For those of you on Sprint, this will be their first LTE tri-band phone. The other carriers have one or two LTE frequency bands. Sprint, by virtue of buying Clearwire and shutting down Nextel, now has three LTE bands. So this phone on Sprint could potentially have the fastest LTE speeds in the country.
The new tabs idea would almost work for me - to manage my workflow I figure I need 8 tabs total. In their infinite wisdom, they've limited the new tabs idea to 5. Why 5? I have no idea. I do enjoy the fact that it's reasonably intelligent, so it does figure out automatically how to filter things. However, I really need the ability to add my own tab for work reasons. You know, the one that's labeled "EVERY EMAIL FROM KEVIN BECAUSE THIS IS THE GUY THAT'S PAYING ME AND I DAMN WELL BETTER NOT MISS A MESSAGE FROM HIM".
Just create a label for Kevin, and a filter so all his mails automatically get that label and the Important label (starred too if you want). His mails will show up on the left in the Inbox, in the Important box, in the Kevin box, and (if you also starred it) in the Starred box.
The tabs are more for broad, generic, automated categorizations. If you want to do something specific like what you've described, you need to use the label and filter tools.
Microsoft, in their traditionally incompetent fashion of misunderstanding their users, decided to mimic Google's unacknowledged mistakes when they came out with Windows 8. (Unity, of course, had beaten them to the punch in incompetence, as they so often do.) Apple figured it out better when they tied search to the home screen on the iPhones, but wisely kept it out of sight. Most people drag their two-dozen useful icons to the first few pages of their iPhone, and use search only when they've forgotten which folder they hid their AnimeTube player in.
Thing is, search isn't the only way to find things in GMail. You can tag emails with labels - I have almost 100 filters set up to do just that based on who sent the email. So I can click on a label to see all my Amazon orders, or everything my web hosting service sent me, or email from co-workers. This does the functional equivalent of sorting mails into folders to help you find stuff without searching, except a mail can be in multiple folders simultaneously.
This is also where iOS fails badly. They're still stuck on the 1984 Macintosh paradigm where the object is the object, and is always the one and only object. That's a limitation of physical objects which has been artificially implemented in software. This is the fundamental skeumorphism Apple needed to remove in the iOS update, but didn't. Just like putting mail into folders, this means if you can't remember which folder you put it in or accidentally put it in the wrong folder, you can't find it without a search. On Windows, Unix/Linux, and Android, you can have pointers (references, links, whatever you want to call them) to an object, like GMail's labels. This lets you sort the app icons on your desktop any way you want, while simultaneously keeping a master list of all your apps in the app drawer. You can even put down multiple copies of the app icons if, say, you might need quick access to your address book both in your folder of communications apps and in your folder of navigation apps.
The thing is, the RIAA knows how to play the game - they paid for the rules after all.
You can only get the extravagant fines for copyright infringement if you've registered your copyright with the Library of Congress (which involves paying a fee and sending them a copy of the work). If the copyright isn't registered, the owner can only claim damages suffered. So when the RIAA "steals" artwork or text from a random web artist/author, worst case they have to pay what they would've paid if they had licensed it, best case they're not caught and they pay nothing.
The thing is, the car's brakes can easily overpower the engine. And your car has two independent sets of brakes - the foot pedal (hydraulic) and the parking brake (mechanical cable linkage, though some luxury models have made it electronic). For unintended acceleration to have caused the accident, you're saying three independent systems which by all accounts function flawlessly 99.999% of the time failed simultaneously and catastrophically. So it's not enough to show the acceleration system can fail. Unless you can come up with something which can cause all three of these systems to fail simultaneously, the odds of that happening are quite literally astronomical.
The far more likely explanation is that these people thought they were stomping on the brake, when they were in fact stomping on the accelerator. I've actually done that when the passenger kicked over a folding sun shade and it (unknown to me) wedged so that every time I pressed the brake, it also pressed the accelerator. The car would lurch forward whenever I started braking. Nothing happened because when I jammed down the brake pedal, the brake overpowered the engine and the car came to a stop. The engine was revving at an uncomfortably high RPM, but the car was stopped.
That's what happened when Audi got hit by the unintended acceleration hysteria in the 1980s. Despite all the rational arguments against it, the press and public hysteria kept growing. They eventually "fixed" the problem by moving the brake and accelerator pedals further apart, and putting in a brake-gearshift interlock. You now have to press down the brake pedal before you can shift out of Park. After they did that, all the cases of unintended acceleration (when shifting the car into gear) disappeared, confirming that it was simple pedal misapplication.
Air-Sea had been a Navy concept since before world war 2. They believed it so much they built carriers, and coordinated land based planes with carrier based planes very effectively, even when the land based planes belonged to the army. Read about Midway.
Coordination within a single branch of the military is trivial. Coordination between the different branches is a nightmare. Each branch likes to do their own thing, and doesn't want to bother with or be bothered by the needs and wants of the other branches. e.g. The Air Force has been trying to kill off the A-10 ground attack aircraft for almost 20 years even though it's the best ground support asset in their arsenal. The Army would love to take over operating the A-10, but federal law limits them to rotary winged aircraft in combat roles. (Ironic considering the Air Force began as the Army Air Corps.)
The divide and interservice rivalry is so deep and entrenched that when I was working on a project for the Army, the higher-ups had mandated that an Air Force officer ride along with them in the Humvee to force the two branches to coordinate.
China was not weak back in the 80s. China was not weak in the 60s. They were an economic powerhouse even then.
Douglas MacArther warned Never fight a land war in Asia".
China was an economic footnote in the 1960s and 1970s. They were in the midst of the Cultural Revolution and were busy lynching anyone who could potentially have contributed to the country's economic development. Their economy took 30 years to double from 1950-1980. From 1980 to 2000 it doubled every 10 years. They didn't become notable on the world stage until (1) Deng Xiaoping began adopting capitalism in the 1980s, and (2) the Soviet Union fell allowing China to emerge from its shadow.
And MacArthur wanted to nuke several Chinese cities to discourage China from entering the Korean War.
Everyone but weapons system planners knew that the Soviet Union was going down as early as the 70s, because economists had predicted it even earlier, just by looking at empty shelves in soviet super markets and the drastic cut back in Soviet aid to its over-extended empire. They hung Castro out to dry, in the late 60s.
As someone who grew up during that time, nobody believed the Iron Curtain was going to come down during our lifetime. It was like the stars in the night sky - always there, always had been there, and always would be there. The Soviets were so secretive that even if they hung Castro out to dry, you couldn't be sure if it was because they were having economic problems, or if it was because Castro had insulted the Soviet Premier's wife about her cooking at a state dinner. The events of 1989 remain one of the most shocking and indelible in my memory - right up there with Challenger and 9/11. Like the millions of people who now claim to have attended Woodstock, plenty of people now claim to have predicted the fall of the Soviet Union in hindsight. But believe me, even in the early 1980s if you had predicted on TV that the Soviet Union would crumble within a decade, you would've been laughed out of the studio.
I've left my ikea days long behind. Nowadays, when I buy something I want it to be good AND beautiful in my house. Yes it costs more than generic products, but I am happy with my previous gen iMac. And when whiners think that it costs too much, I won't lose sleep over it. My life quality is worth something.
It was a bigger issue 7-10 years ago when keeping a computer for longer than 3-4 years was, quite frankly, stupid. Build quality mattered less, and it was silly to pay extra for good looks because if you didn't replace your computer by year 3 and definitely by year 5, it was too slow to run any modern software. Heck, I occasionally run across a person using a computer from back then, and I implore them to upgrade because the extra electricity they burn in 2-3 years will be enough to pay for the new computer.
Now that even low-end CPUs are "fast enough" for most people, keeping a computer for 5-7 years is a real possibility. That means paying an extra $500 for good looks or better build quality is cheaper because it'll be amortized over 6 years instead of 3 years.
At least that's the viewpoint of the casual user. The hard core computer geek who insists on state of the art is probably still on a 3 year upgrade cycle. So for him, dropping an extra $500 for good looks or better build quality is still an extravagance.
Similarly two years ago I bought my non techy parents a Macbook Pro. Since then I've had to do almost no interventions, what a change compared to their previous Windows on HP experience. Their life is better and I sacrifice less time. IT's worth something for me.
5 years ago I bought my non-techy dad a Lenovo Thinkpad. Since then I've had to do almost no interventions. Anecdotes are a dime a dozen.
And incidentally, Apple doesn't make the Macbooks. They're made by Quanta - they're the ODM (original design manufacturer) that Apple uses. Normally the ODM also designs the laptop while the vendor just provides the specs and requirements, so I'm not even sure if Apple even designs the Macbooks.
Quanta also makes most of HP's laptops.
That's the dirty little secret about the laptop industry - the vast majority of laptops aren't made by the brand they're sold under. So it's pointless arguing build quality or reliability based on brand name. To figure out some sort of correlation, you have to know which ODM made which particular model.
That's the way it works in the U.S. too. One company owns the electrical wires and handles repairs and expansions, but you can buy electricity from a plethora of companies. One company owns and maintains the natural gas lines, but you can buy gas from dozens of different companies. The company which owns the lines/pipes isn't allowed to sell electricity or gas. If they want to do that, they have to set up a separate independent company and can't grant access favors or lower rates to that company - it has to compete on equal footing with all the other companies selling electricity or gas.
But for some reason (probably having to do with greasing politicians' palms) the telecos aren't run like this. The company that owns the phone or cable TV lines sells the service, and only they sell the service. Long distance phone service is competitive, but not local phone or internet service.
There is a big difference between a nuclear accident and other power plant accidents. It puts a huge swath of land into an uninhabitable state for a long period.
You mean exactly like hydro does as a matter of design? From the wiki: "However, the dam flooded archaeological and cultural sites and displaced some 1.3 million people, and is causing significant ecological changes, including an increased risk of landslides."
Just build the nuclear plants in remote locations with an unpopulated safety buffer around them. Prohibit people from settling within that buffer. Best case (if there's no accident) nuclear is better than hydro because local wildlife and access to archeological sites is unaffected. Worst case (if there is an accident) it's slightly better than hydro - the worst of the radiation will disappear in a few decades, while a dam's catch-basin will always be there as long as the dam is in operation.
Why the double standard where it's acceptable with hydro but not with nuclear? Because water is safer than radiation? Drowning is one of the leading causes of accidental death, and the death and destruction from the one major hydroelectric dam failure far, far exceed anything from Chernobyl and Fukushima combined. If that's your argument against nuclear power, then you should be even more strongly against hydroelectric power.
It's not a coincidence. The tar pits are natural underground petroleum deposits which percolate to the surface in that spot (same thing happens in other nearby areas and offshore, but not to as great an extent). The petroleum deposits are what attracted the first oil drilling operations there, and made the region famously wealthy. Everything else (Hollywood, designer shoes, etc) came afterwards as a consequence.
I asked myself how much waste is generated to, say, run my house for 30 years. It turns out to be about a train car full of coal vs a bit more than a tablespoon of nuclear waste. The spent fuel production of the entire U.S. is about two tractor trailers full per year. (And that's without reprocessing.) The amount goes up if you include low-level waste like irradiated concrete and steel. But that's stuff you can bury for a couple hundred years and it'll be safe.
I did a similar calc for nuclear vs. wind. Yes a single wind turbine looks more attractive and is cheaper than a nuclear plant, and safer to maintain. But people fail to realize that to equal the power output of an AP1000 nuclear reactor (1154 MW * 0.9 capacity factor = 1036.8 MW average output), you'd need over 4700 MW worth of wind turbines (4700 MW * 0.22 capacity factor, which is the world average for 2011 = 1034). I was gonna re-do the calcs for all to see but while search for wind turbine tonnage I found a site where someone's already done it. The numbers led him to the same conclusion as me: For the same power output, nuclear is simply better than wind or solar - in terms of steel and concrete use, carbon emissions, cost, and safety.
No, only if taking off the shoes was ordered by a government agent or otherwise required by a federal law, then yes, yes it is a violation of fourth ammendment rights. A private airline may put whatever restrictions they like on passengers buying tickets.
However, the government, very specifically, is bound to a code of civil rights which includes standards which, constitutes the agreement under which they operate, and especially conduct searches. If they do not respect civil rights, then they are acting beyond their agreed authority.
The technicality the government uses to get around this is that the airports themselves are government facilities, and they have the right to impose whatever conditions they want on anyone wishing to enter certain parts of that facility. You're not being unwillingly searched in violation of your 4th Amendment rights, you're voluntarily agreeing to be searched in exchange for ingress into the airport terminal area.
Of course then they have laws requiring airlines to use those government-owned terminals. The confluence of these two make it impossible for two private parties (passenger and airline) to conduct business without passing through the government facility. But government empires are built upon such subtle synergies between two seemingly unrelated laws.
Despite breaking the law, disregarding the constitution and making secret laws using a secret court which the people who they serve have no right to access?
Strictly speaking, the Constitution does not apply to foreign nationals living abroad (there's even some question as to if it applies to U.S. citizens living abroad). While it's extremely poor form and a betrayal of trust to spy on your own allies, there's nothing illegal about it.* Unless the country decides to pass a law making it illegal (e.g. the law we have making it illegal to target a head of state of a foreign country for assassination).
This does present an opportunity on another unrelated legal front though. The U.S. seems to want to apply its copyright laws to foreigners doing something with movies/music which is completely legal in their own country. If the U.S. can extradite these people from those countries and prosecute them in the U.S., by the same reasoning Germany and France can extradite NSA officials and prosecute them for wiretapping.
* I do agree that if you say "all men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights," then those rights should transcend the nationality and residence of a person. But you also have to make allowances for political reality. If we were forced on principle to afford all Chinese citizens living in China 4th Amendment rights, while the Chinese were free to take what info they want from Americans in the U.S. because they have no such protections, that creates a disparity which puts the country with fewer rights at a political an economic advantage. The best compromise I've been able to come up with is treat people by the standards of their own country.
Interesting. I was taught the opposite - that the blanks are used so the executioners can't be justifiably lynched if capital punishment ever goes out of style and people get the idea of retroactively punishing the executioners for murder. If you know for certain that one executioner didn't fire a live bullet but you don't know which one, you can't convict any of them for murder. Similar to the can't convict an identical twin for a crime based on DNA evidence meme.
Just make sure they suffer all the pain caused by the $450 Million loss
They did. It was their own money they lost. The summary and TFA gloss over that fact in some circuitous attempt to grind a non-relevant axe. Fining them makes about as much sense as charging someone who fails at committing suicide with attempted murder.
There's a real simple solution that would solve this once and for all. Some ISPs offer unlimited plans, other ISPs offer plans with bandwidth caps, and they compete with each other. If the "bandwidth caps are evil" people are right, everyone will sign up for the unlimited plan and the other ISPs will be forced to abandon caps. If they're wrong, the ISPs with unlimited plans will bog down due to excess traffic from all the bandwidth hogs, and customers will switch to the ISPs with caps because they'll actually deliver the promised speeds.
Simple. It's a bulletproof plan, and the best part is - we don't have to do anything. It'll happen all by itself... No, wait, that's right, we granted monopolies so each municipality only has one cable company and one phone company who can provide internet service, and they're in cahoots with each other not to compete on price. Whose dumb idea was that?
The other big gotcha that never gets mentioned is that rechargeable batteries self-dischanrge in weeks if you don't use them. Capacitors self-discharge in hours or minutes. I can see them being a useful supplement to Li-ions (kinda like a plug-in hybrid can supplement a car's ICE). e.g. Do a 5 min quick-charge just before your flight which will run your laptop for an hour before it starts drawing power from the battery. But I don't see them replacing batteries any time soon.
But the danger of fuel cells is [...] the fact that the cheapest source of hydrogen will be from gasification of fossil fuels, and from the fact that hydrogen via electrolysis is horribly inefficient, and then you actually have to build an infrastructure for the hydrogen distribution
There's work being done on alcohol fuel cells (so far, only methanol). They're a lot less efficient than hydrogen fuel cells. But if we can increase their efficiency and get them to worth with ethanol, then we'll have a way to turn plant matter into an efficient fuel for our cars while using the existing infrastructure.
Personally I see this as being much more likely to succeed than batteries. Current Li-ion tech needs to improve by an order of magnitude to match gasoline's energy density per liter, and nearly two orders of magnitude to match gasoline's energy density per kg. Ethanol has about 80% the energy density of gasoline by volume, and about 60% the energy density by weight, so it's already in the same ballpark. These liquid fuels are simply a much better way to store energy than an electric battery. The only thing holding them back (assuming you can manufacture them in a closed-loop carbon cycle) are the thermodynamic efficiency limits of the carnot heat transfer cycle. And a fuel cell removes that impediment.
This is a dangerous attitude I've been seeing increasing over the last decade. The notion that disagreement is synonymous with weakness and thus should be stomped out.
That slashdot has topics which question sacred cows and widely-held beliefs is a good thing. If the site parroted one and only one viewpoint, then I'd be worried that there was some higher force manipulating it. The fact that contrary viewpoints are presented and moderated up is what tells me it's a functioning system of free expression.
Diversity of opinion and self-questioning is a strength, not a weakness.
Most of the speed ups the A7 gets are from 64-bit code as it cleans up a lot of the architecture. 32-bit code works, but the speedup is minimal.
I'm extremely skeptical that there's much of any significant speedup for 64-bit code in general use (i.e. outside of specialized number crunching applications). If you look at Anandtech's iPhone 5S review where they ran a bunch of math-heavy benchmarks, the median speedup is only about 9%. The benchmarks recording the biggest improvements (AES, SHA1, DGEMM) showed huge speedups due to new hardware cryptographic instructions and vectorization, not from switching to 64-bit code.
My hunch is this is going to play out pretty much like 64-bit Windows. Yes there was a speedup, but only about 5%-15% on average, not enough of a performance boost for people to notice in everyday use. The real reason everyone switched to 64-bit was for the flat memory space addresses (>4 GB). It's better for code to be 64-bit, but the performance increase merits a mere footnote, while the flat memory space is a headliner.
You keep using that phrase. I do not think it means what you think it means.
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State
"Free State". Not the current state, or the state we establisehd in 1787, or the United States of America, but free state. As in an idea. The right to bear arms isn't to preserve the State in whatever incarnation it may morph into in the future. It's to preserve and maintain the State in a status of being free. If the State should deviate from the status of being free, the 2nd Amendment is there to help the people shift it back to a free one.
This was judged impossible to do unless the people had the right to bear firearms independent of the State's authority. Precisely the opposite of how you're interpreting the Amendment. You're mixing up the terms because back then, "the State" on everyone's minds was rule by England. "Free State" was the new Constitutional republic they'd created. But they were smart enough to realize things might change, so they specifically called it "free state" or "free country" in every iteration of the Amendment you've quoted. Never "this country" or "the United States" as you seem to want to interpret it.
It's one of the idiosyncrasies of English. You have plurals, possession, and contraction.
For most nouns, adding an s makes it plural. Websites, posts, etc.
Adding a 's makes it possessive. Obama's, slashdot's, my dog's, etc.
And written contractions of "is" are technically not allowed, even though they're common in the spoken language ("Obama's really upset about the government shutdown." "My dog's eating a biscuit.").
For pronouns, this gets all mixed up. A plural changes the pronoun (it => they).
Possession is denoted by simply adding an s.
Written contractions use 's.
I'll correct native English speakers or people trying to learn English if they make this mistake. But I tend to skip it on forum posts because many posters are not native English speakers, and I consider this grammatical rule itself to be at fault because it's inconsistent.
I'm not sure who appointed Experian watchdog (though I'm certain someone on Slashdot will point out how ignorant I am for not knowing), but for a company with so much power over your own life in terms of credit, it would be nice if, with the power came some sort of responsibility -- and accountability.
Nobody "appointed" Experian watchdog over this information. Many companies (banks, lenders, credit card companies, etc) needed reliable information on a customer's past creditworthiness. Experian (and TransUnion and Equifax) collected and provide this information in sufficient quality for these companies' needs, and so they've become the watchdogs.
The problem is a subtle one I've noticed in several fields (mainly HR and hiring). The credit agencies protect against a false positive - one where an individual who is a high credit risk is incorrectly determined to be a low credit risk, and thus the bank gives them a loan. This protects the companies who seek this information before lending out money or equipment.
They do very little to protect against false negatives - one where an individual with low credit risk is incorrectly flagged as a high credit risk. The companies who use the credit bureaus don't really care about this case because it's a "safe" error for them. If they refuse a loan to someone who would've paid it back, they just lose out on the interest. So there's less incentive to verify the accuracy of negatives on someone's credit report. (Incidentally, low interest rates exacerbate this situation. If interest rates are higher, the interest on a loan can exceed the principal, and thus a false negative could become a greater financial loss than a false positive.)
(In the HR case, a HR department which carelessly culls out job applicants based on keywords and unrealistic years of experience is lowering their risk of false positives. But they're also increasing their risk of false negatives and weeding out a lot of qualified people. From management's standpoint, they can see the direct negative consequences of a bad hire. The negative consequences of failing to hire someone who was a good fit for the job are not so obvious. To correct for this, companies should regularly test their HR departments by submitting applicants who are "perfect" for a job and seeing how many of them get asked for interviews.)
Slashdot Mirror
For those of you on Sprint, this will be their first LTE tri-band phone. The other carriers have one or two LTE frequency bands. Sprint, by virtue of buying Clearwire and shutting down Nextel, now has three LTE bands. So this phone on Sprint could potentially have the fastest LTE speeds in the country.
Just create a label for Kevin, and a filter so all his mails automatically get that label and the Important label (starred too if you want). His mails will show up on the left in the Inbox, in the Important box, in the Kevin box, and (if you also starred it) in the Starred box.
The tabs are more for broad, generic, automated categorizations. If you want to do something specific like what you've described, you need to use the label and filter tools.
Thing is, search isn't the only way to find things in GMail. You can tag emails with labels - I have almost 100 filters set up to do just that based on who sent the email. So I can click on a label to see all my Amazon orders, or everything my web hosting service sent me, or email from co-workers. This does the functional equivalent of sorting mails into folders to help you find stuff without searching, except a mail can be in multiple folders simultaneously.
This is also where iOS fails badly. They're still stuck on the 1984 Macintosh paradigm where the object is the object, and is always the one and only object. That's a limitation of physical objects which has been artificially implemented in software. This is the fundamental skeumorphism Apple needed to remove in the iOS update, but didn't. Just like putting mail into folders, this means if you can't remember which folder you put it in or accidentally put it in the wrong folder, you can't find it without a search. On Windows, Unix/Linux, and Android, you can have pointers (references, links, whatever you want to call them) to an object, like GMail's labels. This lets you sort the app icons on your desktop any way you want, while simultaneously keeping a master list of all your apps in the app drawer. You can even put down multiple copies of the app icons if, say, you might need quick access to your address book both in your folder of communications apps and in your folder of navigation apps.
The thing is, the RIAA knows how to play the game - they paid for the rules after all.
You can only get the extravagant fines for copyright infringement if you've registered your copyright with the Library of Congress (which involves paying a fee and sending them a copy of the work). If the copyright isn't registered, the owner can only claim damages suffered. So when the RIAA "steals" artwork or text from a random web artist/author, worst case they have to pay what they would've paid if they had licensed it, best case they're not caught and they pay nothing.
The thing is, the car's brakes can easily overpower the engine. And your car has two independent sets of brakes - the foot pedal (hydraulic) and the parking brake (mechanical cable linkage, though some luxury models have made it electronic). For unintended acceleration to have caused the accident, you're saying three independent systems which by all accounts function flawlessly 99.999% of the time failed simultaneously and catastrophically. So it's not enough to show the acceleration system can fail. Unless you can come up with something which can cause all three of these systems to fail simultaneously, the odds of that happening are quite literally astronomical.
The far more likely explanation is that these people thought they were stomping on the brake, when they were in fact stomping on the accelerator. I've actually done that when the passenger kicked over a folding sun shade and it (unknown to me) wedged so that every time I pressed the brake, it also pressed the accelerator. The car would lurch forward whenever I started braking. Nothing happened because when I jammed down the brake pedal, the brake overpowered the engine and the car came to a stop. The engine was revving at an uncomfortably high RPM, but the car was stopped.
That's what happened when Audi got hit by the unintended acceleration hysteria in the 1980s. Despite all the rational arguments against it, the press and public hysteria kept growing. They eventually "fixed" the problem by moving the brake and accelerator pedals further apart, and putting in a brake-gearshift interlock. You now have to press down the brake pedal before you can shift out of Park. After they did that, all the cases of unintended acceleration (when shifting the car into gear) disappeared, confirming that it was simple pedal misapplication.
Coordination within a single branch of the military is trivial. Coordination between the different branches is a nightmare. Each branch likes to do their own thing, and doesn't want to bother with or be bothered by the needs and wants of the other branches. e.g. The Air Force has been trying to kill off the A-10 ground attack aircraft for almost 20 years even though it's the best ground support asset in their arsenal. The Army would love to take over operating the A-10, but federal law limits them to rotary winged aircraft in combat roles. (Ironic considering the Air Force began as the Army Air Corps.)
The divide and interservice rivalry is so deep and entrenched that when I was working on a project for the Army, the higher-ups had mandated that an Air Force officer ride along with them in the Humvee to force the two branches to coordinate.
China was an economic footnote in the 1960s and 1970s. They were in the midst of the Cultural Revolution and were busy lynching anyone who could potentially have contributed to the country's economic development. Their economy took 30 years to double from 1950-1980. From 1980 to 2000 it doubled every 10 years. They didn't become notable on the world stage until (1) Deng Xiaoping began adopting capitalism in the 1980s, and (2) the Soviet Union fell allowing China to emerge from its shadow.
And MacArthur wanted to nuke several Chinese cities to discourage China from entering the Korean War.
As someone who grew up during that time, nobody believed the Iron Curtain was going to come down during our lifetime. It was like the stars in the night sky - always there, always had been there, and always would be there. The Soviets were so secretive that even if they hung Castro out to dry, you couldn't be sure if it was because they were having economic problems, or if it was because Castro had insulted the Soviet Premier's wife about her cooking at a state dinner. The events of 1989 remain one of the most shocking and indelible in my memory - right up there with Challenger and 9/11. Like the millions of people who now claim to have attended Woodstock, plenty of people now claim to have predicted the fall of the Soviet Union in hindsight. But believe me, even in the early 1980s if you had predicted on TV that the Soviet Union would crumble within a decade, you would've been laughed out of the studio.
It was a bigger issue 7-10 years ago when keeping a computer for longer than 3-4 years was, quite frankly, stupid. Build quality mattered less, and it was silly to pay extra for good looks because if you didn't replace your computer by year 3 and definitely by year 5, it was too slow to run any modern software. Heck, I occasionally run across a person using a computer from back then, and I implore them to upgrade because the extra electricity they burn in 2-3 years will be enough to pay for the new computer.
Now that even low-end CPUs are "fast enough" for most people, keeping a computer for 5-7 years is a real possibility. That means paying an extra $500 for good looks or better build quality is cheaper because it'll be amortized over 6 years instead of 3 years.
At least that's the viewpoint of the casual user. The hard core computer geek who insists on state of the art is probably still on a 3 year upgrade cycle. So for him, dropping an extra $500 for good looks or better build quality is still an extravagance.
5 years ago I bought my non-techy dad a Lenovo Thinkpad. Since then I've had to do almost no interventions. Anecdotes are a dime a dozen.
And incidentally, Apple doesn't make the Macbooks. They're made by Quanta - they're the ODM (original design manufacturer) that Apple uses. Normally the ODM also designs the laptop while the vendor just provides the specs and requirements, so I'm not even sure if Apple even designs the Macbooks.
Quanta also makes most of HP's laptops.
That's the dirty little secret about the laptop industry - the vast majority of laptops aren't made by the brand they're sold under. So it's pointless arguing build quality or reliability based on brand name. To figure out some sort of correlation, you have to know which ODM made which particular model.
That's the way it works in the U.S. too. One company owns the electrical wires and handles repairs and expansions, but you can buy electricity from a plethora of companies. One company owns and maintains the natural gas lines, but you can buy gas from dozens of different companies. The company which owns the lines/pipes isn't allowed to sell electricity or gas. If they want to do that, they have to set up a separate independent company and can't grant access favors or lower rates to that company - it has to compete on equal footing with all the other companies selling electricity or gas.
But for some reason (probably having to do with greasing politicians' palms) the telecos aren't run like this. The company that owns the phone or cable TV lines sells the service, and only they sell the service. Long distance phone service is competitive, but not local phone or internet service.
You mean exactly like hydro does as a matter of design? From the wiki: "However, the dam flooded archaeological and cultural sites and displaced some 1.3 million people, and is causing significant ecological changes, including an increased risk of landslides."
Just build the nuclear plants in remote locations with an unpopulated safety buffer around them. Prohibit people from settling within that buffer. Best case (if there's no accident) nuclear is better than hydro because local wildlife and access to archeological sites is unaffected. Worst case (if there is an accident) it's slightly better than hydro - the worst of the radiation will disappear in a few decades, while a dam's catch-basin will always be there as long as the dam is in operation.
Why the double standard where it's acceptable with hydro but not with nuclear? Because water is safer than radiation? Drowning is one of the leading causes of accidental death, and the death and destruction from the one major hydroelectric dam failure far, far exceed anything from Chernobyl and Fukushima combined. If that's your argument against nuclear power, then you should be even more strongly against hydroelectric power.
It's not a coincidence. The tar pits are natural underground petroleum deposits which percolate to the surface in that spot (same thing happens in other nearby areas and offshore, but not to as great an extent). The petroleum deposits are what attracted the first oil drilling operations there, and made the region famously wealthy. Everything else (Hollywood, designer shoes, etc) came afterwards as a consequence.
FTFY
The political right wants nuclear, but gave up fighting environmentalists over it long ago.
I asked myself how much waste is generated to, say, run my house for 30 years. It turns out to be about a train car full of coal vs a bit more than a tablespoon of nuclear waste. The spent fuel production of the entire U.S. is about two tractor trailers full per year. (And that's without reprocessing.) The amount goes up if you include low-level waste like irradiated concrete and steel. But that's stuff you can bury for a couple hundred years and it'll be safe.
I did a similar calc for nuclear vs. wind. Yes a single wind turbine looks more attractive and is cheaper than a nuclear plant, and safer to maintain. But people fail to realize that to equal the power output of an AP1000 nuclear reactor (1154 MW * 0.9 capacity factor = 1036.8 MW average output), you'd need over 4700 MW worth of wind turbines (4700 MW * 0.22 capacity factor, which is the world average for 2011 = 1034). I was gonna re-do the calcs for all to see but while search for wind turbine tonnage I found a site where someone's already done it. The numbers led him to the same conclusion as me: For the same power output, nuclear is simply better than wind or solar - in terms of steel and concrete use, carbon emissions, cost, and safety.
The technicality the government uses to get around this is that the airports themselves are government facilities, and they have the right to impose whatever conditions they want on anyone wishing to enter certain parts of that facility. You're not being unwillingly searched in violation of your 4th Amendment rights, you're voluntarily agreeing to be searched in exchange for ingress into the airport terminal area.
Of course then they have laws requiring airlines to use those government-owned terminals. The confluence of these two make it impossible for two private parties (passenger and airline) to conduct business without passing through the government facility. But government empires are built upon such subtle synergies between two seemingly unrelated laws.
Strictly speaking, the Constitution does not apply to foreign nationals living abroad (there's even some question as to if it applies to U.S. citizens living abroad). While it's extremely poor form and a betrayal of trust to spy on your own allies, there's nothing illegal about it.* Unless the country decides to pass a law making it illegal (e.g. the law we have making it illegal to target a head of state of a foreign country for assassination).
This does present an opportunity on another unrelated legal front though. The U.S. seems to want to apply its copyright laws to foreigners doing something with movies/music which is completely legal in their own country. If the U.S. can extradite these people from those countries and prosecute them in the U.S., by the same reasoning Germany and France can extradite NSA officials and prosecute them for wiretapping.
* I do agree that if you say "all men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights," then those rights should transcend the nationality and residence of a person. But you also have to make allowances for political reality. If we were forced on principle to afford all Chinese citizens living in China 4th Amendment rights, while the Chinese were free to take what info they want from Americans in the U.S. because they have no such protections, that creates a disparity which puts the country with fewer rights at a political an economic advantage. The best compromise I've been able to come up with is treat people by the standards of their own country.
Interesting. I was taught the opposite - that the blanks are used so the executioners can't be justifiably lynched if capital punishment ever goes out of style and people get the idea of retroactively punishing the executioners for murder. If you know for certain that one executioner didn't fire a live bullet but you don't know which one, you can't convict any of them for murder. Similar to the can't convict an identical twin for a crime based on DNA evidence meme.
They did. It was their own money they lost. The summary and TFA gloss over that fact in some circuitous attempt to grind a non-relevant axe. Fining them makes about as much sense as charging someone who fails at committing suicide with attempted murder.
There's a real simple solution that would solve this once and for all. Some ISPs offer unlimited plans, other ISPs offer plans with bandwidth caps, and they compete with each other. If the "bandwidth caps are evil" people are right, everyone will sign up for the unlimited plan and the other ISPs will be forced to abandon caps. If they're wrong, the ISPs with unlimited plans will bog down due to excess traffic from all the bandwidth hogs, and customers will switch to the ISPs with caps because they'll actually deliver the promised speeds.
Simple. It's a bulletproof plan, and the best part is - we don't have to do anything. It'll happen all by itself... No, wait, that's right, we granted monopolies so each municipality only has one cable company and one phone company who can provide internet service, and they're in cahoots with each other not to compete on price. Whose dumb idea was that?
The other big gotcha that never gets mentioned is that rechargeable batteries self-dischanrge in weeks if you don't use them. Capacitors self-discharge in hours or minutes. I can see them being a useful supplement to Li-ions (kinda like a plug-in hybrid can supplement a car's ICE). e.g. Do a 5 min quick-charge just before your flight which will run your laptop for an hour before it starts drawing power from the battery. But I don't see them replacing batteries any time soon.
There's work being done on alcohol fuel cells (so far, only methanol). They're a lot less efficient than hydrogen fuel cells. But if we can increase their efficiency and get them to worth with ethanol, then we'll have a way to turn plant matter into an efficient fuel for our cars while using the existing infrastructure.
Personally I see this as being much more likely to succeed than batteries. Current Li-ion tech needs to improve by an order of magnitude to match gasoline's energy density per liter, and nearly two orders of magnitude to match gasoline's energy density per kg. Ethanol has about 80% the energy density of gasoline by volume, and about 60% the energy density by weight, so it's already in the same ballpark. These liquid fuels are simply a much better way to store energy than an electric battery. The only thing holding them back (assuming you can manufacture them in a closed-loop carbon cycle) are the thermodynamic efficiency limits of the carnot heat transfer cycle. And a fuel cell removes that impediment.
This is a dangerous attitude I've been seeing increasing over the last decade. The notion that disagreement is synonymous with weakness and thus should be stomped out.
That slashdot has topics which question sacred cows and widely-held beliefs is a good thing. If the site parroted one and only one viewpoint, then I'd be worried that there was some higher force manipulating it. The fact that contrary viewpoints are presented and moderated up is what tells me it's a functioning system of free expression.
Diversity of opinion and self-questioning is a strength, not a weakness.
I'm extremely skeptical that there's much of any significant speedup for 64-bit code in general use (i.e. outside of specialized number crunching applications). If you look at Anandtech's iPhone 5S review where they ran a bunch of math-heavy benchmarks, the median speedup is only about 9%. The benchmarks recording the biggest improvements (AES, SHA1, DGEMM) showed huge speedups due to new hardware cryptographic instructions and vectorization, not from switching to 64-bit code.
My hunch is this is going to play out pretty much like 64-bit Windows. Yes there was a speedup, but only about 5%-15% on average, not enough of a performance boost for people to notice in everyday use. The real reason everyone switched to 64-bit was for the flat memory space addresses (>4 GB). It's better for code to be 64-bit, but the performance increase merits a mere footnote, while the flat memory space is a headliner.
"Free State". Not the current state, or the state we establisehd in 1787, or the United States of America, but free state. As in an idea. The right to bear arms isn't to preserve the State in whatever incarnation it may morph into in the future. It's to preserve and maintain the State in a status of being free. If the State should deviate from the status of being free, the 2nd Amendment is there to help the people shift it back to a free one.
This was judged impossible to do unless the people had the right to bear firearms independent of the State's authority. Precisely the opposite of how you're interpreting the Amendment. You're mixing up the terms because back then, "the State" on everyone's minds was rule by England. "Free State" was the new Constitutional republic they'd created. But they were smart enough to realize things might change, so they specifically called it "free state" or "free country" in every iteration of the Amendment you've quoted. Never "this country" or "the United States" as you seem to want to interpret it.
It's one of the idiosyncrasies of English. You have plurals, possession, and contraction.
For most nouns, adding an s makes it plural. Websites, posts, etc.
Adding a 's makes it possessive. Obama's, slashdot's, my dog's, etc.
And written contractions of "is" are technically not allowed, even though they're common in the spoken language ("Obama's really upset about the government shutdown." "My dog's eating a biscuit.").
For pronouns, this gets all mixed up. A plural changes the pronoun (it => they).
Possession is denoted by simply adding an s.
Written contractions use 's.
I'll correct native English speakers or people trying to learn English if they make this mistake. But I tend to skip it on forum posts because many posters are not native English speakers, and I consider this grammatical rule itself to be at fault because it's inconsistent.
Nobody "appointed" Experian watchdog over this information. Many companies (banks, lenders, credit card companies, etc) needed reliable information on a customer's past creditworthiness. Experian (and TransUnion and Equifax) collected and provide this information in sufficient quality for these companies' needs, and so they've become the watchdogs.
The problem is a subtle one I've noticed in several fields (mainly HR and hiring). The credit agencies protect against a false positive - one where an individual who is a high credit risk is incorrectly determined to be a low credit risk, and thus the bank gives them a loan. This protects the companies who seek this information before lending out money or equipment.
They do very little to protect against false negatives - one where an individual with low credit risk is incorrectly flagged as a high credit risk. The companies who use the credit bureaus don't really care about this case because it's a "safe" error for them. If they refuse a loan to someone who would've paid it back, they just lose out on the interest. So there's less incentive to verify the accuracy of negatives on someone's credit report. (Incidentally, low interest rates exacerbate this situation. If interest rates are higher, the interest on a loan can exceed the principal, and thus a false negative could become a greater financial loss than a false positive.)
(In the HR case, a HR department which carelessly culls out job applicants based on keywords and unrealistic years of experience is lowering their risk of false positives. But they're also increasing their risk of false negatives and weeding out a lot of qualified people. From management's standpoint, they can see the direct negative consequences of a bad hire. The negative consequences of failing to hire someone who was a good fit for the job are not so obvious. To correct for this, companies should regularly test their HR departments by submitting applicants who are "perfect" for a job and seeing how many of them get asked for interviews.)