Or hundreds of other attacks on unarmed civilians.
I'm not trying to establish moral equivalence or paint them as the sole bad guys or any other kind of oversimplification. I'm just trying to point out that if you're not aware of why the Palestinians are regarded with deep suspicion, then you really don't know anything at all about the nature of the conflict.
It might be possible to tap out a geothermal well, cooling it down faster than the local heat sources can put more heat in. But the effect will be limited to the top crust, not even reaching the bottom crust, much less the mantle or the core.
Yes, in a technical sense it will eventually affect those things, too, but not in any way you'd be able to measure for millions of years. If we find a way to take out energy faster than that, everything in technology will change anyway.
The crappy redesign was definitely a harbinger. It's not quite as bad as it appears: it's just the front page, and the inside pages weren't nearly as bad. Still, it's hard to know who the audience for that landing page is, and even if it's attractive to non-users who you want to sign up, experienced users probably don't want to see what's essentially a bad Flash intro.
I think that's a lot of the argument: the postage and other costs make the DVD side a losing or breakeven proposition. They've always been accused of throttling people who took too much advantage of what's actually a pretty sweet deal.
I downgraded my disk plan, but only because the streaming service has become more valuable. They raised the price; I downgraded my service: the next effect is that I'm paying about the same amount and watching pretty much the same amount of content. That works for me.
The Qwikster thing, though, had me completely baffled. If they'd done that, my service would have gotten worse, and I might have canceled one side or the other. Many people, I think, did that preemptively, especially those who were finding Netflix's library less valuable. You can watch content faster than they can make new things worth seeing. They're getting more old content on-line, but even good old movies and TV shows begin to look dated and don't have as much appeal after a decade or so.
The price rise was a good excuse to acknowledge that, and the Qwikster debacle was a good reason to get out early.
Absolutely, but in this case I'm hard pressed to find the innovation. Them too, apparently, since they ended up killing it.
Usually, an innovative idea will find some supporters even when the vast majority are against it. I never found anybody who supported the Qwikster thing and said, "This makes my life better" or even "I see how this makes Netflix shareholder's lives better." There were guesses, but nobody really stood by the guesses.
I've love to see Netflix do more innovation, even if that innovation makes the service less valuable for me personally. As long as it's benefitting somebody, and in this case I had no idea who that was supposed to be. That was more aggravating than the actual effects I felt as a customer. The pot got stirred, but nobody came out ahead.
That must take quite the infrastructure. During the trivial earthquake a few months ago, voice was absolutely jammed and text messages were very, very slow going. The Japanese must have some system for prioritizing the emergency outgoing message. I wonder if any of the American networks have that feature in there.
Hey, I didn't know about Prague Cemetery. I really liked Name of the Rose, and liked (but didn't love) Foucault's Pendulum. His other novels I could take or leave, mostly leave. How's the new one?
Which may be a more accurate portrayal of average human behavior than intelligence. The depressing thing about fooling 18% isn't what it says about the 18%, but what the 18% are effectively saying about the rest of us.
Given their way, the EPA wouldn't exist. They dominate the world, but don't have absolute control.
As it is, they've hamstrung the EPA as much as possible, and have outsourced a lot of manufacturing to avoid having to deal with it. If they were prevented from outsourcing, they'd probably have devoted even more effort to destroying the EPA. As it is, most of their favorite Presidential candidates would love to make the problem go away for them.
It doesn't seem to many Americans as if we're living in the wealthiest period in history. Their income is declining, and hasn't increased in decades. That's not so noticeable most years, but it becomes obvious in a recession, where the lack of upward mobility suddenly becomes a vast jump in downward mobility.
It is in rich people's interest to see that most people are moderately well off. If it weren't for explicitly redistributionist taxes, the genuinely poor would have eaten the rich decades ago. Short-sightedness means that people don't always do what's in their own best interest. There are better ways to fix the problem than explicit redistribution of wealth, but the rich fight all of them tooth and nail. In the limit case, it will happen with teeth and nails, and that's not good for anybody.
Still, a goodly sum of money. And a lot of people are prepared to see it reduced.
The question is where you direct the reduction. There's a lot of demand to see it put into debt reduction; that is, reducing DoD spending AND not increasing NASA's spending, so that the deficit isn't quite so big.
There are good arguments to be made for either. I'll let you know if I ever hear anybody engaging in one, rather than spouting ideological and partisan talking points.
One advantage to going through a real publishing house is that an editor would remove 99% of your italics.
You want to break the mold, ignore the rules, do your own thing... go ahead. But sometimes conventional wisdom becomes conventional for a reason, and in the case of italics, I think most readers will agree. Used sparingly, they help something stand out, or compel a particular reading of a sentence.
But frequent use dulls their value, and it makes the sentences harder to read. Italics forces a re-parse. That's valuable, when you need it to compel a particular reading, but it grows tiresome very quickly. A well-crafted sentence doesn't need italics. The emphasis is part of the structure, both of that sentence and the whole rest of the paragraph.
Go ahead and get all e.e. cummings on us, and maybe you're breaking out a whole new style. But the odds are you'd be better off following the rules on that one and being novel with other aspects of your storytelling.
It's a good idea to make mandates for the GEO orbit, but it's going to add weight and cost to the next round of birds. That makes them even more expensive, and you'd better be able to demonstrate that you will in fact be able to take advantage of it, or that will be added cost to no benefit.
It sounds like they're faced with the same situation software developers often are: reuse would be great, but much of the time it really is cheaper just to re-build another custom solution. And even if we do explicitly design for re-use, we'll probably guess wrong about what the possible re-uses should have been.
It's _never_ as simple as snapping legos together. It's always the dream, but at best you get dozens of iterations before a standard arises. I bet its the same for satellites as for software.
Everybody in DC does breathe a guilty sigh of relief when Republicans win. Not because they'll do a better job (from the point of view of the GS-10s, it's all kind of the same), but because the level of whiny wailing drops somewhat.
The ringing in your ears usually begins to decrease by midterms, just in time for the GOVERNMENT BAD! screeching to start up again.
Yes and no. The Iraqi government (well, parts of it) would like for some troops to stay. They really enjoy having a free security force.
They were in negotiations with the US to continue it, but terms had to be dictated. The sticking point was a matter of immunity. The Iraqis wanted troops to be subjected to Iraqi laws; currently they are held to the UCMJ (US law). This was the key point in negotiation two weeks ago:
They never came to an agreement, so we get the default: all troops out by the end of the year. This was the official announcement that those negotiations had ended.
That is actual news. Until now, there was reason to expect that the troops would be asked to stay for a few more years. Now we know that's not the case.
Except that it's not serious. The departments he's talking about come to $12 billion, a pittance, a rounding error.
He's not looking for the best bang for his buck, or seriously buckling down to cut the deficit. He's picking a few ideological enemies and eliminating them wholesale while doing fuck-all to the deficit and vast damage to the actual economy.
I'd love to see a serious re-think of government services, one that considers return-on-investment and produces a smaller, more streamlined result. This is not that plan. This is ideological warfare that's designed to disenfranchise people he doesn't like, not streamline government.
We're in debt to the tune of 14 figures. When he starts looking at 12 and 13 figure budget items, he'd be making a dent in the the debt. When he's fiddling around with 9 figure items, he's just pissing down your back and telling you that it's raining.
It may be a paradise for short-sellers at the moment, but in an efficient market that won't last long. You're competing with other short-sellers to try to determine the "true" value of the commodity, and the last one(s) in take it in the shorts. It's even possible that a rush of short-sellers could drive the price below the "true" market value, and you could lose money.
Now, it's hard to define what the true market value of a Bitcoin might be, since it's not backed by anything at all. At least a government fiat currency is backed by the fact that the currency will be used to pay your taxes. It's not impossible to invent a medium of exchange out of whole cloth; that's effectively what gold is. (Gold does have some uses, but for most of history it was just decorative, and the value of a decoration is fickle.)
Still, the high price of Bitcoins was pure speculation, people bidding against each other for a demand that might some day materialize. And given that they were pretty freaking smug about it, I'm not too sorry to see them lose a bunch of money on it.
I haven't used Google voice recognition in this context, but I have seen it in use on YouTube videos. I have yet to see a single case, even for simple spoken speech, where it was even describable as usable.
Their translator generally gets the gist of things, from properly-written text. But the speech-to-text part of it is not ready for prime time, at least not for naturally spoken speech. Maybe it's better when you're speaking directly to it.
Thing is, I got the gist of it. It may not be a great translation, but if I'm in Brazil and the options are (a) that translation, and (b) no translation, I'm a lot better off with (a) than (b).
You could call it 80% of the way there, in four decades of work. The remaining 20% will probably take another four decades, at least. But at 80% we've reached something that is frequently useful.
Slashdot Mirror
What part of "I'm not trying to establish moral equivalence" turned out to be too difficult to understand?
How about 8,000 rockets launched into Israel in the last 10 years?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_Israel
Or blowing up a school bus full of kids:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avivim_school_bus_massacre
Or hundreds of other attacks on unarmed civilians.
I'm not trying to establish moral equivalence or paint them as the sole bad guys or any other kind of oversimplification. I'm just trying to point out that if you're not aware of why the Palestinians are regarded with deep suspicion, then you really don't know anything at all about the nature of the conflict.
Where do those numbers come from?
This could be the Michelson–Morley experiment of our error
There's a Freudian slip for ya.
"Eventually" means "millions of years".
It might be possible to tap out a geothermal well, cooling it down faster than the local heat sources can put more heat in. But the effect will be limited to the top crust, not even reaching the bottom crust, much less the mantle or the core.
Yes, in a technical sense it will eventually affect those things, too, but not in any way you'd be able to measure for millions of years. If we find a way to take out energy faster than that, everything in technology will change anyway.
The crappy redesign was definitely a harbinger. It's not quite as bad as it appears: it's just the front page, and the inside pages weren't nearly as bad. Still, it's hard to know who the audience for that landing page is, and even if it's attractive to non-users who you want to sign up, experienced users probably don't want to see what's essentially a bad Flash intro.
I think that's a lot of the argument: the postage and other costs make the DVD side a losing or breakeven proposition. They've always been accused of throttling people who took too much advantage of what's actually a pretty sweet deal.
I downgraded my disk plan, but only because the streaming service has become more valuable. They raised the price; I downgraded my service: the next effect is that I'm paying about the same amount and watching pretty much the same amount of content. That works for me.
The Qwikster thing, though, had me completely baffled. If they'd done that, my service would have gotten worse, and I might have canceled one side or the other. Many people, I think, did that preemptively, especially those who were finding Netflix's library less valuable. You can watch content faster than they can make new things worth seeing. They're getting more old content on-line, but even good old movies and TV shows begin to look dated and don't have as much appeal after a decade or so.
The price rise was a good excuse to acknowledge that, and the Qwikster debacle was a good reason to get out early.
Absolutely, but in this case I'm hard pressed to find the innovation. Them too, apparently, since they ended up killing it.
Usually, an innovative idea will find some supporters even when the vast majority are against it. I never found anybody who supported the Qwikster thing and said, "This makes my life better" or even "I see how this makes Netflix shareholder's lives better." There were guesses, but nobody really stood by the guesses.
I've love to see Netflix do more innovation, even if that innovation makes the service less valuable for me personally. As long as it's benefitting somebody, and in this case I had no idea who that was supposed to be. That was more aggravating than the actual effects I felt as a customer. The pot got stirred, but nobody came out ahead.
That must take quite the infrastructure. During the trivial earthquake a few months ago, voice was absolutely jammed and text messages were very, very slow going. The Japanese must have some system for prioritizing the emergency outgoing message. I wonder if any of the American networks have that feature in there.
Hey, I didn't know about Prague Cemetery. I really liked Name of the Rose, and liked (but didn't love) Foucault's Pendulum. His other novels I could take or leave, mostly leave. How's the new one?
Which may be a more accurate portrayal of average human behavior than intelligence. The depressing thing about fooling 18% isn't what it says about the 18%, but what the 18% are effectively saying about the rest of us.
I came to see if somebody had discovered the non-slideshow version or at least post a summary. No such luck, and Their Blog Sucks.
Given their way, the EPA wouldn't exist. They dominate the world, but don't have absolute control.
As it is, they've hamstrung the EPA as much as possible, and have outsourced a lot of manufacturing to avoid having to deal with it. If they were prevented from outsourcing, they'd probably have devoted even more effort to destroying the EPA. As it is, most of their favorite Presidential candidates would love to make the problem go away for them.
It doesn't seem to many Americans as if we're living in the wealthiest period in history. Their income is declining, and hasn't increased in decades. That's not so noticeable most years, but it becomes obvious in a recession, where the lack of upward mobility suddenly becomes a vast jump in downward mobility.
It is in rich people's interest to see that most people are moderately well off. If it weren't for explicitly redistributionist taxes, the genuinely poor would have eaten the rich decades ago. Short-sightedness means that people don't always do what's in their own best interest. There are better ways to fix the problem than explicit redistribution of wealth, but the rich fight all of them tooth and nail. In the limit case, it will happen with teeth and nails, and that's not good for anybody.
Still, a goodly sum of money. And a lot of people are prepared to see it reduced.
The question is where you direct the reduction. There's a lot of demand to see it put into debt reduction; that is, reducing DoD spending AND not increasing NASA's spending, so that the deficit isn't quite so big.
There are good arguments to be made for either. I'll let you know if I ever hear anybody engaging in one, rather than spouting ideological and partisan talking points.
So... between UNIVAC and the Turing Test there's absolutely nothing that might be of any use at all?
One advantage to going through a real publishing house is that an editor would remove 99% of your italics.
You want to break the mold, ignore the rules, do your own thing... go ahead. But sometimes conventional wisdom becomes conventional for a reason, and in the case of italics, I think most readers will agree. Used sparingly, they help something stand out, or compel a particular reading of a sentence.
But frequent use dulls their value, and it makes the sentences harder to read. Italics forces a re-parse. That's valuable, when you need it to compel a particular reading, but it grows tiresome very quickly. A well-crafted sentence doesn't need italics. The emphasis is part of the structure, both of that sentence and the whole rest of the paragraph.
Go ahead and get all e.e. cummings on us, and maybe you're breaking out a whole new style. But the odds are you'd be better off following the rules on that one and being novel with other aspects of your storytelling.
It's a good idea to make mandates for the GEO orbit, but it's going to add weight and cost to the next round of birds. That makes them even more expensive, and you'd better be able to demonstrate that you will in fact be able to take advantage of it, or that will be added cost to no benefit.
It sounds like they're faced with the same situation software developers often are: reuse would be great, but much of the time it really is cheaper just to re-build another custom solution. And even if we do explicitly design for re-use, we'll probably guess wrong about what the possible re-uses should have been.
It's _never_ as simple as snapping legos together. It's always the dream, but at best you get dozens of iterations before a standard arises. I bet its the same for satellites as for software.
Everybody in DC does breathe a guilty sigh of relief when Republicans win. Not because they'll do a better job (from the point of view of the GS-10s, it's all kind of the same), but because the level of whiny wailing drops somewhat.
The ringing in your ears usually begins to decrease by midterms, just in time for the GOVERNMENT BAD! screeching to start up again.
Yes and no. The Iraqi government (well, parts of it) would like for some troops to stay. They really enjoy having a free security force.
They were in negotiations with the US to continue it, but terms had to be dictated. The sticking point was a matter of immunity. The Iraqis wanted troops to be subjected to Iraqi laws; currently they are held to the UCMJ (US law). This was the key point in negotiation two weeks ago:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-15208373
They never came to an agreement, so we get the default: all troops out by the end of the year. This was the official announcement that those negotiations had ended.
That is actual news. Until now, there was reason to expect that the troops would be asked to stay for a few more years. Now we know that's not the case.
Except that it's not serious. The departments he's talking about come to $12 billion, a pittance, a rounding error.
He's not looking for the best bang for his buck, or seriously buckling down to cut the deficit. He's picking a few ideological enemies and eliminating them wholesale while doing fuck-all to the deficit and vast damage to the actual economy.
I'd love to see a serious re-think of government services, one that considers return-on-investment and produces a smaller, more streamlined result. This is not that plan. This is ideological warfare that's designed to disenfranchise people he doesn't like, not streamline government.
We're in debt to the tune of 14 figures. When he starts looking at 12 and 13 figure budget items, he'd be making a dent in the the debt. When he's fiddling around with 9 figure items, he's just pissing down your back and telling you that it's raining.
It may be a paradise for short-sellers at the moment, but in an efficient market that won't last long. You're competing with other short-sellers to try to determine the "true" value of the commodity, and the last one(s) in take it in the shorts. It's even possible that a rush of short-sellers could drive the price below the "true" market value, and you could lose money.
Now, it's hard to define what the true market value of a Bitcoin might be, since it's not backed by anything at all. At least a government fiat currency is backed by the fact that the currency will be used to pay your taxes. It's not impossible to invent a medium of exchange out of whole cloth; that's effectively what gold is. (Gold does have some uses, but for most of history it was just decorative, and the value of a decoration is fickle.)
Still, the high price of Bitcoins was pure speculation, people bidding against each other for a demand that might some day materialize. And given that they were pretty freaking smug about it, I'm not too sorry to see them lose a bunch of money on it.
According to this:
http://www.narcoticnews.com/Cocaine-Prices-in-the-U.S.A.php
a kilo of coke is around $30,000. Which, by to the article's estimate, means you'll need about 3-4 kilos to buy one of these cars.
I haven't used Google voice recognition in this context, but I have seen it in use on YouTube videos. I have yet to see a single case, even for simple spoken speech, where it was even describable as usable.
Their translator generally gets the gist of things, from properly-written text. But the speech-to-text part of it is not ready for prime time, at least not for naturally spoken speech. Maybe it's better when you're speaking directly to it.
Thing is, I got the gist of it. It may not be a great translation, but if I'm in Brazil and the options are (a) that translation, and (b) no translation, I'm a lot better off with (a) than (b).
You could call it 80% of the way there, in four decades of work. The remaining 20% will probably take another four decades, at least. But at 80% we've reached something that is frequently useful.