Yikes. The Dutch did a similar cost / benefit calculation when planning the =http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works, the system of dikes and storm gates protecting the lower lands. In this calculation, the value of a human life was set at €2.2M. The obvious solution for NASA is to hire cheaper Dutch astronauts...
That worked fine for Avatar; all other cinematographic qualities of that flick or lack thereof, the 3D really managed to draw me into the movie, and judging from everyone else who has seen it, I am not the only one who experienced that. Same for Sanctum, even though that was much less of a spectacle film. 3D can add a lot to a movie if done well. It's interesting that you mention B&W because to me, with ubiquitous high quality color systems, that is something that is similar to the current state of 3D: a gimmick. When used well, it can add to the atmosphere of a movie but if misused, it can detract from the experience.
Ah yes, the membership cards. In the border regions, illegal dealers are back out on the streets in force, selling pot to tourists, whereas before most drugs were sold legally in coffee shops. Crime and disturbances are way up. Which should give the minister of justice pause, one would think, as this card was introduced precisely to reduce problems in neighborhoods around coffee shops.
But there's little rational thought involved in these decisions. The minister pushing this legislation is part of a conservative coalition, consisting of parties who normally have reasonable policies (in my opinion anyway), but somehow always have that stupid urge to do "something" about drugs.
And that is more or less what this thing has become: a rider. The controversial IP-related clauses from ACTA are getting shoehorned into an otherwise normal trade agreement. They hope that MEPs will not reject the entire deal because of a "bad but small part", to paraphrase one MEP who said she isn't sure whether or not to reject the CETA if the ACTA clauses get tacked on. But that's exactly what MEPs should be crystal clear on: if they reject an agreement, they must also reject anything that has the agreement tacked on as a rider. There's good reason to be clear on that right now; it means that the people negotiating CETA know that they should not add the ACTA stuff if they want to have any hope of the agreement passing parliament. And it is pretty much the only way MEPs can effectively influence the contents of the agreement.
It's interesting to note that some MEPs might actually fall for this; they do not want to reject a good agreement because of one bad rider, no matter how hard they opposed ACTA. "Sure, I am not too happy about this clause regarding our firstborn, but on the whole this deal with the devil looks pretty sweet".
Even so, to label something a "gateway drug", you'll have to show a causal relationship, or at least examine the correlation under different conditions.
Case in point: in my home country of the Netherlands, marihuana is (semi-)legal and freely available. Guess what: while there are more people in the Netherlands who have at some point tried marihuana (per capita), the number of regular users is actually lower than in the USA. Furthermore, we do not have a significantly higher number of users of hard drugs either. Which makes sense: the American pushing pot is breaking the law at the risk of a stiff prison sentence. He'll be more likely to cheerfully sell you something more potent as well. In the Netherlands, licensed coffee shop proprietors enjoy a legal and profitable trade in soft drugs; they are unlikely to risk all that by selling hard drugs on the side (besides, they are checked on a regular basis).
It's not the drug itsef that's the gateway to the nastier stuff. It's the person that is selling it to you. Legalising soft drugs doesn't mean allowing a gateway drug into the hands of your youngsters, it means that you're controlling the gateway and making it less likely that kids come into contact with hard drugs.
The headline is rather misleading, it's as the author of the article is trying to debunk global warming. Which isn't the case; he is merely talking about possible errors in a common way to estimate temperatures. From the article:
These findings, together with the missing orbital signature in published dendrochronological records, suggest that large-scale near-surface air-temperature reconstructions9, 10, 11, 12, 13 relying on tree-ring data may underestimate pre-instrumental temperatures including warmth during Medieval and Roman times.
In other words: estimates of temperature in medieval/Roman times based on tree ring data may well be too low.
We don't really vote for MEPs. We vote for European political parties, almost all of which are made up of groups of national political parties. So people end up voting for the same party they vote for in their own country, and it's often not the best and brightest who advance to European politics, quite the contrary in fact. It seems that the only "good" politicians who get into europarliament are the onces who need a bit of a break from the busy life of national politics.
Not just that. Most large companies want at least some in-house IT people: architects, integrators, project managers and business analysts who understand the business and the company. Two common problems I pick up at large corporate clients:
- The best and brightest of the contractors are quickly promoted to bigger and better things... at a different company. There's your loss of insitutional memory.
- It turns out to be almost impossible to hire and/or nurture employees for these positions, and even harder to keep them there, for the simple reason that having outsourced most IT work makes in incredibly difficult to offer IT staff a meaningful in-house career in IT.
Most companies I've worked with do not openly drive for a reversal of the outsourcing trend (it's still pretty much anathema in management circles). But they all express the desire (and subsequent failure) to fill more positions currently held by contractors with actual employees.
Religion means that instead of developing, nurturing and above all understanding your own moral code, you let someone else spoon-feed you one. And make no mistake, it really is a person (or group of persons) doing the spoon-feeding. The bible is no clear cut guide in itself; there's plenty of nasty stuff in there, so you have priests and fellow christians telling you which bits to ignore and which ones to follow. And the koran is even worse. The only acceptable rendering of that book is in its original Arabic language, and for good reason: the language is incredibly ambiguous, requiring a priesthood for "proper"interpretation. Better to develop your own morality, and sure, copy the good bits from whatever religion takes your fancy. Just understand why you are copying them.
And of course there is good in religion: a lot of religious rules are merely codifications of existing rules and mores of the societies in which these religions sprang up. There is a lot to be said for something that encourages all of us to adopt the same set of rules. But then again it is no surprise that religion crept (and continues to creep) into stuff that we consider to be personal choices. After all, where is the priesthood's role if scripture merely echoes the secular law of the land? Religion has an innate need to meddle in your personal affairs... another good reason to steer clear.
Food is even more important, and we have EVIL farmers and grocers who PROFIT *insert disgusted expression* from our hunger. If we don't pay these guys their blood money, we die. How more wrong can it get?
Oh wait. The market takes care of food just fine. And it can take care of medicine and health care. There are plenty of things wrong with the pharma industry, and the government can play a stronger role there when it comes to regulations and oversight, but I cringe when I read sweeping statements like "pharma is too important to be left to capitalists". Sadly, that statement is now bon ton amongst some of our politicians (in NL); they are repeating it verbatim. By the same token, I could claim that "pharma is too importent to be messed up by bureaucrats". But I won't. Government and private industry both have their roles to play.
It's still not mass producing - it's custom desktop fabrication. It's like laser printing in the 80s... very slow but nice quality. So in the near future it's still mostly for prototyping or small scale runs.
Good point. If and when enough people have access to these printers, and if they are sufficiently standardized, you will not need mass production anymore. Or rather, the product is still produced in mass, but in many small fabs or even on the desktop, as opposed to requiring a single massive factory in China. It's distributed production. The point is that it's not necessary for these printers to become so fast that they can produce thousands of products per hour. If you're printing at home, you will probably print only a few items every day at most, and you'll be able to afford wait times of an hour or so.
The big players in mobile all have their warchest of patents in place. Now they are stepping up the game; apparently it has become necessary to also have a warchest of ongoing lawsuits. Better sue the competition and have 5 cases running against them, then we have something to trade when they decide to sue us in turn.
But they know this: all of this serves quite nicely to keep new players out of the market. If you can get an injunction against a certain product because it has rounded corners, then there's nothing you can't block... unless the competition similarly threatens to block your own products from the market.
I helped a friend build his Makerbot kit, this thing came complete with all necessary parts and electronics. Required tools: just a soldering iron, screwdrivers and other small tools. No difficult cutting, sizing or sawing required. With that said, we've had no end of trouble getting the print head and feeder to work reliably, even a replacement assembly did not help. The feedstock would invariably get stuck in the print head after printing a few layers. I know there's plenty of other people who have had a lot of success with their Makebot or RepRap, but I think you still need to be prepared for a fair amount of fiddling and cursing.
That is the attraction of the Cubify printer. Crappy business model aside, it at least promises to work out of the box.
This is why I like buying ebook readers from Irex or from some obscure Korean hardware company. Because these companies are in the hardware business, not in the content business or in the assrape-your-customers-by-selling-their-personal-data business. And that means their goal is to sell me hardware that works well for me. Sony and Philipsmare still more or less ok; they do content as well and thus are fans of DRm, but at least they haven't build their business models around data mining like Amazon or Google.
Any video of the glasses themselves, preferably a "through" view showing what the actual overlay looks like, and what sort of info will be displayed? I am really not all that interested in a video of a bunch of people wearing those things...
Any video of the glasses themselves, preferably a "through" view showing what the actual overlay looks like, and what sort of info will be displayed. I am really not all that interested in a video of a bunch of people wearing those things...
Big mistake to have that removed. Your health care system now looks a little like ours in the Netherlands, and we are seeing what one would expect to see with mandatory health care insurance: premiums go up every year, and not just because of a greater overall demand. The cold truth is that insurers, collectively, have zero interest in keeping healthcare cost down. On the contrary, they'd rather charge you $600/month rather than $300 to cover the same package, unless there is some real competition amongst insurers. Over here, there really isn't.
I'm no fan of our social-democrat party, but I do agree with an idea they floated the other day: as insurance is mandatory, the insurers add no value whatsoever. They do add a considerable amount of overhead and a staggering amount of red tape and bureaucracy in health care. Cut them out of the deal, let the government handle health care payments and collect premiums (as they already do for part of the basic package).
There's no need to try and match velocity with the sun, though I have no idea how much energy is required to achieve a trajectory that intersects the sun (at a high velocity difference). On Mars, the point is to actually land rather than smash into it.
That's probably on purpose. Perhaps Go Compare even set up the hate page.
I recall an interview with the CEO of some company here in the Netherlands, about winning a "prize" for most annoying ad. He replied that he was well aware that they might win that when they recorded the ad, and at the time he even warned the guy they asked to do the ad (some semi-celebrity) that he might be nominated for most annoying personality as well. The guy knew full well that annoying ads stand out, and may well be tuned out or muted on subsequent airings, but they will be talked about as well. Any publicity is good publicity, as it turns out.
Why does such a thing as a secret ballot even exist in what is supposed to be a democracy? Democratic controls in Europe are tenuous at best, but at least we can see how the guys we voted into office are voting. Except when they don't feel like being held accountable, apparently (only 1/5th of MEPs need to agree to voting in secret)
I'm a pro-Europe constituent, but it's crap like this that casts serious doubts on the way we've implemented "Europe".
Suppose an hour's worth of stalling on our end costs them an hour of their time. Is it worth it? Well, if there's a million of us doing this and only (say) 50 scammers, it'll keep them busy for a couple of years. Kind of like how sending 100 HTTP requests from your computer to a website can bring a large server farm to its knees... if you have tens of thousands of other computers doing the same thing at the same time.
If you want no backdoor at all, better roll your own solution; that's still a legal option in many countries.
personally, I am ok with a backdoor, provided that there are some proper controls around it, such as:
- Access only granted to specific law enforcement agencies (listed publicly)
- Access only granted after due process, i.e. a judge issues a wiretap warrant for a specific suspect in a specific case
- Access is rescinded as soon as the warrant runs out
- The government agencies themselves have proper controls in place to ensure the tapped info is accessed on a need to know basis only.
Of course, these are pretty big "ifs". Looking at my own country (NL), I don't think they meet any of these requirements. Especially not the second point; small wonder we're the most widely tapped country in the world (per capita). Hell, the police do not even need a court-issued warrant for physical (house) searches anymore, the mayor can issue them as well for pretty much any reason... and they have, even ordering door-to-door searches.
I give it two more kiddie porn peddlers with encrypted hard drives before the goverment proposes to outlaw personal crypto.
Perhaps your employer is doing it wrong. We're getting a lot of business-related groups and discussions in Yammer, and we're finding that people are less hesitant to engage on this medium, and do so quicker and more often, compared to the internal message boards we used to have. But those communities in Yammer need to be nurtured or they will likely fail, just like on the message boards.
By the way, the low threshold and informal "feel" of Yammer means that you do get more non-business related chit chat. Which is fine and has value too (team building, getting to know your co-workers etc) as long as people don't spend an unreasonable amount of time on it.
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Yikes. The Dutch did a similar cost / benefit calculation when planning the =http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works, the system of dikes and storm gates protecting the lower lands. In this calculation, the value of a human life was set at €2.2M. The obvious solution for NASA is to hire cheaper Dutch astronauts...
That worked fine for Avatar; all other cinematographic qualities of that flick or lack thereof, the 3D really managed to draw me into the movie, and judging from everyone else who has seen it, I am not the only one who experienced that. Same for Sanctum, even though that was much less of a spectacle film. 3D can add a lot to a movie if done well. It's interesting that you mention B&W because to me, with ubiquitous high quality color systems, that is something that is similar to the current state of 3D: a gimmick. When used well, it can add to the atmosphere of a movie but if misused, it can detract from the experience.
Ah yes, the membership cards. In the border regions, illegal dealers are back out on the streets in force, selling pot to tourists, whereas before most drugs were sold legally in coffee shops. Crime and disturbances are way up. Which should give the minister of justice pause, one would think, as this card was introduced precisely to reduce problems in neighborhoods around coffee shops.
But there's little rational thought involved in these decisions. The minister pushing this legislation is part of a conservative coalition, consisting of parties who normally have reasonable policies (in my opinion anyway), but somehow always have that stupid urge to do "something" about drugs.
And that is more or less what this thing has become: a rider. The controversial IP-related clauses from ACTA are getting shoehorned into an otherwise normal trade agreement. They hope that MEPs will not reject the entire deal because of a "bad but small part", to paraphrase one MEP who said she isn't sure whether or not to reject the CETA if the ACTA clauses get tacked on. But that's exactly what MEPs should be crystal clear on: if they reject an agreement, they must also reject anything that has the agreement tacked on as a rider. There's good reason to be clear on that right now; it means that the people negotiating CETA know that they should not add the ACTA stuff if they want to have any hope of the agreement passing parliament. And it is pretty much the only way MEPs can effectively influence the contents of the agreement.
It's interesting to note that some MEPs might actually fall for this; they do not want to reject a good agreement because of one bad rider, no matter how hard they opposed ACTA. "Sure, I am not too happy about this clause regarding our firstborn, but on the whole this deal with the devil looks pretty sweet".
Even so, to label something a "gateway drug", you'll have to show a causal relationship, or at least examine the correlation under different conditions.
Case in point: in my home country of the Netherlands, marihuana is (semi-)legal and freely available. Guess what: while there are more people in the Netherlands who have at some point tried marihuana (per capita), the number of regular users is actually lower than in the USA. Furthermore, we do not have a significantly higher number of users of hard drugs either. Which makes sense: the American pushing pot is breaking the law at the risk of a stiff prison sentence. He'll be more likely to cheerfully sell you something more potent as well. In the Netherlands, licensed coffee shop proprietors enjoy a legal and profitable trade in soft drugs; they are unlikely to risk all that by selling hard drugs on the side (besides, they are checked on a regular basis).
It's not the drug itsef that's the gateway to the nastier stuff. It's the person that is selling it to you. Legalising soft drugs doesn't mean allowing a gateway drug into the hands of your youngsters, it means that you're controlling the gateway and making it less likely that kids come into contact with hard drugs.
These findings, together with the missing orbital signature in published dendrochronological records, suggest that large-scale near-surface air-temperature reconstructions9, 10, 11, 12, 13 relying on tree-ring data may underestimate pre-instrumental temperatures including warmth during Medieval and Roman times.
In other words: estimates of temperature in medieval/Roman times based on tree ring data may well be too low.
We don't really vote for MEPs. We vote for European political parties, almost all of which are made up of groups of national political parties. So people end up voting for the same party they vote for in their own country, and it's often not the best and brightest who advance to European politics, quite the contrary in fact. It seems that the only "good" politicians who get into europarliament are the onces who need a bit of a break from the busy life of national politics.
Not just that. Most large companies want at least some in-house IT people: architects, integrators, project managers and business analysts who understand the business and the company. Two common problems I pick up at large corporate clients:
- The best and brightest of the contractors are quickly promoted to bigger and better things... at a different company. There's your loss of insitutional memory.
- It turns out to be almost impossible to hire and/or nurture employees for these positions, and even harder to keep them there, for the simple reason that having outsourced most IT work makes in incredibly difficult to offer IT staff a meaningful in-house career in IT.
Most companies I've worked with do not openly drive for a reversal of the outsourcing trend (it's still pretty much anathema in management circles). But they all express the desire (and subsequent failure) to fill more positions currently held by contractors with actual employees.
Religion means that instead of developing, nurturing and above all understanding your own moral code, you let someone else spoon-feed you one. And make no mistake, it really is a person (or group of persons) doing the spoon-feeding. The bible is no clear cut guide in itself; there's plenty of nasty stuff in there, so you have priests and fellow christians telling you which bits to ignore and which ones to follow. And the koran is even worse. The only acceptable rendering of that book is in its original Arabic language, and for good reason: the language is incredibly ambiguous, requiring a priesthood for "proper"interpretation. Better to develop your own morality, and sure, copy the good bits from whatever religion takes your fancy. Just understand why you are copying them.
And of course there is good in religion: a lot of religious rules are merely codifications of existing rules and mores of the societies in which these religions sprang up. There is a lot to be said for something that encourages all of us to adopt the same set of rules. But then again it is no surprise that religion crept (and continues to creep) into stuff that we consider to be personal choices. After all, where is the priesthood's role if scripture merely echoes the secular law of the land? Religion has an innate need to meddle in your personal affairs... another good reason to steer clear.
Food is even more important, and we have EVIL farmers and grocers who PROFIT *insert disgusted expression* from our hunger. If we don't pay these guys their blood money, we die. How more wrong can it get?
Oh wait. The market takes care of food just fine. And it can take care of medicine and health care. There are plenty of things wrong with the pharma industry, and the government can play a stronger role there when it comes to regulations and oversight, but I cringe when I read sweeping statements like "pharma is too important to be left to capitalists". Sadly, that statement is now bon ton amongst some of our politicians (in NL); they are repeating it verbatim. By the same token, I could claim that "pharma is too importent to be messed up by bureaucrats". But I won't. Government and private industry both have their roles to play.
It's still not mass producing - it's custom desktop fabrication. It's like laser printing in the 80s... very slow but nice quality. So in the near future it's still mostly for prototyping or small scale runs.
Good point. If and when enough people have access to these printers, and if they are sufficiently standardized, you will not need mass production anymore. Or rather, the product is still produced in mass, but in many small fabs or even on the desktop, as opposed to requiring a single massive factory in China. It's distributed production. The point is that it's not necessary for these printers to become so fast that they can produce thousands of products per hour. If you're printing at home, you will probably print only a few items every day at most, and you'll be able to afford wait times of an hour or so.
Do you mean "like"? Or perhaps "want"?
The big players in mobile all have their warchest of patents in place. Now they are stepping up the game; apparently it has become necessary to also have a warchest of ongoing lawsuits. Better sue the competition and have 5 cases running against them, then we have something to trade when they decide to sue us in turn.
But they know this: all of this serves quite nicely to keep new players out of the market. If you can get an injunction against a certain product because it has rounded corners, then there's nothing you can't block... unless the competition similarly threatens to block your own products from the market.
I helped a friend build his Makerbot kit, this thing came complete with all necessary parts and electronics. Required tools: just a soldering iron, screwdrivers and other small tools. No difficult cutting, sizing or sawing required. With that said, we've had no end of trouble getting the print head and feeder to work reliably, even a replacement assembly did not help. The feedstock would invariably get stuck in the print head after printing a few layers. I know there's plenty of other people who have had a lot of success with their Makebot or RepRap, but I think you still need to be prepared for a fair amount of fiddling and cursing.
That is the attraction of the Cubify printer. Crappy business model aside, it at least promises to work out of the box.
This is why I like buying ebook readers from Irex or from some obscure Korean hardware company. Because these companies are in the hardware business, not in the content business or in the assrape-your-customers-by-selling-their-personal-data business. And that means their goal is to sell me hardware that works well for me. Sony and Philipsmare still more or less ok; they do content as well and thus are fans of DRm, but at least they haven't build their business models around data mining like Amazon or Google.
Any video of the glasses themselves, preferably a "through" view showing what the actual overlay looks like, and what sort of info will be displayed? I am really not all that interested in a video of a bunch of people wearing those things...
Any video of the glasses themselves, preferably a "through" view showing what the actual overlay looks like, and what sort of info will be displayed. I am really not all that interested in a video of a bunch of people wearing those things...
Big mistake to have that removed. Your health care system now looks a little like ours in the Netherlands, and we are seeing what one would expect to see with mandatory health care insurance: premiums go up every year, and not just because of a greater overall demand. The cold truth is that insurers, collectively, have zero interest in keeping healthcare cost down. On the contrary, they'd rather charge you $600/month rather than $300 to cover the same package, unless there is some real competition amongst insurers. Over here, there really isn't.
I'm no fan of our social-democrat party, but I do agree with an idea they floated the other day: as insurance is mandatory, the insurers add no value whatsoever. They do add a considerable amount of overhead and a staggering amount of red tape and bureaucracy in health care. Cut them out of the deal, let the government handle health care payments and collect premiums (as they already do for part of the basic package).
There's no need to try and match velocity with the sun, though I have no idea how much energy is required to achieve a trajectory that intersects the sun (at a high velocity difference). On Mars, the point is to actually land rather than smash into it.
That's probably on purpose. Perhaps Go Compare even set up the hate page.
I recall an interview with the CEO of some company here in the Netherlands, about winning a "prize" for most annoying ad. He replied that he was well aware that they might win that when they recorded the ad, and at the time he even warned the guy they asked to do the ad (some semi-celebrity) that he might be nominated for most annoying personality as well. The guy knew full well that annoying ads stand out, and may well be tuned out or muted on subsequent airings, but they will be talked about as well. Any publicity is good publicity, as it turns out.
Why does such a thing as a secret ballot even exist in what is supposed to be a democracy? Democratic controls in Europe are tenuous at best, but at least we can see how the guys we voted into office are voting. Except when they don't feel like being held accountable, apparently (only 1/5th of MEPs need to agree to voting in secret)
I'm a pro-Europe constituent, but it's crap like this that casts serious doubts on the way we've implemented "Europe".
Sigh.
Near != nearly. Compare to "narrow escape".
Suppose an hour's worth of stalling on our end costs them an hour of their time. Is it worth it? Well, if there's a million of us doing this and only (say) 50 scammers, it'll keep them busy for a couple of years. Kind of like how sending 100 HTTP requests from your computer to a website can bring a large server farm to its knees... if you have tens of thousands of other computers doing the same thing at the same time.
If you want no backdoor at all, better roll your own solution; that's still a legal option in many countries.
personally, I am ok with a backdoor, provided that there are some proper controls around it, such as:
- Access only granted to specific law enforcement agencies (listed publicly)
- Access only granted after due process, i.e. a judge issues a wiretap warrant for a specific suspect in a specific case
- Access is rescinded as soon as the warrant runs out
- The government agencies themselves have proper controls in place to ensure the tapped info is accessed on a need to know basis only.
Of course, these are pretty big "ifs". Looking at my own country (NL), I don't think they meet any of these requirements. Especially not the second point; small wonder we're the most widely tapped country in the world (per capita). Hell, the police do not even need a court-issued warrant for physical (house) searches anymore, the mayor can issue them as well for pretty much any reason... and they have, even ordering door-to-door searches.
I give it two more kiddie porn peddlers with encrypted hard drives before the goverment proposes to outlaw personal crypto.
Perhaps your employer is doing it wrong. We're getting a lot of business-related groups and discussions in Yammer, and we're finding that people are less hesitant to engage on this medium, and do so quicker and more often, compared to the internal message boards we used to have. But those communities in Yammer need to be nurtured or they will likely fail, just like on the message boards.
By the way, the low threshold and informal "feel" of Yammer means that you do get more non-business related chit chat. Which is fine and has value too (team building, getting to know your co-workers etc) as long as people don't spend an unreasonable amount of time on it.