You can even get add-on cages for you existing case...
I was going to suggest the same kinda thing. Easier than sliding them in and out of the main case and futzing with power and SATA cables. In fact, the ones you suggested are the very cases I use in my 2U rack servers that I build. I like 'em for what I use them for, but I'm going to make a different recommendation for the OP. The problem is that that rack requires that the drives be in special sleds/trays. If the OP is going to be swapping drives, that means swapping sleds.
The new love of my SATA rack world are these StarTech trayless babies. The doors open with a little pull-latch... like most car-doors, and there's no tray. Just slide the drive in and close the door.
Well, I think it is thriving when you consider how they're doing it. This isn't some dude in the projects on a street corner. This is a website that anybody can go browse, select from a variety of things which you're not supposed to be able to get, and then pay for in a way which is untraceable. It's basically a "Yeah, see if you can stop us", kinda deal. The fact that they're able to flip their middle finger to any and all drug prohibition laws and sit there and rake in a non-trivial amount of money in the process... that strikes me as a major shift in how prohibition laws will need to be enforced (or if they'll even try to) in the future.
but if you understand what the promise of BlackBerry is to its user base: it’s all about getting stuff done
Translation: "It's all about checking your email and thinking that no other phone can do that".
Seriously, I've never understood the Blackberry kool-aid. 6-7 years ago, Blackberry people were running around going "Ooh, yeah... I can check my email wherever I am!". Meanwhile, I was on my Palm Treo, checking email, browsing the web, SSH-ing into my servers, playing RPG's, getting turn-by-turn navigation, etc.
Now, granted, I'm sure Blackberry's mail client crashed less-often than the ones for PalmOS... but how did these guys ever convince the business world that, if you want to check your email on the road, the Blackberry is the only device which will do it?
Seems to me that the problem is that people outgrow what PHP can do for them, partly lured by PHP's own efforts to offer more than what it should do for them... but, even though they've outgrown it, they stick with it.
When it came out, it was really handy for throwing in some server-side functionality into your HTML. Unlike Perl, where you'd have to have print statements all over the place, or load templates and replace keywords, PHP let you just in-line your functions with your HTML. (Sure, there were earlier solutions like this, like ASP but... ew!). So, it's a great first web-development language... like BASIC was for PC programming. Like BASIC, the problem came when you never realized that it was time to "leave the nest" and move on to something more rugged, J2EE, AJAX,.NET, take your pick of oodles of alternatives. Instead, people just kept asking that PHP be extended to do a bunch of kooky crap that it never was meant to do.
So, to address the original post, there's kinda no hope in trying to fix what's messed up with it, because there's *way* too big of an installed base... and most of what's messed up about it is that people are using it for larger projects than they should be.
Alright, I've been down a couple of the roads that you're pondering, so I'll give you my experiences. But first, I'll explain my situation, so that you can evaluate whether our goals are congruent:
For years, I've had TiVo's. I've owned everything from the original, to Series-2, to TiVo-HD. I've really had no reason to switch, until my cable provider rolled out "tuning adaptors". The idea behind these things is to let the cable company avoid sending every channel over every wire. Instead, cable boxes "request" that a certain channel be sent their way, and then the cable company routes that channel there. Essentially, every channel becomes video-on-demand. For DVR's, like the TiVo, they make a little "tuning adaptor" which you plug into the TiVo's USB port. Then, when the TiVo wants a channel, it requests it through the tuning adaptor. The problem with this is that the TiVo is required to classify the nature of the tuning request, whether it's for live TV viewing, or for a pre-set recording, or "speculative" recording (TiVo calls these "suggestions", where it is recording something it thinks I might like). This last category is where we run into problems, because they're one feature of the TiVo which I really like, yet they're the first kind of recordings to get declined by the cable provider. Alas, ever since I switched to tuning adaptors a few months ago, my TiVo has recorded about 10 "suggestions". It used to record 10 every couple of days.
So, I'm starting to actively seek ways to "cut the cord". I first had to identify what I was seeking in my "ideal" TV arrangement:
1 - Some sort of "Suggestions", where it finds me other content based upon what I've already watched and/or rated.
2 - Live sports (primarily NFL, but some baseball, hockey, and hoops would be nice, now and then).
3 - ESPN (I love SportsCenter, Pardon the Interruption, Dan LeBatard, etc... so... gotta have that).
4 - Ability to back up and re-watch something (like TiVo's 8-second rewind) and slo-mo or freeze it.
5 - Ability to watch anywhere (TV, iPad, iPhone?)
I've tried home-brewed HTPC solutions, like MythBuntu and LinuxMCE, but they lack the slick polish that I've grown accustomed to with the TiVo and my iOS devices. Granted, I'm a geek; I spend a lot of my work day at the Linux command-line and I program in a half-dozen languages, but I want my content "consumption" experience to be effortless and polished. Also, I can't get hardly any HD stuff over the air, so... stuff like MythBuntu is a non-starter.
A friend has AppleTV, and I have an iPhone and iPad, so I looked into the idea of going that route. Initially, I was turned off by the notion of paying for individual shows, but then I did the math. I'm paying about $70/mo for my digital cable, two tuner cards (for two TiVo's), and the HD tier. Add to that the $15/mo for each TiVo and I'm up to $100 per month. Now, shows in the iTunes store are about $2 each. So, if I watch fewer than 50 shows per month, I should come out ahead. Plus, you get the "Genius" recommendations (which I haven't tried, but it works well enough for music and app recommendations for my tastes). However, the live-sports stuff is slow in coming. There's no NFL, yet. However, if you're a Time/Warner cable customer (or if you know one who will give you their password), you can use the ESPN app to watch anything on ESPN, so you can get the Sunday-night game.... and I've heard that the NFL (or the network who carries it) makes the Thursday-night game available over the web, somehow. But the Sunday-day and MNF games... I guess I'd have to go down to the local sports-grill. The last thing that the AppleTV has going for it is just my own moral one. I like seeing my money go to a company which is rabidly trying to make really slick products than to Charter, who seems hell-bent on making my use tuning-adaptors, paying for channels I never watch, "renting" cable cards just so that I can watch the channels that I'm already paying for, etc. So, even if I end
That's what immediately went through my head, too... except I was thinking that they should just build the servers INTO the truck and wire the networking to it. That could actually be a fun project, working out the ventilation and making the most-efficient use of the space. In case of fire, unhook the power and network trunks and drive away.
Ok, so if I just pull some random numbers out of my ass... We have 100 people. 50 have insurance and 50 don't. If they sell the hearing aid for $3000, they sell 50 of them. If they sell it for $500 they sell 100. Which makes them more money?
Exactly. In fact, remember those supply-and-demand lines from high-school economics. Basically, your revenue at any given price will be given by finding that price on the demand curve, finding the quantity that it gives you, and you multiply them. The visual way to show this is to make a square with the lower-left corner at (0,0) and the upper-right corner at some point on the demand curve. The area in that square is your revenue. But that is far from your maximum possible revenue. It turns out that, in theory, you could make revenue equal to all of the area under the demand curve. That whole triangle! Usually, that ends up being about 100% increase in revenue.
The way you pull this off is you have to be able to charge $100 from the people who are willing to pay $100 but not $101. And you have to charge $250 from the people who are willing to pay $250 but not $251, etc. In other words, you charge everybody the most that they'll pay. The economics term for this is "price discrimination". Problem is, it's tough to charge different prices from different people. First off, you have the problem of being able to secretly offering different prices to different people. Second, you have the problem of figuring out who's willing to pay more. The internet has made the first problem a non-issue... until people caught Amazon doing it. Remember about 6-7 years ago when someone noticed that, if you went to buy a product on Amazon, and if you were using the same account that you previous used to buy 4 pairs of top-of-the-line Air Jordans, Amazon would quote you a higher price than if your account was used to but Sketchers? Turned out that Amazon was figuring out how "upscale" or how "trailer-park" you tended toward in your purchases, and they could figure out how much more they could squeeze out of you.
An example which is a little closer to the hearing-aid insurance one is that of airline tickets. Ever noticed how it costs so much more to buy a round-trip ticket which does not stay over a weekend? Who would want to not stay over a weekend? Business people. Who's money are they spending? The company's. Are they going to aggressively price-shop or be willing to stay over the weekend for a better price? Nope. So, they can soak the business travelers for more money.
With insurance, it's kinda the same deal. Doctors do have "cash" prices, which they offer to patients who lack insurance, but they can't get too crazy with the price disparity or it'll start looking like insurance fraud.
I've had three pairs of MDR V6's, and for the money, I have yet to find anything close in terms of sound, isolation, and comfort.
I have to agree. I've still got the MDR V6's that I got for Christmas back in the 80's. I can wear these things for hours on end and I forget that I have them on. Plus, they do a pretty good job at eliminating outside noise and, for the money, the frequency response is great. The V6's have ruined me for so many other headphones, it's not even funny. It still surprises me to be watching TV and they'll show some sound engineer in front of a big mixing board... and the dude has a pair of V6's on. Also, I once did a tour with a semi-famous solo musician, and I noticed that his front-of-house sound guy had his V6's in the little bag that they come with (because, yeah, they fold up for travel, too).
It *is* unfortunate that the ear-pads deteriorate after a few years, but you can get new ones on ebay for fairly cheap.
Actually, what went through my mind was "marksmanship", but yeah... bible study is probably better.
What I can't get past, when I hear about situations like this, is that, over time, society has made steady strides toward specialization of labor and has been reaping the efficiency gains that accompany it, and then these parents turn their back on it. I'm pretty certain that these parents are not better mathematicians than the local math teacher, better painters than the local art teachers, better grammarians than the local English teacher, etc. On top of that, it would be very tough to match the facilities (especially for something like chem). At my local high-school, for example, they teach CAD, video editing, pottery, printmaking, auto shop... stuff that requires not only a range of skills that you're unlikely to find in a single person (or even a pair of parents), but also makes use of equipment which you're unlikely to find at home (like milling machines, pottery kilns, a hoist for auto shop, etc.). This whole scenario makes me think of somebody trying to be their own lawyer and doctor, too.... just the level of forsaking (or discounting) the expertise offered by those who do that thing for a living.
...and, by the OP's own admission, they're falling short so far (in that the kid's reading isn't up to par) and that they're ill-equipped to teach the subject matter which is planned (in that the parents have no real background in chemistry). It sounds like they're trying to serve two masters; whatever reason they had for pulling the kid out of school (or not ever putting him in), they've decided that that reason trumps "quality of education" (and before you jump on me about public school being lousy, I'm talking about this case, where the parents don't even have the time or skill to get the kid reading well). If it's a religious reason, fine. If it's because you hate the principal of the school, fine. Take heart in the fact that that top priority is being met and accept that the kid's "book larnin'" is going to suffer.
The reason the quest for good AI has waned is because all of the stuff you'd use it on can be done just as cheaply through MechanicalTurk or by hiring a bunch of dudes in India to do it.
I've only read half of the article as of last night (before it showed up on/.), but I'm in agreement with what I've read so far. For some time, I've been telling people that, with the simple addition of lockable cockpit doors, we've reduced the maximum number of people a terrorist can kill with an airplane from 3,000 per plane to about 100 or so. I think it's myopic to spend billions chasing after that last 100. We accept 100 casualties all the time (that many die in car accidents every day. That many die of heart disease every hour... and of cancer every hour).
Since there are more techie types here, I guess I can use the analogy of software profilers (I can 't use this example on lay-people, unfortunately). After you profile the execution of your software, you direct your efforts toward the routines which will get you great gains with just a small improvement in the actual code (like the routines which are called a zillion times). But you don't obsess over that one routine; you improve it how you can and then move on to other targets.
So, okay... lockable cockpit doors. Yay! We reduced the number of expected casualties by 97%. Now, can we direct our efforts toward better cancer screening? Or improvements in highway safety? Or something which is killing *thousands* of times more Americans than hijackings?
I think the lowest-hanging fruit is to sandbox the various CA's to certain domains. The Tunisian gov't shouldn't be able to make certs for paypal.com. They should probably only be making certs for *.tn, so why not have the browsers enforce this? Have the browsers only trust Verisign and the big DNS registrars for.com certs... etc.
I realize that this is a really low-tech fix, and it doesn't go far enough to really solve the problem completely. I also realize that there's a lot of political hand-wringing to be done over which CA's get trusted for domain ".xyz", and there's going to be a lot of whining and bellyaching from the small players who get sandboxed to a small subset of domains. But the advantage is that it doesn't require that users or webmasters out there change their certs or implement DNSSEC or whatever. Basically, all of the browser developers could implement this in their next release... quite easily, too.
Where is the left wing crying "censorship"? Censorship is bad no matter who does it.
Right here, for one.
Now, granted, I haven't actually seen the app, but I'm not hearing that it bashes gays, or says that god hates them, or whatever. I hear that it's supposed to be a support tool for any gays out there who (erroneously, IMHO) think that they can be "fixed" through some kind of therapy. If this were an app claiming to help left-handed people "become right-handed" or turn lead into gold, we'd all just laugh it off. But because this involves an issue that is usually accompanied by intolerance, I think the knee-jerk reaction here is to lump this app in with intolerant viewpoints about homosexuality. But, like I said, I haven't heard anybody say that the app engages in any intolerant or hateful rhetoric. True, the authors are probably bigots and homophobes, but the app shouldn't be judged by its authors.
Frankly, I don't see it as really hurting anybody. Yeah, it's misguided and dumb, but it's not necessarily hate speech.
First off, the columnist starts off with "Laptop beats Tablet", and then proceeds to list limitations of the iPad; one particular tablet. Some of those limitations (iTunes, replaceable battery, no multitasking) are not issues on other tablets. So, I think I consider these to be marginal arguments against tablets.
Next, the guy lists the advantages of a laptop (ports, storage, keyboard, DVD player/burner). Well, these are all things available (in even more abundance) on a desktop PC. So, I could make that same argument that my desktop beats his laptop. It all comes down to what problem you're trying to solve with your laptop. For me, it was portability. And a tablet gives me more of that than my laptop does.
Until a couple of weeks ago, my laptop was my primary weapon. It had, pretty much, stopped using my desktop, except for big computing chores (or when I needed my two-monitor setup). I also thought that the iPads were pretty pointless when they first came out. However, since then, I've noticed that, many times, I'll be laying in bed at night and I'll want to check my mail really quick, or go look up some website, etc. My two options were: 1) Do it on my iPhone, or 2) Walk across the room to get my heavy laptop and either wait for it to boot or come out of sleep mode, sit up so that I could use it while it was on my lap, etc. So, usually, I'd just do it on my iPhone.
So, I figured I'd get an iPad to see if it would "hit the spot" as far as what I was looking for: an always-handy, quick-on mail-reader, web-browser, media-player. And, as it turns out, it was. Since I bought my iPad, I've gone from only using my laptop to using a combination of my iPad and desktop. The desktop is used for coding, heavy web surfing, and preparing content for the iPad. For everything else, I just take my iPad with me. All of that stuff the columnist gripes that he needs (DVD burner, USB ports, etc), I use the ones on the desktop.
Now, one of the unexpected things about my iPad is that some of the apps (Facebook, Match.com, eBay, eTrade, and Weather Channel immediately come to mind) are actually better than on my PC! At first, I didn't understand how this could be. And then it dawned on my that, on my PC, the interface was always through a web browser. On my iPad, I had a custom app for each of these sites, so the UI was uniquely designed to give me a better user experience. I wasn't expecting that at all. In fact, I actually prefer to use the iPad app for some of these sites over using a PC.
So, all in all, I think the columnist is being a bit unfair (in that he's using limitations of the iPad as an indictment of tablets, in general, and also by not acknowledging that, in all of the ways that laptops beat tablets, desktops beat laptops). But, hey, nobody said that tablets (or laptops, for that matter) were for everybody. So, he's not one of the target market. So what?
What's sad is that so many people in our society are lonely -- lonely enough to go to great lengths to find a mate or companionship, or even just sex.
I agree. At first, I was just going to toss in a snide comment about this whole scam being a tax on the stupid... evolution at work, but it's true. It's tragic that someone can be that lonely and have no idea how to fix it. If this person were in chronic physical pain, there are thousands of ways that modern science can help. But, for this chronic emotional pain... what solutions are there for him? "Buy a Russian bride", "Just be happy with yourself", "Just hang in there. You'll meet someone, someday...". Platitudes.
And to think that there are millions like this person. Not necessarily so desperate as to get bilked out for $200k, but forlorn and lonely, nonetheless.
So you're exactly right, some young kids might read these stories, and start using that word. But so what? If they start using it in public, they will learn really quickly just what that word encompasses, and it will be a lesson that they won't forget soon.
Well... I guess I'd say that some parents might want the option of letting their kid learn this lesson in a less-physical manner. In that sense, I guess I support this "kid-friendly" version of the book because it gives parents that option.
What I certainly oppose is the banning of the original. Options are, in my book, almost always a good thing.
If you are too young to maturely handle the n-word, then you are too young to handle the implications of the story anyway.
Well, sort of.
I'll be honest. When I first read the post, my knee-jerk reaction was that this is political-correctness run amok. However, half-way into one of the Slate commentaries on it, I had a thought: What you get out of the book depends upon the age at which you read it. If you're really young, it's just an adventure book, like Treasure Island or something. The historical overtones, the clues about how racism was so innate that it was codified in the national vernacular, will be lost on you unless you're of sufficient age to understand how language changes over time to reflect changing political opinions.
Now, if you're not at that age yet, then it's just an adventure story. Also, you're closer to that age where you're still "absorbing" your vocabulary and vernacular from observing the conversations of others. In other words, if I had some kid who was, say, 5-6 reading it, I'd worry a bit that they'd think that "nigger" was, like countless other ones, just another word that they hadn't come across, yet, and start whipping it out in conversations at school.
This is kinda what the Slate article was hinting at. We abridge countless other books to make them more pertinent or digestible to different audiences (especially younger ones). In science books, we leave out the bit about Newton's law of gravitation and elliptical orbits just say that the planets orbit the sun until the kid's brain is capable of grokking the more-esoteric concepts. The Slate article questions how this is all that different.
So, even though my overall feeling about this is yucky... and that I think this is a scary path to be going down, I must admit that I can envision situations where I would choose the watered-down version for my own kid if they were of a certain age.
No, the tax rate is the percentage of your money that the government gets to decide how to spend.
Regardless of who decides how it's spent, it gets spent on people that aren't him. In other words, he has decided that he only needs (or even wants) a small fraction of that money to spend on his own leisure and amusement.
Okay, so let me get this straight... he probably paid (or will pay) about 30% in federal and state taxes on his money since it's combined salary and capital gains. So, that means he takes home about 70% of it. Now, he says he's willing to give away half of that. So, he's perfectly happy to keep just 35%, actually. That's the equivalent of being taxed at 65%.
It's interesting to think about this when I hear people freak out about the idea of raising the highest tax-bracket rate from, say, 35% to 39%. They claim that, if we did this, all of the rich people would be so incensed that they'd take their money to other countries...
... yet here's a guy who's joining many other guys who are voluntarily, effectively, taxing themselves at about 65%.
...as the US Government has already pledged it for them. We call it "Death Taxes".
There's no such thing as a "death tax". You don't get taxed when you die. Want proof? Put in your will that you want to be buried with your money. They'll let you be buried with every last cent.
It's when money is transferred to someone else (inherited by an heir, earned as an employee, used to purchase a good or service) when it's taxed.
"Death tax" is just an insidious term made up by the Republicans to make the middle- and lower-classes think that could apply to them ("Well, gollie gee wilikers... y'know.. I'm a gonna die someday... an' I shor don't want to be taxed for dyin'"). After all, everybody dies... but the tax only kicks in on people who inherit large estates... that is why it's more-rightly called an "estate tax".
But Republicans avoid calling it that because it makes it sound like it only hits the rich... and they'd have trouble selling that to the public with that vernacular.
About 6-7 years ago, it struck me that, if we had some kind of local and interstate above-ground monorail system that we could attach cars/pods to, it would solve make a lot of things a lot easier. Since everything's on a rail system controlled by a central computer, the occupants don't even need to be able to drive (or even be people at all... ), so you could have your rail-enabled car drop your kid off at school, or deliver your golf-clubs to your friend's house... 8 hours away. Any time you want to take a trip across the country, get on the monorail, punch in the destination, and take a nap, get drunk, screw, whatever.
Granted, it's a pie-in-the-sky wish, but it seems to have more payoff (people would be able to ride it, and you wouldn't be as limited in the form-factor of devices that could run on it, since stuff doesn't have to snugly fit the tube) and less implementation hassle (I presume that erecting suspended stuff is cheaper than digging trenches for tunnels, you wouldn't have as many right-of-way problems since you could build the monorail over existing highways and streets, it might be easier to keep bums and kids from accessing a suspended track than a tunnel, and it's easier to maintain).
So, the tunnel idea just seems kinda like "Hey, let's do it in a harder way that has less utility".
Well, before I address your comment, I'd like to start off by saying that I agree that this is all security theater. You can't take knives on board, but you can take glass. You can't take flammable liquids on board unless they're distributed amongst 3oz bottles.
Now, having said that, I agree with the person you responded to. Flying isn't compulsory. So, you reply with "but how the hell am I going to get to Hawaii?!?!". Now, some people would reply that you can take a cruise. But I think they're missing a larger point: Going to Hawaii isn't even compulsory. The gov't isn't requiring you to go to Hawaii. But, if you do want to go, and if you want to take this mode of transport, then those are the tradeoffs.
The world is full of provisos like this and you don't give them a second thought. If you want to ride in my car, you can't smoke. If you want to smoke during the drive, then go in someone else's car. If you want to spend the night at my mother's house and you're not married to your sweetie, then you can't sleep in the same room. If you want to sleep in the same room as your sweetie, then don't crash at my mother's house. For some reason, you've selected this particular trade-off for "enhanced seething"; probably having to do with how we've all taken flying for granted.
Again, we can co-miserate all day about how this is total bullshit, and about how women get pat-downs more than men or whatever, but this indignation about being subjected to this "for the crime of buying a plane ticket"... give me a break. You could apply that to just about anything. For the "crime of getting a driver's license", you're required to drive on one side of the street and not drive too fast. For the "crime of buying tickets to a football game", you're often limited in how many beers you can buy. For the "crime of wanting to have a mate", you're required to stay in shape and not be an asshole until after the wedding.
These are all optional things, which carry ancillary requirements to do them. For some people, the trade-off is worth it, so the suck it up and deal. For others, it's not worth it, so they just go do something else.
Whoops! That's right. I meant that the income share of the bottom 90% of families (ie, just about all of us here) has gone down by 17%.
Here is the theoretical justification for the laffer curve: At a 0% tax rate, no revenue is generated. At a 100% tax rate, no one works. Somewhere in between is higher, therefore someone in the middle it must have a downward slope.
I agree. And it seems that, after that is established, every Republican I talk to waves their hands in the air and claims that it's just obvious that we're well in the downward-slope region.
I don't buy it.
Something else worth considering. A miniscule increase in year to year economic growth accumulates geometrically over time.
I don't agree. This isn't a simple algebra-II problem where we're calculating compound interest or bacteria multiplying in a dish and things just keep multiplying over and over.
Eventually, you're going to reach the point where everybody's working and they can't make (TV's | houses | cars | lattes ) any faster. This is what boggled me about the dot-com boom; everybody thought that the "new economy" was going to make everything super-cheap to make. But I couldn't shake the fact that it still takes just as many swings of a hammer to build a house.
Unless they somehow make: 1) the house take fewer hammer-swings to build, 2) the hammer-swinger accept less money per swing of the hammer, or 3) somehow lower the cost of the materials, then the price of a house isn't going to go down. But #3 is actually just #1 and #2 applied to the materials supplier.
Now, #2 doesn't really help the economy because the hammer-swinger is going to have less money to spend on other goods. So, the only thing that really helps the economy is #1: making it take fewer hammer swings. The economists' term for this is "worker productivity". Now, the dot-com boom did give us some productivity gains in the form of just-in-time inventorying, smoother channels for ordering/tracking/paying, etc... but it didn't do much to make houses take fewer or smaller nails.
So, anyway... the long and short of it is: I don't agree that we can make tweaks that give us miniscule bumps in the GDP and that they will just keep compounding geometrically without bound. The GDP has a ceiling, determined by worker productivity (ie, how efficiently the worker can make their widget), availability of workers, demand for the widgets, etc. Cyclically, we get politicians who try to squeeze out more GDP with tweaks to the system and then we get corrections like we have now.
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You can even get add-on cages for you existing case...
I was going to suggest the same kinda thing. Easier than sliding them in and out of the main case and futzing with power and SATA cables. In fact, the ones you suggested are the very cases I use in my 2U rack servers that I build. I like 'em for what I use them for, but I'm going to make a different recommendation for the OP. The problem is that that rack requires that the drives be in special sleds/trays. If the OP is going to be swapping drives, that means swapping sleds.
The new love of my SATA rack world are these StarTech trayless babies. The doors open with a little pull-latch... like most car-doors, and there's no tray. Just slide the drive in and close the door.
$2 million doesn't even register.
Well, I think it is thriving when you consider how they're doing it. This isn't some dude in the projects on a street corner. This is a website that anybody can go browse, select from a variety of things which you're not supposed to be able to get, and then pay for in a way which is untraceable. It's basically a "Yeah, see if you can stop us", kinda deal. The fact that they're able to flip their middle finger to any and all drug prohibition laws and sit there and rake in a non-trivial amount of money in the process... that strikes me as a major shift in how prohibition laws will need to be enforced (or if they'll even try to) in the future.
Drug dealers are the resistance in The War on Drugs.
Actually, drug dealers are the ones hoping that the war on drugs continues, or they'll be out of work.
Translation: "It's all about checking your email and thinking that no other phone can do that".
Seriously, I've never understood the Blackberry kool-aid. 6-7 years ago, Blackberry people were running around going "Ooh, yeah... I can check my email wherever I am!". Meanwhile, I was on my Palm Treo, checking email, browsing the web, SSH-ing into my servers, playing RPG's, getting turn-by-turn navigation, etc.
Now, granted, I'm sure Blackberry's mail client crashed less-often than the ones for PalmOS... but how did these guys ever convince the business world that, if you want to check your email on the road, the Blackberry is the only device which will do it?
Seems to me that the problem is that people outgrow what PHP can do for them, partly lured by PHP's own efforts to offer more than what it should do for them... but, even though they've outgrown it, they stick with it.
.NET, take your pick of oodles of alternatives. Instead, people just kept asking that PHP be extended to do a bunch of kooky crap that it never was meant to do.
When it came out, it was really handy for throwing in some server-side functionality into your HTML. Unlike Perl, where you'd have to have print statements all over the place, or load templates and replace keywords, PHP let you just in-line your functions with your HTML. (Sure, there were earlier solutions like this, like ASP but... ew!). So, it's a great first web-development language... like BASIC was for PC programming. Like BASIC, the problem came when you never realized that it was time to "leave the nest" and move on to something more rugged, J2EE, AJAX,
So, to address the original post, there's kinda no hope in trying to fix what's messed up with it, because there's *way* too big of an installed base... and most of what's messed up about it is that people are using it for larger projects than they should be.
Alright, I've been down a couple of the roads that you're pondering, so I'll give you my experiences. But first, I'll explain my situation, so that you can evaluate whether our goals are congruent:
For years, I've had TiVo's. I've owned everything from the original, to Series-2, to TiVo-HD. I've really had no reason to switch, until my cable provider rolled out "tuning adaptors". The idea behind these things is to let the cable company avoid sending every channel over every wire. Instead, cable boxes "request" that a certain channel be sent their way, and then the cable company routes that channel there. Essentially, every channel becomes video-on-demand. For DVR's, like the TiVo, they make a little "tuning adaptor" which you plug into the TiVo's USB port. Then, when the TiVo wants a channel, it requests it through the tuning adaptor. The problem with this is that the TiVo is required to classify the nature of the tuning request, whether it's for live TV viewing, or for a pre-set recording, or "speculative" recording (TiVo calls these "suggestions", where it is recording something it thinks I might like). This last category is where we run into problems, because they're one feature of the TiVo which I really like, yet they're the first kind of recordings to get declined by the cable provider. Alas, ever since I switched to tuning adaptors a few months ago, my TiVo has recorded about 10 "suggestions". It used to record 10 every couple of days.
So, I'm starting to actively seek ways to "cut the cord". I first had to identify what I was seeking in my "ideal" TV arrangement:
1 - Some sort of "Suggestions", where it finds me other content based upon what I've already watched and/or rated.
2 - Live sports (primarily NFL, but some baseball, hockey, and hoops would be nice, now and then).
3 - ESPN (I love SportsCenter, Pardon the Interruption, Dan LeBatard, etc... so... gotta have that).
4 - Ability to back up and re-watch something (like TiVo's 8-second rewind) and slo-mo or freeze it.
5 - Ability to watch anywhere (TV, iPad, iPhone?)
I've tried home-brewed HTPC solutions, like MythBuntu and LinuxMCE, but they lack the slick polish that I've grown accustomed to with the TiVo and my iOS devices. Granted, I'm a geek; I spend a lot of my work day at the Linux command-line and I program in a half-dozen languages, but I want my content "consumption" experience to be effortless and polished. Also, I can't get hardly any HD stuff over the air, so... stuff like MythBuntu is a non-starter.
A friend has AppleTV, and I have an iPhone and iPad, so I looked into the idea of going that route. Initially, I was turned off by the notion of paying for individual shows, but then I did the math. I'm paying about $70/mo for my digital cable, two tuner cards (for two TiVo's), and the HD tier. Add to that the $15/mo for each TiVo and I'm up to $100 per month. Now, shows in the iTunes store are about $2 each. So, if I watch fewer than 50 shows per month, I should come out ahead. Plus, you get the "Genius" recommendations (which I haven't tried, but it works well enough for music and app recommendations for my tastes). However, the live-sports stuff is slow in coming. There's no NFL, yet. However, if you're a Time/Warner cable customer (or if you know one who will give you their password), you can use the ESPN app to watch anything on ESPN, so you can get the Sunday-night game.... and I've heard that the NFL (or the network who carries it) makes the Thursday-night game available over the web, somehow. But the Sunday-day and MNF games... I guess I'd have to go down to the local sports-grill. The last thing that the AppleTV has going for it is just my own moral one. I like seeing my money go to a company which is rabidly trying to make really slick products than to Charter, who seems hell-bent on making my use tuning-adaptors, paying for channels I never watch, "renting" cable cards just so that I can watch the channels that I'm already paying for, etc. So, even if I end
Buy a truck and park it on the facility property.
That's what immediately went through my head, too... except I was thinking that they should just build the servers INTO the truck and wire the networking to it. That could actually be a fun project, working out the ventilation and making the most-efficient use of the space. In case of fire, unhook the power and network trunks and drive away.
Ok, so if I just pull some random numbers out of my ass... We have 100 people. 50 have insurance and 50 don't. If they sell the hearing aid for $3000, they sell 50 of them. If they sell it for $500 they sell 100. Which makes them more money?
Exactly. In fact, remember those supply-and-demand lines from high-school economics. Basically, your revenue at any given price will be given by finding that price on the demand curve, finding the quantity that it gives you, and you multiply them. The visual way to show this is to make a square with the lower-left corner at (0,0) and the upper-right corner at some point on the demand curve. The area in that square is your revenue. But that is far from your maximum possible revenue. It turns out that, in theory, you could make revenue equal to all of the area under the demand curve. That whole triangle! Usually, that ends up being about 100% increase in revenue.
The way you pull this off is you have to be able to charge $100 from the people who are willing to pay $100 but not $101. And you have to charge $250 from the people who are willing to pay $250 but not $251, etc. In other words, you charge everybody the most that they'll pay. The economics term for this is "price discrimination". Problem is, it's tough to charge different prices from different people. First off, you have the problem of being able to secretly offering different prices to different people. Second, you have the problem of figuring out who's willing to pay more. The internet has made the first problem a non-issue... until people caught Amazon doing it. Remember about 6-7 years ago when someone noticed that, if you went to buy a product on Amazon, and if you were using the same account that you previous used to buy 4 pairs of top-of-the-line Air Jordans, Amazon would quote you a higher price than if your account was used to but Sketchers? Turned out that Amazon was figuring out how "upscale" or how "trailer-park" you tended toward in your purchases, and they could figure out how much more they could squeeze out of you.
An example which is a little closer to the hearing-aid insurance one is that of airline tickets. Ever noticed how it costs so much more to buy a round-trip ticket which does not stay over a weekend? Who would want to not stay over a weekend? Business people. Who's money are they spending? The company's. Are they going to aggressively price-shop or be willing to stay over the weekend for a better price? Nope. So, they can soak the business travelers for more money.
With insurance, it's kinda the same deal. Doctors do have "cash" prices, which they offer to patients who lack insurance, but they can't get too crazy with the price disparity or it'll start looking like insurance fraud.
I've had three pairs of MDR V6's, and for the money, I have yet to find anything close in terms of sound, isolation, and comfort.
I have to agree. I've still got the MDR V6's that I got for Christmas back in the 80's. I can wear these things for hours on end and I forget that I have them on. Plus, they do a pretty good job at eliminating outside noise and, for the money, the frequency response is great. The V6's have ruined me for so many other headphones, it's not even funny. It still surprises me to be watching TV and they'll show some sound engineer in front of a big mixing board... and the dude has a pair of V6's on. Also, I once did a tour with a semi-famous solo musician, and I noticed that his front-of-house sound guy had his V6's in the little bag that they come with (because, yeah, they fold up for travel, too).
It *is* unfortunate that the ear-pads deteriorate after a few years, but you can get new ones on ebay for fairly cheap.
I bet they are above average in Bible study...
Actually, what went through my mind was "marksmanship", but yeah... bible study is probably better.
...and, by the OP's own admission, they're falling short so far (in that the kid's reading isn't up to par) and that they're ill-equipped to teach the subject matter which is planned (in that the parents have no real background in chemistry). It sounds like they're trying to serve two masters; whatever reason they had for pulling the kid out of school (or not ever putting him in), they've decided that that reason trumps "quality of education" (and before you jump on me about public school being lousy, I'm talking about this case, where the parents don't even have the time or skill to get the kid reading well). If it's a religious reason, fine. If it's because you hate the principal of the school, fine. Take heart in the fact that that top priority is being met and accept that the kid's "book larnin'" is going to suffer.
What I can't get past, when I hear about situations like this, is that, over time, society has made steady strides toward specialization of labor and has been reaping the efficiency gains that accompany it, and then these parents turn their back on it. I'm pretty certain that these parents are not better mathematicians than the local math teacher, better painters than the local art teachers, better grammarians than the local English teacher, etc. On top of that, it would be very tough to match the facilities (especially for something like chem). At my local high-school, for example, they teach CAD, video editing, pottery, printmaking, auto shop... stuff that requires not only a range of skills that you're unlikely to find in a single person (or even a pair of parents), but also makes use of equipment which you're unlikely to find at home (like milling machines, pottery kilns, a hoist for auto shop, etc.). This whole scenario makes me think of somebody trying to be their own lawyer and doctor, too.... just the level of forsaking (or discounting) the expertise offered by those who do that thing for a living.
The reason the quest for good AI has waned is because all of the stuff you'd use it on can be done just as cheaply through MechanicalTurk or by hiring a bunch of dudes in India to do it.
I've only read half of the article as of last night (before it showed up on /.), but I'm in agreement with what I've read so far. For some time, I've been telling people that, with the simple addition of lockable cockpit doors, we've reduced the maximum number of people a terrorist can kill with an airplane from 3,000 per plane to about 100 or so. I think it's myopic to spend billions chasing after that last 100. We accept 100 casualties all the time (that many die in car accidents every day. That many die of heart disease every hour... and of cancer every hour).
Since there are more techie types here, I guess I can use the analogy of software profilers (I can 't use this example on lay-people, unfortunately). After you profile the execution of your software, you direct your efforts toward the routines which will get you great gains with just a small improvement in the actual code (like the routines which are called a zillion times). But you don't obsess over that one routine; you improve it how you can and then move on to other targets.
So, okay... lockable cockpit doors. Yay! We reduced the number of expected casualties by 97%. Now, can we direct our efforts toward better cancer screening? Or improvements in highway safety? Or something which is killing *thousands* of times more Americans than hijackings?
I think the lowest-hanging fruit is to sandbox the various CA's to certain domains. The Tunisian gov't shouldn't be able to make certs for paypal.com. They should probably only be making certs for *.tn, so why not have the browsers enforce this? Have the browsers only trust Verisign and the big DNS registrars for .com certs... etc.
I realize that this is a really low-tech fix, and it doesn't go far enough to really solve the problem completely. I also realize that there's a lot of political hand-wringing to be done over which CA's get trusted for domain ".xyz", and there's going to be a lot of whining and bellyaching from the small players who get sandboxed to a small subset of domains. But the advantage is that it doesn't require that users or webmasters out there change their certs or implement DNSSEC or whatever. Basically, all of the browser developers could implement this in their next release... quite easily, too.
Where is the left wing crying "censorship"? Censorship is bad no matter who does it.
Right here, for one.
Now, granted, I haven't actually seen the app, but I'm not hearing that it bashes gays, or says that god hates them, or whatever. I hear that it's supposed to be a support tool for any gays out there who (erroneously, IMHO) think that they can be "fixed" through some kind of therapy. If this were an app claiming to help left-handed people "become right-handed" or turn lead into gold, we'd all just laugh it off. But because this involves an issue that is usually accompanied by intolerance, I think the knee-jerk reaction here is to lump this app in with intolerant viewpoints about homosexuality. But, like I said, I haven't heard anybody say that the app engages in any intolerant or hateful rhetoric. True, the authors are probably bigots and homophobes, but the app shouldn't be judged by its authors.
Frankly, I don't see it as really hurting anybody. Yeah, it's misguided and dumb, but it's not necessarily hate speech.
First off, the columnist starts off with "Laptop beats Tablet", and then proceeds to list limitations of the iPad; one particular tablet. Some of those limitations (iTunes, replaceable battery, no multitasking) are not issues on other tablets. So, I think I consider these to be marginal arguments against tablets.
Next, the guy lists the advantages of a laptop (ports, storage, keyboard, DVD player/burner). Well, these are all things available (in even more abundance) on a desktop PC. So, I could make that same argument that my desktop beats his laptop. It all comes down to what problem you're trying to solve with your laptop. For me, it was portability. And a tablet gives me more of that than my laptop does.
Until a couple of weeks ago, my laptop was my primary weapon. It had, pretty much, stopped using my desktop, except for big computing chores (or when I needed my two-monitor setup). I also thought that the iPads were pretty pointless when they first came out. However, since then, I've noticed that, many times, I'll be laying in bed at night and I'll want to check my mail really quick, or go look up some website, etc. My two options were: 1) Do it on my iPhone, or 2) Walk across the room to get my heavy laptop and either wait for it to boot or come out of sleep mode, sit up so that I could use it while it was on my lap, etc. So, usually, I'd just do it on my iPhone.
So, I figured I'd get an iPad to see if it would "hit the spot" as far as what I was looking for: an always-handy, quick-on mail-reader, web-browser, media-player. And, as it turns out, it was. Since I bought my iPad, I've gone from only using my laptop to using a combination of my iPad and desktop. The desktop is used for coding, heavy web surfing, and preparing content for the iPad. For everything else, I just take my iPad with me. All of that stuff the columnist gripes that he needs (DVD burner, USB ports, etc), I use the ones on the desktop.
Now, one of the unexpected things about my iPad is that some of the apps (Facebook, Match.com, eBay, eTrade, and Weather Channel immediately come to mind) are actually better than on my PC! At first, I didn't understand how this could be. And then it dawned on my that, on my PC, the interface was always through a web browser. On my iPad, I had a custom app for each of these sites, so the UI was uniquely designed to give me a better user experience. I wasn't expecting that at all. In fact, I actually prefer to use the iPad app for some of these sites over using a PC.
So, all in all, I think the columnist is being a bit unfair (in that he's using limitations of the iPad as an indictment of tablets, in general, and also by not acknowledging that, in all of the ways that laptops beat tablets, desktops beat laptops). But, hey, nobody said that tablets (or laptops, for that matter) were for everybody. So, he's not one of the target market. So what?
What's sad is that so many people in our society are lonely -- lonely enough to go to great lengths to find a mate or companionship, or even just sex.
I agree. At first, I was just going to toss in a snide comment about this whole scam being a tax on the stupid... evolution at work, but it's true. It's tragic that someone can be that lonely and have no idea how to fix it. If this person were in chronic physical pain, there are thousands of ways that modern science can help. But, for this chronic emotional pain... what solutions are there for him? "Buy a Russian bride", "Just be happy with yourself", "Just hang in there. You'll meet someone, someday...". Platitudes.
And to think that there are millions like this person. Not necessarily so desperate as to get bilked out for $200k, but forlorn and lonely, nonetheless.
From the photos I'm seeing of the protests, it looks like some folks are resorting to smoke signals.
So you're exactly right, some young kids might read these stories, and start using that word. But so what? If they start using it in public, they will learn really quickly just what that word encompasses, and it will be a lesson that they won't forget soon.
Well... I guess I'd say that some parents might want the option of letting their kid learn this lesson in a less-physical manner. In that sense, I guess I support this "kid-friendly" version of the book because it gives parents that option.
What I certainly oppose is the banning of the original. Options are, in my book, almost always a good thing.
If you are too young to maturely handle the n-word, then you are too young to handle the implications of the story anyway.
Well, sort of.
I'll be honest. When I first read the post, my knee-jerk reaction was that this is political-correctness run amok. However, half-way into one of the Slate commentaries on it, I had a thought: What you get out of the book depends upon the age at which you read it. If you're really young, it's just an adventure book, like Treasure Island or something. The historical overtones, the clues about how racism was so innate that it was codified in the national vernacular, will be lost on you unless you're of sufficient age to understand how language changes over time to reflect changing political opinions.
Now, if you're not at that age yet, then it's just an adventure story. Also, you're closer to that age where you're still "absorbing" your vocabulary and vernacular from observing the conversations of others. In other words, if I had some kid who was, say, 5-6 reading it, I'd worry a bit that they'd think that "nigger" was, like countless other ones, just another word that they hadn't come across, yet, and start whipping it out in conversations at school.
This is kinda what the Slate article was hinting at. We abridge countless other books to make them more pertinent or digestible to different audiences (especially younger ones). In science books, we leave out the bit about Newton's law of gravitation and elliptical orbits just say that the planets orbit the sun until the kid's brain is capable of grokking the more-esoteric concepts. The Slate article questions how this is all that different.
So, even though my overall feeling about this is yucky... and that I think this is a scary path to be going down, I must admit that I can envision situations where I would choose the watered-down version for my own kid if they were of a certain age.
No, the tax rate is the percentage of your money that the government gets to decide how to spend.
Regardless of who decides how it's spent, it gets spent on people that aren't him. In other words, he has decided that he only needs (or even wants) a small fraction of that money to spend on his own leisure and amusement.
Okay, so let me get this straight... he probably paid (or will pay) about 30% in federal and state taxes on his money since it's combined salary and capital gains. So, that means he takes home about 70% of it. Now, he says he's willing to give away half of that. So, he's perfectly happy to keep just 35%, actually. That's the equivalent of being taxed at 65%.
... yet here's a guy who's joining many other guys who are voluntarily, effectively, taxing themselves at about 65%.
It's interesting to think about this when I hear people freak out about the idea of raising the highest tax-bracket rate from, say, 35% to 39%. They claim that, if we did this, all of the rich people would be so incensed that they'd take their money to other countries...
...as the US Government has already pledged it for them. We call it "Death Taxes".
There's no such thing as a "death tax". You don't get taxed when you die. Want proof? Put in your will that you want to be buried with your money. They'll let you be buried with every last cent.
It's when money is transferred to someone else (inherited by an heir, earned as an employee, used to purchase a good or service) when it's taxed.
"Death tax" is just an insidious term made up by the Republicans to make the middle- and lower-classes think that could apply to them ("Well, gollie gee wilikers... y'know.. I'm a gonna die someday... an' I shor don't want to be taxed for dyin'"). After all, everybody dies... but the tax only kicks in on people who inherit large estates... that is why it's more-rightly called an "estate tax".
But Republicans avoid calling it that because it makes it sound like it only hits the rich... and they'd have trouble selling that to the public with that vernacular.
About 6-7 years ago, it struck me that, if we had some kind of local and interstate above-ground monorail system that we could attach cars/pods to, it would solve make a lot of things a lot easier. Since everything's on a rail system controlled by a central computer, the occupants don't even need to be able to drive (or even be people at all... ), so you could have your rail-enabled car drop your kid off at school, or deliver your golf-clubs to your friend's house... 8 hours away. Any time you want to take a trip across the country, get on the monorail, punch in the destination, and take a nap, get drunk, screw, whatever.
Granted, it's a pie-in-the-sky wish, but it seems to have more payoff (people would be able to ride it, and you wouldn't be as limited in the form-factor of devices that could run on it, since stuff doesn't have to snugly fit the tube) and less implementation hassle (I presume that erecting suspended stuff is cheaper than digging trenches for tunnels, you wouldn't have as many right-of-way problems since you could build the monorail over existing highways and streets, it might be easier to keep bums and kids from accessing a suspended track than a tunnel, and it's easier to maintain).
So, the tunnel idea just seems kinda like "Hey, let's do it in a harder way that has less utility".
so i'm supposed to drive to hawaii? jackass.
Well, before I address your comment, I'd like to start off by saying that I agree that this is all security theater. You can't take knives on board, but you can take glass. You can't take flammable liquids on board unless they're distributed amongst 3oz bottles.
Now, having said that, I agree with the person you responded to. Flying isn't compulsory. So, you reply with "but how the hell am I going to get to Hawaii?!?!". Now, some people would reply that you can take a cruise. But I think they're missing a larger point: Going to Hawaii isn't even compulsory. The gov't isn't requiring you to go to Hawaii. But, if you do want to go, and if you want to take this mode of transport, then those are the tradeoffs.
The world is full of provisos like this and you don't give them a second thought. If you want to ride in my car, you can't smoke. If you want to smoke during the drive, then go in someone else's car. If you want to spend the night at my mother's house and you're not married to your sweetie, then you can't sleep in the same room. If you want to sleep in the same room as your sweetie, then don't crash at my mother's house. For some reason, you've selected this particular trade-off for "enhanced seething"; probably having to do with how we've all taken flying for granted.
Again, we can co-miserate all day about how this is total bullshit, and about how women get pat-downs more than men or whatever, but this indignation about being subjected to this "for the crime of buying a plane ticket"... give me a break. You could apply that to just about anything. For the "crime of getting a driver's license", you're required to drive on one side of the street and not drive too fast. For the "crime of buying tickets to a football game", you're often limited in how many beers you can buy. For the "crime of wanting to have a mate", you're required to stay in shape and not be an asshole until after the wedding.
These are all optional things, which carry ancillary requirements to do them. For some people, the trade-off is worth it, so the suck it up and deal. For others, it's not worth it, so they just go do something else.
the inflation-adjusted median income has gone down by 17%
No, it hasn't.
Whoops! That's right. I meant that the income share of the bottom 90% of families (ie, just about all of us here) has gone down by 17%.
Here is the theoretical justification for the laffer curve: At a 0% tax rate, no revenue is generated. At a 100% tax rate, no one works. Somewhere in between is higher, therefore someone in the middle it must have a downward slope.
I agree. And it seems that, after that is established, every Republican I talk to waves their hands in the air and claims that it's just obvious that we're well in the downward-slope region.
I don't buy it.
Something else worth considering. A miniscule increase in year to year economic growth accumulates geometrically over time.
I don't agree. This isn't a simple algebra-II problem where we're calculating compound interest or bacteria multiplying in a dish and things just keep multiplying over and over.
Eventually, you're going to reach the point where everybody's working and they can't make (TV's | houses | cars | lattes ) any faster. This is what boggled me about the dot-com boom; everybody thought that the "new economy" was going to make everything super-cheap to make. But I couldn't shake the fact that it still takes just as many swings of a hammer to build a house.
Unless they somehow make: 1) the house take fewer hammer-swings to build, 2) the hammer-swinger accept less money per swing of the hammer, or 3) somehow lower the cost of the materials, then the price of a house isn't going to go down. But #3 is actually just #1 and #2 applied to the materials supplier.
Now, #2 doesn't really help the economy because the hammer-swinger is going to have less money to spend on other goods. So, the only thing that really helps the economy is #1: making it take fewer hammer swings. The economists' term for this is "worker productivity". Now, the dot-com boom did give us some productivity gains in the form of just-in-time inventorying, smoother channels for ordering/tracking/paying, etc... but it didn't do much to make houses take fewer or smaller nails.
So, anyway... the long and short of it is: I don't agree that we can make tweaks that give us miniscule bumps in the GDP and that they will just keep compounding geometrically without bound. The GDP has a ceiling, determined by worker productivity (ie, how efficiently the worker can make their widget), availability of workers, demand for the widgets, etc. Cyclically, we get politicians who try to squeeze out more GDP with tweaks to the system and then we get corrections like we have now.