Hmm, the problems you note are certainly issues with VOIP using consumer equipment on a shared Internet connection (such as my Ooma device over my Comcast Internet, or your Skype box), but I had assumed AT&T's telephone IP backbone probably has dedicated bandwidth allocations, generous bitrates, and cut-through routing to avoid the inherent latency of store-and-forward packet switching.
Prices will go down if there is competitive pressure.
It might happen. One company's "windfall" at operating with reduced capital is another company's reduced barrier to entry. In your own job, if your workload suddenly drops, do you think, "whee, now I can goof off all day," or do you think, "uh oh."
The world's treatment of Africa has been 99% by greed, not good intentions. My friend was in the Peace Corps and realized partway through he was mainly there to pave the way for oil companies. Or the most despicable "resource" extraction of all, the slave trade. Estimates range from 10 to 28 million lives stolen. Good intentions indeed.
Potentially stupid question - how did the country make them rich?
I guess one answer is, why do these success stories tend to occur in the US rather then elsewhere? Why isn't Silicon Valley in a tax haven instead of California?
"We removed up to 50% of the original salt, but we need to arrive at 98%."
Doing several cycles of ion removal with the battery would further desalinate the water, but those extra cycles cost energy, so La Mantia hopes to improve the efficiency enough so that the battery can remove the salt in a single pass.
If they're really the first to implement a new chemical process here, then the GP implying this is not significant in itself and they just published it so they could get venture capital is pretty sad. There used to be this thing called "research." Most of it went nowhere, yet it created the world we live in.
If Americans had become proficient at math, they would have realized that landing on the moon wasn't nearly as big a step towards colonizing Mars and mining on Venus as they (and their favorite sci-fi authors) had assumed.
Wow, the mere mention of Muslims really got your goat, didn't it? Here's what that entire flap was based on (from csmonitor):
In an interview with Al-Jazeera last month [Jun 2010], NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden said that President Obama charged him with reaching out to Muslim nations. The White House corrected him, saying that NASA's core mission is space exploration.
If you're so upset about it, why don't you document how much of Nasa's resources were actually spent on that? Any at all?
Your broader claim is that Nasa is focused on diplomacy. And yet, in the face of this 1.7% budget cut, what actually got cut? A joint US-EU program for Martian exploration. It was the first to go. It's like you purposely base your opinion on the opposite of the facts.
You know, as much as I would not like to waste 2 years of my life in prison, I think I'd be even more worried about the rest of my life, as a felony convict. In these days of less-than-full employment, it's not like you can just rider over the next horizon and start over. Convicted felons are truly screwed for life employment-wise. They can't even get food stamps.
Not true. In the 1960s, the federal government was instrumental in breaking up the apartheid public education system of the South.
And please, do not say, "what good did it do?" Compared to 50 or 100 years ago, Americans are far better educated. The decline we perceive is mainly a factor of 1) relative comparisons to the rest of the world and 2) the inclusion of a higher percentage of the population in modern testing. There were no good old days.
Whereas solar...just doesn't seem to be getting results, for all that is spent on it....
Check the facts, you'll find there has been amazing progress! Solar has gone from a sci-fi pipe dream 30 years ago to (arguably) cheaper than Nuclear today. It's true that investment in solar hasn't paid off yet, but if that cost-reduction curve can hold out a little longer, it will pay off, immensely.
Wow, how far do you think you can stretch that? Think how much we'd save staffing an entire gradeschool with a single teacher! We just need to find one of those special teachers who could do it "easily."
To be fair, it occurred to me that I am still paying for phone service, since I pay for my Internet bandwidth (to Comcast). In fact, the most basic Comcast Internet package is more or less in line with what a basic phone bill used to be if inflation is considered. So in some sense, costs hold fairly steady, but we're enabled to do much more, such as hang out on the phone for hours with our shrink in New York or Vienna:)
Wow, you are making me feel old for remembering when long-distance calling was cost-prohibitive. In 1984 a long-distance domestic call was about 25 cents per minute, which would be 50 cents per minute or $30/hour now. Now I use an ooma device and, after the initial investment, haven't paid a phone bill at all in about 3 years.
By the way, while checking my facts I found this humorous article from the Brookings Institute in 1987 slamming government regulatory action in breaking up AT&T claiming it was causing telephone rates to rise. Ha ha.
Your comment about air traffic control is more relevant than all the ones about privacy. Don't get me wrong, the privacy issues are more important in the long run, but this particular bill is about managing flight safety issues, for example by creating test ranges the FAA will use to explore how best to manage air traffic control. Public policy on spying on Americans will not be settled through the FAA, it will be settled by regulating the police and the use of evidence they gather with drones. Personally I'd be surprised if we get our act together on protecting privacy until there is a big scandal affecting a politician, akin to Watergate.
Rate adjustments based on your claims history already take into account innumerable factors such as how much you drive. For people like me who have been with the same company for a while (at least 15 years in my case), they should already be able to make good predictions, so how much additional predictive value would this data have?
Alternatively, they could buy an actual piece of equipment designed from the ground up and rigorously tested for exactly this purpose and which is permanently in the cockpit and can also be updated via subscription services. But then they wouldn't have toy ipads to play with at taxpayers expense.
Are you referring to an existing device that's cheaper than an iPad, or just taking a pot-shot?
The original WWW of 1990 did not have most of what we associate with the WWW today. Here is the spec from late 1991, and this is what a WWW page looked like. Note for example there is no img tag. (About 19 of those 20 tags were in SGML already - the breakthrough though is HREF - the hyperlink).
I think you're kind of missing the point from Google's perspective. Their business is selling ad space. People selling smartphones buy lots of ad space. Scientific/engineering journals do not.
Why not be picky? Have you seen the stats for divorce lately?
Wait, you think the divorce rate went up because people got less picky?
Having a good relationship does not result from finding the perfect person. There aren't any. (Including yourself, no offense). Does that mean you just pick somebody at random? No, of course not. But if you've dated a few dozen people and the same patterns keep occurring, it's not them, it's you. Trying to have a good relationship by being picky upfront is like trying to drive a good car by buying the right make and model. There are better and worse choices, but when you see a nice older car driving around it says more about the owner than the manufacturer.
I dunno, maybe. I haven't done much PC gaming in almost 10 years (the last game I played much of was Battlefield 1942). I really did tire of the endless bugs in video cards and games, and the upgrade treadmill. Maybe it has changed, but having to support thousands of possible configurations does seem like an inherent cause of instability in PC gaming.
Perhaps the bigger problem is that until a critical mass of people connect their PC's to their TV's, they won't start making many split-screen/party games for PC. And the other "problem" is that consoles are fairly good, and fairly cheap, so, what's the problem?
Hmm, in an ideal world, a reported sigma value should include those types of considerations. (Basically, factoring in how many different hypothesis were tested.) It can be tricky, but you would expect such high-profile science to be top notch. After all, to determine you need 5 or 6 sigmas to exceed 99% probability (which is really just an inconsistent usage of terminology), you still have to perform the same calculation. (Otherwise, how do they know they don't need, say, 8 sigmas in the way they're calculating it?)
I've played tons of splitscreen Halo with my son and it's lots of fun. Even if you're playing against each other, it's a level playing field. If you're playing as a team against others online it's a bit of an advantage because you have two vantage points.
I've been disappointed with perhaps decreasing support for split-screen in console games. To me it's where consoles really shine above PC games. I haven't upgraded from Forza 3 to Forza 4 because they didn't make much improvement to the splitscreen mode (co-op online play, more than 2 AI cars, etc).
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Hmm, the problems you note are certainly issues with VOIP using consumer equipment on a shared Internet connection (such as my Ooma device over my Comcast Internet, or your Skype box), but I had assumed AT&T's telephone IP backbone probably has dedicated bandwidth allocations, generous bitrates, and cut-through routing to avoid the inherent latency of store-and-forward packet switching.
It might happen. One company's "windfall" at operating with reduced capital is another company's reduced barrier to entry. In your own job, if your workload suddenly drops, do you think, "whee, now I can goof off all day," or do you think, "uh oh."
The world's treatment of Africa has been 99% by greed, not good intentions. My friend was in the Peace Corps and realized partway through he was mainly there to pave the way for oil companies. Or the most despicable "resource" extraction of all, the slave trade. Estimates range from 10 to 28 million lives stolen. Good intentions indeed.
Come to think of it, a more direct answer is, "The US Government invented the Internet."
I guess one answer is, why do these success stories tend to occur in the US rather then elsewhere? Why isn't Silicon Valley in a tax haven instead of California?
If they're really the first to implement a new chemical process here, then the GP implying this is not significant in itself and they just published it so they could get venture capital is pretty sad. There used to be this thing called "research." Most of it went nowhere, yet it created the world we live in.
If Americans had become proficient at math, they would have realized that landing on the moon wasn't nearly as big a step towards colonizing Mars and mining on Venus as they (and their favorite sci-fi authors) had assumed.
If you're so upset about it, why don't you document how much of Nasa's resources were actually spent on that? Any at all?
Your broader claim is that Nasa is focused on diplomacy. And yet, in the face of this 1.7% budget cut, what actually got cut? A joint US-EU program for Martian exploration. It was the first to go. It's like you purposely base your opinion on the opposite of the facts.
You know, as much as I would not like to waste 2 years of my life in prison, I think I'd be even more worried about the rest of my life, as a felony convict. In these days of less-than-full employment, it's not like you can just rider over the next horizon and start over. Convicted felons are truly screwed for life employment-wise. They can't even get food stamps.
This must involve a huge blowup of the data. I can't imagine how large a movie would be encrypted to look like an innocuous chat session.
And please, do not say, "what good did it do?" Compared to 50 or 100 years ago, Americans are far better educated. The decline we perceive is mainly a factor of 1) relative comparisons to the rest of the world and 2) the inclusion of a higher percentage of the population in modern testing. There were no good old days.
The idea of giving the security apparatus power to veto political candidacies is insanity.
Check the facts, you'll find there has been amazing progress! Solar has gone from a sci-fi pipe dream 30 years ago to (arguably) cheaper than Nuclear today. It's true that investment in solar hasn't paid off yet, but if that cost-reduction curve can hold out a little longer, it will pay off, immensely.
Wow, how far do you think you can stretch that? Think how much we'd save staffing an entire gradeschool with a single teacher! We just need to find one of those special teachers who could do it "easily."
.
(Hedonic Inflation).
By the way, while checking my facts I found this humorous article from the Brookings Institute in 1987 slamming government regulatory action in breaking up AT&T claiming it was causing telephone rates to rise. Ha ha.
Your comment about air traffic control is more relevant than all the ones about privacy. Don't get me wrong, the privacy issues are more important in the long run, but this particular bill is about managing flight safety issues, for example by creating test ranges the FAA will use to explore how best to manage air traffic control. Public policy on spying on Americans will not be settled through the FAA, it will be settled by regulating the police and the use of evidence they gather with drones. Personally I'd be surprised if we get our act together on protecting privacy until there is a big scandal affecting a politician, akin to Watergate.
Rate adjustments based on your claims history already take into account innumerable factors such as how much you drive. For people like me who have been with the same company for a while (at least 15 years in my case), they should already be able to make good predictions, so how much additional predictive value would this data have?
Are you referring to an existing device that's cheaper than an iPad, or just taking a pot-shot?
The original WWW of 1990 did not have most of what we associate with the WWW today. Here is the spec from late 1991, and this is what a WWW page looked like. Note for example there is no img tag. (About 19 of those 20 tags were in SGML already - the breakthrough though is HREF - the hyperlink).
I think you're kind of missing the point from Google's perspective. Their business is selling ad space. People selling smartphones buy lots of ad space. Scientific/engineering journals do not.
Wait, you think the divorce rate went up because people got less picky?
Having a good relationship does not result from finding the perfect person. There aren't any. (Including yourself, no offense). Does that mean you just pick somebody at random? No, of course not. But if you've dated a few dozen people and the same patterns keep occurring, it's not them, it's you. Trying to have a good relationship by being picky upfront is like trying to drive a good car by buying the right make and model. There are better and worse choices, but when you see a nice older car driving around it says more about the owner than the manufacturer.
Perhaps the bigger problem is that until a critical mass of people connect their PC's to their TV's, they won't start making many split-screen/party games for PC. And the other "problem" is that consoles are fairly good, and fairly cheap, so, what's the problem?
Hmm, in an ideal world, a reported sigma value should include those types of considerations. (Basically, factoring in how many different hypothesis were tested.) It can be tricky, but you would expect such high-profile science to be top notch. After all, to determine you need 5 or 6 sigmas to exceed 99% probability (which is really just an inconsistent usage of terminology), you still have to perform the same calculation. (Otherwise, how do they know they don't need, say, 8 sigmas in the way they're calculating it?)
I've been disappointed with perhaps decreasing support for split-screen in console games. To me it's where consoles really shine above PC games. I haven't upgraded from Forza 3 to Forza 4 because they didn't make much improvement to the splitscreen mode (co-op online play, more than 2 AI cars, etc).