The point of the GP's post was that MS's hegemony would continue unabated. Considering the point of a public company is to generate profits, well, the charts provided by him/her only present a part of the picture. I remember when HP's tablet had a fire sale, going for a loss at $99, and people said even then that this was a signal of the coming end of the iPad, because so many people were willing to buy a failed product once the price was low enough.
Try opening up another unregulated brothel down the road from an existing one, and try hiring away their "escorts", and I'm sure you'd see some interesting activity. I'm not making this stuff up; I lived most of my life in Oakland, where you didn't have to look hard to find evidence of turf wars between pimps and drug dealers, where a new ho on the wrong corner would be beaten up or killed by the more established ones who thought that corner was their spot.
Fully unregulated capitalism leads to the worst abuses and excesses. Just because you don't see it when you pay to play doesn't mean that there is not all kinds of bad stuff going on.
I should have said, "unregulated drugs and prostitution". Would I be wrong to say that the legalized offerings in the Netherlands are heavily regulated? I was talking about unregulated environments where unfettered capitalism prevails; the Netherlands may have nothing to do with what I was talking about.
That being said, it may indeed after all. Do you have any direct involvement with drug parlors or brothels in the Netherlands, i.e. not as a customer, but in running them? I'd be very surprised if there was not a significant underground economy happening behind the scenes even where it's legalized, as people tend to want forbidden fruit, even if a wider variety of fruits are readily available.
If you believe the Wikipedia, we're sitting on 218B barrels of oil, and some stats from 2006 I found say we're using 20M barrels per day. Some quick maths, and that's 30 years of oil if we (a) stay at 2006 levels of usage and (b) squeeze out every last drop. And yes, to be fair, (c) if we don't discover any more.
30 years ain't that long a time. And yes there's oil elsewhere, but we're also not the only drain on it.
This is exactly what was wrong with Romney et al's stance on FEMA. If there's a profit motive, then you're going to get the highest possible cost for the least possible value of goods and services. Where there's reasonable infrastructure, competition can reduce that, but a post-hurricane disaster zone is more likely to resemble turf-based economies (drugs, prostitution) than it is to resemble truly competitive markets (e.g. bazaars).
If your kid is at home coughing up a lung due to a flu and there's no heat in the house, and if phone lines and emergency services are basically unavailable because of the greater circumstance, you're going to buy that last can of chicken soup from your corner market rather than shopping around for a better deal further away. Call it supply and demand if you will, but shopkeepers who engaged in price gouging are profiteering off of others' misery, plain and simple, and there should be consequences.
On the other hand, there are stories of great generosity, like the pizzeria that kept making pies throughout the peak of the crisis, and gave away something on the order of 1000 pizzas to hungry families and emergency workers. That business deserves to prosper. I hope that some anonymous millionaire hands them an envelope containing ten times the profit they would have made had they sold all those pizzas. Hell, maybe FEMA should cut them a check for helping out. At the very least, they should be able to write those costs off for tax purposes.
The "two weeks" comment was a riff on Apple's request for a two week delay on updating the copy on their court-mandated "UK courts said that Samsung didn't copy" announcement.
On the other hand, when Apple ignores what its competition is doing (larger screens on phones, 4G/LTE) people complain that Apple is being arrogant and that anyone who agrees with their decisions is iSheep.
They've done really well with their previous strategy, but no strategy wins forever in a competitive environment. While I think it would be a shame to see them go to a 100% reactionary strategy, trolling Slashdot and other sites for suggestions for new features to release and/or making Samsungian copies of every device that sells more than 10,000 copies, a slight adjustment to address a market which they didn't care about before, but which appears to exist and be under-served, is not a bad idea.
I think that the 7.85" iPad is a purely defensive move. They don't want other vendors to get a strong foothold in the tablet market purely because of their inaction on mid-sized devices. If they continue to use the previous-generation components--CPU, GPU, display--they can take advantage of economies of scale that other vendors don't have, and with an even modest success rate, they can put a dent in the growth of 7" Android-based tablets.
Me, what I'd like to see is a 13-15" iPad "Pro" model, with more room for detailed work (without zooming) for artists, illustrators, photographers, etc. It would be mostly for use on an easel-type desk, because it'd be unwieldy to hold in one hand, but I think it could be a success in some niche markets.
Of course, I don't expect to see it any time soon, but if some Android vendor comes out with one and it is a hit, I doubt that they'd ignore it. A company like Wacom could lead the way with an Android-based large-screen tablet.
Interesting. Of course, the cycle would have had to have started somewhere, and if the whole asteroid-earth-moon thing is true, that could have started a flow that would cause just what you're describing. Basically, if, at the time, the Earth had been a water-covered planet, this sort of collision/ejection could have started a toroid flow which eventually broke up the scar, only to have those features re-coalesce elsewhere on the planet, then break up again, and so on.
What we could be looking at, effectively, is billion-year-old ripples and reflections of the same, coming from one big splash.
Again, it's my gut feel, but I don't see why this would have to contradict the cyclical nature of supercontinents as you you describe.
...that Pangea (the conglomeration of land which drifted apart to become our current continents) might have been the Earth's "exit wound", where the Moon's material separated. For me, this is a hunch, with no basis in scientific fact, so I'm not going to declare its truth or defend it, but I would not be surprised if, in 10 or 20 years, some evidence were to surface supporting this idea.
I remember being a kid and thinking that South America and Africa would fit together like a puzzle, and this was long before I'd ever heard of Pangea. Since that time, it's my understanding that irrefutable evidence--basically, the matching of fault lines and mineral components--has been found to support this. Later, I remember having the idea that the Moon may have been spit out of the Earth as the result of a large collision. My hunch was specious as it was based only on the idea that its orbit is perfectly matched with its rotation speed (aka tidally locked), and I understand that it's possible for that to happen in other ways, but this seemed to me the best bet.
That last idea led to the Pangea idea. Maybe I'll read the freakin' article to see if other people feel the same way.
Actually, aerospace engineers (civi and military) have been working with birds for some time. My guess is that they're now testing the idea because it's been a very difficult problem to solve. Turbulence is complex and chaotic, and perhaps the technology for monitoring, measuring and reacting to a lead plane's waves is just now getting to the point of viability.
If you recall the movie Top Gun from 20+ years ago, getting caught in the jet wash of another plane was something that happened twice at pivotal points in the movie; Goose (Tom Cruise's wing man) died because this jet wash thing caused a crash, and the review proceedings cleared Tom of any wrong-doing, saying that there was no way to foresee the jet wash or something like that. So as of 20-odd years ago, sitting on another plane's tail was apparently considered a dangerous and unpredictable thing to do.
"thousands of years"? Come on, at least give me "tens of thousands of years". Modern birds have been around for 150,000,000 years; even if it took 99.9% of that time to develop this flocking behavior, we're beyond "thousands of years".
I'm sure that it's instinctive, "learned" through generations of selection. Birds that developed to flock over long distances developed the instinct for V-formation flying at the same time; the ones who stayed in formation stuck together for longer distances and had better choices of feeding/mating grounds. The individuals who didn't got left behind and didn't mate.
But there are other kinds of flocking behavior: think of starlings, who make those big, pulsating clouds that are so mezmerizing to watch. I don't know if those are for feeding or protection or what, but they're certainly not optimized for distance as geese are. Maybe those are the descendants of the birds that couldn't stick to the formation and stopped their migrations in different places, met like-minded fowl and created their own flocking legacy.
I appreciate the guidelines, but to some degree, the best guideline is: Don't be an idiot; pay attention to your kid, and if you see signs of a problem, be a parent and change what your kid is allowed to do.
I've got a 3.5 year-old, and in his first few months of infancy, we could totally watch TV while holding him, let him loll around on the floor and play while the TV was on, and he didn't even pay attention to it. He was much more interested in Mom and me, and even more so, his little musical toys.
But at about six months, my wife was watching the news while feeding him, and suddenly he turned away from the boob and looked at the TV like, "WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE?!?!" And immediately, we knew that he couldn't watch TV.
We kept him away from all TV for about another year and a half, when the nanny who was helping out two mornings a week went down to one morning a week (and eventually none), and if the house was going to stay tidy, my wife needed a distraction. Since he was two, we introduced him to Netflix and Dora the Explorer.
On a normal day, he gets one episode of whatever his current favorite show is (currently Blues Clues). It's always educational, and the little guy is totally OK with it. Sometimes he gets bored, shuts down the laptop and announces he's done and goes right to his Legos. The only times he watches more than one a day are when he's sick with a cold and we're trying to keep him in bed.
The first time he ever watched a full-length movie (Cars 2) was, coincidentally, when he was 3. We all had a family cold, and I needed to get some additional sleep. He loves his toy cars, so I figured he'd love the movie, and I told him that since he's such a big boy, he could watch that. He loved it, and it's been a great tool to have, for example, on a recent road trip we did. He wouldn't have made it all the way to Tahoe without Cars 2. The funny thing is that in the last couple of weeks, he's been asking just to see specific scenes in the evenings. Five or 10 minutes, and he's done. He's got more self-control than I did any time before the age of 30.
But not all kids are like that. Some will always have a problem, some will never have a problem. Maybe we got lucky, maybe we actually did the right thing by removing exposure between 6- and 24 months. I don't know, since I can't do the experiment. But I feel pretty strongly that a good, engaged parent can take big steps towards mitigating any problems with screen time just by remaining engaged.
Believe me, "remaining engaged" is easier said than done at some points in a child's development--parenthood can be pretty demanding--but even a C-grade level of engagement is better than an A+ enforcement of a blanket rule. If you take that sort of stimulation away from a kid who can handle it, you might be missing great opportunities for learning: my kid's got an incredible vocabulary because of Dora, Diego, Dinosaur Train, Blues Clues and Cars 2; my wife and I can certainly take some credit, but there are things he says that we know we didn't teach him directly; there's got to be some value there.
Slashdot Mirror
The point of the GP's post was that MS's hegemony would continue unabated. Considering the point of a public company is to generate profits, well, the charts provided by him/her only present a part of the picture. I remember when HP's tablet had a fire sale, going for a loss at $99, and people said even then that this was a signal of the coming end of the iPad, because so many people were willing to buy a failed product once the price was low enough.
I'm all for raw numbers, but context does help.
Dude, don't throw a tantrum.
Nice. I have a nice article with pretty pictures, too.
The best use I've ever seen of GIFs: If We Don't, Remember Me.
Try opening up another unregulated brothel down the road from an existing one, and try hiring away their "escorts", and I'm sure you'd see some interesting activity. I'm not making this stuff up; I lived most of my life in Oakland, where you didn't have to look hard to find evidence of turf wars between pimps and drug dealers, where a new ho on the wrong corner would be beaten up or killed by the more established ones who thought that corner was their spot.
Fully unregulated capitalism leads to the worst abuses and excesses. Just because you don't see it when you pay to play doesn't mean that there is not all kinds of bad stuff going on.
I should have said, "unregulated drugs and prostitution". Would I be wrong to say that the legalized offerings in the Netherlands are heavily regulated? I was talking about unregulated environments where unfettered capitalism prevails; the Netherlands may have nothing to do with what I was talking about.
That being said, it may indeed after all. Do you have any direct involvement with drug parlors or brothels in the Netherlands, i.e. not as a customer, but in running them? I'd be very surprised if there was not a significant underground economy happening behind the scenes even where it's legalized, as people tend to want forbidden fruit, even if a wider variety of fruits are readily available.
If you believe the Wikipedia, we're sitting on 218B barrels of oil, and some stats from 2006 I found say we're using 20M barrels per day. Some quick maths, and that's 30 years of oil if we (a) stay at 2006 levels of usage and (b) squeeze out every last drop. And yes, to be fair, (c) if we don't discover any more.
30 years ain't that long a time. And yes there's oil elsewhere, but we're also not the only drain on it.
This is exactly what was wrong with Romney et al's stance on FEMA. If there's a profit motive, then you're going to get the highest possible cost for the least possible value of goods and services. Where there's reasonable infrastructure, competition can reduce that, but a post-hurricane disaster zone is more likely to resemble turf-based economies (drugs, prostitution) than it is to resemble truly competitive markets (e.g. bazaars).
If your kid is at home coughing up a lung due to a flu and there's no heat in the house, and if phone lines and emergency services are basically unavailable because of the greater circumstance, you're going to buy that last can of chicken soup from your corner market rather than shopping around for a better deal further away. Call it supply and demand if you will, but shopkeepers who engaged in price gouging are profiteering off of others' misery, plain and simple, and there should be consequences.
On the other hand, there are stories of great generosity, like the pizzeria that kept making pies throughout the peak of the crisis, and gave away something on the order of 1000 pizzas to hungry families and emergency workers. That business deserves to prosper. I hope that some anonymous millionaire hands them an envelope containing ten times the profit they would have made had they sold all those pizzas. Hell, maybe FEMA should cut them a check for helping out. At the very least, they should be able to write those costs off for tax purposes.
...otherwise known as a "walled garden".
The "two weeks" comment was a riff on Apple's request for a two week delay on updating the copy on their court-mandated "UK courts said that Samsung didn't copy" announcement.
I love the image. I'm picturing a horror version of the Santa Claus myth: "On Creeper, on Crawler! On Bitey, on Spinny!"
How many snails am I allowed to rig up? And can I put them on a geared set-up which will allow them to achieve horse-like speeds?
On the other hand, when Apple ignores what its competition is doing (larger screens on phones, 4G/LTE) people complain that Apple is being arrogant and that anyone who agrees with their decisions is iSheep.
They've done really well with their previous strategy, but no strategy wins forever in a competitive environment. While I think it would be a shame to see them go to a 100% reactionary strategy, trolling Slashdot and other sites for suggestions for new features to release and/or making Samsungian copies of every device that sells more than 10,000 copies, a slight adjustment to address a market which they didn't care about before, but which appears to exist and be under-served, is not a bad idea.
I think that the 7.85" iPad is a purely defensive move. They don't want other vendors to get a strong foothold in the tablet market purely because of their inaction on mid-sized devices. If they continue to use the previous-generation components--CPU, GPU, display--they can take advantage of economies of scale that other vendors don't have, and with an even modest success rate, they can put a dent in the growth of 7" Android-based tablets.
Me, what I'd like to see is a 13-15" iPad "Pro" model, with more room for detailed work (without zooming) for artists, illustrators, photographers, etc. It would be mostly for use on an easel-type desk, because it'd be unwieldy to hold in one hand, but I think it could be a success in some niche markets.
Of course, I don't expect to see it any time soon, but if some Android vendor comes out with one and it is a hit, I doubt that they'd ignore it. A company like Wacom could lead the way with an Android-based large-screen tablet.
And now we all know exactly where you live ;)
Interesting. Of course, the cycle would have had to have started somewhere, and if the whole asteroid-earth-moon thing is true, that could have started a flow that would cause just what you're describing. Basically, if, at the time, the Earth had been a water-covered planet, this sort of collision/ejection could have started a toroid flow which eventually broke up the scar, only to have those features re-coalesce elsewhere on the planet, then break up again, and so on.
What we could be looking at, effectively, is billion-year-old ripples and reflections of the same, coming from one big splash.
Again, it's my gut feel, but I don't see why this would have to contradict the cyclical nature of supercontinents as you you describe.
Never saw the movie.
Ah, I guess I'm wrong then. Damn.
LOL, gotcha. Sorry for busting your chops.
...that Pangea (the conglomeration of land which drifted apart to become our current continents) might have been the Earth's "exit wound", where the Moon's material separated. For me, this is a hunch, with no basis in scientific fact, so I'm not going to declare its truth or defend it, but I would not be surprised if, in 10 or 20 years, some evidence were to surface supporting this idea.
I remember being a kid and thinking that South America and Africa would fit together like a puzzle, and this was long before I'd ever heard of Pangea. Since that time, it's my understanding that irrefutable evidence--basically, the matching of fault lines and mineral components--has been found to support this. Later, I remember having the idea that the Moon may have been spit out of the Earth as the result of a large collision. My hunch was specious as it was based only on the idea that its orbit is perfectly matched with its rotation speed (aka tidally locked), and I understand that it's possible for that to happen in other ways, but this seemed to me the best bet.
That last idea led to the Pangea idea. Maybe I'll read the freakin' article to see if other people feel the same way.
Actually, aerospace engineers (civi and military) have been working with birds for some time. My guess is that they're now testing the idea because it's been a very difficult problem to solve. Turbulence is complex and chaotic, and perhaps the technology for monitoring, measuring and reacting to a lead plane's waves is just now getting to the point of viability.
If you recall the movie Top Gun from 20+ years ago, getting caught in the jet wash of another plane was something that happened twice at pivotal points in the movie; Goose (Tom Cruise's wing man) died because this jet wash thing caused a crash, and the review proceedings cleared Tom of any wrong-doing, saying that there was no way to foresee the jet wash or something like that. So as of 20-odd years ago, sitting on another plane's tail was apparently considered a dangerous and unpredictable thing to do.
"thousands of years"? Come on, at least give me "tens of thousands of years". Modern birds have been around for 150,000,000 years; even if it took 99.9% of that time to develop this flocking behavior, we're beyond "thousands of years".
Wow. That whole thread was awesome.
I'm sure that it's instinctive, "learned" through generations of selection. Birds that developed to flock over long distances developed the instinct for V-formation flying at the same time; the ones who stayed in formation stuck together for longer distances and had better choices of feeding/mating grounds. The individuals who didn't got left behind and didn't mate.
But there are other kinds of flocking behavior: think of starlings, who make those big, pulsating clouds that are so mezmerizing to watch. I don't know if those are for feeding or protection or what, but they're certainly not optimized for distance as geese are. Maybe those are the descendants of the birds that couldn't stick to the formation and stopped their migrations in different places, met like-minded fowl and created their own flocking legacy.
BRB. Gotta check something with my cheese grater.
I appreciate the guidelines, but to some degree, the best guideline is: Don't be an idiot; pay attention to your kid, and if you see signs of a problem, be a parent and change what your kid is allowed to do.
I've got a 3.5 year-old, and in his first few months of infancy, we could totally watch TV while holding him, let him loll around on the floor and play while the TV was on, and he didn't even pay attention to it. He was much more interested in Mom and me, and even more so, his little musical toys.
But at about six months, my wife was watching the news while feeding him, and suddenly he turned away from the boob and looked at the TV like, "WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE?!?!" And immediately, we knew that he couldn't watch TV.
We kept him away from all TV for about another year and a half, when the nanny who was helping out two mornings a week went down to one morning a week (and eventually none), and if the house was going to stay tidy, my wife needed a distraction. Since he was two, we introduced him to Netflix and Dora the Explorer.
On a normal day, he gets one episode of whatever his current favorite show is (currently Blues Clues). It's always educational, and the little guy is totally OK with it. Sometimes he gets bored, shuts down the laptop and announces he's done and goes right to his Legos. The only times he watches more than one a day are when he's sick with a cold and we're trying to keep him in bed.
The first time he ever watched a full-length movie (Cars 2) was, coincidentally, when he was 3. We all had a family cold, and I needed to get some additional sleep. He loves his toy cars, so I figured he'd love the movie, and I told him that since he's such a big boy, he could watch that. He loved it, and it's been a great tool to have, for example, on a recent road trip we did. He wouldn't have made it all the way to Tahoe without Cars 2. The funny thing is that in the last couple of weeks, he's been asking just to see specific scenes in the evenings. Five or 10 minutes, and he's done. He's got more self-control than I did any time before the age of 30.
But not all kids are like that. Some will always have a problem, some will never have a problem. Maybe we got lucky, maybe we actually did the right thing by removing exposure between 6- and 24 months. I don't know, since I can't do the experiment. But I feel pretty strongly that a good, engaged parent can take big steps towards mitigating any problems with screen time just by remaining engaged.
Believe me, "remaining engaged" is easier said than done at some points in a child's development--parenthood can be pretty demanding--but even a C-grade level of engagement is better than an A+ enforcement of a blanket rule. If you take that sort of stimulation away from a kid who can handle it, you might be missing great opportunities for learning: my kid's got an incredible vocabulary because of Dora, Diego, Dinosaur Train, Blues Clues and Cars 2; my wife and I can certainly take some credit, but there are things he says that we know we didn't teach him directly; there's got to be some value there.