Maybe for each cup of coffee you drink, that's one less chance that it could have been a cola or beer, which could be considered harmful. Perhaps orange squash instead of coffee would have had the same result.
Chain drinking orange squash though will cost you a fortune in dental bills and won't do your blood sugar any favours, just like the cola. Swilling a gallon of coffee each day will only give you bad breath and have you waking up in a panic at night asking who drove a tank through the house whenever a car drives past.
Seems wiser to stick to a cellular phone which the foolish call "dumb".;)
As a dispassionate outside observer I have to say that your comic is a truly fascinating visualisation of what goes on in the brains of angry Slashdot posting cellar dwelling Google fanboys when they obsess about the way they think Apple users live their lives, here is what happens when they wake up one morning and start obsessing about Microsoft for a change:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/co...
Back in my day, we never had to deal with any of these pesky foreign innovators. No sir. Now, we name our electric car companies after them. We're going to hell, I tell you.
Hmmm... In that case, perhaps I can interest you in some imported hand baskets?
Sounds to me like it clears the way for US workers to innovate.
Just out of curiosity, how was this 'Startup Visa' rule stopping US workers from innovating? Did each issue 'Startup Visa' issued cause the innovation centres in the brains of one hundred US workers to be deactivated by means of some evil liberal JuJu magic or something?
AT&T is trying to merge with TW which is also part of Comcast. As if you didn't have choices before, now they'll have virtually all of the DSL, Cable and Wireless market as well as all the media companies that come along under one big corporation. I thought Ma Bell was split up to prevent these kinds of things.
Ma Bell monopoly was indeed broken up to increase competition and it has taken the Republicans and Corporate Democrats decades of non stop corruption and anti competitive activism to undo the damage of that mistake.
Read up on a little history. The chaos in the modern Middle East stems from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after its defeat in the first World War. The European victors carved up its territory into colonies along the modern borders we see today, with little to no regard for the cultural, religious, and socio-political boundaries of the indigenous people. Culturally, it would've made more sense to divide it into Turkey, Kurdistan, and Arabia, and maybe a few other countries to reflect local Sunni/Shia enclaves.
That's why you have Iraq trying to get Sunni and Shia, Kurds and Arabs trying to stay in the same room long enough without killing each other to form something resembling a "national" government. There is no socio-political reason for "Iraq" to exist as a country - it's borders are an artificial construct created by some ignorant Europeans drawing lines on a map for land whose people they knew next to nothing about. The U.S. and Soviet Union may have played off this chaos, but they didn't cause it. Europe did.
Actually it was mostly Britain and France that carved up the Ottoman Empire with Italy coming along for some scraps. Additionally the British hoped to scoop up a good chunk of Turkey proper consisting of Istanbul and the region around the sea of Marmara and the narrows by sponsoring a Greek invasion in 1919 but the Greeks got their ass kicked by Mustafa Kemal who to surprise of everybody involved turned out to be a really good military commander (read: to the surprise of the British, French and Italians, the Germans already knew his qualities as a commander) so that plan went down the tubes. The Italians quickly concluded that this was a mess not worth getting into, pulled out and started selling weapons to Kemal. I suppose you can trust the Italians to recognise a triple decker shit-sandwich with a side of bullshit when they see one. So in the end it was Britain and France who carved up the Ottoman Empire and the only reason Russia wasn't on the list is that Russia was busy tearing itself apart at the time. One of the big reasons the Ottomans allied them selves with Germany in the first place was precisely that Germany's ambitions mostly revolved around economic considerations and trade with the Ottoman Empire rather than annexing territory, kind of like American policy later became, so the Germans prior to WWI had no real ambitions to annex huge swathes of Ottoman territory whatever private fantasies Wilhelm II may have had about an oriental empire. The whole mess was then taken over by the US Government on behalf of US oil companies in the 1940s, the Russians finally made their belated appearance and that adds a third and fourth player to the list of actors responsible for the Middle East mess which in it's complete form reads: Britain, France, The United States of America and Russia. You can try to lay the mess that is the Middle East at the feet of the Europeans but it is really only Britain and France that are to blame and even they have little or no role in shaping the Middle East since October 1956, everything that happened after the Suez crisis goes to the account of the USA and Russia.
For home use, I don't really see the point of using these very computationally expensive codecs - it's not like you can make better rips... just smaller ones, and disk space isn't expensive anymore. My hundred-or-so DVD/Blu-Ray collection was ripped to h.264 a number of years ago, and those still work just fine.
However for a commercial service, it's a different argument. Not only do they have tens of thousands of items in their catalogs, but there's also bandwidth to think about. For them, the investment may make sense. However if it's equally expensive, hardware-wise, to decode the streams... then they have to worry whether their customers will be willing to make the investment.
Don't see the point?? Who buys DVDs snd Blu-Rays these days to rip them? I never even bothered to get a Blu-Ray player. Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu are streaming services. They presumably want to use this codec for streaming, in which case chewing up computational resources which are available in plenty on most PCs, is an acceptable tradeoff for better quality and above all probably less bandwidth consumption. This is especially important now that Trump's new FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is getting ready to stomp the life out of net neutrality which is another way of saying that they are giving the telecom companies a blank cheque to start extorting streaming services and other businesses that rely on the internet for revenue. John Oliver wasn't far off when he likened the death of net neutrality to a license to freely perpetrate mafia style shakedowns on internet businesses. I just hope this thing at least gets blessed with cross browser <video> tag based streaming support.
If someone takes a chalk marker and draws something anti-Semitic on a window, you must go after the window manufacturer!
That's a dumb analogy, windows are not publication service providers that allow you to reach millions of people. If there was a newspaper anywhere publishing articles on it's website on a regular bases that encourage people to burn synagogues and lynch jews it would pretty quickly get a visit from the authorities, even in the USA.
whatever -ism, Germany is having another bout of authoritarianism
It never went away. The Germans have always prioritized conformity over liberty. But they pay a price for that. There is a bit of a startup-culture in Berlin, but Germany has produced few tech companies. The biggest is SAP, which actually has a rather authoritarian culture. If you were planning to start a tech company today, would you do it in Germany? $57 million says that you wouldn't.
Disclaimer: I live in Silicon Valley, and there are several German expats in my neighborhood. They are doing startups, but the aren't doing them in Germany.
Have you ever been in Germany? You make such authoritative statements about it? There's plenty of startups in Germany, they just aren't all overwhelmingly in the software sector. For some reason people seem to put an equality sign between 'startup' and a bunch of people trying to market some app or the other. Software startups are nice but you need a somewhat diverse mix of startups for a healthy economy. I'm not surprised that people in Germany with dreams of a software or even some kind of hardware smartphone gadget startup would go to the Mekka of that kind of thing in Silicone valley but I'm not going to make any furhter judgements about Silicone valley since I've never been there. All I know is that Germany has a healthy economy with a significantly lower GDP to debt ratio than the US, a dept ratio which into the bargain is on a on a fairly sharp downward trend so they must be doing something right even if they aren't competing with Silicone valley in setting up app factories. In the mean time one should note that the purpose of this measure is probably rooted in the German's deep rooted fear of 1932 repeating itself, a fear that you Americans will come to know in the future every time somebody raises the spectre of a Donald Trump presidency repeating it self. Whether slapping a €50 million fine on social media companies is likely to be effective remains to be seen but that's where this comes from, an attempt to prevent an AfD election landslide thanks to hate speech fake news and inflammatory racial propaganda being allowed to run rampant and unchallenged with all the ideas about 'snipers at the border shooting dirty refugees in the head' and other fascist crap that would come with such a catastrophe.
Apple does not like to be reminded but the original iPhone was made by Motorola and it was called the ROKR. [wikipedia.org]
Nothing about that makes any sense.
Well the ROKR did have a castrated version of iTunes installed and if you are a girlfriendless cellar dweller who's only purpose in life is to cook up conspiracy theories about Apple you can probably rationalise that into some kind of conspiracy. You might have to dink a keg of beer and smoke a bunch of weed and maybe finish by dropping some acid but you'd get into the zone eventually.
Smartphones and their apps track and trace peoples purchases, movements, social groups, etc. Apple itself is but a small portion of it but they created a surveillance ecosystem.
Google (Hint: the maker of Android) reads your mail, tracks your browser history, your shopping habits and your movements among other things. I'm pretty sure Apple is an amateur convention compared to Google when it comes to monitoring every single thing their customers do.
The electoral college had its place in the early days of the US republic but it's a completely useless relic by now. It's by no means hard anymore for people to know the presidential candidates and know EXACTLY who they are voting for, there is no need for a trusted middle man who'd go and act on their behalf anymore.
Give the man a cigar... That is exactly the right answer, but most Americans just struggle trying to explain the college's purpose. I have the most fun with Republicans, they are usually the ones who earnestly believe the USA would sink into the seas in a rain of fire, brimstone and liberalism if the electoral college did not guarantee the conservative populations of sparsely populated states a much higher voting power than they'd have in a system where win without gerrymandering by gaining the majority of the popular vote, so it tends to be Republicans who end up to defending the electoral college and gerrymandering to the death.
Don't get me wrong, the president of the US is a pretty important person and whatever he does has some effect on the world. But do we really have to hear every fart he passes? Who gives a shit about this anymore?
Wake me when he DOES something.
Why doesn't everybody in the US care that the United States of America has become the laughing stock of the entire rest of the human race? Trump has actually managed to upstage Robert Mugabe in terms of incompetence and corruption and Turkmenbashi Saparmurat Niyazov in terms of being just plain 'loco'. All that's missing is that pee tape and Trump will have upstaged Berlusconi in being a lecherous pervert. If I was a US American abroad I'd start training myself to end every sentence with 'eh' and tell people I'm Canadian but, mercifully, I'm not American, so instead I can have endless fun asking my American friends to explain why their countrymen voted for Trump. It's kind of fun (if admittedly quite mean) to watch them squirm for a while as they try to explain how the electoral college works and why the electoral college is essential to American democracy until they finally give up an admit they don't understand it either.
No way. That animal weighs about 250 kg, and will easily provide 125 kg of edible meat, at about 3000 kcal/kg. I'm guessing the 8 hour run would cost somewhere between 3000 and 6000 kcal, depending on how fast he was going.
You assume that a sole hunter would hunt one animal for himself only. This assumption is false and an animal as large as you describe would give a sole hunter the finger. You also assume that the hunter would be able to find and kill a large animal every day, which is even more ridiculous.
The typical size of a hunting party is 3-4 men. So at 125*3000 ~ 375.000 kcal/kg per carcass out of which the hunters would consume 9000kcal/kg to recoup the 8 hour run there is plenty left over for the rest of their group. The average size of a hunter gatherer band can range between ~12 to 50 individuals. If we assume a meat consumption of one kilo of meat per day for each individual in a group of 30 hunter gatherers, one carcass like that would last them for four days. However, a group of 30 would easily be able to field two hunter teams of 3-4 men each (or women, since women hunted in some of these societies) with, one group hunting and one either preparing for a hunt, or inbound with a carcass. At the same time these 6-8 people are out hunting the rest of the group would be out gathering fruits, vegetables, seeds roots herbs to supplement the diet and easily matching the contribution of the hunters while others are making equipment, clothing shelters etc... in short religionofpeas numbers seem perfectly plausible to me, especially since hunter gatherers ate every scrap of the animal down to the offal and the marrow in the bones and then used inedible parts including bones to make arrowheads, harpoons spear heads, knives and sinew to make rope, thread and as a component in bow making. Leather of course would not have been wasted either nor would horn or the wool of the animal if any. Many apex predators leave that stuff behind, a large animal killed by humans was likely to completely disappear simply because every bit of it's carcass was used up for some purpose.
Humans are omnivores, eating both meat as well as plants, roots, nuts, and seeds. Meat is high in calories and high in nutrients, and it's much easier to get all your essential nutrients from meat.
Lean meat is certainly not high in calories and humans can only metabolise a few hundred grams of protein per day without getting problems with their health. Ever heard of "rabbit starvation"?
I think that if hunting was an inefficient activity humans would not have continued doing it for millions of years. Rabbit starvation is also one of the reasons why the women would be out gathering fruits, vegetables, seeds roots herbs to supplement the diet while the hunters were doing their thing. There is a good reason why hunting and gathering is a package deal. I live in a region where there are still aboriginals who largely live off of hunting and let me tell you something, these are supremely practical and no-nonsense people who would not bother with hunting if meat was not a viable source of nutrients. They certainly would not hunt animals purely for the fun of, many of them still pray for the spirit of the animals they kill.
They achieved dominance because they are the fastest and most comprehensive. That's how they took over the search engine market in the first place. Having the best product usually get's you into market dominance
That's great, and the EU is not having a problem with that at all.
The problem is that they abuse their dominant search engine to try take over other markets (in this particular case, shopping), which is arguably not the best shopping product, but still got ranked higher in the search results.
In other words Google is basically doing what Microsoft did and that caused Slashdot nerds to go nuts and write long angry tirades where Microsoft was spelled with a $ sign. Interestingly now that the boot is on the other foot and Google is the anti competitive monopolist those same people are defending the monopolist with tooth and claw. To me swapping one monopoly for another is nothing more than moving from the fire into the frying pan.
This fine is moronic on so many levels I'm just cringing in disbelief:
Google search engine is not a public service - they don't owe anything to anyone, they are free to show whichever results they want to and deem necessary.
Google is not the only search engine in the world - there's Bing, Yahoo and others. How on earth can they abuse their "monopolistic" position if there's none?
Google is not selling you their search engine - it's provided basically free of charge (sans ads you may or may not click).
When you have a 80-90% market share there is effectively not competition in which case you are subject to different rules than a company that has active competitors. If you then try to use your dominant market position to actively destroy the competition you get spanked... Google just got spanked.
Google "denied other companies the chance to compete" and left consumers without "genuine choice."
We should start right there. Who forces anyone to use Google in the first place?
What forces me to use Google is the fact that they have the best searches which is to a large extent due to the fact that they have something like 78% of the global market share which in turn is a large part of the reason they are able to deliver such good searches in the first place although Google would like you to believe that it's exclusively due to the fact that their search algorithm is light years more advanced than that those of the competition. Mind you I usually try to use other search engines first, mainly because I'm a compulsive windmill jouster who loathes monopolies or near monopolies in any form, but I all to often end up going back to Google much to my annoyance because I think Google is in desperate need of some truly fierce competition (mind you Bing has been gradually getting better over the years it's just been slooooow going). What makes or breaks a search engine is not giving good results on the 20-30% of searches on very popular and therefore extremely common searches like 'big titties' it's the ability to deliver good results on the 70-80% of searches on very specific/esoteric topics like: 'error LNK2001 unresolved symbol', 'install a performance air filter on a Moto Guzzi bike', 'the silver economy in dark age Europe', 'carrot beer' or 'vegan spinach ice cream' (and yes, the last two really are a thing, just not terribly popular). Its a kind of like the chicken or the egg causality dilemma, the more traffic an engine gets the more accurate the search results get and the quicker it is able to deliver them but if your engine is only getting 3% of the traffic, Bing is getting 20% and Google is hogging the rest you're in for an up hill struggle with your search engine startup unless you get lucky and come up with a quantum leap in search technology like Google did and contrary to what you may believe those don't grow on trees. In the mean time monopolies or near monopolies are never a good thing even if the monopolist is Google.
There are a lot of artists and entertainers that survive on the goodwill of their audience. It happens to be the traditional model. Of course, that does not mesh well with the greed and fantasies of supremacy of the large content monopolies, because it is far cheaper to push a small number of artists as the hottest shit, while neglecting all others, in particular those with smaller audiences because their material is not mainstreamed. As such, the content monopolies actually are very bad for the arts, as they actively oppose diversity. One effect of that is that I never felt the need to pirate even a single bit of music, the stuff in the mainstream was just to universally bad that I lost all interest.
Hence this guy understand what each actual artist and entertainer does: You live by the good opinion of your audience, and all that want to pay you something will do so. Trying to force the others is not only futile, but long-term counterproductive.
I get why people pirate games, you are just plain too chap to pay for anything, you are too poor to buy it, or you want to test it so as to avoid paying for crap. However, it seems to me that if you fall into the last two categories, if you enjoy the game and if you have goodwill towards an artist you'd be inclined to express that good will to pay him a few bucks for his labour. Goodwill from pirates is nice but it does not put food on the artist's table and it does not pay for the development of the next iteration of the game so if you like a game you pirated perhaps you should consider paying for it? Just a thought... no pressure... I know the idea of paying for software is a foreign concept to some and and a downright insult to others.
What we *will* find out is the opinion of an American court, which has no international power. The proper place for this request is the international court of justice in the Netherlands. Unfortunately the US is the only non-dictatorial country that doesn't recognize this court.
I don't think this is about US courts thinking their search warrants are valid in the Ireland. The question is more like: can the US government, compel a US corporation to make available to US investigators an item of interest that is stored on foreign soil perhaps by remote access? Hell, if the US based corporation can be 'persuaded' to allow such access by means of threatening it with massive fines or worse there is no reason to involve the Irish government at all since Microsoft could simply make the decision to move this data or the entire system to a virtual server farm on US soil for the US authorities to poke their nose into. That might expose them to a civil lawsuit in Ireland but that would probably be easier to deal with than the 800 pound gorilla that is the US federal govt. This is not about whether the FBI can fly to Dublin or somewhere else in Ireland, barge into a data centre with an armed tactical team in an armoured car with a big ram on the front sporting an iron plate inscribed with the words 'Us law Trumps yours [pun intended]', flash US search warrants, seize servers and fly back to the US without Irish police being able to do something about it. If the FBI wanted to do that they'd still be shit out of luck unless they get the Garda Síochána to cooperate because they'd not just be pissing off the Irish they'd be pissing off the entire EU27. While this is still alarming, what is just as worrying is the fact that the US Govt. is increasingly hanging labels like 'national security threat' and 'affiliated with Al Qaeda/Isis/Hamas'/Hezbollah/Iran' on anything that label will stick to for 10 seconds in order to get a hold of warrants, make arrests or just launch a drone and bomb the bajeezes out of somebody they don't like.
I don't think Putin's goal was the election of a specific candidate as it was to destroy confidence in the election process. He's succeeded at that.
Well if he did it was a Pyrrhic victory. I don't think this will end up achieving anything other than making people in the US and Europe more defiant and hostile towards Russia. For one thing, If the US public has any kind of sense, it will punish the Republicans in 2018/2020 if they are shown to drag their feet on reacting to this attack on US democracy. Having said that, I expect that finding out (too late as usual) how repealing Obamacare and replacing it with Trumpcare affects them and their sick and ageing relatives who will now be stripped of their healthcare so that rich bastards can get a trillion dollar tax cut, will do more to hurt the Reps. than this attack on America's core constitutional and democratic values will do (I wish they'd call that turd of a bill 'McConnellcare', he deserves it more than Trump) . Secondly, If there was any chance of the sanctions against Russia being relaxed before they meddled in this US election that is now firmly off the table for the foreseeable future. Despite being a pronounced Russophile, even Trump is going to have to be extra tough on Russia simply to distance himself from accusations of having had a hand in the DNC hack. Then there is the question of the permanent long term damage this has done to Russian foreign relations. Russia is painting itself into a corner in all kinds of ways. According to that famous dossier, among other sources, Lavrov and Medvedev were pretty pissed off over this DNC hack and election meddling business because they felt (and they are right) that this is going to poison relations with any future administration other than Trump's, and even there Russia is now in the dog house. Future democratic administrations in particular are going to be especially hostile and will harbour a grudge over this election meddling business for decades. Finally Putin had better start watching his back because if the Dems. and Reps. have dirty secrets, those two are Eagle scouts compared to Putin and his court when it comes to corruption which makes Putin and his mafia very vulnerable. Two can play the game of leaking 'kompromat' and I'm pretty sure US and European intelligence services are going to retaliate if necessary, perhaps by digging up information on the graft and corruption that Putin and his court are mired in up to their chins and releasing it in 'strategically timed' batches. Basically this whole thing has blown up in Putin face in a quite spectacular fashion and in the long run I'm pretty sure he's going to wish he could click the 'Undo' button on the entire election meddling idea. Finally, because somebody is bound to accuse me of hating Russia, I generally agree that it would be good to normalise relations with Russia. However, it takes two to start a fight and so long as Russia is not willing to make concessions I do not see why we should 'give away the home world' to steal a line from Londo and G'Kar just to appease Putin.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe for each cup of coffee you drink, that's one less chance that it could have been a cola or beer, which could be considered harmful. Perhaps orange squash instead of coffee would have had the same result.
Chain drinking orange squash though will cost you a fortune in dental bills and won't do your blood sugar any favours, just like the cola. Swilling a gallon of coffee each day will only give you bad breath and have you waking up in a panic at night asking who drove a tank through the house whenever a car drives past.
Yeah well, he got everybody to forget about Bush... And remember when Nixon was the bottom of the barrel? I guess records are meant to be broken.
Soooooooo.... you guys miss me yet?
-- George W. Bush
What it's like to own an Apple product - The Oatmeal
Seems wiser to stick to a cellular phone which the foolish call "dumb". ;)
As a dispassionate outside observer I have to say that your comic is a truly fascinating visualisation of what goes on in the brains of angry Slashdot posting cellar dwelling Google fanboys when they obsess about the way they think Apple users live their lives, here is what happens when they wake up one morning and start obsessing about Microsoft for a change: http://www.penny-arcade.com/co...
Back in my day, we never had to deal with any of these pesky foreign innovators. No sir. Now, we name our electric car companies after them. We're going to hell, I tell you.
Hmmm... In that case, perhaps I can interest you in some imported hand baskets?
Sounds to me like it clears the way for US workers to innovate.
Just out of curiosity, how was this 'Startup Visa' rule stopping US workers from innovating? Did each issue 'Startup Visa' issued cause the innovation centres in the brains of one hundred US workers to be deactivated by means of some evil liberal JuJu magic or something?
AT&T is trying to merge with TW which is also part of Comcast. As if you didn't have choices before, now they'll have virtually all of the DSL, Cable and Wireless market as well as all the media companies that come along under one big corporation. I thought Ma Bell was split up to prevent these kinds of things.
Ma Bell monopoly was indeed broken up to increase competition and it has taken the Republicans and Corporate Democrats decades of non stop corruption and anti competitive activism to undo the damage of that mistake.
Read up on a little history. The chaos in the modern Middle East stems from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after its defeat in the first World War. The European victors carved up its territory into colonies along the modern borders we see today, with little to no regard for the cultural, religious, and socio-political boundaries of the indigenous people. Culturally, it would've made more sense to divide it into Turkey, Kurdistan, and Arabia, and maybe a few other countries to reflect local Sunni/Shia enclaves. That's why you have Iraq trying to get Sunni and Shia, Kurds and Arabs trying to stay in the same room long enough without killing each other to form something resembling a "national" government. There is no socio-political reason for "Iraq" to exist as a country - it's borders are an artificial construct created by some ignorant Europeans drawing lines on a map for land whose people they knew next to nothing about. The U.S. and Soviet Union may have played off this chaos, but they didn't cause it. Europe did.
Actually it was mostly Britain and France that carved up the Ottoman Empire with Italy coming along for some scraps. Additionally the British hoped to scoop up a good chunk of Turkey proper consisting of Istanbul and the region around the sea of Marmara and the narrows by sponsoring a Greek invasion in 1919 but the Greeks got their ass kicked by Mustafa Kemal who to surprise of everybody involved turned out to be a really good military commander (read: to the surprise of the British, French and Italians, the Germans already knew his qualities as a commander) so that plan went down the tubes. The Italians quickly concluded that this was a mess not worth getting into, pulled out and started selling weapons to Kemal. I suppose you can trust the Italians to recognise a triple decker shit-sandwich with a side of bullshit when they see one. So in the end it was Britain and France who carved up the Ottoman Empire and the only reason Russia wasn't on the list is that Russia was busy tearing itself apart at the time. One of the big reasons the Ottomans allied them selves with Germany in the first place was precisely that Germany's ambitions mostly revolved around economic considerations and trade with the Ottoman Empire rather than annexing territory, kind of like American policy later became, so the Germans prior to WWI had no real ambitions to annex huge swathes of Ottoman territory whatever private fantasies Wilhelm II may have had about an oriental empire. The whole mess was then taken over by the US Government on behalf of US oil companies in the 1940s, the Russians finally made their belated appearance and that adds a third and fourth player to the list of actors responsible for the Middle East mess which in it's complete form reads: Britain, France, The United States of America and Russia. You can try to lay the mess that is the Middle East at the feet of the Europeans but it is really only Britain and France that are to blame and even they have little or no role in shaping the Middle East since October 1956, everything that happened after the Suez crisis goes to the account of the USA and Russia.
For home use, I don't really see the point of using these very computationally expensive codecs - it's not like you can make better rips... just smaller ones, and disk space isn't expensive anymore. My hundred-or-so DVD/Blu-Ray collection was ripped to h.264 a number of years ago, and those still work just fine.
However for a commercial service, it's a different argument. Not only do they have tens of thousands of items in their catalogs, but there's also bandwidth to think about. For them, the investment may make sense. However if it's equally expensive, hardware-wise, to decode the streams... then they have to worry whether their customers will be willing to make the investment.
Don't see the point?? Who buys DVDs snd Blu-Rays these days to rip them? I never even bothered to get a Blu-Ray player. Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu are streaming services. They presumably want to use this codec for streaming, in which case chewing up computational resources which are available in plenty on most PCs, is an acceptable tradeoff for better quality and above all probably less bandwidth consumption. This is especially important now that Trump's new FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is getting ready to stomp the life out of net neutrality which is another way of saying that they are giving the telecom companies a blank cheque to start extorting streaming services and other businesses that rely on the internet for revenue. John Oliver wasn't far off when he likened the death of net neutrality to a license to freely perpetrate mafia style shakedowns on internet businesses. I just hope this thing at least gets blessed with cross browser <video> tag based streaming support.
If someone takes a chalk marker and draws something anti-Semitic on a window, you must go after the window manufacturer!
That's a dumb analogy, windows are not publication service providers that allow you to reach millions of people. If there was a newspaper anywhere publishing articles on it's website on a regular bases that encourage people to burn synagogues and lynch jews it would pretty quickly get a visit from the authorities, even in the USA.
You *will* make people speak correctly or you *will* be fined! Germany Über Alles!
I don't even know how to respond to that other than to point out that It's "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles" you stupid twat.
whatever -ism, Germany is having another bout of authoritarianism
It never went away. The Germans have always prioritized conformity over liberty. But they pay a price for that. There is a bit of a startup-culture in Berlin, but Germany has produced few tech companies. The biggest is SAP, which actually has a rather authoritarian culture. If you were planning to start a tech company today, would you do it in Germany? $57 million says that you wouldn't.
Disclaimer: I live in Silicon Valley, and there are several German expats in my neighborhood. They are doing startups, but the aren't doing them in Germany.
Have you ever been in Germany? You make such authoritative statements about it? There's plenty of startups in Germany, they just aren't all overwhelmingly in the software sector. For some reason people seem to put an equality sign between 'startup' and a bunch of people trying to market some app or the other. Software startups are nice but you need a somewhat diverse mix of startups for a healthy economy. I'm not surprised that people in Germany with dreams of a software or even some kind of hardware smartphone gadget startup would go to the Mekka of that kind of thing in Silicone valley but I'm not going to make any furhter judgements about Silicone valley since I've never been there. All I know is that Germany has a healthy economy with a significantly lower GDP to debt ratio than the US, a dept ratio which into the bargain is on a on a fairly sharp downward trend so they must be doing something right even if they aren't competing with Silicone valley in setting up app factories. In the mean time one should note that the purpose of this measure is probably rooted in the German's deep rooted fear of 1932 repeating itself, a fear that you Americans will come to know in the future every time somebody raises the spectre of a Donald Trump presidency repeating it self. Whether slapping a €50 million fine on social media companies is likely to be effective remains to be seen but that's where this comes from, an attempt to prevent an AfD election landslide thanks to hate speech fake news and inflammatory racial propaganda being allowed to run rampant and unchallenged with all the ideas about 'snipers at the border shooting dirty refugees in the head' and other fascist crap that would come with such a catastrophe.
Apple does not like to be reminded but the original iPhone was made by Motorola and it was called the ROKR. [wikipedia.org]
Nothing about that makes any sense.
Well the ROKR did have a castrated version of iTunes installed and if you are a girlfriendless cellar dweller who's only purpose in life is to cook up conspiracy theories about Apple you can probably rationalise that into some kind of conspiracy. You might have to dink a keg of beer and smoke a bunch of weed and maybe finish by dropping some acid but you'd get into the zone eventually.
Smartphones and their apps track and trace peoples purchases, movements, social groups, etc. Apple itself is but a small portion of it but they created a surveillance ecosystem.
Google (Hint: the maker of Android) reads your mail, tracks your browser history, your shopping habits and your movements among other things. I'm pretty sure Apple is an amateur convention compared to Google when it comes to monitoring every single thing their customers do.
The electoral college had its place in the early days of the US republic but it's a completely useless relic by now. It's by no means hard anymore for people to know the presidential candidates and know EXACTLY who they are voting for, there is no need for a trusted middle man who'd go and act on their behalf anymore.
Give the man a cigar... That is exactly the right answer, but most Americans just struggle trying to explain the college's purpose. I have the most fun with Republicans, they are usually the ones who earnestly believe the USA would sink into the seas in a rain of fire, brimstone and liberalism if the electoral college did not guarantee the conservative populations of sparsely populated states a much higher voting power than they'd have in a system where win without gerrymandering by gaining the majority of the popular vote, so it tends to be Republicans who end up to defending the electoral college and gerrymandering to the death.
Why the hell does anyone still care?
Don't get me wrong, the president of the US is a pretty important person and whatever he does has some effect on the world. But do we really have to hear every fart he passes? Who gives a shit about this anymore?
Wake me when he DOES something.
Why doesn't everybody in the US care that the United States of America has become the laughing stock of the entire rest of the human race? Trump has actually managed to upstage Robert Mugabe in terms of incompetence and corruption and Turkmenbashi Saparmurat Niyazov in terms of being just plain 'loco'. All that's missing is that pee tape and Trump will have upstaged Berlusconi in being a lecherous pervert. If I was a US American abroad I'd start training myself to end every sentence with 'eh' and tell people I'm Canadian but, mercifully, I'm not American, so instead I can have endless fun asking my American friends to explain why their countrymen voted for Trump. It's kind of fun (if admittedly quite mean) to watch them squirm for a while as they try to explain how the electoral college works and why the electoral college is essential to American democracy until they finally give up an admit they don't understand it either.
It's not true ... But it's accurate.
No, .... It's alternatively true.
You assume that a sole hunter would hunt one animal for himself only. This assumption is false and an animal as large as you describe would give a sole hunter the finger. You also assume that the hunter would be able to find and kill a large animal every day, which is even more ridiculous.
The typical size of a hunting party is 3-4 men. So at 125*3000 ~ 375.000 kcal/kg per carcass out of which the hunters would consume 9000kcal/kg to recoup the 8 hour run there is plenty left over for the rest of their group. The average size of a hunter gatherer band can range between ~12 to 50 individuals. If we assume a meat consumption of one kilo of meat per day for each individual in a group of 30 hunter gatherers, one carcass like that would last them for four days. However, a group of 30 would easily be able to field two hunter teams of 3-4 men each (or women, since women hunted in some of these societies) with, one group hunting and one either preparing for a hunt, or inbound with a carcass. At the same time these 6-8 people are out hunting the rest of the group would be out gathering fruits, vegetables, seeds roots herbs to supplement the diet and easily matching the contribution of the hunters while others are making equipment, clothing shelters etc... in short religionofpeas numbers seem perfectly plausible to me, especially since hunter gatherers ate every scrap of the animal down to the offal and the marrow in the bones and then used inedible parts including bones to make arrowheads, harpoons spear heads, knives and sinew to make rope, thread and as a component in bow making. Leather of course would not have been wasted either nor would horn or the wool of the animal if any. Many apex predators leave that stuff behind, a large animal killed by humans was likely to completely disappear simply because every bit of it's carcass was used up for some purpose.
Lean meat is certainly not high in calories and humans can only metabolise a few hundred grams of protein per day without getting problems with their health. Ever heard of "rabbit starvation"?
I think that if hunting was an inefficient activity humans would not have continued doing it for millions of years. Rabbit starvation is also one of the reasons why the women would be out gathering fruits, vegetables, seeds roots herbs to supplement the diet while the hunters were doing their thing. There is a good reason why hunting and gathering is a package deal. I live in a region where there are still aboriginals who largely live off of hunting and let me tell you something, these are supremely practical and no-nonsense people who would not bother with hunting if meat was not a viable source of nutrients. They certainly would not hunt animals purely for the fun of, many of them still pray for the spirit of the animals they kill.
They achieved dominance because they are the fastest and most comprehensive. That's how they took over the search engine market in the first place. Having the best product usually get's you into market dominance
That's great, and the EU is not having a problem with that at all.
The problem is that they abuse their dominant search engine to try take over other markets (in this particular case, shopping), which is arguably not the best shopping product, but still got ranked higher in the search results.
In other words Google is basically doing what Microsoft did and that caused Slashdot nerds to go nuts and write long angry tirades where Microsoft was spelled with a $ sign. Interestingly now that the boot is on the other foot and Google is the anti competitive monopolist those same people are defending the monopolist with tooth and claw. To me swapping one monopoly for another is nothing more than moving from the fire into the frying pan.
This fine is moronic on so many levels I'm just cringing in disbelief:
When you have a 80-90% market share there is effectively not competition in which case you are subject to different rules than a company that has active competitors. If you then try to use your dominant market position to actively destroy the competition you get spanked ... Google just got spanked.
I'm not an American... ;-)
Riiiiiiiiight! ...
Google "denied other companies the chance to compete" and left consumers without "genuine choice."
We should start right there. Who forces anyone to use Google in the first place?
What forces me to use Google is the fact that they have the best searches which is to a large extent due to the fact that they have something like 78% of the global market share which in turn is a large part of the reason they are able to deliver such good searches in the first place although Google would like you to believe that it's exclusively due to the fact that their search algorithm is light years more advanced than that those of the competition. Mind you I usually try to use other search engines first, mainly because I'm a compulsive windmill jouster who loathes monopolies or near monopolies in any form, but I all to often end up going back to Google much to my annoyance because I think Google is in desperate need of some truly fierce competition (mind you Bing has been gradually getting better over the years it's just been slooooow going). What makes or breaks a search engine is not giving good results on the 20-30% of searches on very popular and therefore extremely common searches like 'big titties' it's the ability to deliver good results on the 70-80% of searches on very specific/esoteric topics like: 'error LNK2001 unresolved symbol', 'install a performance air filter on a Moto Guzzi bike', 'the silver economy in dark age Europe', 'carrot beer' or 'vegan spinach ice cream' (and yes, the last two really are a thing, just not terribly popular). Its a kind of like the chicken or the egg causality dilemma, the more traffic an engine gets the more accurate the search results get and the quicker it is able to deliver them but if your engine is only getting 3% of the traffic, Bing is getting 20% and Google is hogging the rest you're in for an up hill struggle with your search engine startup unless you get lucky and come up with a quantum leap in search technology like Google did and contrary to what you may believe those don't grow on trees. In the mean time monopolies or near monopolies are never a good thing even if the monopolist is Google.
I just got confused that the summery didn't mention the abuse of dominant market position and instead mentioned the irrelevant "near-monopoly".
Irrelevant? ...dominant position within the internal market or in a substantial part of it.. and 'near-monopoly' are kind of the same thing.
There are a lot of artists and entertainers that survive on the goodwill of their audience. It happens to be the traditional model. Of course, that does not mesh well with the greed and fantasies of supremacy of the large content monopolies, because it is far cheaper to push a small number of artists as the hottest shit, while neglecting all others, in particular those with smaller audiences because their material is not mainstreamed. As such, the content monopolies actually are very bad for the arts, as they actively oppose diversity. One effect of that is that I never felt the need to pirate even a single bit of music, the stuff in the mainstream was just to universally bad that I lost all interest.
Hence this guy understand what each actual artist and entertainer does: You live by the good opinion of your audience, and all that want to pay you something will do so. Trying to force the others is not only futile, but long-term counterproductive.
I get why people pirate games, you are just plain too chap to pay for anything, you are too poor to buy it, or you want to test it so as to avoid paying for crap. However, it seems to me that if you fall into the last two categories, if you enjoy the game and if you have goodwill towards an artist you'd be inclined to express that good will to pay him a few bucks for his labour. Goodwill from pirates is nice but it does not put food on the artist's table and it does not pay for the development of the next iteration of the game so if you like a game you pirated perhaps you should consider paying for it? Just a thought ... no pressure ... I know the idea of paying for software is a foreign concept to some and and a downright insult to others.
What we *will* find out is the opinion of an American court, which has no international power. The proper place for this request is the international court of justice in the Netherlands. Unfortunately the US is the only non-dictatorial country that doesn't recognize this court.
I don't think this is about US courts thinking their search warrants are valid in the Ireland. The question is more like: can the US government, compel a US corporation to make available to US investigators an item of interest that is stored on foreign soil perhaps by remote access? Hell, if the US based corporation can be 'persuaded' to allow such access by means of threatening it with massive fines or worse there is no reason to involve the Irish government at all since Microsoft could simply make the decision to move this data or the entire system to a virtual server farm on US soil for the US authorities to poke their nose into. That might expose them to a civil lawsuit in Ireland but that would probably be easier to deal with than the 800 pound gorilla that is the US federal govt. This is not about whether the FBI can fly to Dublin or somewhere else in Ireland, barge into a data centre with an armed tactical team in an armoured car with a big ram on the front sporting an iron plate inscribed with the words 'Us law Trumps yours [pun intended]', flash US search warrants, seize servers and fly back to the US without Irish police being able to do something about it. If the FBI wanted to do that they'd still be shit out of luck unless they get the Garda Síochána to cooperate because they'd not just be pissing off the Irish they'd be pissing off the entire EU27. While this is still alarming, what is just as worrying is the fact that the US Govt. is increasingly hanging labels like 'national security threat' and 'affiliated with Al Qaeda/Isis/Hamas'/Hezbollah/Iran' on anything that label will stick to for 10 seconds in order to get a hold of warrants, make arrests or just launch a drone and bomb the bajeezes out of somebody they don't like.
Actually, it did. Whatever the outcome.
I don't think Putin's goal was the election of a specific candidate as it was to destroy confidence in the election process. He's succeeded at that.
Well if he did it was a Pyrrhic victory. I don't think this will end up achieving anything other than making people in the US and Europe more defiant and hostile towards Russia. For one thing, If the US public has any kind of sense, it will punish the Republicans in 2018/2020 if they are shown to drag their feet on reacting to this attack on US democracy. Having said that, I expect that finding out (too late as usual) how repealing Obamacare and replacing it with Trumpcare affects them and their sick and ageing relatives who will now be stripped of their healthcare so that rich bastards can get a trillion dollar tax cut, will do more to hurt the Reps. than this attack on America's core constitutional and democratic values will do (I wish they'd call that turd of a bill 'McConnellcare', he deserves it more than Trump) . Secondly, If there was any chance of the sanctions against Russia being relaxed before they meddled in this US election that is now firmly off the table for the foreseeable future. Despite being a pronounced Russophile, even Trump is going to have to be extra tough on Russia simply to distance himself from accusations of having had a hand in the DNC hack. Then there is the question of the permanent long term damage this has done to Russian foreign relations. Russia is painting itself into a corner in all kinds of ways. According to that famous dossier, among other sources, Lavrov and Medvedev were pretty pissed off over this DNC hack and election meddling business because they felt (and they are right) that this is going to poison relations with any future administration other than Trump's, and even there Russia is now in the dog house. Future democratic administrations in particular are going to be especially hostile and will harbour a grudge over this election meddling business for decades. Finally Putin had better start watching his back because if the Dems. and Reps. have dirty secrets, those two are Eagle scouts compared to Putin and his court when it comes to corruption which makes Putin and his mafia very vulnerable. Two can play the game of leaking 'kompromat' and I'm pretty sure US and European intelligence services are going to retaliate if necessary, perhaps by digging up information on the graft and corruption that Putin and his court are mired in up to their chins and releasing it in 'strategically timed' batches. Basically this whole thing has blown up in Putin face in a quite spectacular fashion and in the long run I'm pretty sure he's going to wish he could click the 'Undo' button on the entire election meddling idea. Finally, because somebody is bound to accuse me of hating Russia, I generally agree that it would be good to normalise relations with Russia. However, it takes two to start a fight and so long as Russia is not willing to make concessions I do not see why we should 'give away the home world' to steal a line from Londo and G'Kar just to appease Putin.