Actually, only HALF of workers can be below average.
Actually, that is technically wrong. To illustrate, consider the set of numbers 1, 1, 1, 1, 10. The average is 14/5, or just under 3. In this case, then, 80% of the sample population is below average.
... everyone who passes within the cameras' view is monitored...
Not for any meaningful definition of "monitored". While I agree they _could_ monitor every single person that appears on the camera, it is currently not feasible to pull off such a feat. It would require massive amounts of manpower (on such a scale as to totally dwarf DDR's STASI I would think) or else it would require computer algorithms that we simply do not have yet.
Exactly. It only becomes evil if they take it one step further out, i.e., they identify a nice, long, straight, wide section of road, purposedly set a low speed limit fully knowing people aren't going to respect it, and then add automatic surveillance.
I believe the 2 came into being because Sun needed some way for people to easily distinguish their Java from Microsoft's Java and so they came up with the 2 in order to do that. Done cleverly, this may have worked around Microsoft's Java license, leaving them dangling at Java 1 while the rest of the world moved on. In this case, Java 2 would have been a stop-gap measure until Sun could get Microsoft's Java 1 license (and possible breaches) decided on in court.
Or I may just be a cynical bastard and perhaps the number 2 _did_ originate from technical merit rather than from legal wranglings:-)
It doesn't rely on Javascript; as far as I can tell it uses straight HTML tags to do its thing. This means that even the paranoid ones such as myself are vulnerable to this sort of attack. I tend to find that interesting in and of itself:-)
Intel is certainly not subsidizing anyone. The high-end market is subsidizing the low-end market. Intel is doing what they do not because they get a warm fuzzy feeling from helping out the little guy but because this approach makes them more money.
That may be part of it, but the main reasons are price elasticity and development cost. There are two different market segments out there, and the boys and girls at Intel know it. Their problem is how to cater to both segments - thereby making more money - while avoiding the astronomical development costs that would be involved in having two completely different products. Their answer is to sell one "crippled" line of the product to the low-cost market with a price designed primarily to cover unit production cost (with a markup) and sell the fully functional version to the high-cost market with a price primarily designed to cover the development cost, also with a markup of course.
You see the exact same thing in the software industry. If I buy JBuilder X from Borland, I can basically choose between the low-cost version at $500 or thereabouts, or I can buy the high-cost version at $3000-ish. The different versions are carefully designed so that high-end customers will really _want_ the expensive version because its features cater to high-end needs such as development of scalable server-side web applications while the low-end one contains features for general application development. There is nothing in the production cost that dicates the price difference - it's just a set of CDs either way and if there are a couple of extra CDs in the high-cost version, that hardly costs them $2500 per unit to manufacture. In stead, they create an artificial product divide in order to cater to different market segments, using one of them to help cover the development costs associated with the more pricey parts of the product.
This is going to be an active problem in any industry or in any phase of a business where the development costs completely overshadow the unit production cost. Until such time as the industry or business has managed to cover its development costs, you will see units that are massively overpriced when compared to actual production cost. This creates a dilemma for the manufacturer, because while he might technically make a profit from selling a unit at, say, $100, this is not going to be enough to cover the huge debt he accrued from development by the time the investors will want their money back. The solution to the problem is to create one market that will buy the unit at $1000 and another that can have it for $100. The $1000 market covers your development costs and the $100 market is just gravy. The way to maintain the high-cost market is to do something or other to cripple the low-cost market product so that the high-cost market won't want it.
If the difference between a low/mid range and high end product is just a switch, or a simple transistor, they shouldn't ask extra money for it, because the features in the low end are only "hidden".
The problem is that the high-end customers are there to help subsidize the low-end customers and if you kill the high-end market by flipping the switch, then the low-end market will need to subsidize itself. The end result will be more expensive hardware for most of us and slightly cheaper hardware for the old high-end customers.
They just gave us a key good for 40 installs of a package
under our MSDE agreement, which only secures 5.
That's just so they can send the BSA to bust down your door and fine you a couple off million when they find that you are using 6 of them:-) Cynical? Who? Me?:-)
Anything that has a halflife of 17 million years isn't going to be particularly radioactive. It will release a particle every now and then but unless you build your house and everything in it from that material, you should probably be more worried about natural radon gas emissions.
A less heavy-handed solution would be to just make the vehicles appear at the point in the story where they should become available. As far as I can tell, copters don't exist in GTA:VC until you've done the first copter mission. After that, you can find them all over the place.
You never actually "complete" GTA. The game never ends. You can aim for "100% complete" if you like, but then, there's a million other stats in the game as well that you might want to aim for. Such as number of people rescued in paramedics missions.
We have some crimes where merely performing the act consitutes a crime (eg speeding), but none that I can think of where the intent but not the act makes one so.
if you dont like the article, one can always send a carefully worded editorial saying that thousands (millions?) of people play GTA and other violent games without going berzerk or feeling mentally tortured.
It might be interesting to do a piece where you poll, say, the 80-ish US aid workers currently working to rescue earthquake victims in Iran to see how many of them are "linked to" playing GTA.
I know I've been "linked to" playing GTA since GTA1 and I've never killed anyone. I even help fund my local police by paying my taxes on time every year:-)
There is no truly "clean" energy source, but wind is about as clean as you can get.
My major doubt wrt wind power is that I don't think people will tolerate it. Wind power parks are huge, ugly and tend to be located in terrain that would otherwise be quite scenic and serene. If wind power is to cover a significant percentage of our energy consumption, there would need to be lots and lots of them and it's only a question of time before the public backlash makes itself known.
That the photos are the same is not what is at issue here - the freelance photographers sold the right to use them in NG magazine, and only the magazine. If the NGS wants to use them in a different work than the magazine, then they need to pay for that right.
Ah, but it is the magazine. It may be distributed in a non-paper format, but that is an implementation detail and hardly worth considering.
Solar power is basically about trapping as much energy as possible from the Sun before it can reflect off the Earth's surface and radiate into space. If we are to rely on this as a major source, we are going to have to trap a lot of energy, and this will eventually be released in the form of heat into the environment. This will serve to heat the Earth more than what would otherwise have been the case, and this certainly has the potential to impact negatively on the environment. Of course, I don't know what kind of scale we're talking before it'd start having noticable effects.
Note that a number of other power sources have a similar problem as they are releasing energy that would otherwise have remained in storage. Fossil fuels and nuclear power are obvious ones (although the latter evens out over the very long term, and the former might also I suppose).
But when you add it all up, at the end of the day you've made a pretty minimal impact on the environment for the amount of energy you produced.
Perhaps. I remain unconvinced though - if we are limited to using ecological production methods in order to reduce pollution, we are going to need huge areas for this cultivation.
As for space, the US has LOTS of space. (No pun intended!). Montana has roughly 150,000 square miles of land and a population less than 900,000. Sure it's a pretty cold climate, but I'm sure you can find (or engineer?) a crop that will grow nicely.
I'm not so concerned with the human population as I am with the animal populations that will be displaced by widespread cultivation. We need to take this environmental impact into account.
Then you might do a little terraforming in the deserts. I wonder how well cactuses burn...:P
Do we know what the environmental impact of terraforming large areas of deserts will be? How important is the desert climate to weather patterns and surrounding biotopes?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, only HALF of workers can be below average.
Actually, that is technically wrong. To illustrate, consider the set of numbers 1, 1, 1, 1, 10. The average is 14/5, or just under 3. In this case, then, 80% of the sample population is below average.
... everyone who passes within the cameras' view is monitored ...
Not for any meaningful definition of "monitored". While I agree they _could_ monitor every single person that appears on the camera, it is currently not feasible to pull off such a feat. It would require massive amounts of manpower (on such a scale as to totally dwarf DDR's STASI I would think) or else it would require computer algorithms that we simply do not have yet.
... doesnt it make sense to put the camera there?
Exactly. It only becomes evil if they take it one step further out, i.e., they identify a nice, long, straight, wide section of road, purposedly set a low speed limit fully knowing people aren't going to respect it, and then add automatic surveillance.
I believe the 2 came into being because Sun needed some way for people to easily distinguish their Java from Microsoft's Java and so they came up with the 2 in order to do that. Done cleverly, this may have worked around Microsoft's Java license, leaving them dangling at Java 1 while the rest of the world moved on. In this case, Java 2 would have been a stop-gap measure until Sun could get Microsoft's Java 1 license (and possible breaches) decided on in court.
:-)
Or I may just be a cynical bastard and perhaps the number 2 _did_ originate from technical merit rather than from legal wranglings
It doesn't rely on Javascript; as far as I can tell it uses straight HTML tags to do its thing. This means that even the paranoid ones such as myself are vulnerable to this sort of attack. I tend to find that interesting in and of itself :-)
"Verbing weirds language."
(A Calvin quote I think)
Intel is certainly not subsidizing anyone. The high-end market is subsidizing the low-end market. Intel is doing what they do not because they get a warm fuzzy feeling from helping out the little guy but because this approach makes them more money.
That may be part of it, but the main reasons are price elasticity and development cost. There are two different market segments out there, and the boys and girls at Intel know it. Their problem is how to cater to both segments - thereby making more money - while avoiding the astronomical development costs that would be involved in having two completely different products. Their answer is to sell one "crippled" line of the product to the low-cost market with a price designed primarily to cover unit production cost (with a markup) and sell the fully functional version to the high-cost market with a price primarily designed to cover the development cost, also with a markup of course.
You see the exact same thing in the software industry. If I buy JBuilder X from Borland, I can basically choose between the low-cost version at $500 or thereabouts, or I can buy the high-cost version at $3000-ish. The different versions are carefully designed so that high-end customers will really _want_ the expensive version because its features cater to high-end needs such as development of scalable server-side web applications while the low-end one contains features for general application development. There is nothing in the production cost that dicates the price difference - it's just a set of CDs either way and if there are a couple of extra CDs in the high-cost version, that hardly costs them $2500 per unit to manufacture. In stead, they create an artificial product divide in order to cater to different market segments, using one of them to help cover the development costs associated with the more pricey parts of the product.
This is going to be an active problem in any industry or in any phase of a business where the development costs completely overshadow the unit production cost. Until such time as the industry or business has managed to cover its development costs, you will see units that are massively overpriced when compared to actual production cost. This creates a dilemma for the manufacturer, because while he might technically make a profit from selling a unit at, say, $100, this is not going to be enough to cover the huge debt he accrued from development by the time the investors will want their money back. The solution to the problem is to create one market that will buy the unit at $1000 and another that can have it for $100. The $1000 market covers your development costs and the $100 market is just gravy. The way to maintain the high-cost market is to do something or other to cripple the low-cost market product so that the high-cost market won't want it.
The problem is that the high-end customers are there to help subsidize the low-end customers and if you kill the high-end market by flipping the switch, then the low-end market will need to subsidize itself. The end result will be more expensive hardware for most of us and slightly cheaper hardware for the old high-end customers.
Would you find this desirable?
The sad truth is: most people would be just that stupid.
This sounds an awful lot like Java Web Start, except JWS uses http to fetch archives.
:-)
And, of course, it's mainly used for distributing Java apps
That's just so they can send the BSA to bust down
your door and fine you a couple off million when
they find that you are using 6 of them
Cynical? Who? Me?
Anything that has a halflife of 17 million
years isn't going to be particularly radioactive.
It will release a particle every now and then but
unless you build your house and everything in it
from that material, you should probably be more
worried about natural radon gas emissions.
A less heavy-handed solution would be to just make
the vehicles appear at the point in the story
where they should become available. As far as I
can tell, copters don't exist in GTA:VC until
you've done the first copter mission. After that,
you can find them all over the place.
The major headache tends to be the Swing API, which tends to be slightly buggy in subtly different ways in different versions of the SDK.
A classical headache between platforms is the handling of modality in Windows vs handling of modality under X.
There is always rtj.org.
You never actually "complete" GTA. The game never ends.
You can aim for "100% complete" if you like, but then, there's a million other stats in the game as well that you might want to aim for. Such as number of people rescued in paramedics missions.
What about "plotting to kill the prime minister"?
It might be interesting to do a piece where you poll, say, the 80-ish US aid workers currently working to rescue earthquake victims in Iran to see how many of them are "linked to" playing GTA.
I know I've been "linked to" playing GTA since GTA1 and I've never killed anyone. I even help fund my local police by paying my taxes on time every year
My major doubt wrt wind power is that I don't think people will tolerate it. Wind power parks are huge, ugly and tend to be located in terrain that would otherwise be quite scenic and serene. If wind power is to cover a significant percentage of our energy consumption, there would need to be lots and lots of them and it's only a question of time before the public backlash makes itself known.
We'll get some idea a couple of hundred years down the line, at which time the Mouse will still be under copyright.
Ah, but it is the magazine. It may be distributed in a non-paper format, but that is an implementation detail and hardly worth considering.
Solar power is basically about trapping as much energy as possible from the Sun before it can reflect off the Earth's surface and radiate into space. If we are to rely on this as a major source, we are going to have to trap a lot of energy, and this will eventually be released in the form of heat into the environment. This will serve to heat the Earth more than what would otherwise have been the case, and this certainly has the potential to impact negatively on the environment. Of course, I don't know what kind of scale we're talking before it'd start having noticable effects.
Note that a number of other power sources have a similar problem as they are releasing energy that would otherwise have remained in storage. Fossil fuels and nuclear power are obvious ones (although the latter evens out over the very long term, and the former might also I suppose).
Perhaps. I remain unconvinced though - if we are limited to using ecological production methods in order to reduce pollution, we are going to need huge areas for this cultivation.
I'm not so concerned with the human population as I am with the animal populations that will be displaced by widespread cultivation. We need to take this environmental impact into account.
Do we know what the environmental impact of terraforming large areas of deserts will be? How important is the desert climate to weather patterns and surrounding biotopes?
Well, to be fair, even good ideas can be implemented in a malicious (or just stupid) fashion.
:-)
Not that I'm convinced that wind power is a good idea, but that's for a different post