Canada's fighters aren't for defence. They're for cooperating with NATO and UN missions which mainly involve flying into a country, blowing up something expensive, and flying out again.
There's no point. Our defence strategy is as is should be - be a good world citizen. If the US decides it wants to invade us we just sit around and wait until they get cold and go home.
A strike fighter that can take off vertically if there's a Marine flying it, off a catapult if there's a naval aviator flying it, off a regular runway if there's a air force pilot flying it....
Yes. The Open Invention Network shouldn't be suing people on flimsy grounds either.
Not to mention that the OIN has members like Google. If one of their members is a practicing entity, the OIN can likely make a good argument that they are as well.
I have a study that says the vast majority of western workers would be more efficient if they'd learn some minimal scripting too. It ain't going to happen, at least not with this generation. Have you ever tried to teach a secretary, lawyer, paralegal or physician LaTeX? It ain't gonna happen.
Businesses use Office because it's their best option. There are no alternatives that work as well, overall, have the same amount of support available, work as well with everyone else (and that's an incredibly low bar), and, to boot, are mostly compatible with the billions of dollars that have been spent training the workforce.
You're asking the wrong question. The right question is, why would you buy a Pixel over another laptop? It can't do anything a cheaper laptop can't, and there are quite a few things it can't do that the cheaper laptop can.
I have a similar desktop machine in the lab. I frequently connect to it remotely. But my notebook is quite useful, certainly for coding, testing, emergency processing on the go, photo editing, video editing, etc. And it does that all on airplanes, trains, on the beach, at my friends' house, my parents' house, my cousins' house, on the boat or at conferences, where the Internet connection ranges from non-existent through too-crowded-to-be-useful to "farmer-class." Oh, and if the university internet connection flakes out, as it frequently does? My notebook can still do everything.
You're describing your chromebook as essentially a dumb terminal, except for webapps, where it's kind of a thin client. An $1100 dumb terminal is... expensive.
Compared to a Nintendo DS, when I play a game on a 4" or 7" tablet, I tend to miss the buttons entirely or press the wrong button far more often because my thumb has moved from where I had expected.
Yes, poorly designed interfaces are bad. Many small buttons are hard to use on a small screen. That doesn't mean touchscreens are bad, it means you can't carelessly port unrelated UIs to them.
Provided that it's available for a device that has buttons. What currently mass-produced gaming device smaller than a PC 1. has buttons and 2. allows indie development? Most phones fail #1, and Nintendo and Sony handheld video game systems fail #2.
Indie development? I thought we were discussing user interfaces. Are you suggesting that touchscreens are bad because they don't work well with a particular legacy UI model used for playing games and Sony and Nintendo won't let you code for their devices? Seems like your complaint isn't really about touchscreens then.
The manufacturer of the iControlPad appears to think so, and so did Sony with the Xperia Play. But the problem with external Bluetooth gaming keyboards such as the iControlPad is that few people are willing to buy a $60 gaming keyboard to play a $2 game.
Yes, the manufacturer of the iControlPad (did they ever manufacture the 10,000 units they wanted? Did they sell them?) and the Xperia Play (so successful Sony discontinued it and didn't make another) did think so. The iControlPad even appears to be a success among a very small fraction of the tens (hundreds?) of millions of touchscreen smartphones sold.
Also, if not many people are interested enough to spend $60 on a gaming keyboard, I don't really see that gaming, at least not with a gamepad, is much of a factor in most people's $500-$1000 smartphone purchases.
Touchscreens aren't a solve-all-problems input device. Where they're mostly used, in smartphones and tablets, they're a very good solution, and that's why they've almost entirely displaced devices with other input styles in those areas.
You're being an idiot. You're not being sensitive, you're being patronizing, and you're contributing to real harm being done.
At no point did I say date rape was okay. Quite the opposite. Now, if you're not so stuck in your self righteousness that you can't engage in rational thought:
Discussion of date rape drugs is not more likely to be a PTSD trigger than discussion, or the existence, of any number of other things including rape, violence, drunk idiots or sex in general. Just to be clear for people (like you) who like to put words in other peoples' mouths, that doesn't make date rape, non-date rape, drugging people or violence against anybody in any way okay.
The Ada Initiative seems to agree with me. Their complaint wasn't actually about the discussion of date rape drugs, it was about the discussion of sex in general. Lots of other people have posted the quote here. They may have a point - perhaps Violet Blue's talk was off topic at the conference she was at. However, since she was invited, it seems the organizers didn't think so. While I suspect the AI was actually using rape as an excuse to get a speaker they dislike banned (which I find abhorrent), their claim is that discussion of sex can trigger flashbacks in women suffering from rape related PTSD. This is certainly true. Their solution was to demand the talk be pulled. That's not a good solution.
PTSD flashbacks (and not just with rape-related PTSD) can be triggered by literally anything. A random sampling of some I've heard: loud noises, dogs, baseball, churches, classrooms, street lights, motorcycles, men with dark hair, etc. Some of those ARE from rape victims. Probably not the ones you think.
As with many mental illnesses, an important criterion for the diagnosis of PTSD is that it interferes significantly with normal life (http://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/pages/dsm-iv-tr-ptsd.asp). So guess how you recover from such a mental illness? It isn't by sterilizing the world. It's by developing strategies to deal with your illness and get back as close as possible to living normally. In fact, guess what the recommended treatments are for PTSD? Counselling and support groups (i.e. talking about it) and, in extreme cases, desensitization therapy (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001923/). To refer back to your post, the only way to recover from a mental illness is to develop strategies to cope with it. Those might involve drug therapy (to reference your silly cancer simile) but far preferable, especially for disorders like PTSD, are non-drug therapies like counselling, support groups, etc. Avoidance is often a symptom of, and may even contribute to a mental illness. It does not treat it.
Having said that, it's quite understandable that someone with PTSD might prefer not to be exposed to easily avoided triggers in public. It seems that Blue knows that, and suggested moving her talk to one of several more restricted venues, but those suggestions were refused.
Violet Blue, by the way, is a trained crisis counsellor (as am I). As far as I can tell, Valerie Aurora is not.
It looks to me very much like Valerie Aurora and the Ada Initiative used (and I chose that word specifically, with all the disgusting connotations it has in this context) rape victims generally to further a political agenda and specifically to muzzle a speaker whom they dislike.
On a personal note, one of the most rewarding interactions I had as a crisis counsellor was with a woman the night before she was scheduled to testify against her rapist. She was dreading facing him and was in crisis at the thought. We talked about her experience, her feelings about testifying and not, and what she was likely to gain or lose from either decision. When we finished she had come to the conclusion that she was a hero, both for facing her fear and helping make sure her attacker didn't get a chance to hurt anyone else. She knew it would be difficult, but she was sure she was capable of doing it.
Uh, no. The materials to make a weaponized virus are scarce, tightly controlled, and concentrated in only a few places. You weren't thinking you hook up a virus printer to your computer, were you? This software is kind of a drag and drop RAD application to make a blueprint for an organism which you then e-mail to a lab that actually does the work.
It's pretty widely agreed that a nice atomic bomb would be pretty trivial to deliver to most places you'd want to, with very few orries about detection. A shipping container is not a sophisticated means of delivery. A biological agent, on the other hand, DOES require sophisticated delivery. The literature on delivery methods for biological agents is extensive. It's not easy. To get any sort of worthwhile effect you don't just drop a beaker on the sidewalk.
Just dig them up. It's not technically difficult. Yes, it's a lot of work, and if someone notices what you're doing they might come and stop you, but it's not technically challenging.
If you DID manage to build yourself the blueprints for a killer virus with this software you still have to send it to a lab to get it made for you. Then someone is very likely to come and stop you. Same end result, but a whole lot more technical hurdles.
Well, yes, PhDs have that sort of relationship. And masters students. Also trades - you know, all those things that were always taught though a master-apprentice method. That includes physicians, by the way. Oh, and there's every child, through the parent-child relationship.
Primary school is an adaptation of various institutions, some very old, that we've used to teach all or most children do do basic things like read and write, since we don't currently need to send them to work in the fields (at least not all the time).
You can measure a few properties of black holes. Their mass, charge and angular momentum. All three of these can be observed by the effects they have on nearby matter. The article isn't precisely clear, but I think they're measuring angular momentum by looking at the effect frame dragging has on absorption spectra in the accretion disk.
No, what you said is insightful. IIRC, anything freely falling into a black hole from infinity would arrive at the event horizon travelling at the speed of light. You're also perfectly free to calculate an escape velocity based on relativity. But this measurement is an (indirect) measurement of the rotation (or at least the angular momentum) of the black hole, not the accretion disk.
That's not actually what happens. The event horizon, among other things, is where general relativity predicts that time will stop. So anything at the event horizon will take forever (literally), from the point of view of an observer at relative rest in flat space, to experience any passage of time. Which means nothing can ever cross the event horizon and continue to fall inward. The event horizon is, very literally, the end.
Stripping away someone's self delusions isn't mean. It prevents him from being an easy mark for snake oil salesmen, whether those are homeopaths or Best Buy employees. In medicine the placebo effect is great, until you get something it doesn't work on and you die because you didn't get real treatment. In stereos it just means you get separated from your money, over and over and over again.
No, stair steps don't exist in the music you hear (at least not beyond trivially small ones). You could potentially make an ADC that did produce stair step samples but it would be a stupid thing to do. As he also mentioned, in some cases ADCs to produce stair step samples, but that's an intermediate step in the conversion and is not what is output.
If you want to get really pedantic, any real ADC does take a certain amount of time to complete a sample so the sample does have some finite extent, but it's very, very small, isn't uniformly distributed and is far outside the band limit anyway.
I suppose you could construct a codec in which an in-band transient might be treated differently than a periodic signal but that has very little to do with what actually happens in real codecs that people do, or might, use.
Maybe you think he's smug because he knows what he's talking about and it disagrees with what you think you know?
He says several times that he used sine waves as a simple illustration. Then he switches to square waves. You apparently don't understand sampling theory well enough to understand why your second sentence, in the context of PCM audio, is incorrect. Perhaps reading this will help: http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html.
On the other hand, you might just be an AC troll, an "audiophile" or an old enthusiast or sound engineer who might have been an excellent technician but never developed a proper understanding of signals. In any case, anybody tempted to agree with your post should read the article at that link.
Slashdot Mirror
A bunch of iOS games also do this, and there's a general purpose gamepad app as well I believe.
This isn't new. The other iOS and Android implementations don't require going through the web back to Google either.
If we really want to deal with that problem we shouldn't be buying short (on a Canadian scale) fighters, but rather investing in more icebreakers.
Canada's fighters aren't for defence. They're for cooperating with NATO and UN missions which mainly involve flying into a country, blowing up something expensive, and flying out again.
There's no point. Our defence strategy is as is should be - be a good world citizen. If the US decides it wants to invade us we just sit around and wait until they get cold and go home.
A strike fighter that can take off vertically if there's a Marine flying it, off a catapult if there's a naval aviator flying it, off a regular runway if there's a air force pilot flying it....
Yes. The Open Invention Network shouldn't be suing people on flimsy grounds either.
Not to mention that the OIN has members like Google. If one of their members is a practicing entity, the OIN can likely make a good argument that they are as well.
SCO wasn't a non practicing entity.
Small patent trolls won't be able to go to court? My heart weeps.
Consumers buy phones, because consumers use phones, a lot, in their daily life. Offices buy office software, because offices use office software.
Even the name gives it away!
Thanks, that was funny.
I have a study that says the vast majority of western workers would be more efficient if they'd learn some minimal scripting too. It ain't going to happen, at least not with this generation. Have you ever tried to teach a secretary, lawyer, paralegal or physician LaTeX? It ain't gonna happen.
Businesses use Office because it's their best option. There are no alternatives that work as well, overall, have the same amount of support available, work as well with everyone else (and that's an incredibly low bar), and, to boot, are mostly compatible with the billions of dollars that have been spent training the workforce.
And people have been saying that for decades. Yet everyone has been buying Office, every version.
If anything is going to kill Office, it's Microsoft. Office 365 looks to be a pretty good stab at doing just that.
You're asking the wrong question. The right question is, why would you buy a Pixel over another laptop? It can't do anything a cheaper laptop can't, and there are quite a few things it can't do that the cheaper laptop can.
I have a similar desktop machine in the lab. I frequently connect to it remotely. But my notebook is quite useful, certainly for coding, testing, emergency processing on the go, photo editing, video editing, etc. And it does that all on airplanes, trains, on the beach, at my friends' house, my parents' house, my cousins' house, on the boat or at conferences, where the Internet connection ranges from non-existent through too-crowded-to-be-useful to "farmer-class." Oh, and if the university internet connection flakes out, as it frequently does? My notebook can still do everything.
You're describing your chromebook as essentially a dumb terminal, except for webapps, where it's kind of a thin client. An $1100 dumb terminal is... expensive.
Yes, poorly designed interfaces are bad. Many small buttons are hard to use on a small screen. That doesn't mean touchscreens are bad, it means you can't carelessly port unrelated UIs to them.
Indie development? I thought we were discussing user interfaces. Are you suggesting that touchscreens are bad because they don't work well with a particular legacy UI model used for playing games and Sony and Nintendo won't let you code for their devices? Seems like your complaint isn't really about touchscreens then.
Yes, the manufacturer of the iControlPad (did they ever manufacture the 10,000 units they wanted? Did they sell them?) and the Xperia Play (so successful Sony discontinued it and didn't make another) did think so. The iControlPad even appears to be a success among a very small fraction of the tens (hundreds?) of millions of touchscreen smartphones sold.
Also, if not many people are interested enough to spend $60 on a gaming keyboard, I don't really see that gaming, at least not with a gamepad, is much of a factor in most people's $500-$1000 smartphone purchases.
Touchscreens aren't a solve-all-problems input device. Where they're mostly used, in smartphones and tablets, they're a very good solution, and that's why they've almost entirely displaced devices with other input styles in those areas.
You're being an idiot. You're not being sensitive, you're being patronizing, and you're contributing to real harm being done.
At no point did I say date rape was okay. Quite the opposite. Now, if you're not so stuck in your self righteousness that you can't engage in rational thought:
Discussion of date rape drugs is not more likely to be a PTSD trigger than discussion, or the existence, of any number of other things including rape, violence, drunk idiots or sex in general. Just to be clear for people (like you) who like to put words in other peoples' mouths, that doesn't make date rape, non-date rape, drugging people or violence against anybody in any way okay.
The Ada Initiative seems to agree with me. Their complaint wasn't actually about the discussion of date rape drugs, it was about the discussion of sex in general. Lots of other people have posted the quote here. They may have a point - perhaps Violet Blue's talk was off topic at the conference she was at. However, since she was invited, it seems the organizers didn't think so. While I suspect the AI was actually using rape as an excuse to get a speaker they dislike banned (which I find abhorrent), their claim is that discussion of sex can trigger flashbacks in women suffering from rape related PTSD. This is certainly true. Their solution was to demand the talk be pulled. That's not a good solution.
PTSD flashbacks (and not just with rape-related PTSD) can be triggered by literally anything. A random sampling of some I've heard: loud noises, dogs, baseball, churches, classrooms, street lights, motorcycles, men with dark hair, etc. Some of those ARE from rape victims. Probably not the ones you think.
As with many mental illnesses, an important criterion for the diagnosis of PTSD is that it interferes significantly with normal life (http://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/pages/dsm-iv-tr-ptsd.asp). So guess how you recover from such a mental illness? It isn't by sterilizing the world. It's by developing strategies to deal with your illness and get back as close as possible to living normally. In fact, guess what the recommended treatments are for PTSD? Counselling and support groups (i.e. talking about it) and, in extreme cases, desensitization therapy (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001923/). To refer back to your post, the only way to recover from a mental illness is to develop strategies to cope with it. Those might involve drug therapy (to reference your silly cancer simile) but far preferable, especially for disorders like PTSD, are non-drug therapies like counselling, support groups, etc. Avoidance is often a symptom of, and may even contribute to a mental illness. It does not treat it.
Having said that, it's quite understandable that someone with PTSD might prefer not to be exposed to easily avoided triggers in public. It seems that Blue knows that, and suggested moving her talk to one of several more restricted venues, but those suggestions were refused.
Violet Blue, by the way, is a trained crisis counsellor (as am I). As far as I can tell, Valerie Aurora is not.
It looks to me very much like Valerie Aurora and the Ada Initiative used (and I chose that word specifically, with all the disgusting connotations it has in this context) rape victims generally to further a political agenda and specifically to muzzle a speaker whom they dislike.
On a personal note, one of the most rewarding interactions I had as a crisis counsellor was with a woman the night before she was scheduled to testify against her rapist. She was dreading facing him and was in crisis at the thought. We talked about her experience, her feelings about testifying and not, and what she was likely to gain or lose from either decision. When we finished she had come to the conclusion that she was a hero, both for facing her fear and helping make sure her attacker didn't get a chance to hurt anyone else. She knew it would be difficult, but she was sure she was capable of doing it.
Uh, no. The materials to make a weaponized virus are scarce, tightly controlled, and concentrated in only a few places. You weren't thinking you hook up a virus printer to your computer, were you? This software is kind of a drag and drop RAD application to make a blueprint for an organism which you then e-mail to a lab that actually does the work.
It's pretty widely agreed that a nice atomic bomb would be pretty trivial to deliver to most places you'd want to, with very few orries about detection. A shipping container is not a sophisticated means of delivery. A biological agent, on the other hand, DOES require sophisticated delivery. The literature on delivery methods for biological agents is extensive. It's not easy. To get any sort of worthwhile effect you don't just drop a beaker on the sidewalk.
Just dig them up. It's not technically difficult. Yes, it's a lot of work, and if someone notices what you're doing they might come and stop you, but it's not technically challenging.
If you DID manage to build yourself the blueprints for a killer virus with this software you still have to send it to a lab to get it made for you. Then someone is very likely to come and stop you. Same end result, but a whole lot more technical hurdles.
Well, yes, PhDs have that sort of relationship. And masters students. Also trades - you know, all those things that were always taught though a master-apprentice method. That includes physicians, by the way. Oh, and there's every child, through the parent-child relationship.
Primary school is an adaptation of various institutions, some very old, that we've used to teach all or most children do do basic things like read and write, since we don't currently need to send them to work in the fields (at least not all the time).
You can measure a few properties of black holes. Their mass, charge and angular momentum. All three of these can be observed by the effects they have on nearby matter. The article isn't precisely clear, but I think they're measuring angular momentum by looking at the effect frame dragging has on absorption spectra in the accretion disk.
No, what you said is insightful. IIRC, anything freely falling into a black hole from infinity would arrive at the event horizon travelling at the speed of light. You're also perfectly free to calculate an escape velocity based on relativity. But this measurement is an (indirect) measurement of the rotation (or at least the angular momentum) of the black hole, not the accretion disk.
That's not actually what happens. The event horizon, among other things, is where general relativity predicts that time will stop. So anything at the event horizon will take forever (literally), from the point of view of an observer at relative rest in flat space, to experience any passage of time. Which means nothing can ever cross the event horizon and continue to fall inward. The event horizon is, very literally, the end.
Stripping away someone's self delusions isn't mean. It prevents him from being an easy mark for snake oil salesmen, whether those are homeopaths or Best Buy employees. In medicine the placebo effect is great, until you get something it doesn't work on and you die because you didn't get real treatment. In stereos it just means you get separated from your money, over and over and over again.
No, stair steps don't exist in the music you hear (at least not beyond trivially small ones). You could potentially make an ADC that did produce stair step samples but it would be a stupid thing to do. As he also mentioned, in some cases ADCs to produce stair step samples, but that's an intermediate step in the conversion and is not what is output.
If you want to get really pedantic, any real ADC does take a certain amount of time to complete a sample so the sample does have some finite extent, but it's very, very small, isn't uniformly distributed and is far outside the band limit anyway.
I suppose you could construct a codec in which an in-band transient might be treated differently than a periodic signal but that has very little to do with what actually happens in real codecs that people do, or might, use.
Maybe you think he's smug because he knows what he's talking about and it disagrees with what you think you know?
He says several times that he used sine waves as a simple illustration. Then he switches to square waves. You apparently don't understand sampling theory well enough to understand why your second sentence, in the context of PCM audio, is incorrect. Perhaps reading this will help: http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html.
On the other hand, you might just be an AC troll, an "audiophile" or an old enthusiast or sound engineer who might have been an excellent technician but never developed a proper understanding of signals. In any case, anybody tempted to agree with your post should read the article at that link.
This guy knows what he's talking about, and communicates it well. Amateur audiophiles should especially read his article here: http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html.