Windows 8 is very good and they made some nice improvements (e.g. Task Manager, file copy operations, IE10, Windows Defender, etc.). Plus, it's pretty quick for Windows in a VM.
I'm finding it virtually impossible to use Win 8 in a VM. It works fine running full-screen, but I run my VMs in a window because the whole point of running a VM is so I can run it along with other stuff. Unfortunately, accessing anything in Win 8 which used to be in the Start menu requires you to move the mouse to a corner of the screen to bring up a pop-up menu. This is easy in full screen mode. It's nearly impossible of it's running inside a VM as the moment your mouse passes the corner and leaves the VM window, it stops updating its position within the VM so it never reaches the corner, and the menu doesn't pop up.
We didn't need another OS. Windows 7 was still alive and well, by releasing Windows 8 they only confused / distracted the current user base.
No, it was time. Historically, Microsoft has about a 2.5 to 3-year release period between OSes.
1990 - Windows 3.0
1992 - Windows 3.1
1995 - Windows 95
1998 - Windows 98
(2000 - Windows ME but everyone pretends it didn't exist)
2001 - Windows XP
2007 - Windows Vista
2009 - Windows 7
2012 - Windows 8
They actually caught a lot of flak for the 5.25 years between XP and Vista. Many companies signed up for 3-year Microsoft support contracts after buying Windows XP, on the assurance of Microsoft salesmen that cost of upgrading their XP boxes to the next version of Windows would be included. When Microsoft took so long to ship Vista, they accused MS of collecting their OS ugprade money up-front, then deliberately slipping the OS ship date to beyond the contract so they'd be forced to pay for OS upgrades again. So they pretty much need to ship a new OS at least every 3 years to keep their customers on support contracts happy.
That too is an anachronism which needs to die, at least for online digital sales. Territorial distribution rights made sense when each distributor wasn't physically capable of supplying your product beyond a certain area. You needed territorial distribution rights to prevent conflicts between the multitude of distributors needed to insure thorough availability.
But there is no sense of distance nor territory on the Internet. If you can sell an MP3 to the guy down the street over the Internet, you can sell and deliver it to anywhere in the world just as easily.
That's why the US has the fifth amendment (and why a right against self-incrimination is a good idea in general). Not turning in DNA is not probable cause for an investigation, and if that is why they started investigating him, the case would have a high chance of being thrown out
No, the fifth amendment just means refusing to turn in your DNA is not evidence of guilt. They can investigate whomever they want (which is why a lot of innocent people get arrested/convicted - overly aggressive detectives and prosecutors convinced that some WAG theory is correct, DNA or not). The cases which are thrown out for fifth amendment violation prior to trial are the ones where a suspect refuses to answer them / give DNA (i.e. legally invokes his fifth amendment right), and the investigators continue to cajole him until he relents and changes his mind.
If they systematically went over the records to find everyone who lived in the area at the time of the murder, used DNA to eliminate 96% of them, and concentrated their investigation on the remaining 4%, there wouldn't be a problem with that. If he refused or they weren't able to get a DNA sample from him legally, then they couldn't mention that to a jury as a reason that he's probably guilty. They'd have to convict him based on other non-DNA evidence, but that's how murder trials were decided for centuries.
To be fair, MS and NS also dragged W3C kicking and screaming into implementing features a lot of web developers wanted. Early on, W3C seemed to want the web to be a purely hyperlinked infosphere - a informational nirvana with just text and pictures, but no layout or design. Many commercial developers wanted to tools to make their sites pretty like sales brochures. W3C didn't want that, and dragged their feet implementing a lot of the features needed to implement that. (The age-old debate between should a web page appear on your browser like the author intended? Or as your browser decides is the best way to display? The best answer like most things appears to be somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.)
In the end though, you have to ask yourself - why are they doing it? NS did it to try to remain the top browser. MS did it to try to make the entire web a proprietary MS ASP extension (thus bolstering Windows sales). So the real question we should be asking is, why is WebKit doing it?
Just curious if you also think it's an "issue" that the ACLU purports to protect the Bill of Rights in general, yet is conspicuously silent about the Second Amendment.
I've long since decided that there is no perfect organization. Every one is always looking out to defend only the things they're interested in defending, which is their freedom to do. As long as on the whole it ends up defending liberties like freedom of speech from the egregious violations, it's all good. Don't use faults in the messenger as an excuse to ignore what may be a perfectly valid message.
I totally agree. However, he was not just downloading, he was "sharing", uploading as well.
Think about it. By definition the number of downloads has to equal the number of uploads. So if there were n people sharing a song, on average they uploaded n/n = 1 copy each.
Dock his allowance (fine him) for the cost of the one song; treble damages for willful copyright violation if you like. Anything above that is silly.
As the article says, most of the growth is in China. That's awesome for the Chinese people, awesome for the open source ecosystem, awesome for Google, and awesome for the handset manufacturers who are making those devices. For app producers, however, it's irrelevant if that marketshare doesn't reflect sales. Even if iOS becomes niche (which I think is likely), it seems to be the best place to put make investment.
Wow. That sort of attitude will just result in you (and the U.S.) becoming a bit player in the future world economy. You arrive at precisely the wrong conclusion.
I was browsing the home pages of the Android apps that I use and discovered that many - including most of my favorites - are actually Chinese apps. The Chinese developers just took the time and effort to make an English-customized version of their native Chinese apps. This sort of language-flexibility greatly increased their apps' marketability and their profits.
So you can either tackle the global marketplace head-on and do the hard things that are needed to compete in it and maximize your apps' appeal. Or you can just throw your hands up in defeat because it's too hard, and stick to what's easiest. You wanna know what's a good investment? Paying someone a few hundred bucks to help with language customizations which will make your app marketable to a billion more people.
The source of his numbers (NetMarketshare) deviates significantly from the two other main sources of these types of stats. You can see the same effect in desktop browser market share, where NetMarketshare still shows IE having a huge lead while the other two show all three browsers (IE, Chrome, FF) closer to evenly split.
Statcounter doesn't correct for unique visitors (which is makes no difference in the context of this debate), but draws from a data pool approximately 3 orders of magnitude larger than NetMarketshare. You can pick through the individual descriptions on the wiki of how the data is collected and massaged and draw your own conclusions. If I had to guess, NetMarketshare's different numbers probably come about because they're weighting by country to try to compensate for their smaller data set.
Read the CBO reports; you know, the recommendations for balancing the budget put forth by a nonpartisan government office whose sole purpose is to analyze the budget and put together budget recommendations. Most of the deficit/debt is due to rising cost of social programs (primarily Medicare/Medicaid). You can read the CBO long-term outlooks all the way back to 2000. They all say the same thing - Medicare/Medicaid expenses are going to blow up and we need to do something about it, Medicare/Medicaid expenses are going to blow up and we need to do something about it. Well we didn't do anything about it, and here we are.
Or you can continue with the misguided belief that everything can be fixed by cutting military spending, thus assuring economic catastrophe (on our present course, Medicare/Medicaid will consume all tax revenue in about 50 years). The annual deficit has exceeded the entire military budget for several years now, so even if you reduced military spending to zero we'd still have a deficit.
The exploitation of different classes of reserves creates externalities of differing severity. Because markets suck at dealing with externalities, we impose some level of regulation designed either to internalize the externalities or to simply forbid activities that cause excessive negative externalities.
You don't even need to bring externalities into this. If we burn $100 worth of oil to squeeze out $120 worth of shale oil, that's $100 worth of energy which is converted to entropy.
If we instead pay Saudi Arabia $120 and they spend $15 pumping out an equivalent amount of oil, that's only $15 worth of energy which is converted to entropy. The remaining $105 the Saudis are free to use to build things. We may not like what they're building, but it's still doing something more constructive with it than turning it into waste heat.
Purely from the standpoint of economic efficiency, we're better off using the cheapest-to-acquire energy first. Externalities can tip it further in this favor (or against in the case of renewables), but even if you had no externalities the apolitical preference would still be to use the cheaper-to-pump oil first.
Racism isn't just about mere feelings. It's about a group wielding power against others in ways that cause real harm.
That's what has me face-palming. From a purely academic standpoint it's an interesting result. However, what they've done is created a report looking for discrimination based on race, but reported it in a way which could be used by people to justify discrimination based on state of origin (e.g. "those stupid redneck racist Southerners").
It's just as wrong to propagate stereotypes based on region of origin as it is propagate stereotypes based on race. For your "a disproportionate number of racist tweets originated from the South" I will raise you "a disproportionate number of crimes are committed by blacks". The whole point of anti-discrimination is that you're not supposed to extrapolate general trends to automatically attribute those (usually rare) characteristics to a specific individual from the group. Yet this analysis on state of origin of racist tweets has none of the anti-discriminatory safeguards that would pepper a study on the rate of crimes committed by blacks, warning you not to extrapolate this conclusion to any individual member of the group.
395 racist tweets from a 0.05% sample works out to 790,000 racist tweets for the country. Even if you assume each racist only posted one racist tweet max, that's 0.25% of the country overall being racist. For the state with the highest rate (Alabama) that's 2%. In an effort to root out racism, this study is presenting their results in a careless fashion which could be used to justify discrimination and anti-Southerner stereotypes against 98% of Alabama residents because of a small minority of bad apples. It is doing the very thing it is criticizing.
The HP-48 emulator for Android is Droid48. It just got updated with some new skins which I guess are supposed to look better on high-res devices, but look pretty bad on mine. The older skins looked just like my old HP-48S (RIP), so I hope the developer at least gives us the option to use the old skins.
He's got a point though. The dealers act like a union. By aggregating the purchasing power of multiple car buyers, they can negotiate for better pricing from the big corporate manufacturer than if everyone bought from them as individuals.
What's getting you upset is that the dealer-union, instead of passing on the same better price to everyone, plays a negotiating game and rewards those who are better at it with a better price. It's like haggling in moira. A lot of players hated having to haggle in the store to get the best price on loot they got from the dungeon. They requested over and over for a flag to turn it off. One of the developers answered, "There is no need for a flag. If you don't like haggling, then simply don't haggle. Accept the first price the store offers you."
That succinctly revealed that the problem wasn't the haggling itself. The problem was knowing that you weren't getting the best price if you didn't haggle. Likewise, if a manufacturer has no-haggle pricing, then everyone pays the same price. By preventing others from getting a lower price via haggling with a dealer, you create for yourself the artificial peace of mind of knowing that you got the "best" price. Even if that "best" price is significantly higher than what you could have gotten if there were dealers you could haggle with.
I've used both for years. VMWare Workstation is the best IMHO, in terms of features, compatibility, and stability. But it costs $200. VMWare Player is probably as stable as Workstation, but is missing a lot of important features, particularly snapshots.
VirtualBox is a good free alternative that has most of the missing features and I'd give it the nod over VMWare Player if you want free. However, it does not react well to moving VMs. With VMWare you can just move/copy the folder containing the VM and most of the time it'll run just fine in its new location. VirtualBox will throw up all sorts of errors if you do that. You have to export the VM, then import it at the new destination to keep it happy (this takes at least 3x as much time as a straight copy).
The last straw, which made me give up on it a year ago, was a bug which caused a failed shrink to put the virtual disk in an inconsistent state and made it impossible for me to recover the VM. I tried restoring the virtual disk from my backups, but apparently the VM configuration files were stored in a folder I wasn't backing up and I ran into the move/copy problem I mentioned above.
As for a hypervisor-based VM, VMWare vSphere is the most fully-featured free product. Some of the missing features make it a pain to mange though (extremely difficult to backup VMs). And while it gives you snapshot capability, you can't make snapshot trees like you can with Workstation and VirtualBox. And I haven't found it to be as stable as VMWare Workstation. It doesn't react well to VMs which crash or hang in certain ways (I can't power them down or reset them, I have to reboot the physical machine).
Yes, but not being able to conceal an affair doesn't speak well for his performance as a security agent.
It's the other way around. When getting a security clearance, one of the things they look for is any skeletons you have in the closet which could be used to blackmail you. The affair itself is not particularly relevant to his job. What is relevant is that he put himself in a situation where he could potentially have been blackmailed. From best to worst, the possible situations for someone who's supposed to be protecting government secrets is:
No affair
Openly public affair
Affair, initially secret, but now admits to it
Affair, still keeping it secret
I think it is just a sign that the market is no longer really competitive. There are too few vendors left in the business (basically what, 3 actual manufacturers are left now at this point).
Arguably, the state of the HDD industry before the flooding was that it was too competitive. It had some of the lowest margins in the tech industry, resulting in big research names like IBM deciding it wasn't worth it and jettisoning its entire storage division (sold it to Hitachi, who after a decade decided the same and sold it to WD).
So the pricing we're seeing now may actually be closer to where prices should have been for a thriving industry. We're not down to 2.5 manufacturers (Toshiba doesn't make 3.5" drives) because of some grand conspiracy to corner the market on HDDs. We're there because HDD prices were too low for all the other manufacturers to stay afloat, resulting in them merging and being acquired. The extremely low margins meant the process overshot, and there are now fewer manufacturers than you'd expect in a healthy industry.
To be honest, reading the transcript it sounds like both the juror and the court got derailed by the specifics of his answer and forgot to follow up with any other lawsuits he was involved in. An understandable mistake.
But if we follow the precedent Koh set by following the letter of the law and disallowing Samsung's evidence on a technicality, she's gonna have to dismiss this juror and hold a new trial on this technicality.
The core point still stands though - pay for military personnel is not "much better" than it used to be. All government payroll data is freely available. Toss it into a spreadsheet and you can see that the average DoD wage is among the lowest in the government at $47,400/yr. Most of the grunts in the field are going to be in the half of that bell curve below that.
Only federal employees working in "water transport & terminals" get paid less. For comparison, the average for postal workers is 40% higher at $66,500/yr You get paid 40% more for dodging unchained dogs than you do dodging bullets.
They already do that with radio and TV (NK versions only have one or two channels). NK just jams the signals near the borders. From what defectors say, most of their information about the rest of the world actually comes across the border with China.
rates in 2011 were (on average) approx. 0.25 â/kWh (= 0.31 US $ / kWh) [corrected]. 0.036 â of this (0.045 US $) goes to renewable energy sources (mostly wind and solar), which is subsidized by the electricity consumers (NOT by the goverment, as some seem to think). In total, around 45% of the price is taxes and subsidies.
By way of comparison, average retail electricity rate in the U.S. is about 0.11 USD / kWh. It varies by region but that's the national average,
Average production cost for coal is about 0.04 - 0.05 USD / kWh.
Average production cost for nuclear is about 0.05 - 0.07 USD / kWh (and because someone will bring it up, yes this includes construction and decommissioning. Nuclear produces a helluva lot of power for a small amount of waste - powering a U.S. home for 30 years generates about a tablespoon of waste vs. a traincar of coal slag.)
Average production cost for wind is about 0.09 - 0.15 USD / kWh. I've heard some of the newer installations go as low as 0.07.
Average production cost for solar (excluding subsidies) is about 0.25 - 0.45 USD / kWh.
So 0.25 â/kWh is high enough to make even solar occasionally viable. So you have a lot more than 45% taxes, or your power companies are robbing you blind, or you have very inefficient electrical production plants. The penchant for Germany quality actually works against you here, as you waste a lot of money on unneeded quality (e.g. every network cable I saw in Germany was shielded, even the 1 meter ones). So the last explanation is not entirely impossible.
On the other hand, this does answer the question of what negative impact high energy prices will have on the economy of a leading first world nation - not a lot.
Remember that we use less than US households though - the average 3 person household uses approx. 3500 kWh/a.
Average use per home in the U.S. is 11,500 kWh / yr. This is partly due to the average home size in the U.S. being roughly twice that of Germany (2700 sq. ft, or 250 sq. meters vs 125 sq meters).
Any why the hell won't slashdot let me post a Euro symbol in my preview when the gentleman from Germany quite obviously could?
On top of that, higher prices help hasten the recovery. If the price of canned food is allowed to rise in the disaster area, some enterprising person outside but nearby the disaster area is going to head to his local supermarket, buy 500 cans of food for $2/ea, load then into his pickup truck, drive 100 miles to the disaster area, and sell them for $4/ea. The area now has 500 more cans of food than if you'd forced the price to remain at $3/ea. If the price went up to $10/ea, then you'd have hundreds if not thousands of people loading up their cars with canned food and transporting them to the area in need.
Higher prices are the incentive the market uses to alleviate shortages. Eliminate them and you just prolong the shortage.
Pundits were creating the illusion of close races to drive up viewing.
Not exactly. What you say is partly true. But there's another dynamic at play here: when predicting election outcomes, there are two sources of uncertainty, not one.
The first is random sampling error, which is what Nate Silver does an excellent job correcting for.
The second is uncertainty in how likely it is that someone will vote. This means if supporters of a candidate acknowledge that their opponent has a seemingly insurmountable lead in the polls, they create a self-fulfilling prophecy. If their candidate seemingly has no chance, then what's the point of voting for him? His supporters will stay home on election day, and he ends up losing even if the polls were wrong and he was actually in the lead.
So when it comes to elections, you basically have two choices. Hold a gun to everyone's head and force them to vote. Or everyone has to pretend their favored candidate could win, even if the polls show he's losing. When people don't do the latter, you get the situation we have in the U.S. - where people who would really prefer the Libertarian candidate end up voting for a Democrat or Republican. Because everyone "knows" the Libertarian candidate could never win. (There are other ways to combat this, e.g. instant run-off voting, but that's a different discussion.)
Samsung already has a line of tablet-like tablet PCs (i.e. not notebooks which convert into a tablet) which it's been selling for over a year. Given Microsoft's announcement of Windows for ARM, it's hardly surprising that Samsung is prepping for an ARM version to go with its Intel version.
It's not supposed to be a fair comparison. It's supposed to be 2012Q3 sales figures. The press is trying to spin it into a story. If you want just the raw numbers from TFA:
Galaxy S3: 18 million
iPhone 4GS: 16.2 million
iPhone 5: 6 million
Slashdot Mirror
I'm finding it virtually impossible to use Win 8 in a VM. It works fine running full-screen, but I run my VMs in a window because the whole point of running a VM is so I can run it along with other stuff. Unfortunately, accessing anything in Win 8 which used to be in the Start menu requires you to move the mouse to a corner of the screen to bring up a pop-up menu. This is easy in full screen mode. It's nearly impossible of it's running inside a VM as the moment your mouse passes the corner and leaves the VM window, it stops updating its position within the VM so it never reaches the corner, and the menu doesn't pop up.
No, it was time. Historically, Microsoft has about a 2.5 to 3-year release period between OSes.
1990 - Windows 3.0
1992 - Windows 3.1
1995 - Windows 95
1998 - Windows 98
(2000 - Windows ME but everyone pretends it didn't exist)
2001 - Windows XP
2007 - Windows Vista
2009 - Windows 7
2012 - Windows 8
They actually caught a lot of flak for the 5.25 years between XP and Vista. Many companies signed up for 3-year Microsoft support contracts after buying Windows XP, on the assurance of Microsoft salesmen that cost of upgrading their XP boxes to the next version of Windows would be included. When Microsoft took so long to ship Vista, they accused MS of collecting their OS ugprade money up-front, then deliberately slipping the OS ship date to beyond the contract so they'd be forced to pay for OS upgrades again. So they pretty much need to ship a new OS at least every 3 years to keep their customers on support contracts happy.
That too is an anachronism which needs to die, at least for online digital sales. Territorial distribution rights made sense when each distributor wasn't physically capable of supplying your product beyond a certain area. You needed territorial distribution rights to prevent conflicts between the multitude of distributors needed to insure thorough availability.
But there is no sense of distance nor territory on the Internet. If you can sell an MP3 to the guy down the street over the Internet, you can sell and deliver it to anywhere in the world just as easily.
No, the fifth amendment just means refusing to turn in your DNA is not evidence of guilt. They can investigate whomever they want (which is why a lot of innocent people get arrested/convicted - overly aggressive detectives and prosecutors convinced that some WAG theory is correct, DNA or not). The cases which are thrown out for fifth amendment violation prior to trial are the ones where a suspect refuses to answer them / give DNA (i.e. legally invokes his fifth amendment right), and the investigators continue to cajole him until he relents and changes his mind.
If they systematically went over the records to find everyone who lived in the area at the time of the murder, used DNA to eliminate 96% of them, and concentrated their investigation on the remaining 4%, there wouldn't be a problem with that. If he refused or they weren't able to get a DNA sample from him legally, then they couldn't mention that to a jury as a reason that he's probably guilty. They'd have to convict him based on other non-DNA evidence, but that's how murder trials were decided for centuries.
To be fair, MS and NS also dragged W3C kicking and screaming into implementing features a lot of web developers wanted. Early on, W3C seemed to want the web to be a purely hyperlinked infosphere - a informational nirvana with just text and pictures, but no layout or design. Many commercial developers wanted to tools to make their sites pretty like sales brochures. W3C didn't want that, and dragged their feet implementing a lot of the features needed to implement that. (The age-old debate between should a web page appear on your browser like the author intended? Or as your browser decides is the best way to display? The best answer like most things appears to be somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.)
In the end though, you have to ask yourself - why are they doing it? NS did it to try to remain the top browser. MS did it to try to make the entire web a proprietary MS ASP extension (thus bolstering Windows sales). So the real question we should be asking is, why is WebKit doing it?
Just curious if you also think it's an "issue" that the ACLU purports to protect the Bill of Rights in general, yet is conspicuously silent about the Second Amendment.
I've long since decided that there is no perfect organization. Every one is always looking out to defend only the things they're interested in defending, which is their freedom to do. As long as on the whole it ends up defending liberties like freedom of speech from the egregious violations, it's all good. Don't use faults in the messenger as an excuse to ignore what may be a perfectly valid message.
Think about it. By definition the number of downloads has to equal the number of uploads. So if there were n people sharing a song, on average they uploaded n/n = 1 copy each.
Dock his allowance (fine him) for the cost of the one song; treble damages for willful copyright violation if you like. Anything above that is silly.
Wow. That sort of attitude will just result in you (and the U.S.) becoming a bit player in the future world economy. You arrive at precisely the wrong conclusion.
I was browsing the home pages of the Android apps that I use and discovered that many - including most of my favorites - are actually Chinese apps. The Chinese developers just took the time and effort to make an English-customized version of their native Chinese apps. This sort of language-flexibility greatly increased their apps' marketability and their profits.
So you can either tackle the global marketplace head-on and do the hard things that are needed to compete in it and maximize your apps' appeal. Or you can just throw your hands up in defeat because it's too hard, and stick to what's easiest. You wanna know what's a good investment? Paying someone a few hundred bucks to help with language customizations which will make your app marketable to a billion more people.
The source of his numbers (NetMarketshare) deviates significantly from the two other main sources of these types of stats. You can see the same effect in desktop browser market share, where NetMarketshare still shows IE having a huge lead while the other two show all three browsers (IE, Chrome, FF) closer to evenly split.
Statcounter doesn't correct for unique visitors (which is makes no difference in the context of this debate), but draws from a data pool approximately 3 orders of magnitude larger than NetMarketshare. You can pick through the individual descriptions on the wiki of how the data is collected and massaged and draw your own conclusions. If I had to guess, NetMarketshare's different numbers probably come about because they're weighting by country to try to compensate for their smaller data set.
Read the CBO reports; you know, the recommendations for balancing the budget put forth by a nonpartisan government office whose sole purpose is to analyze the budget and put together budget recommendations. Most of the deficit/debt is due to rising cost of social programs (primarily Medicare/Medicaid). You can read the CBO long-term outlooks all the way back to 2000. They all say the same thing - Medicare/Medicaid expenses are going to blow up and we need to do something about it, Medicare/Medicaid expenses are going to blow up and we need to do something about it. Well we didn't do anything about it, and here we are.
Or you can continue with the misguided belief that everything can be fixed by cutting military spending, thus assuring economic catastrophe (on our present course, Medicare/Medicaid will consume all tax revenue in about 50 years). The annual deficit has exceeded the entire military budget for several years now, so even if you reduced military spending to zero we'd still have a deficit.
You don't even need to bring externalities into this. If we burn $100 worth of oil to squeeze out $120 worth of shale oil, that's $100 worth of energy which is converted to entropy.
If we instead pay Saudi Arabia $120 and they spend $15 pumping out an equivalent amount of oil, that's only $15 worth of energy which is converted to entropy. The remaining $105 the Saudis are free to use to build things. We may not like what they're building, but it's still doing something more constructive with it than turning it into waste heat.
Purely from the standpoint of economic efficiency, we're better off using the cheapest-to-acquire energy first. Externalities can tip it further in this favor (or against in the case of renewables), but even if you had no externalities the apolitical preference would still be to use the cheaper-to-pump oil first.
That's what has me face-palming. From a purely academic standpoint it's an interesting result. However, what they've done is created a report looking for discrimination based on race, but reported it in a way which could be used by people to justify discrimination based on state of origin (e.g. "those stupid redneck racist Southerners").
It's just as wrong to propagate stereotypes based on region of origin as it is propagate stereotypes based on race. For your "a disproportionate number of racist tweets originated from the South" I will raise you "a disproportionate number of crimes are committed by blacks". The whole point of anti-discrimination is that you're not supposed to extrapolate general trends to automatically attribute those (usually rare) characteristics to a specific individual from the group. Yet this analysis on state of origin of racist tweets has none of the anti-discriminatory safeguards that would pepper a study on the rate of crimes committed by blacks, warning you not to extrapolate this conclusion to any individual member of the group.
395 racist tweets from a 0.05% sample works out to 790,000 racist tweets for the country. Even if you assume each racist only posted one racist tweet max, that's 0.25% of the country overall being racist. For the state with the highest rate (Alabama) that's 2%. In an effort to root out racism, this study is presenting their results in a careless fashion which could be used to justify discrimination and anti-Southerner stereotypes against 98% of Alabama residents because of a small minority of bad apples. It is doing the very thing it is criticizing.
The HP-48 emulator for Android is Droid48. It just got updated with some new skins which I guess are supposed to look better on high-res devices, but look pretty bad on mine. The older skins looked just like my old HP-48S (RIP), so I hope the developer at least gives us the option to use the old skins.
He's got a point though. The dealers act like a union. By aggregating the purchasing power of multiple car buyers, they can negotiate for better pricing from the big corporate manufacturer than if everyone bought from them as individuals.
What's getting you upset is that the dealer-union, instead of passing on the same better price to everyone, plays a negotiating game and rewards those who are better at it with a better price. It's like haggling in moira. A lot of players hated having to haggle in the store to get the best price on loot they got from the dungeon. They requested over and over for a flag to turn it off. One of the developers answered, "There is no need for a flag. If you don't like haggling, then simply don't haggle. Accept the first price the store offers you."
That succinctly revealed that the problem wasn't the haggling itself. The problem was knowing that you weren't getting the best price if you didn't haggle. Likewise, if a manufacturer has no-haggle pricing, then everyone pays the same price. By preventing others from getting a lower price via haggling with a dealer, you create for yourself the artificial peace of mind of knowing that you got the "best" price. Even if that "best" price is significantly higher than what you could have gotten if there were dealers you could haggle with.
I've used both for years. VMWare Workstation is the best IMHO, in terms of features, compatibility, and stability. But it costs $200. VMWare Player is probably as stable as Workstation, but is missing a lot of important features, particularly snapshots.
VirtualBox is a good free alternative that has most of the missing features and I'd give it the nod over VMWare Player if you want free. However, it does not react well to moving VMs. With VMWare you can just move/copy the folder containing the VM and most of the time it'll run just fine in its new location. VirtualBox will throw up all sorts of errors if you do that. You have to export the VM, then import it at the new destination to keep it happy (this takes at least 3x as much time as a straight copy).
The last straw, which made me give up on it a year ago, was a bug which caused a failed shrink to put the virtual disk in an inconsistent state and made it impossible for me to recover the VM. I tried restoring the virtual disk from my backups, but apparently the VM configuration files were stored in a folder I wasn't backing up and I ran into the move/copy problem I mentioned above.
As for a hypervisor-based VM, VMWare vSphere is the most fully-featured free product. Some of the missing features make it a pain to mange though (extremely difficult to backup VMs). And while it gives you snapshot capability, you can't make snapshot trees like you can with Workstation and VirtualBox. And I haven't found it to be as stable as VMWare Workstation. It doesn't react well to VMs which crash or hang in certain ways (I can't power them down or reset them, I have to reboot the physical machine).
It's the other way around. When getting a security clearance, one of the things they look for is any skeletons you have in the closet which could be used to blackmail you. The affair itself is not particularly relevant to his job. What is relevant is that he put himself in a situation where he could potentially have been blackmailed. From best to worst, the possible situations for someone who's supposed to be protecting government secrets is:
No affair
Openly public affair
Affair, initially secret, but now admits to it
Affair, still keeping it secret
Arguably, the state of the HDD industry before the flooding was that it was too competitive. It had some of the lowest margins in the tech industry, resulting in big research names like IBM deciding it wasn't worth it and jettisoning its entire storage division (sold it to Hitachi, who after a decade decided the same and sold it to WD).
So the pricing we're seeing now may actually be closer to where prices should have been for a thriving industry. We're not down to 2.5 manufacturers (Toshiba doesn't make 3.5" drives) because of some grand conspiracy to corner the market on HDDs. We're there because HDD prices were too low for all the other manufacturers to stay afloat, resulting in them merging and being acquired. The extremely low margins meant the process overshot, and there are now fewer manufacturers than you'd expect in a healthy industry.
To be honest, reading the transcript it sounds like both the juror and the court got derailed by the specifics of his answer and forgot to follow up with any other lawsuits he was involved in. An understandable mistake.
But if we follow the precedent Koh set by following the letter of the law and disallowing Samsung's evidence on a technicality, she's gonna have to dismiss this juror and hold a new trial on this technicality.
The core point still stands though - pay for military personnel is not "much better" than it used to be. All government payroll data is freely available. Toss it into a spreadsheet and you can see that the average DoD wage is among the lowest in the government at $47,400/yr. Most of the grunts in the field are going to be in the half of that bell curve below that.
Only federal employees working in "water transport & terminals" get paid less. For comparison, the average for postal workers is 40% higher at $66,500/yr You get paid 40% more for dodging unchained dogs than you do dodging bullets.
They already do that with radio and TV (NK versions only have one or two channels). NK just jams the signals near the borders. From what defectors say, most of their information about the rest of the world actually comes across the border with China.
By way of comparison, average retail electricity rate in the U.S. is about 0.11 USD / kWh. It varies by region but that's the national average,
So 0.25 â/kWh is high enough to make even solar occasionally viable. So you have a lot more than 45% taxes, or your power companies are robbing you blind, or you have very inefficient electrical production plants. The penchant for Germany quality actually works against you here, as you waste a lot of money on unneeded quality (e.g. every network cable I saw in Germany was shielded, even the 1 meter ones). So the last explanation is not entirely impossible.
On the other hand, this does answer the question of what negative impact high energy prices will have on the economy of a leading first world nation - not a lot.
Average use per home in the U.S. is 11,500 kWh / yr. This is partly due to the average home size in the U.S. being roughly twice that of Germany (2700 sq. ft, or 250 sq. meters vs 125 sq meters).
Any why the hell won't slashdot let me post a Euro symbol in my preview when the gentleman from Germany quite obviously could?
On top of that, higher prices help hasten the recovery. If the price of canned food is allowed to rise in the disaster area, some enterprising person outside but nearby the disaster area is going to head to his local supermarket, buy 500 cans of food for $2/ea, load then into his pickup truck, drive 100 miles to the disaster area, and sell them for $4/ea. The area now has 500 more cans of food than if you'd forced the price to remain at $3/ea. If the price went up to $10/ea, then you'd have hundreds if not thousands of people loading up their cars with canned food and transporting them to the area in need.
Higher prices are the incentive the market uses to alleviate shortages. Eliminate them and you just prolong the shortage.
Not exactly. What you say is partly true. But there's another dynamic at play here: when predicting election outcomes, there are two sources of uncertainty, not one.
The first is random sampling error, which is what Nate Silver does an excellent job correcting for.
The second is uncertainty in how likely it is that someone will vote. This means if supporters of a candidate acknowledge that their opponent has a seemingly insurmountable lead in the polls, they create a self-fulfilling prophecy. If their candidate seemingly has no chance, then what's the point of voting for him? His supporters will stay home on election day, and he ends up losing even if the polls were wrong and he was actually in the lead.
So when it comes to elections, you basically have two choices. Hold a gun to everyone's head and force them to vote. Or everyone has to pretend their favored candidate could win, even if the polls show he's losing. When people don't do the latter, you get the situation we have in the U.S. - where people who would really prefer the Libertarian candidate end up voting for a Democrat or Republican. Because everyone "knows" the Libertarian candidate could never win. (There are other ways to combat this, e.g. instant run-off voting, but that's a different discussion.)
Samsung already has a line of tablet-like tablet PCs (i.e. not notebooks which convert into a tablet) which it's been selling for over a year. Given Microsoft's announcement of Windows for ARM, it's hardly surprising that Samsung is prepping for an ARM version to go with its Intel version.
It's not supposed to be a fair comparison. It's supposed to be 2012Q3 sales figures. The press is trying to spin it into a story. If you want just the raw numbers from TFA:
Galaxy S3: 18 million
iPhone 4GS: 16.2 million
iPhone 5: 6 million