a giant K-12 edu-wiki, which can be drawn from by all teachers and students across the state, and across the country. Oh right, somebody stubbed a toe, so we should just go home until they feel better.
The point of BP's report seems to be using "It's complicated" and "many people were involved" to defray blame and remove legal responsibility for the accident from BP.
The details of cement failing to contain hydrocarbons, improper venting into the engine room, etc are all fascinating from an engineering perspective. I don't mean to downplay their value.
But according to BP's incoming CEO: “We have said from the beginning that the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon was a shared responsibility among many entities. This report makes that conclusion even clearer, presenting a detailed analysis of the facts and recommendations for improvement both for BP and the other parties involved. We have accepted all the recommendations and are examining how best to implement them across our drilling operations worldwide." Which is basically leveraging the report into an attempt to avoid proper regulation and positive change, even as other rigs explode in the gulf.
And really, that's the part that gets me. Sure, the cause is a complex series of events that should be studied in detail and understood, so as to be prevented in the future. But "Complex series of events" is being used by BP as shorthand for "we couldn't know" and "but now we do so no regulation is necessary."
Not to be smarmy, but 1 megabit is pretty slow. In my area, most network providers start at 3 mb and go up to 20.
I don't know. The prior ethos was "Make it great for most users, and make it work for the rest." Here, you have an improved experience for the majority of users, who are on a real pipe. And you have an easy and obvious option to turn it off, for the few people still on dial-up. Seems reasonable.
Also, doesn't nearly every browser out there search VIA the URL field?
The question is what do you have more of: Bandwidth and CPU, or time?
A lot of the time I don't know quite what search phrase I should use to get something that I'm looking for. The ability to start typing, maybe get what I'm looking for in the second word, maybe the forth, or maybe go back and edit the search, is nice. When running a single search for something known, it's slightly faster but mostly fluffy. But when you're really looking for something, it can be quite helpful.
Usually when you talk about complex causes, you mean that factors A, B, C, and D all interacted in unexpected ways to cause a failure, but that most of those factors on their own are basically innocuous. This can be the case in aviation, which a century out remains a tricky human endeavor.
Here, we're talking about several major failures, any one of which would be bad on their own. You can't write it off as a "complex cause" when the safety failed because it was improperly maintained, then the safety person failed because he was improperly trained, then the backup safety failed because nobody installed it, etc. The cause is very simple: cutting too many corners.
How would we know? A comically small cardboard cutout of a piano falling on his head? A swath of underpaid Chinese martial artists that surround him, then are summarily laid off? Someone tries to shoot him with an HP branded Smith & Wesson, with "Innovate" written on the bullets, but nobody can get the bullets to move?
Slashdot Mirror
1. The iPad has a larger screen than most netbooks, which can be oriented for the type of media at hand. There is a reason why books are tall and narrow.
2. The iPad is about half of the weight of the current lightest netbooks, although Intel should bring parity back by year's end.
3. The iPad can be held in your hand like a book, and doesn't have to be rested on your lap.
It's not really a question of what does more. It's a question of what is easier to use for normal tasks. If you need power and functionality, you probably want a real laptop with real keys and an actual processor behind it. If you want to wander around your morning reading cnet and checking sports scores while making a cup of coffee, the iPad is an easier form function.
A netbook is just a lighter, weaker laptop. Most of the people I know who have one, have gone back to their laptop for daily usage except for times when they'd need to lug it distances. Besides, they woke up laptop manufacturers to the idea that lighter, smaller, and cheaper were desirable, and now 11" real laptops under 5 pounds are plentiful. Tablets are for those times when you don't need a full laptop, but want something you can wander around with in your hand. Even my netbook would get uncomfortably warm if I were to put it on my legs in the bathroom, and reading from a netbook while wandering up the street is just awkward.
Netbook and laptops work while you're sitting. Tablets work while you're standing up or walking around. That's a pretty significant difference.
Having worked in places where the user can't install any applications, change any preferences, or otherwise use a computer as anything other than a terminal to specific company-controlled services, lots of workplace computers are "just a gadget." Entire industries (and swaths of Slashdot readers) are devoted to ensuring the restrictiveness of computers at work.
You do realize that copyright law doesn't actually cover the sharing of information and ideas, but merely the particular expressive form that entails. If people were to have taken all of these stories and put them into their own words, the newspaper wouldn't have a copyright claim because the information contained therein is not copyrightable. But they didn't, they plagerized to some degree or another.
Also, your description of "No Trademarks" quickly wanders back into the "oh, it's a tradmark" territory. You acknowledge the need for consumers to be able to reliably source the origins of the products they buy, and put a non-falsifiable identifier in there which discriminates manufacturers. Except, of course, that the address of a company doesn't really have any meaning in this day and age, as Apple for example has headquarters and manufacturing all over the world. So you have to fall back to some non-falsifiable unique identifier.
For trademarks, I feel like the system needs to give legal costs+ punative damages against tradmark abusers who sue for opportunistic inactive tradmarks. But that overall the trademark system is OK.
The patent system is badly, badly underfunded. If patent clerks had enough time to actually investigate patents, we might see a dropoff in false patents being granted. Bringing in a network of secret outside consultants might help.
Copyright is getting to be a bit of a mess, but that's mainly due to stupid legislation pushed through by artists groups that don't actually represent the artists. Cut back mandatory damages for small-time personal infringement to something similar to physical theft, modify the DMCA to allow for ANY content protection bypassing so long as it is for things which are within the user's rights, and require the RIAA to sign up each damned artist individually and send each of them a statement every month with the money that they owe that particular artist.
Considering there are about 310,306,840 people in the US, the chance of any one person having been queried by the US government to google in a given year is only one in 72,000. While I'm cautious of government intrusion into private matters, that's hardly 1984.
Yes. They have an adult filter on certain keywords. Enter one of those keywords, and you have to actually hit the enter key. This is pretty clear while you're typing, though, as all entries disappear and "press enter to search" comes up. So it isn't any slower than the traditional way where you have to hit enter for each search.
Do note that you can find the book if you type in "Wisdom of Elizabeth Pisani" without hitting enter, as Elizabeth is the author. So it's more of a keyword search than a content block. That may seem like splitting hairs, but if you just remember certain bits of information, you don't have to hit enter to see potentially sensitive results. I.E. when there are results, you can trust them to be as exhaustive as they would be if you hit enter.
I find it useful for refining results.
[Dominant concept] [sub concept 1] [sub concept 2] [refining concept 1] [refining concept 2] [additional info 1] [additional info 2]
Start typing. If you don't see what you're looking for, keep typing. Add terms and refinements. Keep going. Running 4 separate searches to find what you're looking for is slow. Seeing how you need to change your query to shape your results in realtime can be helpful.
Considering how long Microsoft has given up on I.E., how stagnant Firefox is, and how much trouble Opera has been as of late, it's nice to see a developer that's actually pushing forward with browser development.
Chrome is all of 2 years old. Recent "bloat" includes plug-ins and a show all downloads page. Keeping their browser synchronized with how their home page handles searching doesn't seem like bloat to me at all.
I don't know. I want those whiz-bang features, if they're actually useful. I want a reason to care about new releases. When Opera released mousegestures, it basically changed the way I interacted with computers. This isn't something like that, but it seems like a handy update that will slightly speed up something that happens dozens of times a day.
Chrome already does search-from-bar and live suggestions. What this does is put live search *results* over the page you're currently looking at. It's a browser extension of how google's .com search page works now. While it isn't a revolutionary feature, as far as I know nobody else has implemented it.
http://forums.twingalaxies.com/viewforum.php?f=86
http://forums.twingalaxies.com/viewforum.php?f=86
Supposedly:
1. "They" apparently weren't twin galaxies, but a competitive DK player that happened to be vacationing in the area, and had heard of the controversy.
2. The mother suggested they wait in the car. After a while, the grandmother came out and had them wait in the garage, and gave them a quarter to play.
3. Supposedly it was all pretty friendly when Steve came home.
4. You may not agree what your parents do, but they are still adults and they have the right to invite people into their home.
The lengths these people go to keep clean boards is rather impressive. On one of Mitchell's passes (Florida, I believe), he paid Nintendo Japan to verify the authenticity and originality of an original DK board. He then kept it in the original sealed container until his attempt. On his attempt, he unwrapped it with a scorekeeper present, inserted it into a clean jamma machine, and played through right there. These people take their authenticity incredibly seriously.
Twin Galaxies also has an interesting writeup on the creative license taken by the movie. Don't forget that the apology letter Weibe received was actually immediately after the FunSpot videotape incident, and not years later as implied by editing.
It's a great movie. It takes the rather dry world of competitive video game playing, and turns it into something eminently watchable. But don't pillory Mitchell for how the filmmakers edited him to seem.
I have been cardjacked recently, my fiancee has been card jacked, and most of our friends have had some degree of card fraud. Anecdotally at least, the problem seems endemic.
And while I agree that security levels cost money and require expensive changes, the security of credit cards was setup to be adequate for single-occurrence swiped transactions. For any sort of stored-on-server permanence, current credit card security is a 1960's solution to a problem that started in 2000. The security of the entire system relies upon the security level of the lowest server in the network. On a very large network, that's going to be a very low threshold.
"Room for improvement" makes it sound like a network that could more efficiently reduce overhead through intelligent optimizations. In this case, we have a system that is operating in an environment that not only it wasn't designed for, but that the designers of the original system couldn't have envisioned.
Really, the question isn't if fraud is endemic. The question is how much money is it worth throwing at the problem, and how much can you inconvenience people before they refuse your service. Oh, and if we can avoid the hackjob vendors selling useless iPhone enabled swipe passes and giving out free trips to CEO's in the interim. Unfortunately, there is a lot of "security" out there that is just a smoke-and-mirrors magic trick to extract money from suckers.
For security, credit cards rely upon... nobody who has ever run your credit card being hacked. For security passports rely upon... nobody who has ever recorded your passport being hacked. This is just not secure! By design, this system can *never* adequately secure people's information, because information alone is not secure enough for a transaction.
Options:
Credit cards pass through a Visa or MC controlled layer. Visa or MC then authorize a new single-merchant / single client code combination, which will work at that merchant but no others. The merchant never sees the original credit card number.
A passport decryption chip, which takes the original passport number, a country request number, and munges it in subtle ways, so that the selected passport number relates the the specific person, but the passport country code is hidden within the resultant displayed passport number.
A 2nd piece of information that by agreement can never be stored, but can be used to permanently authorize a particular merchant. For example, the first time you purchased something from Amazon.com, you'd be required to enter your visa password through a visa-controlled interface. Afterwards, Amazon would be allowed to utilize your credit card. This would include recurring billing.
5) A mature development environment.
6) Tools integration.
7) Mature development pathways with known costs.
5, 6, and 7 will exist eventually, but *really* don't exist right now. Creating a semi complex app (like, say, a college information front-end) in Flash would be far easier, cheaper, and with less unexpected problems than doing it in HTML 5.
http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/accepted-payments-policy.html
For most categories, sellers need to offer one or more of the following electronic payment choices:
PayPal
ProPay
Moneybookers
Paymate
Credit card or debit card processed through the seller's Internet merchant account
So the seller either A: has to have a verified merchant account, B: has to accept ProPay, Moneybookers, or Paymate, all of which suck, or C: have to accept Paypal. This is basically the natural extension of a "Paypal only" policy, but with a few token bad alternatives thrown in so as to placate certain regulators and large businesses.
Credit card companies, when it comes to this sort of thing, are Great to the consumer, and absolutely screw over the vendor. This doesn't sound like a Paypal specific issue to me. Credit cards can chargeback for almost any reason, and do so frequently. This doesn't come from the credit card company, but from the vendor.
It sounds like the payment to the Paypal account was fraudulent and therefore reversed, as happens. Because the vendor withdrew the money from the Paypal account, his account has a negative balance ( 600 payment - 600 withdraw - 600 reversed charge = -600).
Another way of looking at this, is the thief used false pretenses to convince someone to ship a laptop out to them. The vendor thought there was money in the account, and withdrew more than he had. What he has at the end, is an accidentally overdrawn account that he is responsible for, and a stolen laptop that he should go find.
Now we get our native Google Voice app, right? Right?
Oh, this just overturns one previous bad rule, not all of them.
Flash is a hammer that frequently gets used to nail in screws. But sometimes you actually need a hammer.
I directly quoted the incoming CEO of BP, as well as cited some of the causes listed in the report.
The point of my post was that BP is very specifically choosing wording and trying to frame the discussion in such a way as to discourage more governmental oversight. This has nothing to do with the engineering of the problem, so much as the larger question of who gets to structure the discourse. BP's specific use of the term "complex causes," as well as their assertion that it's all well understood now and fixes are underway, is primarily to deflect the regulatory oversight that congress briefly talked up in the hopes of an easy midterm election win.
The point of that one post on an internet bulletin board was not to get deeply into the technical explanations for the calamity (though I have read portions of the report, I haven't read the entire thing). But to comment on the way that BP's framing of the discussion around the report has crept into the way that we here were discussing the report. And that the words we were ceeding to BP were inherently designed to bias towards the opinion that "stuff happens [shrug]", thus defeating the discussion of regulatory oversight before it happens.
And stop putting words into my mouth, jerk.
400 students for a pilot program? That doesn't sound like too much money to prove (or more likely squelch) the theory that more computers = smarter students.
Also, I'd guess these are being provided either free or at-cost by Apple, with partner Hughton Mifflin bearing the brunt of other costs. By the wording of the article, they seem to be the ones having commissioned the study, not the other way around.
As a side note, why is it always that "something is going bad here, so we shouldn't do anything about anything else until that is fixed." I've heard that people are starving, so why send people into space. We're at war with Russia, why do we need a civilian network. This isn't an A or B choice. When the state is broke, you have to find ways to make basic research continue to happen. Maybe the study will prove that, as I suspect, throwing money at technology is less effective than throwing money at smaller class sizes. Maybe it will show that the extra expense is worth it, especially as it can be amortized over several classes. Students cost thousands of dollars per year anyway. Or maybe there will be a little bump, and California will jump in with India's $100 tablet effort.
Or maybe we need a giant K-12 edu-wiki, which can be drawn from by all teachers and students across the state, and across the country. Oh right, somebody stubbed a toe, so we should just go home until they feel better.
The point of BP's report seems to be using "It's complicated" and "many people were involved" to defray blame and remove legal responsibility for the accident from BP.
The details of cement failing to contain hydrocarbons, improper venting into the engine room, etc are all fascinating from an engineering perspective. I don't mean to downplay their value.
But according to BP's incoming CEO: “We have said from the beginning that the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon was a shared responsibility among many entities. This report makes that conclusion even clearer, presenting a detailed analysis of the facts and recommendations for improvement both for BP and the other parties involved. We have accepted all the recommendations and are examining how best to implement them across our drilling operations worldwide." Which is basically leveraging the report into an attempt to avoid proper regulation and positive change, even as other rigs explode in the gulf.
And really, that's the part that gets me. Sure, the cause is a complex series of events that should be studied in detail and understood, so as to be prevented in the future. But "Complex series of events" is being used by BP as shorthand for "we couldn't know" and "but now we do so no regulation is necessary."
Not to be smarmy, but 1 megabit is pretty slow. In my area, most network providers start at 3 mb and go up to 20.
I don't know. The prior ethos was "Make it great for most users, and make it work for the rest." Here, you have an improved experience for the majority of users, who are on a real pipe. And you have an easy and obvious option to turn it off, for the few people still on dial-up. Seems reasonable.
Also, doesn't nearly every browser out there search VIA the URL field?
The question is what do you have more of: Bandwidth and CPU, or time?
A lot of the time I don't know quite what search phrase I should use to get something that I'm looking for. The ability to start typing, maybe get what I'm looking for in the second word, maybe the forth, or maybe go back and edit the search, is nice. When running a single search for something known, it's slightly faster but mostly fluffy. But when you're really looking for something, it can be quite helpful.
Usually when you talk about complex causes, you mean that factors A, B, C, and D all interacted in unexpected ways to cause a failure, but that most of those factors on their own are basically innocuous. This can be the case in aviation, which a century out remains a tricky human endeavor.
Here, we're talking about several major failures, any one of which would be bad on their own. You can't write it off as a "complex cause" when the safety failed because it was improperly maintained, then the safety person failed because he was improperly trained, then the backup safety failed because nobody installed it, etc. The cause is very simple: cutting too many corners.
At least they didn't try to have him killed.
How would we know? A comically small cardboard cutout of a piano falling on his head? A swath of underpaid Chinese martial artists that surround him, then are summarily laid off? Someone tries to shoot him with an HP branded Smith & Wesson, with "Innovate" written on the bullets, but nobody can get the bullets to move?