If google blacklisted political cartoons from its search results (even in the US, where they're perfectly legal) then you would have a point comparing them to Apple.
Maybe it's just me, but I thought they blocked apps more for economic reasons, like blocking competitors and saving bandwidth. That's bad enough. But blocking political expression is even worse, and the tie to Apple's bottom line seems very tenuous indeed. I can see a cellphone provider blocking me from tethering to my laptop and saturating their network uploading DVD rips, but I cannot see them interrupting a phone call because it got too political. Google should make a 1984-style Android commercial for this.
Given the circumstances, all I personally ask for is that it's settled that they're statistically safer than cigarettes.
If they turn out to be harmful but less so than cigarettes, perhaps they should be available on prescription for smoking cessation only, rather than just marketed to everybody as a harmless way to get addicted to nicotine. (I don't think there's any controversy about the addictiveness of nicotine, is there? Tobacco companies spent good money spraying it onto cigarettes to make them more addictive, and marijuana advocates claim nicotine is far more addictive than THC).
And if they do turn out to be totally harmless, than they should just be spot-checked for purity like anything else. Nicotine patches are available over the counter (no prescription), and hopefully e-cigarettes turn out no worse than those.
This is PARTICULARLY true when the crutch has been reduced to a mere financial draw, with no serious health consequences.
But that's exactly the question isn't it? "the groups say e-cigarettes have yet to be proven safe... 'Nobody knows what the consumers are actually inhaling,' says Erika Sward, director of national advocacy at the American Lung Association." "[The FDA] has examined electronic cigarettes and determined that they meet the definition of both a drug and device under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, according to legal filings. Drugs and delivery devices must receive FDA approval before being marketed."
So, if this were any other new drug or medical device on the market, we would expect some testing to be required before approval. But since it is perceived as an alternative to smoking, which is almost certainly much worse, the case could be made for lowering the bar in this case. But does that argument has any legal basis? People are assuming these are safe; if it turns out otherwise, there could be a lot of upset. We could blame individuals for assuming they're safe without proof, but did you feel like you were going out on a limb when you asserted "no serious health consequences"?
except to get that battery life you either have to plug into power, or suspend, then hassle with getting the old battery out, the new battery in, and resume from suspend.
Actually you don't. I have a slim bay battery in my Thinkpad (in place of the optical drive) so I can swap the main battery without shutting down.
Honestly though it's a long time since I bothered taking a spare battery, there's no need other than transcontinental flight, and presumably they'll put power outlets in the cheap seats eventually (please?)
I did my taxes on paper and made a mistake. I failed to claim "Making Work Pay." I just assumed it was a low-income thing I wouldn't qualify for. The IRS sent me a letter saying they added it to my return and would deposit the money in my account. It made me rethink not using the software.
Too much of this debate is focusing on whether the manned flight investments of the past were worthwhile. As if redirecting our efforts now would denigrate what Armstrong represented in the 60's. But that's not the question. The question is, given the initiatives now on the table for the future, both manned and unmanned, both in private industry and government, which are most promising and deserving of funding going forward? What is the mission compelling us to put so much of our limited S&T dollars into manned space flight going forward? There is none.
No, I don't realize that. I don't think computers would be recognizably different without the manned space program. In fact, I think most of the computers on the ISS are Thinkpads developed with little or no consideration for space exploration. But if I'm wrong, tell me which part of the computer you are referring to.
The Shuttle basically is a jobs program (for Florida, mainly). But it's an awfully expensive one. Redirecting the funds to more efficient unmanned and private industry programs will accomplish more with the same money.
...but manned space flight really hasn't done much for us. Better to continue gathering knowledge and refining launch vehicles until there is some pressing need to shoot people into space.
You do realise that sequential reads and writes are pretty much irrelevant to most people, right?
My #1 storage delay is waiting for virtual machines to suspend and resume. That means writing or reading a 1GB (or whatever the VM's RAM is) contiguous file. Before SSD, suspend/resume to disk wasn't even worth the wait, now it is. Most people don't bother with VM's, but suspend-to-disk in general is a feature that millions of home users should be using by default to save power (compared to never shutting down) and reduce waiting (compared to rebooting just to grab an email).
Just curious, why does the Tea Party movement catch so much flak?
They're modern hippies... purely an opposition party with no realistic plan of their own, hoping to fix everything simply by tearing down solutions that have been developed (with good reason) over hundreds of years. It's a style of wishful thinking where flawed solutions to problems (such as social programs) are conveniently seen as the source of the problems themselves, giving the false impression of easy solutions.
The end of the Tea Party is when/if they actually get somebody elected and have to start making hard, divisive decisions.
Hard to say. Most of what I replay now is either DVD images or mpeg transport streams captured directly from broadcast TV, with no re-encoding and no inverse telecine applied by me.
I have even seen cases where the network was running a ticker, and the local station was superimposing a scrolling weather alert, and the network ticker was scrolling more smoothly than the weather alert. Seems even the pros can't get it right.
Glad you should mention the Clie, since it brings in both Sony and Palm, maybe the two biggest should-have-beens of this decade. In 2004 or so I got this Clie TH55. It had the same slate design the iPhone would later use to storm the market. The Clie had a big, high-res screen (relatively); had wifi, a camera. Everything you needed to get really creative making apps. (It wasn't a cellphone, then again neither is the iPhone touch).
Sadly, the whole thing was let down terrible by the outdated Palm OS. All the advanced hardware was only (poorly) supported by Sony extensions IIRC. I tried to get into developing for it but couldn't get the tools. Finally, my workplace banned PalmOS devices alltogether because they didn't have sufficient built-in security features. And we had been buying a lot of Palms just 5 or so years previous.
I won't relay the often mentioned smoothness of displaying videos and playing MP3s. It's not that important.
Sure it is! It turns out getting a PVR to display frame-accurate video to a TV is almost impossible with a multitasking OS. Watch a channel with a stock ticker / other scrolling banner, and you will see, it jumps at times. Go ahead and crank up the priority on X and mplayer (or whatever player you use); it can't do it.
I recently switched to fluid bearing fans and they certainly seem quiet; if they're louder I don't think it's much. But extended life is a huge advantage too. Fans are the #1 failure item on PCs, far more than HDDs in my experience. Granted, replacing a fan isn't too expensive, but the hassle and downtime isn't worth it, and in fact the better fans may even be cheaper if they last at least twice as long (we'll see).
speedtest.net, which means they are taking a direct sampling from the actual user connections - no politics involved
OK, I found the page you may be referring to, but what does that ranking actually mean? You said "we" are second, but that's a list of continents (North America is 2nd of 6 continents - sorry Antarctica).
But if you then click "top countries ranked by speed," the US is 29th.
Even so, what do those numbers mean? Is it just the average speed test result for people from that country? That would make no sense, since a country with no access except from the Presidential Palace with 1 GB Internet would win easily.
What about it? If somebody recycles a quote, it's presumably because they think it has some relevance to the topic of discussion. The fact that it's a quote is irrelevant to whether it's used to make an ignorant point.
There are many nuances to these kind of metrics that can be exploited to make things look one way or another. For example, measuring "availability" without regard to cost, which is almost meaningless.
The number that matters is adoption - for each country, a histogram of what percentage of the population has each speed of connection. Adoption is what matters because that determines the actual impact of the infrastructure.
Luckily Obama has put a stop to most of this already. Let's hope he can turn the process around and make America sane again.
Seeing that the Obama White House objects to this retraction is thrilling, compared to the Bush years when every day seemed to bring yet another disaster for the environment, science, and world peace. I am not saying Obama has fully lived up to his campaign promises - he hasn't - but when I think how America was plummeting under Bush, all I can say is, elections matter.
The only good thing about x86 is that it runs legacy Windows programs, but who cares about that in research?
Just because source code is available doesn't mean your problems are over. Even ironing out x86-64 (which millions of people can use) has taken years for the linux distros.
By what set of criteria do you judge software to be less valuable than hardware?
Probably the decline in median standard of living as we switched from one to the other?
Of course, it could be spurious correlation. But I still don't understand how Germany is such a manufacturing and exporting powerhouse if the secret to success in that field is wrecking the environment and abusing workers.
Wow, I can't believe the level xenophobia in here. Hate to break it to you guys, but BGP misconfiguration has always been an issue with the Internet and happens all the time (that paper is from 2002 btw). (Oh noes! Pakistan is attacking us too! And Spain! And we're even attacking ourselves!
You hawks would be funny if some of you didn't hold power.
Generalizing chess past an 8x8 board doesn't make a lot of sense, since the number and types of pieces and their initial placement are so integral to the game. Practically the only people who do generalize it are computational theorists. It's like arguing about what football would be like if the field could by 1000 km long.
Slashdot Mirror
If google blacklisted political cartoons from its search results (even in the US, where they're perfectly legal) then you would have a point comparing them to Apple.
Maybe it's just me, but I thought they blocked apps more for economic reasons, like blocking competitors and saving bandwidth. That's bad enough. But blocking political expression is even worse, and the tie to Apple's bottom line seems very tenuous indeed. I can see a cellphone provider blocking me from tethering to my laptop and saturating their network uploading DVD rips, but I cannot see them interrupting a phone call because it got too political. Google should make a 1984-style Android commercial for this.
If they turn out to be harmful but less so than cigarettes, perhaps they should be available on prescription for smoking cessation only, rather than just marketed to everybody as a harmless way to get addicted to nicotine. (I don't think there's any controversy about the addictiveness of nicotine, is there? Tobacco companies spent good money spraying it onto cigarettes to make them more addictive, and marijuana advocates claim nicotine is far more addictive than THC).
And if they do turn out to be totally harmless, than they should just be spot-checked for purity like anything else. Nicotine patches are available over the counter (no prescription), and hopefully e-cigarettes turn out no worse than those.
But that's exactly the question isn't it? "the groups say e-cigarettes have yet to be proven safe... 'Nobody knows what the consumers are actually inhaling,' says Erika Sward, director of national advocacy at the American Lung Association." "[The FDA] has examined electronic cigarettes and determined that they meet the definition of both a drug and device under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, according to legal filings. Drugs and delivery devices must receive FDA approval before being marketed."
So, if this were any other new drug or medical device on the market, we would expect some testing to be required before approval. But since it is perceived as an alternative to smoking, which is almost certainly much worse, the case could be made for lowering the bar in this case. But does that argument has any legal basis? People are assuming these are safe; if it turns out otherwise, there could be a lot of upset. We could blame individuals for assuming they're safe without proof, but did you feel like you were going out on a limb when you asserted "no serious health consequences"?
Actually you don't. I have a slim bay battery in my Thinkpad (in place of the optical drive) so I can swap the main battery without shutting down.
Honestly though it's a long time since I bothered taking a spare battery, there's no need other than transcontinental flight, and presumably they'll put power outlets in the cheap seats eventually (please?)
I did my taxes on paper and made a mistake. I failed to claim "Making Work Pay." I just assumed it was a low-income thing I wouldn't qualify for. The IRS sent me a letter saying they added it to my return and would deposit the money in my account. It made me rethink not using the software.
Too much of this debate is focusing on whether the manned flight investments of the past were worthwhile. As if redirecting our efforts now would denigrate what Armstrong represented in the 60's. But that's not the question. The question is, given the initiatives now on the table for the future, both manned and unmanned, both in private industry and government, which are most promising and deserving of funding going forward? What is the mission compelling us to put so much of our limited S&T dollars into manned space flight going forward? There is none.
No, I don't realize that. I don't think computers would be recognizably different without the manned space program. In fact, I think most of the computers on the ISS are Thinkpads developed with little or no consideration for space exploration. But if I'm wrong, tell me which part of the computer you are referring to.
The Shuttle basically is a jobs program (for Florida, mainly). But it's an awfully expensive one. Redirecting the funds to more efficient unmanned and private industry programs will accomplish more with the same money.
...but manned space flight really hasn't done much for us. Better to continue gathering knowledge and refining launch vehicles until there is some pressing need to shoot people into space.
My #1 storage delay is waiting for virtual machines to suspend and resume. That means writing or reading a 1GB (or whatever the VM's RAM is) contiguous file. Before SSD, suspend/resume to disk wasn't even worth the wait, now it is. Most people don't bother with VM's, but suspend-to-disk in general is a feature that millions of home users should be using by default to save power (compared to never shutting down) and reduce waiting (compared to rebooting just to grab an email).
Of course, the fast seek time is great too.
They're modern hippies... purely an opposition party with no realistic plan of their own, hoping to fix everything simply by tearing down solutions that have been developed (with good reason) over hundreds of years. It's a style of wishful thinking where flawed solutions to problems (such as social programs) are conveniently seen as the source of the problems themselves, giving the false impression of easy solutions.
The end of the Tea Party is when/if they actually get somebody elected and have to start making hard, divisive decisions.
I have even seen cases where the network was running a ticker, and the local station was superimposing a scrolling weather alert, and the network ticker was scrolling more smoothly than the weather alert. Seems even the pros can't get it right.
Sadly, the whole thing was let down terrible by the outdated Palm OS. All the advanced hardware was only (poorly) supported by Sony extensions IIRC. I tried to get into developing for it but couldn't get the tools. Finally, my workplace banned PalmOS devices alltogether because they didn't have sufficient built-in security features. And we had been buying a lot of Palms just 5 or so years previous.
Sure it is! It turns out getting a PVR to display frame-accurate video to a TV is almost impossible with a multitasking OS. Watch a channel with a stock ticker / other scrolling banner, and you will see, it jumps at times. Go ahead and crank up the priority on X and mplayer (or whatever player you use); it can't do it.
I recently switched to fluid bearing fans and they certainly seem quiet; if they're louder I don't think it's much. But extended life is a huge advantage too. Fans are the #1 failure item on PCs, far more than HDDs in my experience. Granted, replacing a fan isn't too expensive, but the hassle and downtime isn't worth it, and in fact the better fans may even be cheaper if they last at least twice as long (we'll see).
It feels good for the justice dept. to start an investigation to stand up for workers' rights for once!
OK, I found the page you may be referring to, but what does that ranking actually mean? You said "we" are second, but that's a list of continents (North America is 2nd of 6 continents - sorry Antarctica).
But if you then click "top countries ranked by speed," the US is 29th.
Even so, what do those numbers mean? Is it just the average speed test result for people from that country? That would make no sense, since a country with no access except from the Presidential Palace with 1 GB Internet would win easily.
What about it? If somebody recycles a quote, it's presumably because they think it has some relevance to the topic of discussion. The fact that it's a quote is irrelevant to whether it's used to make an ignorant point.
There are many nuances to these kind of metrics that can be exploited to make things look one way or another. For example, measuring "availability" without regard to cost, which is almost meaningless.
The number that matters is adoption - for each country, a histogram of what percentage of the population has each speed of connection. Adoption is what matters because that determines the actual impact of the infrastructure.
Seeing that the Obama White House objects to this retraction is thrilling, compared to the Bush years when every day seemed to bring yet another disaster for the environment, science, and world peace. I am not saying Obama has fully lived up to his campaign promises - he hasn't - but when I think how America was plummeting under Bush, all I can say is, elections matter.
Just because source code is available doesn't mean your problems are over. Even ironing out x86-64 (which millions of people can use) has taken years for the linux distros.
Probably the decline in median standard of living as we switched from one to the other?
Of course, it could be spurious correlation. But I still don't understand how Germany is such a manufacturing and exporting powerhouse if the secret to success in that field is wrecking the environment and abusing workers.
You hawks would be funny if some of you didn't hold power.
Generalizing chess past an 8x8 board doesn't make a lot of sense, since the number and types of pieces and their initial placement are so integral to the game. Practically the only people who do generalize it are computational theorists. It's like arguing about what football would be like if the field could by 1000 km long.