They are taking a more piecemeal approach, removing the keyboard one row at a time. So far only the function keys are gone, next it will be the number keys' turn...
A more directly relevant comparison in some ways is Microsoft acquiring Skype. It was not FOSS but, like FOSS, the latest and greatest version used to be available on all OS platforms (which is why it was so useful) before MS acquired it and broke that so that now Skype is only a shadow of its former self. I seem to remember comments about it also being planned to be kept relatively independent too.
If you are familiar with British Slang there seems to be no need for any rebranding. Indeed, 'git'hub might be considered to be far more appropriate now that it was before!
Yes. This news seems to be a result of someone re-stating how large objects form in the solar system to make it sound sexier encountering a journalist who has never heard of this before. Tomorrow's article will be "Sun formed from particles created at the birth of the universe" to be followed by "Earth contains fossilized remnants of a 6 billion-year-old supernova".
It's pretty much impossible to know what specific number of carriers would magically create the optimal amount of competition.
It's possible if you have the appropriate data. Canada only has three big carriers: Bell, Rogers and Telus and it also has some of the highest mobile phone charges in the western world. While they will happily claim that this is due to the low population density if you look at a coverage map you can see that vast swathes of the country have no service which somewhat undermines this along with the fact that rates in Australia are also much lower than Canada despite a similar population density.
So the data clearly show that 3 big companies is definitely worse than 4. Given that the US rates are also not exactly cheap either compared to other countries it's probable that the optimal number is bigger than 4 but, regardless, 4 is definitely better than 3.
The diamond industry for wedding rings is bullshit
Indeed it is, but mainly because wedding rings are usually just made of gold or platinum without a diamond in sight. Engagement rings on the other hand...
The academic journal publishers add literally zero value.
That's not really true: the best journals act as a filter which both checks the articles for both rigour and relevance. This does add some value but, in the modern world, there are now far better ways to do this than via journals because we no longer need them to provide typesetting and printing. Even worse, as publishers flood the market with lots of new journals each year, many of which have extremely dubious editorial practices, more and more journals don't even provide this level of value.
Electricity - you get limited power, say, 5kW for a residential house.
It is far more than that! A typical electric kettle is about 2.2kW (10A @ 220V). Add to that an electric oven, microwave, water heater, space heater, computer(s), toaster etc. not to mention lighting and your peak usage is probably more like 10-20kW which means your actual limit is probably significantly higher. That's for a house a commercial property likely gets a significantly beefier connection.
The problem is because domestic and typical commercial uses only use their peak capacity for short periods of time so that if their peak is X their average over a day may only be 10% of X. For bitcoin their average is probably more like 90% of X. So, if the bitcoin miners applied for a standard grid connection in a commercial area it is not unreasonable for the power company to expect that they had a typical usage profile and so get into trouble.
The same thing happened with ISPs. Initially, they thought that everyone would just use a small fraction of their available bandwidth and then as new services, like Netflix came out and that fraction went up significantly for those users, they had to find a way to get the money to fund large bandwidth upgrades. They did this by putting on data volume caps so that the largest users ended up paying more to fund the extra bandwidth that they needed. Yes, some of the slimier companies reneged on promises of unlimited bandwidth for a fixed monthly fee but I'm not aware of any power company ever promising unlimited electricity for a fixed monthly fee.
Unless they paid for the electricity in advance then it is not "paid for" and therefore they can increase the price for the largest consumers if they want to.
A bit hypocritical to want to charge Bitcoin miners for how they use electricity...
You are missing the point. Nobody really cares what they use it for, what they care about is that there is suddenly a huge and unsustainable demand for electricity in a region which lacks the infrastructure to deliver it without massive price increases for everyone. The network equivalent would be someone in your neighbourhood running a small server farm which completely sucks up all the local bandwidth so that your network connection gets slowed down and the cost to the ISP to upgrade it would mean that you would have to pay much more for your connection.
ISPs solve this problem by having tiered data plans: you pay more if you want to use more and if you want more than the maximum amount then you will need to negotiate with the ISP for the price. This way those using insane amounts of data will pay for it. The same should happen here for electricity. The only reason bitcoin is the issue is because it can sponge off the network more easily than say an aluminium smelter which would need special connections to be provided.
Math Men's adoration of data -- coupled with their truculence and an arrogant conviction that their 'science' is nearly flawless -- has aroused government anger
The reason for people's anger is not because of their "arrogant conviction that their 'science' is nearly flawless" it is because they are collecting huge amounts of private data and then are either inadequately protecting it from criminals (Equifax) or those seeking to manipulate elections (Facebook).
That's not the point though. In this case "David" is not right and does not deserve to win. You can hardly blame the oil companies for causing climate change when it is your use of their oil products which causes the harm. The oil companies are not the ones burning all the oil and producing the CO2, we are! Nobody is forcing anyone to burn oil people choose to do so either because there is no alternative, the alternative is too expensive or because they are unwilling to reduce their standard of living. We are working on developing cheaper, more effective alternatives but that takes time.
At some point, people have to take responsibility for their own actions. What's next? People suing fast food and candy companies claiming they are responsible for making people fat (No I'm not going to google that to check because I have a very sad feeling that it has probably already happened!).
It seems to me that the common factor is that they work at a US Embassy. Presumably, these are stocked with a variety of high tech equipment both to enable and prevent spying. Is it possible that there is some undesirable interaction of this equipment? The alternative, that someone is targetting US officials in disparate parts of the world with a bizarre ultrasonic non-lethal weapon seems somewhat less likely in the absence of any evidence for either scenario.
You could break it up into different pieces, and place restrictions on what those pieces are allowed to do.
How would you make that stick? If you break up Facebook you leave the field wide open for someone else. Since US laws stop at the US border if an EU company recreated Facebook outside the US they can just ignore US laws about separating certain services. Short of blocking the internet connection between the US and EU how would US regulations stop that company from operating and prevent US citizens for signing up for it?
As long as it's your garden party and you are the one who decides who gets to stay or leave (even if that decision is letting someone else decide) then I don't see why a judge would ever get involved. In fact, I would tend to see this ruling as somewhat problematical since it seems to suggest that if you invite a government members to your party suddenly every member of the public has to be allowed in, in which case the result is going to be that everyone will ban all government members from attending their parties and communication with them will end up being far more restricted. Although if the result is that Trump can't post on Twitter I think we can still call it a win.
How accurate is taking DNA samples from water though?
When it comes to finding mythical monsters completely inaccurate. Anyone who really believes that there is a monster in Loch Ness is simply going to explain it away by e.g. claiming the monster is alien and doesn't have DNA. It's hard to argue against firmly held, irrational beliefs with rational, evidence-based arguments unless you can provide clear and direct evidence that explicitly contradicts those beliefs and not finding something is not going to do that.
Your numbers are off. The solar system escape velocity at the Earth's location is 42 km/s, not 16.6 km/s which is a good thing because the Earth's orbital velocity is 30 km/s! Of course, this still does not alter the conclusion which is that even the nearest star requires an unfeasibly large amount of energy to reach within a period approaching a human lifetime. Indeed if you try to go even faster the numbers get even more depressing because above ~0.1c you will have to account for relativistic effects.
You are right - I should have more accurately said "a" key difference because, apart from not being able to feed all the data a human is exposed to into an algorithm we also don't have an algorithm capable of digesting and understanding the massive variety of data that would be included - even if it could handle the volume.
Slashdot Mirror
How is Apple not here first?
They are taking a more piecemeal approach, removing the keyboard one row at a time. So far only the function keys are gone, next it will be the number keys' turn...
Not all of us. The hydrogen in us is probably "big bang"-dust.
You only have to look at Microsoft's past behavior in order to accurately predict the future with the GitHub acquisition.
Skype is one that immediately comes to mind. It was never FOSS but they did almost exactly what you said with it!
A more directly relevant comparison in some ways is Microsoft acquiring Skype. It was not FOSS but, like FOSS, the latest and greatest version used to be available on all OS platforms (which is why it was so useful) before MS acquired it and broke that so that now Skype is only a shadow of its former self. I seem to remember comments about it also being planned to be kept relatively independent too.
If you are familiar with British Slang there seems to be no need for any rebranding. Indeed, 'git'hub might be considered to be far more appropriate now that it was before!
Yes. This news seems to be a result of someone re-stating how large objects form in the solar system to make it sound sexier encountering a journalist who has never heard of this before. Tomorrow's article will be "Sun formed from particles created at the birth of the universe" to be followed by "Earth contains fossilized remnants of a 6 billion-year-old supernova".
It's pretty much impossible to know what specific number of carriers would magically create the optimal amount of competition.
It's possible if you have the appropriate data. Canada only has three big carriers: Bell, Rogers and Telus and it also has some of the highest mobile phone charges in the western world. While they will happily claim that this is due to the low population density if you look at a coverage map you can see that vast swathes of the country have no service which somewhat undermines this along with the fact that rates in Australia are also much lower than Canada despite a similar population density.
So the data clearly show that 3 big companies is definitely worse than 4. Given that the US rates are also not exactly cheap either compared to other countries it's probable that the optimal number is bigger than 4 but, regardless, 4 is definitely better than 3.
The diamond industry for wedding rings is bullshit
Indeed it is, but mainly because wedding rings are usually just made of gold or platinum without a diamond in sight. Engagement rings on the other hand...
The academic journal publishers add literally zero value.
That's not really true: the best journals act as a filter which both checks the articles for both rigour and relevance. This does add some value but, in the modern world, there are now far better ways to do this than via journals because we no longer need them to provide typesetting and printing. Even worse, as publishers flood the market with lots of new journals each year, many of which have extremely dubious editorial practices, more and more journals don't even provide this level of value.
...that some enterprising busker does not put the reader at waist height in a crowded area and gain hundreds of "taps" from unsuspecting passersby.
Electricity - you get limited power, say, 5kW for a residential house.
It is far more than that! A typical electric kettle is about 2.2kW (10A @ 220V). Add to that an electric oven, microwave, water heater, space heater, computer(s), toaster etc. not to mention lighting and your peak usage is probably more like 10-20kW which means your actual limit is probably significantly higher. That's for a house a commercial property likely gets a significantly beefier connection.
The problem is because domestic and typical commercial uses only use their peak capacity for short periods of time so that if their peak is X their average over a day may only be 10% of X. For bitcoin their average is probably more like 90% of X. So, if the bitcoin miners applied for a standard grid connection in a commercial area it is not unreasonable for the power company to expect that they had a typical usage profile and so get into trouble.
The same thing happened with ISPs. Initially, they thought that everyone would just use a small fraction of their available bandwidth and then as new services, like Netflix came out and that fraction went up significantly for those users, they had to find a way to get the money to fund large bandwidth upgrades. They did this by putting on data volume caps so that the largest users ended up paying more to fund the extra bandwidth that they needed. Yes, some of the slimier companies reneged on promises of unlimited bandwidth for a fixed monthly fee but I'm not aware of any power company ever promising unlimited electricity for a fixed monthly fee.
Unless they paid for the electricity in advance then it is not "paid for" and therefore they can increase the price for the largest consumers if they want to.
Will this apply to flights as well? I thought that plastic utensils there were generally regarded as a safety feature, not just a cheap convenience.
The issue isn't that the oil companies directly caused climate change. It's that they consistently lied to continue to profit from oil.
Then prosecute them for that. Don't sue them for something that they are not responsible for.
A bit hypocritical to want to charge Bitcoin miners for how they use electricity...
You are missing the point. Nobody really cares what they use it for, what they care about is that there is suddenly a huge and unsustainable demand for electricity in a region which lacks the infrastructure to deliver it without massive price increases for everyone. The network equivalent would be someone in your neighbourhood running a small server farm which completely sucks up all the local bandwidth so that your network connection gets slowed down and the cost to the ISP to upgrade it would mean that you would have to pay much more for your connection.
ISPs solve this problem by having tiered data plans: you pay more if you want to use more and if you want more than the maximum amount then you will need to negotiate with the ISP for the price. This way those using insane amounts of data will pay for it. The same should happen here for electricity. The only reason bitcoin is the issue is because it can sponge off the network more easily than say an aluminium smelter which would need special connections to be provided.
Math Men's adoration of data -- coupled with their truculence and an arrogant conviction that their 'science' is nearly flawless -- has aroused government anger
The reason for people's anger is not because of their "arrogant conviction that their 'science' is nearly flawless" it is because they are collecting huge amounts of private data and then are either inadequately protecting it from criminals (Equifax) or those seeking to manipulate elections (Facebook).
That's not the point though. In this case "David" is not right and does not deserve to win. You can hardly blame the oil companies for causing climate change when it is your use of their oil products which causes the harm. The oil companies are not the ones burning all the oil and producing the CO2, we are! Nobody is forcing anyone to burn oil people choose to do so either because there is no alternative, the alternative is too expensive or because they are unwilling to reduce their standard of living. We are working on developing cheaper, more effective alternatives but that takes time.
At some point, people have to take responsibility for their own actions. What's next? People suing fast food and candy companies claiming they are responsible for making people fat (No I'm not going to google that to check because I have a very sad feeling that it has probably already happened!).
Yes, 1843, that sounds about the right year for this article to have been written
So the article is about his struggles learning Fortran?
It seems to me that the common factor is that they work at a US Embassy. Presumably, these are stocked with a variety of high tech equipment both to enable and prevent spying. Is it possible that there is some undesirable interaction of this equipment? The alternative, that someone is targetting US officials in disparate parts of the world with a bizarre ultrasonic non-lethal weapon seems somewhat less likely in the absence of any evidence for either scenario.
You could break it up into different pieces, and place restrictions on what those pieces are allowed to do.
How would you make that stick? If you break up Facebook you leave the field wide open for someone else. Since US laws stop at the US border if an EU company recreated Facebook outside the US they can just ignore US laws about separating certain services. Short of blocking the internet connection between the US and EU how would US regulations stop that company from operating and prevent US citizens for signing up for it?
As long as it's your garden party and you are the one who decides who gets to stay or leave (even if that decision is letting someone else decide) then I don't see why a judge would ever get involved. In fact, I would tend to see this ruling as somewhat problematical since it seems to suggest that if you invite a government members to your party suddenly every member of the public has to be allowed in, in which case the result is going to be that everyone will ban all government members from attending their parties and communication with them will end up being far more restricted. Although if the result is that Trump can't post on Twitter I think we can still call it a win.
How accurate is taking DNA samples from water though?
When it comes to finding mythical monsters completely inaccurate. Anyone who really believes that there is a monster in Loch Ness is simply going to explain it away by e.g. claiming the monster is alien and doesn't have DNA. It's hard to argue against firmly held, irrational beliefs with rational, evidence-based arguments unless you can provide clear and direct evidence that explicitly contradicts those beliefs and not finding something is not going to do that.
Are you sure it isn't just a British asteroid?
Yes. If it were it would be brexiting the solar system not remaining.
Your numbers are off. The solar system escape velocity at the Earth's location is 42 km/s, not 16.6 km/s which is a good thing because the Earth's orbital velocity is 30 km/s! Of course, this still does not alter the conclusion which is that even the nearest star requires an unfeasibly large amount of energy to reach within a period approaching a human lifetime. Indeed if you try to go even faster the numbers get even more depressing because above ~0.1c you will have to account for relativistic effects.
You are right - I should have more accurately said "a" key difference because, apart from not being able to feed all the data a human is exposed to into an algorithm we also don't have an algorithm capable of digesting and understanding the massive variety of data that would be included - even if it could handle the volume.