Come to think of it, have we fully examined whether the benefits of teachers' unions outweigh the costs? Based on the Precautionary Principle, perhaps we should ban them until more research is done.
Still, aren't the CC companies and banks the weak point in spam operations? Surely the government would be able to lean on them even harder than they can lean on some foreign ISP regarding a website.
there was "some concern" over the statistical methods used, but that's not scandalous at all; there's always some argument in science over methodology
Very true, but that doesn't really square with the claim that "the science is settled," does it? Many of the anti-AGW arguments are about methodology, yet the pro-AGW types often seem quick to dismiss (if not slander) anyone who questions their methodology.
Exactly, JRHelgeson. It's amazing how many supposedly tech-savvy Slashdotters think automotive engineering can be done by decree. I suspect that if there were proposed regulations forcing all desktop computer manufacturers to sell computers that averaged (say) 20 watts of power usage, we'd hear screams of outrage and denunciations of ignorance.
One advantage that Apple has over their competitors is the vertical integration.
True, and another is massive economies of scale: the iPad comes in a few similar configurations, and they are selling tens of millions of them. They can get unbeatable deals from suppliers with volumes like that.
I'm sorry, but I'm pretty sure that you and the people modding you up having never worked in the magazine publishing business. It's been years since I've been professionally involved, but I'm sure per-copy printing costs still far exceed mailing costs. USPS periodical rates are $.131 to $.701 per pound, and labeling costs aren't going to add much more. But you can bet that a pound of standard magazines (with color on the covers and at least some of the guts) costs far more than that to print, especially thick, image-heavy ones like National Geographic, Playboy, anything in the fashion/home/architecture fields, etc.
Not to defend the economics of the Kindle on this issue, but your calculations don't consider that the $18/year print subscription is so inexpensive because it is subsidized by the advertising it carries. I don't believe the sales of ads in digital editions are anywhere near as significant.
Given the quotes in the video, it seems like they're trying to lower people's expectations.
Make an exception to Jobs' anti-leak beliefs in order to "reset the expectations" of techies, while risking the Osborne effect and suppressing demand for the current iPad? No way, dude. It's got to be an unofficial leak.
With all due respect, I doubt if you have any experience in the publishing industry. Talk to any dead-tree publisher of newspapers, magazines, or books and ask if they'd like to have distribution (plus some promotion) handled by someone else for a mere 30%. They'd jump at it.
I think a "long shot" can also be relative: not necessarily long, but it seems that way because it's longer than you expect. In Hell's Angels (1930) there's a wonderful shot during a bombing raid on a munitions dump. Shot straight down from the plane, we see the bomb shrink as it drops, meet its shadow at the target and blow it up, and then the debris spreading out and (perhaps the coolest part) some debris coming back up towards the plane, and getting rather close.
The whole shot is probably far less than a minute long, but it's absolutely riveting and even seems "too long" because the shot ends long after you expect. Of course, you expect more cuts and angles because such scenes are basically always filmed that way. (A partial exception is Major Kong riding the bomb at the end of Dr. Strangelove, but even then the camera partially moves down with Kong and the bomb.) There's always at least one shot of the bombs dropping from the side, and several cuts from the ground of explosions, often with fast editing and different angles to "add drama," I suppose, but it's 100% predictable.
The shot in Hell's Angels also works well because it keeps us in the point of view of our protagonists in the bomber, as if we are actually there, which makes it feel much more realistic than the same action would with multiple changes of camera position.
The difficulty is precisely counting the number of atoms in a macroscopic object
Then why not count the precise number of atoms in a microscopic object and make the International System of Units work for us here? Just define the yoctogram as a certain number of atoms, then multiply it by 10^27 to get a kilogram.
I have no problem at all believing that Apple has serious problems, in general, identifying functional problems produced by styling decisions
Bingo. And I can guess the dynamic: Jobs wants things to look a certain way, and pushes the engineers hard. This produces some great designs, but occasional fails when Jobs overrode the warnings he got. Thus the beautiful Cube case that tended to grow cracks, the notorious round mouse, the iPhone 4 antenna, and maybe a few more.
This initiative is especially amusing coming shortly after this innovation from Obama's Organizing for America. Click the link and (unless you get an error) you'll get a page based on your location, with the phone number of a voter to call. You get the name, age, gender, city, and party ID. You're supposed to read a short push-poll from a script, get their opinions of the President and his policies, and report on the person's response. No potential for abuse there, having political opinions linked to individuals in a central database run by the President's organization!
Compare the time it's taking to finalize HTML5 with some past engineering challenges:
The first prototype Jeep was designed and built and delivered for testing in about two months by the tiny and bankrupt American Bantam Car Company, which had to hire a freelance engineer for the job because they no longer had an engineering staff.
The first P-51 Mustang, which eventually became the best all-round fighter of the war, was designed and built in 117 days.
The Empire State Building was built in about 18 months.
Well, true, but I see this as no different than lawmakers making laws that benefit their favored interest groups, for ideology or money or votes or all of the above. At least lobbyists have to convince lawmakers of their case, while lawmakers can just collude among themselves.
Real news would be if somebody actually found a way to counteract their deeds.
No, the solution is well-known, just unpalatable to many people: stop having the government attempting to micromanage the economy. Every time Congress decides to treat one segment of the economy differently than another, through special taxes, regulations, subsidies, privileges, etc., the lobbyists will appear. Note that I am not arguing against all taxes and such, just pointing out that all such interference produces lobbyists.
Besides, if you want Congress to (e.g.) redesign the health care system, do you think they would actually do a better job if doctors, hospitals, and drug companies weren't consulted at all? I don't. I think they'd end up with legislation that was even more clueless. Just because lobbyists are arguing for a particular group doesn't mean they're always wrong.
If you want to minimize lobbyists, advocate against all special tax breaks and subsidies and for making taxes and regulation as uniform, sensible, and simple as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Come to think of it, have we fully examined whether the benefits of teachers' unions outweigh the costs? Based on the Precautionary Principle, perhaps we should ban them until more research is done.
Absolutely true. I just didn't see anyone mention server/bandwidth issues as one possible factor.
Given how server- and bandwidth-intensive Siri is, Apple may also have wanted to restrict it to the 4S simply to limit the number of people using it.
Still, aren't the CC companies and banks the weak point in spam operations? Surely the government would be able to lean on them even harder than they can lean on some foreign ISP regarding a website.
But every time I read about spammers like this, I think of the rubber stamp from the movie Top Secret!.
Nyan King!
Very true, but that doesn't really square with the claim that "the science is settled," does it? Many of the anti-AGW arguments are about methodology, yet the pro-AGW types often seem quick to dismiss (if not slander) anyone who questions their methodology.
Is there another word for 'radioactive' we can use to get rid of the negative connotation?
It's naturally degradable!
Exactly, JRHelgeson. It's amazing how many supposedly tech-savvy Slashdotters think automotive engineering can be done by decree. I suspect that if there were proposed regulations forcing all desktop computer manufacturers to sell computers that averaged (say) 20 watts of power usage, we'd hear screams of outrage and denunciations of ignorance.
True, and another is massive economies of scale: the iPad comes in a few similar configurations, and they are selling tens of millions of them. They can get unbeatable deals from suppliers with volumes like that.
"Anything" doesn't seem to be an exaggeration: how low do you have to be to produce fake rice from plastic and fake chicken eggs from chemicals?
I'm sorry, but I'm pretty sure that you and the people modding you up having never worked in the magazine publishing business. It's been years since I've been professionally involved, but I'm sure per-copy printing costs still far exceed mailing costs. USPS periodical rates are $.131 to $.701 per pound, and labeling costs aren't going to add much more. But you can bet that a pound of standard magazines (with color on the covers and at least some of the guts) costs far more than that to print, especially thick, image-heavy ones like National Geographic, Playboy, anything in the fashion/home/architecture fields, etc.
Not to defend the economics of the Kindle on this issue, but your calculations don't consider that the $18/year print subscription is so inexpensive because it is subsidized by the advertising it carries. I don't believe the sales of ads in digital editions are anywhere near as significant.
Make an exception to Jobs' anti-leak beliefs in order to "reset the expectations" of techies, while risking the Osborne effect and suppressing demand for the current iPad? No way, dude. It's got to be an unofficial leak.
With all due respect, I doubt if you have any experience in the publishing industry. Talk to any dead-tree publisher of newspapers, magazines, or books and ask if they'd like to have distribution (plus some promotion) handled by someone else for a mere 30%. They'd jump at it.
I think a "long shot" can also be relative: not necessarily long, but it seems that way because it's longer than you expect. In Hell's Angels (1930) there's a wonderful shot during a bombing raid on a munitions dump. Shot straight down from the plane, we see the bomb shrink as it drops, meet its shadow at the target and blow it up, and then the debris spreading out and (perhaps the coolest part) some debris coming back up towards the plane, and getting rather close.
The whole shot is probably far less than a minute long, but it's absolutely riveting and even seems "too long" because the shot ends long after you expect. Of course, you expect more cuts and angles because such scenes are basically always filmed that way. (A partial exception is Major Kong riding the bomb at the end of Dr. Strangelove, but even then the camera partially moves down with Kong and the bomb.) There's always at least one shot of the bombs dropping from the side, and several cuts from the ground of explosions, often with fast editing and different angles to "add drama," I suppose, but it's 100% predictable.
The shot in Hell's Angels also works well because it keeps us in the point of view of our protagonists in the bomber, as if we are actually there, which makes it feel much more realistic than the same action would with multiple changes of camera position.
As I suspected it would, the first sentence includes the word "momentum."
How is a Dell Streak with a five-inch 800 x 480 screen comparable to an iPad with a 9.7 inch 1024 x 768 screen?
Then why not count the precise number of atoms in a microscopic object and make the International System of Units work for us here? Just define the yoctogram as a certain number of atoms, then multiply it by 10^27 to get a kilogram.
Bingo. And I can guess the dynamic: Jobs wants things to look a certain way, and pushes the engineers hard. This produces some great designs, but occasional fails when Jobs overrode the warnings he got. Thus the beautiful Cube case that tended to grow cracks, the notorious round mouse, the iPhone 4 antenna, and maybe a few more.
The summary has an error: Bob McCall is the space artist, Bruce McCall is a humorous illustrator and writer.
This initiative is especially amusing coming shortly after this innovation from Obama's Organizing for America. Click the link and (unless you get an error) you'll get a page based on your location, with the phone number of a voter to call. You get the name, age, gender, city, and party ID. You're supposed to read a short push-poll from a script, get their opinions of the President and his policies, and report on the person's response. No potential for abuse there, having political opinions linked to individuals in a central database run by the President's organization!
Compare the time it's taking to finalize HTML5 with some past engineering challenges:
Is HTML5 really so much more complicated?
Well, true, but I see this as no different than lawmakers making laws that benefit their favored interest groups, for ideology or money or votes or all of the above. At least lobbyists have to convince lawmakers of their case, while lawmakers can just collude among themselves.
No, the solution is well-known, just unpalatable to many people: stop having the government attempting to micromanage the economy. Every time Congress decides to treat one segment of the economy differently than another, through special taxes, regulations, subsidies, privileges, etc., the lobbyists will appear. Note that I am not arguing against all taxes and such, just pointing out that all such interference produces lobbyists.
Besides, if you want Congress to (e.g.) redesign the health care system, do you think they would actually do a better job if doctors, hospitals, and drug companies weren't consulted at all? I don't. I think they'd end up with legislation that was even more clueless. Just because lobbyists are arguing for a particular group doesn't mean they're always wrong.
If you want to minimize lobbyists, advocate against all special tax breaks and subsidies and for making taxes and regulation as uniform, sensible, and simple as possible.
You're correct about the original takeoff system, but the Wright flyer didn't use a "motorcycle engine." It was a custom-designed, four-cylinder engine with a cast aluminum crankcase.