What isn't included in this survey, I surmise, is that the sick Americans are kept "alive" longer, by bankrupting them on expensive medical technologies and pharmaceuticals. It is a life-extending technology that only kicks-in, once the damage has been done!
I think it's more likely that the metric used to measure health is a poor predictor of life expectancy. In fact, the article actually demonstrates as much. This could be because, say, the ability to run a few miles or the number of days spent with a cold each year might indicate good health, but doesn't mean you won't come down with a bad case of cancer or something else that may actually kill you. I suspect Americans are in worse overall health because they're less active and more overweight, wheras brits consume a whole lot more alcohol.
I think most people would happily trade 10% of their salary for 10% more vacation (5 more weeks). We in the U.S. work way too much and live too little.
As for procrastination, unfortunately it often pays off in the workplace. If your boss asks for something to be done at deadline D and you know it takes T, then you do the prep work up front (like research the problem) but don't actually start on the specifics until D-T. Because quite often it turns out no longer to be needed, or before T arrives it's discovered something different is needed, so different that you would have to start over on the task-specific parts. Personally I hate having work on my plate and compulsively finish it up as soon as possible, but doing so isn't really in my own interest (in terms of ROI on my work).
And, like always, laziness is the mother of all invention. We harnessed animals so we wouldn't have to work ourselves, invented mills to save work of hand milling, etc etc. Basically we invent machines and smarter ways of doing things to save work. Unfortunately this is contradictory to the modern workplace where if you created a machine to do your work for you the employer would lay you off rather than continue paying you a salary for work done by your machine. More specifically, they'd buy your machine and RIF those now superfluous. It's why sysadmins automate tasks with scripts, even though if they do it well enough they might soon find themselves without work. Similarly an engineer who does the work of two and consistently delivers quality results early, without even appearing to work hard, may find management suspicious of whether their job warrants even one single full-time position. At least if management isn't technical enough to tell the difference.
The best materials we currently have to make plastic solar-cells ("organic photo-voltaics") have pretty poor efficiency.
But if it's a transparent film, even in the absorption spectrum, you could stack it several layers deep and possibly give each layer a slightly different absorption spectrum. Behind the stack you sandwich a mirror so residual light reflects out for a second trip. Maybe the mirror or a top film could be made to fluoresce as well to bring more energy into the absorption spectrum.
I can't believe they're suggesting that a Mini is a replacement for a server. They'd be better off suggesting a MBP as a replacement. Is their ad campaign going to be "One tenth the performance at one third the price"?
At least the Mac Pro offers the same performance level as the Xserver.
dom
A Mac Mini can do many things just fine. I know a place that uses a Mac Mini to manage four Epson 10800 printers and a Lightjet. It runs three different RIP servers. It clones itself to an external drive daily and backs itself up with TM to the same drive. If it were to go belly up (and it probably will, eventually) they replace it with another, boot it off the external drive and restore the last 24 hours, or most of it, from the TM incrementals. While it runs they can clone it back to the internal drive. It has no display but is entirely managed using screen sharing. If the Mac Mini supported target disk mode they could get rid of the external drive entirely and just keep the spare as a bootable backup in TD mode.
Who's saying it is? Correlation is really all insurance rates need to be based on.
Well, like any other price insurance rates are based on elasticity (PED). Risk just sets the break-even point; clearly if you sell at break even you're not making a dime, and insurance isn't really a true commodity where price is everything but has a fair degree of elasticity. Browser may be a risk correlation, but it may also be an elasticity correlation just as well... (In other words, Firefox users may be willing to pay more or comparison shop less than Chrome users, or have fewer options for whatever reason.) Look up "price elasticity of demand" - for some reason Chrome won't let me paste a link on Slashdot.
Calculus is useless for the vast majority of people (I've taken engineering-level calculus, so I'm not speaking from a position of ignorance here on that).
Maybe from a practical perspective, but not from an intellectual perspective. It's the first, and in many case only exposure many people have to relating to reality in abstract terms - to the very notion of a physical model. Concepts like rates and rates of rates, and their inverse accumulations, are pretty easy to understand and conceptualize, in that to many if not virtually all people they're intuitive, which makes them perfect for an introduction to abstract thinking. It implicitly teaches students to model the world, in ways that can be formally proven to be as correct as the underlying assumptions, with results whose accuracy only depend the accuracy of measurements. It implicitly teaches notions like time-shift invariance (meaning it works a way today it works the same tomorrow). Even if this is ALL they take away from it, at least they develop the notion that reality can be modeled. What if they weren't exposed to the concept at all, ever? They'd be intellectually much, much weaker. Calculus plants an embryo of scientific thinking. It's hard to learn for most people because they're not used to thinking abstractly.
You need math to program the software, but you really don't need it to design a sleek, effective UI. There's both people who need to know advanced mathematics, and people who don't.
Maybe not to create a UI, but presumably the program has to do something as well. Just a UI can be created in a design tool for that purpose, with virtually no programming needed. As soon as any sort of data processing or analysis is needed, being familiar with at least discrete mathematics is a very good idea. But, linear systems, statistics, basic filtering, and linear algebra can't hurt either!
None of the new genre "mystery" shows, weather it be Caprica, The Event, or Rubicon, are doing all that well in the ratings. Granted, not all of them are amazing shows in their own right, but I think part of it is that viewers simply aren't willing to invest in a "mystery" show when the writers have proven time and time again that they won't actually deliver a consistent answer when it comes to the "mystery" aspect of the show.
Mystery? What mystery?! I don't recall a single mystery in Caprica, it was more like straight-up chronicling. If there was some mystery, even a little, it might have had non-zero interest. It was just so cliche and predictable it couldn't die soon enough.
While the story line was arcing, the script was really garbage. The characters were so cliche and overdone it was cringe worthy. It was visually dull. Uneventful. Uninteresting. Meaningless. Meh.
Isn't that how democracy is supposed to work? It's not like the non-citizens can give themselves the right to vote, and it doesn't affect anything other than local government
More specifically, in SF it only applies to school board elections. Permanent legal residents are required by law to put their children in school, just like everybody else, so it's only reasonable that they have a say in what goes on there. A school board election, after all, is only a notch above a PTA meeting and they're welcome there.
Really? Because where I am they're having trouble hiring people with the skill set we require.
That's a pretty broad comment. What are the skills that you require? If we're talking about people with experience writing object-oriented COBOL code and willing to work for little more than minimum wage, you're right. If we're talking about people able to write decent Java code for a reasonable salary, then post your requirements on Slashdot and I expect that you'll find a lot of applicants.
If you talk about people who know the JVM and JIT engine inside and out and can optimize JavaFX for the next gen Blu-Ray players - yeah, you'll get lots of applicants perhaps. But chances are none are even remotely qualified. If you're the manager in charge of this I can guarantee you will never find the people you need and you will ALWAYS have open reqs. If a qualified engineer were to knock on your door you count your blessings and hire them! Conversely, you can't treat them like shit or they walk out the door, and they'll tell all the other ten qualified engineers in the valley - because they all know each other from some past job and meet over pizza and beer every so often - after which you can't find a replacement, period. Eventually YOUR boss will figure out YOU are the obstacle to staffing and get rid of YOU.
The purpose of Java is to get companies to write fancy enterprise apps in Java and sell them Oracle products as the database back-end. Why exactly they'd buy the #1 tool which people use to access your flagship application, and then proceed to alienate everyone who uses it, is beyond me... but I don't see how it helps Oracle make money.
They bought Sun for its server business - hardware and Solaris. They couldn't care less about Java; it's not a source of revenue to them and the hardware drag is minimal. It's just something they got as part of the deal. Sun had a lot of other stuff they also couldn't care less about - all that is going to either wither on the wine and go away by attrition, or they take out the shotgun. Unless there's a hardware or DB drag a product is dead in the water.
On a side note I find it, err..., rather American that the only gasoline engine is the 2.5L one. In Europe that's not even available - but there's a wide selection of engines, the smallest ones being the normally aspirated 1.4 and the turbo-charged 1.2TSI and the largest one the GTI's turbo-charged 2.0.
Easy: Americans drive automatic transmissions. The transmission control can't see there's a hill coming up ahead and downshift before reaching it, leaving it momentarily in a high gear before it responds. Engines here need a power reserve to bridge bad shift timing or it becomes very difficult to keep up with traffic.
SSD - symmetric diagonally dominant, mean the diagonal element is more the sum of abs all the rest in the row. That is a very strong condition, which happen in very specific applications. Never met them in the computer vision and image processing for example.
I'm not familiar with using linear systems for simulations, but I would guess that any system that models inertia would end up SDD. Meaning a bias towards the existing state rather than any other cell's/particle's state. This is very different from imaging or audio, where the convolution for e.g. diffraction rings or echo cancellation isn't SDD.
Facebook is too expensive for what it is -- a neatly designed hack for people to make their own web pages and connect with others.
I don't think you have a good grasp of what it is. It's more like slashdot, except scoped to people you know and unmoderated so anyone can post stuff. The moderation consists in your ability to ignore people. There may be some sort of web page creation feature, but I doubt it - you'd create a site somewhere else and post a link to it. There are also private messages, and personal (but publicly visible) messages.
A lot of the terminology is stupid - like "friends" and "wall" (personal but public messages). This could all be restructured to be more descriptive since the terminology itself is a stumbling block to many - especially older 40+ ones who aren't particularly motivated to figure what it is rather than what it's called in the first place.
Aside from some data consistency issues (related to the whole BigTable nonsense) - I find Facebooks UI pretty damn easy. A UI refresh is one thing they DON'T need, IMHO.
Too many different settings and options, spread over too many different places - fairly typical implementation-driven UI design (rather than UI design-driven implementation). The feed itself is pretty good, though made overly complicated sometimes - for instance, why is there a separate 'latest"? basically it seems to be some sort of manual cache refresh, and why would it think I want anything other than the latest?! What is "not latest"? The supporting facilities, like photo albums, are also pretty messy - people typically just want to "post photos on facebook", not manage albums and slide shows or whatever.
Apple is very good at designing these sort of things, especially with regards to integration. They also don't shy away from doing more complex engineering work to support a simplified interface with fewer settings.
However, this is stuff FB itself should handle. I don't think it makes business sense for Apple to buy it at over $50b.
* I buy 100 Dell systems, then leave. My stupid manager barely knows how to plug in a keyboard, but she can rely upon Dell for support.
Even more importantly, she can find a replacement on craigslist before you've even left the building. This makes your work a commodity in her view, and she'll pay more for equipment to keep payroll down. Because replacement cost in the end translates to the wage she has to pay to keep you.
Packing everyone into 8x10 cells, isn't an acceptable solution to me. Any solution that doesn't allow for wide open space of undeveloped land, wilderness, forests, jungles, deserts, is suboptimal. We could cram everyone into skyscrapers that cover the entire earth in one giant planet wide city, but what kind of life would that be? Quality of life and quality of our living space are important things to consider. Humans were not meant to be packed like sardines into crowded cities with no where to escape to. The health effects both known and unknown would be profound.
The earth has ~150M km^2 of land surface. That's 37b acres. If each family averaging 3 people had an acre we could fit 100b people. Now, all of that isn't livable, but a family also doesn't need an acre; an average living space of 2500 sq ft is plenty - bigger for large families, maybe "only" 1000 sq ft for singles. We could still fit 100b people using these luxurious standards while using only a fraction of the surface.
The problem would be the rest of the earth's land surface and oceans wouldn't be sufficient to feed 100b, provide fresh water, energy for heating and cooling, clothing, or even furnish all this living space to begin with.
what TFA refers to isn't doomsday by 2030, but that in 2030, we will be using renewable resources twice as fast as they can be renewed. Which means that we are going to run out of lotsastuff one day, but exactly when is hard to estimate.
TFA:
According to the Living Planet Report, human demands on natural resources have doubled in under 50 years and are now outstripping what the Earth can provide by more than half; and humanity carries on as it is in use of resources, globally it will need the capacity of two Earths by 2030.
Your stance certainly is not what the headline, TFS and TFA say. The key part is "now outstripping what the Earth can provide by more than half." now.
I don't see anything wrong with that. All you need to do is multiply 24 months by the rate, to see how much you will be spending, and decide whether or not it's a good bargain.... If you disagree, well then just sign-on with one of those pay-as-you-go companies that sell the phone and service separately..
Nothing wrong with that. But, after 24 mo the phone is paid for and the rate should be adjusted accordingly. Additionally, the phone should be unlocked so you have alternatives other than buying another phone and starting over at square 1. In effect, the equipment subsidy portion of the plan should by law be factored out as a separate financing article, with a stated APR and term.
BTW binding arbitration doesn't mean much. Paypal tried to include that in their TOS but when they later were sued by State AGs for stealing money from customer accounts, the justice quickly nullified the clause as being in violation of consumer protection laws. He said that users cannot sign-away rights already protected by superior laws. Same applies here with the wireless carriers.
Sounds plausible. From a broader perspective one has to ask whether a corporation that tries to make customers sign contractual agreements that make them think they've forfeited inalienable legal rights is bargaining in good faith. It ranks up there with usury and breaking people's legs to make them pay up. It also ought to run right into our constitutional right to due process.
Why don't we, people who appreciate intellectual honest, just state the facts without the often abused practice of demonizing?
A lot of people are intellectually honest, but also intellectually underdeveloped. This means they still put their intellectual abilities in the service of supporting their gut response, rather than the other way around.
They say "All these securities are worthless now, they can't be traded." Basically, they just write off the debt. It is all stored in their computers anyhow. All they have to do to succeed at that is convince the other debt holders it is ok. So long as everyone else, the pension plans, the other nations, etc that own US securities say "Yep, we are happy, we are convinced you'll only do this to China because they are assholes and not to us, we'll still buy your stuff," then they are fine.
This isn't realistic in any way or shape; there's really no way to clearly distinguish securities owned by a Chinese bank from ones owned by a Russian or French bank - while owners are registered they get pooled and layered globally. The securities will become part of global funds, which have investors outside China; they're used to guarantee loans for investments in China for foreign businesses; they're flat out pooled in global index funds; and they're even used a payment. I don't think Russians would appreciate not getting paid for oil because the U.S. suddenly eliminated China's main means of payment. There's no way to destroy one country's economy without destroying everyone's economy - this should be pretty clear from the U.S. banking troubles which dragged down banks everywhere. Part of this stems from investments effectively having become liquid assets; I can today liquidate stock quicker, easier, and cheaper than I can get currency from the nearest ATM! It's all effectively cash. The other issue worth considering is that much of Chinese infrastructure is actually owned by U.S. investors and corporations, which means our economic well being is tied to theirs. It's worth keeping in mind here that income from foreign investments is not considered part of the trade balance or GDP (it's accounted for in the country where the return was produced). So these two metrics don't tell the whole story.
The Chinese just need to withdraw the money they've put into western assets and which they lent to the west to finance our national debts.
No need to waste a single bullet since there are better ways to devastate the western world in one stroke.
How would they do that? You can't just "withdraw" money in treasury notes and bills. That's a bit like a bank threatening to "withdraw" the money in your mortgage. These are contractually set up instruments with predetermined terms and payment schedules, not petty cash. All they can do is start selling it off, in which case they'll drop in value and we can buy them back for pennies on the dollar. Not much of a threat.
Slashdot Mirror
What isn't included in this survey, I surmise, is that the sick Americans are kept "alive" longer, by bankrupting them on expensive medical technologies and pharmaceuticals. It is a life-extending technology that only kicks-in, once the damage has been done!
I think it's more likely that the metric used to measure health is a poor predictor of life expectancy. In fact, the article actually demonstrates as much. This could be because, say, the ability to run a few miles or the number of days spent with a cold each year might indicate good health, but doesn't mean you won't come down with a bad case of cancer or something else that may actually kill you. I suspect Americans are in worse overall health because they're less active and more overweight, wheras brits consume a whole lot more alcohol.
I think most people would happily trade 10% of their salary for 10% more vacation (5 more weeks). We in the U.S. work way too much and live too little.
As for procrastination, unfortunately it often pays off in the workplace. If your boss asks for something to be done at deadline D and you know it takes T, then you do the prep work up front (like research the problem) but don't actually start on the specifics until D-T. Because quite often it turns out no longer to be needed, or before T arrives it's discovered something different is needed, so different that you would have to start over on the task-specific parts. Personally I hate having work on my plate and compulsively finish it up as soon as possible, but doing so isn't really in my own interest (in terms of ROI on my work).
And, like always, laziness is the mother of all invention. We harnessed animals so we wouldn't have to work ourselves, invented mills to save work of hand milling, etc etc. Basically we invent machines and smarter ways of doing things to save work. Unfortunately this is contradictory to the modern workplace where if you created a machine to do your work for you the employer would lay you off rather than continue paying you a salary for work done by your machine. More specifically, they'd buy your machine and RIF those now superfluous. It's why sysadmins automate tasks with scripts, even though if they do it well enough they might soon find themselves without work. Similarly an engineer who does the work of two and consistently delivers quality results early, without even appearing to work hard, may find management suspicious of whether their job warrants even one single full-time position. At least if management isn't technical enough to tell the difference.
The best materials we currently have to make plastic solar-cells ("organic photo-voltaics") have pretty poor efficiency.
But if it's a transparent film, even in the absorption spectrum, you could stack it several layers deep and possibly give each layer a slightly different absorption spectrum. Behind the stack you sandwich a mirror so residual light reflects out for a second trip. Maybe the mirror or a top film could be made to fluoresce as well to bring more energy into the absorption spectrum.
I can't believe they're suggesting that a Mini is a replacement for a server. They'd be better off suggesting a MBP as a replacement. Is their ad campaign going to be "One tenth the performance at one third the price"?
At least the Mac Pro offers the same performance level as the Xserver.
dom
A Mac Mini can do many things just fine. I know a place that uses a Mac Mini to manage four Epson 10800 printers and a Lightjet. It runs three different RIP servers. It clones itself to an external drive daily and backs itself up with TM to the same drive. If it were to go belly up (and it probably will, eventually) they replace it with another, boot it off the external drive and restore the last 24 hours, or most of it, from the TM incrementals. While it runs they can clone it back to the internal drive. It has no display but is entirely managed using screen sharing. If the Mac Mini supported target disk mode they could get rid of the external drive entirely and just keep the spare as a bootable backup in TD mode.
Who's saying it is? Correlation is really all insurance rates need to be based on.
Well, like any other price insurance rates are based on elasticity (PED). Risk just sets the break-even point; clearly if you sell at break even you're not making a dime, and insurance isn't really a true commodity where price is everything but has a fair degree of elasticity. Browser may be a risk correlation, but it may also be an elasticity correlation just as well... (In other words, Firefox users may be willing to pay more or comparison shop less than Chrome users, or have fewer options for whatever reason.) Look up "price elasticity of demand" - for some reason Chrome won't let me paste a link on Slashdot.
Calculus is useless for the vast majority of people (I've taken engineering-level calculus, so I'm not speaking from a position of ignorance here on that).
Maybe from a practical perspective, but not from an intellectual perspective. It's the first, and in many case only exposure many people have to relating to reality in abstract terms - to the very notion of a physical model. Concepts like rates and rates of rates, and their inverse accumulations, are pretty easy to understand and conceptualize, in that to many if not virtually all people they're intuitive, which makes them perfect for an introduction to abstract thinking. It implicitly teaches students to model the world, in ways that can be formally proven to be as correct as the underlying assumptions, with results whose accuracy only depend the accuracy of measurements. It implicitly teaches notions like time-shift invariance (meaning it works a way today it works the same tomorrow). Even if this is ALL they take away from it, at least they develop the notion that reality can be modeled. What if they weren't exposed to the concept at all, ever? They'd be intellectually much, much weaker. Calculus plants an embryo of scientific thinking. It's hard to learn for most people because they're not used to thinking abstractly.
You need math to program the software, but you really don't need it to design a sleek, effective UI. There's both people who need to know advanced mathematics, and people who don't.
Maybe not to create a UI, but presumably the program has to do something as well. Just a UI can be created in a design tool for that purpose, with virtually no programming needed. As soon as any sort of data processing or analysis is needed, being familiar with at least discrete mathematics is a very good idea. But, linear systems, statistics, basic filtering, and linear algebra can't hurt either!
None of the new genre "mystery" shows, weather it be Caprica, The Event, or Rubicon, are doing all that well in the ratings. Granted, not all of them are amazing shows in their own right, but I think part of it is that viewers simply aren't willing to invest in a "mystery" show when the writers have proven time and time again that they won't actually deliver a consistent answer when it comes to the "mystery" aspect of the show.
Mystery? What mystery?! I don't recall a single mystery in Caprica, it was more like straight-up chronicling. If there was some mystery, even a little, it might have had non-zero interest. It was just so cliche and predictable it couldn't die soon enough.
While the story line was arcing, the script was really garbage. The characters were so cliche and overdone it was cringe worthy. It was visually dull. Uneventful. Uninteresting. Meaningless. Meh.
Isn't that how democracy is supposed to work? It's not like the non-citizens can give themselves the right to vote, and it doesn't affect anything other than local government
More specifically, in SF it only applies to school board elections. Permanent legal residents are required by law to put their children in school, just like everybody else, so it's only reasonable that they have a say in what goes on there. A school board election, after all, is only a notch above a PTA meeting and they're welcome there.
Really? Because where I am they're having trouble hiring people with the skill set we require.
That's a pretty broad comment. What are the skills that you require? If we're talking about people with experience writing object-oriented COBOL code and willing to work for little more than minimum wage, you're right. If we're talking about people able to write decent Java code for a reasonable salary, then post your requirements on Slashdot and I expect that you'll find a lot of applicants.
If you talk about people who know the JVM and JIT engine inside and out and can optimize JavaFX for the next gen Blu-Ray players - yeah, you'll get lots of applicants perhaps. But chances are none are even remotely qualified. If you're the manager in charge of this I can guarantee you will never find the people you need and you will ALWAYS have open reqs. If a qualified engineer were to knock on your door you count your blessings and hire them! Conversely, you can't treat them like shit or they walk out the door, and they'll tell all the other ten qualified engineers in the valley - because they all know each other from some past job and meet over pizza and beer every so often - after which you can't find a replacement, period. Eventually YOUR boss will figure out YOU are the obstacle to staffing and get rid of YOU.
The purpose of Java is to get companies to write fancy enterprise apps in Java and sell them Oracle products as the database back-end. Why exactly they'd buy the #1 tool which people use to access your flagship application, and then proceed to alienate everyone who uses it, is beyond me... but I don't see how it helps Oracle make money.
They bought Sun for its server business - hardware and Solaris. They couldn't care less about Java; it's not a source of revenue to them and the hardware drag is minimal. It's just something they got as part of the deal. Sun had a lot of other stuff they also couldn't care less about - all that is going to either wither on the wine and go away by attrition, or they take out the shotgun. Unless there's a hardware or DB drag a product is dead in the water.
On a side note I find it, err..., rather American that the only gasoline engine is the 2.5L one. In Europe that's not even available - but there's a wide selection of engines, the smallest ones being the normally aspirated 1.4 and the turbo-charged 1.2TSI and the largest one the GTI's turbo-charged 2.0.
Easy: Americans drive automatic transmissions. The transmission control can't see there's a hill coming up ahead and downshift before reaching it, leaving it momentarily in a high gear before it responds. Engines here need a power reserve to bridge bad shift timing or it becomes very difficult to keep up with traffic.
Comparing the solver's complexity to Gaussian-Elimination isn't useful. No one in their right mind uses direct solvers on large linear systems.
It's useful because every other solver is compared to the same standard.
SSD - symmetric diagonally dominant, mean the diagonal element is more the sum of abs all the rest in the row. That is a very strong condition, which happen in very specific applications. Never met them in the computer vision and image processing for example.
I'm not familiar with using linear systems for simulations, but I would guess that any system that models inertia would end up SDD. Meaning a bias towards the existing state rather than any other cell's/particle's state. This is very different from imaging or audio, where the convolution for e.g. diffraction rings or echo cancellation isn't SDD.
Facebook is too expensive for what it is -- a neatly designed hack for people to make their own web pages and connect with others.
I don't think you have a good grasp of what it is. It's more like slashdot, except scoped to people you know and unmoderated so anyone can post stuff. The moderation consists in your ability to ignore people. There may be some sort of web page creation feature, but I doubt it - you'd create a site somewhere else and post a link to it. There are also private messages, and personal (but publicly visible) messages.
A lot of the terminology is stupid - like "friends" and "wall" (personal but public messages). This could all be restructured to be more descriptive since the terminology itself is a stumbling block to many - especially older 40+ ones who aren't particularly motivated to figure what it is rather than what it's called in the first place.
Aside from some data consistency issues (related to the whole BigTable nonsense) - I find Facebooks UI pretty damn easy. A UI refresh is one thing they DON'T need, IMHO.
Too many different settings and options, spread over too many different places - fairly typical implementation-driven UI design (rather than UI design-driven implementation). The feed itself is pretty good, though made overly complicated sometimes - for instance, why is there a separate 'latest"? basically it seems to be some sort of manual cache refresh, and why would it think I want anything other than the latest?! What is "not latest"? The supporting facilities, like photo albums, are also pretty messy - people typically just want to "post photos on facebook", not manage albums and slide shows or whatever.
Apple is very good at designing these sort of things, especially with regards to integration. They also don't shy away from doing more complex engineering work to support a simplified interface with fewer settings.
However, this is stuff FB itself should handle. I don't think it makes business sense for Apple to buy it at over $50b.
* I buy 100 Dell systems, then leave. My stupid manager barely knows how to plug in a keyboard, but she can rely upon Dell for support.
Even more importantly, she can find a replacement on craigslist before you've even left the building. This makes your work a commodity in her view, and she'll pay more for equipment to keep payroll down. Because replacement cost in the end translates to the wage she has to pay to keep you.
Packing everyone into 8x10 cells, isn't an acceptable solution to me. Any solution that doesn't allow for wide open space of undeveloped land, wilderness, forests, jungles, deserts, is suboptimal. We could cram everyone into skyscrapers that cover the entire earth in one giant planet wide city, but what kind of life would that be? Quality of life and quality of our living space are important things to consider. Humans were not meant to be packed like sardines into crowded cities with no where to escape to. The health effects both known and unknown would be profound.
The earth has ~150M km^2 of land surface. That's 37b acres. If each family averaging 3 people had an acre we could fit 100b people. Now, all of that isn't livable, but a family also doesn't need an acre; an average living space of 2500 sq ft is plenty - bigger for large families, maybe "only" 1000 sq ft for singles. We could still fit 100b people using these luxurious standards while using only a fraction of the surface.
The problem would be the rest of the earth's land surface and oceans wouldn't be sufficient to feed 100b, provide fresh water, energy for heating and cooling, clothing, or even furnish all this living space to begin with.
what TFA refers to isn't doomsday by 2030, but that in 2030, we will be using renewable resources twice as fast as they can be renewed. Which means that we are going to run out of lotsastuff one day, but exactly when is hard to estimate.
TFA:
According to the Living Planet Report, human demands on natural resources have doubled in under 50 years and are now outstripping what the Earth can provide by more than half; and humanity carries on as it is in use of resources, globally it will need the capacity of two Earths by 2030.
Your stance certainly is not what the headline, TFS and TFA say. The key part is "now outstripping what the Earth can provide by more than half." now.
1.5x+ now. 2x in 2030.
I don't see anything wrong with that. All you need to do is multiply 24 months by the rate, to see how much you will be spending, and decide whether or not it's a good bargain. ... If you disagree, well then just sign-on with one of those pay-as-you-go companies that sell the phone and service separately. .
Nothing wrong with that. But, after 24 mo the phone is paid for and the rate should be adjusted accordingly. Additionally, the phone should be unlocked so you have alternatives other than buying another phone and starting over at square 1. In effect, the equipment subsidy portion of the plan should by law be factored out as a separate financing article, with a stated APR and term.
BTW binding arbitration doesn't mean much. Paypal tried to include that in their TOS but when they later were sued by State AGs for stealing money from customer accounts, the justice quickly nullified the clause as being in violation of consumer protection laws. He said that users cannot sign-away rights already protected by superior laws. Same applies here with the wireless carriers.
Sounds plausible. From a broader perspective one has to ask whether a corporation that tries to make customers sign contractual agreements that make them think they've forfeited inalienable legal rights is bargaining in good faith. It ranks up there with usury and breaking people's legs to make them pay up. It also ought to run right into our constitutional right to due process.
Why don't we, people who appreciate intellectual honest, just state the facts without the often abused practice of demonizing?
A lot of people are intellectually honest, but also intellectually underdeveloped. This means they still put their intellectual abilities in the service of supporting their gut response, rather than the other way around.
They say "All these securities are worthless now, they can't be traded." Basically, they just write off the debt. It is all stored in their computers anyhow. All they have to do to succeed at that is convince the other debt holders it is ok. So long as everyone else, the pension plans, the other nations, etc that own US securities say "Yep, we are happy, we are convinced you'll only do this to China because they are assholes and not to us, we'll still buy your stuff," then they are fine.
This isn't realistic in any way or shape; there's really no way to clearly distinguish securities owned by a Chinese bank from ones owned by a Russian or French bank - while owners are registered they get pooled and layered globally. The securities will become part of global funds, which have investors outside China; they're used to guarantee loans for investments in China for foreign businesses; they're flat out pooled in global index funds; and they're even used a payment. I don't think Russians would appreciate not getting paid for oil because the U.S. suddenly eliminated China's main means of payment. There's no way to destroy one country's economy without destroying everyone's economy - this should be pretty clear from the U.S. banking troubles which dragged down banks everywhere. Part of this stems from investments effectively having become liquid assets; I can today liquidate stock quicker, easier, and cheaper than I can get currency from the nearest ATM! It's all effectively cash. The other issue worth considering is that much of Chinese infrastructure is actually owned by U.S. investors and corporations, which means our economic well being is tied to theirs. It's worth keeping in mind here that income from foreign investments is not considered part of the trade balance or GDP (it's accounted for in the country where the return was produced). So these two metrics don't tell the whole story.
The Chinese just need to withdraw the money they've put into western assets and which they lent to the west to finance our national debts. No need to waste a single bullet since there are better ways to devastate the western world in one stroke.
How would they do that? You can't just "withdraw" money in treasury notes and bills. That's a bit like a bank threatening to "withdraw" the money in your mortgage. These are contractually set up instruments with predetermined terms and payment schedules, not petty cash. All they can do is start selling it off, in which case they'll drop in value and we can buy them back for pennies on the dollar. Not much of a threat.