It says ThomsonFly and Thomas Cook have a reciprocal maintenance agreement, and he worked for ThomsonFly and was on a Thomas Cook airplane. This is really no different than if a company engineer had been on the plane.
He did his job and he will get paid for it. There's nothing all that remarkable about it. Engineers fly all the time just like anybody else. The only thing remotely unusual about this story is that there was a reciprocal maintenance agreement involved and this guy worked for the other airline, but I sincerely doubt it's unusual at all for engineers on airlines with reciprocal agreements to fly on the other airline.
Anyway, there's more to the "but it's Canada" argument than just heat.
Japan tops the world in longevity and they also have some of the lightest people in the world. While obesity isn't unheard of there, and neither is being slightly overweight, it's a lot more common to be underweight by the accepted western definition. I couldn't find the average weight for adults, but the average weight for a 16 year old male in Japan is around 136 pounds at a height of around 5'6". In the United States, that is the lowest recommended weight even for someone with a "small frame" at that height.
So why do they have such long lifespans if being slightly overweight is better than being underweight?
I'm sure it has mostly to do with the amount and type of nutrients a person is ingesting. Westerners eat a diet that's higher in fat and calories per nutrient. For example, they eat a lot more fish than we do; we eat more red meat. They eat more rice; we eat more potatoes. Without making a real effort or taking supplements, a westerner will need to ingest more calories and fat to get the same nutrients as a Japanese person.
I would strongly suspect that this is a case where correlation != causation in terms of being slightly overweight and living longer. A person would probably live longer still if they were slightly underweight but got the same (or better) nutrients, which is basically the situation in Japan and that is exactly the result.
I wonder what the costs are for a broadcast versus a webcast? For a broadcast you'd need to coordinate multiple stations and time zones, there are power costs to push the signal, station costs, licensing costs.. For a webcast there's the server and pipe sized to the load you expect. Maybe you need Akamai or some other similar system, but I expect that it's much cheaper than broadcast.
For most TV channels, it is much more expensive to broadcast via the web than it is to broadcast via standard television. The obvious reason being that TV channels are set up to broadcast via, well, TV. All of the equipment is already bought and paid for, the processes are in place, the staffing level set, etc. Now you throw this wrench in the works of suddenly asking a TV channel to worry about digital codecs, about digital delivery, about server capacity, all this other crap... it becomes a huge clusterfuck. And it means adding staff, adding equipment, redirecting resources, etc.
I'll say that when Hulu first launched, I was responsible for getting some clips - just clips! - ready for one of the launch channels. We were trying to do the minimum required of us because we knew it was going to be a big headache. And it was. First of all, most of the tapes (yes, tapes) were stored off-site and needed to be located and transported. Then they needed to be digitized, then edited, then encoded. At the time, Hulu would allow you to submit either flv's or "mezzanine" files that were either mpeg2 files (yes, mpeg2) or QuickTimes using the DVC Pro codec. Well, we tried both flvs and QuickTimes and had major problems with both. First, encoding to flv from our digitized files took approximately 24 hours for each clip. (You don't realize how large uncompressed digital files are.) So that was obviously out. Rendering from Final Cut to DVC Pro was much quicker, so we did that. Then we had to figure out how to actually get them the files, and it turned out buying a bunch of drives and FedExing them all over the place was really the only way. But then every flv they encoded from our files ended up stretched, because they couldn't figure out how to handle the non-square pixels that were in their own QT spec (the spec calls for a 720x480 file at a 4:3 aspect ratio).
All of this (plus dealing with the metadata and various other things) ended up taking up basically 100% of my time, plus 100% of two PAs' time, plus a large chunk of various other departments' time, plus probably 30-40% of my boss' time. And we had to buy a bunch of new hardware and software to do all the encodes ourselves that we ended up doing, and come up with all new processes.
You have to think about all the hidden costs. It's not just a case of "oh webcasting uses no bandwidth so it's practically free". Would it be "free" if, say, you suddenly asked General Motors to start making rubber ducks or bathtubs instead of cars? That's pretty much the equivalent. It is a totally new process that needs to be created from scratch. There's almost nothing about webcasting that is similar to broadcasting.
It doesn't even save money after you've got things set up and running somewhat smoothly, because now you've got *two* separate processes going on - broadcast TV still exists and will exist for the foreseeable future.
This is something Hulu needs to work on, actually. For shows like the Simpsons or House, which are highly popular, the commercials are always spot on. For less popular shows, such as some of the oddities like Paranormal TV, cooking, and anime, the commercials can cut in at the worst times.
Has nothing to do with Hulu. The segment times are programmed by whoever submits the show. And yes, I know this from experience.
It is possible that Hulu's system could just be screwing up occasionally - it wouldn't be the first time - but if you watch an episode more than once and always see the breaks in the same places, then obviously it's working properly and those breaks were programmed by the TV channel, not Hulu.
Why would a business, with this theoretical professional attitude, use the stock image that came with *any* new computer? I thought it was more or less standard procedure for the admins to provide a sanitized and customized image and use that right off the bat. I mean, it isn't any sort of secret that computers get shipped with tons of garbage pre installed, why was it allowed to be used in a production environment like that?
At every company I've worked at, laptops do not get imaged right off the bat for several reasons:
a) often non-standard hardware that needs special drivers b) laptops often need software installed that the desktops don't (meaning IT depts. would need to grant admin access anyway) c) too many support headaches. IT would rather let the manufacturer deal with it.
Also, traditionally companies bought ThinkPad laptops because of the stuff they came with preinstalled, and also the stuff they don't. ThinkPads don't ship with a bunch of trialware and crapware - or at least they didn't before Lenovo took over. (My first ThinkPad shipped 100% clean. My current one shipped with Norton and some other junk, not to mention about 100 processes running; very disappointing.) But they do ship with a lot of useful (and some previously-useful) stuff, like hard drive shock protection and biometric security. Lenovo has cut into this usefulness by pretty much dropping support for some of the better pre-installed utilities, like the System Update utility that acted like Windows Update, but just for machine-specific drivers and utilities. You now have to get them manually from Lenovo's web site.
Lenovo has really been running the ThinkPad line into the ground. It's not just their software shenanigans; I have a TP SL500, and I would not say it qualifies in any way as a ThinkPad. It has a glossy plastic lid, no roll cage, no thinklight (ok, I knew that going in), a really crappy keyboard that feels like junk and doesn't even lay flat, and it crashes on me about once per day. It also makes an annoying high-pitched whining noise from the processor - and no, it's not the fan. It's really just about the worst laptop I've ever owned and if it wasn't for the matte screen (still an option!) and the TrackPoint (which I still LOVE), I'd have sold this thing months ago.
The higher-end ThinkPads are *better* but not as good as they used to be. For example, Lenovo uses three keyboard suppliers now, when IBM used to use just one - and ThinkPads have long been known for their keyboards. Supposedly one of Lenovo's suppliers is the same as what IBM used (I think it's NMB), but the other two are the same generic crap keyboard manufacturers as used in other brands' machines. And there's no way to know which one you're going to get - Lenovo treats them interchangeably, even in the same model, and even in their priciest machines.
They've really lost the plot when it comes to the ThinkPad line if you ask me.
So when actors endorsed $PRODUCT it was old media and OK, but now that it's bloggers we need to apply the same "old media" rules? Blogging is different then advertising and should have different rules -- or NO rules.
Free Speach is much more important then some FTC fear of everybody being confused on the internet.
Are you honestly telling me that you cannot differentiate between an ad and payola? And you don't see the obvious ethical difference?
If a blog wants to come out and say "buy X product, because they paid us to tell you to", that's totally fine. That is an ad.
What is not fine is for them to say "buy X product because we like it!" when they secretly don't, but have been asked to say they do by the manufacturer that has showered them with gifts in return.
This is not a free speech issue, nor is there a damn thing that's confusing about it to anyone with half a brain.
And the only people that have anything to "fear" from it are those who are afraid of no longer being able to scam their readers.
Yes, though that's rather specific to the financial industry. The securities market is more (though not nearly enough, apparently) heavily regulated than commerce at large.
This discussion is about payola. And yes, all broadcast stations are forbidden from accepting payola without disclosing it:
The FCC obviously regulates the airwaves, so this wouldn't apply to newspapers, but it does apply to all broadcast stations. There might be some similar rule enforced by the FTC in regard to newspapers, I'm not sure.
First, 1 in 10 Americans does not own either of these formats. Come on, really? 30 million Americans own HD-DVD players? If Toshiba and their partners had sales like that, the format war would have been over long before it was - in HD-DVD's favor.
Second, this clearly isn't taking into account the 22 million PS3's out there, of which about 12 million are in the United States. This is still the player of choice for most people - at least until that $99 player announced over the weekend comes along. But this is one case where a game console is actually clearly better than most standalone players and most people know it.
Polaroids can still be useful for previewing exposures in large-format photography, which is still a film world. They simply don't make 4x5" digital sensors, period.
They were also still in wide use up until the very end in the film industry, where they were used both for location scouting and for continuity. It is simply *not* more convenient to take a bunch of pictures with a digital camera, go back to the office and print them out, *then* put those printouts in a binder than it is to just take a bunch of photos and stick them in a binder immediately so anyone can see them. Even if you have a small digital printer that you bring with you, that's still an extra step, not to mention the time and effort it takes to hook up the printer and then print out the photo.
Of course, that is what the industry does these days, but they are still not particularly happy about it.
I'm calling bullshit on that one. How'd you remember your login/password here? Or do you have it tattooed on you somewhere? (Not very good for security IMNSHO.)
It's generally a good sign of a software company's health if it has a clearly defined process not just for actual software development, but for planning and milestone setting.
You hit it squarely on the head.
I used to read these statements from 3DR about the game being done "when it's done" with bemusement, because while many saw that as a commitment to quality, I just saw it as code for "we have no idea what we're doing, so don't hold your breath".
DNF should be a lesson to everybody that milestones and deadlines exist for a reason. While they can seem arbitrary and occasionally unrealistic, without them you get into this pattern of meandering where nothing is ever as good as you think you can make it, so you constantly tweak and fix, then as you're doing that new technologies come out and pass your work by, meaning you need to basically start over and everything repeats again.
Every game ever released has parts that the developers wished they could have spent more time on, or re-done in some way. No game is ever 100% perfect from the developer's perspective. But they get released anyway, and if the developer has done their job at all, everybody loves the game anyway and nobody notices the little things that the developer sees. (This is no different than any other creative medium, btw. Film, music, art... creators are never fully satisfied.)
Without milestones, though, the developer is free to fixate on those little things that nobody else would ever notice or care about. That's why project management is one of the most important aspects of game production. And 3DR didn't seem to have any.
Yes 2k owns the publishing rights, but not the IP to Duke Nukem. It was said however that 2k games has offered 30million for the ip rights for whole Duke Nukem franchise, so have to see how it turns out.
Ironically, 3DR shutting down may be just the impetus needed to actually get this game released.
If 2K does manage to buy it, I would expect its release within the year. In what state, who knows, but it'll be out there.
The submission makes it sound as if there's some big mystery about adding 3G to a laptop that Apple has to solve. But there are other laptop makers out there besides Apple, and almost all of them have been putting 3G in their notebooks for years now. This is a feature that Apple is just behind on, and especially if they want to keep *any* semblance of a business market (and designers and photographers run businesses too - and a lot of them are freelance, working outside), then it's something they really need to catch up on.
It's a big and obvious mistake to suggest that 3G connectivity is meant to replace wi-fi. 3G connectivity is meant to replace, well, not having any connectivity. Laptops are meant to be portable, and they can go lots of places where wi-fi doesn't exist.
I can't believe I actually even have to explain this.
Korea, and Japan are highly competitive markets when it comes to telecommunications.
Not when it comes to infrastructure. All infrastructure projects in Japan are heavily funded public works programs, including their internet backbone. The competitive market comes in as a result of that, not a cause. Their markets are as competitive as they are because the government invested the money to make them that way.
It's not that nobody in the US government realizes this - that's why Obama included high speed internet in his stimulus plan. But we haven't had a government like this for eight years, so things aren't going to change overnight.
This is why capitalism failed: because commoners and the intelligent don't understand that no transaction is one-sided except theft (which is why government is theft, by the way).
Huh? You had me and then you lost me. Please explain that last part, because I can't see any logic in that statement.
If the companies delivering internet doesn't deliver the speed or quality desired by the citizens of a region or city; then I see absolutely no problem with the people taking matters into their own hands. In fact I would call it democracy in practice.
It's more like socialism in practice. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but let's call it what it is.
Ok, there's a bit of a distinction here. "Citizen-owned" and "City-owned" are two different things. A "citizen-owned" entity would just be a corporation like any other, subject to the same rules as Time Warner. Time Warner itself is "citizen-owned". But such a competing corporation couldn't operate in most cities because of franchise rules that on the one hand keep there from being a tangled mess of wires and torn-up streets everywhere but on the other hand also sanction monopolies.
This is a city-owned entity. It is a government organization that is undercutting a private company by selling its products and services at cost. There's no way for any private for-profit company to "compete" with that. Socialism is not about competition; it's about government providing services at the lowest cost possible. Businesses exist to be profitable; they're not charities. The goal of a business is to sell products for the highest price possible, not the lowest.
Now, I'm not arguing that there's anything wrong with what this city is doing. But I wonder how many people who are criticizing Time Warner over this really understand what they're arguing in favor of. They're arguing in favor of an economic system that is designed to be anti-competitive and to provide services for less than a private company ever could. Given that most seem to be criticizing Time Warner for "not competing", I would say very few understand this.
Please submit a link to a post where you have done what you are asking of him.
What, because he hasn't done the same thing, he has no right to criticize? That's fallacy. You may as well say nobody has the right to criticize the president because they've never been president.
FWIW, I felt the same way as the parent - I couldn't even make out the song at first, and that ruined it enough that I just quit listening after about 30 seconds. Not to take away from the guy's effort - I'm sure it was a lot of work, and he should be commended for that - but it ends up just sounding like a bad MIDI recording.
Even pro wrestling is "real" in that the moves they're performing are real. When a guy jumps off a ring corner 20 feet into the air and does a backflip down on top of another guy, that's real. And without a lot of training and a lot of practice, you're looking at serious injury or worse without proper training.
You can debate the difference between a "game" and a "sport" but for me, it really comes down to the risk of physical injury. A big reason (though not the only reason) people like sports is because they like to see athletes perform physical feats that they themselves cannot. It's all about pushing the body to its limit. "Games" don't have that. They can still be interesting to watch, but for other reasons. You don't watch a chess match hoping to see a 99 yard touchdown pass or a slam dunk. On the other hand, the audience for watching "games" is inherently much smaller than the audience for sports, because there's less raw excitement.
Professional gaming is what it says - a game, not a sport. It will never be more popular than, say, watching two people play chess. People are just inherently more interested in watching other people perform physical tasks - video gaming is in the second person, you're watching someone manipulate some other character that doesn't really exist, and it's that virtual character that appears to be doing all the work and taking all the risks. It's not a sport and it'll never be popular for that reason.
I don't have any problem with this, aside from cases where you're using the trademark with permission.
Well, but a lot of people are. Google is not actually allowing anyone to use trademarked names at the moment, including advertisers who have distribution deals with those who own the trademark (which generally gives them the right to use the trademark in marketing - after all, what manufacturer wouldn't want their officially authorized dealers to advertise that they sell their items??). There are a lot of complaints about this on the Adwords support forum right now.
In fact, I'm not even sure the trademark owners themselves could get away with using their trademarks at the moment, given that Google's support is basically non-existent - they will allow it if you prove to them that you own the trademark, but good luck with that. Google sends an automated response to basically everybody that emails them for any reason these days.
I run a small web store selling Japanese clothes, and I made sure not to use any of the actual brands we carry in our Adwords keywords. That's another thing - if your account gets suspended because of this, good luck getting it unsuspended. Again, it's like they don't even have anybody working there right now.
Except he's a public official. I for one very much doubt he did this in his own time, or with his own money.
But you're turning this around. Again, that's a question of abuse of power, which really has nothing to do with protection of privacy. Politicians can and do abuse their power in any number of ways to get what they want. Whether that happened here is a separate issue.
The question is "do you have a right to anonymity when making political editorials?" That's a different question than "do you have the right to make anonymous political editorials?" The answer to the latter question is "of course". The answer to the former question is "of course not".
There's no protection of privacy when making editorials, especially ones that by design are intended to hurt someone else. Whether or not that hurt is justified and the editorial truthful is immaterial - just as an accused defendant has the right to know his accuser in court, so too is it elsewhere in our society.
Look at it this way. Imagine if, instead of some random person, this blogger was instead a member of the Republican National Committee executing a covert strategy to take down this Democratic representative. Would their privacy be protected then? If not, why not?
There can't be a double standard for the obvious reason that you don't know who you're dealing with or what their motives are until they are unmasked. And both the accused and the public have a right to know that.
Anonymity has its uses, but this country has a much longer history - and a long legal basis - in people dealing with each other face to face, with all the cards on the table.
Crustaceans are bugs. They have like 5 brain cells.
What difference does that make?
And did you actually read the article? Reflexes don't last for a lifetime. The part about the hermit crabs switching shells only if they'd been exposed to a painful stimuli in the past certainly suggests pain memory. The fact that crustaceans limp when exposed to painful stimuli is also pretty compelling evidence. There's no reason whatsoever to limp unless you feel pain - that's a pain-induced protection response, not an aversive reflex.
The whole point of the article is that we've assumed crustaceans don't experience pain because they don't have a neocortex in their brains, which is where we experience pain. But that just means they don't experience it by the same mechanism we do, not that they don't experience it at all. (Since you apparently didn't read the article, they use vision as another example of something lobsters have that's processed in a manner completely different from humans.)
Well, but both certificates were for capitalone.com subdomains. In this case, I wouldn't worry too much about it. I'd complain, but it's more of an annoyance than a security risk.
I'd worry a lot more if one certificate was for capitalone.com and the other for capone.com or capitolone.com or capital1.com or something like that. Then you've got a problem.
Not to mention that I regularly use satellite imagery to augment maps when I am going somewhere unfamiliar and want to get a better idea of what it will look like when I get there.
I do too, although arguably street view is a lot more useful for that. You're not going to be looking at where you're going from 200 miles up when you get there, so why do you need to see it from that angle if the purpose is to get an idea of what it will look like from the ground?
Personally, I'm having a hard time getting really worked up about this one way or the other. Maybe it's because I lived without satellite images for approximately 33 of my 37 years on this Earth without much of a problem, and I don't think we'd be losing much to not have them again. This is not like GPS or the internet as a whole or something where there is real utility that would be lost if you switched it off.
On the other hand, I'm obviously against all this fear-mongering. I'm not so intentionally dense (as I do believe some people are) as to not see any way that a terrorist could use these images for their own purposes, but that doesn't mean I think it's a reason to blur anything or turn it off. It's just a tool, and like any tool it can be used for good or evil. It's not a weapon, it's not a drug, it's not something the government should have a role in regulating.
It's more like, say, a pipe wrench. Sure, I could take a pipe wrench and whack somebody over the head with it and probably kill them. I could do it repeatedly and probably kill a lot of people.
Or, I could use it to fix broken pipes.
This is the thing with tools. They have a benign purpose and that's what most people use them for. But of course they *could* be used for evil. Are we going to just regulate everything that fits that description?
If the government is going to outlaw Google's satellite images, then it seems to me they need to outlaw pipe wrenches too.
Slashdot Mirror
Where does it say he fixed it "for free"?
It says ThomsonFly and Thomas Cook have a reciprocal maintenance agreement, and he worked for ThomsonFly and was on a Thomas Cook airplane. This is really no different than if a company engineer had been on the plane.
He did his job and he will get paid for it. There's nothing all that remarkable about it. Engineers fly all the time just like anybody else. The only thing remotely unusual about this story is that there was a reciprocal maintenance agreement involved and this guy worked for the other airline, but I sincerely doubt it's unusual at all for engineers on airlines with reciprocal agreements to fly on the other airline.
Anyway, there's more to the "but it's Canada" argument than just heat.
Japan tops the world in longevity and they also have some of the lightest people in the world. While obesity isn't unheard of there, and neither is being slightly overweight, it's a lot more common to be underweight by the accepted western definition. I couldn't find the average weight for adults, but the average weight for a 16 year old male in Japan is around 136 pounds at a height of around 5'6". In the United States, that is the lowest recommended weight even for someone with a "small frame" at that height.
So why do they have such long lifespans if being slightly overweight is better than being underweight?
I'm sure it has mostly to do with the amount and type of nutrients a person is ingesting. Westerners eat a diet that's higher in fat and calories per nutrient. For example, they eat a lot more fish than we do; we eat more red meat. They eat more rice; we eat more potatoes. Without making a real effort or taking supplements, a westerner will need to ingest more calories and fat to get the same nutrients as a Japanese person.
I would strongly suspect that this is a case where correlation != causation in terms of being slightly overweight and living longer. A person would probably live longer still if they were slightly underweight but got the same (or better) nutrients, which is basically the situation in Japan and that is exactly the result.
I wonder what the costs are for a broadcast versus a webcast? For a broadcast you'd need to coordinate multiple stations and time zones, there are power costs to push the signal, station costs, licensing costs.. For a webcast there's the server and pipe sized to the load you expect. Maybe you need Akamai or some other similar system, but I expect that it's much cheaper than broadcast.
For most TV channels, it is much more expensive to broadcast via the web than it is to broadcast via standard television. The obvious reason being that TV channels are set up to broadcast via, well, TV. All of the equipment is already bought and paid for, the processes are in place, the staffing level set, etc. Now you throw this wrench in the works of suddenly asking a TV channel to worry about digital codecs, about digital delivery, about server capacity, all this other crap... it becomes a huge clusterfuck. And it means adding staff, adding equipment, redirecting resources, etc.
I'll say that when Hulu first launched, I was responsible for getting some clips - just clips! - ready for one of the launch channels. We were trying to do the minimum required of us because we knew it was going to be a big headache. And it was. First of all, most of the tapes (yes, tapes) were stored off-site and needed to be located and transported. Then they needed to be digitized, then edited, then encoded. At the time, Hulu would allow you to submit either flv's or "mezzanine" files that were either mpeg2 files (yes, mpeg2) or QuickTimes using the DVC Pro codec. Well, we tried both flvs and QuickTimes and had major problems with both. First, encoding to flv from our digitized files took approximately 24 hours for each clip. (You don't realize how large uncompressed digital files are.) So that was obviously out. Rendering from Final Cut to DVC Pro was much quicker, so we did that. Then we had to figure out how to actually get them the files, and it turned out buying a bunch of drives and FedExing them all over the place was really the only way. But then every flv they encoded from our files ended up stretched, because they couldn't figure out how to handle the non-square pixels that were in their own QT spec (the spec calls for a 720x480 file at a 4:3 aspect ratio).
All of this (plus dealing with the metadata and various other things) ended up taking up basically 100% of my time, plus 100% of two PAs' time, plus a large chunk of various other departments' time, plus probably 30-40% of my boss' time. And we had to buy a bunch of new hardware and software to do all the encodes ourselves that we ended up doing, and come up with all new processes.
You have to think about all the hidden costs. It's not just a case of "oh webcasting uses no bandwidth so it's practically free". Would it be "free" if, say, you suddenly asked General Motors to start making rubber ducks or bathtubs instead of cars? That's pretty much the equivalent. It is a totally new process that needs to be created from scratch. There's almost nothing about webcasting that is similar to broadcasting.
It doesn't even save money after you've got things set up and running somewhat smoothly, because now you've got *two* separate processes going on - broadcast TV still exists and will exist for the foreseeable future.
This is something Hulu needs to work on, actually. For shows like the Simpsons or House, which are highly popular, the commercials are always spot on. For less popular shows, such as some of the oddities like Paranormal TV, cooking, and anime, the commercials can cut in at the worst times.
Has nothing to do with Hulu. The segment times are programmed by whoever submits the show. And yes, I know this from experience.
It is possible that Hulu's system could just be screwing up occasionally - it wouldn't be the first time - but if you watch an episode more than once and always see the breaks in the same places, then obviously it's working properly and those breaks were programmed by the TV channel, not Hulu.
Why would a business, with this theoretical professional attitude, use the stock image that came with *any* new computer? I thought it was more or less standard procedure for the admins to provide a sanitized and customized image and use that right off the bat. I mean, it isn't any sort of secret that computers get shipped with tons of garbage pre installed, why was it allowed to be used in a production environment like that?
At every company I've worked at, laptops do not get imaged right off the bat for several reasons:
a) often non-standard hardware that needs special drivers
b) laptops often need software installed that the desktops don't (meaning IT depts. would need to grant admin access anyway)
c) too many support headaches. IT would rather let the manufacturer deal with it.
Also, traditionally companies bought ThinkPad laptops because of the stuff they came with preinstalled, and also the stuff they don't. ThinkPads don't ship with a bunch of trialware and crapware - or at least they didn't before Lenovo took over. (My first ThinkPad shipped 100% clean. My current one shipped with Norton and some other junk, not to mention about 100 processes running; very disappointing.) But they do ship with a lot of useful (and some previously-useful) stuff, like hard drive shock protection and biometric security. Lenovo has cut into this usefulness by pretty much dropping support for some of the better pre-installed utilities, like the System Update utility that acted like Windows Update, but just for machine-specific drivers and utilities. You now have to get them manually from Lenovo's web site.
Lenovo has really been running the ThinkPad line into the ground. It's not just their software shenanigans; I have a TP SL500, and I would not say it qualifies in any way as a ThinkPad. It has a glossy plastic lid, no roll cage, no thinklight (ok, I knew that going in), a really crappy keyboard that feels like junk and doesn't even lay flat, and it crashes on me about once per day. It also makes an annoying high-pitched whining noise from the processor - and no, it's not the fan. It's really just about the worst laptop I've ever owned and if it wasn't for the matte screen (still an option!) and the TrackPoint (which I still LOVE), I'd have sold this thing months ago.
The higher-end ThinkPads are *better* but not as good as they used to be. For example, Lenovo uses three keyboard suppliers now, when IBM used to use just one - and ThinkPads have long been known for their keyboards. Supposedly one of Lenovo's suppliers is the same as what IBM used (I think it's NMB), but the other two are the same generic crap keyboard manufacturers as used in other brands' machines. And there's no way to know which one you're going to get - Lenovo treats them interchangeably, even in the same model, and even in their priciest machines.
They've really lost the plot when it comes to the ThinkPad line if you ask me.
So when actors endorsed $PRODUCT it was old media and OK, but now that it's bloggers we need to apply the same "old media" rules? Blogging is different then advertising and should have different rules -- or NO rules.
Free Speach is much more important then some FTC fear of everybody being confused on the internet.
Are you honestly telling me that you cannot differentiate between an ad and payola? And you don't see the obvious ethical difference?
If a blog wants to come out and say "buy X product, because they paid us to tell you to", that's totally fine. That is an ad.
What is not fine is for them to say "buy X product because we like it!" when they secretly don't, but have been asked to say they do by the manufacturer that has showered them with gifts in return.
This is not a free speech issue, nor is there a damn thing that's confusing about it to anyone with half a brain.
And the only people that have anything to "fear" from it are those who are afraid of no longer being able to scam their readers.
Yes, though that's rather specific to the financial industry. The securities market is more (though not nearly enough, apparently) heavily regulated than commerce at large.
This discussion is about payola. And yes, all broadcast stations are forbidden from accepting payola without disclosing it:
http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/PayolaRules.html
The FCC obviously regulates the airwaves, so this wouldn't apply to newspapers, but it does apply to all broadcast stations. There might be some similar rule enforced by the FTC in regard to newspapers, I'm not sure.
No. The statistics are clearly faulty.
First, 1 in 10 Americans does not own either of these formats. Come on, really? 30 million Americans own HD-DVD players? If Toshiba and their partners had sales like that, the format war would have been over long before it was - in HD-DVD's favor.
Second, this clearly isn't taking into account the 22 million PS3's out there, of which about 12 million are in the United States. This is still the player of choice for most people - at least until that $99 player announced over the weekend comes along. But this is one case where a game console is actually clearly better than most standalone players and most people know it.
Polaroids can still be useful for previewing exposures in large-format photography, which is still a film world. They simply don't make 4x5" digital sensors, period.
They were also still in wide use up until the very end in the film industry, where they were used both for location scouting and for continuity. It is simply *not* more convenient to take a bunch of pictures with a digital camera, go back to the office and print them out, *then* put those printouts in a binder than it is to just take a bunch of photos and stick them in a binder immediately so anyone can see them. Even if you have a small digital printer that you bring with you, that's still an extra step, not to mention the time and effort it takes to hook up the printer and then print out the photo.
Of course, that is what the industry does these days, but they are still not particularly happy about it.
My digicam has a voice memo feature - I can annotate a photo any time after taking it.
Well now, that wouldn't be very cinematic, would it?
Sheesh, there are other movies out there besides Star Trek - you'd think *someone* else here would have gotten the reference.
I'm calling bullshit on that one. How'd you remember your login/password here? Or do you have it tattooed on you somewhere? (Not very good for security IMNSHO.)
Someone needs to watch more movies.
It's generally a good sign of a software company's health if it has a clearly defined process not just for actual software development, but for planning and milestone setting.
You hit it squarely on the head.
I used to read these statements from 3DR about the game being done "when it's done" with bemusement, because while many saw that as a commitment to quality, I just saw it as code for "we have no idea what we're doing, so don't hold your breath".
DNF should be a lesson to everybody that milestones and deadlines exist for a reason. While they can seem arbitrary and occasionally unrealistic, without them you get into this pattern of meandering where nothing is ever as good as you think you can make it, so you constantly tweak and fix, then as you're doing that new technologies come out and pass your work by, meaning you need to basically start over and everything repeats again.
Every game ever released has parts that the developers wished they could have spent more time on, or re-done in some way. No game is ever 100% perfect from the developer's perspective. But they get released anyway, and if the developer has done their job at all, everybody loves the game anyway and nobody notices the little things that the developer sees. (This is no different than any other creative medium, btw. Film, music, art... creators are never fully satisfied.)
Without milestones, though, the developer is free to fixate on those little things that nobody else would ever notice or care about. That's why project management is one of the most important aspects of game production. And 3DR didn't seem to have any.
Yes 2k owns the publishing rights, but not the IP to Duke Nukem. It was said however that 2k games has offered 30million for the ip rights for whole Duke Nukem franchise, so have to see how it turns out.
Ironically, 3DR shutting down may be just the impetus needed to actually get this game released.
If 2K does manage to buy it, I would expect its release within the year. In what state, who knows, but it'll be out there.
The submission makes it sound as if there's some big mystery about adding 3G to a laptop that Apple has to solve. But there are other laptop makers out there besides Apple, and almost all of them have been putting 3G in their notebooks for years now. This is a feature that Apple is just behind on, and especially if they want to keep *any* semblance of a business market (and designers and photographers run businesses too - and a lot of them are freelance, working outside), then it's something they really need to catch up on.
It's a big and obvious mistake to suggest that 3G connectivity is meant to replace wi-fi. 3G connectivity is meant to replace, well, not having any connectivity. Laptops are meant to be portable, and they can go lots of places where wi-fi doesn't exist.
I can't believe I actually even have to explain this.
Korea, and Japan are highly competitive markets when it comes to telecommunications.
Not when it comes to infrastructure. All infrastructure projects in Japan are heavily funded public works programs, including their internet backbone. The competitive market comes in as a result of that, not a cause. Their markets are as competitive as they are because the government invested the money to make them that way.
It's not that nobody in the US government realizes this - that's why Obama included high speed internet in his stimulus plan. But we haven't had a government like this for eight years, so things aren't going to change overnight.
This is why capitalism failed: because commoners and the intelligent don't understand that no transaction is one-sided except theft (which is why government is theft, by the way).
Huh? You had me and then you lost me. Please explain that last part, because I can't see any logic in that statement.
If the companies delivering internet doesn't deliver the speed or quality desired by the citizens of a region or city; then I see absolutely no problem with the people taking matters into their own hands. In fact I would call it democracy in practice.
It's more like socialism in practice. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but let's call it what it is.
Ok, there's a bit of a distinction here. "Citizen-owned" and "City-owned" are two different things. A "citizen-owned" entity would just be a corporation like any other, subject to the same rules as Time Warner. Time Warner itself is "citizen-owned". But such a competing corporation couldn't operate in most cities because of franchise rules that on the one hand keep there from being a tangled mess of wires and torn-up streets everywhere but on the other hand also sanction monopolies.
This is a city-owned entity. It is a government organization that is undercutting a private company by selling its products and services at cost. There's no way for any private for-profit company to "compete" with that. Socialism is not about competition; it's about government providing services at the lowest cost possible. Businesses exist to be profitable; they're not charities. The goal of a business is to sell products for the highest price possible, not the lowest.
Now, I'm not arguing that there's anything wrong with what this city is doing. But I wonder how many people who are criticizing Time Warner over this really understand what they're arguing in favor of. They're arguing in favor of an economic system that is designed to be anti-competitive and to provide services for less than a private company ever could. Given that most seem to be criticizing Time Warner for "not competing", I would say very few understand this.
When I first saw the headline, I thought "why would Seattle be so concerned about Pittsburgh? They're not even in the same league!"
It is an odd headline even knowing the right context.
Please submit a link to a post where you have done what you are asking of him.
What, because he hasn't done the same thing, he has no right to criticize? That's fallacy. You may as well say nobody has the right to criticize the president because they've never been president.
FWIW, I felt the same way as the parent - I couldn't even make out the song at first, and that ruined it enough that I just quit listening after about 30 seconds. Not to take away from the guy's effort - I'm sure it was a lot of work, and he should be commended for that - but it ends up just sounding like a bad MIDI recording.
Two words: pro wrestling.
Even pro wrestling is "real" in that the moves they're performing are real. When a guy jumps off a ring corner 20 feet into the air and does a backflip down on top of another guy, that's real. And without a lot of training and a lot of practice, you're looking at serious injury or worse without proper training.
You can debate the difference between a "game" and a "sport" but for me, it really comes down to the risk of physical injury. A big reason (though not the only reason) people like sports is because they like to see athletes perform physical feats that they themselves cannot. It's all about pushing the body to its limit. "Games" don't have that. They can still be interesting to watch, but for other reasons. You don't watch a chess match hoping to see a 99 yard touchdown pass or a slam dunk. On the other hand, the audience for watching "games" is inherently much smaller than the audience for sports, because there's less raw excitement.
Professional gaming is what it says - a game, not a sport. It will never be more popular than, say, watching two people play chess. People are just inherently more interested in watching other people perform physical tasks - video gaming is in the second person, you're watching someone manipulate some other character that doesn't really exist, and it's that virtual character that appears to be doing all the work and taking all the risks. It's not a sport and it'll never be popular for that reason.
I don't have any problem with this, aside from cases where you're using the trademark with permission.
Well, but a lot of people are. Google is not actually allowing anyone to use trademarked names at the moment, including advertisers who have distribution deals with those who own the trademark (which generally gives them the right to use the trademark in marketing - after all, what manufacturer wouldn't want their officially authorized dealers to advertise that they sell their items??). There are a lot of complaints about this on the Adwords support forum right now.
In fact, I'm not even sure the trademark owners themselves could get away with using their trademarks at the moment, given that Google's support is basically non-existent - they will allow it if you prove to them that you own the trademark, but good luck with that. Google sends an automated response to basically everybody that emails them for any reason these days.
I run a small web store selling Japanese clothes, and I made sure not to use any of the actual brands we carry in our Adwords keywords. That's another thing - if your account gets suspended because of this, good luck getting it unsuspended. Again, it's like they don't even have anybody working there right now.
Except he's a public official. I for one very much doubt he did this in his own time, or with his own money.
But you're turning this around. Again, that's a question of abuse of power, which really has nothing to do with protection of privacy. Politicians can and do abuse their power in any number of ways to get what they want. Whether that happened here is a separate issue.
The question is "do you have a right to anonymity when making political editorials?" That's a different question than "do you have the right to make anonymous political editorials?" The answer to the latter question is "of course". The answer to the former question is "of course not".
There's no protection of privacy when making editorials, especially ones that by design are intended to hurt someone else. Whether or not that hurt is justified and the editorial truthful is immaterial - just as an accused defendant has the right to know his accuser in court, so too is it elsewhere in our society.
Look at it this way. Imagine if, instead of some random person, this blogger was instead a member of the Republican National Committee executing a covert strategy to take down this Democratic representative. Would their privacy be protected then? If not, why not?
There can't be a double standard for the obvious reason that you don't know who you're dealing with or what their motives are until they are unmasked. And both the accused and the public have a right to know that.
Anonymity has its uses, but this country has a much longer history - and a long legal basis - in people dealing with each other face to face, with all the cards on the table.
Crustaceans are bugs. They have like 5 brain cells.
What difference does that make?
And did you actually read the article? Reflexes don't last for a lifetime. The part about the hermit crabs switching shells only if they'd been exposed to a painful stimuli in the past certainly suggests pain memory. The fact that crustaceans limp when exposed to painful stimuli is also pretty compelling evidence. There's no reason whatsoever to limp unless you feel pain - that's a pain-induced protection response, not an aversive reflex.
The whole point of the article is that we've assumed crustaceans don't experience pain because they don't have a neocortex in their brains, which is where we experience pain. But that just means they don't experience it by the same mechanism we do, not that they don't experience it at all. (Since you apparently didn't read the article, they use vision as another example of something lobsters have that's processed in a manner completely different from humans.)
Well, but both certificates were for capitalone.com subdomains. In this case, I wouldn't worry too much about it. I'd complain, but it's more of an annoyance than a security risk.
I'd worry a lot more if one certificate was for capitalone.com and the other for capone.com or capitolone.com or capital1.com or something like that. Then you've got a problem.
Not to mention that I regularly use satellite imagery to augment maps when I am going somewhere unfamiliar and want to get a better idea of what it will look like when I get there.
I do too, although arguably street view is a lot more useful for that. You're not going to be looking at where you're going from 200 miles up when you get there, so why do you need to see it from that angle if the purpose is to get an idea of what it will look like from the ground?
Personally, I'm having a hard time getting really worked up about this one way or the other. Maybe it's because I lived without satellite images for approximately 33 of my 37 years on this Earth without much of a problem, and I don't think we'd be losing much to not have them again. This is not like GPS or the internet as a whole or something where there is real utility that would be lost if you switched it off.
On the other hand, I'm obviously against all this fear-mongering. I'm not so intentionally dense (as I do believe some people are) as to not see any way that a terrorist could use these images for their own purposes, but that doesn't mean I think it's a reason to blur anything or turn it off. It's just a tool, and like any tool it can be used for good or evil. It's not a weapon, it's not a drug, it's not something the government should have a role in regulating.
It's more like, say, a pipe wrench. Sure, I could take a pipe wrench and whack somebody over the head with it and probably kill them. I could do it repeatedly and probably kill a lot of people.
Or, I could use it to fix broken pipes.
This is the thing with tools. They have a benign purpose and that's what most people use them for. But of course they *could* be used for evil. Are we going to just regulate everything that fits that description?
If the government is going to outlaw Google's satellite images, then it seems to me they need to outlaw pipe wrenches too.