I'm not sure if it was the person who submitted the article or if samzenpus decided to condense things, but the quote is straight from the article, except for removing one sentence from the middle:
"Details of how the attacks could be executed were kept under wraps while solar panel monitoring kit vendor Solar-Log distributed a patch for the flaws."
Which wouldn't be that big a deal, except that the part included in the Slashdot blurb refers to the "eponymous management system", which makes absolutely no sense if you don't include the name of the software/company.
Well tastes differ of course, but Spider-Man is supposed to be the "everyman" hero. And not even a regular "everyman", a smart but kind of dorky and awkward "everyman" who just lucks into his powers.
Superman is born with his powers (but doesn't consider himself "special" despite that.) Batman develops his "powers" through hard work and dedication. (Obviously being rich helps a lot, but also obviously not every rich person can become a superhero.) Captain America is, generally speaking, rewarded with his powers because he is at heart a great person. Or along the lines of the old adage, some are born great (Superman) some achieve greatness (Batman, Captain America) and some have greatness thrust upon them (Spider-Man.)
If you take Spider-Man and make him less dorky and awkward he seems a bit less like the everyman, at least to the dorky and awkward people who comics are (or at least used to be) most popular with:) If you change his backstory from "stumbled into powers" to "was destined to gain his powers from his parents", then you're really changing his character type, even if it's not immediately apparent. He's no long the type of character that became popular with his fans in the first place and, as you say, if the everyman wasn't your type of superhero to begin with then there are already a lot of other options.
I'm obviously at in advantage because i live in SoCal, but when i switched to T-Mobile at the start of 2010 i thought their 3G network was pretty good. When my phone started malfunctioning in... mid 2011 i think? and couldn't hold a 3G connection anymore, i thought their Edge network was slow, but i made do. When i got my new phone in late 2013 i thought 4G was blazing fast. Fast enough that i don't even bother switching to wireless at home. (That choice is influenced by being on the $30/month unlimited data plan and the fact that our wireless router can be a bit wonky at times.)
I haven't found anywhere outside in OC or LA where i can't get signal, except for some spots near the top of the Runyon Canyon Park, which i can live with. When i was on 3G or Edge there were a couple buildings that i couldn't get signal inside of very well (unfortunately one of those buildings was my office =) but since switching to 4G that problem seems to have disappeared.
(Except for the lunch room at work. I can't get signal in the lunch room. No one, no matter what their carrier, can get signal in the lunch room. They must have built it out of lead or something.)
(random musing: I like pink motorcycle lady, and don't remember anything distinctive about her voice at all. I don't really think she's any better or worse than CZJ was.)
I'm judging this based almost solely on the trailers, but the new Peter Parker does not seem dorky enough. He looks like they tried to make him into a hipster instead. The CGI in the trailers, especially for the second movie, makes me think "video game" more than "action movie". And all in all i just don't see the point of Spider-Man reboot so soon.
I've seen all the Marvel movies (great.) I saw Man of Steel (okay movie with significant problems that have already been hashed over.) I saw Wolverine (not perfect, but a lot better than the Origins movie). And i'm going to go see Days of Future Past. I have almost zero interest in seeing the second take of Spider-Man 2. Nothing this review has said really changes my opinion (i don't think Spider-Man really needed that much shading) and some of the things i've read in other reviews have helped bolster that opinion. (Rewriting Spider-Man's backstory via his parents to make him a "destined child" kind of strikes me as wrong.)
"but their ID-checking gun seems to default to an unfireable state, which might not always be an attractive feature."
I'm sorry, but that's the _only_ feature of this gun vis-a-vis a regular gun. The whole point is that it has to be "activated" by some specific method before it will work, in an attempt to verify that only the "right" person can use it. The details may differ, whether using a watch such as in this case or other proposed methods using fingerprints or other biometrics, but the fundamental concept is that the gun doesn't fire unless that condition is met.
Why in the world would you pay extra for a gun that checks your ID, but then decides to default to a fireable state even if you fail the ID check? If that's what you want you could just get a regular gun that doesn't bother checking your ID to begin with.
If you don't like the fundamental concept, don't buy the gun. If you don't like the idea of laws being passed in relation to this concept then write to your congressperson and/or vote for someone else. But complaining that the gun does exactly what it is designed to do is just dumb. (And needless to say, harassing and/or threatening employees of the company that sells them is just insane.)
Doesn't a gas giant "giving birth" to a moon count? Hot Venus? Radio signal from Jupiter?
No, it doesn't. Velikovsky theorized that Venus was ejected from Jupiter. We have no good theories for how or why a gas giant would spontaneously produce and then eject a smaller terrestrial planet, not to mention no physical evidence that i've seen that it has ever actually happened.
What is going on here is that some of the material in Saturn's rings has accreted together into a moonlet. It's already been theorized that that's how at least some of Saturn's other 100+ moonlets were formed. The only reason that this is at all a surprise is that A: there's still enough material left in the rings after forming all the other moonlets and B: that we're caught it in the middle of the process . And as for (B), i haven't seen any estimates of how long it's been going on, but i suspect that it's been taking place slowly over millions of years, and we're only seeing it now because we've finally gotten sensitive enough instruments in the right position to detect it.
If so then in one case we have a tiny moon, one of over 100, being formed by a known method over a period of millions of years. And in the other case we have the 2nd largest terrestrial planet, one of just 8 planets total, being formed by an entirely unknown method over the period of a couple thousand years.
The first case provides absolutely no support for the second case.
As for "Hot Venus", that doesn't really provide any evidence for Velikovsky unless you don't believe the greenhouse effect exists.
And i don't know what radio signals from Jupiter have to do with Velikovsky's theories of planetary formation, so i can't really address that.
Even if you doubt his line of reasoning, his predictions are very interesting. Perhaps you can interpret his narrative as, at the very least, a very productive muse.
Oh sure, they're _interesting_. But lots of people make interesting predictions from random theories that aren't based on any solid evidence. Some of those people we call science fiction and fantasy authors, and others we call crackpots, depending on whether they think their "interesting predictions" are actually the truth or just a form of entertainment.
There are certain topics for which simplistic narratives dominate over thorough investigation and rational discourse. These include:
(1) Anything about Velikovsky or mythology: Most people simply assume that mythology = myth. Very few people take the time to investigate any observed correspondences between the stories held by cultures -- and even when suggestions are made for scientific explanations.
You're only half right. These days no one has a problem with proposing that myths may be based on scientific realities. There have been intriguing proposals about the relation between the myth of Atlantis and the erruption of Thera, a similar or identical link to the parting of the Red Sea, and several interesting theories about what might have inspired the various deluge mythologies.
The problem with Velikovsky is that his proposed solutions were batshit crazy. If the Uniformitarians were insisting that 2 + 2 = 3, then Velikovsky was right that they were getting it wrong. But his proposed counter-solution was that 2 + 2 = 10000!
We have pretty good evidence that the solar system is in a fairly stable situation in regards to the major bodies. There's certainly no astronomical record of any significant changes for the past several hundred years. (And i suspect much longer if one takes Chinese astronomical observations into account.)
But we are supposed to believe that between about 10k years ago and approximately 1 AD, the solar system underwent a MASSIVE reconfiguration. One or more new planets were created and several planets, including Earth, significantly changed their orbits, involving several VERY close passes between those planets. Then after all those planets finished swapping places and crossing paths with each other they just settled down into a configuration that just coincidentally also could have been stable for the last several hundred million years, and then haven't budged an inch (metaphorically speaking) since then.
The other theories i mentioned in the first paragraph have good physical evidence to indicate that they are at least plausible. As far as i'm aware Velikovsky had no physical evidence supporting his claims. In fact the full version of his theory is something like "If, in total contradiction to all present appearances, the solar system of a few thousand years ago was an entirely chaotic system, AND we rewrite several portions of recorded history to make points in different timelines line up better, THEN we might be able to explain certain myths." I'm sorry, but Occam's Razor just does not work that way.
Just to push another free online alternative, i've been using FreeTaxUSA.com for several years. They'll file your federal taxes for free, but charge a fairly small fee to file your state as well. (I believe it was about $10 the last time i paid, but may have gone up since then.)
I used to pay that small fee, but then last year(?) CA started their free efile thing, so now i do my CA taxes for free via the CA website, and my Fed taxes for free via the FreeTaxUSA site. If more and more states start pushing the free efile thing then i expect FreeTaxUSA will have to rejigger their business model, but in the meantime it's a good thing for me.
Of course i have very simple taxes, so i can't say how either system would work for people who actually have credits and loopholes they want to use. Based on the comments i posted at the time it took me 12 minutes to do the state and 27 minutes to do the Fed. (Though it might have taken me a little longer if FreeTaxUSA hadn't saved some of my settings from last year.)
I'm kind of glad neither Velikovsky nor James P Hogan are still alive to blow this out or proportion. Velikovsky had a fundamentally good idea but got carried away with it, and James P Hogan wrote some good books related to the subject before his brain went soft in his old age.
And thus immediately after he explained how people are bad at comprehending the confluence of small probabilities with large numbers, you demonstrate the principle.
Yes, it might be only a 5% chance that _anyone_ finds that gold coin, not 5% chance per person. The issue is that it's not just one gold coin, there are a bunch of gold coins, each of which only has a 5% chance being found. The odds of someone finding a particular coin are small, but the odds of no one finding any of the coins is even smaller.
The odds of a particular skydiver having a close encounter with a particular meteor are astronomical. However many meteors surive atmospheric entry each day and many people go skydiving each day. The odds that every skydiver that day will be far away from every meteor that day is _much_ lower. Still not common, but much lower. And the odds that it doesn't happen to any skydiver on any day in the year is another couple magnitudes lower.
Then on top of that, what are the odds that a balloonist has a close encounter with a meteor? Or a hang glider?
Instead of a skydiver encountering a meteor, it could have been someone falling out of a plane without a parachute or having their parachute fail but surviving the fall anyways. (It's happened a couple times in history.) Or a meteorite hitting the ground somewhere famous in front of a bunch of tourists. Or an practically infinite number of other very unlikely things that don't involve either rocks or people falling out of the sky. If either of those stories had happened instead we'd still be saying "wow, what were the odds of that happening?"
If you can think of something that has exactly a trillion to one odds of happening to anyone in their lifetime, the odds of it happening to anyone on the planet aren't good. If you come up with a 1000 different things with those odds that are entirely unrelated to each other, then the odds that at least one of them will happen to someone on the planet are pretty high.
Still to this day, every time the Daily Show starts with "I'm Jon Stewart" i can't help but mentally fill in "here's my report." I really wish they'd put the show out on DVD. I'm glad that you can find some of the sketches on YouTube, but it's a rather limited selection.
And has anyone seen "The (206)" yet? Is it anywhere near as good? If so i need to figure out a way to watch that. (Preferably a legal way that will help convince them there's a demand and keep the show from being canceled.)
I wish i'd thought of registering that! Not that i'd use it for my primary account, but it would be fun to use on occasion, and i'm sure some really weird stuff gets sent there.
I live along Wilshire, the street on (or rather, under) which they're building this subway, the Purple Line extension. They just started a couple months ago. The first stage of the project is currently planned to last 9 years, which will cover 4 miles. A bit of trivia, it only took only ten years for the US to dig the 48 mile Panama canal through jungle and mountainous terrain. (To be fair, the French had already done about 15% of the excavation when the US acquired the project, but that ten year time span includes reviewing the plans and deciding to take a different approach.)
They're currently trying to get a permit to do 24 hour construction, i only know about this because there have been people going around the neighborhood trying to get everyone to sign a petition to block the permit. The people pushing the petition are trying to make it sound like there would be construction going on 24 hours a day every day for the full 9 years. I'm sure that's not actually the case, for if no other reason than if they were doing 24 hour construction every day it would almost certainly take less than 9 years. However LA hasn't made it very clear how much time, if any, they expect to cut off the deadline if they do get the permit.
TLDR: The project is already scheduled to take forever. I don't think it really matters if they stop for awhile to take a look at some fossils. In fact if they're at least halfway competent they could probably work on another section while the fossils are being excavated.
"When one thinks of Consumer Reports, refrigerator ratings and car seat reviews usually come to mind"
Actually i bought my subscription to Consumer Reports specifically because of the car reviews, and if i were to name the top two things that come to my mind when i think of them it would probably be cars and TVs.
I'm an okay programmer (I'd estimate that i'm maybe in the 25-50th percentile, far from a star but still able to provide some value) but my memory for names is horrible. I'll often remember there's a function that does X but not remember the name. With code completion i can narrow in on the right function pretty quickly. Without it i'd have to either go check old code to see what function it was i used in the past or do some searches online to rediscover it, either of which would take much longer.
Actually i'm not really sure which is worse, the archived BBC front page or the current BBC front page. Checking some more pages from the archive, in my opinion the 2010 BBC beats out both the modern and 2001 BBCs. The 2005 BBC is rather weak though.
For contrast, the 2001 and 2005 CNN front pages looks decent, but by 2010 it was starting to decline. A lot of sites on the web seem to be heading in a direction that i don't particularly like. Maybe i'm just a stick in the mud or maybe there are a bunch of people who've specialized in web design and UI and feel the need to make things fancy than necessary in order to justify their own existence. (The guy who came up with GMail's new compose springs to mind.)
And one more bit, like many people i browse Slashdot more at work than i probably should. The more "fancy" and the less plain-texty it looks, the less comfortable i feel doing that. Also when at work i use NoScript and block as much scripting as possible (particularly after one site i used to visit started using scripts to refresh itself and link to other sites so often that it threw up some flags in IT and i got me a talking-to from my manager) so needing to enable JavaScript in order to read comments in Beta is _very_ annoying.
I need to spend some time at lunch finding a screencap of Manning's face as the opening snap flies right past his head. It was priceless at the time, and only more so in retrospect as it set the tone for the entire game.
In order to really fix things requires going back in time. They either should have released the Wii U a year or two earlier, or they should have made it much more powerful. A year or two earlier and a Wii that was effectively on par with the PS3 and 360 would have seemed great. Coming out just a year before the much more powerful PS4 and XBOne made it seem pretty weak. On the other hand if they could have gotten it at least into the same ballpark as the PS4 and XBOne in terms of specs they might have been okay. The PS2 was the weakest console of its generation in terms of power, but it was "good enough" and it was the earliest of the surviving consoles to come out so got a big head start.
Of course the only way they could have aforded to do that however would be to ditch the Wii U tablet controller, which is consuming far too much of the cost per console. It's an interesting idea, and there are some cool things you can do with it, but the evidence seems to indicate that it just wasn't worth it. The Wii was revolutionary when it came out, and everyone else copied Nintendo. With the Wii U it was pretty clear that now Nintendo was the one doing the copying.
Maybe there's some other gimick they could have come up with which would have re-created the Wii frenzy all over again, but a pseudo-tablet wasn't it.
And overarching all of this, they need better third party support. They've needed better third party support since the N64 days, and if anything the problem has only gotten worse. People keep telling them they need better third party support, and occasionally they admit they need better third party support and announce some plan to get better third party support, and yet somehow it never gets fixed. Part of the problem is that they've gotten themselves stuck in a viscious circle, no one expects good third party games on Nintendo consoles (as opposed to handhelds) so no one buys third party games, so third parties judge that making games for Nintendo consoles isn't profitable, so no on expects good third party games... But of course Nintendo isn't helping with their often counter-productive approaches toward third parties. I ahve no idea what Nintendo could do to dig them out of the pit they've gotten themselves into in this regard.
Unless things turn around on the Wii U really soon, the best they can possibly do is have a short generation. About three years from now release the Wii U 2, with better stats than the PS4 and XBOne. (Releasing it two years from now would be better, except they'd risk really pissing off everyone who already bought a Wii U, cf. Dreamcast. A 4 year cycle is short, but not unreasonable.) Make it backwards compatible with the Wii and Wii U, but don't include the tablet controller. The only new gimick i can think of that _might_ go over well would be a VR type system, but then they'd be going up against Oculus Rift. (I'm also not convinved that a VR system would be good for gaming. On the other half i didn't think the Wii motion controller or Wii U tablet controller would be good for gaming, so as far as the market is concenred i'm running about 50/50 on my predictions.)
TLDR: For once actually do _something_ to fix relations with third party developers and release a simple but powerful console three years from now.
Actually, here's another idea. When they announce that future console, make it a joint project with Sega. Even if Sega only had a small share (say, 10%) the news that Sega was getting back into the console business would generate a ton of PR. But that's even less likely to happen than Nintendo getting the next console right on their own.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure if it was the person who submitted the article or if samzenpus decided to condense things, but the quote is straight from the article, except for removing one sentence from the middle:
"Details of how the attacks could be executed were kept under wraps while solar panel monitoring kit vendor Solar-Log distributed a patch for the flaws."
Which wouldn't be that big a deal, except that the part included in the Slashdot blurb refers to the "eponymous management system", which makes absolutely no sense if you don't include the name of the software/company.
Well tastes differ of course, but Spider-Man is supposed to be the "everyman" hero. And not even a regular "everyman", a smart but kind of dorky and awkward "everyman" who just lucks into his powers.
:) If you change his backstory from "stumbled into powers" to "was destined to gain his powers from his parents", then you're really changing his character type, even if it's not immediately apparent. He's no long the type of character that became popular with his fans in the first place and, as you say, if the everyman wasn't your type of superhero to begin with then there are already a lot of other options.
Superman is born with his powers (but doesn't consider himself "special" despite that.) Batman develops his "powers" through hard work and dedication. (Obviously being rich helps a lot, but also obviously not every rich person can become a superhero.) Captain America is, generally speaking, rewarded with his powers because he is at heart a great person. Or along the lines of the old adage, some are born great (Superman) some achieve greatness (Batman, Captain America) and some have greatness thrust upon them (Spider-Man.)
If you take Spider-Man and make him less dorky and awkward he seems a bit less like the everyman, at least to the dorky and awkward people who comics are (or at least used to be) most popular with
I'm obviously at in advantage because i live in SoCal, but when i switched to T-Mobile at the start of 2010 i thought their 3G network was pretty good. When my phone started malfunctioning in... mid 2011 i think? and couldn't hold a 3G connection anymore, i thought their Edge network was slow, but i made do. When i got my new phone in late 2013 i thought 4G was blazing fast. Fast enough that i don't even bother switching to wireless at home. (That choice is influenced by being on the $30/month unlimited data plan and the fact that our wireless router can be a bit wonky at times.)
I haven't found anywhere outside in OC or LA where i can't get signal, except for some spots near the top of the Runyon Canyon Park, which i can live with. When i was on 3G or Edge there were a couple buildings that i couldn't get signal inside of very well (unfortunately one of those buildings was my office =) but since switching to 4G that problem seems to have disappeared.
(Except for the lunch room at work. I can't get signal in the lunch room. No one, no matter what their carrier, can get signal in the lunch room. They must have built it out of lead or something.)
(random musing: I like pink motorcycle lady, and don't remember anything distinctive about her voice at all. I don't really think she's any better or worse than CZJ was.)
I'm judging this based almost solely on the trailers, but the new Peter Parker does not seem dorky enough. He looks like they tried to make him into a hipster instead. The CGI in the trailers, especially for the second movie, makes me think "video game" more than "action movie". And all in all i just don't see the point of Spider-Man reboot so soon.
I've seen all the Marvel movies (great.) I saw Man of Steel (okay movie with significant problems that have already been hashed over.) I saw Wolverine (not perfect, but a lot better than the Origins movie). And i'm going to go see Days of Future Past. I have almost zero interest in seeing the second take of Spider-Man 2. Nothing this review has said really changes my opinion (i don't think Spider-Man really needed that much shading) and some of the things i've read in other reviews have helped bolster that opinion. (Rewriting Spider-Man's backstory via his parents to make him a "destined child" kind of strikes me as wrong.)
"but their ID-checking gun seems to default to an unfireable state, which might not always be an attractive feature."
I'm sorry, but that's the _only_ feature of this gun vis-a-vis a regular gun. The whole point is that it has to be "activated" by some specific method before it will work, in an attempt to verify that only the "right" person can use it. The details may differ, whether using a watch such as in this case or other proposed methods using fingerprints or other biometrics, but the fundamental concept is that the gun doesn't fire unless that condition is met.
Why in the world would you pay extra for a gun that checks your ID, but then decides to default to a fireable state even if you fail the ID check? If that's what you want you could just get a regular gun that doesn't bother checking your ID to begin with.
If you don't like the fundamental concept, don't buy the gun. If you don't like the idea of laws being passed in relation to this concept then write to your congressperson and/or vote for someone else. But complaining that the gun does exactly what it is designed to do is just dumb. (And needless to say, harassing and/or threatening employees of the company that sells them is just insane.)
"AOL claims that it affects 'only' 2% of their members, but recommends that everyone change their passwords and security questions."
Hey mom? Sorry to bother you, but AOL got hacked, so could you please change your maiden name? I need a new answer for my security question.
Doesn't a gas giant "giving birth" to a moon count? Hot Venus? Radio signal from Jupiter?
No, it doesn't. Velikovsky theorized that Venus was ejected from Jupiter. We have no good theories for how or why a gas giant would spontaneously produce and then eject a smaller terrestrial planet, not to mention no physical evidence that i've seen that it has ever actually happened.
What is going on here is that some of the material in Saturn's rings has accreted together into a moonlet. It's already been theorized that that's how at least some of Saturn's other 100+ moonlets were formed. The only reason that this is at all a surprise is that A: there's still enough material left in the rings after forming all the other moonlets and B: that we're caught it in the middle of the process . And as for (B), i haven't seen any estimates of how long it's been going on, but i suspect that it's been taking place slowly over millions of years, and we're only seeing it now because we've finally gotten sensitive enough instruments in the right position to detect it.
If so then in one case we have a tiny moon, one of over 100, being formed by a known method over a period of millions of years. And in the other case we have the 2nd largest terrestrial planet, one of just 8 planets total, being formed by an entirely unknown method over the period of a couple thousand years.
The first case provides absolutely no support for the second case.
As for "Hot Venus", that doesn't really provide any evidence for Velikovsky unless you don't believe the greenhouse effect exists.
And i don't know what radio signals from Jupiter have to do with Velikovsky's theories of planetary formation, so i can't really address that.
Even if you doubt his line of reasoning, his predictions are very interesting. Perhaps you can interpret his narrative as, at the very least, a very productive muse.
Oh sure, they're _interesting_. But lots of people make interesting predictions from random theories that aren't based on any solid evidence. Some of those people we call science fiction and fantasy authors, and others we call crackpots, depending on whether they think their "interesting predictions" are actually the truth or just a form of entertainment.
There are certain topics for which simplistic narratives dominate over thorough investigation and rational discourse. These include:
(1) Anything about Velikovsky or mythology: Most people simply assume that mythology = myth. Very few people take the time to investigate any observed correspondences between the stories held by cultures -- and even when suggestions are made for scientific explanations.
You're only half right. These days no one has a problem with proposing that myths may be based on scientific realities. There have been intriguing proposals about the relation between the myth of Atlantis and the erruption of Thera, a similar or identical link to the parting of the Red Sea, and several interesting theories about what might have inspired the various deluge mythologies.
The problem with Velikovsky is that his proposed solutions were batshit crazy. If the Uniformitarians were insisting that 2 + 2 = 3, then Velikovsky was right that they were getting it wrong. But his proposed counter-solution was that 2 + 2 = 10000!
We have pretty good evidence that the solar system is in a fairly stable situation in regards to the major bodies. There's certainly no astronomical record of any significant changes for the past several hundred years. (And i suspect much longer if one takes Chinese astronomical observations into account.)
But we are supposed to believe that between about 10k years ago and approximately 1 AD, the solar system underwent a MASSIVE reconfiguration. One or more new planets were created and several planets, including Earth, significantly changed their orbits, involving several VERY close passes between those planets. Then after all those planets finished swapping places and crossing paths with each other they just settled down into a configuration that just coincidentally also could have been stable for the last several hundred million years, and then haven't budged an inch (metaphorically speaking) since then.
The other theories i mentioned in the first paragraph have good physical evidence to indicate that they are at least plausible. As far as i'm aware Velikovsky had no physical evidence supporting his claims. In fact the full version of his theory is something like "If, in total contradiction to all present appearances, the solar system of a few thousand years ago was an entirely chaotic system, AND we rewrite several portions of recorded history to make points in different timelines line up better, THEN we might be able to explain certain myths." I'm sorry, but Occam's Razor just does not work that way.
Just to push another free online alternative, i've been using FreeTaxUSA.com for several years. They'll file your federal taxes for free, but charge a fairly small fee to file your state as well. (I believe it was about $10 the last time i paid, but may have gone up since then.)
I used to pay that small fee, but then last year(?) CA started their free efile thing, so now i do my CA taxes for free via the CA website, and my Fed taxes for free via the FreeTaxUSA site. If more and more states start pushing the free efile thing then i expect FreeTaxUSA will have to rejigger their business model, but in the meantime it's a good thing for me.
Of course i have very simple taxes, so i can't say how either system would work for people who actually have credits and loopholes they want to use. Based on the comments i posted at the time it took me 12 minutes to do the state and 27 minutes to do the Fed. (Though it might have taken me a little longer if FreeTaxUSA hadn't saved some of my settings from last year.)
I'm kind of glad neither Velikovsky nor James P Hogan are still alive to blow this out or proportion. Velikovsky had a fundamentally good idea but got carried away with it, and James P Hogan wrote some good books related to the subject before his brain went soft in his old age.
That's nothing! Look at how many wikipedia articles there are for Redundancy!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And thus immediately after he explained how people are bad at comprehending the confluence of small probabilities with large numbers, you demonstrate the principle.
Yes, it might be only a 5% chance that _anyone_ finds that gold coin, not 5% chance per person. The issue is that it's not just one gold coin, there are a bunch of gold coins, each of which only has a 5% chance being found. The odds of someone finding a particular coin are small, but the odds of no one finding any of the coins is even smaller.
The odds of a particular skydiver having a close encounter with a particular meteor are astronomical. However many meteors surive atmospheric entry each day and many people go skydiving each day. The odds that every skydiver that day will be far away from every meteor that day is _much_ lower. Still not common, but much lower. And the odds that it doesn't happen to any skydiver on any day in the year is another couple magnitudes lower.
Then on top of that, what are the odds that a balloonist has a close encounter with a meteor? Or a hang glider?
Instead of a skydiver encountering a meteor, it could have been someone falling out of a plane without a parachute or having their parachute fail but surviving the fall anyways. (It's happened a couple times in history.) Or a meteorite hitting the ground somewhere famous in front of a bunch of tourists. Or an practically infinite number of other very unlikely things that don't involve either rocks or people falling out of the sky. If either of those stories had happened instead we'd still be saying "wow, what were the odds of that happening?"
If you can think of something that has exactly a trillion to one odds of happening to anyone in their lifetime, the odds of it happening to anyone on the planet aren't good. If you come up with a 1000 different things with those odds that are entirely unrelated to each other, then the odds that at least one of them will happen to someone on the planet are pretty high.
Still to this day, every time the Daily Show starts with "I'm Jon Stewart" i can't help but mentally fill in "here's my report." I really wish they'd put the show out on DVD. I'm glad that you can find some of the sketches on YouTube, but it's a rather limited selection.
And has anyone seen "The (206)" yet? Is it anywhere near as good? If so i need to figure out a way to watch that. (Preferably a legal way that will help convince them there's a demand and keep the show from being canceled.)
To: terrorist@google.com Subject: Do you want to build a snowman?
"certain accounts such as terrorist@google.com"
I wish i'd thought of registering that! Not that i'd use it for my primary account, but it would be fun to use on occasion, and i'm sure some really weird stuff gets sent there.
I live along Wilshire, the street on (or rather, under) which they're building this subway, the Purple Line extension. They just started a couple months ago. The first stage of the project is currently planned to last 9 years, which will cover 4 miles. A bit of trivia, it only took only ten years for the US to dig the 48 mile Panama canal through jungle and mountainous terrain. (To be fair, the French had already done about 15% of the excavation when the US acquired the project, but that ten year time span includes reviewing the plans and deciding to take a different approach.)
They're currently trying to get a permit to do 24 hour construction, i only know about this because there have been people going around the neighborhood trying to get everyone to sign a petition to block the permit. The people pushing the petition are trying to make it sound like there would be construction going on 24 hours a day every day for the full 9 years. I'm sure that's not actually the case, for if no other reason than if they were doing 24 hour construction every day it would almost certainly take less than 9 years. However LA hasn't made it very clear how much time, if any, they expect to cut off the deadline if they do get the permit.
TLDR: The project is already scheduled to take forever. I don't think it really matters if they stop for awhile to take a look at some fossils. In fact if they're at least halfway competent they could probably work on another section while the fossils are being excavated.
Slashdot would also like to know if you've stopped beating your wife.
"When one thinks of Consumer Reports, refrigerator ratings and car seat reviews usually come to mind"
...wait, they review car seats too?
Actually i bought my subscription to Consumer Reports specifically because of the car reviews, and if i were to name the top two things that come to my mind when i think of them it would probably be cars and TVs.
I'm an okay programmer (I'd estimate that i'm maybe in the 25-50th percentile, far from a star but still able to provide some value) but my memory for names is horrible. I'll often remember there's a function that does X but not remember the name. With code completion i can narrow in on the right function pretty quickly. Without it i'd have to either go check old code to see what function it was i used in the past or do some searches online to rediscover it, either of which would take much longer.
"with grouped together services that vary not just in throughput or quality guarantees, but in what sites you can reach at each service level"
Someone came up with a nice prediction of things to come along those lines: http://i.imgur.com/5RrWm.png
Actually i'm not really sure which is worse, the archived BBC front page or the current BBC front page. Checking some more pages from the archive, in my opinion the 2010 BBC beats out both the modern and 2001 BBCs. The 2005 BBC is rather weak though.
For contrast, the 2001 and 2005 CNN front pages looks decent, but by 2010 it was starting to decline. A lot of sites on the web seem to be heading in a direction that i don't particularly like. Maybe i'm just a stick in the mud or maybe there are a bunch of people who've specialized in web design and UI and feel the need to make things fancy than necessary in order to justify their own existence. (The guy who came up with GMail's new compose springs to mind.)
And one more bit, like many people i browse Slashdot more at work than i probably should. The more "fancy" and the less plain-texty it looks, the less comfortable i feel doing that. Also when at work i use NoScript and block as much scripting as possible (particularly after one site i used to visit started using scripts to refresh itself and link to other sites so often that it threw up some flags in IT and i got me a talking-to from my manager) so needing to enable JavaScript in order to read comments in Beta is _very_ annoying.
Betteridge's law of headlines strikes again!
I need to spend some time at lunch finding a screencap of Manning's face as the opening snap flies right past his head. It was priceless at the time, and only more so in retrospect as it set the tone for the entire game.
In order to really fix things requires going back in time. They either should have released the Wii U a year or two earlier, or they should have made it much more powerful. A year or two earlier and a Wii that was effectively on par with the PS3 and 360 would have seemed great. Coming out just a year before the much more powerful PS4 and XBOne made it seem pretty weak. On the other hand if they could have gotten it at least into the same ballpark as the PS4 and XBOne in terms of specs they might have been okay. The PS2 was the weakest console of its generation in terms of power, but it was "good enough" and it was the earliest of the surviving consoles to come out so got a big head start.
Of course the only way they could have aforded to do that however would be to ditch the Wii U tablet controller, which is consuming far too much of the cost per console. It's an interesting idea, and there are some cool things you can do with it, but the evidence seems to indicate that it just wasn't worth it. The Wii was revolutionary when it came out, and everyone else copied Nintendo. With the Wii U it was pretty clear that now Nintendo was the one doing the copying.
Maybe there's some other gimick they could have come up with which would have re-created the Wii frenzy all over again, but a pseudo-tablet wasn't it.
And overarching all of this, they need better third party support. They've needed better third party support since the N64 days, and if anything the problem has only gotten worse. People keep telling them they need better third party support, and occasionally they admit they need better third party support and announce some plan to get better third party support, and yet somehow it never gets fixed. Part of the problem is that they've gotten themselves stuck in a viscious circle, no one expects good third party games on Nintendo consoles (as opposed to handhelds) so no one buys third party games, so third parties judge that making games for Nintendo consoles isn't profitable, so no on expects good third party games... But of course Nintendo isn't helping with their often counter-productive approaches toward third parties. I ahve no idea what Nintendo could do to dig them out of the pit they've gotten themselves into in this regard.
Unless things turn around on the Wii U really soon, the best they can possibly do is have a short generation. About three years from now release the Wii U 2, with better stats than the PS4 and XBOne. (Releasing it two years from now would be better, except they'd risk really pissing off everyone who already bought a Wii U, cf. Dreamcast. A 4 year cycle is short, but not unreasonable.) Make it backwards compatible with the Wii and Wii U, but don't include the tablet controller. The only new gimick i can think of that _might_ go over well would be a VR type system, but then they'd be going up against Oculus Rift. (I'm also not convinved that a VR system would be good for gaming. On the other half i didn't think the Wii motion controller or Wii U tablet controller would be good for gaming, so as far as the market is concenred i'm running about 50/50 on my predictions.)
TLDR: For once actually do _something_ to fix relations with third party developers and release a simple but powerful console three years from now.
Actually, here's another idea. When they announce that future console, make it a joint project with Sega. Even if Sega only had a small share (say, 10%) the news that Sega was getting back into the console business would generate a ton of PR. But that's even less likely to happen than Nintendo getting the next console right on their own.
How is he supposed to serve as a lesson to others if they're busy purging all records of him?
"Remember what happened to Jang Song Thaek before you think about crossing me!"
"Who? I don't remember him at all."
"Exactly!"
Sounds a bit more like bad comedy than a real threat.
Hey, maybe _your_ universe only has ten dimensions, but _my_ universe goes to eleven!