I mean, the US has the least regulated airwaves in the western world
Tell the grandparent he's a fucking cunt on the TV in America. Now try it in Britain. One of these will land you with a large fine, the other will not.
He doesn't appear to understand the meaning of the word free trade because support for free trade were words out of his mouth after talking about implementing tariffs, though
He understands it very well. What he means when he talks about free trade is not free movement of goods or labour (which benefit poor people), it's free movement of capital (which benefits rich people). He wants to clamp down on free movement of goods and labour but continue to allow free movement of capital, because that's good for him.
Here's the problem: there is far more of a shortage of smart people than of money in medical research. That's okay though, because while $3bn sounds like a lot, it's actually a really tiny amount. I couldn't find the most recent figures, but in 2003 the US alone spent $94.3bn on medical research. That's around $123bn, adjusting for inflation. Even if Zuckerberg spent all of the pledged money in one year, he'd only be promising to increase this amount by just under 2.5%, for a single year. Can you think of a single large project where a 2.5% increase in funding for one year has made a large difference, ever? It sounds like he's actually spending the money over 10 years though, so that's a 0.25% increase in funding. I'm being generous there and only counting the US budget. The EU spends a similar amount, Russia and China both spend a lot, so in total it amounts to well under a 0.1% increase in funding for medical research over 10 years. How much more productive would you be if I offered to pay you 0.1% more over the next 10 years?
There was a study a few years ago that found that the optimal price point for music was 5/track. At that price, people will impulse-buy entire albums if they've heard a track that they like, without even thinking about whether they'll listen to the rest.
Not necessarily. As the grandparent posted, and I've said many times before, creating is hard, copying is easy. You need a business model where people pay for the creation, not the copying. For example, you release a beta version of the game with most of the game world missing for free, then you ask for funding to finish it. Once you've received enough to cover your development and distribution costs and make a decent profit, you release the game for free. Then you start asking people to contribute to developing the next one.
This sounds weird, but it's actually exactly the business model that many TV shows use. They produce a pilot and send it to the networks for free. The networks watch it and if they like it then they fund the development of the first season. If the first season does well, they start asking the network for money for the second, and so on. The only difference is that you'd ask the customers directly, rather than having a middleman who wants to sell adverts.
You don't even have to go that far. If I go into a shop, steal a DVD, and give it to you, the penalty is lower than if I buy the DVD, make a copy, and give that to you. I suspect that part of the reason that people don't take the risk seriously is that it's hard for a moderately sane person to imagine that a court would uphold a penalty for copying an object that's greater than the cost of stealing it.
While five years seems a bit long, that's so streaming and rebroadcast doesn't cut too deeply into the DVD/BluRay sales
Studios used to wait six months between cinema release and DVD sales because they were scared that DVD sales would cut into cinema ticket sales. Now they often do simultaneous releases because they learned that if you don't make content available in the format that people want then they'll pirate it (and now we have large statutory penalties because it's hard to argue actual damages when you're refusing to sell the thing that's been pirated). People won't buy the DVD if they can't stream it, they'll either go without or pirate.
Also, take a look at Google's Pixel device or Apple's Mac. Both of those are locked down in similar ways, possibly even more severely.
I'm not sure about the Pixel, but from what I've read it's expected to support dual boot out of the box. Apple Macs come with a tool called Boot Camp that will partition your disk and aid installing MS Windows (it provide drivers for various bits of hardware and installs the required BIOS compatibility optional bits in the UEFI partition for non-EFI-aware operating systems).
Without multipliers, the miles correspond to the number of miles that you've travelled. If you got one mile for every mile and one mile let you buy one mile of travel, you'd never pay after your first flight.
It is impossible to lose weight if you eat more than you burn, even if all of those calories are "healthy".
That's assuming that 'eat' and 'digest' are equivalent. They're not, and various things affect the efficiency of your digestive system. It's perfectly possible to eat a lot more calories than your body absorbs (though it's not possible to eat fewer unless you learn to photosynthesise).
If you ever visit Apple, go to their cafeteria. Order a pizza. Look at the box: it comes in a custom Apple-designed cardboard box (actually, a very nice design that is smaller than a normal pizza box and stacks better). Look carefully, and you'll see the Apple patent number listed on it. I wanted to take a photograph, but apparently Apple is very strict about people not taking photos anywhere on their campus.
The US constitution requires that the government accept payment for taxes in US dollars, but it doesn't prohibit it from accepting them in another form. It's always possible that he might persuade the IRS to accept miles instead of dollars.
Probably quite difficult. That said, miles probably don't mean what you think they mean. United has three categories of air miles:
Lifetime flight miles are the total number of miles that you've flown. These count towards your million mile status (when you get enough in this category, you get status for life).
Premiere qualifying miles. These are the number of miles that you've flow, with a few small tweaks, which count towards your premiere status for the next year (25K for silver, 50K for gold, and so on).
Award miles. These expire if you don't fly with them for a while (18 months, I think), accumulate roughly in proportion to the number of dollars you spend with them (with a multiplier for your premiere status) and can be used to buy flights, upgrades, and so on.
I believe that this person was given 15 million award miles. That doesn't mean that he can use them to fly a million miles. For example, a transatlantic flight (around 2.5-6K miles, depending on the route) booked with award miles costs either 30K or 60K (depending on whether you want a guaranteed flight or a chance to be bumped). And you still need to pay airport taxes for the trip (likely around $100-150). If you want to upgrade to business class, I think it's another 20K miles and a $500 fee.
That said, 15M award miles is probably enough that he'd never need to pay full price for a flight ever again. It's enough for 125 transatlantic round trips, which is a lot more than most people take in a lifetime (though some people obviously do: you can spend all of those miles without reaching million miler status).
Sometimes. Most people don't actually want to lose weight though, they want to lose fat. If you exercise a bit more, you'll likely lose some fat and put on some muscle. Muscle is denser than fat, so your weight may go up for a little while, and the scale will make you feel like it isn't working.
Successful weight loss almost always comes down to simple math; burn more calories than you consume.
Which is a really good way to make yourself very ill. Hint: If the only thing that you're tracking is calories, then you're likely to have too much of some and too little of other things that you need.
Treating power users like they are imbeciles is never a good thing.
The intersection of the set of people who can be described as power users and the set of people for whom entering a single command on the command line is too hard is probably zero.
especially when security at an airport likely has no fucking idea I paid cash at a travel agency
They might well know. Travel agencies are expected to report all manner of things. Try booking a flight on the same day (or, worse, rescheduling a flight), for example. Unless it's something that you do regularly and you did it through a business account, you'll almost certainly be marked for extra security checks.
Oh yes, lots. Mostly from C?O types though - people who fly a lot and see the Oracle and SAP adverts outside the First Class lounge, but don't have to deal with the technology on a day to day basis and don't mind paying high premiums for having someone to blame at the next board meeting if things go wrong.
DOS wasn't too bad. Remember, the competitor for DOS was CP/M, not UNIX or VMS. It ran a command interpreter, TSRs, and launched a single program. That was about all that you needed it to do on an 8086 with 64-640KB of RAM. Windows 3 was fairly comparable with GEM. Both just about ran with 640KB of RAM, but Windows looked better (for example, colour icons). More importantly, Windows 3.1 provided an incremental upgrade path that started to use features from the 386.
The competition to Windows 3.1 was OS/2, which was a lot better, but needed a lot more RAM. Back then, 4MB of RAM cost about £125. Windows 3.1 ran happily in 4MB, OS/2 needed at least 8MB (so did NT 3.51) and cost a lot more for the software license. The extra functionality wasn't worth £200/seat for better hardware and more expensive software to most businesses.
There were other DOS clones (I particularly remember DR DOS) which gave 32-bit protected memory, multitasking, and multiple VTs, but these features are not that useful on a desktop without a GUI and GEM was killed as a separate product before DR DOS gained these features. iRMX (and PL/M86) was more interesting, but was so closely tied to the x86 architecture that it didn't get the early adoption from people who weren't convinced that the m68k was dead as a desktop computer CPU.
This is situation normal for Google coders. They have really good in-house refactoring tools and absolutely no clue about API design. As such, every iteration of every Google product involves massive code refactorings to fix poor API design choices in the previous one, which has little impact in house because the migration is largely automated.
Coming back after so many years was a mistake, it didn't work.
And it didn't work either time. The Red Dwarf VI finale in 1993 was superb. Red Dwarf VII in 1997 was mediocre. VIII in 1999 had a very few high spots, but was basically just bland.
Back to Earth in 2009 was awful. Even Season VIII got a few chortles. I watched all of Back to Earth without laughing once and was left with no desire to watch any future Red Dwarf.
Apparently there was a direct-to-DVD Season X in 2012. Maybe it was okay, but at this point I think they've pissed off all but the most die-hard of fans. It's like Star Trek after Enterprise and Nemesis: it needs a reboot and a new set of fans if they want to reuse the brand, because they've run it so far into the ground that the only way to get the older fans involved is to pretend all of the recent crap didn't happen and appeal to nostalgia.
In my research, I found an really interesting paper (from France, IIRC, it's been a while) showing that even a 16-pixel (!) image could still be used to determine the age and sex of a person to around 80-90% accuracy, and recognize the same person again over half the time
There was some research from DERA a while ago (back when DERA still existed, so a good 15 or so years back) trying to put biometric information on magstripe cards. They managed to put enough information in the 50 bits of space that they had to uniquely identify all of the faces that they tested it with (a few million) with no false positives. That's not really surprising, when you think that 50 bits gives you 2^50 combinations (about one quadrillion). With perfect encoding, you'd only need around 34 bits to uniquely identify every human, so 50 bits gave them a lot of space for the non-linear distribution of real faces in the possible-face space. 16 colour pixels gives you 384 bits, so there's a lot of possible discrimination with that much information (though there are probably a lot of combinations of pixel values that you never see: blue and pink polkadot faces are pretty rare).
Note that this means that the spooks probably really can do some of the "ridiculous" image processing and recognition we tend to laugh at in movies and TV shows
In the 90s there was a lot of research into algorithmic image compression. For faces, this works very well - you take an average face and then just encode the differences between a specific face and the average (then apply normal data compression to the result). You can often enhance images in the same way: If you know that the thing you're looking at is a face then that's a lot of information that you can add to data that you get from the source image. You may not get the original, but you'll probably get something that a human (or another well trained NN) can use to recognise the person.
Given her track record: An increase in corporate power, more wars, and a big step up in the deployment of the surveillance state, coupled with a greater deduction in credibility for the left making it even harder to undo.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you get S/MIME certs via Let's Encrypt?
I mean, the US has the least regulated airwaves in the western world
Tell the grandparent he's a fucking cunt on the TV in America. Now try it in Britain. One of these will land you with a large fine, the other will not.
He doesn't appear to understand the meaning of the word free trade because support for free trade were words out of his mouth after talking about implementing tariffs, though
He understands it very well. What he means when he talks about free trade is not free movement of goods or labour (which benefit poor people), it's free movement of capital (which benefits rich people). He wants to clamp down on free movement of goods and labour but continue to allow free movement of capital, because that's good for him.
Here's the problem: there is far more of a shortage of smart people than of money in medical research. That's okay though, because while $3bn sounds like a lot, it's actually a really tiny amount. I couldn't find the most recent figures, but in 2003 the US alone spent $94.3bn on medical research. That's around $123bn, adjusting for inflation. Even if Zuckerberg spent all of the pledged money in one year, he'd only be promising to increase this amount by just under 2.5%, for a single year. Can you think of a single large project where a 2.5% increase in funding for one year has made a large difference, ever? It sounds like he's actually spending the money over 10 years though, so that's a 0.25% increase in funding. I'm being generous there and only counting the US budget. The EU spends a similar amount, Russia and China both spend a lot, so in total it amounts to well under a 0.1% increase in funding for medical research over 10 years. How much more productive would you be if I offered to pay you 0.1% more over the next 10 years?
There was a study a few years ago that found that the optimal price point for music was 5/track. At that price, people will impulse-buy entire albums if they've heard a track that they like, without even thinking about whether they'll listen to the rest.
Not necessarily. As the grandparent posted, and I've said many times before, creating is hard, copying is easy. You need a business model where people pay for the creation, not the copying. For example, you release a beta version of the game with most of the game world missing for free, then you ask for funding to finish it. Once you've received enough to cover your development and distribution costs and make a decent profit, you release the game for free. Then you start asking people to contribute to developing the next one.
This sounds weird, but it's actually exactly the business model that many TV shows use. They produce a pilot and send it to the networks for free. The networks watch it and if they like it then they fund the development of the first season. If the first season does well, they start asking the network for money for the second, and so on. The only difference is that you'd ask the customers directly, rather than having a middleman who wants to sell adverts.
You don't even have to go that far. If I go into a shop, steal a DVD, and give it to you, the penalty is lower than if I buy the DVD, make a copy, and give that to you. I suspect that part of the reason that people don't take the risk seriously is that it's hard for a moderately sane person to imagine that a court would uphold a penalty for copying an object that's greater than the cost of stealing it.
While five years seems a bit long, that's so streaming and rebroadcast doesn't cut too deeply into the DVD/BluRay sales
Studios used to wait six months between cinema release and DVD sales because they were scared that DVD sales would cut into cinema ticket sales. Now they often do simultaneous releases because they learned that if you don't make content available in the format that people want then they'll pirate it (and now we have large statutory penalties because it's hard to argue actual damages when you're refusing to sell the thing that's been pirated). People won't buy the DVD if they can't stream it, they'll either go without or pirate.
Also, take a look at Google's Pixel device or Apple's Mac. Both of those are locked down in similar ways, possibly even more severely.
I'm not sure about the Pixel, but from what I've read it's expected to support dual boot out of the box. Apple Macs come with a tool called Boot Camp that will partition your disk and aid installing MS Windows (it provide drivers for various bits of hardware and installs the required BIOS compatibility optional bits in the UEFI partition for non-EFI-aware operating systems).
Without multipliers, the miles correspond to the number of miles that you've travelled. If you got one mile for every mile and one mile let you buy one mile of travel, you'd never pay after your first flight.
It is impossible to lose weight if you eat more than you burn, even if all of those calories are "healthy".
That's assuming that 'eat' and 'digest' are equivalent. They're not, and various things affect the efficiency of your digestive system. It's perfectly possible to eat a lot more calories than your body absorbs (though it's not possible to eat fewer unless you learn to photosynthesise).
If you ever visit Apple, go to their cafeteria. Order a pizza. Look at the box: it comes in a custom Apple-designed cardboard box (actually, a very nice design that is smaller than a normal pizza box and stacks better). Look carefully, and you'll see the Apple patent number listed on it. I wanted to take a photograph, but apparently Apple is very strict about people not taking photos anywhere on their campus.
The US constitution requires that the government accept payment for taxes in US dollars, but it doesn't prohibit it from accepting them in another form. It's always possible that he might persuade the IRS to accept miles instead of dollars.
I believe that this person was given 15 million award miles. That doesn't mean that he can use them to fly a million miles. For example, a transatlantic flight (around 2.5-6K miles, depending on the route) booked with award miles costs either 30K or 60K (depending on whether you want a guaranteed flight or a chance to be bumped). And you still need to pay airport taxes for the trip (likely around $100-150). If you want to upgrade to business class, I think it's another 20K miles and a $500 fee.
That said, 15M award miles is probably enough that he'd never need to pay full price for a flight ever again. It's enough for 125 transatlantic round trips, which is a lot more than most people take in a lifetime (though some people obviously do: you can spend all of those miles without reaching million miler status).
Sometimes. Most people don't actually want to lose weight though, they want to lose fat. If you exercise a bit more, you'll likely lose some fat and put on some muscle. Muscle is denser than fat, so your weight may go up for a little while, and the scale will make you feel like it isn't working.
Successful weight loss almost always comes down to simple math; burn more calories than you consume.
Which is a really good way to make yourself very ill. Hint: If the only thing that you're tracking is calories, then you're likely to have too much of some and too little of other things that you need.
Treating power users like they are imbeciles is never a good thing.
The intersection of the set of people who can be described as power users and the set of people for whom entering a single command on the command line is too hard is probably zero.
especially when security at an airport likely has no fucking idea I paid cash at a travel agency
They might well know. Travel agencies are expected to report all manner of things. Try booking a flight on the same day (or, worse, rescheduling a flight), for example. Unless it's something that you do regularly and you did it through a business account, you'll almost certainly be marked for extra security checks.
But does Oracle have any customer loyalty?
Oh yes, lots. Mostly from C?O types though - people who fly a lot and see the Oracle and SAP adverts outside the First Class lounge, but don't have to deal with the technology on a day to day basis and don't mind paying high premiums for having someone to blame at the next board meeting if things go wrong.
The competition to Windows 3.1 was OS/2, which was a lot better, but needed a lot more RAM. Back then, 4MB of RAM cost about £125. Windows 3.1 ran happily in 4MB, OS/2 needed at least 8MB (so did NT 3.51) and cost a lot more for the software license. The extra functionality wasn't worth £200/seat for better hardware and more expensive software to most businesses.
There were other DOS clones (I particularly remember DR DOS) which gave 32-bit protected memory, multitasking, and multiple VTs, but these features are not that useful on a desktop without a GUI and GEM was killed as a separate product before DR DOS gained these features. iRMX (and PL/M86) was more interesting, but was so closely tied to the x86 architecture that it didn't get the early adoption from people who weren't convinced that the m68k was dead as a desktop computer CPU.
This is situation normal for Google coders. They have really good in-house refactoring tools and absolutely no clue about API design. As such, every iteration of every Google product involves massive code refactorings to fix poor API design choices in the previous one, which has little impact in house because the migration is largely automated.
"Traitor" is a label thrown about by mindless patriots
You replied:
traitor isn't thrown around by "mindless idiots."
I find it interesting that your subconscious autocorrected 'patriot' to 'idiot', but it doesn't really help the point that you're trying to make.
Coming back after so many years was a mistake, it didn't work.
And it didn't work either time. The Red Dwarf VI finale in 1993 was superb. Red Dwarf VII in 1997 was mediocre. VIII in 1999 had a very few high spots, but was basically just bland.
Back to Earth in 2009 was awful. Even Season VIII got a few chortles. I watched all of Back to Earth without laughing once and was left with no desire to watch any future Red Dwarf.
Apparently there was a direct-to-DVD Season X in 2012. Maybe it was okay, but at this point I think they've pissed off all but the most die-hard of fans. It's like Star Trek after Enterprise and Nemesis: it needs a reboot and a new set of fans if they want to reuse the brand, because they've run it so far into the ground that the only way to get the older fans involved is to pretend all of the recent crap didn't happen and appeal to nostalgia.
In my research, I found an really interesting paper (from France, IIRC, it's been a while) showing that even a 16-pixel (!) image could still be used to determine the age and sex of a person to around 80-90% accuracy, and recognize the same person again over half the time
There was some research from DERA a while ago (back when DERA still existed, so a good 15 or so years back) trying to put biometric information on magstripe cards. They managed to put enough information in the 50 bits of space that they had to uniquely identify all of the faces that they tested it with (a few million) with no false positives. That's not really surprising, when you think that 50 bits gives you 2^50 combinations (about one quadrillion). With perfect encoding, you'd only need around 34 bits to uniquely identify every human, so 50 bits gave them a lot of space for the non-linear distribution of real faces in the possible-face space. 16 colour pixels gives you 384 bits, so there's a lot of possible discrimination with that much information (though there are probably a lot of combinations of pixel values that you never see: blue and pink polkadot faces are pretty rare).
Note that this means that the spooks probably really can do some of the "ridiculous" image processing and recognition we tend to laugh at in movies and TV shows
In the 90s there was a lot of research into algorithmic image compression. For faces, this works very well - you take an average face and then just encode the differences between a specific face and the average (then apply normal data compression to the result). You can often enhance images in the same way: If you know that the thing you're looking at is a face then that's a lot of information that you can add to data that you get from the source image. You may not get the original, but you'll probably get something that a human (or another well trained NN) can use to recognise the person.
Given her track record: An increase in corporate power, more wars, and a big step up in the deployment of the surveillance state, coupled with a greater deduction in credibility for the left making it even harder to undo.