Yes, god forbid surveillance in the hands of the people, where it could do the most good to protect them from the actions of the authorities, becomes ubiquitous. Leave the public surveillance to the professionals who are there to protect us for our own good!
Virtually every company has stretched their update cycles on PCs in the past few years. It started with the economic downturn but like many new "efficiencies", they have discovered they can live with a 5, 6, even 7 year life cycle vs their old 3-4 year cycles.
At the same time home users are not seeing a reason to upgrade. Most people are not doing much more than surfing the web and maybe using some form of an office suite. With fast multicore CPUs, cheap RAM, and SSDs, even power users are not replacing as much continually upgrading. I used to go through laptops in 18 months tops. Now, I'm over two years on my i7, 16GB, 256GB SSD equipped laptop and I see zero reason to upgrade anytime in the near future. It's just not being taxed, even with some of the crazy analytic workloads I throw at it. My home PC is going on 2 years old. I've upgraded. Added a new video card to replace my old 8800 GT, I added an SSD boot drive, new monitor. But replacing the whole box, I don't see it happening anytime soon.
The industry needs to face it, PCs are the new TVs.
Yea, I don't think there is an evil scientist cackling over killing a beloved feature in the background here. If it was popular, I can't see them killing it.
Re:That's the inconvenient truth of "the simple li
on
Iceman Had Bad Teeth
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He is correct: when you remove infant mortality from the numbers the average age at death jumps dramatically. Those "the average roman only lived to 19" stats are total crap. If you think about it, we would have died out in a few generations if that were true, since parents would have died while most children were still too young to care for themselves. As for the median farmer, unless they worked themselves to death or had zero sense of hygiene, they may not have fared much worse, on average. They probably had a better diet, lacking the "rich" foods the richest folks would have had access to, and let's face it: medicine back then was hit or miss if it helped or killed you faster.
I think the industry has unintentionally brought this upon themselves. Between the fast multi-core procs, SSDs, and cheap RAM PCs are just not falling behind as fast as they used to. I have an i7 based laptop that's over 2 years old and I just can't find any reason to replacing it yet. Maybe when it breaks. Used to be I'd replace my laptop about every 18 months. My desktop PC is a i5 2320 and I'm not sure when I'll even need to start to think about replacing it either. Neither of these feel any slower than when I bought them.
I've tried this before but a FAGGOT is such a non-standardized unit of measure no one can seem to come up with a consistently working conversion. Sometimes we ended up with a carton of menthols. Sometimes a big bundle of sticks (why the fuck would I need that?) The worse were the times we ended up with a cheap beer swilling ex high school jock. Seriously inconvenient unit of measure those were and I couldn't trade them for anything useful!
Since virtually every console and most games now require internet access and use back-end servers for something, the manufactures/publishers just need to add age restriction enforcement to their TOS agreements. "You must be 18 years old or older to play games rates M" and such. Then just have the feds arrest the little violators and charge them under the CFAA.
Fixed! They were probably going to grow up to be felons anyway, so this just nips it in the bud early. As an added bonus since they will now be felons, they won't be eligible to (legally) purchase/own/use firearms!
So we drop inches, ounces, and fluid ounces, add add SI prefixes to Mile, Pound, and Gallon. We keep our much cooler sounding "imperial units", gain the ease of using base 10 divisions, and the metric system can go suck it!
Yea, it does. We are not asking "Have you had a hand severed by a wind turbine prop in the past year". That's a specific symptom and there is virtually no wiggle room on the answer. You either have both hands, or you lost one to a wind farm. The symptoms in this case are vague. If you ask the general population if they have experienced headaches in the past 6 months you a) will get a high number of positive responses and b) just by asking the question you will induce a positive response in a percentage of the population.
Now of course you will say "but we expect the responses to be the same, real or false, across the population as a whole, so people living near wind turbines would report the same as people not living near them". Yes, but now you have another confounder: Do the people who live near the turbine experience real symptoms at a rate similar to the over-reported response in the general population? Likely? No, but you can NOT say for a FACT that it is or is not true.
Without the ability to control for confounding variables (which is virtually impossible in this case outside of an experimental settings that is outside the technical/ethical bounds of what can actually be done) you can not draw a definite conclusion, only show correlation. Which brings me back to my original point:
"...studying conditions such as this is very difficult since the "symptoms" are so generalized and subject to psychosomatic effects. A symptom that is in a person's head may not be "real" to the researcher, but it's real to the patient and it's very difficult to prove otherwise without putting some ethically questionable and/or logistically impossible controls in the study."
That methodology leaves you with a correlation vs causation problem. Did the local campaigns trigger the "symptoms", or did they cause people to make a legitimate association between real symptoms and a wind farm, something they had not considered before (like one of the parent posts suggested)? An even bigger problem is this: would your own survey have the same type of influence on the results as the anti-wind farm campaign? Without a way to control for that, you can't, strictly speaking, assign a cause. Ideally (and very unrealistically) you would setup fake wind farms in areas years in advance, and also run the same campaigns and see what percentage of those people also reported symptoms. At the same time, you would setup real but "hidden" wind farms in other areas, repeating your study with those people as well. However, as I'm sure you can see, the logistics are impossible.
I'm not saying the study is invalid (I believe quite the opposite), and like you bring up it does show a correlation, but it is not conclusive. Without that, there is really no way anyone is going to sway the people who would benefit most from it: those who believe they are having issues attributed to the wind farm.
If that is, of course, the goal. On the other hand, it does suggest an absolutely evil method for trolling the general public:-)
First let me say, I agree with you. I also actually don't mind the look of a wind farm on the horizon. There is a big farm in central Illinois that, personally, I feel adds to the view of the farmland it occupies. The giant, white structures provide a striking contrast to the flat, continuous farmland, especially in spring.
That said, studying conditions such as this is very difficult since the "symptoms" are so generalized and subject to psychosomatic effects. A symptom that is in a person's head may not be "real" to the researcher, but it's real to the patient and it's very difficult to prove otherwise without putting some ethically questionable and/or logistically impossible controls in the study. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it would require a lot of work and active participation by the subjects. No survey or non-experimental study could do it to a degree that the people claiming these types of illness could be persuaded by the results if they were contrary to their belief in the condition.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, god forbid surveillance in the hands of the people, where it could do the most good to protect them from the actions of the authorities, becomes ubiquitous. Leave the public surveillance to the professionals who are there to protect us for our own good!
Just carry around a few more spare batteries. The beauty of changeable batteries is you can change them. A necessity with most Android devices anyway.
Just hope that Rachel from card services doesn't pick an inappropriate time to call and help you lower your interest rates...
Virtually every company has stretched their update cycles on PCs in the past few years. It started with the economic downturn but like many new "efficiencies", they have discovered they can live with a 5, 6, even 7 year life cycle vs their old 3-4 year cycles.
At the same time home users are not seeing a reason to upgrade. Most people are not doing much more than surfing the web and maybe using some form of an office suite. With fast multicore CPUs, cheap RAM, and SSDs, even power users are not replacing as much continually upgrading. I used to go through laptops in 18 months tops. Now, I'm over two years on my i7, 16GB, 256GB SSD equipped laptop and I see zero reason to upgrade anytime in the near future. It's just not being taxed, even with some of the crazy analytic workloads I throw at it. My home PC is going on 2 years old. I've upgraded. Added a new video card to replace my old 8800 GT, I added an SSD boot drive, new monitor. But replacing the whole box, I don't see it happening anytime soon.
The industry needs to face it, PCs are the new TVs.
Yea, I don't think there is an evil scientist cackling over killing a beloved feature in the background here. If it was popular, I can't see them killing it.
An app that uses facial recognition to search the internet for nude or embarrassing pics.
Why cancer, of course. Everything new causes cancer.
Oh, and ingrown toenails.
Or a paper map and an printed MLS book? Or a stone tablet and another stone tablet?
Then get an Audi.
He is correct: when you remove infant mortality from the numbers the average age at death jumps dramatically. Those "the average roman only lived to 19" stats are total crap. If you think about it, we would have died out in a few generations if that were true, since parents would have died while most children were still too young to care for themselves. As for the median farmer, unless they worked themselves to death or had zero sense of hygiene, they may not have fared much worse, on average. They probably had a better diet, lacking the "rich" foods the richest folks would have had access to, and let's face it: medicine back then was hit or miss if it helped or killed you faster.
Shouldn't it read: North Korean Missile Raised to Failing Position, Says US Official
I think the industry has unintentionally brought this upon themselves. Between the fast multi-core procs, SSDs, and cheap RAM PCs are just not falling behind as fast as they used to. I have an i7 based laptop that's over 2 years old and I just can't find any reason to replacing it yet. Maybe when it breaks. Used to be I'd replace my laptop about every 18 months. My desktop PC is a i5 2320 and I'm not sure when I'll even need to start to think about replacing it either. Neither of these feel any slower than when I bought them.
But the other company is making money doing it! Making money on their hard work and Fox gets none of it.
Honestly I'm surprised they haven't sued TV makers under the same irrational logic. "Your product displays our content and you don't pay us a dime!"
I think you mean Asus HAD a motherboard. The p8z77-v premium has been discontinued.
I've tried this before but a FAGGOT is such a non-standardized unit of measure no one can seem to come up with a consistently working conversion. Sometimes we ended up with a carton of menthols. Sometimes a big bundle of sticks (why the fuck would I need that?) The worse were the times we ended up with a cheap beer swilling ex high school jock. Seriously inconvenient unit of measure those were and I couldn't trade them for anything useful!
Since virtually every console and most games now require internet access and use back-end servers for something, the manufactures/publishers just need to add age restriction enforcement to their TOS agreements. "You must be 18 years old or older to play games rates M" and such. Then just have the feds arrest the little violators and charge them under the CFAA.
Fixed! They were probably going to grow up to be felons anyway, so this just nips it in the bud early. As an added bonus since they will now be felons, they won't be eligible to (legally) purchase/own/use firearms!
...Big Advance In Hydrogen Production Changed Alternative Energy Landscape
Seriously, how many "big advancement" stories come out like this each year, then vanish to never be heard from again?
So we drop inches, ounces, and fluid ounces, add add SI prefixes to Mile, Pound, and Gallon. We keep our much cooler sounding "imperial units", gain the ease of using base 10 divisions, and the metric system can go suck it!
Just guessing here, but I'd imagine 10^6 $100 bills are more convenient than 10^8 $1 bills.
Until then it's just so much hot...um...hydrogen gas.
So has the school of the pill dispenser team suspended them yet under a zero tolerance drug policy?
Yea, it does. We are not asking "Have you had a hand severed by a wind turbine prop in the past year". That's a specific symptom and there is virtually no wiggle room on the answer. You either have both hands, or you lost one to a wind farm. The symptoms in this case are vague. If you ask the general population if they have experienced headaches in the past 6 months you a) will get a high number of positive responses and b) just by asking the question you will induce a positive response in a percentage of the population .
Now of course you will say "but we expect the responses to be the same, real or false, across the population as a whole, so people living near wind turbines would report the same as people not living near them". Yes, but now you have another confounder: Do the people who live near the turbine experience real symptoms at a rate similar to the over-reported response in the general population? Likely? No, but you can NOT say for a FACT that it is or is not true.
Without the ability to control for confounding variables (which is virtually impossible in this case outside of an experimental settings that is outside the technical/ethical bounds of what can actually be done) you can not draw a definite conclusion, only show correlation. Which brings me back to my original point:
"...studying conditions such as this is very difficult since the "symptoms" are so generalized and subject to psychosomatic effects. A symptom that is in a person's head may not be "real" to the researcher, but it's real to the patient and it's very difficult to prove otherwise without putting some ethically questionable and/or logistically impossible controls in the study."
That methodology leaves you with a correlation vs causation problem. Did the local campaigns trigger the "symptoms", or did they cause people to make a legitimate association between real symptoms and a wind farm, something they had not considered before (like one of the parent posts suggested)? An even bigger problem is this: would your own survey have the same type of influence on the results as the anti-wind farm campaign? Without a way to control for that, you can't, strictly speaking, assign a cause. Ideally (and very unrealistically) you would setup fake wind farms in areas years in advance, and also run the same campaigns and see what percentage of those people also reported symptoms. At the same time, you would setup real but "hidden" wind farms in other areas, repeating your study with those people as well. However, as I'm sure you can see, the logistics are impossible.
:-)
I'm not saying the study is invalid (I believe quite the opposite), and like you bring up it does show a correlation, but it is not conclusive. Without that, there is really no way anyone is going to sway the people who would benefit most from it: those who believe they are having issues attributed to the wind farm.
If that is, of course, the goal. On the other hand, it does suggest an absolutely evil method for trolling the general public
TMI = Three Mile Island :-)
First let me say, I agree with you. I also actually don't mind the look of a wind farm on the horizon. There is a big farm in central Illinois that, personally, I feel adds to the view of the farmland it occupies. The giant, white structures provide a striking contrast to the flat, continuous farmland, especially in spring.
That said, studying conditions such as this is very difficult since the "symptoms" are so generalized and subject to psychosomatic effects. A symptom that is in a person's head may not be "real" to the researcher, but it's real to the patient and it's very difficult to prove otherwise without putting some ethically questionable and/or logistically impossible controls in the study. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it would require a lot of work and active participation by the subjects. No survey or non-experimental study could do it to a degree that the people claiming these types of illness could be persuaded by the results if they were contrary to their belief in the condition.