Actually first time I listened Gaga and liked her music I had never seen her on video. As for the music will stand the test of time, it depends. Most good artists reinvent themselves along their career. They also release albums rather sparingly. She does not seem to be doing this, so I am guessing her career will crater sooner rather than later.
She hasn't been around for very long, putting out her first album in 2008, and she only has two albums. I really don't get where you are coming up with the not releasing albums sparingly. Relatively, David Bowie had more albums out in the same amount of time and would take three more years to wrap up his androgynous glam appearance with Ziggy Stardust and reinvent himself. The Beatles had seven albums in the first three years and didn't so much reinvent themselves as much as just discovered drugs. Then you have the debate as whether Lady Gaga hasn't reinvented herself or if she does it every time she shows up.
The true test is not if she reinvents herself or if she puts out albums fast or slow but rather if she can continue to do so over time. Plenty of band put out one or two good albums only to follow them up with poor ones. it will only be several years and a few more albums before we can judge if she'll have long term effect or not. For right now, she is just the new, hot thing. She does seem to have a decent amount of cross genre appeal though.
According to the article the difference is 4%. How is that small? I'm not even a physicist and that seems like a pretty huge difference to me.
It is a significant difference, however, this is Nature magazine and does not usually deal with data or presenting it to scientists but rather the common person. This can be seen by their writing out "0.00000000000003 millimetres" rather than the more usually useful "3*10^-16 m". The people reading their article are not actually intended to make sense out of that number. Rather they are just supposed to see all the zeros and go "Wow, that's really, really small and insignificant." Nature is not actually trying to present data but provide a combination of sensational, yet easily understandable reporting to the layperson who has some interest in science but doesn't really care to use any of it.
...but anyone who has ever thought about going for the long tab would catch that name. Robin Sage, really? Come on! [wikipedia.org]
Well, it's not unusual for people to use fake names on Facebook, especially in the light of recent security issues. I have a sizable fraction of friends (and they are actual friends) who use fake names because they don't want all their data, photos, etc being so easily available to potential employers, family, or strangers. Such a fake name as Robin Sage probably worked in the hacker's advantage even if recognized as such because it gave the illusion that the girl was interested in and sympathetic to the military.
I want laptop internals to be standardized, which would help upgrades be much more bearable (and, in some cases, make them possible).
Well, it would never happen and you'd probably never want it to. Indeed, ten years ago, they tried something like that with video cards so you could swap them out and upgrade your laptop. Trouble is that by time you want to upgrade your video card, you'll want to upgrade the rest of it. You probably think that you want that but you are essentially asking for a beige box laptop. If they were to do that, the components would have to be able to fit the least common denominator. All your laptops would be huge and bulky and make the laptops of ten years ago look slim. It would be crap for a laptop due to size, weight, and other things that make people want laptops rather than a full size computer.
Meanwhile, other companies, like Apple, Lenovo, HP, and anybody else who typically makes custom computer cases will put more and better engineering and parts into a computer to get better performance, weight, size, or some other spec out of their laptops than would be possible with standardized parts. Then we'd be right back where we are today. Standardized parts, for the most part are a pipe dream as far as laptops go, because the design criteria for laptops pushes towards custom builds that will be better than one with standard parts.
Or it's a press release to raise support among the general population, and when it comes time to implementation, more knowledgeable people will draft the actual language.
Well, it is the EU and not the USA, so I suppose something like that might be possible.
It's about time mac os x on any hardware/ mid-towers.
Isn't it about time that Porsche made a cheap economy car, to the price point I want, with the features I expect out of a sports car?
While I agree that a mid-sized tower would be nice as would always better hardware for the same price in their current models, it has been tried before and failed. Pre current reign of Jobs, there were all sorts of styles designs, it was to much research and design of too many models of which some didn't sell. One of the things Jobs did was trim down the line so that the company could become profitable again. Like licensing the OS out to other manufacurers, it wasn't something that benefited Apple so don't expect it again. For everybody else, there are hackintoshes. From what I've read, it's not hard and not too many driver issues.
From what I've gathered by reading posts here over the years, the main complaint is that Apple takes open products, modifies them to work with their proprietary products such as OS X, then submits their code changes, but the changes are so tied to their proprietary products such as their OS, that it does not benefit any of the other people working on the open product for their own purposes. Therefore, those people who can see but have no use for Apple's code changes feel that Apple is obeying the letter of the law but not the spirit, so to speak because those changes do not benefit them or the product outside of Apple's use of it.
Well, except in the case of energy regulation, every state that has deregulated has instantly had massive price spikes (or are these good for the consumer?)... and insurance where the companies kick you out as soon as you file claims unless regulated.
You forgot to mention blackouts from power companies overloading the grid by trying to treat electricity as a commodity on a grid that was not designed to handle electricity as a commodity.
"Any kind of IT product should be able to communicate with any type of service in the future."
What does that even mean?
It means they either don't know what they are talking about or want wording sufficiently vague that they can make any demand they feel like. Probably a little of both in my opinion actually.
How could they possibly believe that is actually the mark of the beast? Everybody knows those grocery store "loyalty cards" are the real Mark of the Beast!
The real question here isn't so much why did they get rid of it -- that's pretty obvious -- but why they released this product in the first place? Is their management really so out of touch they thought this had potential?
Actually, I was thinking it might make a decent kids phone. Not that kids would want it mind you, but parents buy the thing and a phone that allows them to do the favorite social networking sites while not free access to the internet might be a nice compromise that both parents and kids could deal with. Then again, I'm not a parent, nor a kid, so I am unfamiliar with the realities of raising a child in the internet age. From people saying they have actually seen them in the wild, it seems that mostly poster's wives are buying them. I can see it being an older person's phone also. The few apps they need to keep in touch with family and not have to deal with the complexity of a smart phone. My parents use Facebook to keep in touch with me and my cousins, but lord knows when they'll figure out texting. Then there was the entire 'backed up to the cloud' aspect which is why they bought Danger and is appealing to anybody who has never head of Sidekick.
The tougher process of getting an app INTO the iTunes app store I honestly think is helping weed out the lower grade fluff we find in the Android market. How many times have you gone looking through apps, found something that looked pretty good, installed it, and it was crap? How many reviews on the Android Market read something like this: Force closes, one star!. It's the same problem with all the various free Windows software that's everywhere on the net. You have more choice, but you have more choices of crap. If people are going to spend the time, money, and effort to get an app into Apple's store, they're more likely to make sure it's something that's worth being there. They want to get paid, after all.
This is one of the reasons I don't complain too much about the App store approval process, or at least that the App store is near the only way to get apps on the iPhone. I remember going out to Cnet or two Cows and downloading apps for my Palm III and V. I'd go through them all and pick and install the ones that looked good and had decent ratings. I still learned that I'd have to schedule time to reset my Palm and go uninstall two thrids of the programs afterward because they were too buggy to use or otherwise caused it to crash.
How many users even know about the App Store *approval process*. Hmm? I'm an iPhone developer, and it bugs me to no end. But how the hell would an end user know? They have no way of interacting with the App Store's approval process, just the "storefront", so to speak. If a large enough number of respondents were dissatisfied with that, then I question who they solicited.
Because it's news. Slashdot isn't the only website the publishes articles about when Apple rejects something or reverses an acceptance of an app. (Indeed,/. really only posts about news stories elsewhere.) When something like that happens, it makes the mainstream news circuit. CNN has articles about it. The Economist has articles about it. The other news channels have blurbs about it. It may not be headline news, but it is certainly filler news that has injected itself into the mainstream knowledge. How do you think that public reaction builds up to the point that Apple reverses their decision so quickly. I'd almost bet that most people have a better idea of the current App Store approval process than they do of what is going on in congress currently. (Although that might not be saying much.)
I really hate that scene. Lucas dropped that line to try to move the "force" from being Fantasy Fiction magic (and quell complaints that Star Wars is not science fiction). But it still doesn't explain what "the force" is supposed to be. Are the midichlorians a bunch of tiny wizards ala Harry Potter casing "force" spells everywhere? It's still just nonsense.
Just look up Orgone and bions. It fits together fairly well complete with a darkside.
Personally, if I was in the same spot, I'd go and look over all the XKCD comics and pick my favorite. It's nice black line art that would go well with a tattoo, particularly if surrounded by equations.
Yes, but somehow, I was lucky and part of the generation that was always right at both those ages while the genrations above and below us don't really understand how things work.
And if I may reply to my own post (because I was going to say this but forgot), it may do MS well to follow the same strategy. Put out a solid product and then make regular updates that add features and usability while building up a customer base. If anybody can come in with a loss leader while looking towards the long term end result, it would be MS. Trouble is, what are the chances of MS putting out a solid product, following it up with regular updates, while not dumping everything, starting all over from scratch, and redesigning everything from the ground up before such a policy can come to fruit?
Well they did, until Apple decided to put it in (from the complete lack of a user outcry since the iPhone's inception, I'm sure - this is another brilliant concept from the mind of the great Steve Jobs).
If you are serious, I think you are failing to see Apple's sales strategy. They were always going to have cut-and-paste, just like they were always going to have MMS. Sure, the initial version didn't have them, but that is because Apple starts with a small core functionality and makes it work. They don't worry about bullet points as much as they do a working and easy to use end device. One they have it, then they will put out a new version (in the iPhone's case both for hardware and software). The new versions will have those bullet point features added once they have been made to work as well as the core functionality. Not only does this give a solid and useable device which appeals to the general consumer, but also give them feature creep and a reason for people with perfectly working earlier versions to want to buy new models. When the first iPhone came out I knew it would have cut-and-paste as well as MMS if I waited, and it did. Look at the iPod, they did the same thing there. Once the iPod got photos, games, and notes. I knew that it would eventually replace my PDA* in functionality if I waited long enough.
*As it happened, the cell phone replaced if first, but I was still lacking features will lately. The iPod touch would have done that perfectly however if I hadn't have gotten a cell first.
Could someone explain why some Muslims believe that their rules need to apply to non-Muslims?
Because the Koran is not just a book of religion with philosophy, it also presents the plans for civil government, laws, and punishments as well. That's the entire Sharia law that you hear about when talking about Muslim countries and the Taliban. It doesn't just apply to Muslims because it is stating the laws that their government should use for everybody under its jurisdiction, believers and non-believers.
I thought the USA was the sue-happy country. Don't we have a patent on it or something? Italy better start preparing for a lawsuit from the U.S.
Dude, Rome had the entire lawyer thing down well before the Republic fell. IIRC, there is writing of Caesar discussing the sue happy nature of Rome much like it is discussed in the USA today and for a time he even was a lawyer.
The next World War will likely be about natural resources. (Tell me with a straight face it won't be.)
I'll tell you that it won't likely be with a straight face. Since WW2, colonialism has pretty much gone away in what we considered such for exploitation of natural resources. It was more beneficial to have open markets as the open market made us more money than enslaving the people of the colonies and using their natural resources only for ourselves. Currently, and in the likely future, commodities are on the open market and being sold to the highest bidder. If somebody who would start a war over such natural resources had the money and manufacturing to win that war, they'd have the money and power to simply buy those commodities on the open market. If they don't have more money to buy those commodities instead of somebody else, they also don't have the money to win a war against that somebody else.
If I was to point a finger at a likely cause of the next world war, I'd probably say economics and national debt. Country A is going to owe Country B and not pay it back. Country B will seek to gain control of assets from Country A which might include natural resources, but also could include land, factories, rights, IP, etc. Country A will decide they have to fight to retain those assets.
Obama has already promised that America will be out of Afghanistan by 2011. Didn't you get the memo? Surely he was briefed on this top-secret information before he made his decision. Looks like it's a good day to be Chinese - they certainly won't be bothered by our moral concerns.
Ya, we'll be out of Afghanistan just like we are currently out of Germany and Japan. Hell, we aren't even out of Cuba yet from the Spanish-American war and we don't even talk to Cuba.
Businesses aren't even upgrading from XP or IE 6 on relatively cheap desktop PCs that are probably be cycled through anyway because what they have simply "works", and you expect them to do differently with servers? For that matter there are probably plenty of dumb terminals and main frames still out there being used rather than a 'return'. We just got rid of the last of our dumb terminals a three years ago. The system we had worked. Buying a replacement was a multi-million dollar project that involved racks of new servers, more permanent FTE positions to manage it, and doubling the number of desktop computers to use it. For that matter, it also used tapes for backup. I'm sure there are thousands of old systems out there that still use tape that even though they may not be the newest equipment out there, there is still no business reason to upgrade them. To get our system upgraded, it was a two year sales pitch that had to be supported by a good show of ROI, and then another year project lead time before the vendor could do it. Actually, one of the reasons businesses aren't upgrading from IE6 and WinXp is probably because the servers have to be upgraded first.
Slashdot Mirror
She hasn't been around for very long, putting out her first album in 2008, and she only has two albums. I really don't get where you are coming up with the not releasing albums sparingly. Relatively, David Bowie had more albums out in the same amount of time and would take three more years to wrap up his androgynous glam appearance with Ziggy Stardust and reinvent himself. The Beatles had seven albums in the first three years and didn't so much reinvent themselves as much as just discovered drugs. Then you have the debate as whether Lady Gaga hasn't reinvented herself or if she does it every time she shows up.
The true test is not if she reinvents herself or if she puts out albums fast or slow but rather if she can continue to do so over time. Plenty of band put out one or two good albums only to follow them up with poor ones. it will only be several years and a few more albums before we can judge if she'll have long term effect or not. For right now, she is just the new, hot thing. She does seem to have a decent amount of cross genre appeal though.
It is a significant difference, however, this is Nature magazine and does not usually deal with data or presenting it to scientists but rather the common person. This can be seen by their writing out "0.00000000000003 millimetres" rather than the more usually useful "3*10^-16 m". The people reading their article are not actually intended to make sense out of that number. Rather they are just supposed to see all the zeros and go "Wow, that's really, really small and insignificant." Nature is not actually trying to present data but provide a combination of sensational, yet easily understandable reporting to the layperson who has some interest in science but doesn't really care to use any of it.
Well, it's not unusual for people to use fake names on Facebook, especially in the light of recent security issues. I have a sizable fraction of friends (and they are actual friends) who use fake names because they don't want all their data, photos, etc being so easily available to potential employers, family, or strangers. Such a fake name as Robin Sage probably worked in the hacker's advantage even if recognized as such because it gave the illusion that the girl was interested in and sympathetic to the military.
The one that Blizzard really has access to and can verify every month is the one on your credit card.
Well, it would never happen and you'd probably never want it to. Indeed, ten years ago, they tried something like that with video cards so you could swap them out and upgrade your laptop. Trouble is that by time you want to upgrade your video card, you'll want to upgrade the rest of it. You probably think that you want that but you are essentially asking for a beige box laptop. If they were to do that, the components would have to be able to fit the least common denominator. All your laptops would be huge and bulky and make the laptops of ten years ago look slim. It would be crap for a laptop due to size, weight, and other things that make people want laptops rather than a full size computer.
Meanwhile, other companies, like Apple, Lenovo, HP, and anybody else who typically makes custom computer cases will put more and better engineering and parts into a computer to get better performance, weight, size, or some other spec out of their laptops than would be possible with standardized parts. Then we'd be right back where we are today. Standardized parts, for the most part are a pipe dream as far as laptops go, because the design criteria for laptops pushes towards custom builds that will be better than one with standard parts.
Well, it is the EU and not the USA, so I suppose something like that might be possible.
Isn't it about time that Porsche made a cheap economy car, to the price point I want, with the features I expect out of a sports car?
While I agree that a mid-sized tower would be nice as would always better hardware for the same price in their current models, it has been tried before and failed. Pre current reign of Jobs, there were all sorts of styles designs, it was to much research and design of too many models of which some didn't sell. One of the things Jobs did was trim down the line so that the company could become profitable again. Like licensing the OS out to other manufacurers, it wasn't something that benefited Apple so don't expect it again. For everybody else, there are hackintoshes. From what I've read, it's not hard and not too many driver issues.
From what I've gathered by reading posts here over the years, the main complaint is that Apple takes open products, modifies them to work with their proprietary products such as OS X, then submits their code changes, but the changes are so tied to their proprietary products such as their OS, that it does not benefit any of the other people working on the open product for their own purposes. Therefore, those people who can see but have no use for Apple's code changes feel that Apple is obeying the letter of the law but not the spirit, so to speak because those changes do not benefit them or the product outside of Apple's use of it.
You forgot to mention blackouts from power companies overloading the grid by trying to treat electricity as a commodity on a grid that was not designed to handle electricity as a commodity.
It means they either don't know what they are talking about or want wording sufficiently vague that they can make any demand they feel like. Probably a little of both in my opinion actually.
How could they possibly believe that is actually the mark of the beast? Everybody knows those grocery store "loyalty cards" are the real Mark of the Beast!
Actually, I was thinking it might make a decent kids phone. Not that kids would want it mind you, but parents buy the thing and a phone that allows them to do the favorite social networking sites while not free access to the internet might be a nice compromise that both parents and kids could deal with. Then again, I'm not a parent, nor a kid, so I am unfamiliar with the realities of raising a child in the internet age. From people saying they have actually seen them in the wild, it seems that mostly poster's wives are buying them. I can see it being an older person's phone also. The few apps they need to keep in touch with family and not have to deal with the complexity of a smart phone. My parents use Facebook to keep in touch with me and my cousins, but lord knows when they'll figure out texting. Then there was the entire 'backed up to the cloud' aspect which is why they bought Danger and is appealing to anybody who has never head of Sidekick.
This is one of the reasons I don't complain too much about the App store approval process, or at least that the App store is near the only way to get apps on the iPhone. I remember going out to Cnet or two Cows and downloading apps for my Palm III and V. I'd go through them all and pick and install the ones that looked good and had decent ratings. I still learned that I'd have to schedule time to reset my Palm and go uninstall two thrids of the programs afterward because they were too buggy to use or otherwise caused it to crash.
Because it's news. Slashdot isn't the only website the publishes articles about when Apple rejects something or reverses an acceptance of an app. (Indeed, /. really only posts about news stories elsewhere.) When something like that happens, it makes the mainstream news circuit. CNN has articles about it. The Economist has articles about it. The other news channels have blurbs about it. It may not be headline news, but it is certainly filler news that has injected itself into the mainstream knowledge. How do you think that public reaction builds up to the point that Apple reverses their decision so quickly. I'd almost bet that most people have a better idea of the current App Store approval process than they do of what is going on in congress currently. (Although that might not be saying much.)
Just look up Orgone and bions. It fits together fairly well complete with a darkside.
Personally, if I was in the same spot, I'd go and look over all the XKCD comics and pick my favorite. It's nice black line art that would go well with a tattoo, particularly if surrounded by equations.
On the more personal side, I would probably get the equations from Tippler's "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation" which is essentially showing that physics does not care about causality and time travel is possible.
Yes, but somehow, I was lucky and part of the generation that was always right at both those ages while the genrations above and below us don't really understand how things work.
And if I may reply to my own post (because I was going to say this but forgot), it may do MS well to follow the same strategy. Put out a solid product and then make regular updates that add features and usability while building up a customer base. If anybody can come in with a loss leader while looking towards the long term end result, it would be MS. Trouble is, what are the chances of MS putting out a solid product, following it up with regular updates, while not dumping everything, starting all over from scratch, and redesigning everything from the ground up before such a policy can come to fruit?
If you are serious, I think you are failing to see Apple's sales strategy. They were always going to have cut-and-paste, just like they were always going to have MMS. Sure, the initial version didn't have them, but that is because Apple starts with a small core functionality and makes it work. They don't worry about bullet points as much as they do a working and easy to use end device. One they have it, then they will put out a new version (in the iPhone's case both for hardware and software). The new versions will have those bullet point features added once they have been made to work as well as the core functionality. Not only does this give a solid and useable device which appeals to the general consumer, but also give them feature creep and a reason for people with perfectly working earlier versions to want to buy new models. When the first iPhone came out I knew it would have cut-and-paste as well as MMS if I waited, and it did. Look at the iPod, they did the same thing there. Once the iPod got photos, games, and notes. I knew that it would eventually replace my PDA* in functionality if I waited long enough.
*As it happened, the cell phone replaced if first, but I was still lacking features will lately. The iPod touch would have done that perfectly however if I hadn't have gotten a cell first.
Because the Koran is not just a book of religion with philosophy, it also presents the plans for civil government, laws, and punishments as well. That's the entire Sharia law that you hear about when talking about Muslim countries and the Taliban. It doesn't just apply to Muslims because it is stating the laws that their government should use for everybody under its jurisdiction, believers and non-believers.
Dude, Rome had the entire lawyer thing down well before the Republic fell. IIRC, there is writing of Caesar discussing the sue happy nature of Rome much like it is discussed in the USA today and for a time he even was a lawyer.
I'll tell you that it won't likely be with a straight face. Since WW2, colonialism has pretty much gone away in what we considered such for exploitation of natural resources. It was more beneficial to have open markets as the open market made us more money than enslaving the people of the colonies and using their natural resources only for ourselves. Currently, and in the likely future, commodities are on the open market and being sold to the highest bidder. If somebody who would start a war over such natural resources had the money and manufacturing to win that war, they'd have the money and power to simply buy those commodities on the open market. If they don't have more money to buy those commodities instead of somebody else, they also don't have the money to win a war against that somebody else.
If I was to point a finger at a likely cause of the next world war, I'd probably say economics and national debt. Country A is going to owe Country B and not pay it back. Country B will seek to gain control of assets from Country A which might include natural resources, but also could include land, factories, rights, IP, etc. Country A will decide they have to fight to retain those assets.
Ya, we'll be out of Afghanistan just like we are currently out of Germany and Japan. Hell, we aren't even out of Cuba yet from the Spanish-American war and we don't even talk to Cuba.
Businesses aren't even upgrading from XP or IE 6 on relatively cheap desktop PCs that are probably be cycled through anyway because what they have simply "works", and you expect them to do differently with servers? For that matter there are probably plenty of dumb terminals and main frames still out there being used rather than a 'return'. We just got rid of the last of our dumb terminals a three years ago. The system we had worked. Buying a replacement was a multi-million dollar project that involved racks of new servers, more permanent FTE positions to manage it, and doubling the number of desktop computers to use it. For that matter, it also used tapes for backup. I'm sure there are thousands of old systems out there that still use tape that even though they may not be the newest equipment out there, there is still no business reason to upgrade them. To get our system upgraded, it was a two year sales pitch that had to be supported by a good show of ROI, and then another year project lead time before the vendor could do it. Actually, one of the reasons businesses aren't upgrading from IE6 and WinXp is probably because the servers have to be upgraded first.
Exactly. This is also why I will never buy an Android Phone till it at least can act as a Turing machine.