The alternative hypothesis is the null hypothesis - global warming and global cooling and even global temperature stability are natural phenomena... Or do you deny that climate ever changed before humans came along?:)
Well, that does raise the issue, if this anti-evolution "scientist" establishes that CO2 is not the cause of global warming, what is his alternate hypothesis on the cause?
The whole point of insurance is to make a variable cost into a fixed cost. Even if better security substantially reduces your average cost over an infinte time horizon, it does not make the associated costs predictable. It's like saying, don't get homeowners insurance in case your house burns down, just remember to turn off the iron when you leave home.
I understand that concern, but I doubt they can pull it off. If a significant number of people start hitting the cap, there will be a lot of market pressure for higher caps (at least in areas with competitive markets), and legal pressure due to the obvious anti-competitive aspect. I wouldn't make a blanket statement that all caps are good or bad, it all depends on how restrictive they are. So long as most subscribers (90%+) aren't feeling a pinch, that seems reasonable for a fixed-price offering. I am willing to bet that average bandwidth usage per customer is still growing at a healthy rate, and I won't panic until/unless providers manage to stop that trend. If the caps haven't budged 3 or 4 years from now, I will certainly change my tune.
Some of the netflix is HD, but it's true even that bitrate is much less than broadcast TV. Still it looks better than DVD. Sure, I hope they will raise or eliminate the cap as more HD content becomes available for streaming. But calling it "useless" today is hyperbole.
I have a wife, 4 kids, and a netflix-enabled TV that we all use to watch streaming video. And my son in particular watches way too much youtube. We have never come even close to hitting the Comcast limit of 250 GB / mo.
I recently got an i7 4-core MacBook Pro and wonder if I should have got an i5, because this one can hardly do anything without the fan coming on, and is often uncomfortably hot on my lap.
If were about "doing more," people would still just be using email (and email lists) over twitter. It's all the restrictions of twitter that prevent it from being a nuisance that made it stick.
What kind of modeling has been done to determine the effects of pumping huge amounts of hot air into the upper atmosphere? They should, at least, plug this thing into one of the "Global Warming Is Caused By Man And Will Kill Us All" programs, and see what happens.
Pumping hot air into the upper atmosphere is the opposite of what they're doing; what they're doing is slowing the rise of hot air using a turbine. It's wind power, only vertical. The air will still get back up where it wants to be, but with some of its heat/velocity siphoned off by the turbine. (It's also like hydroelectric, except that fast-running rivers are a relatively scarce and easily exhausted resource, whereas wind turbines will only "dam" a negligible fraction of all moving air for the foreseeable future.)
Anyways, global warming is not caused by the release of man-made heat (which is negligible), it's caused by the release of gasses that make the atmosphere a more efficient thermal blanket over the earth, trapping more of the sun's energy. This thing won't release any greenhouse gasses.
Financial modelling at the rate they're getting--which will be above market rates for electricity, via government subsidies/mandates that a certain percentage of power generation be green. It's still good, but their financial modelling won't reflect true cost.
First, how do you know what modeling decisions they've made? Many renewable energy incentives have built-in sunset dates. Predicting their renewal is just as uncertain as predicting the price of gasoline years from now.
Second, using "true" cost in this way is a destructive misnomer. The market rate is not the "true cost" in any meaningful sense; rather it is heavily dependent on how much of true cost can be externalized (either by pushing costs onto unwilling participants, or into the future). Market forces can be harnessed productively to help set prices, but they are not The Truth.
Whether somebody is criminally insane or just "evil" doesn't make a huge difference in what happens to them though. It just determines whether they're locked up in an asylum or a prison (and taking antipsychotics either way). Even if a crazy violent person isn't culpable, society has to protect itself from them.
Yeah, I bet the whole thing was actually a mass execution of christians protesting for the right to feed starving puppies, and then they put them in a train and shot it with lightning and jumped it off a bridge as a cover story to save face. Darn commie face-savers.
And that is the model I hope Apple does not abandon in favor of the more provider-centric model typical of mobile apps. An automated update from Tiger to Lion straight from apple.com is an example of something that will not fly where I work - before a new OS version can be deployed, IT has to test each OS version for compatibility with all our approved applications, and train the computer support people, etc. It takes forever, and I suspect it isn't worth it, but this can't be the only place with such policies. Also lately I asked if we could store data at a provider to share with collaborators and was told "go talk to Computer Security and Legal," which is another way of saying, don't bother unless you really, really need this. Even full-screen apps rub me the wrong way a little bit. The corporate user is not there to watch TV, he is multiasking lots of applications on his 30" monitor. Again, I realize none of this is compulsory yet so I'm not trying to start a panic, I'm just saying, Apple please don't forget those of us who still need PCs for what they do well.
I think Apple will be motivated to use the mobile business models on the desktop wherever they can, because it's been so immensely profitable for them. I wouldn't like much of that, but I'm not too worried, because 1) customers, including corporate users, still have influence with Apple through their buying power, and 2) mobile won't always be this profitable, like anything it will become commoditized and simmer down.
As far as businesses loving devices that are locked down, you forget an important point - THEY want/need to be the ones with root, not some cloud provider somewhere.
Does this mean one could assign a PCI (express) slot with a graphics card to a virtual machine? If so it could become the easiest way to have a multi-seat box, which has always required some black magic until now.
One of my daughters also broke her arm from a fall off the monkey bars about 4 years ago. So, everybody rest easy, playgrounds aren't entirely safe yet.
Did you really think $9.99/mo for 1 DVD at a time + all the streaming content you can eat was going to last forever? Those are *startup* prices. They do that to grow the business, then they jack up the prices when they need to be profitable.
That's the problem. The IP owners are stuck in the mindset of, "all we have to do with this new technology is share enough of the benefit with customers to make it a tiny bit better than our previous offering..."
That approach wasn't super-successful for the music industry.
Are there any regulations in particular you find odious and unnecessary? Keep in mind, a high-profile disaster or 3 could easily set back the privatization of space, too. Look at nuclear power; regulation has added to the cost, but what's really held it back was not the cost, but the political fallout from nuclear disasters. (Which is not entirely fair, since nuclear power in the US seems reasonably well regulated and has a good safety record, but suffers from the legacy of, for example, Chernobyl, which was built and operated very differently).
It will be interesting to see how people react when the first astronauts from private industry are killed. Personally, I predict the political fallout will be LESS than the shuttle disasters, since all of us, by paying taxes, have a stake in those. On the other hand, space exploration doesn't have the legacy of, say, mining, an industry in which we just expect people to get buried alive once in a while, because it has always been that way.
This is not just facial recognition, but face, iris, and fingerprinting. I can't speak for this device in particular, but if inaccuracy is your only objection, get ready to embrace the technology, because multi-modal systems like this should be extremely accurate, soon if not already. (Even before portable DNA matching comes along, which it will).
Just because an iPhone is only $600 doesn't mean another company could duplicate its functionality for $600 to include in their product.
My question is the opposite - why is this a big bulky hardware add-on instead of simply using the camera already in the phone? I think somebody could approximate this functionality in a $2 app. (Perhaps it would require a close-up focus lens as well?) Hmm, it looks like it may have a fingerprint reader built-in, too. (Just like my Thinkpad!)
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No, I realize there is natural climate change. But the sudden change in CO2 concentration and temperature over the last few decades do not fit the pattern of change in the last several hundred thousand years. We're living in a climate outlier unprecedented to homo sapiens.
Well, that does raise the issue, if this anti-evolution "scientist" establishes that CO2 is not the cause of global warming, what is his alternate hypothesis on the cause?
The whole point of insurance is to make a variable cost into a fixed cost. Even if better security substantially reduces your average cost over an infinte time horizon, it does not make the associated costs predictable. It's like saying, don't get homeowners insurance in case your house burns down, just remember to turn off the iron when you leave home.
I understand that concern, but I doubt they can pull it off. If a significant number of people start hitting the cap, there will be a lot of market pressure for higher caps (at least in areas with competitive markets), and legal pressure due to the obvious anti-competitive aspect. I wouldn't make a blanket statement that all caps are good or bad, it all depends on how restrictive they are. So long as most subscribers (90%+) aren't feeling a pinch, that seems reasonable for a fixed-price offering. I am willing to bet that average bandwidth usage per customer is still growing at a healthy rate, and I won't panic until/unless providers manage to stop that trend. If the caps haven't budged 3 or 4 years from now, I will certainly change my tune.
Some of the netflix is HD, but it's true even that bitrate is much less than broadcast TV. Still it looks better than DVD. Sure, I hope they will raise or eliminate the cap as more HD content becomes available for streaming. But calling it "useless" today is hyperbole.
I have a wife, 4 kids, and a netflix-enabled TV that we all use to watch streaming video. And my son in particular watches way too much youtube. We have never come even close to hitting the Comcast limit of 250 GB / mo.
One supposes the servers would at least be in a cage.
I recently got an i7 4-core MacBook Pro and wonder if I should have got an i5, because this one can hardly do anything without the fan coming on, and is often uncomfortably hot on my lap.
If were about "doing more," people would still just be using email (and email lists) over twitter. It's all the restrictions of twitter that prevent it from being a nuisance that made it stick.
Pumping hot air into the upper atmosphere is the opposite of what they're doing; what they're doing is slowing the rise of hot air using a turbine. It's wind power, only vertical. The air will still get back up where it wants to be, but with some of its heat/velocity siphoned off by the turbine. (It's also like hydroelectric, except that fast-running rivers are a relatively scarce and easily exhausted resource, whereas wind turbines will only "dam" a negligible fraction of all moving air for the foreseeable future.)
Anyways, global warming is not caused by the release of man-made heat (which is negligible), it's caused by the release of gasses that make the atmosphere a more efficient thermal blanket over the earth, trapping more of the sun's energy. This thing won't release any greenhouse gasses.
First, how do you know what modeling decisions they've made? Many renewable energy incentives have built-in sunset dates. Predicting their renewal is just as uncertain as predicting the price of gasoline years from now.
Second, using "true" cost in this way is a destructive misnomer. The market rate is not the "true cost" in any meaningful sense; rather it is heavily dependent on how much of true cost can be externalized (either by pushing costs onto unwilling participants, or into the future). Market forces can be harnessed productively to help set prices, but they are not The Truth.
Whether somebody is criminally insane or just "evil" doesn't make a huge difference in what happens to them though. It just determines whether they're locked up in an asylum or a prison (and taking antipsychotics either way). Even if a crazy violent person isn't culpable, society has to protect itself from them.
Yeah, I bet the whole thing was actually a mass execution of christians protesting for the right to feed starving puppies, and then they put them in a train and shot it with lightning and jumped it off a bridge as a cover story to save face. Darn commie face-savers.
And that is the model I hope Apple does not abandon in favor of the more provider-centric model typical of mobile apps. An automated update from Tiger to Lion straight from apple.com is an example of something that will not fly where I work - before a new OS version can be deployed, IT has to test each OS version for compatibility with all our approved applications, and train the computer support people, etc. It takes forever, and I suspect it isn't worth it, but this can't be the only place with such policies. Also lately I asked if we could store data at a provider to share with collaborators and was told "go talk to Computer Security and Legal," which is another way of saying, don't bother unless you really, really need this. Even full-screen apps rub me the wrong way a little bit. The corporate user is not there to watch TV, he is multiasking lots of applications on his 30" monitor. Again, I realize none of this is compulsory yet so I'm not trying to start a panic, I'm just saying, Apple please don't forget those of us who still need PCs for what they do well.
As far as businesses loving devices that are locked down, you forget an important point - THEY want/need to be the ones with root, not some cloud provider somewhere.
Does this mean one could assign a PCI (express) slot with a graphics card to a virtual machine? If so it could become the easiest way to have a multi-seat box, which has always required some black magic until now.
One of my daughters also broke her arm from a fall off the monkey bars about 4 years ago. So, everybody rest easy, playgrounds aren't entirely safe yet.
Bzzt, wrong. Netflix already was profitable.
Because taxes didn't go up 60% in one year?
That approach wasn't super-successful for the music industry.
Well, I'm glad there was one pro-safety post on this thread, just to keep things interesting. But how does your argument apply to a playground?
It will be interesting to see how people react when the first astronauts from private industry are killed. Personally, I predict the political fallout will be LESS than the shuttle disasters, since all of us, by paying taxes, have a stake in those. On the other hand, space exploration doesn't have the legacy of, say, mining, an industry in which we just expect people to get buried alive once in a while, because it has always been that way.
This is not just facial recognition, but face, iris, and fingerprinting. I can't speak for this device in particular, but if inaccuracy is your only objection, get ready to embrace the technology, because multi-modal systems like this should be extremely accurate, soon if not already. (Even before portable DNA matching comes along, which it will).
My question is the opposite - why is this a big bulky hardware add-on instead of simply using the camera already in the phone? I think somebody could approximate this functionality in a $2 app. (Perhaps it would require a close-up focus lens as well?) Hmm, it looks like it may have a fingerprint reader built-in, too. (Just like my Thinkpad!)
My question is why did they give up on the 30" 2560x1600 monitor and go back down to 27"?