This is why most people should really be on something along the lines of an HDHP and treat health insurance as insurance. When you spend your money on yourself you care about both the cost and the benefit
Except that this doesn't work in practice. For a lot of things, an early treatment is cheap and a late treatment is very expensive. If people have to pay for both though, they're more likely to skip the early treatment in the hope that they'll get better by themselves and won't need the later one. This is one of the main reasons why healthcare ends up costing more in total in countries where the cost is paid directly by the patient.
There was no way I was going to keep straight the Jains and Sikhs and ascetic ("skinny Buddha") Buddhists and. the later ("fat Buddha") Buddhists, the relationship or lack thereof of all those to Hinduism
You're not meant to from the lecture. If memorising the differences is important, then that's what books and hand outs are for. Either is likely to be far more detailed, complete, and accurate than anything you can jot down in a lecture.
The reason physical notetaking works is that it forces the listener to engage the speaker actively rather than passively
Or it forces you to pay attention to writing and miss what the speaker has been saying. When I was lecturing, I found that there was an inverse correlation between the amount of note taking a student did and their understanding at the end of the term.
Flash works POORLY on OSX due the API's Apple exposes to them
How does this nonsense get repeated? Flash needs:
Video decoding and playback in a layer
2D vector drawing in a layer
2D raster drawing in a layer
Compositing layers
OS X exposes APIs for all of these, and automatically offloads the compositing and video decoding to the GPU where possible. Flash doesn't use them, it implements its own crappy (unaccelerated) compositor. In 10.6.4, Apple introduced the APIs that Adobe asked for (which were a stupid idea - they allow you to decode video frames on the GPU, then move the data back across the bus, composite in software, and then move the result back across the bus for the final rendering, which is what Flash actually wanted to do). The result? Flash is still slow.
There is simply not excuse for the fact that VLC used half as much CPU to decode exactly the same H.264 video file as Flash on OS X. QuickTime used even less if you put the video in a.mp4 container instead of.flv. Flash wouldn't use the QuickTime decoder, which would have cut their CPU usage in half for things like YouTube. The Flash developers claimed that was because they needed to composite things on the resulting video. The problem with this argument is that you can use a CGLayer as a rendering target for a QuickTime movie and then composite that layer over or under any others, all via supported APIs.
I did a series of video lessons to accompany one of my books and the publisher put them together using a Flash thing. On my Core 2 Duo, it was only just useable. I rewrote their application in Cocoa, using the standard compositing and video playback APIs, and CPU usage dropped to about 20% of one core. And, yes, this did include things like compositing video over static backgrounds and then compositing text over video.
Flash, as we know, works very well on Windows.
No it doesn't. It just works marginally less badly than it does on OS X.
It's also largely useless. Knowing where you are to within 5km relative to a star and some planets is useful when you are within a star system. Knowing where you are in some arbitrary coordinate system but not knowing where any of the nearby planets are in that coordinate system is a recipe for a '60s TV series.
As AC pointed out we typically observe a midday curfew on April fools day in Australia, although I guess that's just a local thing
It's the same in the UK. If you make an april fools joke after noon then you are the fool, not the person who believes it. This probably made more sense when accurate clocks were rare.
Mind you, this is assuming that voters don't actually hate themselves and their country
It's not self loathing, it shocking ignorance. Around 2004, there was a BBC documentary that followed the reelection campaign for George W Bush. Even the people they interviewed who were actively involved in the campaign often had no idea what his policies were, how he was perceived internationally, or what he had done while in office. The people they were talking to had even less idea. Yet all of them then went to vote for GWB. I suspect the same is true of Obama and I'm fairly certain it's true in most congressional elections. If the average voter can't tell you anything about the voting record of he person he's voting for, how can you expect a rational outcome to the election?
Schools teach, but they also demonstrate your ignorance to you. The best education is the one you give yourself, but that's of no use if you don't know what it is that you don't know. I had a few programming classes in school when I was 7. It wasn't enough to give me a detailed knowledge of programming, but it was enough to let me know that it was something that I was interested in learning and to motivate me to learn most of the rest on my own time.
Computer science is logic, graph theory, information theory, complexity theory, set theory, and game theory, with some psychology and a bit of electronic engineering. Computers are just tools. The Dijkstra quote of relevance is:
Computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes.
It shows just how much of a control freak the US has become and how of a lapdog the UK is.
The UK doesn't have a say in the matter, it's between the US and the airlines. The US says to the airlines 'do this or we won't let any of your planes land in the USA. Oh, and we may arrest members of your board if they happen to be in the USA'. The airline either does it or loses a very large part of their operating capability.
They can't deny boarding to a passenger, but they can tell an airline that doesn't deny boarding in the UK when the US government requests it that none of their planes will be allowed to land in the USA in the future. I don't know of any airliners that fly between the UK and Canada that do not also operate flights into the US, so this would be pretty much guaranteed to enforce compliance.
You say that they don't speak English, but the link you reference says they don't speak English as a first language. You need a very strange set of priorities to consider a million school children being bilingual is a bad thing.
I'm sorry but I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people in this country would still prefer a balanced approach to factual news
Really? What country are you in, because judging by viewing figures for television news and circulation figures for newspapers, most people in the USA and UK would prefer a source of news that doesn't challenge their personal prejudices or force them to think.
They don't have to pay the H.264 client license if they're not the ones shipping the client. They still need to pay the server license, but that's a different issue. As to the frame-accurate seeking, this is possible in HTM5, it's just not easy. You need something on the server to (re)start the stream at the specified location, while current default player implementations just use byte range seeking. There's no reason why Adobe couldn't write an HTML5 player that sent AJAX commands to their server to do the seeking. Same result, less cost to Adobe...
Why can't this be done via software programming? Just upload a data file to your phone.
Security. If it's just a file, then you compromise the OS and you can copy it. Then you can just copy it to another phone and start running up that user's phone bill. With a SIM, you need physical access to the phone to clone it.
SIM cloners exist, but currently you can't implement one in software that runs on a smartphone. That's the entire point of the SIM. The smartphone OS does not need to be trusted by the network.
Why would you want to store contacts on the SIM? If the phone is lost, typically the SIM is lost too. You should back up the contacts onto another machine. That's why most older phones support SyncML and other open standards for syncing and Android phones support a proprietary standard for storing all of your personal data where Google can index it.
The purpose of the SIM is being an isolated crypto chip for handshaking with the network that can't be compromised as a result of the phone's OS being compromised.
Do you have any idea how irrelevant that amount of space is? The standard Mini-SIM is 25x15mm. It's tiny. The Micro-SIM is 15x12mm. It's about as small as it can be without getting lost instantly when you remove it from the phone. The Nano-SIM is 12x9mm. Your phone would save 6x12x0.76mm. A typical smartphone has far more wasted space than that in various places. For applications where that much space actually is important, there is the embedded SIM, which is only 5x6mm.
Their video server can stream video to an HTML5-based player. And then Adobe doesn't even have to pay the license fees for distributing the H.264 implementation...
Yes, force people who do NOT want to be social to be social
Please can we not conflate not wanting to be part of a massive centralised communications system controlled and monitored by a single unaccountable entity with not wanting to be social?
Remind me again why I want to participate in social networking?
Because it's much better to make one company the complete arbiter of all of your interpersonal communication than to give lots of competing companies a small and replaceable slice of it. No, I don't understand it either.
Slashdot Mirror
for the US having a government not basing its policies on adages, witticisms and one-liners.
Yes, I think we would be very grateful if that happened.
This is why most people should really be on something along the lines of an HDHP and treat health insurance as insurance. When you spend your money on yourself you care about both the cost and the benefit
Except that this doesn't work in practice. For a lot of things, an early treatment is cheap and a late treatment is very expensive. If people have to pay for both though, they're more likely to skip the early treatment in the hope that they'll get better by themselves and won't need the later one. This is one of the main reasons why healthcare ends up costing more in total in countries where the cost is paid directly by the patient.
There was no way I was going to keep straight the Jains and Sikhs and ascetic ("skinny Buddha") Buddhists and. the later ("fat Buddha") Buddhists, the relationship or lack thereof of all those to Hinduism
You're not meant to from the lecture. If memorising the differences is important, then that's what books and hand outs are for. Either is likely to be far more detailed, complete, and accurate than anything you can jot down in a lecture.
The reason physical notetaking works is that it forces the listener to engage the speaker actively rather than passively
Or it forces you to pay attention to writing and miss what the speaker has been saying. When I was lecturing, I found that there was an inverse correlation between the amount of note taking a student did and their understanding at the end of the term.
Flash works POORLY on OSX due the API's Apple exposes to them
How does this nonsense get repeated? Flash needs:
OS X exposes APIs for all of these, and automatically offloads the compositing and video decoding to the GPU where possible. Flash doesn't use them, it implements its own crappy (unaccelerated) compositor. In 10.6.4, Apple introduced the APIs that Adobe asked for (which were a stupid idea - they allow you to decode video frames on the GPU, then move the data back across the bus, composite in software, and then move the result back across the bus for the final rendering, which is what Flash actually wanted to do). The result? Flash is still slow.
There is simply not excuse for the fact that VLC used half as much CPU to decode exactly the same H.264 video file as Flash on OS X. QuickTime used even less if you put the video in a .mp4 container instead of .flv. Flash wouldn't use the QuickTime decoder, which would have cut their CPU usage in half for things like YouTube. The Flash developers claimed that was because they needed to composite things on the resulting video. The problem with this argument is that you can use a CGLayer as a rendering target for a QuickTime movie and then composite that layer over or under any others, all via supported APIs.
I did a series of video lessons to accompany one of my books and the publisher put them together using a Flash thing. On my Core 2 Duo, it was only just useable. I rewrote their application in Cocoa, using the standard compositing and video playback APIs, and CPU usage dropped to about 20% of one core. And, yes, this did include things like compositing video over static backgrounds and then compositing text over video.
Flash, as we know, works very well on Windows.
No it doesn't. It just works marginally less badly than it does on OS X.
Yes, I'm pretty sure that's what I said...
It's also largely useless. Knowing where you are to within 5km relative to a star and some planets is useful when you are within a star system. Knowing where you are in some arbitrary coordinate system but not knowing where any of the nearby planets are in that coordinate system is a recipe for a '60s TV series.
As AC pointed out we typically observe a midday curfew on April fools day in Australia, although I guess that's just a local thing
It's the same in the UK. If you make an april fools joke after noon then you are the fool, not the person who believes it. This probably made more sense when accurate clocks were rare.
Mind you, this is assuming that voters don't actually hate themselves and their country
It's not self loathing, it shocking ignorance. Around 2004, there was a BBC documentary that followed the reelection campaign for George W Bush. Even the people they interviewed who were actively involved in the campaign often had no idea what his policies were, how he was perceived internationally, or what he had done while in office. The people they were talking to had even less idea. Yet all of them then went to vote for GWB. I suspect the same is true of Obama and I'm fairly certain it's true in most congressional elections. If the average voter can't tell you anything about the voting record of he person he's voting for, how can you expect a rational outcome to the election?
Schools teach, but they also demonstrate your ignorance to you. The best education is the one you give yourself, but that's of no use if you don't know what it is that you don't know. I had a few programming classes in school when I was 7. It wasn't enough to give me a detailed knowledge of programming, but it was enough to let me know that it was something that I was interested in learning and to motivate me to learn most of the rest on my own time.
Computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes.
It shows just how much of a control freak the US has become and how of a lapdog the UK is.
The UK doesn't have a say in the matter, it's between the US and the airlines. The US says to the airlines 'do this or we won't let any of your planes land in the USA. Oh, and we may arrest members of your board if they happen to be in the USA'. The airline either does it or loses a very large part of their operating capability.
They can't deny boarding to a passenger, but they can tell an airline that doesn't deny boarding in the UK when the US government requests it that none of their planes will be allowed to land in the USA in the future. I don't know of any airliners that fly between the UK and Canada that do not also operate flights into the US, so this would be pretty much guaranteed to enforce compliance.
You say that they don't speak English, but the link you reference says they don't speak English as a first language. You need a very strange set of priorities to consider a million school children being bilingual is a bad thing.
I'm sorry but I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people in this country would still prefer a balanced approach to factual news
Really? What country are you in, because judging by viewing figures for television news and circulation figures for newspapers, most people in the USA and UK would prefer a source of news that doesn't challenge their personal prejudices or force them to think.
And it's a beta version. Now that they're the ones responsible for developing Flash for Chrome, do you think that will continue?
They don't have to pay the H.264 client license if they're not the ones shipping the client. They still need to pay the server license, but that's a different issue. As to the frame-accurate seeking, this is possible in HTM5, it's just not easy. You need something on the server to (re)start the stream at the specified location, while current default player implementations just use byte range seeking. There's no reason why Adobe couldn't write an HTML5 player that sent AJAX commands to their server to do the seeking. Same result, less cost to Adobe...
Why can't this be done via software programming? Just upload a data file to your phone.
Security. If it's just a file, then you compromise the OS and you can copy it. Then you can just copy it to another phone and start running up that user's phone bill. With a SIM, you need physical access to the phone to clone it.
SIM cloners exist, but currently you can't implement one in software that runs on a smartphone. That's the entire point of the SIM. The smartphone OS does not need to be trusted by the network.
Dual and triple SIM phones are available and they use Mini SIMs, not even Micro SIMs.
Why would you want to store contacts on the SIM? If the phone is lost, typically the SIM is lost too. You should back up the contacts onto another machine. That's why most older phones support SyncML and other open standards for syncing and Android phones support a proprietary standard for storing all of your personal data where Google can index it.
The purpose of the SIM is being an isolated crypto chip for handshaking with the network that can't be compromised as a result of the phone's OS being compromised.
Do you have any idea how irrelevant that amount of space is? The standard Mini-SIM is 25x15mm. It's tiny. The Micro-SIM is 15x12mm. It's about as small as it can be without getting lost instantly when you remove it from the phone. The Nano-SIM is 12x9mm. Your phone would save 6x12x0.76mm. A typical smartphone has far more wasted space than that in various places. For applications where that much space actually is important, there is the embedded SIM, which is only 5x6mm.
Their video server can stream video to an HTML5-based player. And then Adobe doesn't even have to pay the license fees for distributing the H.264 implementation...
Yes, force people who do NOT want to be social to be social
Please can we not conflate not wanting to be part of a massive centralised communications system controlled and monitored by a single unaccountable entity with not wanting to be social?
Remind me again why I want to participate in social networking?
Because it's much better to make one company the complete arbiter of all of your interpersonal communication than to give lots of competing companies a small and replaceable slice of it. No, I don't understand it either.