In theory, yes your super secure system should not leak any info. On the other hand, it's nice when you also make this stuff user friendly.
because some systems allow any username, some require email addresses instead, some require username but have some sort of odd limitation on it (must be 10 chars, or must have a number, or 2 numbers, etc), it's actually quite useful to know if I've even got the right username before attempting all of the passwords it might be (which again may be various, because you've imposed stupid limitations on what the password can or cannot be).
Furthermore, if you are going to lock me out of the account, please let me know how many attempts I have. This is especially important on systems which do a permanent lockout (rather than a 20 minute lockout or whatever), which requires a phone call to unlock (a few banks are guilty of this). If I've got 5 tries and can't remember it after 4 tries, then I'll just give in and use the password reset option rather than lock myself out and have to waste time on the phone with customer service.
And then in light of the above two points, if you've got a captcha and you don't tell me what the problem is with my login attempts, I'm going to have to kill you. Captchas these days are so convoluted, it's actually pretty routine to get them wrong. So when my login attempt fails, I'm going to assume over and over that it's the captcha that I'm just not reading correctly (is that distorted Y character an uppercase or lowercase?). When I try that 10 times, only to later discover that the problem was that I couldn't use one of my usual login names because your website required me to use 2 numbers in my login name, blood will be spilled.
Also, in reply to your previous post:
You sound like the kind of person we may be looking to hire soon. I've hired a few people with your level of experience.
> I can put together a secure login-driven Web site using PHP and MySQL.
Error. One of the companies I own is based on a single product, a SECURE login system.
Error, on your part. You just proceeded to tell us about the vulnerabilities in your login system, therefore you too are in error when you say your product is a secure login system.:-)
I build a pie factory and sell you 1/8th of it, did you produce anything? Other than a paycheck for whatever lawyers and realtors were involved, no. My point stands, stock ownership has nothing to do with actually producing anything. Stockholders are nothing more than the biggest, fattest group of gambling addicts in our society today, producing nothing of value to anyone but revenues for the casinos (aka stock exchanges).
Really? Stock ownership has nothing to do with production? Let me ask you a series of questions:
Why does the stock exist in the first place? Did the actual owners/producers just decide that they wanted to be kind and give away a share of their potential future profits? No, the reason is that the owners decided they wanted to give up a portion of their ownership equity in exchange for money that they could use to help grow the company. So the person who bought the stock gave them money to grow the company. Sure seems like they produced something.
So now you might say that only applies to the original stock purchaser, who gave the money directly to the company, and that it doesn't apply to secondary purchasers shift money-for-stock back and forth. Well, that ALMOST makes sense. Except that in most circumstances, the original purchaser wouldn't have purchased had they not known there was a secondary-sale market for them to sell off their stock to either cash in on the success of their investment (if the business succeeds) or cash out their remaining value (if the business stays flat or fails).
Now, in some cases, the company itself might offer to buy back the stock directly (eliminating the need for a secondary-sale market), but usually that's not the case. The company usually wants to keep their hands on that money so they can continue to grow the business.
So I would contend that stock ownership enables business growth, which grows production.
Uhm. According to the article brewers and farmers have been doing this for a 100 years. If this was inherently unsafe, we would know by now.
I love that logic. By your reasoning, we had been using asbestos for 4500 years, so surely if there was something inherently unsafe about it, we would have known about it 4400 years ago.
The reason all but one automotive assembly line has pulled out of Detroit is...
One? Just one plant? Even if you are just talking about Detroit itself, ignoring the suburbs, there is a GM plant and 2 Chrysler plants in Detroit. But when people talk about Detroit and auto companies, they mean the entire metro detroit area. And in that area, there is:
Ford: (Wayne, Flat Rock) GM: (Detroit, Orion) Chrysler: (Detroit x 2, Sterling Heights, Warren)
So that's 8 auto assembly plants in metro Detroit. Yep, just one plant here.
If Costco never planned to sell it, that would be one thing. However, Costco was initially going to sell it and then rejected it after the first several loads were leaking oil. That certainly wouldn't help their case.
The company shut down in 2012. These were produced prior to the company's closure. This is probably not safe for human consumption at this point.
Consumer peanut butter's got a shelf life of roughly a year or two at most, generally.
Please, give me a break. Do you really buy into all the expiration date BS? Yes, some stuff expires relatively quickly, but most of it is BS...a combination of covering their ass and encouraging you to throw good product out to buy more. The best is when I see stuff like bottles of vinegar or water dated only a few months out. Give me a break.
But that aside...RTFS: "Costco initially agreed to allowing the peanut butter to be sold"
Yes, I'm sure Costco agreed to sell a product that was so clearly rancid that even some slashdot poster could tell just by reading about it.
If you knew a little bit about how macrovision worked, you'd be able to reason why your "fun fact" doesn't make logical sense. So let me give you some details
1) Most VCRs (I'm not sure if this was always the case or only in later years) contain an automatic gain control in the recording mechanism. The AGC would try to adjust the picture brightness based on the signal it received, so that what you recorded would be neither too dark nor too bright. I'm not familiar with the exact mechanisms they use to calculate how much adjustment to apply. Many VCRs also apply this AGC processing to signals that are merely passing through the VCR, even if you aren't recording
2) As an unrelated fact, analog video signals actually include the closed captioning data encoded into the video feed. This data is encoded into a part of the video stream that usually isn't displayed on your TV. However, sometimes you may see this data when playing back the analog signal on a digital display, if overscanning is turned off. If you've ever seen video with a row of black and white dots/bars at the top, that's the closed captioning data.
3) Along comes Macrovision. Some assholes discovered that if you manipulate the signal contained in the closed captioning data, you can often screw with the AGC mechanism in VCRs, causing it to repeatedly alter the video signal from brighter to darker. Also, because VCRs often apply this AGC to signals being passed through, this also explains why you usually couldn't hook up your DVD player to your VCR to get around the fact that your older TV didn't have RCA inputs.
So if you think about this, there is no reason why it should matter if the VCRs are the same brand. With any VCR, the signal it outputs is going to be the same, no matter whether hooked up to a TV, a VCR of the same brand, or of a different brand. Likewise, the input signal is going to be processed the same, no matter whether coming from a VCR of the same brand or different brand, a DVD player, a camcorder, or a cable box. The only thing that makes the difference is the implementation of AGC in the VCR. Either A) Your VCR implements AGC in a manner that is susceptible to macrovision manipulation B) Your VCR implements AGC in a manner that ignores this extra data. C) Your VCR doesn't do AGC
If the VCR doing the recording falls into category A, then it won't work right. If the VCR falls into category B or C, then the macrovision won't have any effect on you. I think Occam would say that the simplest explanation would be that the VCRs you worked with fall into category B or C.
It's kind of funny you didn't even bother to read my post carefully before responding
Firefox: " Once the memory hits about 800MB, it starts to hiccup/pause all the time. When it gets to its worst, I can't even watch a video on youtube without it pausing for 1/2 second every 5 seconds"
Chrome: "Chrome is using nearly 3GB of memory...Despite that, performance is still perfect."
Clearly from my post, I don't care very much how much memory the app uses. It's the fact that, as firefox grows in memory size, it becomes less and less responsive. Chrome at 3GB seems no less responsive to me than Chrome at 60 MB. Can't say the same for firefox, not even at 800MB (and I'd have to kill myself before suffering long enough for it to actually get up to 3GB).
The question was asked: "I really just don't see why anyone would use Chrome...What positive purpose does it serve?". I was simply answering. Isn't that what we do here in slashdot discussions?
As for any denial, there's nothing for me to be in denial about. I've been using chrome as my primary browser for (I'd guess) approximately 2 years now and I've never had cause to complain about it. Like I already acknowledged, memory footprint is probably the big issue people complain about with Chrome, but that's a negligible issue to me. I've got plenty of memory.
I do tons of web development, so I'm back and forth between these browsers (and others) on a regular basis for development purposes, but for regular use I stick to Chrome and have seen no reason to switch back to Firefox. My wife is much more of your ordinary, non-technical user. She was the first one to make the switch to Chrome permanently because of several issues she had (which went away once using Chrome). My mother-in-law has a very old, quite under-powered machine. Somewhere along the line, firefox started becoming extremely unresponsive to the mouse. It's the only application that behaves that way. No idea what caused it (tried updating video drivers and searching online for solutions...no luck). Switched her to chrome and it's been fine for her (she never uses more than 1 tab, so memory issues are not a problem for her underpowered machine either)
Those are just my experiences. Like I said earlier, your experiences may differ. Use what you like. I'm not particularly religious about browsers.
Yep, and then when you reload all of those tabs: 1) oops, those ones don't reload because you have to log back in, and then you lose your context 2) oops, those other tabs use server side sessions which are now expired, so the page is no longer valid and can't be reloaded 3) oops, any pages that have any complex script state need to be put back into the proper state Not to mention that just closing the browser takes it like 5 minutes to unallocate its 2 GB of memory.
Seriously, why do you seem so upset that I've not enjoyed my firefox experience and that I now find Chrome better? If it works for me and makes me happy, why does that have to bug you so much that you have to be an asshole with comments about breaking out in a sweat and having low UID self esteem issues?
Why did I chose Chrome over Firefox? Because I got sick of the memory leak problems under firefox. When I browse, I use a shit-ton of tabs. After about 3 days, firefox is consuming over 1GB of memory even after I close every single tab. If I let it go about a week, it's up to nearly 2 GB. Once the memory hits about 800MB, it starts to hiccup/pause all the time. When it gets to its worst, I can't even watch a video on youtube without it pausing for 1/2 second every 5 seconds. I went through year after year of "sorry, but there's no memory leaks", followed by "oh, we fixed those leaks...there are no more leaks", followed by "now we've redesigned it all so it won't leak any more", etc. Sure, go ahead and deny the problem and blame it on the plugins if you like. Switching to Chrome has resulted in flawless performance for me since then, despite me using an equal number of similar plugins.
Does chrome use a crapload of memory? Sure, but I don't really give a shit. I've got 12GB of memory in my machine and rarely come close to using it all. Chrome is using nearly 3GB of memory right now across about 50 processes, but I've still got 6GB free on my box. Despite that, performance is still perfect. I could never say the same about firefox. And if I close Chrome down to a single tab, it will shrink back down to 60MB or so of memory. It cleans up perfectly (due to its process-per-tab design).
That was the one major thorn that twisted in my side with Firefox year after year, but it wasn't the only one. Another one was the firefox instance that didn't start but also didn't terminate, resulting in firefox refusing to open another copy until I manually killed the previous process. Then in the last year or 2 of me using it, it seemed like an increasing number of small changes/bugs/whatever causing one site or another to stop working properly when I upgraded versions. Since switching to Chrome, that's all been a thing of the past.
Your experience may differ from mine, but for me Chrome has been a much nicer experience. I don't miss firefox the slightest bit.
This isn't the first time this happened. In late 2012, there was a promo where you by an LG (I think that was the brand) HDTV and get a year of netflix for free. The problem was, you could just go onto the LG website and enter your serial number, and the website would accept any made up number as long as it started with the correct 2 or 3 digit sequence (or something like that). That was all over slickdeals too.
Why isn't that useful to consumers? I can't tell you the number of time I've spent 10 minutes looking for a product, going up and down aisles, ask an employee which aisle it's in, still can't find it, and then finally realize I've walked right by it a half dozen times. If I could just pull out my phone and it could lead me right to it, I'd love it. That's not them forcing something on me...it's helping me more easily find something I already know I want.
Still, such a thing is probably quite a ways out. Just think about how often stores reorganize their merchandise. Any maps like this would quickly be out of date. It's not really feasible until it would be cheap enough for a store to own a mappinig robot of their very own and have it automatically map the aisles by itself at night once a week.
They also are doing shit for notification. I always use my Target card...I have received zero notifications from Target about the compromise, and no new card.
Are you sure? You might want to check you mailbox again, or your spam filters. I've received the following emails from them:
Dec 20 - Letter from Target’s CEO Gregg Steinhafel and Important Notice Dec 23 - Important Information for our REDcard Holders
Not sure how you figured that. Target has 1921 stores, and is generally open 14 hours per day for the holiday season (8am-10pm). 40 milllion spread across that and over 19 days comes to 1 transaction every 46 seconds Awesome work with the math. But let me give you one tiny bit of info you might have missed. Did you realize Target is more than 1 store? Actually, 1921 stores to be exact. So that's (lets round up) 20823 per store. Spread over 19 days, that's 1096 per store per day. The stores are open probably closer to an average of 14 hours a day for the holiday season. So that's 78 per hour, or one transaction every 46 seconds. Somehow I think they can manage a bit more than that. Even if you factor in that not every transaction is a credit/debit transaction, I think it's still very believable.
I have never like it as an analogy either. In the classic classroom rubber-sheet demonstration the marble rolls toward the bowling ball because the EARTH's gravity causes it to roll down hill. This is nothing at all like the way general relativity works.
General relativity requires a curvature of space-time, not just space. The best analogy I've seen comes from Kip Thorne (I think); Imagine 2 ants on the surface of an orange, both walking towards the "north" pole. Walking is an analogy to moving forward in time. After a while some "force" has brought them closer together (because they are near the pole).
And yet, to someone like me (a non-physicist) the rubber sheet analogy makes a lot of sense to me, while the orange analogy....well, I'm not exactly sure where you are going with that because it helps me understand nothing. Maybe you just didn't explain it fully or correctly, but I'm not finding it very useful
Why do these things always make the main page a day late?
Or three (I saw it on Friday).
Took me almost an hour, a lot of which was trying to figure out "one way to store data".
From the other clues, I had the first 3 letters. The only think that made sense to me for the 4th letter was "E". I thought "well, I guess that kind of makes sense, though that's a really awkward way of phrasing it". It wasn't until later I realized that was the wrong answer. When I found the correct answer I was a bit surprised. Not being a big fan of crosswords, I didn't realize they did that in answers (trying to be vague in my reply, so as not to spoil it for anyone).
Oh jeez, you really need to stop looking at Google through your Android-colored glasses! Google was a cool tech company a decade ago when they came up with products that benefited the users, namely an email product that offered 1GB of space free when others gave you 20MB, and of course search. Since then they've morphed from a tech to an advertising and data-mining company, and all of their products reflect this. Google:"Do you want to sign up for G+" or "Do you want to use your real name on Youtube?" User:clicks NO Google:"OK, we'll ask you later"
Do No Evil hasn't existed at Google for a decade, if it ever did.
Whine whine. Your typical slashdot "google this google that...blah blah blah...do no evil...now give me my +5" post. Are you SERIOUSLY suggesting that asking you to sign up for google+ qualifies as EVIL? My god, the bar for that one has really gotten low lately. You've offered me a decent service for free while only very slightly inconveniencing me....EVIL!!!!!!!!11!!!1!!!!!one!!!
Google does a ton of things in the last decade that benefit users, or at least myself, greatly: 1) youtube - Great place for me to host videos to share with my family. They're all private URLs so not publicly searchable, and I know pretty much anybody that I want to share the url with can see them, even on a tablet or phone. And if google wants to do some video datamining of my 3 year old daughter doing something cute, who the fuck cares.
2) maps - Nevermind that it's not even 10 years old. Most of the best improvements (street view, real time traffic, predictive traffic, navigation, public transit) were all created in the last 5-6 years. All accessible from my android phone. It's amazing how useful this is. In 2004 I visited Chicago for a weekend and used only public transit. As a tourist, I remember how nervous I was using it. I had the maps, trying to figure out what bus to take to where, and what connections I need to pick up and seeing how they all timed up. Nightmare to me. I visited there again this summer and unlike last time, I didn't plan a thing as far as how to get here or there. When I needed to go somewhere, I just put in the location and it showed me all the options for bus or rail. In 2004, I didn't go anywhere without knowing exactly where I was in relation to everywhere else. This time, I couldn't tell you shit about where I was, as I didn't need to know. Just followed a few simple instructions and I was where I needed to be
3) google+ - yes, some of us actually use it. I can't stand facebook. You have little control over what you see, they're always breaking your privacy settings, and it's filled with crap (half the "posts" are some score or achievement somebody in farmville or some other crappy game). Google let me control exactly what/who I want to see, and they've always been pretty good at not "breaking" privacy options.
4) gmail - even this is less than a decade old (launched in 2004), but I'll give you a break there. But still, tons of great improvements in UI design over the last 5 years. There has been cool enhancements, like the Google Talk feature
5) video chat - text chat has already been pretty easy to do among different os and device options, but video was a different story. Even 2-3 years ago, I remember trying to do video chats between android and ipad. So very few options. The ones I did try were all buggy (ex: some devices the video would be upside down), and blatantly missing support for obvious features (like rotating displays). The ones that worked halfway decent quickly made themselves annoying after some updates were released. Since google got serious about this in the last year or so, this is has become a piece of cake
6) voice - Thanks google. With the help of a $40 obi device, I haven't paid a penny for my home phone service in 3 years (sadly it looks like that may be coming to and end in the next 5 months or so). The abilty to ring mulitple phones (and use your contacts to control who rings to what
I'm neither defending nor criticizing the president, but that statement was clearly a bit of hyperbole, and you'd have to be an idiot to take it at face value. Why do I say that? 1) The statement was made about plans that existed prior to the ACA going into effect 2) One of the major problems that the ACA was created to address was the fact that insurance companies could (and routinely did) cancel people's policies for any reason at all. 3) Laws cannot be made to retroactively force people/companies to do something.
So I think the point was, there was nothing in the law that could cause you to lose the coverage you had. However, there was no way to prevent insurance companies from cancelling policies on their own whim before the ACA went into effect.
> And remember, if you need telephone assistance with Healthcare.gov, call the help line at 1-800-F1UCKYO. That's really the number - they're not even hiding how much they care.
Sounds like someone desperately trying to find something negative about the phone number. And not govt. intentionally trying to offer an offensive phone number to people for healthcare assistance.
ACA has issues of its own. You do not need to make up stuff to make it look bad.
But you've got to admin that's a damn funny phone number for them to have. And hey, I guess it works, because before I had no clue what the phone number is (don't care, because I've got good insurance through work). Now I've got it memorized and I'm sure I'll never forget it.
The Wii only achieved an odd form of success though. While lots of people bought it and Nintendo profited on the sales of the consoles, nowadays they're just sitting on people's shelves unused. Even with that kind of market saturation is it successful if the average Wii owner has, what, less than 5 games? Less than 2? I don't know the answer but if something is purchased but then rarely used it's only a partial success. They have to sell games too.
Actually, unlike Microsoft and Sony, all Nintendo has to do is sell the system and they've already made a profit, even on launch day.
As far as selling games goes, well let's take a look at the top selling games across all consoles
If we disregard Wii Sports (since it was included for free) and all previous generation consoles, then we have the following: Mario Kart Wii Wii Sports Resort (some of these were included, but some were purchases separately Wii Play New Super Mario Bros Wii Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Wii Fit Wii Fit Plus GTA V
That's 5 or 6 top sellers for the Wii (depending on if you count Resort), and only 2 for the competition. Looks like they aren't hurting too bad. But what about just the overall total of all games sold for the console, worldwide?
So yeah, they are on the bottom of that metric, but still very respectable...only 4% lower than the PS3 and 15% lower than the 360. Not bad at all considering all those system supposedly sitting unused on shelves.
The idea here is that a properly-tuned fixed-RPM engine should be able to charge those batteries several times over on a tank of gas. And if the batteries were worth a damn (see the Model S), then those batteries would carry you a good distance.
So let's say that a tank of gas, with a fixed-tuning engine properly sized for the charging generator, can charge the batteries 3 times. The Model S battery pack gets 230 miles from a charge. And it gets 3 charges on top of that, for a total of 920 miles of range. Now we're talking.
Anyone wanna do the energy-density calculations to see if this is in the right ballpark? Because I'm thinking that a 2x improvement in mileage is pretty conservative and has nothing to do with fantasy land.
Assuming you and the GGP are the same AC...moving the goalposts a bit now, huh? You said, when referring to the volt, that you should get 1000 mph out of THIS CONFIGURATION. Well guess what...THAT configuration has a 16kwh battery array, not 60kwh or 85kwh as the model S does. Now suddenly you are talking about adding the volt's engine to an array the size of the model S. Guess what...not you've got the inefficiencies of having to do the power conversion, plus you have the weight of the huge battery array, plus you have the weight of the ICE, plus the weight of the gas. Oh...and lets not forget about costs. Instead of a $40k or $80k car, you're added all of this expense and complexity together, so you are now probably talking about a $100k car. Yeah, I'm sure that's going to sell great, even if you could get that mythical 1000 mile range out of it.
Of course, if you want to derp around with a hybrid solution, then, yeah, the efficiency is going to be shit and it's going to be about like what you calculated.
See...again, you've moved the goalposts. The configuration we were talking about WAS a hybrid solution. That's what your 1000 mile range figure was based on...what a configuration like the volt has should get. Now you are saying "oh yeah, well hybrid IS going to suck". Well guess what....if it's not hybrid...if it's purely electric, then you DO NOT HAVE AN ICE in the car to recharge the battery. So how exactly do you "charge the batteries 3 times" without having an ICE in the car?
You're all over the place here. It seems like you just have a hatred for GM and/or the Volt and it's causing you to just start spewing garbage without even thinking about what you are saying. Let's be real here. The Volt is far from perfect, but lets have some reality in the criticisms of it, and not just go spewing garbage that makes no sense.
3) Its battery life is pathetic, so it makes up for it with a mediocre ICE to charge with. Wake me when it has a range near 1000 miles, which is what a setup like this should be sporting.
Wow, not sure how you get +4 with utter crap like that. You thing that setup should be sporting near 1000 miles? OK, lets see about that. Presumably, you don't think that the model S has a pathetic range, so we'll use that as a baseline for what you think a car should get. The modelS gets 230 miles off a 60kwh battery. So that means the Volts 16kwh battery should get 60 miles. So yes, the Tesla makes more efficient use of the battery. But lets get back to that 1000 mile figure. So we've got 60 miles from the included battery. That means you think it should get 940 miles from the included fuel capacity. Well, it has a 9.3 gallon tank, so apparently you think it should be getting 101 MPG? Sorry, but even the best production motorcycles don't get that high. For production cars, the best ones only get about half of that.
So I think about 500 miles would be the absolute tops you could hope for in a really efficient car with those specs. Granted that's a bit better than its actual 380 mile range, but it's a far cry from your BS 1000 mile figure. If you are throwing out fantasy numbers, why didn't you just say 5000 miles?
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In theory, yes your super secure system should not leak any info. On the other hand, it's nice when you also make this stuff user friendly.
because some systems allow any username, some require email addresses instead, some require username but have some sort of odd limitation on it (must be 10 chars, or must have a number, or 2 numbers, etc), it's actually quite useful to know if I've even got the right username before attempting all of the passwords it might be (which again may be various, because you've imposed stupid limitations on what the password can or cannot be).
Furthermore, if you are going to lock me out of the account, please let me know how many attempts I have. This is especially important on systems which do a permanent lockout (rather than a 20 minute lockout or whatever), which requires a phone call to unlock (a few banks are guilty of this). If I've got 5 tries and can't remember it after 4 tries, then I'll just give in and use the password reset option rather than lock myself out and have to waste time on the phone with customer service.
And then in light of the above two points, if you've got a captcha and you don't tell me what the problem is with my login attempts, I'm going to have to kill you. Captchas these days are so convoluted, it's actually pretty routine to get them wrong. So when my login attempt fails, I'm going to assume over and over that it's the captcha that I'm just not reading correctly (is that distorted Y character an uppercase or lowercase?). When I try that 10 times, only to later discover that the problem was that I couldn't use one of my usual login names because your website required me to use 2 numbers in my login name, blood will be spilled.
Also, in reply to your previous post:
You sound like the kind of person we may be looking to hire soon. I've hired a few people with your level of experience.
> I can put together a secure login-driven Web site using PHP and MySQL.
Error. One of the companies I own is based on a single product, a SECURE login system.
Error, on your part. You just proceeded to tell us about the vulnerabilities in your login system, therefore you too are in error when you say your product is a secure login system. :-)
I build a pie factory and sell you 1/8th of it, did you produce anything? Other than a paycheck for whatever lawyers and realtors were involved, no. My point stands, stock ownership has nothing to do with actually producing anything. Stockholders are nothing more than the biggest, fattest group of gambling addicts in our society today, producing nothing of value to anyone but revenues for the casinos (aka stock exchanges).
Really? Stock ownership has nothing to do with production? Let me ask you a series of questions:
Why does the stock exist in the first place? Did the actual owners/producers just decide that they wanted to be kind and give away a share of their potential future profits? No, the reason is that the owners decided they wanted to give up a portion of their ownership equity in exchange for money that they could use to help grow the company. So the person who bought the stock gave them money to grow the company. Sure seems like they produced something.
So now you might say that only applies to the original stock purchaser, who gave the money directly to the company, and that it doesn't apply to secondary purchasers shift money-for-stock back and forth. Well, that ALMOST makes sense. Except that in most circumstances, the original purchaser wouldn't have purchased had they not known there was a secondary-sale market for them to sell off their stock to either cash in on the success of their investment (if the business succeeds) or cash out their remaining value (if the business stays flat or fails).
Now, in some cases, the company itself might offer to buy back the stock directly (eliminating the need for a secondary-sale market), but usually that's not the case. The company usually wants to keep their hands on that money so they can continue to grow the business.
So I would contend that stock ownership enables business growth, which grows production.
Uhm. According to the article brewers and farmers have been doing this for a 100 years. If this was inherently unsafe, we would know by now.
I love that logic. By your reasoning, we had been using asbestos for 4500 years, so surely if there was something inherently unsafe about it, we would have known about it 4400 years ago.
The reason all but one automotive assembly line has pulled out of Detroit is ...
One? Just one plant? Even if you are just talking about Detroit itself, ignoring the suburbs, there is a GM plant and 2 Chrysler plants in Detroit. But when people talk about Detroit and auto companies, they mean the entire metro detroit area. And in that area, there is:
Ford: (Wayne, Flat Rock)
GM: (Detroit, Orion)
Chrysler: (Detroit x 2, Sterling Heights, Warren)
So that's 8 auto assembly plants in metro Detroit. Yep, just one plant here.
If Costco never planned to sell it, that would be one thing. However, Costco was initially going to sell it and then rejected it after the first several loads were leaking oil. That certainly wouldn't help their case.
Jars of peanut butter come in many different sizes.
Not at Costco, they don't. Costco sells thing in only 1 size: fucking huge.
But more seriously, if this happens to be the Kirkland brand natural peanut butter that Costco sells, it comes in a 2-pack of 40oz jars.
The company shut down in 2012. These were produced prior to the company's closure. This is probably not safe for human consumption at this point.
Consumer peanut butter's got a shelf life of roughly a year or two at most, generally.
Please, give me a break. Do you really buy into all the expiration date BS? Yes, some stuff expires relatively quickly, but most of it is BS...a combination of covering their ass and encouraging you to throw good product out to buy more. The best is when I see stuff like bottles of vinegar or water dated only a few months out. Give me a break.
But that aside...RTFS:
"Costco initially agreed to allowing the peanut butter to be sold"
Yes, I'm sure Costco agreed to sell a product that was so clearly rancid that even some slashdot poster could tell just by reading about it.
If you knew a little bit about how macrovision worked, you'd be able to reason why your "fun fact" doesn't make logical sense. So let me give you some details
1) Most VCRs (I'm not sure if this was always the case or only in later years) contain an automatic gain control in the recording mechanism. The AGC would try to adjust the picture brightness based on the signal it received, so that what you recorded would be neither too dark nor too bright. I'm not familiar with the exact mechanisms they use to calculate how much adjustment to apply. Many VCRs also apply this AGC processing to signals that are merely passing through the VCR, even if you aren't recording
2) As an unrelated fact, analog video signals actually include the closed captioning data encoded into the video feed. This data is encoded into a part of the video stream that usually isn't displayed on your TV. However, sometimes you may see this data when playing back the analog signal on a digital display, if overscanning is turned off. If you've ever seen video with a row of black and white dots/bars at the top, that's the closed captioning data.
3) Along comes Macrovision. Some assholes discovered that if you manipulate the signal contained in the closed captioning data, you can often screw with the AGC mechanism in VCRs, causing it to repeatedly alter the video signal from brighter to darker. Also, because VCRs often apply this AGC to signals being passed through, this also explains why you usually couldn't hook up your DVD player to your VCR to get around the fact that your older TV didn't have RCA inputs.
So if you think about this, there is no reason why it should matter if the VCRs are the same brand. With any VCR, the signal it outputs is going to be the same, no matter whether hooked up to a TV, a VCR of the same brand, or of a different brand. Likewise, the input signal is going to be processed the same, no matter whether coming from a VCR of the same brand or different brand, a DVD player, a camcorder, or a cable box. The only thing that makes the difference is the implementation of AGC in the VCR. Either
A) Your VCR implements AGC in a manner that is susceptible to macrovision manipulation
B) Your VCR implements AGC in a manner that ignores this extra data.
C) Your VCR doesn't do AGC
If the VCR doing the recording falls into category A, then it won't work right. If the VCR falls into category B or C, then the macrovision won't have any effect on you. I think Occam would say that the simplest explanation would be that the VCRs you worked with fall into category B or C.
It's kind of funny you didn't even bother to read my post carefully before responding
Firefox: " Once the memory hits about 800MB, it starts to hiccup/pause all the time. When it gets to its worst, I can't even watch a video on youtube without it pausing for 1/2 second every 5 seconds"
Chrome: "Chrome is using nearly 3GB of memory...Despite that, performance is still perfect."
Clearly from my post, I don't care very much how much memory the app uses. It's the fact that, as firefox grows in memory size, it becomes less and less responsive. Chrome at 3GB seems no less responsive to me than Chrome at 60 MB. Can't say the same for firefox, not even at 800MB (and I'd have to kill myself before suffering long enough for it to actually get up to 3GB).
The question was asked: "I really just don't see why anyone would use Chrome...What positive purpose does it serve?". I was simply answering. Isn't that what we do here in slashdot discussions?
As for any denial, there's nothing for me to be in denial about. I've been using chrome as my primary browser for (I'd guess) approximately 2 years now and I've never had cause to complain about it. Like I already acknowledged, memory footprint is probably the big issue people complain about with Chrome, but that's a negligible issue to me. I've got plenty of memory.
I do tons of web development, so I'm back and forth between these browsers (and others) on a regular basis for development purposes, but for regular use I stick to Chrome and have seen no reason to switch back to Firefox. My wife is much more of your ordinary, non-technical user. She was the first one to make the switch to Chrome permanently because of several issues she had (which went away once using Chrome). My mother-in-law has a very old, quite under-powered machine. Somewhere along the line, firefox started becoming extremely unresponsive to the mouse. It's the only application that behaves that way. No idea what caused it (tried updating video drivers and searching online for solutions...no luck). Switched her to chrome and it's been fine for her (she never uses more than 1 tab, so memory issues are not a problem for her underpowered machine either)
Those are just my experiences. Like I said earlier, your experiences may differ. Use what you like. I'm not particularly religious about browsers.
Yep, and then when you reload all of those tabs:
1) oops, those ones don't reload because you have to log back in, and then you lose your context
2) oops, those other tabs use server side sessions which are now expired, so the page is no longer valid and can't be reloaded
3) oops, any pages that have any complex script state need to be put back into the proper state
Not to mention that just closing the browser takes it like 5 minutes to unallocate its 2 GB of memory.
Seriously, why do you seem so upset that I've not enjoyed my firefox experience and that I now find Chrome better? If it works for me and makes me happy, why does that have to bug you so much that you have to be an asshole with comments about breaking out in a sweat and having low UID self esteem issues?
Why did I chose Chrome over Firefox? Because I got sick of the memory leak problems under firefox. When I browse, I use a shit-ton of tabs. After about 3 days, firefox is consuming over 1GB of memory even after I close every single tab. If I let it go about a week, it's up to nearly 2 GB. Once the memory hits about 800MB, it starts to hiccup/pause all the time. When it gets to its worst, I can't even watch a video on youtube without it pausing for 1/2 second every 5 seconds. I went through year after year of "sorry, but there's no memory leaks", followed by "oh, we fixed those leaks...there are no more leaks", followed by "now we've redesigned it all so it won't leak any more", etc. Sure, go ahead and deny the problem and blame it on the plugins if you like. Switching to Chrome has resulted in flawless performance for me since then, despite me using an equal number of similar plugins.
Does chrome use a crapload of memory? Sure, but I don't really give a shit. I've got 12GB of memory in my machine and rarely come close to using it all. Chrome is using nearly 3GB of memory right now across about 50 processes, but I've still got 6GB free on my box. Despite that, performance is still perfect. I could never say the same about firefox. And if I close Chrome down to a single tab, it will shrink back down to 60MB or so of memory. It cleans up perfectly (due to its process-per-tab design).
That was the one major thorn that twisted in my side with Firefox year after year, but it wasn't the only one. Another one was the firefox instance that didn't start but also didn't terminate, resulting in firefox refusing to open another copy until I manually killed the previous process. Then in the last year or 2 of me using it, it seemed like an increasing number of small changes/bugs/whatever causing one site or another to stop working properly when I upgraded versions. Since switching to Chrome, that's all been a thing of the past.
Your experience may differ from mine, but for me Chrome has been a much nicer experience. I don't miss firefox the slightest bit.
This isn't the first time this happened. In late 2012, there was a promo where you by an LG (I think that was the brand) HDTV and get a year of netflix for free. The problem was, you could just go onto the LG website and enter your serial number, and the website would accept any made up number as long as it started with the correct 2 or 3 digit sequence (or something like that). That was all over slickdeals too.
Why isn't that useful to consumers? I can't tell you the number of time I've spent 10 minutes looking for a product, going up and down aisles, ask an employee which aisle it's in, still can't find it, and then finally realize I've walked right by it a half dozen times. If I could just pull out my phone and it could lead me right to it, I'd love it. That's not them forcing something on me...it's helping me more easily find something I already know I want.
Still, such a thing is probably quite a ways out. Just think about how often stores reorganize their merchandise. Any maps like this would quickly be out of date. It's not really feasible until it would be cheap enough for a store to own a mappinig robot of their very own and have it automatically map the aisles by itself at night once a week.
Working on a ranged degausser for any glass user pointing it in my direction.
Wow. I didn't realize google glass was storing its data on magnetic media. Or do you mean that the eye piece is actually a mini CRT?
They also are doing shit for notification. I always use my Target card...I have received zero notifications from Target about the compromise, and no new card.
Are you sure? You might want to check you mailbox again, or your spam filters. I've received the following emails from them:
Dec 20 - Letter from Target’s CEO Gregg Steinhafel and Important Notice
Dec 23 - Important Information for our REDcard Holders
Not sure how you figured that. Target has 1921 stores, and is generally open 14 hours per day for the holiday season (8am-10pm). 40 milllion spread across that and over 19 days comes to 1 transaction every 46 seconds
Awesome work with the math. But let me give you one tiny bit of info you might have missed. Did you realize Target is more than 1 store? Actually, 1921 stores to be exact. So that's (lets round up) 20823 per store. Spread over 19 days, that's 1096 per store per day. The stores are open probably closer to an average of 14 hours a day for the holiday season. So that's 78 per hour, or one transaction every 46 seconds. Somehow I think they can manage a bit more than that. Even if you factor in that not every transaction is a credit/debit transaction, I think it's still very believable.
I have never like it as an analogy either. In the classic classroom rubber-sheet demonstration the marble rolls toward the bowling ball because the EARTH's gravity causes it to roll down hill. This is nothing at all like the way general relativity works.
General relativity requires a curvature of space-time, not just space. The best analogy I've seen comes from Kip Thorne (I think); Imagine 2 ants on the surface of an orange, both walking towards the "north" pole. Walking is an analogy to moving forward in time. After a while some "force" has brought them closer together (because they are near the pole).
And yet, to someone like me (a non-physicist) the rubber sheet analogy makes a lot of sense to me, while the orange analogy....well, I'm not exactly sure where you are going with that because it helps me understand nothing. Maybe you just didn't explain it fully or correctly, but I'm not finding it very useful
Why do these things always make the main page a day late?
Or three (I saw it on Friday).
Took me almost an hour, a lot of which was trying to figure out "one way to store data".
From the other clues, I had the first 3 letters. The only think that made sense to me for the 4th letter was "E". I thought "well, I guess that kind of makes sense, though that's a really awkward way of phrasing it". It wasn't until later I realized that was the wrong answer. When I found the correct answer I was a bit surprised. Not being a big fan of crosswords, I didn't realize they did that in answers (trying to be vague in my reply, so as not to spoil it for anyone).
Oh jeez, you really need to stop looking at Google through your Android-colored glasses!
Google was a cool tech company a decade ago when they came up with products that benefited the users, namely an email product that offered 1GB of space free when others gave you 20MB, and of course search. Since then they've morphed from a tech to an advertising and data-mining company, and all of their products reflect this.
Google:"Do you want to sign up for G+" or "Do you want to use your real name on Youtube?"
User:clicks NO
Google:"OK, we'll ask you later"
Do No Evil hasn't existed at Google for a decade, if it ever did.
Whine whine. Your typical slashdot "google this google that...blah blah blah...do no evil...now give me my +5" post. Are you SERIOUSLY suggesting that asking you to sign up for google+ qualifies as EVIL? My god, the bar for that one has really gotten low lately. You've offered me a decent service for free while only very slightly inconveniencing me....EVIL!!!!!!!!11!!!1!!!!!one!!!
Google does a ton of things in the last decade that benefit users, or at least myself, greatly:
1) youtube - Great place for me to host videos to share with my family. They're all private URLs so not publicly searchable, and I know pretty much anybody that I want to share the url with can see them, even on a tablet or phone. And if google wants to do some video datamining of my 3 year old daughter doing something cute, who the fuck cares.
2) maps - Nevermind that it's not even 10 years old. Most of the best improvements (street view, real time traffic, predictive traffic, navigation, public transit) were all created in the last 5-6 years. All accessible from my android phone. It's amazing how useful this is. In 2004 I visited Chicago for a weekend and used only public transit. As a tourist, I remember how nervous I was using it. I had the maps, trying to figure out what bus to take to where, and what connections I need to pick up and seeing how they all timed up. Nightmare to me. I visited there again this summer and unlike last time, I didn't plan a thing as far as how to get here or there. When I needed to go somewhere, I just put in the location and it showed me all the options for bus or rail. In 2004, I didn't go anywhere without knowing exactly where I was in relation to everywhere else. This time, I couldn't tell you shit about where I was, as I didn't need to know. Just followed a few simple instructions and I was where I needed to be
3) google+ - yes, some of us actually use it. I can't stand facebook. You have little control over what you see, they're always breaking your privacy settings, and it's filled with crap (half the "posts" are some score or achievement somebody in farmville or some other crappy game). Google let me control exactly what/who I want to see, and they've always been pretty good at not "breaking" privacy options.
4) gmail - even this is less than a decade old (launched in 2004), but I'll give you a break there. But still, tons of great improvements in UI design over the last 5 years. There has been cool enhancements, like the Google Talk feature
5) video chat - text chat has already been pretty easy to do among different os and device options, but video was a different story. Even 2-3 years ago, I remember trying to do video chats between android and ipad. So very few options. The ones I did try were all buggy (ex: some devices the video would be upside down), and blatantly missing support for obvious features (like rotating displays). The ones that worked halfway decent quickly made themselves annoying after some updates were released. Since google got serious about this in the last year or so, this is has become a piece of cake
6) voice - Thanks google. With the help of a $40 obi device, I haven't paid a penny for my home phone service in 3 years (sadly it looks like that may be coming to and end in the next 5 months or so). The abilty to ring mulitple phones (and use your contacts to control who rings to what
I'm neither defending nor criticizing the president, but that statement was clearly a bit of hyperbole, and you'd have to be an idiot to take it at face value. Why do I say that?
1) The statement was made about plans that existed prior to the ACA going into effect
2) One of the major problems that the ACA was created to address was the fact that insurance companies could (and routinely did) cancel people's policies for any reason at all.
3) Laws cannot be made to retroactively force people/companies to do something.
So I think the point was, there was nothing in the law that could cause you to lose the coverage you had. However, there was no way to prevent insurance companies from cancelling policies on their own whim before the ACA went into effect.
> And remember, if you need telephone assistance with Healthcare.gov, call the help line at 1-800-F1UCKYO. That's really the number - they're not even hiding how much they care.
Sounds like someone desperately trying to find something negative about the phone number. And not govt. intentionally trying to offer an offensive phone number to people for healthcare assistance.
ACA has issues of its own. You do not need to make up stuff to make it look bad.
But you've got to admin that's a damn funny phone number for them to have. And hey, I guess it works, because before I had no clue what the phone number is (don't care, because I've got good insurance through work). Now I've got it memorized and I'm sure I'll never forget it.
The Wii only achieved an odd form of success though. While lots of people bought it and Nintendo profited on the sales of the consoles, nowadays they're just sitting on people's shelves unused. Even with that kind of market saturation is it successful if the average Wii owner has, what, less than 5 games? Less than 2? I don't know the answer but if something is purchased but then rarely used it's only a partial success. They have to sell games too.
Actually, unlike Microsoft and Sony, all Nintendo has to do is sell the system and they've already made a profit, even on launch day.
As far as selling games goes, well let's take a look at the top selling games across all consoles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games#All_Consoles
If we disregard Wii Sports (since it was included for free) and all previous generation consoles, then we have the following:
Mario Kart Wii
Wii Sports Resort (some of these were included, but some were purchases separately
Wii Play
New Super Mario Bros Wii
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Wii Fit
Wii Fit Plus
GTA V
That's 5 or 6 top sellers for the Wii (depending on if you count Resort), and only 2 for the competition. Looks like they aren't hurting too bad. But what about just the overall total of all games sold for the console, worldwide?
http://www.vgchartz.com/analysis/platform_totals/Software/Global/
Wii: 901 million games
360: 826 million games
PS3: 749 million games
Yep, that is indeed an odd form of success. Most hardware sold (with none of it sold at a loss), and most games sold. What a total failure.
Oh, and since you said you didn't know the answer about the tie-ratio:
http://www.vgchartz.com/analysis/platform_totals/Tie-Ratio/Global/
Wii: 8.99
360: 10.48
PS3: 9.35
So yeah, they are on the bottom of that metric, but still very respectable...only 4% lower than the PS3 and 15% lower than the 360. Not bad at all considering all those system supposedly sitting unused on shelves.
The idea here is that a properly-tuned fixed-RPM engine should be able to charge those batteries several times over on a tank of gas. And if the batteries were worth a damn (see the Model S), then those batteries would carry you a good distance.
So let's say that a tank of gas, with a fixed-tuning engine properly sized for the charging generator, can charge the batteries 3 times. The Model S battery pack gets 230 miles from a charge. And it gets 3 charges on top of that, for a total of 920 miles of range. Now we're talking.
Anyone wanna do the energy-density calculations to see if this is in the right ballpark? Because I'm thinking that a 2x improvement in mileage is pretty conservative and has nothing to do with fantasy land.
Assuming you and the GGP are the same AC...moving the goalposts a bit now, huh? You said, when referring to the volt, that you should get 1000 mph out of THIS CONFIGURATION. Well guess what...THAT configuration has a 16kwh battery array, not 60kwh or 85kwh as the model S does. Now suddenly you are talking about adding the volt's engine to an array the size of the model S. Guess what...not you've got the inefficiencies of having to do the power conversion, plus you have the weight of the huge battery array, plus you have the weight of the ICE, plus the weight of the gas. Oh...and lets not forget about costs. Instead of a $40k or $80k car, you're added all of this expense and complexity together, so you are now probably talking about a $100k car. Yeah, I'm sure that's going to sell great, even if you could get that mythical 1000 mile range out of it.
Of course, if you want to derp around with a hybrid solution, then, yeah, the efficiency is going to be shit and it's going to be about like what you calculated.
See...again, you've moved the goalposts. The configuration we were talking about WAS a hybrid solution. That's what your 1000 mile range figure was based on...what a configuration like the volt has should get. Now you are saying "oh yeah, well hybrid IS going to suck". Well guess what....if it's not hybrid...if it's purely electric, then you DO NOT HAVE AN ICE in the car to recharge the battery. So how exactly do you "charge the batteries 3 times" without having an ICE in the car?
You're all over the place here. It seems like you just have a hatred for GM and/or the Volt and it's causing you to just start spewing garbage without even thinking about what you are saying. Let's be real here. The Volt is far from perfect, but lets have some reality in the criticisms of it, and not just go spewing garbage that makes no sense.
3) Its battery life is pathetic, so it makes up for it with a mediocre ICE to charge with. Wake me when it has a range near 1000 miles, which is what a setup like this should be sporting.
Wow, not sure how you get +4 with utter crap like that. You thing that setup should be sporting near 1000 miles? OK, lets see about that. Presumably, you don't think that the model S has a pathetic range, so we'll use that as a baseline for what you think a car should get. The modelS gets 230 miles off a 60kwh battery. So that means the Volts 16kwh battery should get 60 miles. So yes, the Tesla makes more efficient use of the battery. But lets get back to that 1000 mile figure. So we've got 60 miles from the included battery. That means you think it should get 940 miles from the included fuel capacity. Well, it has a 9.3 gallon tank, so apparently you think it should be getting 101 MPG? Sorry, but even the best production motorcycles don't get that high. For production cars, the best ones only get about half of that.
So I think about 500 miles would be the absolute tops you could hope for in a really efficient car with those specs. Granted that's a bit better than its actual 380 mile range, but it's a far cry from your BS 1000 mile figure. If you are throwing out fantasy numbers, why didn't you just say 5000 miles?