Was it Wisconsin, where following worries about contaminating groundwater with oil they passed a law stating "any even motor vehicle even partially immersed in water must be immediately moved to dry ground" efficiently banning all ships and motorboats?
The power boaters and jet skiers would cry "Foul!"
But there is nothing particularly unusual about restricting fragile inland (state) waterways to rafts, rowboats and canoes.
I bet every real estate agent in the world would like one of these hooked up to a database of houses for sale, so they could instantly scan all the relevant information.
... is to keep your eyes focused on the prospect.
He is the most important thing in your life right now; don't let him catch you drifting off into Lah-Lah land.
A North Korean missile launch would alter the world's political, economic, and military landscape beyond recognition. But I would expect it to be a very intense, very dangerous, environment for the nerd and the geek.
EA has 21 games and DLC in the top 50 Amazon PC game bestseller list. [4:30 EDT April 9]
It's telling that SimCity continues to top Bioshock Infinite in sales --- arguably the best single player game out there, in any genre, with a Metacritic rating of 95.
EA is very strong in genres which appeal to a very different demographic and set of values than Slashdot. The core appeal of the Sims is the same as the soap opera or telenovela. The major league sports fan wants to recreate the game day experience.
It is not as easy as it looks.
That is why EA's games continue to rake in the cash while the geek rages on.
Any college student will tell you the best meal they had was "free" not because of the food quality, but because it was free. I'm assuming Google just has a cafeteria that employees can just walk into and get a meal or two during any given day while they are working, and that this is an every day occurrence.
Student meal plans are not free.
There are damn few services on campus that come free.
The rules are clear if you are working on an oil rig or a deep-diving submersible --- any site so remote and secured that only your employer can keep you fed and housed and the costs are astronomical.
The five-star buffet in Mountain View?
That is taxable as income.
This is not a new issue. Although the concept of tech companies offering their employees gourmet catered dining is relatively recent, restaurants, hotels, bars, and other hospitality businesses have offered their staffs free meals since time immemorial.
In those cases, the US federal tax code allows a business to exclude the cost of meals from its employees' income only as long as the meals are eaten on the employer's business premises and they are provided "for the employer's convenience."
A company like Google might have a hard time proving the latter clause. A recent job posting for a "Food Experience Design Manager" would seem to suggest that mealtimes at the Chocolate Factory's over 120 cafes are designed as much for its employees' enjoyment as to bolster the bottom line:
As the Global Service and Experience Design Manager, you think about everything that goes into how Googlers interact with food. From our ever-popular micro-kitchens to multi-course meals at cafes, the design, layout and experience of eating at Google should promote healthy habits and social serendipity for Googlers. Our food venues need to support the healthiest, happiest workforce on the planet.
Similarly, Yahoo! started offering its employees free food last August, with a spokesperson telling El Reg that the move was "part of how Yahoo! looks after its talent." But meals offered as a recruitment or retention tactic don't count as being ''for the employer's convenience'' either, according to experts.
Note how the rare attempts at selling prebuilt Linux PCs, such as the early netbooks, have tended to have oddball custom Linux distros (Linpus? WTF?) instead of, let's say, Debian, Ubuntu, or even a RHEL clone. My cynical side says that this was done on purpose as a way of discrediting Linux in the eyes of the general population.
It was done to present a plausible --- commercially viable -- - alternative to the mass market consumer-oriented Windows PC. That often included concessions to the demands of big box retail like including a fully licensed media player in the baseline OEM install.
Linpus Linux is a Fedora-based operating system created by the Taiwanese firm Linpus Technologies Inc. Linpus was designed specifically to fully support the Asian market, with full Unicode support for the Chinese and Japanese languages. A special version, Linpus Lite, was written to run on devices with lower-cost hardware such as netbooks. It has both an icon and tab-based "Simple mode", designed for new users; and, a conventional style "PC mode" for those wanting a more Microsoft Windows-like interface. It is targeted at handheld devices with smaller screens, and supports resolutions as low as VGA (640X480).
The Acer Aspire One [comes] with Linpus Lite Linux pre-installed, there is also a version of the Acer Revo 3610 and 3700 with Linpus Linux pre-installed.
A version for normal desktop computers and servers is also available, as well as a Multimedia version called Linpus Media Center. The Media Center version offers an "Upgrade pack" to purchase patent licenses from MPEG-LA for DVD, MP3, WMV and a few other codecs.
Linux is mainstream. It just isn't called "Linux". Everybody with a Galaxy III, a Nook, or a Kindle is using Linux.
Each of these devices shoves the operating system as far into the background as is humanly possible. The Kindle user remains comfortably within the bounds of the customized Kindle UI and Amazon's Kindle app store.
I applaud the creation of Bitcoin, but really, would you trust your $10,000 more on a server somewhere or in an FDIC-covered bank?
I hate to break this to you, but your insured deposits aren't held as coins in an outsized piggy bank like Scrooge McDuck's Money Bin. They exist only as entries in an electronic ledger.
How does releasing this code to OSS interact with trademark law from Lucas (or Disney now, I guess)?
What you have is the source code for the modified Quake engine.
What you don't have are the rights to the Star Wars IP. Characters and props. Background art. Script and story. Music, sound effects and vocal performance.
From 1977 and 1978, these documents chronicle Apple's first OS and what made the Apple II into a serious computer for the masses.
The computer for the masses has to be affordable.
The original retail price of the computer was US $1298 (with 4 kB of RAM) and US $2638 (with the maximum 48 kB of RAM). The original Apple II was discontinued at the start of 1981, having been superseded by the II+.
An estimated 40,000 machines were sold for its 4-year production run.
What cost $1298 in 1977 would cost $4848.66 in 2012. What cost $2638 in 1977 would cost $9854.21 in 2012. The Inflation Calculator
Following Visicalc's release, Bricklin and Frankston developed ports for the Atari 800 and Commodore PET, both of which could be done easily due to sharing 6502 CPUs with the Apple II and being able to recycle large portions of code. Other versions followed for the HP 150 and TRS-80 Model I and II. Finally, Visicalc was ported to the IBM PC and became one of the initial pieces of software available for it on its 1981 launch.
According to your wikipedia page you like nature photography. Have you ever considered embracing your inner Thoreau and giving it all up to live a simpler life in the woods?
To be fair, Walden Pond was a bare two miles out of Concord, Thoreau was supported by his family and friends, and made a trip into town about every other day,
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
on
Let Them Eat Teslas
·
· Score: 1
And who underwrites the losses for students who flunk out, die, refuse to work or only work for minimum wage, and those who are committed to prison for whatever offence?
Every loan comes with the risk of default.
These losses are statistically predictable and generally fairly easy to absorb.
Without subsidized student loans. many trades and professions would be closed to all but the sons and daughters of the very rich.
It looks like this might finally be the year. With Windows 8 throwing a lot of users away with a bad interface and a marketplace lock-in.
PC games --- from the casual to the most sophisticated --- are run full screen, each with its own UI.
The geek may have a dozen desktop apps running across multiple screens, which is trivially easy to do in Windows 8. Use multiple monitors But I've never found a plausible excuse for putting more than six quick-launch apps on the taskbar, including Skype and a radio player.
There is no "marketplace lock-in " on the Win 8 desktop.
The Windows Store is --- for all practical purposes --- indistinguishable from the Android, Apple or Ubuntu store. The best "Modern" apps have a distinctive look and feel. They install easily and are updated frequently.
These are the shorts that people remember and all but the very last were produced 4:3, not widescreen.
There have been many attempts to revive Tom & Jerry, none showing any great sympathy or understanding of the characters. Chuck Jones struggled here and it shows.
The only hope is to make Linux distributions more UEFI friendly. UEFI and Secure Boot is certainly here to stay.
The geek frets over UEFI because he is dependent on cheap commodity hardware built for the Windows eco-system --- and because almost no one buys a PC with Linux installed. The best he can hope for realistically is that a curious user can be persuaded to dual boot.
That isn't going to happen if he has to disable system-level security.
Not that he hasn't made it perfectly clear that dislikes and distrusts changing system level defaults for any reason whatsoever.
and it's still going to get downloaded on thepiratebay like every other film out there
The difference is that the paying customer has a say in what future productions and budgets will be green-lighted.
The unexpected success of "How To Train Your Dragon" spawned a sequel, a Christmas special, and 40 episodes of the best production values and scripting of any animated series you could name.
Now and again the geek will ride the coattails of WALL-E to the heights or be tossed a bone like "Serenity." Mostly what he gets is a half-century or so of "Dr Who," "Star Trek," and "Star Wars." To tale a chance on something new is too big a risk.
They still charge for the encoder.
Because VP8 is good enough and FREE, is why the big hassle is there.
This is what you owe MPEG LA for the use of a licensed H.264 encoder:
Personal and internal business use: 20 cents a unit, max. Paid by hardware and software manufacturers selling more than 100,000 units each year. Realistically, given the enterprise caps and volume discounts, 10 cents a unit or less.
User pays for content by subscription: Nothing until you have more than 100,000 subscribers.
User pays for content by title: 2 cents a title, max.
If your local country values Windows for employment more than that is what you should use, because that is what will help/them/ build a future. Microsoft has educational versions of their products available for next to nothing worldwide, so cost isn't an issue for Windows and Office.
There are an endless list of questions that aren't being addressed here.
This is just a tiny sampling:
However, a closer look at the data reveals a deep and ongoing disparity between the educational achievement and opportunities available for urban children of ladino descent as compared to children of Mayan descent living in the rural areas. In addition, that disparity is amplified when comparing the education of boys and girls across all ethnic and socioeconomic factors.,
The current state of education in Guatemala, while improving, still remains significantly underfunded and it is estimated that less than 15% of all classrooms nationwide meet minimum standards for classroom space, teaching materials, classroom equipment and furniture, and water/sanitation. In the rural villages of Guatemala, that percentage drops to 0%.
Another factor contributing to the low quality of teaching is the lack of resources to teach a unified curriculum. The Guatemalan Ministry of Education has developed a K-12 curriculum (in Spanish) which can be downloaded (but not easily since it is in many sections) from their website. However, in our conversations with teachers in the rural schools, they had no access to that curriculum, nor had they been provided with curriculum guides or teaching materials to actually teach the curriculum in their classrooms.
The Reality: In many of the villages we work with there is agreement that the students are expected to learn to be virtuous and moral, but emphasis on academic learning is clearly secondary. In addition, there is the widespread belief that some students are just ''slow'' and will never be successful academically.
The Reality: Most parents in the rural villages are either illiterate or with extremely limited education. They do want the schools to provide instruction in ''moral'' behavior and understand the value of having some math and reading skills. However, because of their marginal economic situation, they also begin to have their children work with them in the fields or in the markets as soon as the children are capable of making a contribution in those areas. There also continues to be a bias in many of the rural communities against girls continuing their education to higher levels. However, some teachers are reporting that they are seeing generational shift in parent attitudes towards school, with younger parents taking a more active role in their child's education.
The flight attendant came up to me and asked me if she could put an unaccompanied minor next to me during the flight. She asked if I could just keep an eye out for him, and make sure he didn't disappear on the flight. I said it was no problem...
At that point, you agreed to share responsibility for the safety of this kid.
I keep getting suckered into this articles just to see if the failing PC market has finally forced them to pull their heads out of their *sses and reinstate the desktop by default and the start button...
It may be my aging eyes.
But I have left the Start menu behind with no regrets and I very much like the look and feel of the best Metro/Modern Apps.
Slashdot Mirror
Was it Wisconsin, where following worries about contaminating groundwater with oil they passed a law stating "any even motor vehicle even partially immersed in water must be immediately moved to dry ground" efficiently banning all ships and motorboats?
The power boaters and jet skiers would cry "Foul!"
But there is nothing particularly unusual about restricting fragile inland (state) waterways to rafts, rowboats and canoes.
There will be a few real-world uses for Glass that are positive and cost-effective. For the vast majority, this device is a non-starter at any price.
This past summer I had surgery for a lazy eye.
I didn't realize under afterwards how much that wandering eye had kept people at a distance.
The geek's social skills and perception are stereotypically awful. I would have to agree that there is truth in that.
I bet every real estate agent in the world would like one of these hooked up to a database of houses for sale, so they could instantly scan all the relevant information.
... is to keep your eyes focused on the prospect.
He is the most important thing in your life right now; don't let him catch you drifting off into Lah-Lah land.
The glasses are a distraction. Ditch them.
Or am I mistaken?
A North Korean missile launch would alter the world's political, economic, and military landscape beyond recognition. But I would expect it to be a very intense, very dangerous, environment for the nerd and the geek.
EA has 21 games and DLC in the top 50 Amazon PC game bestseller list. [4:30 EDT April 9]
It's telling that SimCity continues to top Bioshock Infinite in sales --- arguably the best single player game out there, in any genre, with a Metacritic rating of 95.
EA is very strong in genres which appeal to a very different demographic and set of values than Slashdot. The core appeal of the Sims is the same as the soap opera or telenovela. The major league sports fan wants to recreate the game day experience.
It is not as easy as it looks.
That is why EA's games continue to rake in the cash while the geek rages on.
Any college student will tell you the best meal they had was "free" not because of the food quality, but because it was free. I'm assuming Google just has a cafeteria that employees can just walk into and get a meal or two during any given day while they are working, and that this is an every day occurrence.
Student meal plans are not free.
There are damn few services on campus that come free.
The rules are clear if you are working on an oil rig or a deep-diving submersible --- any site so remote and secured that only your employer can keep you fed and housed and the costs are astronomical.
The five-star buffet in Mountain View?
That is taxable as income.
This is not a new issue. Although the concept of tech companies offering their employees gourmet catered dining is relatively recent, restaurants, hotels, bars, and other hospitality businesses have offered their staffs free meals since time immemorial.
In those cases, the US federal tax code allows a business to exclude the cost of meals from its employees' income only as long as the meals are eaten on the employer's business premises and they are provided "for the employer's convenience."
A company like Google might have a hard time proving the latter clause. A recent job posting for a "Food Experience Design Manager" would seem to suggest that mealtimes at the Chocolate Factory's over 120 cafes are designed as much for its employees' enjoyment as to bolster the bottom line:
As the Global Service and Experience Design Manager, you think about everything that goes into how Googlers interact with food. From our ever-popular micro-kitchens to multi-course meals at cafes, the design, layout and experience of eating at Google should promote healthy habits and social serendipity for Googlers. Our food venues need to support the healthiest, happiest workforce on the planet.
Similarly, Yahoo! started offering its employees free food last August, with a spokesperson telling El Reg that the move was "part of how Yahoo! looks after its talent." But meals offered as a recruitment or retention tactic don't count as being ''for the employer's convenience'' either, according to experts.
Tax man to take a bite of tech employees' free meals?
Note how the rare attempts at selling prebuilt Linux PCs, such as the early netbooks, have tended to have oddball custom Linux distros (Linpus? WTF?) instead of, let's say, Debian, Ubuntu, or even a RHEL clone. My cynical side says that this was done on purpose as a way of discrediting Linux in the eyes of the general population.
It was done to present a plausible --- commercially viable -- - alternative to the mass market consumer-oriented Windows PC. That often included concessions to the demands of big box retail like including a fully licensed media player in the baseline OEM install.
Linpus Linux is a Fedora-based operating system created by the Taiwanese firm Linpus Technologies Inc. Linpus was designed specifically to fully support the Asian market, with full Unicode support for the Chinese and Japanese languages. A special version, Linpus Lite, was written to run on devices with lower-cost hardware such as netbooks. It has both an icon and tab-based "Simple mode", designed for new users; and, a conventional style "PC mode" for those wanting a more Microsoft Windows-like interface. It is targeted at handheld devices with smaller screens, and supports resolutions as low as VGA (640X480).
The Acer Aspire One [comes] with Linpus Lite Linux pre-installed, there is also a version of the Acer Revo 3610 and 3700 with Linpus Linux pre-installed.
A version for normal desktop computers and servers is also available, as well as a Multimedia version called Linpus Media Center. The Media Center version offers an "Upgrade pack" to purchase patent licenses from MPEG-LA for DVD, MP3, WMV and a few other codecs.
Linpus Linux
Linux is mainstream. It just isn't called "Linux". Everybody with a Galaxy III, a Nook, or a Kindle is using Linux.
Each of these devices shoves the operating system as far into the background as is humanly possible. The Kindle user remains comfortably within the bounds of the customized Kindle UI and Amazon's Kindle app store.
'Masses' is a fairly relative concept, as is 'affordable'.
I'm unwilling to bend quite so far as this.
The median household income in 1977 was $13, 570. Money Income in 1977 of Households in the United States
I applaud the creation of Bitcoin, but really, would you trust your $10,000 more on a server somewhere or in an FDIC-covered bank?
I hate to break this to you, but your insured deposits aren't held as coins in an outsized piggy bank like Scrooge McDuck's Money Bin. They exist only as entries in an electronic ledger.
How does releasing this code to OSS interact with trademark law from Lucas (or Disney now, I guess)?
What you have is the source code for the modified Quake engine.
What you don't have are the rights to the Star Wars IP. Characters and props. Background art. Script and story. Music, sound effects and vocal performance.
From 1977 and 1978, these documents chronicle Apple's first OS and what made the Apple II into a serious computer for the masses.
The computer for the masses has to be affordable.
The original retail price of the computer was US $1298 (with 4 kB of RAM) and US $2638 (with the maximum 48 kB of RAM). The original Apple II was discontinued at the start of 1981, having been superseded by the II+.
An estimated 40,000 machines were sold for its 4-year production run.
Apple II series
What cost $1298 in 1977 would cost $4848.66 in 2012. What cost $2638 in 1977 would cost $9854.21 in 2012. The Inflation Calculator
Following Visicalc's release, Bricklin and Frankston developed ports for the Atari 800 and Commodore PET, both of which could be done easily due to sharing 6502 CPUs with the Apple II and being able to recycle large portions of code. Other versions followed for the HP 150 and TRS-80 Model I and II. Finally, Visicalc was ported to the IBM PC and became one of the initial pieces of software available for it on its 1981 launch.
VisiCalc
According to your wikipedia page you like nature photography. Have you ever considered embracing your inner Thoreau and giving it all up to live a simpler life in the woods?
To be fair, Walden Pond was a bare two miles out of Concord, Thoreau was supported by his family and friends, and made a trip into town about every other day,
And who underwrites the losses for students who flunk out, die, refuse to work or only work for minimum wage, and those who are committed to prison for whatever offence?
Every loan comes with the risk of default.
These losses are statistically predictable and generally fairly easy to absorb.
Without subsidized student loans. many trades and professions would be closed to all but the sons and daughters of the very rich.
It looks like this might finally be the year. With Windows 8 throwing a lot of users away with a bad interface and a marketplace lock-in.
PC games --- from the casual to the most sophisticated --- are run full screen, each with its own UI.
The geek may have a dozen desktop apps running across multiple screens, which is trivially easy to do in Windows 8. Use multiple monitors But I've never found a plausible excuse for putting more than six quick-launch apps on the taskbar, including Skype and a radio player.
There is no "marketplace lock-in " on the Win 8 desktop.
The Windows Store is --- for all practical purposes --- indistinguishable from the Android, Apple or Ubuntu store. The best "Modern" apps have a distinctive look and feel. They install easily and are updated frequently.
They could, you know, what police used to do before they all became lazy. Back in the day we called it 'Walking a beat'.
This was back in the day when you willing to pay for such services. The manning requirements are huge.
so 95% of the world won't be able to see it...
I'd say the chances are quite good that production will be co-financed through partnerships with other networks and services.
That's why all the Tom and Jerry episodes are in 4:3 instead of their original wide screen format.
I
Hanna and Barbera ultimately wrote, produced and directed 114 Tom and Jerry shorts at MGM cartoon studios in Hollywood from 1940 to 1957.
Tom and Jerry
These are the shorts that people remember and all but the very last were produced 4:3, not widescreen.
There have been many attempts to revive Tom & Jerry, none showing any great sympathy or understanding of the characters. Chuck Jones struggled here and it shows.
The only hope is to make Linux distributions more UEFI friendly. UEFI and Secure Boot is certainly here to stay.
The geek frets over UEFI because he is dependent on cheap commodity hardware built for the Windows eco-system --- and because almost no one buys a PC with Linux installed. The best he can hope for realistically is that a curious user can be persuaded to dual boot.
That isn't going to happen if he has to disable system-level security.
Not that he hasn't made it perfectly clear that dislikes and distrusts changing system level defaults for any reason whatsoever.
and it's still going to get downloaded on thepiratebay like every other film out there
The difference is that the paying customer has a say in what future productions and budgets will be green-lighted.
The unexpected success of "How To Train Your Dragon" spawned a sequel, a Christmas special, and 40 episodes of the best production values and scripting of any animated series you could name.
Now and again the geek will ride the coattails of WALL-E to the heights or be tossed a bone like "Serenity." Mostly what he gets is a half-century or so of "Dr Who," "Star Trek," and "Star Wars." To tale a chance on something new is too big a risk.
They still charge for the encoder. Because VP8 is good enough and FREE, is why the big hassle is there.
This is what you owe MPEG LA for the use of a licensed H.264 encoder:
Personal and internal business use: 20 cents a unit, max. Paid by hardware and software manufacturers selling more than 100,000 units each year. Realistically, given the enterprise caps and volume discounts, 10 cents a unit or less.
User pays for content by subscription: Nothing until you have more than 100,000 subscribers.
User pays for content by title: 2 cents a title, max.
Internet distribution free to user is free to distribute. AVC Patent Portfolio License Briefing
It is not too difficult to find VP8 aware video editors. But video cameras, video hardware of kind, for any purpose?
If your local country values Windows for employment more than that is what you should use, because that is what will help /them/ build a future. Microsoft has educational versions of their products available for next to nothing worldwide, so cost isn't an issue for Windows and Office.
There are an endless list of questions that aren't being addressed here.
This is just a tiny sampling:
However, a closer look at the data reveals a deep and ongoing disparity between the educational achievement and opportunities available for urban children of ladino descent as compared to children of Mayan descent living in the rural areas. In addition, that disparity is amplified when comparing the education of boys and girls across all ethnic and socioeconomic factors.,
The current state of education in Guatemala, while improving, still remains significantly underfunded and it is estimated that less than 15% of all classrooms nationwide meet minimum standards for classroom space, teaching materials, classroom equipment and furniture, and water/sanitation. In the rural villages of Guatemala, that percentage drops to 0%.
Another factor contributing to the low quality of teaching is the lack of resources to teach a unified curriculum. The Guatemalan Ministry of Education has developed a K-12 curriculum (in Spanish) which can be downloaded (but not easily since it is in many sections) from their website. However, in our conversations with teachers in the rural schools, they had no access to that curriculum, nor had they been provided with curriculum guides or teaching materials to actually teach the curriculum in their classrooms.
The Reality: In many of the villages we work with there is agreement that the students are expected to learn to be virtuous and moral, but emphasis on academic learning is clearly secondary. In addition, there is the widespread belief that some students are just ''slow'' and will never be successful academically.
The Reality: Most parents in the rural villages are either illiterate or with extremely limited education. They do want the schools to provide instruction in ''moral'' behavior and understand the value of having some math and reading skills. However, because of their marginal economic situation, they also begin to have their children work with them in the fields or in the markets as soon as the children are capable of making a contribution in those areas. There also continues to be a bias in many of the rural communities against girls continuing their education to higher levels. However, some teachers are reporting that they are seeing generational shift in parent attitudes towards school, with younger parents taking a more active role in their child's education.
Education in Guatemala
The site includes links to the Guatemalan National Curriculum. [PDF files in Spanish]
The flight attendant came up to me and asked me if she could put an unaccompanied minor next to me during the flight. She asked if I could just keep an eye out for him, and make sure he didn't disappear on the flight. I said it was no problem...
At that point, you agreed to share responsibility for the safety of this kid.
I keep getting suckered into this articles just to see if the failing PC market has finally forced them to pull their heads out of their *sses and reinstate the desktop by default and the start button...
It may be my aging eyes.
But I have left the Start menu behind with no regrets and I very much like the look and feel of the best Metro/Modern Apps.
No touch screen. No touch mouse. No problems.