Someone always has to post a mirror/silver paint comment.
Silver paint isn't perfectly reflective. It might mean the laser has to be a little bit more powerful, or on for a little bit longer, but you still get fried.
Then you're wrong. A monopoly is having a dominant market share that is protected somehow, either a natural monopoly, a government granted one, or something where the barrier to entry is simply so high that others can't do it. Just because everybody else makes sucky products doesn't mean you've got a monopoly.
You're right though, not only do you have to have a monopoly, you have to abuse it to be in the wrong.
You've got that backwards. If Apple were leveraging their monopoly (in online music sales) to expand into phone sales, you'd only be able to play iTunes tracks on iOS devices.
Your way around they'd have to be leveraging their phone monopoly to expand into music. But they didn't do that - music came first.
Other vendors were releasing OSes but they didn't get anywhere because MS had such a dominant market share with Office, and the Office formats were closed so you couldn't write software that would interact with it properly.
Other vendors were releasing browsers but they didn't get anywhere because MS built their own browser into their OS, and it could do special things others couldn't BECAUSE it was built into the OS. Ditto for Office.
MS didn't get convicted of being a monopolist because they made Windows or Office or IE. They were convicted because they made all three, and used the interaction between the three to make it extremely difficult for anyone to get any traction in any of the OS, office suite or web browser arenas.
Yes, if Apple threatened developers to prevent them from developing for other platforms that would be monopolistic behaviour. Notice what they HAVEN'T done?
Other companies make non-crippled devices. The people who want an iPad but don't want it crippled buy those. Thus, Apple has a 90% market share.
There just aren't that many people who wan to run interpreters or fork subprocesses on their tablet. And most of the ones who do are perfectly capable of jailbreaking an iPad anyway.
I had some friends come back across the US-Canada border (to Canada). They said that they were in line for quite a while, but when they got to the border itself they were just waved through. Apparently Canadian customs, as usual, was mostly interested in people smuggling semis full of tax free cigarettes across the border. The line was due to US customs... searching Americans, outbound from the US.
I've heard of a few countries that impede their citizens when exiting the country. They're pretty much all places I'd want to stay away from.
Keynote is WAY better than Powerpoint. Even PP can be okay though (if frustrating to actually use) if you use it properly. Unfortunately MS seems to design it to encourage abuse, rather than the opposite.
They have to come up with all kinds of useless features so that Firefox can add the latest and greatest new feature - a "freeze" button to stop all computation on a web page.
Good luck with that. Maybe if you climb a tree and the ionosphere is just right.
Coverage maps lie. Having driven through that area to get to Georgian Bay to go kayaking, cell service is weak enough on the highways, never mind off them.
Save up the pictures and dump them when you get home.
So basically what you're saying is that all the US has to offer Canada is their military?
Now, which stereotypes about Americans are wrong?
By the way, the Canadian government (and most world governments) is smaller than the US government in terms of $/capita or $/GDP, total tax burden in many Canadian provinces is actually lower than in several American states, and is lower than all of them if you include reasonable health insurance, and the things you hear about our health care system "after you're sick" are for elective surgeries and the like - if you're really sick you get care. Free.
No, it's not. You can do a little bit, provided you have enough precision moving the camera, but super resolution (no matter what deconvolution algorithm you use, and RL isn't exactly cutting edge) doesn't really buy you much. It's useful in a few niche areas, like microscopy, but other than that it's impractical.
Yes, I did super resolution research a few years ago.
"I haven't be able to make it happen, but it should be possible to combine N pictures to get a bit less than N times the normal resolution. If you had 100 photos that were 8 megapixels each, you should be able to composite them into a 100 megapixel image with the right alignment and extrapolation algorithms."
No, you can't. Using super-resolution and an expensive mount that can shift the picture by EXACTLY half a pixel (or a quarter, or an eighth), you can get better resolution out of multiple shots, but the technique is severely limited in practice. If you get a factor of two you're doing well.
Unless you're talking about using a longer lens, taking multiple pictures and stitching them together. That's trivial.
"what about your own service charges? I'm in canada, and more than a handful of transactions in a month and they want to start dinging me money to use debit or a credit card."
Get a real account where you have unlimited transactions. PC Financial, ING and others will be happy to help you out with that. They actually pay interest on chequing and savings accounts too.
"Celsius is problematic because the degrees are too large, thus not really a better system"
What? Celsius degrees are too large for what? For any common use, Celsius degrees are still smaller than they need to be. We generally use only every 5 - room temperature is 20 degrees where I'm from, and commonly 25 here in the eastern part of Canada. 30 is hot, 35 sweltering and 40 really, really hot. At 15 you need a jacket, 10 a coat, and 0 is freezing.
Americans seem to use mostly tens of degrees Fahrenheit. It's 50, 60, 70, 80 or 90 out.
If you're doing something where you need precise temperature measurements you can use tenths of degrees.
Well, to start with, the actual mechanism by which general anaesthetic causes unconsciousness is unknown. It's interesting to know how something we use so much actually works. And it might be interesting to know whether it works by the same mechanism that falling asleep naturally does.
Chill. We can explain consciousness as well as most people can explain how their cars work - it seems to arise from activity in the cortex. We even have a decent idea of the parts of the cortex that are most important. From this article it sounds like there are neurons that act to inhibit that activity and so inhibit consciousness. That does indeed explain unconsciousness. You don't need to know all about transistors and etching integrated circuits to explain why a computer that got dropped from a second story window doesn't work.
No, we don't know all the gory details yet, and we probably won't ever be able to satisfy the hard core philosophical navel gazers.
Classification isn't the problem, and never really has been. It's VERY unlikely that you can get anything like the resolution you'd need for any sort of useful brain reading from surface sensors and even if you're willing to undergo invasive surgery to implant electrodes you'd almost certainly need more than are practical to implant at the moment, placement is also a problem, and you STILL might not get enough spatial resolution.
For SF style brain interfaces we're still lacking a workable means to read and stimulate neurons.
Weird. I lived near a place where they were actively developing wind farms in Canada. The local farmers were competing to literally have windmills located in their back yards.
Are you surprised? There's this persistent idea that aboriginal people, and native Americans in particular, were such great caretakers of the environment. The truth is that as soon as they acquired the means to significantly affect their environments they did so, just like the rest of us, from helping drive the mammoth to extinction to cutting down all the trees on Easter island.
Botulinum toxin producing bacteria have the advantage of being very easy to culture - in poorly prepared preserves. Looks like that collection of Mason jars in the cupboard is going to suddenly be regarded as a weapons cache.
Slashdot Mirror
That's kind of expensive. I thought they were paying people to use it, no?
They've got decent R&D combined with crap design, marketing and management. Not such an uncommon problem, actually.
Someone always has to post a mirror/silver paint comment.
Silver paint isn't perfectly reflective. It might mean the laser has to be a little bit more powerful, or on for a little bit longer, but you still get fried.
Antiship missiles, however, would be very effective.
Then you're wrong. A monopoly is having a dominant market share that is protected somehow, either a natural monopoly, a government granted one, or something where the barrier to entry is simply so high that others can't do it. Just because everybody else makes sucky products doesn't mean you've got a monopoly.
You're right though, not only do you have to have a monopoly, you have to abuse it to be in the wrong.
You've got that backwards. If Apple were leveraging their monopoly (in online music sales) to expand into phone sales, you'd only be able to play iTunes tracks on iOS devices.
Your way around they'd have to be leveraging their phone monopoly to expand into music. But they didn't do that - music came first.
Other vendors were releasing OSes but they didn't get anywhere because MS had such a dominant market share with Office, and the Office formats were closed so you couldn't write software that would interact with it properly.
Other vendors were releasing browsers but they didn't get anywhere because MS built their own browser into their OS, and it could do special things others couldn't BECAUSE it was built into the OS. Ditto for Office.
MS didn't get convicted of being a monopolist because they made Windows or Office or IE. They were convicted because they made all three, and used the interaction between the three to make it extremely difficult for anyone to get any traction in any of the OS, office suite or web browser arenas.
Yes, if Apple threatened developers to prevent them from developing for other platforms that would be monopolistic behaviour. Notice what they HAVEN'T done?
Other companies make non-crippled devices. The people who want an iPad but don't want it crippled buy those. Thus, Apple has a 90% market share.
There just aren't that many people who wan to run interpreters or fork subprocesses on their tablet. And most of the ones who do are perfectly capable of jailbreaking an iPad anyway.
I had some friends come back across the US-Canada border (to Canada). They said that they were in line for quite a while, but when they got to the border itself they were just waved through. Apparently Canadian customs, as usual, was mostly interested in people smuggling semis full of tax free cigarettes across the border. The line was due to US customs... searching Americans, outbound from the US.
I've heard of a few countries that impede their citizens when exiting the country. They're pretty much all places I'd want to stay away from.
Keynote is WAY better than Powerpoint. Even PP can be okay though (if frustrating to actually use) if you use it properly. Unfortunately MS seems to design it to encourage abuse, rather than the opposite.
They have to come up with all kinds of useless features so that Firefox can add the latest and greatest new feature - a "freeze" button to stop all computation on a web page.
Actually... can I have one of these please?
Good luck with that. Maybe if you climb a tree and the ionosphere is just right.
Coverage maps lie. Having driven through that area to get to Georgian Bay to go kayaking, cell service is weak enough on the highways, never mind off them.
Save up the pictures and dump them when you get home.
So basically what you're saying is that all the US has to offer Canada is their military?
Now, which stereotypes about Americans are wrong?
By the way, the Canadian government (and most world governments) is smaller than the US government in terms of $/capita or $/GDP, total tax burden in many Canadian provinces is actually lower than in several American states, and is lower than all of them if you include reasonable health insurance, and the things you hear about our health care system "after you're sick" are for elective surgeries and the like - if you're really sick you get care. Free.
No, it's not. You can do a little bit, provided you have enough precision moving the camera, but super resolution (no matter what deconvolution algorithm you use, and RL isn't exactly cutting edge) doesn't really buy you much. It's useful in a few niche areas, like microscopy, but other than that it's impractical.
Yes, I did super resolution research a few years ago.
"I haven't be able to make it happen, but it should be possible to combine N pictures to get a bit less than N times the normal resolution. If you had 100 photos that were 8 megapixels each, you should be able to composite them into a 100 megapixel image with the right alignment and extrapolation algorithms."
No, you can't. Using super-resolution and an expensive mount that can shift the picture by EXACTLY half a pixel (or a quarter, or an eighth), you can get better resolution out of multiple shots, but the technique is severely limited in practice. If you get a factor of two you're doing well.
Unless you're talking about using a longer lens, taking multiple pictures and stitching them together. That's trivial.
"What will happen if a baby sucks on a polymer note?"
It won't get high from the cocaine embedded in the fibres?
"what about your own service charges? I'm in canada, and more than a handful of transactions in a month and they want to start dinging me money to use debit or a credit card."
Get a real account where you have unlimited transactions. PC Financial, ING and others will be happy to help you out with that. They actually pay interest on chequing and savings accounts too.
"Celsius is problematic because the degrees are too large, thus not really a better system"
What? Celsius degrees are too large for what? For any common use, Celsius degrees are still smaller than they need to be. We generally use only every 5 - room temperature is 20 degrees where I'm from, and commonly 25 here in the eastern part of Canada. 30 is hot, 35 sweltering and 40 really, really hot. At 15 you need a jacket, 10 a coat, and 0 is freezing.
Americans seem to use mostly tens of degrees Fahrenheit. It's 50, 60, 70, 80 or 90 out.
If you're doing something where you need precise temperature measurements you can use tenths of degrees.
The US uses coloured bills now. Sure, they're not coloured enough to be useful, but you have to ease Americans into things gradually.
Well, to start with, the actual mechanism by which general anaesthetic causes unconsciousness is unknown. It's interesting to know how something we use so much actually works. And it might be interesting to know whether it works by the same mechanism that falling asleep naturally does.
Chill. We can explain consciousness as well as most people can explain how their cars work - it seems to arise from activity in the cortex. We even have a decent idea of the parts of the cortex that are most important. From this article it sounds like there are neurons that act to inhibit that activity and so inhibit consciousness. That does indeed explain unconsciousness. You don't need to know all about transistors and etching integrated circuits to explain why a computer that got dropped from a second story window doesn't work.
No, we don't know all the gory details yet, and we probably won't ever be able to satisfy the hard core philosophical navel gazers.
the resolution of the sensors.
Classification isn't the problem, and never really has been. It's VERY unlikely that you can get anything like the resolution you'd need for any sort of useful brain reading from surface sensors and even if you're willing to undergo invasive surgery to implant electrodes you'd almost certainly need more than are practical to implant at the moment, placement is also a problem, and you STILL might not get enough spatial resolution.
For SF style brain interfaces we're still lacking a workable means to read and stimulate neurons.
Weird. I lived near a place where they were actively developing wind farms in Canada. The local farmers were competing to literally have windmills located in their back yards.
Are you surprised? There's this persistent idea that aboriginal people, and native Americans in particular, were such great caretakers of the environment. The truth is that as soon as they acquired the means to significantly affect their environments they did so, just like the rest of us, from helping drive the mammoth to extinction to cutting down all the trees on Easter island.
Anthrax can also be found in common dirt.
Botulinum toxin producing bacteria have the advantage of being very easy to culture - in poorly prepared preserves. Looks like that collection of Mason jars in the cupboard is going to suddenly be regarded as a weapons cache.