I assume Microsoft is calling these new products "slates" -- while everybody else still calls them tablets -- to distance them from the last time Microsoft tried to create a market for tablets and failed?
'Closed' doesn't always mean 'you can never have the source code', it can just mean 'you can't do what you want with the source code'. UNIX is one of these cases.
The children I know today spend virtually no time playing in the sense I understood it. When they're not being ferried from one structured (adult led) activity to the next, they're in front of a TV or computer with an adult nearby.
Plus, I know very few parents among my peers who had more than one kid (or who plan to). With both parents juggling full-time jobs, it just seems like too much work (to say nothing of the expense). As a result, the single child gets the absolute total focus of the parents' attention. Simply put, a lot of them are spoiled rotten. I see kids with whole rooms full of toys, games, computers... basically everything they ever asked for. When something isn't going their way, they pitch a fit until the parents change their minds. When you're in the car with them, you're going to listen to what they want to listen to on the radio. When they feel like watching their Disney DVDs, they're going to watch their Disney DVDs -- which is why mom and dad have to buy them their own flat-panel TV. The child is the focus, pretty much from sunup to sundown. And I know it's not right for me to judge, particularly since I don't have children of my own, but I look at my friends and I know for a fact they weren't raised the way they're raising their kids. I'm sure the temptation to spoil your kids must be huge, but I sometimes fear we're raising an entire generation of narcissists.
I prefer to see a songwriter's position as closer to that of a magazine columnist or a book author: arranging words (or music) on a page and not necessarily expecting to have to perform them live.
I'm not saying this sounds like a desirable way to fund books today -- in fact, I hate the idea that an author is expected to develop some kind of cult of celebrity if he/she wants to earn any money, rather than earning it off the merits of the work itself -- but Charles Dickens used to perform live.
A: No "side rails" on escalators, just the moving rubber handrail (which has too much traction to slide down) B: Bumps built into the rails on pretty much any staircases that have rails, to prevent people from sliding down them.
Also, the "national average" covers a lot of people. In Texas, for example, the statewide average is 64 percent. Meanwhile, the statewide average in California is 24.4 percent -- and that includes both the Bay Area, where people are pretty fit, and Southern California, where walking on a sidewalk (moving or no) is pretty rare. Given that comparison, a rate in the 20's doesn't sound all that bad -- and indeed, if you visit New York City, you will see a lot fewer fat people than you see in Houston or Phoenix, for example.
Not really. In my city, you can walk to any corner store and you will see a radius of flattened gum-blobs all around the entrance where kids have been hanging around in front of the store after school over the years. Most stores at least post a little wastebasket near the door. It makes no difference.
In Canada, it's an unspoken rule to stand on the right leaving enough room on the left for people wanting to walk to get past. The escalators themselves are generally wide enough to two people on a step (though it might just be that most travelling Canadians aren't too fat yet), so this works fine.
This is true in the San Francisco Bay Area, also. A lot of people ignore the unspoken rule (or just never knew it). However, I have discovered a method of solving this problem that improves on the tried-and-true Bay Area passive-aggressive approach of making huffing noises under one's breath. Instead, I say, "excuse me, please" and occasionally make a nodding motion with my chin up the escalator. Most people get the hint, subtle though it may be.
The color inversion happens because e-ink screens are bistable -- the screen uses no electricity when it's displaying either the light or dark elements. In order to change what's shown on the screen, it needs to 'clear' what was displayed previously. This manifests itself as a brief 'flashing' of the screen. Incidentally, when it flashes is the only time that an e-ink screen consumes any energy. Conversely, your LCD monitor that doesn't require this flashing is constantly using electricity.
That might be true, but it sure seems to use a lot of energy when it does change the page. I've had a Nook for about a week, and the stated claims of 10-day battery life seem ridiculously overinflated. Reading for about two hours seems to use between 15-20 percent of the battery's charge, and that's with all wireless connectivity disabled. What on Earth is sucking all that power, if the screen is only using power when it changes the page, is beyond me. Either the motherboard or the OS have terrible, power-sucking design flaws or else the e-ink screens' power advantage vs. LCDs really isn't that significant.
Given that the man is 68 years old, has been doing movie reviews for a long time and probably one of his first experiences with video games was E.T. for the Atari 2600
Don't mean to shock you or anything, but 68 years is even older than that...
But who knows... confronted with a pile of $150k, tax free...
Effectively this is exactly what actual prostitutes are confronted with every single day
Ummmm... actually, most "actual prostitutes" earn exactly nothing from prostitution. All of their income goes to drugs, or is held by a pimp, or both. I get so sick of this idea that prostitutes are somehow empowered, "sex positive" women who are in charge of their own destinies. For the vast majorities of prostitutes, this is not the case. Prostitutes are psychologically damaged women who are abused and manipulated by men. Almost every "actual prostitute" has experienced physical battery, either from a pimp or a john. Among the risks of the "profession" are disfiguring injury, sexually transmitted diseases (including HIV), and death by murder. Prostitution is not a "victimless crime." The prostitutes are the victims.
A girl I was talking to about this a few years ago said that a man once offered her $1,000 and she had an orgasm right there sitting in the chair in the bar.
...and then said, "YOINK!!!", grabbed the cash, and walked right out of the bar.
I have many reasons for not having tattoos, but this was actually one of them when I was a young man. I grew up in a California suburb with very little crime, more racism than black people, and cops who didn't have a whole lot to do when they weren't issuing drunk-driving tickets. Cops who don't have much to do is always a bad thing. In our case, they were hard at work prosecuting the "gang violence problem," which basically meant harassing kids wherever they could be found. Once, while loitering in a park, my friend and I were pulled aside by the cops, who proceeded to bring out a camera from their car and take photographs of all of our identifying marks for their "gang records." My friend had tattoos; I did not. And on that day I vowed never to get any.
That's your option. I would argue that, by paying my bill in full or in part at a time of my own choosing, I am considerably more financially agile than you are. This is important to me, because since I am self-employed I cannot necessarily count on regular paychecks and consistent income throughout the year.
Well, that's one anecdote. I have the opposite experience. My primary credit card is also the first credit card I ever got. Mine did have a low interest rate. Over the years the card changed hands to two different banks through mergers, and now it's with Chase. Each time the brand logo on my card changed, I was been grandfathered in with the same APR as before. I've been with Chase for a while now, and though it wasn't even by choice, I'm perfectly happy with them as they have never given me anything but good service. They even recently upgraded my card to one of their "premium" products -- while keeping me at the same interest rate, which currently stands at 4.65% (yes, you read that right). And no, I am not anything close to "rich," by any stretch of the imagination.
My guess is that your experience is due to the nature of the product you received from Chase. By "product," I mean card -- not all credit cards are the same, even when issued by the same bank. Different product lines tolerate different terms. For example, I once had a card that had a very poor interest rate, like they were giving you. I called up my bank and said I really couldn't see using this card ever again, given that my other cards offered so much better terms. The lady on the phone looked at my records and said yes, indeed I should qualify for a better rate -- but that unfortunately she couldn't give it to me with this particular card. She recommended I apply for a new card from the same bank, and she could take my application over the phone. I did so and they mailed me out my new card in a week or two, with the interest rate cut in half. I threw the old card away. Of course, which products you qualify for largely depend on your credit score.
I had the same thought... but I'm just quoting Danny Boyle. There's some evidence (ahem) to suggest he might not know what he's talking about.
He also said he tried having a romance scene in Sunshine but decided that romance absolutely, positively, does not work in a science fiction film. Coming off a zombie movie (28 Days Later) he said he found the zombie genre to be virtually unlimited in possibilities, but the space genre was so narrow, constrained, and formulaic that you could hardly do anything with it. Again, that's Danny Boyle talking, not me -- I can even Google the interview for you if you want.
Well, it is called science fiction for a reason. To me, Sunshine was never about the science so much as the people and their circumstances.
Except that a big part of Sunshine's marketing campaign was all the research Danny Boyle had done to prepare for it, and all the scientific advisors they had on staff, and all the films and documents about NASA spacecraft they watched so they could get every detail right. I've read a quote from Danny Boyle where he talked about how on the Space Shuttle, every single screw is a unique size so that every screw only fits exactly where it's supposed to go, and he wanted that level of detail and realism in Sunshine.
(As an aside, I still want to know why the solution to a fire in a garden on a space ship is to pump oxygen into the room, rather than pumping it out.)
General Electric is still around, and with about the same product line they had a century ago - power station equipment, appliances, lamps, and turbines. (Along the way, GE entered and left semiconductors and computers.)
Along the way it also got into transportation, energy, financial services, and entertainment (it owns NBC Universal). GE is hardly "a company that makes light bulbs."
It's fair criticism. If The Economist is guilty of anything, I'd say it's that it too often wants to be seen to be "taking a hard line" on both sides of an issue, as it seems to have done here. The result is "leaders" that often seem to lead nowhere.
But your rebuttal's last point -- "So, it's in one of the most regulated industries, but at the same time, regulators are responsible for its actions because they didn't regulate? Huh?" -- is off base. The Economist editorial quite clearly states, "BP operates in one of the most regulated industries on earth with some of the most perverse rules, subsidies and incentives" (emphasis mine). Just because an industry is highly regulated doesn't mean it is well regulated, and I cannot believe the oil industry is truly well regulated when so many politicians have such close ties to it.
The fact that BP's stock rose on the announcement of the $20 billion fund suggests to me, at least, that BP's investors desperately want it to appease the politicians that are now clamoring for blood. The Economist's main point is that retroactively trying to extract a pound of flesh from BP now, only when Congress is forced to admit that the penalties and checks it earlier put in place are insufficient, seems unjust. Government has to take at least some of the blame.
On the other hand, BP's evasiveness throughout the debacle does it no credit.
Interestingly enough, I just read an editorial about Obama v. BP in this week's issue of The Economist. The subheading: "America's justifiable fury with BP is degenerating into a broader attack on business." Some choice quotes:
Mr Obama decided to "inform" BP that it must put adequate funds to meet all compensation claims into an escrow account beyond its control, although he has no authority to do so. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives, instructed it not to pay a dividend until all claims tied to the spill are settled. Her fellow Democrats in Congress are trying to raise BP's liability retroactively--the sort of move America's courts rightly frown on. Mr Salazar, on even thinner legal ice, suggested that the government would hold BP accountable not just for the harm directly done by the spill, but also for the jobs lost in the oil business thanks to the freeze on oil drilling in deep water that he himself has imposed.
The magazine frowns upon all these things and it makes some sense. If, as The Economist suggests, BP's value has already dropped by $89 billion and that's "far in excess of all but the most dire forecasts of the ultimate costs of the spill," what is to be gained by all this backlash against the oil industry but a bunch of political posturing?
News flash: The United States is still inexorably reliant on its oil industry. If the Obama administration wants to do something about future oil disasters, maybe it should think more seriously about that and what can be done about it. Also, had government done a better job of regulating the oil industry in the first place, BP's shoddy practices might not have gone unchecked and this disaster might never have happened.
I'm surprised everybody thinks this is so strange. There are lots of examples of "weird geek names," but what about Hank Williams III? True, most people in the English-speaking world would write the Roman numeral, rather than writing Hank Williams 3... but what's stopping them? And even then, a Roman numeral is a number. You wouldn't want to run a regex on the name string, decide it was all [A-Za-z], and output his name as "Mr. III."
I'm sitting next to a Brother ink jet printer right now. I really prefer lasers, but in this case I wanted a large format multi-function machine. My Brother will both print and scan up to 11x17" (equivalent to A3) and it cost me less than $200, shipped to my front door. It shipped with full, high-capacity ink cartridges, not HP's half cartridges. And while it does include some software it's pretty lightweight, and is basically used to handle features like networked scanning and a monitor program to let you know when the ink is low. Both are optional. And yes, Brother explicitly offers drivers for Linux.The print quality is what it is -- could be better, could be a lot worse -- and the build quality seems fairly plasticky, but that seems par for the course with today's printers. Overall my only complaint was that the price was so low it wasn't even a significant tax write-off.
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I assume Microsoft is calling these new products "slates" -- while everybody else still calls them tablets -- to distance them from the last time Microsoft tried to create a market for tablets and failed?
'Closed' doesn't always mean 'you can never have the source code', it can just mean 'you can't do what you want with the source code'. UNIX is one of these cases.
As is Windows, for that matter.
The children I know today spend virtually no time playing in the sense I understood it. When they're not being ferried from one structured (adult led) activity to the next, they're in front of a TV or computer with an adult nearby.
Plus, I know very few parents among my peers who had more than one kid (or who plan to). With both parents juggling full-time jobs, it just seems like too much work (to say nothing of the expense). As a result, the single child gets the absolute total focus of the parents' attention. Simply put, a lot of them are spoiled rotten. I see kids with whole rooms full of toys, games, computers... basically everything they ever asked for. When something isn't going their way, they pitch a fit until the parents change their minds. When you're in the car with them, you're going to listen to what they want to listen to on the radio. When they feel like watching their Disney DVDs, they're going to watch their Disney DVDs -- which is why mom and dad have to buy them their own flat-panel TV. The child is the focus, pretty much from sunup to sundown. And I know it's not right for me to judge, particularly since I don't have children of my own, but I look at my friends and I know for a fact they weren't raised the way they're raising their kids. I'm sure the temptation to spoil your kids must be huge, but I sometimes fear we're raising an entire generation of narcissists.
I prefer to see a songwriter's position as closer to that of a magazine columnist or a book author: arranging words (or music) on a page and not necessarily expecting to have to perform them live.
I'm not saying this sounds like a desirable way to fund books today -- in fact, I hate the idea that an author is expected to develop some kind of cult of celebrity if he/she wants to earn any money, rather than earning it off the merits of the work itself -- but Charles Dickens used to perform live.
Where I live there are:
A: No "side rails" on escalators, just the moving rubber handrail (which has too much traction to slide down)
B: Bumps built into the rails on pretty much any staircases that have rails, to prevent people from sliding down them.
Also, the "national average" covers a lot of people. In Texas, for example, the statewide average is 64 percent. Meanwhile, the statewide average in California is 24.4 percent -- and that includes both the Bay Area, where people are pretty fit, and Southern California, where walking on a sidewalk (moving or no) is pretty rare. Given that comparison, a rate in the 20's doesn't sound all that bad -- and indeed, if you visit New York City, you will see a lot fewer fat people than you see in Houston or Phoenix, for example.
Not really. In my city, you can walk to any corner store and you will see a radius of flattened gum-blobs all around the entrance where kids have been hanging around in front of the store after school over the years. Most stores at least post a little wastebasket near the door. It makes no difference.
In Canada, it's an unspoken rule to stand on the right leaving enough room on the left for people wanting to walk to get past. The escalators themselves are generally wide enough to two people on a step (though it might just be that most travelling Canadians aren't too fat yet), so this works fine.
This is true in the San Francisco Bay Area, also. A lot of people ignore the unspoken rule (or just never knew it). However, I have discovered a method of solving this problem that improves on the tried-and-true Bay Area passive-aggressive approach of making huffing noises under one's breath. Instead, I say, "excuse me, please" and occasionally make a nodding motion with my chin up the escalator. Most people get the hint, subtle though it may be.
The color inversion happens because e-ink screens are bistable -- the screen uses no electricity when it's displaying either the light or dark elements. In order to change what's shown on the screen, it needs to 'clear' what was displayed previously. This manifests itself as a brief 'flashing' of the screen. Incidentally, when it flashes is the only time that an e-ink screen consumes any energy. Conversely, your LCD monitor that doesn't require this flashing is constantly using electricity.
That might be true, but it sure seems to use a lot of energy when it does change the page. I've had a Nook for about a week, and the stated claims of 10-day battery life seem ridiculously overinflated. Reading for about two hours seems to use between 15-20 percent of the battery's charge, and that's with all wireless connectivity disabled. What on Earth is sucking all that power, if the screen is only using power when it changes the page, is beyond me. Either the motherboard or the OS have terrible, power-sucking design flaws or else the e-ink screens' power advantage vs. LCDs really isn't that significant.
God dammit, everybody pipe down. I'm trying to take a nap.
Given that the man is 68 years old, has been doing movie reviews for a long time and probably one of his first experiences with video games was E.T. for the Atari 2600
Don't mean to shock you or anything, but 68 years is even older than that...
But who knows... confronted with a pile of $150k, tax free...
Effectively this is exactly what actual prostitutes are confronted with every single day
Ummmm... actually, most "actual prostitutes" earn exactly nothing from prostitution. All of their income goes to drugs, or is held by a pimp, or both. I get so sick of this idea that prostitutes are somehow empowered, "sex positive" women who are in charge of their own destinies. For the vast majorities of prostitutes, this is not the case. Prostitutes are psychologically damaged women who are abused and manipulated by men. Almost every "actual prostitute" has experienced physical battery, either from a pimp or a john. Among the risks of the "profession" are disfiguring injury, sexually transmitted diseases (including HIV), and death by murder. Prostitution is not a "victimless crime." The prostitutes are the victims.
A girl I was talking to about this a few years ago said that a man once offered her $1,000 and she had an orgasm right there sitting in the chair in the bar.
...and then said, "YOINK!!!", grabbed the cash, and walked right out of the bar.
I have many reasons for not having tattoos, but this was actually one of them when I was a young man. I grew up in a California suburb with very little crime, more racism than black people, and cops who didn't have a whole lot to do when they weren't issuing drunk-driving tickets. Cops who don't have much to do is always a bad thing. In our case, they were hard at work prosecuting the "gang violence problem," which basically meant harassing kids wherever they could be found. Once, while loitering in a park, my friend and I were pulled aside by the cops, who proceeded to bring out a camera from their car and take photographs of all of our identifying marks for their "gang records." My friend had tattoos; I did not. And on that day I vowed never to get any.
That's your option. I would argue that, by paying my bill in full or in part at a time of my own choosing, I am considerably more financially agile than you are. This is important to me, because since I am self-employed I cannot necessarily count on regular paychecks and consistent income throughout the year.
Well, that's one anecdote. I have the opposite experience. My primary credit card is also the first credit card I ever got. Mine did have a low interest rate. Over the years the card changed hands to two different banks through mergers, and now it's with Chase. Each time the brand logo on my card changed, I was been grandfathered in with the same APR as before. I've been with Chase for a while now, and though it wasn't even by choice, I'm perfectly happy with them as they have never given me anything but good service. They even recently upgraded my card to one of their "premium" products -- while keeping me at the same interest rate, which currently stands at 4.65% (yes, you read that right). And no, I am not anything close to "rich," by any stretch of the imagination.
My guess is that your experience is due to the nature of the product you received from Chase. By "product," I mean card -- not all credit cards are the same, even when issued by the same bank. Different product lines tolerate different terms. For example, I once had a card that had a very poor interest rate, like they were giving you. I called up my bank and said I really couldn't see using this card ever again, given that my other cards offered so much better terms. The lady on the phone looked at my records and said yes, indeed I should qualify for a better rate -- but that unfortunately she couldn't give it to me with this particular card. She recommended I apply for a new card from the same bank, and she could take my application over the phone. I did so and they mailed me out my new card in a week or two, with the interest rate cut in half. I threw the old card away. Of course, which products you qualify for largely depend on your credit score.
I had the same thought... but I'm just quoting Danny Boyle. There's some evidence (ahem) to suggest he might not know what he's talking about.
He also said he tried having a romance scene in Sunshine but decided that romance absolutely, positively, does not work in a science fiction film. Coming off a zombie movie (28 Days Later) he said he found the zombie genre to be virtually unlimited in possibilities, but the space genre was so narrow, constrained, and formulaic that you could hardly do anything with it. Again, that's Danny Boyle talking, not me -- I can even Google the interview for you if you want.
Well, it is called science fiction for a reason. To me, Sunshine was never about the science so much as the people and their circumstances.
Except that a big part of Sunshine's marketing campaign was all the research Danny Boyle had done to prepare for it, and all the scientific advisors they had on staff, and all the films and documents about NASA spacecraft they watched so they could get every detail right. I've read a quote from Danny Boyle where he talked about how on the Space Shuttle, every single screw is a unique size so that every screw only fits exactly where it's supposed to go, and he wanted that level of detail and realism in Sunshine.
(As an aside, I still want to know why the solution to a fire in a garden on a space ship is to pump oxygen into the room, rather than pumping it out.)
General Electric is still around, and with about the same product line they had a century ago - power station equipment, appliances, lamps, and turbines. (Along the way, GE entered and left semiconductors and computers.)
Along the way it also got into transportation, energy, financial services, and entertainment (it owns NBC Universal). GE is hardly "a company that makes light bulbs."
The US government has given you a temporary monopoly by force but that doesn't make it a right.
Hmm. Guess it was a mistake to call that a copyright, then, huh?
It's fair criticism. If The Economist is guilty of anything, I'd say it's that it too often wants to be seen to be "taking a hard line" on both sides of an issue, as it seems to have done here. The result is "leaders" that often seem to lead nowhere.
But your rebuttal's last point -- "So, it's in one of the most regulated industries, but at the same time, regulators are responsible for its actions because they didn't regulate? Huh?" -- is off base. The Economist editorial quite clearly states, "BP operates in one of the most regulated industries on earth with some of the most perverse rules, subsidies and incentives" (emphasis mine). Just because an industry is highly regulated doesn't mean it is well regulated, and I cannot believe the oil industry is truly well regulated when so many politicians have such close ties to it.
The fact that BP's stock rose on the announcement of the $20 billion fund suggests to me, at least, that BP's investors desperately want it to appease the politicians that are now clamoring for blood. The Economist's main point is that retroactively trying to extract a pound of flesh from BP now, only when Congress is forced to admit that the penalties and checks it earlier put in place are insufficient, seems unjust. Government has to take at least some of the blame.
On the other hand, BP's evasiveness throughout the debacle does it no credit.
Mr Obama decided to "inform" BP that it must put adequate funds to meet all compensation claims into an escrow account beyond its control, although he has no authority to do so. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives, instructed it not to pay a dividend until all claims tied to the spill are settled. Her fellow Democrats in Congress are trying to raise BP's liability retroactively--the sort of move America's courts rightly frown on. Mr Salazar, on even thinner legal ice, suggested that the government would hold BP accountable not just for the harm directly done by the spill, but also for the jobs lost in the oil business thanks to the freeze on oil drilling in deep water that he himself has imposed.
The magazine frowns upon all these things and it makes some sense. If, as The Economist suggests, BP's value has already dropped by $89 billion and that's "far in excess of all but the most dire forecasts of the ultimate costs of the spill," what is to be gained by all this backlash against the oil industry but a bunch of political posturing?
News flash: The United States is still inexorably reliant on its oil industry. If the Obama administration wants to do something about future oil disasters, maybe it should think more seriously about that and what can be done about it. Also, had government done a better job of regulating the oil industry in the first place, BP's shoddy practices might not have gone unchecked and this disaster might never have happened.
Who the hell has numbers in there name?
I'm surprised everybody thinks this is so strange. There are lots of examples of "weird geek names," but what about Hank Williams III? True, most people in the English-speaking world would write the Roman numeral, rather than writing Hank Williams 3... but what's stopping them? And even then, a Roman numeral is a number. You wouldn't want to run a regex on the name string, decide it was all [A-Za-z], and output his name as "Mr. III."
Well... I can't speak to that. This is a $200 networked ink jet printer with built-in WiFi, so I don't really need a print server.
I'm sitting next to a Brother ink jet printer right now. I really prefer lasers, but in this case I wanted a large format multi-function machine. My Brother will both print and scan up to 11x17" (equivalent to A3) and it cost me less than $200, shipped to my front door. It shipped with full, high-capacity ink cartridges, not HP's half cartridges. And while it does include some software it's pretty lightweight, and is basically used to handle features like networked scanning and a monitor program to let you know when the ink is low. Both are optional. And yes, Brother explicitly offers drivers for Linux.The print quality is what it is -- could be better, could be a lot worse -- and the build quality seems fairly plasticky, but that seems par for the course with today's printers. Overall my only complaint was that the price was so low it wasn't even a significant tax write-off.