Assuming these are the same ones you saw yesterday, the problem I have with conclusion that the US is falling behind "hard" based on these charts is that there was still growth. But if the US is already pumping out, say, 1000 papers a year, then increasing to 1200 a year is quantitatively more than a country that published 20 papers at the first year of measurement and 40 papers at the end. But, the growth of the second country will look more impressive. Not to say the US isn't leveling off, but it's like expecting a hot new product to double its sales every quarter, it's just not possible due to eventual saturation (cue xkcd comic about extrapolation).
Also, the research chart is for publications in 2001, while the growth chart measured the change between 1990 and 2001. E.g. before the Bush II administration and the Republican war on science. Since both charts' data ends at 2001, it's clear that (at the time) the US was still way ahead of everyone else in scientific paper output.
> I can't comprehend WHY this would seem enjoyable for anyone.
The only reason that I can see is that you can make all the pathetically stupid, awful mistakes that the more socially inclined made in Junior High or even grade school, and get them out of your system. Do too bad at dealing with girl#1, and just redo one's profile and try again, assuming that one cannot reset the memory of CloudGirl and start HER from scratch. That way, one can get to the point where one can at least text/chat/IM/etc. socially, well enough to consider an online relationship. And THAT seems a stretch.
There's a massive difference between voice chat and text chat. One is real-time, the other is delayed, even if by seconds, giving the more socially awkward time to compose and organize thoughts.
I have no problem chatting or posting online, but do when chatting in person or even on the phone (with friends, never mind on a date). Phone, you have to listen for the nuances, pick up on the mood, adjust your own voice, keep engaged in a particular topic (not easy if you have some ADD), etc. In person, you have all that plus body language, whether to try advancing the mood by wrapping an arm around her, etc.
I know your point was getting them comfortable enough with a real online-only "romantic" relationship, but if you're socially awkward enough to use this cloud GF ten times before you're comfortable, you will flounder the first time you try it in the real world--or the confidence you feel comes across as too creepy.
I was worried that the Enterprise's new home would be parked outside and exposed to the elements and harsh smog of NYC. Thankfully, from the artist renderings it looks like she'll be enclosed in a glass visitor's building.
Nowadays, the scales are off the eyes of those who are paying attention. You still have to care, though. Same with Apple and Google et al.
Indeed. I'm an Apple fan and have been with them since the late 80s, but not so much a fanboi that I'm blind to their issues.
Bottom line: A big, massive organization with any significant influence and/or moving lots of money must always, always be watched. Apple, Google, Microsoft, MADD, the Gates Foundation, hell even the Red Cross and various multinational charity organizations. And of course government at all levels.
The current iMac form factor was reasonably open until 2005, i.e. you could open it up and access the internals pretty easily. Starting in 2006 though, it became a nightmare to self-service, because you now had to get at things from the front, instead of from the back. Getting at the hard drive (it was fine, but bad capacitors rendered the system itself dead) required removing just about every damn component first, when it should be one of the easiest things to get at.
Enterprise was the worst, followed by Voyager. It's not nerds not liking hot women--there was no objection to Troi in TNG, or Dax in DS9, or at least that wasn't the reason people gave if they disliked those shows.
As a so-called prequel, Enterprise took the most tired and overdone element of Star Trek, time travel, and made it part of its very DNA with the "temporal cold war". The idea that the original Star Trek universe of TOS, TNG, DS9 and even Voyager was the result of meddling in the 22nd century by aliens in the far future, was ridiculous. Though to be fair, story-wise we started down that slippery slope in Star Trek: First Contact.
The producers also deliberately kicked at continuity just for the sake of it, like bringing in the Ferengi, then contriving a reason why they weren't heard from again until TNG's time. T'Pol as first officer on a Starfleet vessel. The Borg (though here, ST: First Contact can be blamed again).
My daughter is now almost 21 and remarkably mature for her age, but if she were 16 and had acted that way I'd have smashed her phone.
Ok, that's kinda funny isn't it?
Why? That's exactly what my cousin did to some of her students when she was teaching English in Japan a decade ago. They didn't believe her threat to toss their new, expensive phones out the 3rd floor window if they kept using them in class, and when she did exactly that they whined to their parents.
Thankfully, upon the outraged parents meeting my cousin over this they sided with her. Probably had something to do with putting it in monetary terms--the parents were paying good money (this was at a private school) for their kid to take the class and actually learn the material.
Of course she couldn't get away with that in North America. To the GP's point, the school would've instantly fired her, and the parents would sue both her and the school for destroying personal property and causing emotional harm to their poor, poor child.
It is a sad state when a 16 year old has to be treated like a child and even sadder when they respond at a level even lower than the pathetic expectations of our society.
Sad state? More like frightening--in most places 16 is old enough to legally get behind the wheel of a motor vehicle.
The problem is that Microsoft hasn't built out any new stores since the first few... An extremely small percentage of people in the USA can get to a Microsoft store. Building out retail stores is useless unless you plan on making it easily available to large portion of people.
That is entirely a Microsoft problem then. With their billions of dollars available they have no financial constraints to building a Microsoft store in every major mall in America.
That is, unless they aren't seeing expected ROI in the few stores that they specifically chose and thought would meet their internal success indicators, and don't want to risk rolling out others.
When it comes to the ios interface, Apple is very strict about what can go on behind the scenes.
Android will only throw a app out of ram if it notices a issue, ios do so by default the moment one hit the home button. And while android leave things running, only one app can be running at any one time in ios (baring some recent exceptions like audio streaming).
This "default" of unloading from RAM you speak of is exactly contrary to my experience with iOS 4+. Most apps updated for it are put into inactive states (exceptions: threads for audio streaming, GPS, VOIP, etc), but relaunch them right away and they return to exactly where they were before... maybe in a paused mode, but hit unpause in a game for example and it will pick up right away.
This can also be verified by running any number of memory monitor utlility apps. I routinely have only 3 or 4 MB "free" and the previous app will re-open where I left it. Hitting the "free up memory" option seen in some of these utilities consumes as much memory as it can and then releases it, so I end up with 80-100+ MB free and the previous app now has to reload everything into memory.
Those tablets required a lot of power to be effective. Not designed for continuous everyday use.
Are you kidding? It's been showing the same message for thousands of years without having to recharge! Granted it took a lot of energy to change the display in the first place. I hear they're a bitch to carry around, though.
>>Reminds me of the episode they did where they raced a Horse against a Ford Mustang and the horse won because it was a tight oval.
Reminds me of a famous story where a man won a bet he could beat a horse in a 100 yard dash, by simply making it 50 yards each way.
And *that* reminds me of the (true) story where Americans claimed they had the record for fastest man in the world after the 1996 Olympics, because they took Michael Johnson's winning 200m time and simply divided the time in half, even though the unofficial title has always been bestowed on the record holder of the 100m dash (Canadian Donovan Bailey at those Olympics).
But, most other parallel staging launch vehicles use liquid propellant boosters, not solid propellant ones that can't be shut down early once they're fired. And the payload for most of these launchers is still at the top, the Soviet-era shuttle notwithstanding.
From what I read after a quick google, only the leading edges, since they're piping the heat to cooler areas to radiate away. A big advantage is that this is apparently a metallic alloy, not the reinvorced carbon-carbon, so a direct hit on it like what doomed Columbia would not have left a gaping hole in the most heat-sensitive place on the craft. On the other hand, it could disable the coolant circulation system...
You probably couldn't replace the entire TPS because the surface area covered by the black-tiles is HUGE. You couldn't possibly pipe it all to a cooler (white tiled) area, the piping would be impossibly complex and add a lot of weight. It's also an active cooling system, i.e. energy needed to circulate the coolant, and Fukushima has amply shown why you want passive cooling whenever possible.
Nuclear plants ARE operated by Simpsons like personnel. Think for a moment, who would work in such an environment if he could get ANY other job?
My personal position? If the price is right for me, yes. And yes, if agreed on the contract, one could expect from me a level of professionalism higher than the one depicted for Homer (expect though my resignation if requested to deal with the aftermaths of an accident that didn't catch me on the site).
Compare and contrast with the Japanese workers who volunteered to rotate into the crippled nuclear plant to try their best to keep the disaster from escalating.
As bad and dangerous as incompetent personnel are, I also don't want anyone working critical operations in a nuclear plant who abandons their coworkers when the going gets tough.
A slight exaggeration, but not at all hard to reach. Using http://www.rupissed.com/ a 160cm, 55kg woman drinking an English pint of beer at lunch, finishing 20 minutes before leaving, has a blood alcohol level of 0.049%. Assuming real beer of course, at 5% ABV. Add in wiggle room and other body factors and she could easily blow over the legal limit.
Yes she could drink less, or have a lighter drink, or stay longer, but there you go
A friend was heading home on an empty highway late one night after work, hadn't had anything to drink, was doing the speed limit, and obeying all traffic laws. He got pulled over.
Why? After determining my friend was free to go, the officer said there's plenty of drivers who know they're just above the legal limit (recently revised downward here, to a blood alcohol level of 0.05%, so quite a few women can't even have a single drink now) and do everything to avoid suspicion by being the best possible driver.
The officer, though good humoured, declined my friend's request to get a ticket for driving the speed limit.
Remember that it was Cingular that originally had the exclusive iPhone deal, and AT&T bought them out right before the original launch.
No one else *wanted* to carry the iPhone, least of all Verizon, it took too much control away from the carriers, who were used to nickel and diming for every single handset feature like Bluetooth and custom ringtones. Though restrictive in other ways, the iPhone was instrumental in breaking the carrier's grip on power in the US and paving the way for Android.
It's an extremely vicious cycle. Well-meaning people and organizations sponsor and feed the starving children, provide education and better health care so they live longer. Once they're older they can't fend for themselves properly because they've been dependent on charity their whole childhood, so they have no meaningful jobs, remain poor (or get recruited into the local gangs and military--it's a way to escape poverty and have meaning in your life), and have children either because there's nothing else to do (or it's forced on the women), coupled with the stupidity of the church and religious dogma preventing meaningful contraceptives, sex education and access to abortions. Repeat cycle.
On point #4, it's been awhile since I played with webserver setup, but SSL certificates for public sites are usually tied to the server DNS name, not its IP. I'm pretty sure this means you can have more than one webserver/hostname entry, all with the same IP, and use host header names (IIS) or Name-based Virtual Host Support (Apache/others) to determine which site and certificate to connect the user to.
There's still the occasional hiccup in recognizing certificate authorities, even big ones. My cell phone carrier's and my cable provider's accounts website renewed their certs recently, about six months apart; both times Firefox and mobile Safari failed to recognize the authority (Verisign!!), i.e. it didn't think the SSL session had been hijacked or that the server was mis-configured. Both browsers were up to date at the time. The connections were still encrypted, the certificate info looked in order, but I could not TRUST that I was connected to the right server if the browsers didn't! The next updates to both fixed this, but this should not be happening in this day and age.
I've also dealt with server applications which don't permit SSL and non-SSL connections at the same time, it's all or nothing. This meant content authors and admins for that content management system-driven public website could not log in and work securely, without pointlessly forcing every public visitor into a secure session, too.
None of these are reasons not to use SSL, of course, just that there are still some technical hurdles that crop up, sometimes unexpectedly.
So you enjoyed $1.00/minute long distance then? 9600bps modems? How about paying extra for touch tone service?
Bell Canada, believe it or not, still charges an extra $4/mo for touchtone. My parents are grandfathered into the service without it and refuse to pay extra just to dial out a little quicker (to use TT services once connected, they switch their phones from pulse to TT).
Back in the day it used to cost Bell more to maintain the pulse system than to simply give them TT for free.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe the charts you're referring to are these ones:
Science Research
Science Growth
Assuming these are the same ones you saw yesterday, the problem I have with conclusion that the US is falling behind "hard" based on these charts is that there was still growth. But if the US is already pumping out, say, 1000 papers a year, then increasing to 1200 a year is quantitatively more than a country that published 20 papers at the first year of measurement and 40 papers at the end. But, the growth of the second country will look more impressive. Not to say the US isn't leveling off, but it's like expecting a hot new product to double its sales every quarter, it's just not possible due to eventual saturation (cue xkcd comic about extrapolation).
Also, the research chart is for publications in 2001, while the growth chart measured the change between 1990 and 2001. E.g. before the Bush II administration and the Republican war on science. Since both charts' data ends at 2001, it's clear that (at the time) the US was still way ahead of everyone else in scientific paper output.
(No, I'm not American).
You just had to spoil last season's Doctor Who for everyone, didn't you...
> I can't comprehend WHY this would seem enjoyable for anyone.
The only reason that I can see is that you can make all the pathetically stupid, awful mistakes that the more socially inclined made in Junior High or even grade school, and get them out of your system. Do too bad at dealing with girl#1, and just redo one's profile and try again, assuming that one cannot reset the memory of CloudGirl and start HER from scratch. That way, one can get to the point where one can at least text/chat/IM/etc. socially, well enough to consider an online relationship. And THAT seems a stretch.
There's a massive difference between voice chat and text chat. One is real-time, the other is delayed, even if by seconds, giving the more socially awkward time to compose and organize thoughts.
I have no problem chatting or posting online, but do when chatting in person or even on the phone (with friends, never mind on a date). Phone, you have to listen for the nuances, pick up on the mood, adjust your own voice, keep engaged in a particular topic (not easy if you have some ADD), etc. In person, you have all that plus body language, whether to try advancing the mood by wrapping an arm around her, etc.
I know your point was getting them comfortable enough with a real online-only "romantic" relationship, but if you're socially awkward enough to use this cloud GF ten times before you're comfortable, you will flounder the first time you try it in the real world--or the confidence you feel comes across as too creepy.
I was worried that the Enterprise's new home would be parked outside and exposed to the elements and harsh smog of NYC. Thankfully, from the artist renderings it looks like she'll be enclosed in a glass visitor's building.
Nowadays, the scales are off the eyes of those who are paying attention. You still have to care, though. Same with Apple and Google et al.
Indeed. I'm an Apple fan and have been with them since the late 80s, but not so much a fanboi that I'm blind to their issues.
Bottom line: A big, massive organization with any significant influence and/or moving lots of money must always, always be watched. Apple, Google, Microsoft, MADD, the Gates Foundation, hell even the Red Cross and various multinational charity organizations. And of course government at all levels.
The current iMac form factor was reasonably open until 2005, i.e. you could open it up and access the internals pretty easily. Starting in 2006 though, it became a nightmare to self-service, because you now had to get at things from the front, instead of from the back. Getting at the hard drive (it was fine, but bad capacitors rendered the system itself dead) required removing just about every damn component first, when it should be one of the easiest things to get at.
Enterprise was the worst, followed by Voyager. It's not nerds not liking hot women--there was no objection to Troi in TNG, or Dax in DS9, or at least that wasn't the reason people gave if they disliked those shows.
As a so-called prequel, Enterprise took the most tired and overdone element of Star Trek, time travel, and made it part of its very DNA with the "temporal cold war". The idea that the original Star Trek universe of TOS, TNG, DS9 and even Voyager was the result of meddling in the 22nd century by aliens in the far future, was ridiculous. Though to be fair, story-wise we started down that slippery slope in Star Trek: First Contact.
The producers also deliberately kicked at continuity just for the sake of it, like bringing in the Ferengi, then contriving a reason why they weren't heard from again until TNG's time. T'Pol as first officer on a Starfleet vessel. The Borg (though here, ST: First Contact can be blamed again).
I could go on, but no point beating a dead horse.
My daughter is now almost 21 and remarkably mature for her age, but if she were 16 and had acted that way I'd have smashed her phone.
Ok, that's kinda funny isn't it?
Why? That's exactly what my cousin did to some of her students when she was teaching English in Japan a decade ago. They didn't believe her threat to toss their new, expensive phones out the 3rd floor window if they kept using them in class, and when she did exactly that they whined to their parents.
Thankfully, upon the outraged parents meeting my cousin over this they sided with her. Probably had something to do with putting it in monetary terms--the parents were paying good money (this was at a private school) for their kid to take the class and actually learn the material.
Of course she couldn't get away with that in North America. To the GP's point, the school would've instantly fired her, and the parents would sue both her and the school for destroying personal property and causing emotional harm to their poor, poor child.
It is a sad state when a 16 year old has to be treated like a child and even sadder when they respond at a level even lower than the pathetic expectations of our society.
Sad state? More like frightening--in most places 16 is old enough to legally get behind the wheel of a motor vehicle.
The problem is that Microsoft hasn't built out any new stores since the first few... An extremely small percentage of people in the USA can get to a Microsoft store. Building out retail stores is useless unless you plan on making it easily available to large portion of people.
That is entirely a Microsoft problem then. With their billions of dollars available they have no financial constraints to building a Microsoft store in every major mall in America.
That is, unless they aren't seeing expected ROI in the few stores that they specifically chose and thought would meet their internal success indicators, and don't want to risk rolling out others.
When it comes to the ios interface, Apple is very strict about what can go on behind the scenes.
Android will only throw a app out of ram if it notices a issue, ios do so by default the moment one hit the home button. And while android leave things running, only one app can be running at any one time in ios (baring some recent exceptions like audio streaming).
This "default" of unloading from RAM you speak of is exactly contrary to my experience with iOS 4+. Most apps updated for it are put into inactive states (exceptions: threads for audio streaming, GPS, VOIP, etc), but relaunch them right away and they return to exactly where they were before... maybe in a paused mode, but hit unpause in a game for example and it will pick up right away.
This can also be verified by running any number of memory monitor utlility apps. I routinely have only 3 or 4 MB "free" and the previous app will re-open where I left it. Hitting the "free up memory" option seen in some of these utilities consumes as much memory as it can and then releases it, so I end up with 80-100+ MB free and the previous app now has to reload everything into memory.
Those tablets required a lot of power to be effective. Not designed for continuous everyday use.
Are you kidding? It's been showing the same message for thousands of years without having to recharge! Granted it took a lot of energy to change the display in the first place. I hear they're a bitch to carry around, though.
How do you like 'dem apples?
(Jobs checks his the value of his Apple shares, then checks revenue from iPhone hardware sales)
Like my Apples just fine.
Sent from my iPhone
>>Reminds me of the episode they did where they raced a Horse against a Ford Mustang and the horse won because it was a tight oval.
Reminds me of a famous story where a man won a bet he could beat a horse in a 100 yard dash, by simply making it 50 yards each way.
And *that* reminds me of the (true) story where Americans claimed they had the record for fastest man in the world after the 1996 Olympics, because they took Michael Johnson's winning 200m time and simply divided the time in half, even though the unofficial title has always been bestowed on the record holder of the 100m dash (Canadian Donovan Bailey at those Olympics).
But, most other parallel staging launch vehicles use liquid propellant boosters, not solid propellant ones that can't be shut down early once they're fired. And the payload for most of these launchers is still at the top, the Soviet-era shuttle notwithstanding.
From what I read after a quick google, only the leading edges, since they're piping the heat to cooler areas to radiate away. A big advantage is that this is apparently a metallic alloy, not the reinvorced carbon-carbon, so a direct hit on it like what doomed Columbia would not have left a gaping hole in the most heat-sensitive place on the craft. On the other hand, it could disable the coolant circulation system...
You probably couldn't replace the entire TPS because the surface area covered by the black-tiles is HUGE. You couldn't possibly pipe it all to a cooler (white tiled) area, the piping would be impossibly complex and add a lot of weight. It's also an active cooling system, i.e. energy needed to circulate the coolant, and Fukushima has amply shown why you want passive cooling whenever possible.
Nuclear plants ARE operated by Simpsons like personnel. Think for a moment, who would work in such an environment if he could get ANY other job?
My personal position? If the price is right for me, yes. And yes, if agreed on the contract, one could expect from me a level of professionalism higher than the one depicted for Homer (expect though my resignation if requested to deal with the aftermaths of an accident that didn't catch me on the site).
Compare and contrast with the Japanese workers who volunteered to rotate into the crippled nuclear plant to try their best to keep the disaster from escalating.
As bad and dangerous as incompetent personnel are, I also don't want anyone working critical operations in a nuclear plant who abandons their coworkers when the going gets tough.
A slight exaggeration, but not at all hard to reach. Using http://www.rupissed.com/ a 160cm, 55kg woman drinking an English pint of beer at lunch, finishing 20 minutes before leaving, has a blood alcohol level of 0.049%. Assuming real beer of course, at 5% ABV. Add in wiggle room and other body factors and she could easily blow over the legal limit.
Yes she could drink less, or have a lighter drink, or stay longer, but there you go
I don't recall Apple ever remote-killing an app that was previously available.
Remote kills *have* been done to Android apps and Kindle ebooks, though.
A friend was heading home on an empty highway late one night after work, hadn't had anything to drink, was doing the speed limit, and obeying all traffic laws. He got pulled over.
Why? After determining my friend was free to go, the officer said there's plenty of drivers who know they're just above the legal limit (recently revised downward here, to a blood alcohol level of 0.05%, so quite a few women can't even have a single drink now) and do everything to avoid suspicion by being the best possible driver.
The officer, though good humoured, declined my friend's request to get a ticket for driving the speed limit.
Hindsight is 20/20.
Remember that it was Cingular that originally had the exclusive iPhone deal, and AT&T bought them out right before the original launch.
No one else *wanted* to carry the iPhone, least of all Verizon, it took too much control away from the carriers, who were used to nickel and diming for every single handset feature like Bluetooth and custom ringtones. Though restrictive in other ways, the iPhone was instrumental in breaking the carrier's grip on power in the US and paving the way for Android.
Then tell me: How is it that the population of Western Europe has been fairly stable for the last many decades?
Simplistic answer: education, contraception and legal abortions, women's rights, decreased wages, more luxury spending, reduced religious influence.
It's an extremely vicious cycle. Well-meaning people and organizations sponsor and feed the starving children, provide education and better health care so they live longer. Once they're older they can't fend for themselves properly because they've been dependent on charity their whole childhood, so they have no meaningful jobs, remain poor (or get recruited into the local gangs and military--it's a way to escape poverty and have meaning in your life), and have children either because there's nothing else to do (or it's forced on the women), coupled with the stupidity of the church and religious dogma preventing meaningful contraceptives, sex education and access to abortions. Repeat cycle.
On point #4, it's been awhile since I played with webserver setup, but SSL certificates for public sites are usually tied to the server DNS name, not its IP. I'm pretty sure this means you can have more than one webserver/hostname entry, all with the same IP, and use host header names (IIS) or Name-based Virtual Host Support (Apache/others) to determine which site and certificate to connect the user to.
There's still the occasional hiccup in recognizing certificate authorities, even big ones. My cell phone carrier's and my cable provider's accounts website renewed their certs recently, about six months apart; both times Firefox and mobile Safari failed to recognize the authority (Verisign!!), i.e. it didn't think the SSL session had been hijacked or that the server was mis-configured. Both browsers were up to date at the time. The connections were still encrypted, the certificate info looked in order, but I could not TRUST that I was connected to the right server if the browsers didn't! The next updates to both fixed this, but this should not be happening in this day and age.
I've also dealt with server applications which don't permit SSL and non-SSL connections at the same time, it's all or nothing. This meant content authors and admins for that content management system-driven public website could not log in and work securely, without pointlessly forcing every public visitor into a secure session, too.
None of these are reasons not to use SSL, of course, just that there are still some technical hurdles that crop up, sometimes unexpectedly.
So you enjoyed $1.00/minute long distance then? 9600bps modems? How about paying extra for touch tone service?
Bell Canada, believe it or not, still charges an extra $4/mo for touchtone. My parents are grandfathered into the service without it and refuse to pay extra just to dial out a little quicker (to use TT services once connected, they switch their phones from pulse to TT).
Back in the day it used to cost Bell more to maintain the pulse system than to simply give them TT for free.