So you are telling me that Saturn is somehow connected to the S&P 500?
Actually that one wouldn't be nearly as interesting if you re-computed it with updated numbers, since the S&P 500 tanked. You don't have to cherrypick the winter birth data that way; the correlation is very robust. And now they are figuring out why.
Things that have proven cost-ineffective (such as public transport which, except in special circumstances, tends to cost far more per ride - in money, risk, and rider lifetime - than individual vehicles).
1) Obviously the point of investing in new public transport technologies is to improve them. You seem to be ruling out any potential technology that could be called "public transport" out-of-hand, which makes no sense
2) There's no reason public transport might not rely on individual vehicles. Heck, that's what taxis are.
3) There are economically viable public transportation systems all of the world, including the US (commerial air, for one). Dismissing them all as "special circumstances" is a loophole big enough for a double-decker bus.
4) I'd love to know what you were thinking when you said public transport is more risky.
Don't get me wrong, the bus service where I live is a huge time waste and I never ride it. That's why I'd love it if somebody invested in finding something better.
It's not unfortunate if they're effective. The way we're living now is simply not sustainable, fossil fuel being an obvious example. Some say, "don't worry, technology will increase the carrying capacity without limit," and then whine at every proposed investment in said technology, which doesn't make a lot of sense.
From what I gather it's not the ones that receive the most spam, but rather those for whom spam is the highest proportion of email. Maybe Idahoans receive the same number of spams as everybody else, but simply send and receive fewer legitimate emails. Or maybe there is no systematic difference between states at all, and the results would be entirely different if you looked at any month other than September 09. With just one sample there is no measure of variance and therefore no way to tell whether the result is significant.
I don't think whoever wrote the article understands what they're trying to explain. First, the author repeatedly says "percent of spam" (e.g. "the spam capital of the US is Idaho with 93.8 percent of spam," and "...Puerto Rico, with 83.1 percent of spam") when apparently the data is actually the percent of email received in the state which is spam. Second, the explanations given for Idaho topping this list have no relevance to the question whatever. Claiming botnets and the recession are to blame with no attempt to explain how these factors impact Idaho different than other states is nonsense! Finally, even if the author understood the data, the data is uninteresting without some test of statistical significance. The difference between states with highest and lowest spam rates is only 10%, is that significant? Is it repeatable if you sampled during a different interval? Who knows.
Maybe somebody can explain the furor over Acorn to me. When a cop is found to be crooked, is there a big outcry to de-fund the police? Of course not. I remember a guy selling pot from the McDonald's drive-thru, but I don't remember any big movement to revoke McDonald's corporate license, either. So what is this really about?
If Microsoft licenses 2,000,000 $250 copies of Vista, it doesn't utilize any more state resources than if they had licensed 200,000 copies of vista, or if they had licensed 2,000,000 $100 copies instead.
What, 2 replies to you already and nobody stated the obvious? If I license 2,000,000 copies of Windows from Microsoft, it doesn't utilize any more of Microsoft's resources than if I had licensed only 200,000 copies instead. Nor does licensing Vista Mickey-Mouse Edition use any more Microsoft resources than licensing Ultra Enterprise Edition. The vast majority of Microsoft's business is just charging OEMs and enterprises $x for each OS image they clone. Their entire business model is based on charging people whatever they can pay! "From each according to his ability," as it were.
If his service actually works, his home in Las Vegas (which is probably underwater anyways) is just the tip of the iceberg, and most of his ill-gotten gains are hiding safely in Jamaica - which is distinctly possible.
Is it just me or do we get all sorts of stories about this or that breakthrough but I have yet to see ANY of this stuff make it to wide use (or even in specialized cases).
I think what you are seeing is all the progress in solar is masked by the fact it still hasn't reached the critical threshold of being cheaper than fossil fuel. Regardless of whether it's 20 percent more expensive or 20 times more expensive, it's still not the cheapest option. However, it has been making progress and getting cheaper, which fossil fuel is headed quickly in the other direction. (Well, not coal... it's the cheap, plentiful, crystal meth of energy production that may just prove the undoing of our environment).
General Motors, now Motors Liquidation Company had Total Revenue for the last twelve months of 129 billion dollars. Yet they lost money overall (gross profit = $-1.6B) over that same period of time. What's their worth on the market right now, if you wanted to buy all their shares? 467 million dollars.
It's not accurate to say that General Motors is now Motors Liquidation Company. Under the terms of the bankruptcy and reorganization, everything of value was sold off to other carmakers or reorganized into a new company, "General Motors Company LLC," which will have an IPO next year. Motors Liquidation Company is just the detritus, a shell left behind to parcel out the scraps. It's amazing the stock is even worth 476 million when this is what its own management has to say:
Management continues to remind investors of its strong belief that there will be no value for the common stockholders in the bankruptcy liquidation process, even under the most optimistic of scenarios. Stockholders of a company in chapter 11 generally receive value only if all claims of the company's secured and unsecured creditors are fully satisfied. In this case, management strongly believes all such claims will not be fully satisfied, leading to its conclusion that the common stock will have no value.
IMHO allowing GM to reorganize this way is a shell game to place a partition between the valuable assets ad the junk that gets "written off" by bankruptcy, leaving shareholders and creditors holding the bag. But anyways, it would be more fair to value GMC's last year's revenues against the total value of all the pieces it broke into: New GM + Motors Liquidation Company + plus all the brands they sold off (Saturn, Saab, Hummer).
if you're going out to the local mall, and your kid's just at the age where they're free to wander a little, it may be a good idea
If they were cheaper, I would definitely get these for my kids when we go backpacking. The problem isn't so much crazy people roaming the hills, but simply an absent-minded kid wandering off and freezing to death. It does happen. (I am assuming there's some way to use this without a cellular network around?) Heck, I would buy one for myself if they were cheaper, I go out by myself sometimes and if you break your leg in the backcountry it would save everybody a lot of time and expense.
My new laptop (using to type this response) has 3 drive bays so could use SSD and a couple of 7200rpm disks, but still wont compete with a desktop running 10000rpm disks.
Won't compete in what category? A good ssd blows away a 10000 rpm disk. I was very underwhelmed with the upgrade from 4200 to 7200 rpm laptop drive and found both much slower than desktop drives, but fast SSDs beat any hard disk.
No, laptops could never keep pace with desktops until very recently, not due to processor speed but rather due to disk speed. SSD has been a big great forward for laptop/desktop parity.
Companies do cater to that niche market, however; Lenovo, for example. The Lenovo T400 runs a nice Core 2 Duo. Its battery life is a bit above that of the average notebook - but you -can- even extend that by upgrading from a 4-cell (~4 hours) to a 6-cell or even a 9-cell battery (~10 hours) and go beyond that if you add the external bay battery.
You can also put a battery in the internal bay, replacing the optical drive. A nice advantage of this is you can swap the main battery without powering down, as the computer is running from the slim bay battery while you do the swap. The 9 cell is just too bulky; I find it much nicer to have a nice, light, compact 4 cell to absorb daily wear (it still lasts long enough to go to a meeting etc), then take a slim bay battery with two or more 4 or 6 cell batteries on occasions when more longevity is needed.
A fixed 10-hour battery is a complete waste of size and weight unless you need that capacity on a regular basis.
For the moment, yes, the news is available for free elsewhere so why pay? The entire question is whether there will continue to be 49 free lanes on the highway. Some, like Rupert Murdoch, believe those are going broke, creating a better value proposition for fee-based services. Obviously this won't be all-or-nothing; there will always be some free lanes, the only question is how many, and in what state of disrepair. IMHO we really need to create a financial incentive for good reporting without blocking access to that reporting through inconvenience and expense - not an easy problem to solve.
The only thing worse than Python is, well, Javascript.
I'd be interested to hear what you like better, and why? Personally I'm still sad that Java (not Javascript) didn't win on the Web - a cross-platform, general purpose language that is at least a reasonable choice for most anything. To make programming faster, you can always use higher-level libraries or code-building environments on top of it, or compile some other syntax to java bytecode.
Now instead the Web is a big mish-mash of fundamentally incompatible technologies. And if anybody does pull off the one-runtime-for-anything vision, it looks like it will be Microsoft.
Seriously, how is a PC a unit of processing ability?
Of course, there is no correct (or even really meaningful) way to measure "processing ability" in general. Doubtless this machine's cores would be more like DSPs or GPU cores rather than CPU cores anyways. It would be insane to use general purpose CPUs for a specialized task on this scale.
Why not Just say 1E9 or even 1 * 10^9 for "a thousand million".
While we're at it, I'd prefer 10^9 ("ten to the 9th power") over 1*10^9 ("one times ten to the 9th power"). The "one times..." isn't accomplishing anything.
Yes, the government must keep doing everything the same way it is now forever, otherwise something could possibly go wrong.
You can't weigh the risks of the new way without considering the problems with how things are done now. Having thousands of independently run servers doing more or less the same thing throughout a big enterprise has lots of problems. Hopefully this will centralize widely-useful services, thus saving money on servers and administration. More importantly, it will give smaller departments access to more IT services, make it easier for people in different departments to communicate, and reduce the time wasted re-learning the quirks of each department when collaborating with another group or moving between orgs. The federal government is too byzantine and parochial. Maybe standardizing business practices through common software services will help.
What a dopey comment, why weigh in at all if your only thought is to accept the limitations of the most obvious off-the-shelf solutions, or nothing at all? The question itself already went far beyond your "coverage/no coverage" false dichotomy by identifying various technologies such as 3g range extenders and satellites that offer various tradeoffs. At the least, somebody with experience using these could weigh in on their utility, or lack thereof.
Slashdot Mirror
Using a zoom also allows you to use a flash. Flashing from too close creates less even illumination and, on the cameras I've tried, overexposure.
Actually that one wouldn't be nearly as interesting if you re-computed it with updated numbers, since the S&P 500 tanked. You don't have to cherrypick the winter birth data that way; the correlation is very robust. And now they are figuring out why.
Sadly air-cooled pushrod engines don't do 367 mph. Not even with a chrome sissybar and tassles on the handlebars.
1) Obviously the point of investing in new public transport technologies is to improve them. You seem to be ruling out any potential technology that could be called "public transport" out-of-hand, which makes no sense
2) There's no reason public transport might not rely on individual vehicles. Heck, that's what taxis are.
3) There are economically viable public transportation systems all of the world, including the US (commerial air, for one). Dismissing them all as "special circumstances" is a loophole big enough for a double-decker bus.
4) I'd love to know what you were thinking when you said public transport is more risky.
Don't get me wrong, the bus service where I live is a huge time waste and I never ride it. That's why I'd love it if somebody invested in finding something better.
It's not unfortunate if they're effective. The way we're living now is simply not sustainable, fossil fuel being an obvious example. Some say, "don't worry, technology will increase the carrying capacity without limit," and then whine at every proposed investment in said technology, which doesn't make a lot of sense.
From what I gather it's not the ones that receive the most spam, but rather those for whom spam is the highest proportion of email. Maybe Idahoans receive the same number of spams as everybody else, but simply send and receive fewer legitimate emails. Or maybe there is no systematic difference between states at all, and the results would be entirely different if you looked at any month other than September 09. With just one sample there is no measure of variance and therefore no way to tell whether the result is significant.
I don't think whoever wrote the article understands what they're trying to explain. First, the author repeatedly says "percent of spam" (e.g. "the spam capital of the US is Idaho with 93.8 percent of spam," and "...Puerto Rico, with 83.1 percent of spam") when apparently the data is actually the percent of email received in the state which is spam. Second, the explanations given for Idaho topping this list have no relevance to the question whatever. Claiming botnets and the recession are to blame with no attempt to explain how these factors impact Idaho different than other states is nonsense! Finally, even if the author understood the data, the data is uninteresting without some test of statistical significance. The difference between states with highest and lowest spam rates is only 10%, is that significant? Is it repeatable if you sampled during a different interval? Who knows.
Maybe somebody can explain the furor over Acorn to me. When a cop is found to be crooked, is there a big outcry to de-fund the police? Of course not. I remember a guy selling pot from the McDonald's drive-thru, but I don't remember any big movement to revoke McDonald's corporate license, either. So what is this really about?
What, 2 replies to you already and nobody stated the obvious? If I license 2,000,000 copies of Windows from Microsoft, it doesn't utilize any more of Microsoft's resources than if I had licensed only 200,000 copies instead. Nor does licensing Vista Mickey-Mouse Edition use any more Microsoft resources than licensing Ultra Enterprise Edition. The vast majority of Microsoft's business is just charging OEMs and enterprises $x for each OS image they clone. Their entire business model is based on charging people whatever they can pay! "From each according to his ability," as it were.
If his service actually works, his home in Las Vegas (which is probably underwater anyways) is just the tip of the iceberg, and most of his ill-gotten gains are hiding safely in Jamaica - which is distinctly possible.
I think what you are seeing is all the progress in solar is masked by the fact it still hasn't reached the critical threshold of being cheaper than fossil fuel. Regardless of whether it's 20 percent more expensive or 20 times more expensive, it's still not the cheapest option. However, it has been making progress and getting cheaper, which fossil fuel is headed quickly in the other direction. (Well, not coal... it's the cheap, plentiful, crystal meth of energy production that may just prove the undoing of our environment).
Maybe comic book characters are a dime a dozen, and marketing really is the most important factor in their success.
It's not accurate to say that General Motors is now Motors Liquidation Company. Under the terms of the bankruptcy and reorganization, everything of value was sold off to other carmakers or reorganized into a new company, "General Motors Company LLC," which will have an IPO next year. Motors Liquidation Company is just the detritus, a shell left behind to parcel out the scraps. It's amazing the stock is even worth 476 million when this is what its own management has to say:
IMHO allowing GM to reorganize this way is a shell game to place a partition between the valuable assets ad the junk that gets "written off" by bankruptcy, leaving shareholders and creditors holding the bag. But anyways, it would be more fair to value GMC's last year's revenues against the total value of all the pieces it broke into: New GM + Motors Liquidation Company + plus all the brands they sold off (Saturn, Saab, Hummer).
If they were cheaper, I would definitely get these for my kids when we go backpacking. The problem isn't so much crazy people roaming the hills, but simply an absent-minded kid wandering off and freezing to death. It does happen. (I am assuming there's some way to use this without a cellular network around?) Heck, I would buy one for myself if they were cheaper, I go out by myself sometimes and if you break your leg in the backcountry it would save everybody a lot of time and expense.
Won't compete in what category? A good ssd blows away a 10000 rpm disk. I was very underwhelmed with the upgrade from 4200 to 7200 rpm laptop drive and found both much slower than desktop drives, but fast SSDs beat any hard disk.
No, laptops could never keep pace with desktops until very recently, not due to processor speed but rather due to disk speed. SSD has been a big great forward for laptop/desktop parity.
You can also put a battery in the internal bay, replacing the optical drive. A nice advantage of this is you can swap the main battery without powering down, as the computer is running from the slim bay battery while you do the swap. The 9 cell is just too bulky; I find it much nicer to have a nice, light, compact 4 cell to absorb daily wear (it still lasts long enough to go to a meeting etc), then take a slim bay battery with two or more 4 or 6 cell batteries on occasions when more longevity is needed.
A fixed 10-hour battery is a complete waste of size and weight unless you need that capacity on a regular basis.
For the moment, yes, the news is available for free elsewhere so why pay? The entire question is whether there will continue to be 49 free lanes on the highway. Some, like Rupert Murdoch, believe those are going broke, creating a better value proposition for fee-based services. Obviously this won't be all-or-nothing; there will always be some free lanes, the only question is how many, and in what state of disrepair. IMHO we really need to create a financial incentive for good reporting without blocking access to that reporting through inconvenience and expense - not an easy problem to solve.
I'd be interested to hear what you like better, and why? Personally I'm still sad that Java (not Javascript) didn't win on the Web - a cross-platform, general purpose language that is at least a reasonable choice for most anything. To make programming faster, you can always use higher-level libraries or code-building environments on top of it, or compile some other syntax to java bytecode.
Now instead the Web is a big mish-mash of fundamentally incompatible technologies. And if anybody does pull off the one-runtime-for-anything vision, it looks like it will be Microsoft.
Of course, there is no correct (or even really meaningful) way to measure "processing ability" in general. Doubtless this machine's cores would be more like DSPs or GPU cores rather than CPU cores anyways. It would be insane to use general purpose CPUs for a specialized task on this scale.
While we're at it, I'd prefer 10^9 ("ten to the 9th power") over 1*10^9 ("one times ten to the 9th power"). The "one times..." isn't accomplishing anything.
The submitter's errors aren't SMS-isms, they're just plain old poor English.
Is there some aspect of this process that could conceivably be affected by microgravity? If not, the ISS is awfully expensive lab space.
You can't weigh the risks of the new way without considering the problems with how things are done now. Having thousands of independently run servers doing more or less the same thing throughout a big enterprise has lots of problems. Hopefully this will centralize widely-useful services, thus saving money on servers and administration. More importantly, it will give smaller departments access to more IT services, make it easier for people in different departments to communicate, and reduce the time wasted re-learning the quirks of each department when collaborating with another group or moving between orgs. The federal government is too byzantine and parochial. Maybe standardizing business practices through common software services will help.
What a dopey comment, why weigh in at all if your only thought is to accept the limitations of the most obvious off-the-shelf solutions, or nothing at all? The question itself already went far beyond your "coverage/no coverage" false dichotomy by identifying various technologies such as 3g range extenders and satellites that offer various tradeoffs. At the least, somebody with experience using these could weigh in on their utility, or lack thereof.