So paint a big red target on the side of the container.
It seems like a reasonably sensible idea to be able to rapidly turn a civilian ship/train/truck into a missile launch system, for a country that can't afford to have that much military infrastructure sitting unused. There's no real reason that they have to look like any other old container. The tactical choice to be made is, of course, whether the risk is greater from potentially having your enemies target civilians, or from having your cruise missile stations very easily identified.
Isn't that just semantics? Of course it's not a physical dependency, and as such comparisons to drugs are misplaced, but the term 'addiction' is commonly used to include problems with both physical and psychological causes.
Absolutely. I'm almost surprised that the Vatican doesn't have better PR people, to be honest; obviously the Slashdot crowd are not exactly known for giving religious groups any sympathy (not that they deserve it), but the fact that the the immediate reaction from pretty much everyone here is "another attempt at furthering their cover-up" implies they could've done a better job with that speech...
Maybe not a pill, but here you go. You sure as hell won't lose weight, but it'll all go on as muscle rather than fat. Still a little way off, but it's beginning human trials this year, apparently.
Alternatively there's this, which really will make you lose weight, but you might not like the side effects. All that material has to go somewhere - it's either staying in your body in one form or another, or it's coming out at high speed.
OTOH plenty of English shops simply don't accept Scottish notes, on the basis that most employees couldn't tell the difference between a real one and a piece of paper with "£6.73" scrawled on it in yellow crayon.
A bit off topic, but how can one be unable to get a bank account? A ten second Google search shows that there are accounts in existence with no fee or minimum balance.
I pretty much agree, small denomination notes are easier to carry than coins.
I do, however, always seem to end up with an excessive bundle of them that won't fit in my wallet while in the states - paying for a $4 item with a ten seems (in my experience) likely to get six singles in change. Paying $5 with a twenty often gets a ten and five ones. It's by no means a major issue, just something I noticed happening that I thought was a little odd. Not enough fives in circulation, perhaps?
Blank polymer substrate is also sold to a number of countries that print bank notes using their own facilities.
Admittedly, though, I don't see the Americans being particularly enthusiastic about any part of the supply chain being out of their hands.
Personally I care less about what they're made of and more about the sizes and colours. I know dollars are tinted now, but they're still basically green, and all the same size. Not a major issue, I know, but it's just that little bit less convenient when you're thumbing through your wallet.
I don't see what harm it's doing, and more than any other industry. I'd be genuinely interested to hear why you think otherwise, but from experience I assume it will be based on a moral code to which I do not subscribe. Apologies if my assumption is mistaken.
Porn = "cool, forward thinking" ?
That's not what I meant. Porn is neither inherently cool nor uncool. I was suggesting that using archaic moral standards in an attempt to taint their competition is what goes against that "cool, forward thinking" image.
Can't you realize that Jobs maybe want to enforce a personal policy ? Maybe he really doesn't like that sort of things from an ethical point of view.
Call me cynical, but I don't think I'll ever believe that a company exec is acting on anything but financial grounds. Sure, this might coincide with his personal principles (or it might not), but either way I don't think he would've said it without putting the (predicted) market impact first.
That wasn't the argument he made here, though. I think in this case he's missed the mark. Blocking the porn apps themselves was one thing, but painting it as a moral issue and trying to call Google 'guilty by association' is quite another. If he'd said "You're not horny teenagers any more, why not stop watching porn and just go out to a bar and find an actual person to have sex with?" I think he'd actually have come across much better!
That is Job's message - and it is what his young up-scale urban-sophisticate audience wants and needs to hear.
In my experience, few young adults consider porn dangerous, immoral or corrupting. The way that Jobs put this forward (using the word 'moral', especially) makes them look extremely out of touch with the feelings of their customer base.
Not only is the actual availability of porn a potential driving force, Apple has just shattered their facade of being a "cool, forward thinking company".
As I said in another comment, their core market is young, rich, art/media types. Apple have far less of a need than many to worry about the older, more conservative buyers. Using porn as the bogeyman just isn't going to fly with young people - trying to drag an opponent's name through the mud by associating it with something that plenty of people now consider harmless just makes Apple look out of touch.
Depends who you're marketing to. The pro-porn stance might not win you a majority in the overall population, but Apple may well have shot themselves in the foot when it comes to their most loyal customers.
Sure, smartphones are heading for the mainstream now, but the core audience (probably even more so for the iPhone than most others) is young, affluent, media-minded types. That just happens to intersect almost exactly with the segment of the population who are likely to be particularly liberal and progressively minded, the ones who are quite comfortable with sex.
Banning the apps was one thing, but actively using the availability of porn as a negative against Android sounds like something from the 1950s. All this has done is made me think of Jobs as old and out of touch.
They might not necessarily be flawed. It quite probably is a 'rehash' of what Intel were doing, and for good reason:
If all the chips come off the same line, then they might have an average cost of, say, $150. If there's a huge demand for quad-core chips at $200 and little demand for six-core chips at $350 then it's probably going to be more profitable disable two cores, bulk up the stock already consisting of chips with only four working cores, and take the $200 rather than have a chip sitting on a shelf. Thus some quad-cores are perfectly good six-cores, others aren't. They couldn't, however, afford to market all the six-core chips at $200 because the yield would be too low - there'd be nothing to do with all the faulty ones, thus pushing the average cost above $150.
I assume that the cost amortisation of the fab plants comes into it somewhat, and presumably other factors too (not least the 'whatever the market will bear' coefficient).
Of course, there is a finite manufacturing cost floor and when you hit that you're only going to improve by altering the technology, but I was under the impression that we're still a decent way off from that point.
Your point might stand if the regulations for a police officer were exactly the same as the regulations for a firearm. Until that point, they can't be compared on equal footing.
So far the movies actually made by Marvel studios rather than just co-produced by them do seem to be better than what they were initially licensing their characters to (the Fantastic Four sequel being a perfect example of the latter).
They still fall squarely in the 'high budget Hollywood superhero movie' category, and they're not exactly highbrow, but I found both Iron Man and Ed Norton's version of The Incredible Hulk to be good entertainment. I'm interested to see how they do with Iron Man 2, and I still hold out fairly high hopes for The Avengers.
This could actually hasten the demise of flash (assuming that's actually going to happen at all...), if the format it transcodes into is universally playable.
On the fly transcoding every time a piece of content is accessed seems is a fairly excessive load on the server, so presumably the videos are either pre-transcoded en masse or transcoded on demand and then cached for future access.
In either case, the content provider is left with a pile of flash videos and a separate pile of videos in this new format (site seems to be down, so I can't check what that actually is). If the mystery format is, in fact, playable on non-Apple devices there's no real reason for them to keep hold of the flash versions - why serve two copies if the iPad version does fine for PCs as well?
I've just had a look for what's around in the UK, and they look awesome, but the focus does seem to be on the community rather than the resources.
I'm not trying to devalue group participation at all, and I'm certainly considering going along to hang out with some like-minded people, it's just that last I checked you can't cut intricate patterns out of sheet steel using only community spirit!
Your phrasing is unnecessarily inflammatory, but the answer is 'yes'. However, the answer is also 'yes' if you asked the same blanket question about all Americans, or Indians, or Australians, or whatever.
Cultural preferences and ideas become outmoded, or simply start off illogical, and don't always tally with the demonstrable facts. It happens everywhere.
Minor correction: Amazon chose to pay out, they didn't have to.
Now, it's possible that the court would've held Amazon liable anyway, but it hasn't come to that yet, and they may just as well have informed the customer that their case was with Sony instead.
Amazon probably didn't take it to court first because they decided that the 20% refund to one guy was a more financially sensible option than allowing it to generate bad publicity and potentially run up legal fees. Whether they'll change their minds tomorrow when they see 1,000 similar claims is anybody's guess, though.
I assume that if they'd refused, the next step would've been a small claim in the county court (I know that's the case for issues like this under UK law, but it may differ since it's an EU directive, even though it took place in the UK). It's apparently fairly well set-up to assist individual claimants representing themselves, and the fees are low.
That said, the time and effort involved is probably still greater than the value of a PS3 - how much further value you place on the principle of the issue, however, is quite another matter!
Slashdot Mirror
So paint a big red target on the side of the container.
It seems like a reasonably sensible idea to be able to rapidly turn a civilian ship/train/truck into a missile launch system, for a country that can't afford to have that much military infrastructure sitting unused. There's no real reason that they have to look like any other old container. The tactical choice to be made is, of course, whether the risk is greater from potentially having your enemies target civilians, or from having your cruise missile stations very easily identified.
Luckily, someone has condensed the opinions of that most reliable of sources, the Daily Mail, into a handy list!
Isn't that just semantics? Of course it's not a physical dependency, and as such comparisons to drugs are misplaced, but the term 'addiction' is commonly used to include problems with both physical and psychological causes.
Absolutely. I'm almost surprised that the Vatican doesn't have better PR people, to be honest; obviously the Slashdot crowd are not exactly known for giving religious groups any sympathy (not that they deserve it), but the fact that the the immediate reaction from pretty much everyone here is "another attempt at furthering their cover-up" implies they could've done a better job with that speech...
Well if they'd been looking kilometres in the wrong direction, it implies that there wasn't a precise record of its position!
Maybe not a pill, but here you go. You sure as hell won't lose weight, but it'll all go on as muscle rather than fat. Still a little way off, but it's beginning human trials this year, apparently.
Alternatively there's this, which really will make you lose weight, but you might not like the side effects. All that material has to go somewhere - it's either staying in your body in one form or another, or it's coming out at high speed.
OTOH plenty of English shops simply don't accept Scottish notes, on the basis that most employees couldn't tell the difference between a real one and a piece of paper with "£6.73" scrawled on it in yellow crayon.
A bit off topic, but how can one be unable to get a bank account? A ten second Google search shows that there are accounts in existence with no fee or minimum balance.
I pretty much agree, small denomination notes are easier to carry than coins.
I do, however, always seem to end up with an excessive bundle of them that won't fit in my wallet while in the states - paying for a $4 item with a ten seems (in my experience) likely to get six singles in change. Paying $5 with a twenty often gets a ten and five ones. It's by no means a major issue, just something I noticed happening that I thought was a little odd. Not enough fives in circulation, perhaps?
"We have a lot more bills and we have a lot more ATMs/vending machines." [Citation Needed]
From the linked article:
Admittedly, though, I don't see the Americans being particularly enthusiastic about any part of the supply chain being out of their hands.
Personally I care less about what they're made of and more about the sizes and colours. I know dollars are tinted now, but they're still basically green, and all the same size. Not a major issue, I know, but it's just that little bit less convenient when you're thumbing through your wallet.
Porn = harmless ?
I don't see what harm it's doing, and more than any other industry. I'd be genuinely interested to hear why you think otherwise, but from experience I assume it will be based on a moral code to which I do not subscribe. Apologies if my assumption is mistaken.
Porn = "cool, forward thinking" ?
That's not what I meant. Porn is neither inherently cool nor uncool. I was suggesting that using archaic moral standards in an attempt to taint their competition is what goes against that "cool, forward thinking" image.
Can't you realize that Jobs maybe want to enforce a personal policy ? Maybe he really doesn't like that sort of things from an ethical point of view.
Call me cynical, but I don't think I'll ever believe that a company exec is acting on anything but financial grounds. Sure, this might coincide with his personal principles (or it might not), but either way I don't think he would've said it without putting the (predicted) market impact first.
That wasn't the argument he made here, though. I think in this case he's missed the mark. Blocking the porn apps themselves was one thing, but painting it as a moral issue and trying to call Google 'guilty by association' is quite another. If he'd said "You're not horny teenagers any more, why not stop watching porn and just go out to a bar and find an actual person to have sex with?" I think he'd actually have come across much better!
In my experience, few young adults consider porn dangerous, immoral or corrupting. The way that Jobs put this forward (using the word 'moral', especially) makes them look extremely out of touch with the feelings of their customer base.
Not only is the actual availability of porn a potential driving force, Apple has just shattered their facade of being a "cool, forward thinking company".
As I said in another comment, their core market is young, rich, art/media types. Apple have far less of a need than many to worry about the older, more conservative buyers. Using porn as the bogeyman just isn't going to fly with young people - trying to drag an opponent's name through the mud by associating it with something that plenty of people now consider harmless just makes Apple look out of touch.
Depends who you're marketing to. The pro-porn stance might not win you a majority in the overall population, but Apple may well have shot themselves in the foot when it comes to their most loyal customers.
Sure, smartphones are heading for the mainstream now, but the core audience (probably even more so for the iPhone than most others) is young, affluent, media-minded types. That just happens to intersect almost exactly with the segment of the population who are likely to be particularly liberal and progressively minded, the ones who are quite comfortable with sex.
Banning the apps was one thing, but actively using the availability of porn as a negative against Android sounds like something from the 1950s. All this has done is made me think of Jobs as old and out of touch.
They might not necessarily be flawed. It quite probably is a 'rehash' of what Intel were doing, and for good reason:
If all the chips come off the same line, then they might have an average cost of, say, $150. If there's a huge demand for quad-core chips at $200 and little demand for six-core chips at $350 then it's probably going to be more profitable disable two cores, bulk up the stock already consisting of chips with only four working cores, and take the $200 rather than have a chip sitting on a shelf. Thus some quad-cores are perfectly good six-cores, others aren't. They couldn't, however, afford to market all the six-core chips at $200 because the yield would be too low - there'd be nothing to do with all the faulty ones, thus pushing the average cost above $150.
I assume that the cost amortisation of the fab plants comes into it somewhat, and presumably other factors too (not least the 'whatever the market will bear' coefficient).
Of course, there is a finite manufacturing cost floor and when you hit that you're only going to improve by altering the technology, but I was under the impression that we're still a decent way off from that point.
That should've read: "...for a police officer using a taser..."
Your point might stand if the regulations for a police officer were exactly the same as the regulations for a firearm. Until that point, they can't be compared on equal footing.
So far the movies actually made by Marvel studios rather than just co-produced by them do seem to be better than what they were initially licensing their characters to (the Fantastic Four sequel being a perfect example of the latter).
They still fall squarely in the 'high budget Hollywood superhero movie' category, and they're not exactly highbrow, but I found both Iron Man and Ed Norton's version of The Incredible Hulk to be good entertainment. I'm interested to see how they do with Iron Man 2, and I still hold out fairly high hopes for The Avengers.
This could actually hasten the demise of flash (assuming that's actually going to happen at all...), if the format it transcodes into is universally playable.
On the fly transcoding every time a piece of content is accessed seems is a fairly excessive load on the server, so presumably the videos are either pre-transcoded en masse or transcoded on demand and then cached for future access.
In either case, the content provider is left with a pile of flash videos and a separate pile of videos in this new format (site seems to be down, so I can't check what that actually is). If the mystery format is, in fact, playable on non-Apple devices there's no real reason for them to keep hold of the flash versions - why serve two copies if the iPad version does fine for PCs as well?
I've just had a look for what's around in the UK, and they look awesome, but the focus does seem to be on the community rather than the resources.
I'm not trying to devalue group participation at all, and I'm certainly considering going along to hang out with some like-minded people, it's just that last I checked you can't cut intricate patterns out of sheet steel using only community spirit!
Your phrasing is unnecessarily inflammatory, but the answer is 'yes'. However, the answer is also 'yes' if you asked the same blanket question about all Americans, or Indians, or Australians, or whatever.
Cultural preferences and ideas become outmoded, or simply start off illogical, and don't always tally with the demonstrable facts. It happens everywhere.
Minor correction: Amazon chose to pay out, they didn't have to.
Now, it's possible that the court would've held Amazon liable anyway, but it hasn't come to that yet, and they may just as well have informed the customer that their case was with Sony instead.
Amazon probably didn't take it to court first because they decided that the 20% refund to one guy was a more financially sensible option than allowing it to generate bad publicity and potentially run up legal fees. Whether they'll change their minds tomorrow when they see 1,000 similar claims is anybody's guess, though.
I assume that if they'd refused, the next step would've been a small claim in the county court (I know that's the case for issues like this under UK law, but it may differ since it's an EU directive, even though it took place in the UK). It's apparently fairly well set-up to assist individual claimants representing themselves, and the fees are low.
That said, the time and effort involved is probably still greater than the value of a PS3 - how much further value you place on the principle of the issue, however, is quite another matter!