I'm not sure RIM will be breathing sighs of relief over this. Yeah, it's an incremental update, but it makes the device faster and a lot of people will latch onto the larger display as a good thing. (I'm not so sure; more screen is generally good, but it all depends on how it feels in the hand, given that it's a specifically hand-held device.) Basically, this thing is going to outsell all of RIM's portfolio by a large factor, even though it's only incremental. For people still on the iPhone 4 (instead of the 4S), it's a huge leap in functionality, and there are tens of millions of those people.
Uh, they are diversified. The large amount of their retirement in Apple stock isn't because they overbought Apple, but because AAPL has performed so well.
They are diversified. It's just that the other stocks are underperforming (not worthless; that was rhetorical hyperbole), for the most part. But my point wasn't about my parents' retirement per se, but that their judgement, and that of all the other stockholders, would make it impossible for Apple to forego such a large part of their income stream.
You know, I've been hearing that for more than 30 years now, and yet the exploitable reserves just keep growing. A few years ago, when Kevin Drum was making his reputation with his blogging on peak oil, we didn't have the ability to efficiently extract oil from shales and sands. Now we do, and that is a vast, vast supply. And realistically, what good is it to worry even if that were not true? When oil gets scarce, the price will go up, and we will be driven to find alternatives. That's why we use petroleum in the first place, rather than whale oil (which petroleum was initially exploited to replace).
A large part of my parents' retirement is in Apple stock, not by design but because the other stocks they hold are basically worthless. (And before you start calling my parents the 1%, my father was enlisted military, then a GM auto assembler, and my mother was an accountant for the Air Force.) So tell me, why would they accede to a change that would cost them nearly 80% of the largest portion of their available savings for retirement as the stock crashes back to reflect the change in earnings? And why for that matter would any shareholder accept losing 80% of their investment if it could be avoided? The GP is correct.
In what sense are we past the peak on oil? Our exploitable reserves are larger now than ever, and the rate of growth in reserves outpaces the rate of growth in usage. I see no evidence at all that we are past peak oil, if such a thing even actually has meaning outside the context of individual fields.
Citation needed. Clearly, resources are finite as long as we are confined to one planet, but I have yet to see any information that most resources, or many resources, are close to exhaustion. We have more known, recoverable oil reserves now than when peak oil was first postulated, for instance. Our food production capacity is far greater than what Malthus was concerned about, for instance. The only things I can think of that are seriously depleted are whale oil (which we've obviated by switching to petroleum), ivory (which we've obviated largely with ceramics) and certain hardwoods. In addition, there are vast untapped areas, like Siberia, ripe for utilization when the need arises. When human ingenuity and substitution of goods are taken into account, I see no reason we cannot sustain a larger population than we have now into the indefinite future with rising standards of living. If we're really get smart, we leave the planet and colonize several more, at which point that timeline begins to extend beyond the limits of the imaginable.
Oh, yeah. I had a period of long-term unemployment when the economy crashed in 2008, and at one point interviewed at a company that needed a UNIX admin. Generally, I do architecture-level work, but eating is a particular hobby of mine, and I needed anything. I was not hired because I was overqualified. Ironically, a year later (when I had been working in another position for several months, they called me back in to interview for a position with a different team as a kind of pseudo-manager, working with their teams to offload a lot of tasks that the team's boss didn't want to do. The interview questions were mostly inapplicable hypotheticals about something I'd developed and technical questions about products I hadn't used, but had used similar types. The upshot: they didn't hire me. So with the same company, I ended up being told I was too technical for their technical position, and not technical enough for their non-technical position. Odd place, that.
Yes, exactly. When I write code anything more than a bog-standard getter/setter method, the first thing I do is write a comment describing everything coming in and everything going out, and how "in" and "out" differ. Then I write a series of comments going through the entire set of steps that have to happen (at 50000' level) to get the in, do the transformation to produce the out, and actually send off the out. For those parts where the 50000' view isn't obvious ("read in the file from the passed filehandle, throwing an exception if you can't" covers it, but "now combine the two streams" doesn't), I break it down further in more comments. Only when I'm sure that the comments are a good approximation of the final flow do I actually write the code. During that process, I eliminate those comments that are now superfluous (for example, because the code is obvious and common, or because the why is otherwise unimportant for that block). The end result is a small increase in the time to write the code, and a vast decrease in the time needed to debug the code, along with dramatically better maintainability.
Nice try at a birther sideswipe, but it's not going anywhere. As to the college records, mainly I'm curious why he's been so determined to keep them secret. My best guess is that he tried to pump up his credentials as an exotic by falsely claiming (or hinting at) foreign birth. My second best guess is that he got in based on the influence of some of his radical mentors rather than on merit. It's also entirely possible that there's nothing there of any interest, but in that case, why go to such lengths to keep the records from being released (as opposed to passively refusing to release them).
Actually, we don't know that at all. How do we know that he didn't have his grades strategically massaged to make a popular, exotic, up and coming black kid just a little more successful? Or that the rules were waived in his case for "life experience" or some similar rot? That's the thing: without the records, we're just taking people's word for it. That said, it doesn't matter in the slightest, unless there's some scandal that's been being buried for years. Which is why people wonder why so much effort is being made to keep these records private. Meanwhile, the Obama campaign is trying mightily to raise the same kinds of questions about Romney's tax returns. In both cases, there is only danger to the candidate if there is an obvious scandal buried in the documents, or something that can be spun as such. In neither case do we actually have a right to know the information, and in both cases the candidates are within their rights to maintain their privacy.
Or for that matter, his college records. As much as I'd like to see those from Obama, he's under no obligation to release them, and it would be just as wrong to release them illegally as it would be to release Romney's tax returns.
It could also be the other way around. Obama's past campaigns have a history of getting private information disclosed, like opponents' divorce records. It's as plausible that the Obama campaign illegally obtained the records from the IRS, and when public pressure wouldn't force Romney to release the records, decided to stage a burglary to get them out in the public without the campaign's fingerprints on them. I doubt that happened, but it's as or more likely than that Romney was attempting to take them out of the discussion by making them "too hot... to touch."
I'm a big believer in separation of powers (though the Consul system was horrid once Rome was more than a city-state), but the only way a republic works is for different offices to be chosen by different methods. We in the US have reduced all of our methods to popular vote of the whole, and that's not been very useful. I'd say that's a far worse system defect than even the two-party system, which is bad enough if your concern is limiting the ability of government to screw you over.
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I'm not sure RIM will be breathing sighs of relief over this. Yeah, it's an incremental update, but it makes the device faster and a lot of people will latch onto the larger display as a good thing. (I'm not so sure; more screen is generally good, but it all depends on how it feels in the hand, given that it's a specifically hand-held device.) Basically, this thing is going to outsell all of RIM's portfolio by a large factor, even though it's only incremental. For people still on the iPhone 4 (instead of the 4S), it's a huge leap in functionality, and there are tens of millions of those people.
They have Thunderbolt and Lightning, so I'm going with "Very, Very Frightening"
So one more row of pixels would make all the difference for you, then?
Yeah, his sig is certainly unfortunate.
Uh, they are diversified. The large amount of their retirement in Apple stock isn't because they overbought Apple, but because AAPL has performed so well.
They are diversified. It's just that the other stocks are underperforming, for the most part.
They are diversified. It's just that the other stocks are underperforming (not worthless; that was rhetorical hyperbole), for the most part. But my point wasn't about my parents' retirement per se, but that their judgement, and that of all the other stockholders, would make it impossible for Apple to forego such a large part of their income stream.
You know, I've been hearing that for more than 30 years now, and yet the exploitable reserves just keep growing. A few years ago, when Kevin Drum was making his reputation with his blogging on peak oil, we didn't have the ability to efficiently extract oil from shales and sands. Now we do, and that is a vast, vast supply. And realistically, what good is it to worry even if that were not true? When oil gets scarce, the price will go up, and we will be driven to find alternatives. That's why we use petroleum in the first place, rather than whale oil (which petroleum was initially exploited to replace).
Because "troll" is apparently "disagree", especially lately.
A large part of my parents' retirement is in Apple stock, not by design but because the other stocks they hold are basically worthless. (And before you start calling my parents the 1%, my father was enlisted military, then a GM auto assembler, and my mother was an accountant for the Air Force.) So tell me, why would they accede to a change that would cost them nearly 80% of the largest portion of their available savings for retirement as the stock crashes back to reflect the change in earnings? And why for that matter would any shareholder accept losing 80% of their investment if it could be avoided? The GP is correct.
In what sense are we past the peak on oil? Our exploitable reserves are larger now than ever, and the rate of growth in reserves outpaces the rate of growth in usage. I see no evidence at all that we are past peak oil, if such a thing even actually has meaning outside the context of individual fields.
Citation needed. Clearly, resources are finite as long as we are confined to one planet, but I have yet to see any information that most resources, or many resources, are close to exhaustion. We have more known, recoverable oil reserves now than when peak oil was first postulated, for instance. Our food production capacity is far greater than what Malthus was concerned about, for instance. The only things I can think of that are seriously depleted are whale oil (which we've obviated by switching to petroleum), ivory (which we've obviated largely with ceramics) and certain hardwoods. In addition, there are vast untapped areas, like Siberia, ripe for utilization when the need arises. When human ingenuity and substitution of goods are taken into account, I see no reason we cannot sustain a larger population than we have now into the indefinite future with rising standards of living. If we're really get smart, we leave the planet and colonize several more, at which point that timeline begins to extend beyond the limits of the imaginable.
Bigot.
Oh, yeah. I had a period of long-term unemployment when the economy crashed in 2008, and at one point interviewed at a company that needed a UNIX admin. Generally, I do architecture-level work, but eating is a particular hobby of mine, and I needed anything. I was not hired because I was overqualified. Ironically, a year later (when I had been working in another position for several months, they called me back in to interview for a position with a different team as a kind of pseudo-manager, working with their teams to offload a lot of tasks that the team's boss didn't want to do. The interview questions were mostly inapplicable hypotheticals about something I'd developed and technical questions about products I hadn't used, but had used similar types. The upshot: they didn't hire me. So with the same company, I ended up being told I was too technical for their technical position, and not technical enough for their non-technical position. Odd place, that.
I'd have to say that there's a reason that they don't print your comments.
Just release it into the public domain and be done with it.
Yes, exactly. When I write code anything more than a bog-standard getter/setter method, the first thing I do is write a comment describing everything coming in and everything going out, and how "in" and "out" differ. Then I write a series of comments going through the entire set of steps that have to happen (at 50000' level) to get the in, do the transformation to produce the out, and actually send off the out. For those parts where the 50000' view isn't obvious ("read in the file from the passed filehandle, throwing an exception if you can't" covers it, but "now combine the two streams" doesn't), I break it down further in more comments. Only when I'm sure that the comments are a good approximation of the final flow do I actually write the code. During that process, I eliminate those comments that are now superfluous (for example, because the code is obvious and common, or because the why is otherwise unimportant for that block). The end result is a small increase in the time to write the code, and a vast decrease in the time needed to debug the code, along with dramatically better maintainability.
I don't think you and I are disagreeing.
Don't be mumble mumble.
Nice try at a birther sideswipe, but it's not going anywhere. As to the college records, mainly I'm curious why he's been so determined to keep them secret. My best guess is that he tried to pump up his credentials as an exotic by falsely claiming (or hinting at) foreign birth. My second best guess is that he got in based on the influence of some of his radical mentors rather than on merit. It's also entirely possible that there's nothing there of any interest, but in that case, why go to such lengths to keep the records from being released (as opposed to passively refusing to release them).
Actually, we don't know that at all. How do we know that he didn't have his grades strategically massaged to make a popular, exotic, up and coming black kid just a little more successful? Or that the rules were waived in his case for "life experience" or some similar rot? That's the thing: without the records, we're just taking people's word for it. That said, it doesn't matter in the slightest, unless there's some scandal that's been being buried for years. Which is why people wonder why so much effort is being made to keep these records private. Meanwhile, the Obama campaign is trying mightily to raise the same kinds of questions about Romney's tax returns. In both cases, there is only danger to the candidate if there is an obvious scandal buried in the documents, or something that can be spun as such. In neither case do we actually have a right to know the information, and in both cases the candidates are within their rights to maintain their privacy.
NNTP + HTML + a web browser + a few search tools. How hard is this, really?
Or for that matter, his college records. As much as I'd like to see those from Obama, he's under no obligation to release them, and it would be just as wrong to release them illegally as it would be to release Romney's tax returns.
It could also be the other way around. Obama's past campaigns have a history of getting private information disclosed, like opponents' divorce records. It's as plausible that the Obama campaign illegally obtained the records from the IRS, and when public pressure wouldn't force Romney to release the records, decided to stage a burglary to get them out in the public without the campaign's fingerprints on them. I doubt that happened, but it's as or more likely than that Romney was attempting to take them out of the discussion by making them "too hot ... to touch."
I'm a big believer in separation of powers (though the Consul system was horrid once Rome was more than a city-state), but the only way a republic works is for different offices to be chosen by different methods. We in the US have reduced all of our methods to popular vote of the whole, and that's not been very useful. I'd say that's a far worse system defect than even the two-party system, which is bad enough if your concern is limiting the ability of government to screw you over.