This is utter nonsense and the many regular visits from Germans and French in their respective partner towns and cities tell a different stories. True there is prejudice on both sides of the border. For example, that Germans can't cook (which is only true for North Germans;-)) and the French want to control every joint company and endeavour (which is so true, especially with Airbus Group where the CEO is Tom Enders, oh wait he is German, but then it must be true in all other cases). And yes, there is a feeling in Germany that the French want to dominate and there is a feeling in France that France cannot really compete. In the end this is rubbish. However, Hollande is not really a visionary President nor was it Sarkozi. And the same applies to Schröder and now Merkel. However, Merkel might have done a step in the right direction lately. Anyway, I am much more optimistic about the German-French relations.
I agree, I'm a German citizen and France leads the list of all the countries I'd least like Germany to go to war with closely followed by the USA and the UK. Of all the things that have kept the peace in Europe since the end of WWII the Berlin/Paris axis is by far the most important and I hope it stays that way. Even the relationship with Britain is a secondary concern to Franco-German relations when it comes to ensuring peace in Europe. The importance of our relationship with France is matched only by the relationship with the USA. As long as these two bonds remain strong Russia and Putin can go fuck them selves. Also, if Britain 'Brexits' I think the EU could probably survive it but a fracture in the Paris-Berlin axis would be fatal to the EU and to Europe in general.
Germany and France arguing... what could possibly go wrong? It's not like there's any historical precedent or anything... where, you know, Germany was in the wrong in the past...
I would not go there if I was you... That's an argument that was buried so far down in the ground by the post war leaders of France and Germany back in the 1950s and 60s that they weren't satisfied the hole was deep enough until they hit magma and this was done for a good reason.
While Apple is kicking the crap out of everyone profit wise, they are actually getting the crap kicked out of them in the mobile space for actual marketshare. Still everyone would rather have the share that is happy to pay a much higher margin on hardware.
Care to explain that? Do you mean in terms of their Mobile OSs market share? They are the only competitor to the Android monoculture worth mentioning and I'm pretty sure they could gain quite a lot of market share if they'd be inclined to license out their OS like Google does. So in view of the fact that they are the only competitor of Android worth mentioning even though they don't license their OS I'd say they are doing pretty well. Or perhaps you are talking about their market share in terms of device sales? In that case you'd be complaining that Apple does not have the kind of market share on the device market that Google has on the Mobile OS market or Microsoft on the desktop computer market (~80-90%) which would amount to a monoculture and to you complaining that there are many device manufacturers in the mobile device market who engage in healthy competition.
... It's not always about raw performance vs price. Apple wouldn't be kicking the crap out of all the other...
For one, Raspberry Pi is no Apple, and Apple's mobile devices ain't driven by Raspberry Pi, either
Don't be a dick, he's not trying to prod your Apple hate nerve with a pointy stick. All he's doing is pointing at a mobile device as an example of the fact that in a device that often gets used in small form factor device projects lots of features and blistering, screaming, top hardware performance is't always the most important thing.
It's not always about raw performance vs price. Apple wouldn't be kicking the crap out of all the other mobile players if that were true. Years ago, I remember hearing lots of disparaging remarks (here on/. mostly) about iPods, and how xyz brand was so much better because it could play Ogg Vorbis, and was hackable, had more storage for less cost, etc, etc. Where are all those players today?
Performance/price is important (although at that price point, do you really think people care all that much?), but don't forget about other factors: compatibility, community, mindshare, design, ease-of-use, reliability, and so on...
I'm working on an enclosed device and I quite frankly neither need nor want top performance, partly because of the excess heat I then have to deal with. In fact one of the things that irritates me most about the PI2 is that there is no analogue to the PI model A which is easier to cram into device enclosures. I'd also prefer to get my boards with plastic snap-in USB/Ethernet/etc... connectors that lend them selves to easily creating devices. Computers like the Raspberry PI are great for start-up companies who can't afford to go to a manufacturer and have their own custom electronics made but until Element 14 started offering their customization service (which I admittedly haven't tried out yet) cramming the Raspberry PI or any of these board computers into any kind of compact and handy enclosure was a nightmare. The Raspberry foundation has been ignoring this market segment.
What will really make Steam on Linux take off is if they ever get Steam OS to the same level of reliability as Android. Once they get there they can hope to do to the game console market with Steam OS what Google did to the Mobile Phone market with Android, i.e. make lower the bar on entry into the game console market to a point where relatively small startups can compete. The question that remains is: do they have the resources, the will and the vision to do that?
While I got a chuckle out of the burn against Apple, it does just seem in general like they aren't working on cross-platform support at all anymore.
Yeah, is the problem really that Apple makes crappy computers or that Oculus makes bloated and inefficient hardware/software? A colleague of mine is nuts about this thing and pre-ordered one for a somewhat higher amount of money than I spent on a Zeiss rifle scope and a set of quality quick release attachments (and I thought I was being frivolous about spending but at least that scope will last me for life) because he not only did he have to fork over wad of cash for the Rift, he also had to upgrade his computer and buy a particular display card recommended by Oculus. I can see what fascinates people about a device like the Oculus Rift, especially if you are into flight sims like my colleague, but I think that the Rift has been hyped up beyond reason.
So now my DVD player has to be connected to the Internet? Now we have new and exciting routes for evildoers and opportunities for adverts and other junk to be inserted into our media. Then you have the joy that if the DVD manufacturer goes broke - or just decides not to keep supporting the format some years from now - then all of your DVD's would just stop playing?
The entire POINT of physical media is that I can play it anywhere - and that I own the content forever. If you break either one of those (and they just broke both of them) - then I might as well stream content online and save the need for a rack with 200 disks in it cluttering up my media room.
Forget it. If I have to put up with all of those things, I might as well use Amazon/Netflix/whatever to get my content.
So what? Next-Gen Ultra HD Blu-Ray discs probably won't be cracked for a while and the security mechanism makes them annoying to use, why is this even news? Next-Gen Ultra HD Blu-Ray discs were rendered obsolete by streaming services long before Next-Gen Ultra HD Blu-Ray discs even hit the market. Eventually the media industry will register this but until then, if the media industry wants to pour resources into an obsolete content delivery mechanism, I applaud that because those resources would otherwise be spent on their legal efforts to prosecute 'media pirates' (1) which is ever bit as as futile as Next-Gen Ultra HD Blu-Ray discs are obsolete. However, their legal hunter killer teams are a lot more annoying than Next-Gen Ultra HD Blu-Ray discs whose existence I am simply going to ignore.
(1) a.k.a people who'd like to get media streamed to their PC but can't because the 'media industry' is still obsessed with delivering their products via obsolete and easily damaged plastic discs so they 'pirate' content off the internet instead.
Kasich is smart enough to realize that he isn't going to win the general election in 2016. He also may be the only person on stage smart enough to realize that none of the GOP hopefuls will, either - hence there is no reason for him to negotiate with Rubio for a cabinet position that will never materialize.
If he really cared about the GOP he would drop out if only to spare his party the agonizing international humiliation of the GOP personified by Donald Trump. The GOP makes an ass of the United States every so often, we have grown used to that. Take for example the Scalia replacement blockade that they are launching. What are they planning? To blockade the supreme court appointment until after the next election? However, it's looking like there will be a democratic president so what then? Will the GOP blockade or filibuster a Scalia replacement for another 4-8 years until there is a republican in the White House? I don't know what Americans see when they observe this farce unfolding but the rest of the world looks at that business and sees a bunch of apparently grown up people behaving like petulant preschoolers. Trump, on the other hand, is a whole new low for the GOP and one would think a loyal party member would take a hit for the team if it resulted in Trump being defeated in the primaries even if the GOP does not get the white house this time around.
"Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort."
Developing a measure with the explicit intended goal to deny the US Government Legal access to any random State enemy's communications device by demanding brute-force decryption software through lawful order by making an alteration solely intended to render that as impossible could be argued as an act with the sole intention of "giving aid and comfort".
It could also be argued to be an act intended to keep the noses of the FIB, CIA, NSA, et al out of places where they don't belong i.e. the private data of every Apple iPhone/iPad/Mac using person on the planet.
So if Israel stopped intercepting rockets fired into Israel, stopped halting suicide bombers from coming in and in general just let all the attempted murder, terrorism and killing of their civilians that is attempted by the other side, is it then okay for them to do what they are doing? Or if you have the capability to defend yourself with one some deaths and only lots of FEAR of death, and your enemy defends themselves in a way to up the death toll of innocents around them... are you just stuck sucking it up and knowing that your people will simply have to die?
Did you read the article and see the example of the "drones earmarked for use by "terrorist elements in Gaza" to gather intelligence on IDF movements" provided by the Jerusalem Post?
What a joke, Is this a hoax or something? That thing looks exactly like a cheap Chinese drone my coworker bought. The thing requires constant attention to keep it airborne, you have to maintain eye contact with it and give constant control feedback at all times to keep it from crashing, it has no GPS powered autopilot, no automatic hover function, no route planning software and the camera feed is crappy to say the least. If Hamas wants to get it's hands on proper drones they'll smuggle proper ones in through tunnels from Egypt or they'll just build drones from smuggled COTS parts (keep in mind they manufacture their own home designed RPG launcher in Gaza) and there is essentially nothing that the IDF or Israeli customs service can do to stop them except keep bugging the Egyptians to do something about Hamas bribing their border guards.
Choosing to live in a high cost metropolitan area is a life choice.
Forcibly taking people away from their families and friends and resettling them in an unfamiliar place is a violation of human rights. Personally I would never choose to live in a high cost metro, but I couldn't tell someone whose roots are in one to just move. I can't see myself moving Bolivia so that my income will stretch further, so I can't ask anyone else to leave everything and everyone behind.
There is an element of choice here. If your employer makes the choice to leave his current location and move to a high cost area then that is their choice and it is your choice to follow them to the new location even though your living costs will rise enormously. You also have the choice to quit and get a new job. If Yelp made the decision to set up shop in a place where the shitty wages they pay their people do not cover their living expenses then that's Yelp's choice. Personally I'd have elected to set up in some cheaper location where low wages stretch further so that things like this do not happen and if they did happen I'd try to take a course of action to resolve the matter that is not lifted from the pages of George Orwell's 1984 but Yelp must have their reasons for doing stupid things and displaying all the finesse of a bull in a china shop in their employee relations. I can't imagine what those reasons might be, perhaps Yelp's upper management got drunk one night and overdosed on Ayn Rand?... I don't know, but I'm sure they have their reasons. Now the CEO of Yelp has responded by pointing out that the city of San Francisco must act to lower the cost of housing... but wait a minute.... isn't that socialism?
In the sense of "Russia" (meaning the USSR) and East Germany and their extensive spying on their own citizens, then yes.
She grew up in an era where it was common to conflate communism (the economic system) with poverty and an Orwellian government such as the USSR. She likely learned it that way in school.
With all due respect to the KGB and the Stasi, I think organisations like the NSA and it's various friends and allies around the world have developed information gathering capabilities the KGB and Stasi could not even have dreamt of for the simple reason that they would not have been able to conceive of a future where such things were possible. Comparing what the NSA and co. are doing to the Soviet/E-German mass surveillance systems is like comparing a 1975 Ford Escort with a Tesla Model X.
Yes, and indeed the referenced article says that we had two months of warning and did a drone strike to take out the command and control operation (or, more likely, some goat herders). And that wasn't enough to prevent the attack. If there's a lesson here, it's that this is an asymmetrical problem, and fixing it is going to require addressing underlying causes, not throwing cash and civil liberties on the bonfire in a futile attempt to even things up.
But it's so much easier to throw cash, guns and draconian prison sentences at a problem than tackling the root cause? I mean, just take one look at how successful the war on drugs has been!!!
One question, though. Did you really mean to talk about "archaic species" if they were close enough to interbreed and re-merge? I understand that there are lots of subtleties, but the concept of species as lines distinct enough not to interbreed was drilled into us pretty heavily at school...
I may have used the term species a bit loosely but that also brings us to an interesting question. When have two groups of a species 'evolved apart' enough to be considered separate species? Turns out there is no hard and fast definition of this. In the old days this was done by analysing morphological differences of animals, however, recently it turns out that animals we thought were unrelated were actually genetically rather closely related or vice versa so morphology is not the best determinant all on it's own. In my opinion you have got two different species when the difference in their DNA is so great they can't produce live offspring and the ability to produce infertile offspring is then the transitional state. This means that genetics and not morphology is the best way to classify species and that is controversial. But morphology cannot be ignored. There are also cases where two different animal groups cannot practically mate due to anatomical differences even though one may be able to interbreed them in a petri dish and produce live, and even fertile offspring via artificial implanting of embryos. Are those separate species? It'a a matter of definition. Neanderthals for example are referred to as a 'species or subspecies of human in the genus Homo' in the Wikipedia article i.e. scientists are still bickering about whether the Neanderthals should be called Homo Neanderthalensis (species) or Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis (subspecies of H. Sapiens). Personally I'm inclined to go with "can no longer produce offspring or only produce sterile offspring" as being the point when you get a new species and that still leaves us with the problem of defining a sub-species. According to geneticists Neanderthals and Modern humans were rather close to this point when the interbreeding events took place but they were still able to produce fertile offspring or we would not be carrying around H. Neanderthalensis and H. Denisovensis DNA now would we?
The argument has been a bit more heated than that. For many decades humans, unlike all other known species, were thought to have an evolutionary tree without any branches. Over the last couple of decades it turns out that:
1) The human evolutionary tree had many, many, many branches.
2) Dwarfism in humans existed, i.e. the hobbits.
3) Archaic forms of humans existed until fairly recently, again the hobbits.
4) It turns out you can recover large amounts of DNA from ridiculously old samples and discover extinct species of humans without ever touching a shovel and scraping at dirt with a bricklayer's trowel.
5) Some of the diverse branches of the human evolutionary tree merged again when modern humans mated with archaic forms of human. Well know examples of this are Neanderthals, Denisovans plus at least a couple of other archaic species unknown from anything except DNA. Upwards of 20% of the DNA of the Neanderthal for example still exist in our genome.
6) There are a lot of surprises still left to discover, like Albert Perry's Y-chromasome which pre-dates the oldest know modern human fossil by 140000 years.
I really love it when things like this happen. Scientific communities tend to settle into a routine. They are like a bunch of people in a conference room who have dominant theories to explain much of the way things work and most of the work that still need doing is to extend and improve these theories and the oddballs with weird theories have been pushed into a corner and are being ignored. Then, just as people were settling into a routine under the fatherly guidance of the big names in the field, somebody opens the door and brings in a discovery like this or Svante Pääbo's discovery of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA in modern humans (Ian Tattersall has been eating crow on that score ever since) or my other recent favourite contribution to the human origins debate which is Eske Willerslev 's discovery of people that were genetically closely related to modern Europeans but who lived in Siberia. It turns out that these people contributed significantly to the groups that settled the Americas, meaning that Native Americans and Europeans are actually very closely connected by genetic bonds that stretch back way, way, way, way before Columbus (as in 24000 years ago)... so here we once again have the revenge of the scientific oddballs.
I've managed to mess up systems real badly by using aptitude and blindly accept conflict resolutions that involved removing and downgrading packages (or leaving dependencies unresolved). But that only happened because I thought I was smarter than apt-get (package xxx could not be installed? Bah! aptitude will fix that)...I had backups anyway.
I've never seen systems get messed up because of trivial apt-get operations otherwise (dist-upgrade between different versions is always hit-or-miss, though).
I have, however, seems windows systems become stuck in a reboot loop after a routine windows (critical) update, which is no fun to solve because you don't even get a console, or logs or anything. Not even live CD with some basic rescue utilities. Knoppix has saved my arse countless times in those situations.
I've also seen Windows get 'bricked' after an update as well as 'OS X'. That's 'bricked' from a normal user's point of view, I could usually fix the problem but then I have a CS degree. The same has happened with Linux boxes (i.e. 'bricking' that was fixable with a high degree of computer knowledge) but it's quite rare that it's so bad I can't even boot to command line. These days the most irritation I get from Linux is annoying glitches and bugs that are mostly due to poor quality control but that also depends on the distribution. Some distributions are way better at quality control than others.
for example last night I removed the soduku game that came with my distro, thanks to its dependency tree and debian / ubuntu's package management removing this one stupid game took half of XFCE with it, and I was left with a command prompt
say what you want about windows, it doesnt fuck the entire system if I uninstall solitaire
I'm not a fan of the Debian packaging system but it's not that bad. You must ether have done something really wrong or you are just really bad at trolling. For one thing apt-get tells you what it is going to remove so if you blindly accepted you have only yourself to blame. Secondly I'm having a hard time believing that apt-get would actually uninstall that many packages for such a trivial program.
Apple is dead. I don't see them ever launching another hit like the iPhone which by all means won't be the last massive hit in the tech sector. Apple will slowly fade away. Without their (relatively low yield) dividends and the massive 218 billions in cash the stock would be pretty much worthless now.
Is there nothing that doesn't somehow tie back to XKCD? https://xkcd.com/556/ [xkcd.com]
Seriously, this is cool - but the Trump name drop is as bad as apple-baiting.
Well, Trump certainly does have a history with offshore wind farms. He and his lawyers managed to delay the implementation of a wind farm project off the coast of Scotland for several years. It finally went ahead after he lost three successive court judgements.
His objection was that the turbines would spoil the view from his golf course.
If Trump was a real scot that episode would have ended just like that XKCD cartoon except Trump would have shown up with claymore and a wearing a kilt, his comb-over waiving gracefully in the wind as he charged the wind turbines yelling: “They may take our lives, but they’ll never spoil the view from our golf-course!” with a really piss-poor imitation of a Scottish accent.
Why would it make sense? Because Elon said so? If the truck will actually be used like a truck there won't be any chargers around. If you are talking about rich dorks running around town to show off, than maybe you are right.
If Elon Musk and his gang of eggheads can build a truck that will move cargo at a lower cost per drive kilometre with a full load of cargo than a diesel truck can then just you wait and see, the charging stations will pop up like mushrooms around a rotting tree stump. The there is fierce competition among the haulage companies, to them only the bottom line matters. If the truck that gives them a competitive edge is electric then they will not stick with diesels for the sake of tradition or some asinine right wing ideological aversion to 'tree hugger technology'.
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This is utter nonsense and the many regular visits from Germans and French in their respective partner towns and cities tell a different stories. True there is prejudice on both sides of the border. For example, that Germans can't cook (which is only true for North Germans ;-)) and the French want to control every joint company and endeavour (which is so true, especially with Airbus Group where the CEO is Tom Enders, oh wait he is German, but then it must be true in all other cases). And yes, there is a feeling in Germany that the French want to dominate and there is a feeling in France that France cannot really compete. In the end this is rubbish. However, Hollande is not really a visionary President nor was it Sarkozi. And the same applies to Schröder and now Merkel. However, Merkel might have done a step in the right direction lately. Anyway, I am much more optimistic about the German-French relations.
I agree, I'm a German citizen and France leads the list of all the countries I'd least like Germany to go to war with closely followed by the USA and the UK. Of all the things that have kept the peace in Europe since the end of WWII the Berlin/Paris axis is by far the most important and I hope it stays that way. Even the relationship with Britain is a secondary concern to Franco-German relations when it comes to ensuring peace in Europe. The importance of our relationship with France is matched only by the relationship with the USA. As long as these two bonds remain strong Russia and Putin can go fuck them selves. Also, if Britain 'Brexits' I think the EU could probably survive it but a fracture in the Paris-Berlin axis would be fatal to the EU and to Europe in general.
Germany and France arguing... what could possibly go wrong? It's not like there's any historical precedent or anything... where, you know, Germany was in the wrong in the past...
I would not go there if I was you... That's an argument that was buried so far down in the ground by the post war leaders of France and Germany back in the 1950s and 60s that they weren't satisfied the hole was deep enough until they hit magma and this was done for a good reason.
While Apple is kicking the crap out of everyone profit wise, they are actually getting the crap kicked out of them in the mobile space for actual marketshare. Still everyone would rather have the share that is happy to pay a much higher margin on hardware.
Care to explain that? Do you mean in terms of their Mobile OSs market share? They are the only competitor to the Android monoculture worth mentioning and I'm pretty sure they could gain quite a lot of market share if they'd be inclined to license out their OS like Google does. So in view of the fact that they are the only competitor of Android worth mentioning even though they don't license their OS I'd say they are doing pretty well. Or perhaps you are talking about their market share in terms of device sales? In that case you'd be complaining that Apple does not have the kind of market share on the device market that Google has on the Mobile OS market or Microsoft on the desktop computer market (~80-90%) which would amount to a monoculture and to you complaining that there are many device manufacturers in the mobile device market who engage in healthy competition.
For one, Raspberry Pi is no Apple, and Apple's mobile devices ain't driven by Raspberry Pi, either
Don't be a dick, he's not trying to prod your Apple hate nerve with a pointy stick. All he's doing is pointing at a mobile device as an example of the fact that in a device that often gets used in small form factor device projects lots of features and blistering, screaming, top hardware performance is't always the most important thing.
It's not always about raw performance vs price. Apple wouldn't be kicking the crap out of all the other mobile players if that were true. Years ago, I remember hearing lots of disparaging remarks (here on /. mostly) about iPods, and how xyz brand was so much better because it could play Ogg Vorbis, and was hackable, had more storage for less cost, etc, etc. Where are all those players today?
Performance/price is important (although at that price point, do you really think people care all that much?), but don't forget about other factors: compatibility, community, mindshare, design, ease-of-use, reliability, and so on...
I'm working on an enclosed device and I quite frankly neither need nor want top performance, partly because of the excess heat I then have to deal with. In fact one of the things that irritates me most about the PI2 is that there is no analogue to the PI model A which is easier to cram into device enclosures. I'd also prefer to get my boards with plastic snap-in USB/Ethernet/etc... connectors that lend them selves to easily creating devices. Computers like the Raspberry PI are great for start-up companies who can't afford to go to a manufacturer and have their own custom electronics made but until Element 14 started offering their customization service (which I admittedly haven't tried out yet) cramming the Raspberry PI or any of these board computers into any kind of compact and handy enclosure was a nightmare. The Raspberry foundation has been ignoring this market segment.
1% of 10 million users on Steam - that's 100,000 people. Sounds like an important set of potential customers. (Source: peak of 11 million concurrent users logged in over the past 48 hours).
What will really make Steam on Linux take off is if they ever get Steam OS to the same level of reliability as Android. Once they get there they can hope to do to the game console market with Steam OS what Google did to the Mobile Phone market with Android, i.e. make lower the bar on entry into the game console market to a point where relatively small startups can compete. The question that remains is: do they have the resources, the will and the vision to do that?
While I got a chuckle out of the burn against Apple, it does just seem in general like they aren't working on cross-platform support at all anymore.
Yeah, is the problem really that Apple makes crappy computers or that Oculus makes bloated and inefficient hardware/software? A colleague of mine is nuts about this thing and pre-ordered one for a somewhat higher amount of money than I spent on a Zeiss rifle scope and a set of quality quick release attachments (and I thought I was being frivolous about spending but at least that scope will last me for life) because he not only did he have to fork over wad of cash for the Rift, he also had to upgrade his computer and buy a particular display card recommended by Oculus. I can see what fascinates people about a device like the Oculus Rift, especially if you are into flight sims like my colleague, but I think that the Rift has been hyped up beyond reason.
... hipster ...
The1960s called, they want their vocabulary back...
So now my DVD player has to be connected to the Internet? Now we have new and exciting routes for evildoers and opportunities for adverts and other junk to be inserted into our media. Then you have the joy that if the DVD manufacturer goes broke - or just decides not to keep supporting the format some years from now - then all of your DVD's would just stop playing?
The entire POINT of physical media is that I can play it anywhere - and that I own the content forever. If you break either one of those (and they just broke both of them) - then I might as well stream content online and save the need for a rack with 200 disks in it cluttering up my media room.
Forget it. If I have to put up with all of those things, I might as well use Amazon/Netflix/whatever to get my content.
So what? Next-Gen Ultra HD Blu-Ray discs probably won't be cracked for a while and the security mechanism makes them annoying to use, why is this even news? Next-Gen Ultra HD Blu-Ray discs were rendered obsolete by streaming services long before Next-Gen Ultra HD Blu-Ray discs even hit the market. Eventually the media industry will register this but until then, if the media industry wants to pour resources into an obsolete content delivery mechanism, I applaud that because those resources would otherwise be spent on their legal efforts to prosecute 'media pirates' (1) which is ever bit as as futile as Next-Gen Ultra HD Blu-Ray discs are obsolete. However, their legal hunter killer teams are a lot more annoying than Next-Gen Ultra HD Blu-Ray discs whose existence I am simply going to ignore.
(1) a.k.a people who'd like to get media streamed to their PC but can't because the 'media industry' is still obsessed with delivering their products via obsolete and easily damaged plastic discs so they 'pirate' content off the internet instead.
Kasich is smart enough to realize that he isn't going to win the general election in 2016. He also may be the only person on stage smart enough to realize that none of the GOP hopefuls will, either - hence there is no reason for him to negotiate with Rubio for a cabinet position that will never materialize.
If he really cared about the GOP he would drop out if only to spare his party the agonizing international humiliation of the GOP personified by Donald Trump. The GOP makes an ass of the United States every so often, we have grown used to that. Take for example the Scalia replacement blockade that they are launching. What are they planning? To blockade the supreme court appointment until after the next election? However, it's looking like there will be a democratic president so what then? Will the GOP blockade or filibuster a Scalia replacement for another 4-8 years until there is a republican in the White House? I don't know what Americans see when they observe this farce unfolding but the rest of the world looks at that business and sees a bunch of apparently grown up people behaving like petulant preschoolers. Trump, on the other hand, is a whole new low for the GOP and one would think a loyal party member would take a hit for the team if it resulted in Trump being defeated in the primaries even if the GOP does not get the white house this time around.
"Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. "
Developing a measure with the explicit intended goal to deny the US Government Legal access to any random State enemy's communications device by demanding brute-force decryption software through lawful order by making an alteration solely intended to render that as impossible could be argued as an act with the sole intention of "giving aid and comfort".
It could also be argued to be an act intended to keep the noses of the FIB, CIA, NSA, et al out of places where they don't belong i.e. the private data of every Apple iPhone/iPad/Mac using person on the planet.
So if Israel stopped intercepting rockets fired into Israel, stopped halting suicide bombers from coming in and in general just let all the attempted murder, terrorism and killing of their civilians that is attempted by the other side, is it then okay for them to do what they are doing? Or if you have the capability to defend yourself with one some deaths and only lots of FEAR of death, and your enemy defends themselves in a way to up the death toll of innocents around them ... are you just stuck sucking it up and knowing that your people will simply have to die?
Did you read the article and see the example of the "drones earmarked for use by "terrorist elements in Gaza" to gather intelligence on IDF movements" provided by the Jerusalem Post?
http://live.jpost.com/HttpHand...
What a joke, Is this a hoax or something? That thing looks exactly like a cheap Chinese drone my coworker bought. The thing requires constant attention to keep it airborne, you have to maintain eye contact with it and give constant control feedback at all times to keep it from crashing, it has no GPS powered autopilot, no automatic hover function, no route planning software and the camera feed is crappy to say the least. If Hamas wants to get it's hands on proper drones they'll smuggle proper ones in through tunnels from Egypt or they'll just build drones from smuggled COTS parts (keep in mind they manufacture their own home designed RPG launcher in Gaza) and there is essentially nothing that the IDF or Israeli customs service can do to stop them except keep bugging the Egyptians to do something about Hamas bribing their border guards.
Forcibly taking people away from their families and friends and resettling them in an unfamiliar place is a violation of human rights. Personally I would never choose to live in a high cost metro, but I couldn't tell someone whose roots are in one to just move. I can't see myself moving Bolivia so that my income will stretch further, so I can't ask anyone else to leave everything and everyone behind.
There is an element of choice here. If your employer makes the choice to leave his current location and move to a high cost area then that is their choice and it is your choice to follow them to the new location even though your living costs will rise enormously. You also have the choice to quit and get a new job. If Yelp made the decision to set up shop in a place where the shitty wages they pay their people do not cover their living expenses then that's Yelp's choice. Personally I'd have elected to set up in some cheaper location where low wages stretch further so that things like this do not happen and if they did happen I'd try to take a course of action to resolve the matter that is not lifted from the pages of George Orwell's 1984 but Yelp must have their reasons for doing stupid things and displaying all the finesse of a bull in a china shop in their employee relations. I can't imagine what those reasons might be, perhaps Yelp's upper management got drunk one night and overdosed on Ayn Rand? ... I don't know, but I'm sure they have their reasons. Now the CEO of Yelp has responded by pointing out that the city of San Francisco must act to lower the cost of housing... but wait a minute.... isn't that socialism?
In the sense of "Russia" (meaning the USSR) and East Germany and their extensive spying on their own citizens, then yes.
She grew up in an era where it was common to conflate communism (the economic system) with poverty and an Orwellian government such as the USSR. She likely learned it that way in school.
With all due respect to the KGB and the Stasi, I think organisations like the NSA and it's various friends and allies around the world have developed information gathering capabilities the KGB and Stasi could not even have dreamt of for the simple reason that they would not have been able to conceive of a future where such things were possible. Comparing what the NSA and co. are doing to the Soviet/E-German mass surveillance systems is like comparing a 1975 Ford Escort with a Tesla Model X.
Yes, and indeed the referenced article says that we had two months of warning and did a drone strike to take out the command and control operation (or, more likely, some goat herders). And that wasn't enough to prevent the attack. If there's a lesson here, it's that this is an asymmetrical problem, and fixing it is going to require addressing underlying causes, not throwing cash and civil liberties on the bonfire in a futile attempt to even things up.
But it's so much easier to throw cash, guns and draconian prison sentences at a problem than tackling the root cause? I mean, just take one look at how successful the war on drugs has been!!!
I wish I had mod points for this.
One question, though. Did you really mean to talk about "archaic species" if they were close enough to interbreed and re-merge? I understand that there are lots of subtleties, but the concept of species as lines distinct enough not to interbreed was drilled into us pretty heavily at school...
I may have used the term species a bit loosely but that also brings us to an interesting question. When have two groups of a species 'evolved apart' enough to be considered separate species? Turns out there is no hard and fast definition of this. In the old days this was done by analysing morphological differences of animals, however, recently it turns out that animals we thought were unrelated were actually genetically rather closely related or vice versa so morphology is not the best determinant all on it's own. In my opinion you have got two different species when the difference in their DNA is so great they can't produce live offspring and the ability to produce infertile offspring is then the transitional state. This means that genetics and not morphology is the best way to classify species and that is controversial. But morphology cannot be ignored. There are also cases where two different animal groups cannot practically mate due to anatomical differences even though one may be able to interbreed them in a petri dish and produce live, and even fertile offspring via artificial implanting of embryos. Are those separate species? It'a a matter of definition. Neanderthals for example are referred to as a 'species or subspecies of human in the genus Homo' in the Wikipedia article i.e. scientists are still bickering about whether the Neanderthals should be called Homo Neanderthalensis (species) or Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis (subspecies of H. Sapiens). Personally I'm inclined to go with "can no longer produce offspring or only produce sterile offspring" as being the point when you get a new species and that still leaves us with the problem of defining a sub-species. According to geneticists Neanderthals and Modern humans were rather close to this point when the interbreeding events took place but they were still able to produce fertile offspring or we would not be carrying around H. Neanderthalensis and H. Denisovensis DNA now would we?
I read it as 'emacs vs. vim' kind of an argument.
The argument has been a bit more heated than that. For many decades humans, unlike all other known species, were thought to have an evolutionary tree without any branches. Over the last couple of decades it turns out that:
1) The human evolutionary tree had many, many, many branches.
2) Dwarfism in humans existed, i.e. the hobbits.
3) Archaic forms of humans existed until fairly recently, again the hobbits.
4) It turns out you can recover large amounts of DNA from ridiculously old samples and discover extinct species of humans without ever touching a shovel and scraping at dirt with a bricklayer's trowel.
5) Some of the diverse branches of the human evolutionary tree merged again when modern humans mated with archaic forms of human. Well know examples of this are Neanderthals, Denisovans plus at least a couple of other archaic species unknown from anything except DNA. Upwards of 20% of the DNA of the Neanderthal for example still exist in our genome.
6) There are a lot of surprises still left to discover, like Albert Perry's Y-chromasome which pre-dates the oldest know modern human fossil by 140000 years.
I really love it when things like this happen. Scientific communities tend to settle into a routine. They are like a bunch of people in a conference room who have dominant theories to explain much of the way things work and most of the work that still need doing is to extend and improve these theories and the oddballs with weird theories have been pushed into a corner and are being ignored. Then, just as people were settling into a routine under the fatherly guidance of the big names in the field, somebody opens the door and brings in a discovery like this or Svante Pääbo's discovery of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA in modern humans (Ian Tattersall has been eating crow on that score ever since) or my other recent favourite contribution to the human origins debate which is Eske Willerslev 's discovery of people that were genetically closely related to modern Europeans but who lived in Siberia. It turns out that these people contributed significantly to the groups that settled the Americas, meaning that Native Americans and Europeans are actually very closely connected by genetic bonds that stretch back way, way, way, way before Columbus (as in 24000 years ago)... so here we once again have the revenge of the scientific oddballs.
Except a Democrat could become president. Is congress going to hold out and do nothing for another eight years?
That would be perfectly in keeping with the 'my way or the highway' attitude to democracy the ultra right wing Republicans seem to have developed.
I've managed to mess up systems real badly by using aptitude and blindly accept conflict resolutions that involved removing and downgrading packages (or leaving dependencies unresolved). But that only happened because I thought I was smarter than apt-get (package xxx could not be installed? Bah! aptitude will fix that)...I had backups anyway.
I've never seen systems get messed up because of trivial apt-get operations otherwise (dist-upgrade between different versions is always hit-or-miss, though).
I have, however, seems windows systems become stuck in a reboot loop after a routine windows (critical) update, which is no fun to solve because you don't even get a console, or logs or anything. Not even live CD with some basic rescue utilities. Knoppix has saved my arse countless times in those situations.
I've also seen Windows get 'bricked' after an update as well as 'OS X'. That's 'bricked' from a normal user's point of view, I could usually fix the problem but then I have a CS degree. The same has happened with Linux boxes (i.e. 'bricking' that was fixable with a high degree of computer knowledge) but it's quite rare that it's so bad I can't even boot to command line. These days the most irritation I get from Linux is annoying glitches and bugs that are mostly due to poor quality control but that also depends on the distribution. Some distributions are way better at quality control than others.
And its by ignorant design mostly
for example last night I removed the soduku game that came with my distro, thanks to its dependency tree and debian / ubuntu's package management removing this one stupid game took half of XFCE with it, and I was left with a command prompt
say what you want about windows, it doesnt fuck the entire system if I uninstall solitaire
I'm not a fan of the Debian packaging system but it's not that bad. You must ether have done something really wrong or you are just really bad at trolling. For one thing apt-get tells you what it is going to remove so if you blindly accepted you have only yourself to blame. Secondly I'm having a hard time believing that apt-get would actually uninstall that many packages for such a trivial program.
...With the technology available, a smart phone should start to rival a Star Trek Tricorder ... be a stud finder...
... personally, I'd prefer it if Apple added a babe finder to the iPhone if they absolutely have to start competing with Tinder.
Apple is dead. I don't see them ever launching another hit like the iPhone which by all means won't be the last massive hit in the tech sector. Apple will slowly fade away. Without their (relatively low yield) dividends and the massive 218 billions in cash the stock would be pretty much worthless now.
Michael Dell is that you?
Apple is the "Tesla graveyard." "If you don't make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple," Musk recently told a German newspaper.
It seems that whatever entity it was that possessed Steve Jobs and gave him his boundless arrogance has found a new host.
Is there nothing that doesn't somehow tie back to XKCD?
https://xkcd.com/556/ [xkcd.com]
Seriously, this is cool - but the Trump name drop is as bad as apple-baiting.
Well, Trump certainly does have a history with offshore wind farms. He and his lawyers managed to delay the implementation of a wind farm project off the coast of Scotland for several years. It finally went ahead after he lost three successive court judgements.
His objection was that the turbines would spoil the view from his golf course.
If Trump was a real scot that episode would have ended just like that XKCD cartoon except Trump would have shown up with claymore and a wearing a kilt, his comb-over waiving gracefully in the wind as he charged the wind turbines yelling: “They may take our lives, but they’ll never spoil the view from our golf-course!” with a really piss-poor imitation of a Scottish accent.
Why would it make sense? Because Elon said so? If the truck will actually be used like a truck there won't be any chargers around. If you are talking about rich dorks running around town to show off, than maybe you are right.
If Elon Musk and his gang of eggheads can build a truck that will move cargo at a lower cost per drive kilometre with a full load of cargo than a diesel truck can then just you wait and see, the charging stations will pop up like mushrooms around a rotting tree stump. The there is fierce competition among the haulage companies, to them only the bottom line matters. If the truck that gives them a competitive edge is electric then they will not stick with diesels for the sake of tradition or some asinine right wing ideological aversion to 'tree hugger technology'.