I'm shocked at the comments from people who don't realize it is summer down there; who really should have enough shame to keep their ignorant mouths shut.
Climate Science deals in long term trends, they are not meteorologists. Just as it doesn't cause bad weather it contributes to the severity of it (since weather is the result of temperature differences.) Also embarrassing are the people who don't realize winter is caused by the tilt of the earth, not how close we are to the sun (right now, in the winter we are closer to the sun.)
It doesn't cause boats of mostly tourists (plus some desperate scientist guides) to not get stuck when being reckless in one of the most dangerous areas of the ocean. The rescue ship has no choice but to take risks they would not otherwise to reach them, no surprise they risked getting trapped.
This news story was brought to you by BP, Exon, etc. It's not really a big news item; there is so much more important news.
To freeze ocean waters takes a lot of COLD, which has to come from somewhere... Ice cubes melt in your drink but it gets colder... point is, to assume that the surrounding area is nice because it's warmer is rather simplistic-- the relative warmth of the top of the ocean is going to dissipate quickly as cold flows into it or the ocean current shifts direction. One should expect more extreme conditions in that area with an increased temperature difference... If it wasn't being impacted by global warming it would be more predictable and less active.... because the energy input to the system down there IS the temperature difference it's obvious that more input energy is going to be expressed (before you say wind and water currents also input energy into the system down there, think about where those two come from.)
How do you measure success in predictions? I would think if you are within the projected range then that is a success; while they did go outside of the projected range YEARS LATER it is after all a detailed simulation of a problem so complex you can never project that far in the future. So I would say their success was limited up to that point in time when the bounds were breached; guess I'm remembering something else... I was sure it was the high bound not the lower one... So next time, the projection will be for a shorter span of time (or they will just include a range so great that it is kind of useless after a few years.) They can make a projection that is almost impossible to be in error by extending the max/min projections and so then it can't be said to be a wrong prediction. Even then, they still had confidence levels so even in error one could say they were not incorrect. It's not like we can reboot the planet and see how many times out of 100 it falls outside the confidence level more than 5 times. You can do the odds for the lottery and say with high confidence nobody will win it (not absolutely but such a low number that it's nearer 0% than 1%)... but eventually somebody gets the numbers... and it's outside of your high confidence level.
As they get better at simulations they might greatly improve but this is still a vastly more complicated system they are trying to model where even 100% knowledge can't solve for all the chaotic variables being simulated - all one can do at that point is know at what point the information is useless because the projected range (due to chaos) is too vast. One one side you have simulated models-- which are extremely limited and on the other side you have broad understanding that describes long term macro level behaviors that are kind of outside the realm of simulation.
Fluid Dynamics may be something god doesn't understand (that's a reference to a physics joke,) but the macro level trends can be understood far better. Newtonian physics is macro level and works great but at the micro level it does not work anymore (lets not ruin the point by getting into other perspectives where it breaks as well.)
seismologists: good point. predictive geology. The one I knew only ever seemed to crush various kinds of rocks. But there you still have two sides-- the one trying to do immediate predictions by constructing models and the other one looking at the plate tectonics and how over 1000s of years how much grinding is going to occur, how fast it moves, etc. the long term one is probably going to be easier but less useful.
No their predictive powers are not poor; they are better than psychics, TV pundits, most political advisers, many investors...
This is not weather forecasting, it's a long term science akin to geology. You can use geology to predict projections into the future too. It'll do about as well in the end but watching year by year to see how the century comes out is like complaining a rocket is off trajectory by meters... what matters is if it ends up within meters of the target and you are not going to know until it gets there.
In this case, we are adjusting the whole model as the projection plays out which makes it impossible - even if you are 100% correct, the answer changes as you alter the problem. CA is going into the ocean, slowly - not a hard projection to make and we can't conceive of altering that course anytime soon-- but it may happen and it doesn't make that projection wrong. This is more like some sci-fi time travel story line where small probabilities can impact the outcome greatly.
No the worst case projections were NOT reported, the average projected trend-line was. They figured we were too stupid to read a proper projection graph. The extreme disasters possible were reported... with each one trying to out shock the other, I'm surprised the Planetary Science people were not pulled into it with all the known extremes that happen on other planets... wrap those around implied connections to Earth by the "reporter" and they could have warped it even more. I remember the 80s stuff about how we only use 1% of the brain; which is still true, but they reported it inaccurately as if that was ALL the time when the science had different levels for different activities - setting up a strawman was setup against brain science.
I have a brooding lamp. Those bulbs are not banned; they are not even lights - they are heaters that give off some light... and that is their purpose; sadly light bulbs have actually been heaters sold as lights for a century. Poor selfish cheapskate, you'll have to buy special bulbs over the old incandescent ones... I just used the special bulbs in the 1st place since they are better and don't cost that much more.
Heating wire is not expensive and it lasts longer than a light bulb (plus it works better) so there may be a larger market of such devices for cheapskates who were previously using light bulbs. If you feel like MacGyver for your "creative" uses for incandescent bulbs; wake up, it was just a TV show and you are not being that clever.
Congrats at using cheap heaters as heaters but your tiny inconvenience is harming the planet and costing your ignorant neighbors a lot more money than you are saving; not to mention the reduction in construction of power stations and all the negative impacts of those.
Nice optimistic idea, but long term it won't work like you think. The entrenched powers are too powerful and the system is way too corrupt; including the incompetent citizenry.
BTW, bogus meaningless lawsuits can shutdown small players and even if you can fight them without going broke, their law firms against your cheap lawyer can make you lose even the obvious cases. I've seen it happen in my area where "cable" in the contract agreement was defined as TV only because it was signed in the 80s so internet and phone were exempted from the franchise agreement - when clearly the city agreement was over the use of public land (what all services use) to run their cables - and not about the signal on those wires. The lousy lawyer couldn't get the stupid or corrupt judge to decide a clear cut case.
Also, since when do such tit for tat agreements hold with mega corporations in the 1st place? After some years they always weasel out of their part of the grand bargain.
The Carriers are a monopoly power, they compete as little as possible because they know they are the only choice. Being all in the stock market, they have like minded institutional share holders who probably invest in the group of them - which makes them even more unlikely to truly complete; while the short term investors do push them to compete the net result is they will do nothing to lower prices but will compete with approximately the same levels of infrastructure investment (as little as possible.)
Price fixing is the NORM for telecom, so it is kind of sick that Apple is caught doing it against them - doesn't matter if it was right or wrong, it's still price fixing. The laws can be circumvented, Apple may learn how or people will be hacking around with imported devices.
Fascism is already widespread in the USA. I suggest you look it up (hint: it came from Italy.)
This is not Fascism. It is socialism.... although just about everything is justified with socialist arguments, including many Fascist positions... which not should come as a surprise given that socialism is a generic reasoning and Fascism is a specific societal structuring combining government with conventional business (and therefore inherently authoritarian.)
The authoritarian characteristics must be the root of your false comparison. It is somewhat authoritarian to have a top down ban. It's not criminalizing your use, it's just a commerce regulation aimed at a specific kind of light bulb (incandescents are not banned, just the really pathetic ones.) It is a middle ground policy. Doing nothing (letting people educate and actuate themselves) would be anarchy. Educating the public would be 1 step from anarchy, propaganda another step but the middle ground is clearly in some regulation and these are rather mild as those go. If it were Fascist, we'd have government harming LED and CFLs until they are more profitable because the century old light bulb conspiracy would not want to be undermined by technology advances... The Edison patents were used before to stop the manufacture of light bulbs that lasted decades (one of which has become famious for lasting century long, but it was designed to do so; before the industry collusion.) To them, it never will be about power savings - it's about planned obsolescence and the rest is merely the servant to marketing.
The hype is merely another fund raising vote-getting move to sucker more votes over a non issue.
Special bulbs were always exempt. Better incandescent are not banned, only the embarrassingly primitive ones that arguably are not light bulbs since you're lucky to get 10% light from them--- the rest is heat. It's frankly misleading to label them anything other than a heater or a resistor.
Firewire was not perfect; however, there were 3 reasons it didn't get bigger:
1) Intel was against it.
2) USB 1 was cheap and totally not designed to fill the gap Firewire was designed to fill. Firewire support costs extra $ and you still needed USB... complex controllers and buffering wasn't in USB 1; then USB 2 (a hack) took away the price advantage by adding complexity (by then the cost difference was gone... the difference was never great to begin with.)
3) consumers are the mass market. they are happy with "good enough" which is a really really low bar. Many didn't seem to know the difference between USB 1 and Firewire; plus they didn't care much. Most "experienced" users couldn't notice the speed gap between USB 2 and Firewire but it was significant in the real world. Some USB 2 devices sucked... and people didn't notice it was running near USB 1 speeds.
The reality is that the changes firewire made were adopted by all the other upgraded standards. What is sad is the project sat at Apple for years when it could have come out much earlier and trounced SCSI... which is what it initially was aiming at.
Final Cut Pro X changed the game significantly which upset all the entrenched pros. The changes take relearning and people do not like that unless they were really upset with their previous workflow (like everybody was before FCP, even Avid which was great but it cost way too much!) People liked their FCP 7 workflow.
The main reason pros were upset with Final Cut Pro is they removed all the hardware and high end features from the software. Your expensive camera gear was rendered useless because FCPX was file based and didn't care about film or magnetic tapes which all the pros had much more money invested in. The Mac and FCP is cheap compared to all the other gear.
Pros who make $$ think little of blowing $10k on a new workstation. Apple ALWAYS has high end configurations for people who just want the maxed out system and money is not an issue...
As for the base models, Apple has always had static pricing and rarely lowers price points during the life of the model. When they introduce something it usually has a fair market price with the PC world, on rare occasions it is better. I've spec'd out PCs with the same stuff and they can come out to be more-- usually because Apple has some unusual option that costs a bundle to replicate. I can't buy workstation cards like those for the prices apple is getting them at. I have a workstation card NOW and even though it is 6 years old it beats the stock GPUs that come with many new consumer machines.
When I was in the tv industry, we would retask or just resell the mac -- macs have crazy resale value! You don't need to upgrade anything, just buy new and ebay the old model-- it'll cost you less, if you value your time-- I've had times where it only cost $250 to upgrade to the newer mac. Also, the benefits of going from a $1500 GPU to the next $1500 every year are not usually worth it... (but selling the old card it likely going to cost you as much as if you just did the whole mac at the same time.)
Future US TV Journalists will not have to risk error or waste their time stereotyping the people in their reports! They can spend their important time investigating celebrities!
Police cameras can profile people without bias so they know who to abuse and who not to abuse! No more frivolous lawsuits over police prejudice!
I making computers "hip" was lame when they did it for white kids. What got me hooked was video games and the idea I could make them --- that is all one needs... It won't help girls much because they've not been so keen on gaming.
READING. I hated to read but to do anything serious on a computer you have to READ. Now I read all the time. "Minority" reading levels are at lower levels than they should be. If you dislike reading, forget about computers.
Math is not actually needed; programming only takes a certain kind of math thinking and a minimal level of math background. Math is generally taught so kids hate it so even saying MATH is not going to help. Perhaps, one could combine math and computers in a compelling way that has not been done before NOT involving those horrid TI calculators. Not likely... it'll probably cause more kids to hate computers.
Ditch the TV get the kid a computer instead. Even the poor own a TV or two now days. Investing in a computer is a lower priority than a 2nd TV. Don't know about now, but when I was a kid, most kids didn't get much time to the family computer, IF they had a computer at all. Girls were generally discouraged from even using the computer and I see that in my relatives' girls today... it's just facebook, email, and the encyclopedia / cliff notes that writes their mindless homework. For the boys it's OK but the girls were subtly discouraged and the older are more strongly discouraged (because computer == facebook in their parent's mind.)
1) CA has a larger economy than most other nations on earth. 2) CA pays more to the federal government than it gets back. (something people who bitch a lot never bother to look up.) 3) CA pays more to the federal government than any other state.
I think they should split up or change how senators are allocated because it's totally moronic that small nothing states are on a fully equal footing with much larger states. Senators have too much power too... which made far more sense when they were picked by state government and not by popular vote, as the founders intended (they also didn't intend House seats to be capped.)
Bad portability of C has created all these "solutions" which are less about C itself than the surrounding system. There needs to be more of a standardized runtime than what we have today and PNaCL does address this. I'm still quite skeptical of PNaCl; it's only significant contribution is addressing the base library issue... which it does with a really small focus because it exists for only 1 purpose.
I've also not been a fan of how performance freaks (like myself) will sacrifice security and stability for more speed when newer hardware always compensates. Except in rare cases where the algorithm costs become an issue, I am now FOR slower implementations that perform better. That is, what I consider performance today has changed from my experiences-- stability and security are what define performance for me. Having cpus that are beyond most our needs is also a factor. Only consumer entertainment devices and super computing have such high demands they disregard stability and performance.
I would feel better about C source code compiling to a locked down set of runtime libraries than some bitcode -- which for C is not far from the object files the C compiler generates in the first place. I've done assembly, C is clearly written by an assembly programmer who wanted a portable assembly that played nicely with multiple developers. I don't view anything C does as "high level" it's only as abstract as is necessary; it's minimalism is why it continues to be a top language. Some slightly "lower-level" format that is less able to be audited and re-introduces the temptation for runtime optimization, recompiling etc. does not make me feel it is worth it the minimal gains. You are not going to hide source code with PNaCL it can be decompiled to C without much loss... I bet far easier than with decompilers. Just compile the C (which can be comment stripped and compacted or even pre-compliler processed) and leave it alone while it executes. No temptation to complicate things with a VM-- no need for a VM in the 1st place if the runtime and OS manage it properly.
WHAT WE REALLY NEED is to resolve the problems of C and unix by learning from the bandaids that projects like Java, PNaCL, GNU Hurd, ADA, and the move Virtualization... To me it looks a lot like Virtualization is on a similar trajectory as microkernels. To me it looks like the hypervisors will progress towards where microkernels would have been if they had been evolving and at some turning point people will see the use case that was missed all these years. That is where I'm coming from and perhaps PNaCl will be something that wakes people up... but if it wasn't so attached to the VM concept it could have a bigger more profound impact.... which it may have indirectly if it gains enough attention.
In a sense bitcoin is regulated by it's design in a way only a computer system can be. There are fewer rules that can be easily bent to political will because the design of the system enforces it's own rules; making it decentralized, like Gold. Gold being a physical item, it has been easier to control and regulate but don't let that make you think bitcoin is immune from lawyers. nothing is. It has little regulation so that appeals to the economic anarchists (libertards) but in reality, it's strongly rigid nature by design is a basic form of regulation that can not be tampered with, unlike anything that has ever existed before.
The reason many people like bitcoin isn't just a political agenda, it's a response to the corruption and power control over a monetary system has over people over the history of civilization. An attempt to take away the human element that eventually ruins all systems with concentrated power.
I read about bitcoin before it got going and I never did anything with it but observe. I'm surprised it made it this far without terrorism turning it into another Prohibition "war" but I'm still waiting for that expected outcome... unless it can get powerful enough influence before the banks declare it a threat, our masters will forbid it.
Well then we are talking about C, which is highly portable already. It's technical power combined with the build systems and support libraries are what make it a pain, not the language itself. If you think compacting it into a bytecode would help it, I think not... and C is already so close to a portable assembly you are not hiding a great deal by such a conversion. If you want the power of C but the ease of a VM like java, then you need to make a massive portable library that must be bundled with the compiler and define a nice zip file format (like jar.) Most of all, a better shared library linking system has long been needed.
Virtual Machines are proof that Operating Systems have failed at their job. We dismissed microkernels and those high overhead academic designs but here we are running VMs because our programs were not portable enough or protected by the OS like they should have been in the 1st place.
The politicians never stopped themselves from passing unconstitutional laws seeking to weaken or outright exempt the Constitution. Every attempt has to be met with strong public pressure and in recent generations that pressure has weakened either by ineptitude or the indirect assault on democracy by wealthy institutions.
Free assembly is just as strongly protected as free speech but the public does not defend it so local city councils routinely trounce that right and the "security state" along with that unconstitutional century-old espionage act has done quite a bit against free speech and free press.
The 4th is obvious to anybody but a lawyer that it does not allow copying of your personal papers, then allowing them to later be easily accessed and if something bad is found a retroactive warrant can be issued... The reason juries are made up of peers is because of the belief in common sense over "lawyer-think" which has nothing to do with truth, honest logic, or science.
Any government would run longer, better, if lawyers were barred from serving in office. Their profession is to justify the means for their client's ends. Engineers, scientists, professors - they are the problem solvers.
They tend to last longer too... not sure about newer models but in the past they were better quality and the cost was worth it; but buying used on ebay helped.
Other relatives, it's linux + openbox. which has them still confused for certain things. one jumped ship already and is probably learning more new things with Windows 8 than if she just learned the parts of linux she had trouble with.
Every foiled plot I've heard about at any depth (not mainstream media) has been some kind of entrapment scheme setup by the FBI. Some of which I don't oppose, because it is good that the bomb dealers you do find are likely undercover agents but they've often been going too far in the ones cited as great successes. We have morons who lock themselves out of their faulty car bombs or can't set their crotch bomb off or can't even blow off their own leg with the tiny amount of explosive in their shoe that continue slip past Big Brother.
That is an even worse solution. It is NOT a partnership when one party bribes the other to not do their job. Exclusive contractors may get great monopoly deals but it is easy to find who to blame and a competent media and citizenry have a better chance at keeping things legit. When you distribute the contractors as "partners" and have them collude with each other to corrupt the process it is much harder to debug and to regulate it.
Remember, government overhead cost $ but so does the profit overhead of efficient contractors. Having the government do it with occasional small minor contractors will be more effective. If your gov is so bad this process fails or is costly it won't be any better at handling the 3rd parties. At least politicians become directly responsible when they are doing it; which is yet another reason they love to outsource their responsibilities because it mitigates the risk to their career. In addition the contractors have incentive to bribe the politicians who have an incentive to take the bribes. Punishment is uncommon and not severe enough.
So you have incentives by medium to large private parties, the media they advertize with or own, and the corrupt or risk adverse politicians. It is no wonder why the public thinks the government can't do anything, all the propaganda has been one sided for generations.
People today wouldn't think the government couldn't do all the things it has done successfully in the past and continues to do today.
It's capped to the speed of the pricing system. The power company decides the rates; if it's based solely upon instant demand of the "market" then it becomes a game of milliseconds like the financial casinos.
If the rate is too slow, then the power company creates more troubles for themselves as everybody adapts to the rates causing low rate times to become high usage spikes. In a more distributed solution, the rates are set by location... and locations raise or lower their loads to match the grid. Oh! Doesn't that sound like a smart grid?
So this is the next step in the smart grid, with the minor money savings used as an incentive; but one should just think about regulating such things in because that isn't much of a money incentive to buy the electronics to allow such use (regulating it LATER after electric cars take over is quite likely in some countries.)
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I'm shocked at the comments from people who don't realize it is summer down there; who really should have enough shame to keep their ignorant mouths shut.
Climate Science deals in long term trends, they are not meteorologists. Just as it doesn't cause bad weather it contributes to the severity of it (since weather is the result of temperature differences.) Also embarrassing are the people who don't realize winter is caused by the tilt of the earth, not how close we are to the sun (right now, in the winter we are closer to the sun.)
It doesn't cause boats of mostly tourists (plus some desperate scientist guides) to not get stuck when being reckless in one of the most dangerous areas of the ocean. The rescue ship has no choice but to take risks they would not otherwise to reach them, no surprise they risked getting trapped.
This news story was brought to you by BP, Exon, etc. It's not really a big news item; there is so much more important news.
To freeze ocean waters takes a lot of COLD, which has to come from somewhere... Ice cubes melt in your drink but it gets colder... point is, to assume that the surrounding area is nice because it's warmer is rather simplistic-- the relative warmth of the top of the ocean is going to dissipate quickly as cold flows into it or the ocean current shifts direction. One should expect more extreme conditions in that area with an increased temperature difference... If it wasn't being impacted by global warming it would be more predictable and less active.... because the energy input to the system down there IS the temperature difference it's obvious that more input energy is going to be expressed (before you say wind and water currents also input energy into the system down there, think about where those two come from.)
How do you measure success in predictions? I would think if you are within the projected range then that is a success; while they did go outside of the projected range YEARS LATER it is after all a detailed simulation of a problem so complex you can never project that far in the future. So I would say their success was limited up to that point in time when the bounds were breached; guess I'm remembering something else... I was sure it was the high bound not the lower one... So next time, the projection will be for a shorter span of time (or they will just include a range so great that it is kind of useless after a few years.) They can make a projection that is almost impossible to be in error by extending the max/min projections and so then it can't be said to be a wrong prediction. Even then, they still had confidence levels so even in error one could say they were not incorrect. It's not like we can reboot the planet and see how many times out of 100 it falls outside the confidence level more than 5 times. You can do the odds for the lottery and say with high confidence nobody will win it (not absolutely but such a low number that it's nearer 0% than 1%)... but eventually somebody gets the numbers... and it's outside of your high confidence level.
As they get better at simulations they might greatly improve but this is still a vastly more complicated system they are trying to model where even 100% knowledge can't solve for all the chaotic variables being simulated - all one can do at that point is know at what point the information is useless because the projected range (due to chaos) is too vast. One one side you have simulated models-- which are extremely limited and on the other side you have broad understanding that describes long term macro level behaviors that are kind of outside the realm of simulation.
Fluid Dynamics may be something god doesn't understand (that's a reference to a physics joke,) but the macro level trends can be understood far better. Newtonian physics is macro level and works great but at the micro level it does not work anymore (lets not ruin the point by getting into other perspectives where it breaks as well.)
seismologists: good point. predictive geology. The one I knew only ever seemed to crush various kinds of rocks. But there you still have two sides-- the one trying to do immediate predictions by constructing models and the other one looking at the plate tectonics and how over 1000s of years how much grinding is going to occur, how fast it moves, etc. the long term one is probably going to be easier but less useful.
READ: psychics. not physicists. big difference.
No their predictive powers are not poor; they are better than psychics, TV pundits, most political advisers, many investors...
This is not weather forecasting, it's a long term science akin to geology. You can use geology to predict projections into the future too. It'll do about as well in the end but watching year by year to see how the century comes out is like complaining a rocket is off trajectory by meters... what matters is if it ends up within meters of the target and you are not going to know until it gets there.
In this case, we are adjusting the whole model as the projection plays out which makes it impossible - even if you are 100% correct, the answer changes as you alter the problem. CA is going into the ocean, slowly - not a hard projection to make and we can't conceive of altering that course anytime soon-- but it may happen and it doesn't make that projection wrong. This is more like some sci-fi time travel story line where small probabilities can impact the outcome greatly.
No the worst case projections were NOT reported, the average projected trend-line was. They figured we were too stupid to read a proper projection graph. The extreme disasters possible were reported... with each one trying to out shock the other, I'm surprised the Planetary Science people were not pulled into it with all the known extremes that happen on other planets... wrap those around implied connections to Earth by the "reporter" and they could have warped it even more. I remember the 80s stuff about how we only use 1% of the brain; which is still true, but they reported it inaccurately as if that was ALL the time when the science had different levels for different activities - setting up a strawman was setup against brain science.
I have a brooding lamp. Those bulbs are not banned; they are not even lights - they are heaters that give off some light... and that is their purpose; sadly light bulbs have actually been heaters sold as lights for a century. Poor selfish cheapskate, you'll have to buy special bulbs over the old incandescent ones... I just used the special bulbs in the 1st place since they are better and don't cost that much more.
Heating wire is not expensive and it lasts longer than a light bulb (plus it works better) so there may be a larger market of such devices for cheapskates who were previously using light bulbs. If you feel like MacGyver for your "creative" uses for incandescent bulbs; wake up, it was just a TV show and you are not being that clever.
Congrats at using cheap heaters as heaters but your tiny inconvenience is harming the planet and costing your ignorant neighbors a lot more money than you are saving; not to mention the reduction in construction of power stations and all the negative impacts of those.
Nice optimistic idea, but long term it won't work like you think. The entrenched powers are too powerful and the system is way too corrupt; including the incompetent citizenry.
BTW, bogus meaningless lawsuits can shutdown small players and even if you can fight them without going broke, their law firms against your cheap lawyer can make you lose even the obvious cases. I've seen it happen in my area where "cable" in the contract agreement was defined as TV only because it was signed in the 80s so internet and phone were exempted from the franchise agreement - when clearly the city agreement was over the use of public land (what all services use) to run their cables - and not about the signal on those wires. The lousy lawyer couldn't get the stupid or corrupt judge to decide a clear cut case.
Also, since when do such tit for tat agreements hold with mega corporations in the 1st place? After some years they always weasel out of their part of the grand bargain.
The Carriers are a monopoly power, they compete as little as possible because they know they are the only choice. Being all in the stock market, they have like minded institutional share holders who probably invest in the group of them - which makes them even more unlikely to truly complete; while the short term investors do push them to compete the net result is they will do nothing to lower prices but will compete with approximately the same levels of infrastructure investment (as little as possible.)
Price fixing is the NORM for telecom, so it is kind of sick that Apple is caught doing it against them - doesn't matter if it was right or wrong, it's still price fixing. The laws can be circumvented, Apple may learn how or people will be hacking around with imported devices.
I suggest you go look at politicalcompass.org.
Fascism is already widespread in the USA. I suggest you look it up (hint: it came from Italy.)
This is not Fascism. It is socialism.... although just about everything is justified with socialist arguments, including many Fascist positions... which not should come as a surprise given that socialism is a generic reasoning and Fascism is a specific societal structuring combining government with conventional business (and therefore inherently authoritarian.)
The authoritarian characteristics must be the root of your false comparison. It is somewhat authoritarian to have a top down ban. It's not criminalizing your use, it's just a commerce regulation aimed at a specific kind of light bulb (incandescents are not banned, just the really pathetic ones.) It is a middle ground policy. Doing nothing (letting people educate and actuate themselves) would be anarchy. Educating the public would be 1 step from anarchy, propaganda another step but the middle ground is clearly in some regulation and these are rather mild as those go. If it were Fascist, we'd have government harming LED and CFLs until they are more profitable because the century old light bulb conspiracy would not want to be undermined by technology advances... The Edison patents were used before to stop the manufacture of light bulbs that lasted decades (one of which has become famious for lasting century long, but it was designed to do so; before the industry collusion.) To them, it never will be about power savings - it's about planned obsolescence and the rest is merely the servant to marketing.
The hype is merely another fund raising vote-getting move to sucker more votes over a non issue.
Special bulbs were always exempt. Better incandescent are not banned, only the embarrassingly primitive ones that arguably are not light bulbs since you're lucky to get 10% light from them--- the rest is heat. It's frankly misleading to label them anything other than a heater or a resistor.
Firewire was not perfect; however, there were 3 reasons it didn't get bigger:
1) Intel was against it.
2) USB 1 was cheap and totally not designed to fill the gap Firewire was designed to fill. Firewire support costs extra $ and you still needed USB... complex controllers and buffering wasn't in USB 1; then USB 2 (a hack) took away the price advantage by adding complexity (by then the cost difference was gone... the difference was never great to begin with.)
3) consumers are the mass market. they are happy with "good enough" which is a really really low bar. Many didn't seem to know the difference between USB 1 and Firewire; plus they didn't care much. Most "experienced" users couldn't notice the speed gap between USB 2 and Firewire but it was significant in the real world. Some USB 2 devices sucked... and people didn't notice it was running near USB 1 speeds.
The reality is that the changes firewire made were adopted by all the other upgraded standards. What is sad is the project sat at Apple for years when it could have come out much earlier and trounced SCSI... which is what it initially was aiming at.
Final Cut Pro X changed the game significantly which upset all the entrenched pros. The changes take relearning and people do not like that unless they were really upset with their previous workflow (like everybody was before FCP, even Avid which was great but it cost way too much!) People liked their FCP 7 workflow.
The main reason pros were upset with Final Cut Pro is they removed all the hardware and high end features from the software. Your expensive camera gear was rendered useless because FCPX was file based and didn't care about film or magnetic tapes which all the pros had much more money invested in. The Mac and FCP is cheap compared to all the other gear.
Pros who make $$ think little of blowing $10k on a new workstation. Apple ALWAYS has high end configurations for people who just want the maxed out system and money is not an issue...
As for the base models, Apple has always had static pricing and rarely lowers price points during the life of the model. When they introduce something it usually has a fair market price with the PC world, on rare occasions it is better. I've spec'd out PCs with the same stuff and they can come out to be more-- usually because Apple has some unusual option that costs a bundle to replicate. I can't buy workstation cards like those for the prices apple is getting them at. I have a workstation card NOW and even though it is 6 years old it beats the stock GPUs that come with many new consumer machines.
When I was in the tv industry, we would retask or just resell the mac -- macs have crazy resale value! You don't need to upgrade anything, just buy new and ebay the old model-- it'll cost you less, if you value your time-- I've had times where it only cost $250 to upgrade to the newer mac. Also, the benefits of going from a $1500 GPU to the next $1500 every year are not usually worth it... (but selling the old card it likely going to cost you as much as if you just did the whole mac at the same time.)
Future US TV Journalists will not have to risk error or waste their time stereotyping the people in their reports! They can spend their important time investigating celebrities!
Police cameras can profile people without bias so they know who to abuse and who not to abuse! No more frivolous lawsuits over police prejudice!
Never underestimate the power of lawyers, politicians, and their propagandists. Nothing can withstand their power, even reality.
The French didn't drink cool aid.
I making computers "hip" was lame when they did it for white kids. What got me hooked was video games and the idea I could make them --- that is all one needs... It won't help girls much because they've not been so keen on gaming.
READING. I hated to read but to do anything serious on a computer you have to READ. Now I read all the time. "Minority" reading levels are at lower levels than they should be. If you dislike reading, forget about computers.
Math is not actually needed; programming only takes a certain kind of math thinking and a minimal level of math background. Math is generally taught so kids hate it so even saying MATH is not going to help. Perhaps, one could combine math and computers in a compelling way that has not been done before NOT involving those horrid TI calculators. Not likely... it'll probably cause more kids to hate computers.
Ditch the TV get the kid a computer instead. Even the poor own a TV or two now days. Investing in a computer is a lower priority than a 2nd TV. Don't know about now, but when I was a kid, most kids didn't get much time to the family computer, IF they had a computer at all. Girls were generally discouraged from even using the computer and I see that in my relatives' girls today... it's just facebook, email, and the encyclopedia / cliff notes that writes their mindless homework. For the boys it's OK but the girls were subtly discouraged and the older are more strongly discouraged (because computer == facebook in their parent's mind.)
1) CA has a larger economy than most other nations on earth.
2) CA pays more to the federal government than it gets back. (something people who bitch a lot never bother to look up.)
3) CA pays more to the federal government than any other state.
I think they should split up or change how senators are allocated because it's totally moronic that small nothing states are on a fully equal footing with much larger states. Senators have too much power too... which made far more sense when they were picked by state government and not by popular vote, as the founders intended (they also didn't intend House seats to be capped.)
Bad portability of C has created all these "solutions" which are less about C itself than the surrounding system. There needs to be more of a standardized runtime than what we have today and PNaCL does address this. I'm still quite skeptical of PNaCl; it's only significant contribution is addressing the base library issue... which it does with a really small focus because it exists for only 1 purpose.
I've also not been a fan of how performance freaks (like myself) will sacrifice security and stability for more speed when newer hardware always compensates. Except in rare cases where the algorithm costs become an issue, I am now FOR slower implementations that perform better. That is, what I consider performance today has changed from my experiences-- stability and security are what define performance for me. Having cpus that are beyond most our needs is also a factor. Only consumer entertainment devices and super computing have such high demands they disregard stability and performance.
I would feel better about C source code compiling to a locked down set of runtime libraries than some bitcode -- which for C is not far from the object files the C compiler generates in the first place. I've done assembly, C is clearly written by an assembly programmer who wanted a portable assembly that played nicely with multiple developers. I don't view anything C does as "high level" it's only as abstract as is necessary; it's minimalism is why it continues to be a top language. Some slightly "lower-level" format that is less able to be audited and re-introduces the temptation for runtime optimization, recompiling etc. does not make me feel it is worth it the minimal gains. You are not going to hide source code with PNaCL it can be decompiled to C without much loss... I bet far easier than with decompilers. Just compile the C (which can be comment stripped and compacted or even pre-compliler processed) and leave it alone while it executes. No temptation to complicate things with a VM-- no need for a VM in the 1st place if the runtime and OS manage it properly.
WHAT WE REALLY NEED is to resolve the problems of C and unix by learning from the bandaids that projects like Java, PNaCL, GNU Hurd, ADA, and the move Virtualization... To me it looks a lot like Virtualization is on a similar trajectory as microkernels. To me it looks like the hypervisors will progress towards where microkernels would have been if they had been evolving and at some turning point people will see the use case that was missed all these years. That is where I'm coming from and perhaps PNaCl will be something that wakes people up... but if it wasn't so attached to the VM concept it could have a bigger more profound impact.... which it may have indirectly if it gains enough attention.
In a sense bitcoin is regulated by it's design in a way only a computer system can be. There are fewer rules that can be easily bent to political will because the design of the system enforces it's own rules; making it decentralized, like Gold. Gold being a physical item, it has been easier to control and regulate but don't let that make you think bitcoin is immune from lawyers. nothing is. It has little regulation so that appeals to the economic anarchists (libertards) but in reality, it's strongly rigid nature by design is a basic form of regulation that can not be tampered with, unlike anything that has ever existed before.
The reason many people like bitcoin isn't just a political agenda, it's a response to the corruption and power control over a monetary system has over people over the history of civilization. An attempt to take away the human element that eventually ruins all systems with concentrated power.
I read about bitcoin before it got going and I never did anything with it but observe. I'm surprised it made it this far without terrorism turning it into another Prohibition "war" but I'm still waiting for that expected outcome... unless it can get powerful enough influence before the banks declare it a threat, our masters will forbid it.
Well then we are talking about C, which is highly portable already. It's technical power combined with the build systems and support libraries are what make it a pain, not the language itself. If you think compacting it into a bytecode would help it, I think not... and C is already so close to a portable assembly you are not hiding a great deal by such a conversion. If you want the power of C but the ease of a VM like java, then you need to make a massive portable library that must be bundled with the compiler and define a nice zip file format (like jar.) Most of all, a better shared library linking system has long been needed.
Virtual Machines are proof that Operating Systems have failed at their job. We dismissed microkernels and those high overhead academic designs but here we are running VMs because our programs were not portable enough or protected by the OS like they should have been in the 1st place.
The politicians never stopped themselves from passing unconstitutional laws seeking to weaken or outright exempt the Constitution. Every attempt has to be met with strong public pressure and in recent generations that pressure has weakened either by ineptitude or the indirect assault on democracy by wealthy institutions.
Free assembly is just as strongly protected as free speech but the public does not defend it so local city councils routinely trounce that right and the "security state" along with that unconstitutional century-old espionage act has done quite a bit against free speech and free press.
The 4th is obvious to anybody but a lawyer that it does not allow copying of your personal papers, then allowing them to later be easily accessed and if something bad is found a retroactive warrant can be issued... The reason juries are made up of peers is because of the belief in common sense over "lawyer-think" which has nothing to do with truth, honest logic, or science.
Any government would run longer, better, if lawyers were barred from serving in office. Their profession is to justify the means for their client's ends. Engineers, scientists, professors - they are the problem solvers.
They tend to last longer too... not sure about newer models but in the past they were better quality and the cost was worth it; but buying used on ebay helped.
Other relatives, it's linux + openbox. which has them still confused for certain things. one jumped ship already and is probably learning more new things with Windows 8 than if she just learned the parts of linux she had trouble with.
Already exists and is slowly moving forward with almost zero help. Supports many languages already.
http://www.parrot.org/
Every foiled plot I've heard about at any depth (not mainstream media) has been some kind of entrapment scheme setup by the FBI. Some of which I don't oppose, because it is good that the bomb dealers you do find are likely undercover agents but they've often been going too far in the ones cited as great successes. We have morons who lock themselves out of their faulty car bombs or can't set their crotch bomb off or can't even blow off their own leg with the tiny amount of explosive in their shoe that continue slip past Big Brother.
That is an even worse solution. It is NOT a partnership when one party bribes the other to not do their job. Exclusive contractors may get great monopoly deals but it is easy to find who to blame and a competent media and citizenry have a better chance at keeping things legit. When you distribute the contractors as "partners" and have them collude with each other to corrupt the process it is much harder to debug and to regulate it.
Remember, government overhead cost $ but so does the profit overhead of efficient contractors. Having the government do it with occasional small minor contractors will be more effective. If your gov is so bad this process fails or is costly it won't be any better at handling the 3rd parties. At least politicians become directly responsible when they are doing it; which is yet another reason they love to outsource their responsibilities because it mitigates the risk to their career. In addition the contractors have incentive to bribe the politicians who have an incentive to take the bribes. Punishment is uncommon and not severe enough.
So you have incentives by medium to large private parties, the media they advertize with or own, and the corrupt or risk adverse politicians. It is no wonder why the public thinks the government can't do anything, all the propaganda has been one sided for generations.
People today wouldn't think the government couldn't do all the things it has done successfully in the past and continues to do today.
It's capped to the speed of the pricing system. The power company decides the rates; if it's based solely upon instant demand of the "market" then it becomes a game of milliseconds like the financial casinos.
If the rate is too slow, then the power company creates more troubles for themselves as everybody adapts to the rates causing low rate times to become high usage spikes. In a more distributed solution, the rates are set by location ... and locations raise or lower their loads to match the grid. Oh! Doesn't that sound like a smart grid?
So this is the next step in the smart grid, with the minor money savings used as an incentive; but one should just think about regulating such things in because that isn't much of a money incentive to buy the electronics to allow such use (regulating it LATER after electric cars take over is quite likely in some countries.)