In theory, a program could add a revision for every keystroke. But if you want to revert to a previous revision, it'd be tedious to find the right revision that way.
Possibly true for word processors. But Lightroom saves every modification step you make to a photo (unless you choose to prune them), and it is wonderful. I can instantly compare the current version of a photo to any previous version. It would be cooler if they implemented edit trees instead of saving just a single linear edit path, but there's plenty of time in the future for that.
Americans that never venture out of America tend to think a free national health service is a terrible thought. [...]
It's the difference between ignorant and worldly wise.
Calling it a free health care system is ignorant. Those who are worldly wise would call it government-required health insurance funded by taxes.
I don't really care where people stand on the health care debate. I can see either private or public systems working to a certain extent. But characterizing government-sponsored health care as "free" is self-delusional best case, deliberately deceptive worst-case. It's not free. If you think it is, you're ignorant of how you're paying for it.
In my experience, their situation has absolutely nothing to do with not wanting to work. I get so sick of hearing ignorant pricks say some lame line like "work at McDonalds." There is no unlimited supply of jobs available anywhere. The poor want jobs - badly. They want to work, and do so when they can.
I worked at and eventually became a manager at a company which hired predominantly low-income workers. I got to work with and talk with quite a few of them, as well as interview countless others. The poor run the full gamut. Some want badly to work (the hardest worker I've ever met was poor, and - I later learned - an illegal immigrant). Some are lazy bums who will slack off the moment they don't have any supervision (we had to let one guy go because he was too lazy to even show up for work most days - it took him three weeks to pick up his first and only paycheck despite us calling him every 2-3 days because he was too lazy to drop by).
On average I would say the poor have a weaker work ethic and are harder to manage than middle- and upper-class folks. They are enthusiastic when they talk, and the first few days at work. But as the weeks wear on, their performance starts to drop. You have to micromanage them more (on average). That's partly what keeps them poor. Many of them also suffer from circumstances outside their control which keeps them down - severe allergies, an uncontrollable temper, physical handicaps which limits their ability to get manual labor jobs, kids and the inability to find babysitters, a criminal record from some stupid mistakes fresh out of high school, etc.
So on average I'd say GP is slightly correct. But the poor run the full gamut and it's horribly unfair to pre-judge them all based on the average. You really do have to get to know each individual and their quirks. If they have a good work ethic but are held back by circumstances, once you get to know them you can often match them up with jobs which minimize the impact of their impediment. e.g. The guy who had a bad temper loved animals, so we had him tending horses. He absolutely loved that, and it reduced his contact with other workers thus minimizing opportunity for his temper to become a problem. And many of the younger ones with a poor work ethic can be turned around with some good management and encouragement.
Your statement positively oozes contempt for people you quite obviously have no clue about. In my mind, anyone who sneers at a human being because of their poverty is worse than a card-carrying KKK neo-nazi. It's every bit as prejudiced as the belief that a person's color has anything to do with their character.
Given Slashdot's political leanings, I'd point out that the exact same thing is true for rich people. You shouldn't sneer at a human being because of their wealth either. Most of the wealthy people and especially the few millionaires I know are some of the hardest working people I've ever met.
It's wrong to assume poor people are lazy, and it's wrong to assume rich people are undeserving fat cats who simply take advantage of others. You really do need to avoid these prejudices and get to know each person individually.
I wouldn't have made this post a few weeks ago, but reading other people's comments about hydrogen fuel made it painfully obvious that many people have a fundamental misunderstanding about how the hydrogen economy works: There is no free energy. You cannot convert water into hydrogen with little energy, then burn the hydrogen with oxygen to get lots of energy.
The amount of energy you put in to break water into hydrogen and oxygen has to be more than the energy you get out when you burn (or combine via a fuel cell) the hydrogen with oxygen. There is no getting around this; it is simple thermodynamics. This is why many people refer to hydrogen as a battery, not as a fuel. Free hydrogen is exceptionally rare to find, so when you manufacture atomic hydrogen gas you're storing energy in it like in a battery. When you burn the hydrogen, you're extracting that energy like from a battery.
With electrolysis, typically you're looking at about 50%-70% of the energy you put in ending up in the hydrogen gas. The rest is converted into waste heat. With a non-research grade fuel cell, you're looking at about 50%-70% efficiency there as well (the rest going to waste heat). So for the cycle overall, you're at 25%-50% efficiency. That is, only 25%-50% of the energy you put in to create the hydrogen ends up actually doing useful work, which is absolutely abysmal for a battery.
The cost of materials like platinum is also a bit misleading. The platinum is not consumed during the electrolysis process. While the high cost of platinum does affect the cost of the device used to generate hydrogen, it has no effect on the cost of the hydrogen gas itself. Almost the entirety of the cost of hydrogen gas is the energy used to create it by cracking water.
That was the old theory. The problem with studying the cosmology of star systems is that until recently we only had a sample of one. When they started finding planets orbiting other stars, they tended to be gas giants because of the methods used (orbit perturbations, light falloff due to occultations). But a surprising number of these gas giants orbit closely around their parent star. IIRC one has an orbit whose period is a few Earth-weeks. At this point, I think you can say all bets are off.
Some relevant data here (per pupil spending):
US average - $10499
Alabama - $8870
California - $9657
Mississippi - $8075
You'd be surprised, but California is really not spending a lot on their kids either. The places that are spending a lot:
DC - $16408
New Jersey - $16271
New York - $18126
Alaska - $15552
Vermont - $15175
For comparison to your 2008-2009 data, here's the 2008 data for OECD countries (PPP so local cost of living is taken into account, data is from this page):
Australia - $7814
Canada - $8388
France - $8559
Germany - $7859
Italy - $9071
Japan - $8301
S. Korea - $6723
Poland - $4682 (the U.S. educational results are closest to Poland's)
Spain - $8522
Sweden - $9524
U.K. - $9169
Denmark - $10429
Austria - $10994
U.S. - $10995
Norway - $12070
Switzerland - $13775
Luxembourg - $16909
As for how the students perform in school vs. amount spent, refer to chart B7.2 on this spreadsheet. Basically, only Italy gets worse test results per dollar spent on each student. So yeah by U.S. standards California is "really not spending a lot on their kids". But compared to other OECD countries, California's spending is well above average. These results suck any way you cut them.
One would hope that the logic and reasoning could be taught in an hour or two, maybe refreshed and reinforced a few minutes each day. Teaching the facts is what takes up the bulk of the time.
this detects only that you are touching an object, not where
Seems like that would be pretty easy to add with some sort of capacitive (or possibly even resistive) gradient mesh overlaid on top of the surface you wanted to turn into a touchscreen. A touch in one location would then generate a different frequency response than a touch in a different location. If the mesh has orthogonal signal gradient curves along orthogonal physical axes, you can get 2D and 3D touch location data.
Unlike a regular touchscreen, you could reverse the mesh and add it to the object doing the touching. Add something to your middle finger so it generates a different response than your index finger. So if you touch the screen with the index finger it does the regular select and drag. But if you touch it with your middle finger it pops up a menu (like a second mouse button).
In this case, you don't need government to judge what's good or bad for you. Just make a law requiring what you sell to match what you advertise. If they only want to use anorexic models in their clothing ads, then they can only sell clothing which fits anorexic models. If they want to sell different sizes, well then they need to use different size models in their ads.
The unspoken disconnect here is that the fashion industry isn't selling clothing. So any arguments based on "I should be able to advertise my clothing any way I like" don't hold. The industry is selling an image, of which the clothing is just a part. An image which is far disconnected from reality. Force that image to match what they're really selling and the problem goes away.
Yeah, Costo/Walmart is the way to go. The $20,000 photo printers they use are the same ones they use for film. If you get a roll of negatives developed there, they don't actually print them by shining light through them. They scan the film and send the scan to the digital film printer. The paper is the same Kodak/Fuji film print paper as they use for photos on negatives.
If you're handy with Photoshop, you can even download icc color profiles for the photo printer at your nearest Costco/Walmart. Use it to preview/tweak your photo so it'll look just the way you want once printed.
This is nothing new. Most of the airport security personnel I've met have been courteous, but there are a few who seem to be there for the power trip. They will insist that they are right even when it's obvious they're wrong and/or the law is on your side..
In the late 1990s during a transfer in London, I had to be screened again (this was shortly after some terrorists had tried to slip aboard some bombs by tweaking luggage tags to get them aboard planes they weren't boarding). I used an HP LX200 as my PDA, and I knew its static memory didn't react well to x-rays. It had been corrupted enough to require a reboot with data loss the first time I sent it through an x-ray machine, so I always put it into a separate tray and requested a hand inspection. I requested a hand inspection as usual, and according to the security agent apparently they don't do those in the U.K. I argued with him briefly, explaining that I knew passing it through the x-ray machine could wipe its memory. He insisted that I had to put it through if I wanted to board my flight, at which point I relented. It went through, and the memory got corrupted as expected.
Prior to that, it was usually about film. Anyone who's had a high school science class knows x-rays will expose film. Apparently, many airport security agents never took a high school science course. By law in the U.S., you're allowed to request film be hand-inspected. But sift through the archives of any of the older (film) photography forums, and you'll find countless horror stories about airport security insisting on sending the film through the x-ray machine. The BBC and David Attenborough lost 5 weeks of film shot in Papua New Guinea for the Life of Birds series that way.
This privilege is valuable to working class families that have a lot of kids but not a lot of savings
This "privilege" is why these families don't have a lot of savings. Rather than save up their money for 12.5 months before buying, they go for the instant gratification option which comes at a higher cost and thus helps keeps them in the low income working class. They've survived all these years without an Xbox 360. Why do they suddenly need one Right Now?
I can understand taking a loan for purchases which require years or decades of saving (car, house). But if someone lacks the discipline to save up for a year for an entertainment purchase, they are better off learning that discipline. It makes no sense to complain how the 1% are keeping you down when you willingly give them your money.
As the summary states the colleges are not owed any money, therefore they hve Zero grounds to hold hostage the record of the students 4-5 years. They are committing a crime (charged money but did not provide the final document promised in the contract).
Do realize that the natural conclusion from this line of reasoning is that school degrees paid for with a loan will become like cars bought with a loan. Just as the loaning bank holds the title of your car until you pay off the loan, the banks/government will require the school to transfer all copies of your transcript over to them, neatly cutting the schools out of your equation.
I agree it's a crappy thing for the government to pressure schools to do, but it's not at all like the analogy the NYU prof has put forth. It's more like buying a lawnmower for your landscaping business on a loan, then not repaying the loan. Just because the bank repossesses the lawnmower does not mean they're depriving you of your ability to get work. It just means you cannot use the lawnmower to help you find landscaping work, at least until you start making the loan payments.
The students are not unable to work (that would be like debtor's prison). They can find work just as easily as any other able-bodied person. They just cannot find work which takes advantage of their degree which they haven't been paying for.
The problem is that subsidized loans are probably the absolute worst way to make college available to more people. A loan distorts the supply-demand model by allowing people to shift money from the future into the present. What happens when people suddenly have more money to spend on something with a limited supply? The price goes up. As tuitions have been, far outpacing the rate of inflation.
Loans for college are a demand-side solution. We allow time-shifting of money to increase demand, more money flows to colleges, and in response colleges expand and more colleges get built. At least that's how it's supposed to work in theory. What's actually been happening is that big-name colleges have a monopoly on their name. So instead of increasing supply (hiring more professors and and admitting more students), they've just been ratcheting up their tuitions to match the increased availability of money due to loans. Then they use the higher tuitions as circular reasoning for why we need more loans.
We need a supply-side solution. One that makes college available to more people by increasing supply directly. e.g. Cut off student loans, put the money into public universities instead. Yeah it's not perfect - poor kids won't be able to get into expensive private colleges. But it's a damn sight better than inflating tuition prices for everyone by 200%-300%, and consigning poor students to a decade or more of debt after they graduate. At this point, we need to use the public universities to exert downward pressure on the market price of tuition to fix the damage done by decades of cheap school loans.
This is just taking the rating system on online stores like Amazon or Newegg, and making them viewable in meat-space. It's got the same problems (sample bias - fake reviews by astroturfers, overrepresentation of people who like to submit reviews, multiple reviews by those wanting to game the system), plus a few new ones (using Facebook means no way to verify if the person giving the like has actually bought/worn the product, someone in the store can switch hangers, you have no way to tell if the store is accurately reporting the data or is hyping up inventory it wants to get rid of, etc).
Long-term, I think scanning the barcode for the product with your phone to get online reviews will win out.
Public and Scientific earth viewing satellites are dwindling. The military has plenty of money to launch all they need.
*Poof* You have your wish. The military budget is now zero. And we still have a $610 billion budget deficit.
Can we please stop derailing any budget/financing debate with the misguided notion that everything can be fixed by cutting military spending? The problem is that the government spends way, way more than it takes in, period. Military spending is just a part of the problem, not the sole problem. It's not even the main problem if you believe the CBO reports (heresy, I know). Medicare and Medicaid are.
Nope. LTE is part of the GSM family - CDMA has functionally dead-ended (at least in the US) with EVDO Rev B. It seems like it's a convergence because you will eventually finally have all four major US carriers using a single 4G technology.
The attempts by people to badmouth CDMA never cease to amaze me. The original GSM was based on the horribly inefficient TDMA. Basically, the phones took turns talking to the tower, even if they had nothing to say. You got the same limited bandwidth whether you were the only phone connected to the tower, or if the tower were at capacity. If there were more phones than timeslices, you couldn't connect, period.
CDMA allows all phones to transmit simultaneously, they just use orthogonal codes which allow the tower to decipher which signal came from which phone. It's computationally more expensive, but it allows a single phone to use all the bandwidth if there are no other phones, while distributing the bandwidth equally if there are multiple phones. If there are more phones transmitting than bandwidth, you start getting dropouts (the volatility of SNR means there's no hard limit at which this happens, as with TDMA).
When carriers started adding data services, GSM was borked due to TDMA's inefficiency. That's why CDMA carriers rolled out 2G and 3G service about a year sooner than GSM carriers. GSM was forced to graft on a separate non-TDMA radio just to handle data traffic. (This is also why you can talk and use data simultaneously on GSM - the phones have two radios, one for voice, one for data. It's not a feature; it's a side-benefit to a fix which CDMA never needed. Most CDMA phones just have one radio which handles both voice and data.) The later GSM 3g data protocols used wideband CDMA. That's right, CDMA won - it was the better technology for data. GSM just incorporated it into their standard so it was still called GSM. If LTE is CDMA functionally dead-ending, then GSM dead-ended way back when cellular data services were first added.
What's happening with LTE is that most implementations are opting for OFDMA. OFDMA can squeeze in more bandwidth than CDMA, but requires even more processing power. Until recently, microprocessors weren't powerful enough to decode it on a cell phone without severely impacting battery life (this is the reason early LTE implementations have a reputation for being power hogs). Because it's OFDMA, it requires a different radio. That's old hat for GSM phones - just add a third radio for LTE. But it's something new for CDMA phones - CDMA radio for voice and 3g data, add a second radio for LTE. (And yes, this means you can talk and use LTE data simultaneously on a CDMA phone.)
GSM and CDMA have nothing to do with LTE technologically; it is just the standard they've decided to use for 4g data. In both cases, a completely new radio has to be added to the phone to handle LTE traffic. GSM using LTE is not a concession to CDMA, and CDMA using LTE is not a concession to GSM. Theoretically, if you expanded the operating frequencies, an LTE tower should be able to service 4g data for both GSM and CDMA phones (the whole point of LTE was to standardize a lot of the underlying technologies for compatibility). But until GSM ditches TDMA for voice and/or CDMA ditches CDMA for voice, there will be no convergence.
To be fair, has there been any evidence that this was condoned and coordinated at a high level in the Conservative party? Even the summary implicates a single IP address. That would seem to suggest it was the brainchild of a single or few rogue members, not the party overall.
You're dealing with a large organization in a very free society. It's very possible someone in the party is guilty of doing this, but the leadership is telling the truth when they proclaim innocence. Because it's political, there's a tendency for people who disagree with the politics to automatically assume any corruption goes all the way to the top.
But as soon as you extrapolate their production capacity to equal that of current coal and nuclear plants, you find that their empirical accident and fatality rate is no longer insignificant.
The problem here isn't that nuclear is risky. Everything we do has risks. The problem is that we're judging the risks of the alternatives based on their current (minuscule) capacity. Their aggregate risk falls underneath our alarm threshold, so gets ignored. Then proposing those alternatives be scaled up 20-100x to replace nuclear, under the assumption that their aggregate risk will remain the same instead of also scaling up 20-100x.
Once you scale up their risk along with capacity (basically assume all power sources generate the same amount of power), you find that they're actually more dangerous than nuclear.
I haven't owned a Drobo so I can't comment on the quality or functionality. But QNAP and Synology are generally considered the leaders in the NAS market. SmallNetBuilder has pretty thorough coverage and benchmarks of your NAS options.
If you don't need a NAS, just some form of aggregate storage, non-networked alternatives are made by Mediasonic and Sans Digital. In my case I just needed something to throw my old drives in and power it on every couple weeks to backup my ZFS file server. So one of these connected via USB 3.0 or eSATA worked just fine.
And if the GBP goes back up to 1.5 Euro, they'll fix it by lowering the price again, right? No? Whaddaya mean it needs to be fixed by raising the price in Euros?
I tend to fall on Google's side on this (because other companies do the same thing or worse; Google only got "caught" because they did the honest thing and publicly admitted their mistake). But placing blame entirely on people who fail to encrypt their wireless is going too far in Google's favor. If I don't lock the door to my house, yeah it's my fault if I get robbed. But that doesn't make the robbery legal.
If you find a neighbor's wifi network is open, that doesn't give you carte blanche to use it and snoop their devices and data; especially in the countries where privacy laws afford some protection against that sort of snooping. This spills over into a grey area regarding data on encrypted networks. What happens if I record your encrypted wifi data, and 10 years from now computers have gotten fast enough that what was sufficient encryption at the time of the recording can be broken in a few seconds? Do I get to say "tough, you broadcast that data on public airwaves using insufficient protection; it's now mine to do with as I wish"?
Your private data has to be afforded some legal protection regardless of the amount or strength of encryption. The dividing line has to be whether the user had an expectation of privacy when transmitting that data. I think most courts would buy the argument that you don't have an expectation of privacy only on openly public networks (e.g. Starbucks). I think wifi is new enough for non-tech people that for a home network, most courts would agree the owner had an expectation of privacy even if he failed to turn encryption on.
I think what confuses people is that most of the Constitution outlines what the Federal government can do. Per the 10th Amendment, powers not granted to the Federal government are reserved for the States and the People. So States are free to take upon themselves powers not granted to the Federal government by the Constitution.
The few Amendments outlining what the Federal government can't do are different. The Constitution, being the highest law in the land, extends these prohibitions to the States as well.
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Possibly true for word processors. But Lightroom saves every modification step you make to a photo (unless you choose to prune them), and it is wonderful. I can instantly compare the current version of a photo to any previous version. It would be cooler if they implemented edit trees instead of saving just a single linear edit path, but there's plenty of time in the future for that.
Calling it a free health care system is ignorant. Those who are worldly wise would call it government-required health insurance funded by taxes.
I don't really care where people stand on the health care debate. I can see either private or public systems working to a certain extent. But characterizing government-sponsored health care as "free" is self-delusional best case, deliberately deceptive worst-case. It's not free. If you think it is, you're ignorant of how you're paying for it.
I worked at and eventually became a manager at a company which hired predominantly low-income workers. I got to work with and talk with quite a few of them, as well as interview countless others. The poor run the full gamut. Some want badly to work (the hardest worker I've ever met was poor, and - I later learned - an illegal immigrant). Some are lazy bums who will slack off the moment they don't have any supervision (we had to let one guy go because he was too lazy to even show up for work most days - it took him three weeks to pick up his first and only paycheck despite us calling him every 2-3 days because he was too lazy to drop by).
On average I would say the poor have a weaker work ethic and are harder to manage than middle- and upper-class folks. They are enthusiastic when they talk, and the first few days at work. But as the weeks wear on, their performance starts to drop. You have to micromanage them more (on average). That's partly what keeps them poor. Many of them also suffer from circumstances outside their control which keeps them down - severe allergies, an uncontrollable temper, physical handicaps which limits their ability to get manual labor jobs, kids and the inability to find babysitters, a criminal record from some stupid mistakes fresh out of high school, etc.
So on average I'd say GP is slightly correct. But the poor run the full gamut and it's horribly unfair to pre-judge them all based on the average. You really do have to get to know each individual and their quirks. If they have a good work ethic but are held back by circumstances, once you get to know them you can often match them up with jobs which minimize the impact of their impediment. e.g. The guy who had a bad temper loved animals, so we had him tending horses. He absolutely loved that, and it reduced his contact with other workers thus minimizing opportunity for his temper to become a problem. And many of the younger ones with a poor work ethic can be turned around with some good management and encouragement.
Given Slashdot's political leanings, I'd point out that the exact same thing is true for rich people. You shouldn't sneer at a human being because of their wealth either. Most of the wealthy people and especially the few millionaires I know are some of the hardest working people I've ever met.
It's wrong to assume poor people are lazy, and it's wrong to assume rich people are undeserving fat cats who simply take advantage of others. You really do need to avoid these prejudices and get to know each person individually.
I wouldn't have made this post a few weeks ago, but reading other people's comments about hydrogen fuel made it painfully obvious that many people have a fundamental misunderstanding about how the hydrogen economy works: There is no free energy. You cannot convert water into hydrogen with little energy, then burn the hydrogen with oxygen to get lots of energy.
The amount of energy you put in to break water into hydrogen and oxygen has to be more than the energy you get out when you burn (or combine via a fuel cell) the hydrogen with oxygen. There is no getting around this; it is simple thermodynamics. This is why many people refer to hydrogen as a battery, not as a fuel. Free hydrogen is exceptionally rare to find, so when you manufacture atomic hydrogen gas you're storing energy in it like in a battery. When you burn the hydrogen, you're extracting that energy like from a battery.
With electrolysis, typically you're looking at about 50%-70% of the energy you put in ending up in the hydrogen gas. The rest is converted into waste heat. With a non-research grade fuel cell, you're looking at about 50%-70% efficiency there as well (the rest going to waste heat). So for the cycle overall, you're at 25%-50% efficiency. That is, only 25%-50% of the energy you put in to create the hydrogen ends up actually doing useful work, which is absolutely abysmal for a battery.
The cost of materials like platinum is also a bit misleading. The platinum is not consumed during the electrolysis process. While the high cost of platinum does affect the cost of the device used to generate hydrogen, it has no effect on the cost of the hydrogen gas itself. Almost the entirety of the cost of hydrogen gas is the energy used to create it by cracking water.
That was the old theory. The problem with studying the cosmology of star systems is that until recently we only had a sample of one. When they started finding planets orbiting other stars, they tended to be gas giants because of the methods used (orbit perturbations, light falloff due to occultations). But a surprising number of these gas giants orbit closely around their parent star. IIRC one has an orbit whose period is a few Earth-weeks. At this point, I think you can say all bets are off.
For comparison to your 2008-2009 data, here's the 2008 data for OECD countries (PPP so local cost of living is taken into account, data is from this page):
Australia - $7814
Canada - $8388
France - $8559
Germany - $7859
Italy - $9071
Japan - $8301
S. Korea - $6723
Poland - $4682 (the U.S. educational results are closest to Poland's)
Spain - $8522
Sweden - $9524
U.K. - $9169
Denmark - $10429
Austria - $10994
U.S. - $10995
Norway - $12070
Switzerland - $13775
Luxembourg - $16909
As for how the students perform in school vs. amount spent, refer to chart B7.2 on this spreadsheet. Basically, only Italy gets worse test results per dollar spent on each student. So yeah by U.S. standards California is "really not spending a lot on their kids". But compared to other OECD countries, California's spending is well above average. These results suck any way you cut them.
One would hope that the logic and reasoning could be taught in an hour or two, maybe refreshed and reinforced a few minutes each day. Teaching the facts is what takes up the bulk of the time.
this detects only that you are touching an object, not where
Seems like that would be pretty easy to add with some sort of capacitive (or possibly even resistive) gradient mesh overlaid on top of the surface you wanted to turn into a touchscreen. A touch in one location would then generate a different frequency response than a touch in a different location. If the mesh has orthogonal signal gradient curves along orthogonal physical axes, you can get 2D and 3D touch location data.
Unlike a regular touchscreen, you could reverse the mesh and add it to the object doing the touching. Add something to your middle finger so it generates a different response than your index finger. So if you touch the screen with the index finger it does the regular select and drag. But if you touch it with your middle finger it pops up a menu (like a second mouse button).
It's a really cool idea with a lot of potential.
In this case, you don't need government to judge what's good or bad for you. Just make a law requiring what you sell to match what you advertise. If they only want to use anorexic models in their clothing ads, then they can only sell clothing which fits anorexic models. If they want to sell different sizes, well then they need to use different size models in their ads.
The unspoken disconnect here is that the fashion industry isn't selling clothing. So any arguments based on "I should be able to advertise my clothing any way I like" don't hold. The industry is selling an image, of which the clothing is just a part. An image which is far disconnected from reality. Force that image to match what they're really selling and the problem goes away.
Yeah, Costo/Walmart is the way to go. The $20,000 photo printers they use are the same ones they use for film. If you get a roll of negatives developed there, they don't actually print them by shining light through them. They scan the film and send the scan to the digital film printer. The paper is the same Kodak/Fuji film print paper as they use for photos on negatives.
If you're handy with Photoshop, you can even download icc color profiles for the photo printer at your nearest Costco/Walmart. Use it to preview/tweak your photo so it'll look just the way you want once printed.
This is nothing new. Most of the airport security personnel I've met have been courteous, but there are a few who seem to be there for the power trip. They will insist that they are right even when it's obvious they're wrong and/or the law is on your side..
In the late 1990s during a transfer in London, I had to be screened again (this was shortly after some terrorists had tried to slip aboard some bombs by tweaking luggage tags to get them aboard planes they weren't boarding). I used an HP LX200 as my PDA, and I knew its static memory didn't react well to x-rays. It had been corrupted enough to require a reboot with data loss the first time I sent it through an x-ray machine, so I always put it into a separate tray and requested a hand inspection. I requested a hand inspection as usual, and according to the security agent apparently they don't do those in the U.K. I argued with him briefly, explaining that I knew passing it through the x-ray machine could wipe its memory. He insisted that I had to put it through if I wanted to board my flight, at which point I relented. It went through, and the memory got corrupted as expected.
Prior to that, it was usually about film. Anyone who's had a high school science class knows x-rays will expose film. Apparently, many airport security agents never took a high school science course. By law in the U.S., you're allowed to request film be hand-inspected. But sift through the archives of any of the older (film) photography forums, and you'll find countless horror stories about airport security insisting on sending the film through the x-ray machine. The BBC and David Attenborough lost 5 weeks of film shot in Papua New Guinea for the Life of Birds series that way.
This "privilege" is why these families don't have a lot of savings. Rather than save up their money for 12.5 months before buying, they go for the instant gratification option which comes at a higher cost and thus helps keeps them in the low income working class. They've survived all these years without an Xbox 360. Why do they suddenly need one Right Now?
I can understand taking a loan for purchases which require years or decades of saving (car, house). But if someone lacks the discipline to save up for a year for an entertainment purchase, they are better off learning that discipline. It makes no sense to complain how the 1% are keeping you down when you willingly give them your money.
Do realize that the natural conclusion from this line of reasoning is that school degrees paid for with a loan will become like cars bought with a loan. Just as the loaning bank holds the title of your car until you pay off the loan, the banks/government will require the school to transfer all copies of your transcript over to them, neatly cutting the schools out of your equation.
I agree it's a crappy thing for the government to pressure schools to do, but it's not at all like the analogy the NYU prof has put forth. It's more like buying a lawnmower for your landscaping business on a loan, then not repaying the loan. Just because the bank repossesses the lawnmower does not mean they're depriving you of your ability to get work. It just means you cannot use the lawnmower to help you find landscaping work, at least until you start making the loan payments.
The students are not unable to work (that would be like debtor's prison). They can find work just as easily as any other able-bodied person. They just cannot find work which takes advantage of their degree which they haven't been paying for.
The problem is that subsidized loans are probably the absolute worst way to make college available to more people. A loan distorts the supply-demand model by allowing people to shift money from the future into the present. What happens when people suddenly have more money to spend on something with a limited supply? The price goes up. As tuitions have been, far outpacing the rate of inflation.
Loans for college are a demand-side solution. We allow time-shifting of money to increase demand, more money flows to colleges, and in response colleges expand and more colleges get built. At least that's how it's supposed to work in theory. What's actually been happening is that big-name colleges have a monopoly on their name. So instead of increasing supply (hiring more professors and and admitting more students), they've just been ratcheting up their tuitions to match the increased availability of money due to loans. Then they use the higher tuitions as circular reasoning for why we need more loans.
We need a supply-side solution. One that makes college available to more people by increasing supply directly. e.g. Cut off student loans, put the money into public universities instead. Yeah it's not perfect - poor kids won't be able to get into expensive private colleges. But it's a damn sight better than inflating tuition prices for everyone by 200%-300%, and consigning poor students to a decade or more of debt after they graduate. At this point, we need to use the public universities to exert downward pressure on the market price of tuition to fix the damage done by decades of cheap school loans.
This is just taking the rating system on online stores like Amazon or Newegg, and making them viewable in meat-space. It's got the same problems (sample bias - fake reviews by astroturfers, overrepresentation of people who like to submit reviews, multiple reviews by those wanting to game the system), plus a few new ones (using Facebook means no way to verify if the person giving the like has actually bought/worn the product, someone in the store can switch hangers, you have no way to tell if the store is accurately reporting the data or is hyping up inventory it wants to get rid of, etc).
Long-term, I think scanning the barcode for the product with your phone to get online reviews will win out.
*Poof* You have your wish. The military budget is now zero. And we still have a $610 billion budget deficit.
Can we please stop derailing any budget/financing debate with the misguided notion that everything can be fixed by cutting military spending? The problem is that the government spends way, way more than it takes in, period. Military spending is just a part of the problem, not the sole problem. It's not even the main problem if you believe the CBO reports (heresy, I know). Medicare and Medicaid are.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_verification_software
md5sum is the one I know best, but that's because my computing is unix-centric.
The attempts by people to badmouth CDMA never cease to amaze me. The original GSM was based on the horribly inefficient TDMA. Basically, the phones took turns talking to the tower, even if they had nothing to say. You got the same limited bandwidth whether you were the only phone connected to the tower, or if the tower were at capacity. If there were more phones than timeslices, you couldn't connect, period.
CDMA allows all phones to transmit simultaneously, they just use orthogonal codes which allow the tower to decipher which signal came from which phone. It's computationally more expensive, but it allows a single phone to use all the bandwidth if there are no other phones, while distributing the bandwidth equally if there are multiple phones. If there are more phones transmitting than bandwidth, you start getting dropouts (the volatility of SNR means there's no hard limit at which this happens, as with TDMA).
When carriers started adding data services, GSM was borked due to TDMA's inefficiency. That's why CDMA carriers rolled out 2G and 3G service about a year sooner than GSM carriers. GSM was forced to graft on a separate non-TDMA radio just to handle data traffic. (This is also why you can talk and use data simultaneously on GSM - the phones have two radios, one for voice, one for data. It's not a feature; it's a side-benefit to a fix which CDMA never needed. Most CDMA phones just have one radio which handles both voice and data.) The later GSM 3g data protocols used wideband CDMA. That's right, CDMA won - it was the better technology for data. GSM just incorporated it into their standard so it was still called GSM. If LTE is CDMA functionally dead-ending, then GSM dead-ended way back when cellular data services were first added.
What's happening with LTE is that most implementations are opting for OFDMA. OFDMA can squeeze in more bandwidth than CDMA, but requires even more processing power. Until recently, microprocessors weren't powerful enough to decode it on a cell phone without severely impacting battery life (this is the reason early LTE implementations have a reputation for being power hogs). Because it's OFDMA, it requires a different radio. That's old hat for GSM phones - just add a third radio for LTE. But it's something new for CDMA phones - CDMA radio for voice and 3g data, add a second radio for LTE. (And yes, this means you can talk and use LTE data simultaneously on a CDMA phone.)
GSM and CDMA have nothing to do with LTE technologically; it is just the standard they've decided to use for 4g data. In both cases, a completely new radio has to be added to the phone to handle LTE traffic. GSM using LTE is not a concession to CDMA, and CDMA using LTE is not a concession to GSM. Theoretically, if you expanded the operating frequencies, an LTE tower should be able to service 4g data for both GSM and CDMA phones (the whole point of LTE was to standardize a lot of the underlying technologies for compatibility). But until GSM ditches TDMA for voice and/or CDMA ditches CDMA for voice, there will be no convergence.
To be fair, has there been any evidence that this was condoned and coordinated at a high level in the Conservative party? Even the summary implicates a single IP address. That would seem to suggest it was the brainchild of a single or few rogue members, not the party overall.
You're dealing with a large organization in a very free society. It's very possible someone in the party is guilty of doing this, but the leadership is telling the truth when they proclaim innocence. Because it's political, there's a tendency for people who disagree with the politics to automatically assume any corruption goes all the way to the top.
Renewables are great. In theory.
But as soon as you extrapolate their production capacity to equal that of current coal and nuclear plants, you find that their empirical accident and fatality rate is no longer insignificant.
The problem here isn't that nuclear is risky. Everything we do has risks. The problem is that we're judging the risks of the alternatives based on their current (minuscule) capacity. Their aggregate risk falls underneath our alarm threshold, so gets ignored. Then proposing those alternatives be scaled up 20-100x to replace nuclear, under the assumption that their aggregate risk will remain the same instead of also scaling up 20-100x.
Once you scale up their risk along with capacity (basically assume all power sources generate the same amount of power), you find that they're actually more dangerous than nuclear.
I haven't owned a Drobo so I can't comment on the quality or functionality. But QNAP and Synology are generally considered the leaders in the NAS market. SmallNetBuilder has pretty thorough coverage and benchmarks of your NAS options.
If you don't need a NAS, just some form of aggregate storage, non-networked alternatives are made by Mediasonic and Sans Digital. In my case I just needed something to throw my old drives in and power it on every couple weeks to backup my ZFS file server. So one of these connected via USB 3.0 or eSATA worked just fine.
And if the GBP goes back up to 1.5 Euro, they'll fix it by lowering the price again, right? No? Whaddaya mean it needs to be fixed by raising the price in Euros?
I tend to fall on Google's side on this (because other companies do the same thing or worse; Google only got "caught" because they did the honest thing and publicly admitted their mistake). But placing blame entirely on people who fail to encrypt their wireless is going too far in Google's favor. If I don't lock the door to my house, yeah it's my fault if I get robbed. But that doesn't make the robbery legal.
If you find a neighbor's wifi network is open, that doesn't give you carte blanche to use it and snoop their devices and data; especially in the countries where privacy laws afford some protection against that sort of snooping. This spills over into a grey area regarding data on encrypted networks. What happens if I record your encrypted wifi data, and 10 years from now computers have gotten fast enough that what was sufficient encryption at the time of the recording can be broken in a few seconds? Do I get to say "tough, you broadcast that data on public airwaves using insufficient protection; it's now mine to do with as I wish"?
Your private data has to be afforded some legal protection regardless of the amount or strength of encryption. The dividing line has to be whether the user had an expectation of privacy when transmitting that data. I think most courts would buy the argument that you don't have an expectation of privacy only on openly public networks (e.g. Starbucks). I think wifi is new enough for non-tech people that for a home network, most courts would agree the owner had an expectation of privacy even if he failed to turn encryption on.
I think what confuses people is that most of the Constitution outlines what the Federal government can do. Per the 10th Amendment, powers not granted to the Federal government are reserved for the States and the People. So States are free to take upon themselves powers not granted to the Federal government by the Constitution.
The few Amendments outlining what the Federal government can't do are different. The Constitution, being the highest law in the land, extends these prohibitions to the States as well.