Yeah, brakes are a different class, since they're a safety requirement rather than a nicety. It's especially nice in shifters, because it takes some of the tedious adjustment out of the picture.
Mostly, I think it's about clean aerodynamic profiles and simplicity: no wires means nothing to adjust. They've had batteries on bikes for a while, so this isn't novel on that score.
It's definitely for high-end road bikes only, real top-of-the-line stuff. I don't know if it will make a difference at that grade or not (it's way out of my league) but it sounds as if the doomsayers don't really know what it is high-end cyclists want and why. Yes, there are issues to be worked out, but I'm pretty sure they're aware of that.
One of the problems with the Shuttle was that it was conceived of as a "truck", with drivers shuttling cargo. The problem is that you really don't need drivers for cargo; astronauts really ARE just spam-in-a-can, as far as the carrier is concerned.
Trying to carry both humans AND cargo made the design harder (and heavier) than it needed to be. A ship that carries one or the other makes both safer. This works very well for the Russians, who can just park whatever they want on top of a disposable rocket.
It's possible that the split makes some sort of long-term sense. I can't even begin to fathom what that sense is, though if I had to guess I'd say that it had something to do with making nice with the studios. That doesn't make sense, but then, the studios have this bizarre hatred of streaming that doesn't make sense either, so maybe the two things have the same root.
Even if that's the case, though, you need to get your ducks in a row before ditching the disc business. It's only a win for customers if it gets them better streaming content. They prepped the customers for it by separating the pricing plans. That came with a price increase as well, but I think that the separation of the plans was the real goal.
Without that, splitting the business comes with downsides for the users and no upside. Get the upside (more streaming movies) and you'll get customers squawking, but not necessarily running away. Sell them the downside prematurely and you lose a million customers.
That's not just "slower" but "more fully worked out". Hastings may well think that he's in a better position to cut deals with studios, but he hasn't said so, and even if he did say it we're in no position to believe him.
You joke, but in Thunderbird, that's exactly what I do. I never empty the trash, and if I need something, I search there. It's just what GMail calls "archive". I suppose I should live in fear of accidentally pushing the "empty trash" button, but I guess that's what backups are for.
I don't bother separating out the good stuff from the bad stuff, since it may all be necessary some day. The only things that get separated out specially are the actual spam.
Screw my culture. If you need killing, I'm going to kill you, and I'm not going to let my "culture" impose some extra moral requirement on me.
This is to your benefit: it means that I'm NOT going to kill you if you DON'T need killing. If somebody decides that their "honor" needs to be satisfied, you can end up dead.
You can sleep tight knowing that you can call me a coward all you like because I don't care what you think of me. Try that with an "honorable" person and see how well you sleep.
If you're going to kill me, then sneaking up on me is the best way to do it.
But I'm pretty sure you won't, because you have no reason to. It's wise to have a generic fear of those who kill without reason: they never go away, even in societies with honor codes and duels. But they're a small minority, and the precautions you take are the same regardless.
If you do have reason to kill me, we should talk about it. If we can't reach a reasonable conclusion, then either I'm being unreasonable, or you are. If it's me, then you probably should go ahead and kill me, and you should do it in such a way that I don't see it coming. If you're the one being unreasonable, then it would be best to keep your unreasonableness to a degree that isn't worth my trouble to sneak up on you and end our disagreement the hard way.
The vast majority of the time, this works. In fact, I haven't had to kill anybody yet. But you never know.
Yes, it's EXACTLY the kind of thinking that leads to unmanned fighter drones killing US citizens. If I thought that this person could be reasoned with, then I'd have supported doing that. If he were in the US so that I could have arrested him (which actually takes a lot more power than just killing him), I'd have supported that, too.
But I couldn't do either of those things, so yes, it's either him or me and I choose me.
Yeah, the quote sounds all manly and tough, but I think it's also pretty stupid. If I am going to kill you, it's because it's important that you be dead. It's not a test of my masculinity, or some kind of honor thing where I'm going to let Fate or our skills with a weapon decide which of us really deserves to be deceased.
If I kill you, I'm going to sneak up on you, and you'll have no idea what's happening until you no longer know that anything is happening. It won't be "honorable", just necessary. If it's not necessary, I won't do it.
The real civility and honor comes BEFORE the killing part, where I try to settle our differences like adult human beings, with language. If you have any honor, we'll settle it then. If we don't find an honorable way to settle it, I won't be looking for an honorable solution, just a solution.
The difference is that McVeigh was in the United States, where we had both the authority and the facilities to arrest him. There is absolutely no way we could have arrested somebody in Yemen.
The closest we could have come would have been to send in a team of Navy Seals, a dangerous operation with a very high chance of failure, and legally it would have been equally dubious. Or we could have asked Yemen to arrest them for us, but the Yemeni government is in peril and has not been very successful at arresting its enemies.
Comparing him to McVeigh is misleading. The situations are totally different. Had he been on US soil, he surely would have been arrested. I don't know whether this was legal or not, but I know that "Oh, we should have just arrested him" is a bogus argument.
He didn't formally renounce his citzenship. His attacks on the US could be interpreted as a renunciation of citizenship, but as far as I know there's no court case deciding that.
It might be that this results in a process by which a US court revokes somebody's citizenship for them, without a declaration, but it would be better if there were legislation to achieve that.
As TFA says, different measurers come up with different stats. The article highlights one company that shows Chrome a lot higher up on the list. Two others disagree, though those statistics show a pretty remarkable share for Chrome even if it's not passing Firefox.
Also remember that profits in the tech industry are incredibly variable. You can spend a lot of money on R&D or marketing in one quarter, or have a surge of interest in your new product followed by a rapid dropoff.
It's hard to evaluate this without looking at their full balance sheet.
The situations aren't parallel. I'm sure Columbus would have been happy to send a robot, if he could have. Especially if he knew before he left that it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars just for him to be able to breathe.
Nobody wants to end exploration. We're all desperate for exploration. So desperate that we want to send ten times as many missions, missions which stay up for years rather than weeks. Which is the sort of thing we can do with machines.
This isn't one continuous stream of neutrinos. They turn the experiment on, and phone over: "Hey, we're sending neutrinos. You get 'em?" "Yeah, we got 'em".
Then they turn it off. "It done?" "Yep, it's off". Like looking for the circuit breaker that controls one light switch.
They repeated this thousands of times. If the neutrinos are coming from somewhere/somewhen else, then it's either a really, really, REALLY stunning coincidence or somebody's messing with you. Or, vastly more likely, they're seeing the neutrinos from the experiment, just 60 nanoseconds sooner than expected. That's plenty interesting all by itself.
They're not telling the people at CERN they're wrong. If anything, it's the CERN physicists announcing that they're wrong, but they don't know why and are looking for help.
Nobody here is going to be able to give it to them. Whatever's wrong is buried deep in the setup. They've already checked all the things they can think of, and they're looking for help. We get to play along with the home game, but we're not going to be the ones who figure it out. We're not contributing, just exercising our brains.
There's a tiny, tiny, tiny chance that it's not their setup, but that they've actually discovered something. As Asimov said, the real wins don't sound like "Eureka". They sound like "That's funny..." Thus far, "that's funny..." is what we're getting. Most likely, "that's funny" means you've done something wrong. But once in a very rare while, it means something else. And we get to play with it early.
Unfortunately, no. The labs are separated by hundreds of miles of solid rock. There's just no way to get a photon at any wavelength through that much rock.
It works with neutrinos only precisely because they're neutral, and don't interact with the rock. (In fact, the vast majority of them go right on through the detector as well.)
Still... if this experiment holds up, they'll find a way to relocate the experiment to space. That'll let you bounce a light beam as well as your neutrinos. You can also put 'em thousands of miles apart, increasing the effect, as well as varying the distance to check those effects.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. First, the effect has to be confirmed with much, much cheaper instrumentation here on earth. Space is always pricey.
It may improve their bottom line, but probably not all that much. A $10 connection is at most $25 million, a rounding error for a company that has $45 billion in revenue.
And that doesn't include the cost of providing that service: bandwidth, cable maintenance, user support phone calls, etc. If the $10 includes a cable modem, then their profit margin is going to be razor thin. (It's kinda skeezy if $10 turns into $15 or $20 through fees, taxes, and "optional" services.)
It's more about PR; even if this ends up costing them $25 million it's a pretty good deal. But more importantly, the PR allowed them to buy up NBC, creating a vertical integration that can easily boost their profit by more than $25 million.
CAN-SPAM also means that they have to provide a real opt-out. We've taught ourselves to assume that the opt-out just tells spammers that you've received their message, but a legitimate company can be sued if they don't take you off the list.
It's annoying to have to click an opt-out message for something you didn't think you were opting in to, but it's not the real nuisance. The real nuisance is the bottom-feeding spammers who use botnets to spew vast amounts of fraudulent crap. Compared to that, the CAN-SPAM "legitimate" spam is a drop in the bucket and easily managed.
I'd like to see companies that fail to comply with CAN-SPAM sued when they fail to follow the rules. Most of them want to be aggressive but keep it legal, and lawsuits will push them to keep on the legal side. When they use fraud, they need to be hammered, but that's going to be fairly rare. The real problems will still come from the fraudsters; you don't have any existing business relationship because they don't have any legitimate product to sell.
That's interesting. I've never run one like that. Especially on a hot day, that could be fun, a nice cool-off between the run and bike legs. Especially compared to an in-the-water start, early in the morning, which can be frigid even in a wetsuit and even when the day is going to be blistering.
As I'm sure you figured out, that's exactly why they put the swimming first. They watch you like a hawk, with literally hundreds of people out in boats and ski-doos. Having the swimming first means that they get it all over with at once, in a couple of hours, rather than having them be out there literally all day.
Especially for the full-length Ironman, where the finalists don't finish until well after dark. Having to do the swim course in the dark would guarantee deaths.
Those high-profile hijackings didn't kill 3,000 people or destroy billion-dollar buildings. It used to be that if you got hijacked, you took an involuntary detour to Cuba, or you got ransomed, and then went home. It was unpleasant, but it wasn't a calamity.
The damage caused may not merit the trillions we're spending on it, but it definitely put people more on edge than the other hijackings.
Very much this. "Killing the TSA" means getting groped by a private contractor rather than a government employee. There may be "competition" for that job, but the choice isn't up to you. It's not like you'd be able to choose between the "groping" and "no-groping" screeners.
Their contract would be chock-full of security requirements. It may or may not actually specify "groping", but if it says, "catch 95% of random government probes", you bet there's still gonna be groping (or nudie pics or whatever other invasive schemes they've got). The goal is to prevent terrorism, and private industry doesn't have some magical non-invasive way to look for bombs that terrorists potentially strap to their family jewels.
Don't give the Republicans their anti-government derp in the hopes that it gives you your privacy back. It does not happen.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2008/07/shimano?currentPage=1
Yeah, brakes are a different class, since they're a safety requirement rather than a nicety. It's especially nice in shifters, because it takes some of the tedious adjustment out of the picture.
Mostly, I think it's about clean aerodynamic profiles and simplicity: no wires means nothing to adjust. They've had batteries on bikes for a while, so this isn't novel on that score.
It's definitely for high-end road bikes only, real top-of-the-line stuff. I don't know if it will make a difference at that grade or not (it's way out of my league) but it sounds as if the doomsayers don't really know what it is high-end cyclists want and why. Yes, there are issues to be worked out, but I'm pretty sure they're aware of that.
Like dark gray mayonnaise.
One of the problems with the Shuttle was that it was conceived of as a "truck", with drivers shuttling cargo. The problem is that you really don't need drivers for cargo; astronauts really ARE just spam-in-a-can, as far as the carrier is concerned.
Trying to carry both humans AND cargo made the design harder (and heavier) than it needed to be. A ship that carries one or the other makes both safer. This works very well for the Russians, who can just park whatever they want on top of a disposable rocket.
It's possible that the split makes some sort of long-term sense. I can't even begin to fathom what that sense is, though if I had to guess I'd say that it had something to do with making nice with the studios. That doesn't make sense, but then, the studios have this bizarre hatred of streaming that doesn't make sense either, so maybe the two things have the same root.
Even if that's the case, though, you need to get your ducks in a row before ditching the disc business. It's only a win for customers if it gets them better streaming content. They prepped the customers for it by separating the pricing plans. That came with a price increase as well, but I think that the separation of the plans was the real goal.
Without that, splitting the business comes with downsides for the users and no upside. Get the upside (more streaming movies) and you'll get customers squawking, but not necessarily running away. Sell them the downside prematurely and you lose a million customers.
That's not just "slower" but "more fully worked out". Hastings may well think that he's in a better position to cut deals with studios, but he hasn't said so, and even if he did say it we're in no position to believe him.
You joke, but in Thunderbird, that's exactly what I do. I never empty the trash, and if I need something, I search there. It's just what GMail calls "archive". I suppose I should live in fear of accidentally pushing the "empty trash" button, but I guess that's what backups are for.
I don't bother separating out the good stuff from the bad stuff, since it may all be necessary some day. The only things that get separated out specially are the actual spam.
Screw my culture. If you need killing, I'm going to kill you, and I'm not going to let my "culture" impose some extra moral requirement on me.
This is to your benefit: it means that I'm NOT going to kill you if you DON'T need killing. If somebody decides that their "honor" needs to be satisfied, you can end up dead.
You can sleep tight knowing that you can call me a coward all you like because I don't care what you think of me. Try that with an "honorable" person and see how well you sleep.
If you're going to kill me, then sneaking up on me is the best way to do it.
But I'm pretty sure you won't, because you have no reason to. It's wise to have a generic fear of those who kill without reason: they never go away, even in societies with honor codes and duels. But they're a small minority, and the precautions you take are the same regardless.
If you do have reason to kill me, we should talk about it. If we can't reach a reasonable conclusion, then either I'm being unreasonable, or you are. If it's me, then you probably should go ahead and kill me, and you should do it in such a way that I don't see it coming. If you're the one being unreasonable, then it would be best to keep your unreasonableness to a degree that isn't worth my trouble to sneak up on you and end our disagreement the hard way.
The vast majority of the time, this works. In fact, I haven't had to kill anybody yet. But you never know.
Yes, it's EXACTLY the kind of thinking that leads to unmanned fighter drones killing US citizens. If I thought that this person could be reasoned with, then I'd have supported doing that. If he were in the US so that I could have arrested him (which actually takes a lot more power than just killing him), I'd have supported that, too.
But I couldn't do either of those things, so yes, it's either him or me and I choose me.
I did say I would eat all of my killing.
Yeah, the quote sounds all manly and tough, but I think it's also pretty stupid. If I am going to kill you, it's because it's important that you be dead. It's not a test of my masculinity, or some kind of honor thing where I'm going to let Fate or our skills with a weapon decide which of us really deserves to be deceased.
If I kill you, I'm going to sneak up on you, and you'll have no idea what's happening until you no longer know that anything is happening. It won't be "honorable", just necessary. If it's not necessary, I won't do it.
The real civility and honor comes BEFORE the killing part, where I try to settle our differences like adult human beings, with language. If you have any honor, we'll settle it then. If we don't find an honorable way to settle it, I won't be looking for an honorable solution, just a solution.
The difference is that McVeigh was in the United States, where we had both the authority and the facilities to arrest him. There is absolutely no way we could have arrested somebody in Yemen.
The closest we could have come would have been to send in a team of Navy Seals, a dangerous operation with a very high chance of failure, and legally it would have been equally dubious. Or we could have asked Yemen to arrest them for us, but the Yemeni government is in peril and has not been very successful at arresting its enemies.
Comparing him to McVeigh is misleading. The situations are totally different. Had he been on US soil, he surely would have been arrested. I don't know whether this was legal or not, but I know that "Oh, we should have just arrested him" is a bogus argument.
He didn't formally renounce his citzenship. His attacks on the US could be interpreted as a renunciation of citizenship, but as far as I know there's no court case deciding that.
It might be that this results in a process by which a US court revokes somebody's citizenship for them, without a declaration, but it would be better if there were legislation to achieve that.
As TFA says, different measurers come up with different stats. The article highlights one company that shows Chrome a lot higher up on the list. Two others disagree, though those statistics show a pretty remarkable share for Chrome even if it's not passing Firefox.
I've heard this interpretation before, but an awful lot of Christians still cite Leviticus whenever it suits, often while eating a bacon cheeseburger.
I realize that hypocrisy is far from limited to Christians, but this one is a regular on the evening news:
"Hey, how about some gay marriage?"
"Nuh uh, Leviticus."
A just universe would follow that up with a serious punching.
Also remember that profits in the tech industry are incredibly variable. You can spend a lot of money on R&D or marketing in one quarter, or have a surge of interest in your new product followed by a rapid dropoff.
It's hard to evaluate this without looking at their full balance sheet.
The situations aren't parallel. I'm sure Columbus would have been happy to send a robot, if he could have. Especially if he knew before he left that it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars just for him to be able to breathe.
Nobody wants to end exploration. We're all desperate for exploration. So desperate that we want to send ten times as many missions, missions which stay up for years rather than weeks. Which is the sort of thing we can do with machines.
This isn't one continuous stream of neutrinos. They turn the experiment on, and phone over: "Hey, we're sending neutrinos. You get 'em?" "Yeah, we got 'em".
Then they turn it off. "It done?" "Yep, it's off". Like looking for the circuit breaker that controls one light switch.
They repeated this thousands of times. If the neutrinos are coming from somewhere/somewhen else, then it's either a really, really, REALLY stunning coincidence or somebody's messing with you. Or, vastly more likely, they're seeing the neutrinos from the experiment, just 60 nanoseconds sooner than expected. That's plenty interesting all by itself.
They're not telling the people at CERN they're wrong. If anything, it's the CERN physicists announcing that they're wrong, but they don't know why and are looking for help.
Nobody here is going to be able to give it to them. Whatever's wrong is buried deep in the setup. They've already checked all the things they can think of, and they're looking for help. We get to play along with the home game, but we're not going to be the ones who figure it out. We're not contributing, just exercising our brains.
There's a tiny, tiny, tiny chance that it's not their setup, but that they've actually discovered something. As Asimov said, the real wins don't sound like "Eureka". They sound like "That's funny..." Thus far, "that's funny..." is what we're getting. Most likely, "that's funny" means you've done something wrong. But once in a very rare while, it means something else. And we get to play with it early.
Unfortunately, no. The labs are separated by hundreds of miles of solid rock. There's just no way to get a photon at any wavelength through that much rock.
It works with neutrinos only precisely because they're neutral, and don't interact with the rock. (In fact, the vast majority of them go right on through the detector as well.)
Still... if this experiment holds up, they'll find a way to relocate the experiment to space. That'll let you bounce a light beam as well as your neutrinos. You can also put 'em thousands of miles apart, increasing the effect, as well as varying the distance to check those effects.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. First, the effect has to be confirmed with much, much cheaper instrumentation here on earth. Space is always pricey.
It may improve their bottom line, but probably not all that much. A $10 connection is at most $25 million, a rounding error for a company that has $45 billion in revenue.
And that doesn't include the cost of providing that service: bandwidth, cable maintenance, user support phone calls, etc. If the $10 includes a cable modem, then their profit margin is going to be razor thin. (It's kinda skeezy if $10 turns into $15 or $20 through fees, taxes, and "optional" services.)
It's more about PR; even if this ends up costing them $25 million it's a pretty good deal. But more importantly, the PR allowed them to buy up NBC, creating a vertical integration that can easily boost their profit by more than $25 million.
CAN-SPAM also means that they have to provide a real opt-out. We've taught ourselves to assume that the opt-out just tells spammers that you've received their message, but a legitimate company can be sued if they don't take you off the list.
It's annoying to have to click an opt-out message for something you didn't think you were opting in to, but it's not the real nuisance. The real nuisance is the bottom-feeding spammers who use botnets to spew vast amounts of fraudulent crap. Compared to that, the CAN-SPAM "legitimate" spam is a drop in the bucket and easily managed.
I'd like to see companies that fail to comply with CAN-SPAM sued when they fail to follow the rules. Most of them want to be aggressive but keep it legal, and lawsuits will push them to keep on the legal side. When they use fraud, they need to be hammered, but that's going to be fairly rare. The real problems will still come from the fraudsters; you don't have any existing business relationship because they don't have any legitimate product to sell.
That's interesting. I've never run one like that. Especially on a hot day, that could be fun, a nice cool-off between the run and bike legs. Especially compared to an in-the-water start, early in the morning, which can be frigid even in a wetsuit and even when the day is going to be blistering.
As I'm sure you figured out, that's exactly why they put the swimming first. They watch you like a hawk, with literally hundreds of people out in boats and ski-doos. Having the swimming first means that they get it all over with at once, in a couple of hours, rather than having them be out there literally all day.
Especially for the full-length Ironman, where the finalists don't finish until well after dark. Having to do the swim course in the dark would guarantee deaths.
Those high-profile hijackings didn't kill 3,000 people or destroy billion-dollar buildings. It used to be that if you got hijacked, you took an involuntary detour to Cuba, or you got ransomed, and then went home. It was unpleasant, but it wasn't a calamity.
The damage caused may not merit the trillions we're spending on it, but it definitely put people more on edge than the other hijackings.
Very much this. "Killing the TSA" means getting groped by a private contractor rather than a government employee. There may be "competition" for that job, but the choice isn't up to you. It's not like you'd be able to choose between the "groping" and "no-groping" screeners.
Their contract would be chock-full of security requirements. It may or may not actually specify "groping", but if it says, "catch 95% of random government probes", you bet there's still gonna be groping (or nudie pics or whatever other invasive schemes they've got). The goal is to prevent terrorism, and private industry doesn't have some magical non-invasive way to look for bombs that terrorists potentially strap to their family jewels.
Don't give the Republicans their anti-government derp in the hopes that it gives you your privacy back. It does not happen.